Chapter 18 #2
Her feet quickened without permission. The pull was gentle, almost tender, a sadness that wasn't hers settling over her chest like a weight, making her want to go to it.
To find the source and sit with it and share in whatever hurt that much.
Her eyes stung and she didn't know why. She blinked hard and forced herself to slow down, forced herself to breathe through the ache blooming in her throat.
That wasn't her grief. She knew her own, had carried enough of it, and this belonged to someone else.
Her skin prickled in warning even as her body leaned toward the sound, and she made her steps even and deliberate.
The rhythmic sound didn't stop. It just waited, patient as the tide.
The north cove opened before her, sheltered by boulders that rose from the surf dark and slick.
It was a narrow strip of rocky beach. Beyond the cove's mouth the water churned with no rhyme or reason, but inside, the surface lay flat and still.
Smooth as glass without a single ripple, despite the wind tearing at her hair.
Her stomach dropped. She'd seen water misbehave near the pump station, had felt the wrongness of it then, but this was worse. . Something was doing this on purpose.
She crouched at the waterline. The knees of her jeans soaked through as she pressed her palms flat against the wet rock and closed her eyes.
She drew the air in, steady and careful, pulling it through her senses the way she pulled warmth through bread dough, reading what it carried.
The magic here was dense, heavy, saturated with salt and depth, rooted in the bedrock beneath her.
It tasted like brine and tainted herbs, and it dwarfed anything she'd ever sensed from the coven.
This wasn't a witch. This wasn't a wolf.
This was something that belonged to the water itself.
While she studied the elements the sound that carried through the wind intensified and she found herself walking deeper into the water.
She opened her eyes. The surface shifted.
Movement stirred beneath the glass, slow and deliberate. Not a fish, not a seal. But definitely something wild watching her with awareness and intelligence. Compelled to move, she took another step deeper into the water. Then it surfaced.
The creature rose with unhurried grace, and Willow stopped breathing.
Pale skin caught the diffused light, iridescent the way abalone shell shifts between blue and silver depending on the angle.
Black hair fanned across the surface, each strand moving on its own as if alive.
The face held beauty and terror in equal measure, high cheekbones, a jaw too sharp, a mouth too wide.
The eyes were solid dark, no whites, and when her lips parted the teeth behind them were thin and numerous and made for destruction.
Willow's body locked, frozen in place. She couldn’t move. Her pulse hammered in her wrists, her throat, and her temples, an automatic response to a predator's attention. Every instinct she had screamed at her to run.
But she couldn’t run.
The siren watched her with the flat patience of a creature deciding whether to kill.
Then she shifted, turning her body toward the deeper cove behind her before snapping back to Willow, and the movement revealed what she'd been hiding.
The curve of her belly beneath the surface.
Shoulders hunched, arms drawn close to center. Not aggressive. Protective.
She was pregnant.
Every piece of the puzzle fell into place. The turned boats. The nightmares. The equipment that kept failing near the shore. The mysterious sounds that drove people away from the cove. By a mother, frightened and alone, using every weapon she had to keep the world away from her child.
The answer had been here the whole time, hiding in a mist shrouded cove, pregnant and scared and lashing out at anything that came too close.
Willow opened her mouth to speak, to say anything that might signal she understood.
The compulsion hit like a wave crashing through her skull.
It blotted out thought. Walk. The command buried itself in her muscles, her bones, her blood. Walk into the cove. Keep walking. The deep will feel safe. The cold will feel warm.
The grief she'd felt on the path was nothing compared to this, the same magic with the dial ripped to ten, slamming past her defenses and sinking hooks into her will. Her left foot moved before she caught it, gravel shifting under her boot, and for one terrible second she wanted to obey. The surface looked peaceful. It looked like sleep. And the peace she’s always craved.
A memory interrupted her thoughts. Her grandmother teaching her to bake all those years ago.
Press, fold, turn.
The rhythm grounded her, bringing out muscle memory older than thought. Her grandmother's hands over hers on the bread board, guiding the dough. Press, fold, turn.
Focus on what the dough needs her grandmother said. It will ground your magic and give you the power you need.
Her senses awakened and she continued to press and fold and turn in her mind.
But she needed more than grounding. She pulled the air toward her, drew it through her lungs and her skin and her magic the way she'd been taught, and she pushed back.
Using her magic as force. The air around her was hers to shape, and she shaped it into a wall between her will and the siren's command.
The compulsion battered against it and she held, pulling more, pushing harder, pouring everything she had into the barrier while the siren's song tried to shred it apart.
She held the way she'd held through everything else on this island, through Ryker's cruelty and the exile threats and the nights alone in the cabin wondering if she'd made the worst mistake of her life bringing her witches here.
She held because she could, because her magic was real and it was strong and she was done letting anyone, wolf or siren or her own fear, tell her otherwise.
The compulsion shattered. She staggered back from the waterline gasping, sweat cooling on her forehead, her hands trembling and her knees gone soft. She'd never fought anything like that. Never imagined any power could reach inside someone's will and rewrite it.
The siren's expression hadn't changed. Those depthless eyes tracked her with what might have been surprise, the calculation of a creature encountering resistance it hadn't expected.
Then the cove erupted. The siren closed the distance in a surge of white spray, faster than anything that size should have been able to move.
Willow stumbled backward, boots slipping on wet rock, but the beach was narrow and there was nowhere to go.
Fingers closed around her ankle, grip like iron, and the shock of the touch stole the breath from her lungs.
She hit the rocks hard, hip and elbow cracking against stone, and the siren pulled.
The water took her in one brutal second. Cold she'd never known bypassed her skin and seized her chest. The surface vanished above her and the world became pressure and silence and the grip dragging her deeper.
She couldn't see, couldn't breathe. The siren's claws pressed into the skin above her boot, sharp points breaking through.
She reached for the air out of instinct and found nothing.
Water surrounded her, filled the spaces where her power source should have been, and for the first time in her life her magic had nothing to draw from.
The dregs of what she'd been holding when the siren pulled her under were already fading.
She gathered what was left and pushed it toward the siren. Not force this time. She didn't have enough for force. Just feeling, raw and desperate, the only language she had left. I understand what you're protecting. Please. I'm not a threat.
She pushed it through the cold and the silence with everything she had, which was almost nothing, but it was all she could offer.
Her vision narrowed to a shrinking point of pale light above her, the surface growing farther away with every heartbeat.
Something in the siren's grip shifted, the claws easing a fraction, and Willow couldn't tell if she'd imagined it or if the creature had actually hesitated, because the cold was taking everything now, thought and breath and the light from above, and the last thing she felt before the dark swallowed her whole was the faint pulse of her magic still reaching on fumes toward a mother who was just as scared as she was.