Chapter 2
It was too quiet.
As soon as Valrek entered the caves, he knew something was wrong.
The wind howled outside and waves crashed below, the storm building its fury against the cliffs that had been his family’s refuge for the past four years.
But from the deeper chambers inside their home, where Lilani should have been playing with her collection of shells and strange stones, there was nothing.
No giggling. No humming. No endless stream of questions about why seabirds flew and fish didn’t, or whether clouds tasted like water, or if her Papa had ever fought a sea monster.
Gods damn it.
His heart started to pound as he dropped his kill and raced through their rooms. The main chamber was empty.
Lilani’s sleeping alcove was empty. The small nook where she kept her treasures—stones she claimed were dragon eggs, driftwood she’d shaped into a fleet of ships, a broken compass she’d found on the beach and insisted still pointed towards adventure—was empty too.
But at the rear of the caves the hidden path down to the beach, the one he’d forbidden her from using alone at least a thousand times, had fresh footprints in the damp sand.
Small footprints. Six-year-old footprints. Heading straight into the storm.
His beast roared in panicked fury but he forced it down.
Finding his daughter required control, not tearing the entire cliff face apart with his claws.
He took the path at a dead run, despite the wet rock.
He knew every step, every handhold. He’d walked this path a thousand times since their exile began—carrying supplies up from the beach, carrying Lilani when she grew tired, carrying the weight of his own failure like a physical burden across his shoulders.
The beach came into view, and his heart stopped.
There she was.
Lilani danced along the edge of the surf, her wild curly hair streaming behind her, her small arms spread wide as if embracing the storm itself.
A seabird—one of the black-winged creatures that nested in the cliff crevices—hopped ahead of her, leading her in some game only the two of them understood.
Her golden eyes, so like his own, were bright with joy.
Her laughter carried to him in fragments, torn apart by the wind.
She was alive. She was beautiful. She was fifty meters from safety and far, far too close to the water.
“Lilani!”
His voice cracked across the beach like thunder, and the seabird startled into flight. Lilani spun towards him, her face splitting into the hopeful smile she reserved for the moments when she’d done something she knew she shouldn’t and didn’t regret it even a little.
“Papa! Look! The bird was showing me how to—”
“Come here. Now.”
The severity in his tone finally registered, and her grin faltered. She took a step towards him, then another, breaking into the eager run that meant she knew she was in trouble but also knew he would never stay angry for long because he never, ever could.
She was too close to the edge.
He saw it happen with the horrible clarity that only came in nightmares.
The rock beneath her foot, wet and covered in algae, shifted.
A terrified cry escaped her lips as her arms pinwheeled.
Her small body tilted towards the churning water just as the storm reached down and grabbed the sea in its fist.
The wave was enormous, three times the height of those that had come before, driven by the winds that had been building since dawn. It didn’t crest so much as lunge, a wall of gray-green water that crashed over the rocks where Lilani had been dancing and swallowed her whole.
“No!”
He was moving before the sound finished leaving his throat, his body shifting without conscious choice—muscles thickening, bones restructuring, the beast clawing its way free in a burst of desperate transformation.
Fur erupted across his arms and chest. Claws split through his fingertips.
His senses exploded outward, catching the salt-copper scent of blood in the water, her blood. Gods, please no.
He dove into the water after her.
The sea tried to kill him immediately. The undertow dragged at his legs while the storm surge shoved at his chest and yet another current yanked at the core of him. His Vultor strength meant nothing here. The ocean didn’t care about strength.
He fought anyway, through water so filled with sand and debris that even his enhanced vision couldn’t penetrate it, through currents that spun him until up and down lost all meaning, and through the roar of the storm and the howl of his beast. He thought he heard another cry and tried desperately to angle towards it.
Where is she? Where is she? Where is—
A light.
A shimmer of blue-violet, soft but impossible to miss even amidst the chaos. It moved through the water with a speed that made no sense, cutting across currents that should have dragged it under, heading towards—
Heading towards the small figure caught in the rip current, limbs loose, hair like a tangle of dark seaweed, golden eyes closed.
Lilani.
He changed course, but the light reached her first.
He saw hands, pale, webbed, and impossibly graceful, close around his daughter’s small body. The shimmer of light flared brighter, like an array of underwater stars, and he saw the creature—a female, his brain supplied through the haze of terror—turn towards the shore and begin to swim.
She moved through the water like she was part of it, gliding through currents that should have torn her apart, finding paths through the chaos that shouldn’t have existed, and he did his best to intercept her.
The light from her body illuminated the water around her, giving him glimpses of a pale human face.
Beneath the sparks of light, her pale skin had an opalescent sheen and her dark hair floated around her like a living shadow.
His beast should have been roaring about threats and predators and unknown females near his child. Instead, it went utterly, dangerously still. He ignored it. His daughter was limp in a stranger’s arms, and nothing else mattered.
They reached the shore at nearly the same moment—the female emerging from the surf with Lilani cradled against her chest just as he dragged himself onto the rocks with claws that gouged trenches in the stone.
He was still half-transformed, fur bristling, fangs extended, every instinct screaming at him to grab his daughter and run.
The female stopped at the water’s edge.
She was breathing hard, gills fluttering along her neck, and the shimmer of her skin had dimmed to a pale, exhausted silver.
Up close, she was smaller than he’d expected.
Slim but strong, her body clearly built for the water.
Her fingers, long and webbed, held Lilani with a gentleness that made his chest ache.
“There’s a cut on her head, but she’s alive.” The female’s voice was soft and melodic despite her exhaustion. “She needs warmth. Get her inside.”
He reached for his daughter, and their fingers touched.
The world stopped.
Her scent hit him like a hammer to the chest. Cold sea and warm honey, brine and sweetness, something so right that his beast let out a howl of recognition.
Mate.
He didn’t believe in mates, especially not after his first disastrous experience with a female. But now this strange female stood before him with his daughter in her arms and her scent burning through his blood like wildfire, and his beast, who had barely acknowledged Tabitha, was howling,
Protect. Claim. Keep.
The female’s eyes, a blue so pale it was almost crystalline, widened. The tiny specks covering her skin flared purple, and she took a sharp step backwards. Her feet slipped on the wet rocks, and for a moment she looked like she might bolt back into the water.
He grabbed her without thinking, afraid that both she and Lilani would disappear beneath the waves again. Her skin was like cool silk beneath his hands, and her scent shifted, honey warming towards something headier, something that made his beast rumble with satisfaction.
“You’d better take her,” she whispered.
Enough of his control remained that he managed to release her arms and gather Lilani close.
“I—I should go.”
Her voice had changed, high and uncertain as she took another step back.
“Wait.”
The word came out as a growl, and she flinched. A stab of something unfamiliar, regret perhaps, shot through him and he forced his beast back. Not completely, his control was still too fragile, but hopefully he looked less like he was about to tear her throat out.
“You saved my daughter.” Better. Almost human. “Thank you.”
Her gaze darted from his partially-transformed face to the small child in his arms, then back again. She was clearly terrified, but she didn’t run. Lilani stirred in his arms and let out a small whimper. The female’s expression softened instantly, the fear in her eyes replaced with concern.
“She’s waking up. The cold…”
She was right. He needed to get his daughter to safety, away from the storm and the salt and the lingering scent of blood. But the thought of letting this female walk away, of returning to the silent caves with only a fading memory of her scent, was unacceptable. His beast wouldn’t allow it.
“Come with me.” He gestured with his head towards the cliff path. “You’re exhausted. You can warm up. I have food.”
He saw the indecision on her face—exhaustion warring with fear, duty warring with a desperate need to escape. He could see the fine tremor in her hands, the slight slump to her shoulders, and knew she was at the end of her strength.
“I—I can’t,” she said finally. “I’m sure she’ll be fine.”
Then she turned and slipped back into the storm-tossed waters with a fluid, impossible grace, leaving him standing in the crashing surf with his daughter in his arms and the scent of salt and honey fading on the wind.