Chapter 26
Phoebe
The Ocean Off Castletide
A flurry of emotions crashes over me like relentless waves after a tropical storm.
Fear. Horror. Sadness so sharp it guts me. But nothing is as crushing as regret.
I know I just got here. I know Kael took me when he should have asked.
But the truth is, I have never felt more at home than with him.
And gods, I just wish we had more time.
My lungs burn, screaming for air.
My body thrashes weakly against the pull, but I can’t see anything beneath the water—only blackness, thick and oily, wrapping around me like living ropes.
Tentacles of dark magic.
They drag me deeper, against the tide, against reason, against hope.
Spots explode in my vision.
My chest is a furnace.
I’m seconds from unconsciousness when I feel it.
Something touches me—not a hand, but a whisper. A word.
Breathe.
I choke against it.
I can’t. That’s suicide. To breathe water—it’s insane.
The voice comes again, deeper, resonant, echoing with the endless weight of the abyss.
But I know it.
It’s his.
Breathe now, Telya. Breathe me.
I shake my head even as darkness claws at the edges of my sight.
But then the command thrums through the bond, undeniable, filling me with heat and certainty.
I open my mouth. Against every human instinct, I draw in a breath.
And—oxygen.
Cool, blessed, beautiful oxygen.
My lungs fill, my chest no longer screaming, and I sob in relief even though I’m underwater.
I breathe.
Then light. A sudden, swirling brightness, a luminescent storm carving through the black.
It hurls toward me, massive and unstoppable.
Kael.
But not as I know him.
He’s bigger. Wilder. More. Tentacles whip like living storms around him, his body aglow with abyssal power, his trident blazing brighter than lightning.
His roar shakes the sea itself, and the thing holding me shrieks before it’s ripped away.
He looks like a freaking sexy hot merman on steroids.
Holy. Fuck.
But the monster doesn’t flee. It launches at him.
They tangle in a ferocious clash, light against shadow, his coils strangling, its darkness clawing.
My heart seizes, torn between awe and terror.
I flounder, spinning in the currents, desperate to find which way is up, which way is out.
Kael. My love.
The thought hammers in me louder than my pulse.
Fear for him is worse than the fear of drowning ever was.
Then—movement.
A shimmer passes me, smooth and vast.
A curved fin, glittering like silver and gold, slices through the black.
A cry echoes in the deep—mournful and strong.
The curved fin whales.
I lunge, fingers brushing slick skin, and then I’ve got hold.
The creature surges upward, carrying me with terrifying, impossible speed.
The surface shatters above me.
I break through, gasping—not because I need air, but because I need to see.
“Kael!” I scream, voice raw and breaking, as the sea explodes below with his battle.
I hang on the whale, salt pouring off my hair, lungs heaving though the whale’s back rocks me atop the turbulent, black sea.
For a heartbeat, I only watch—inky water where his light fought the dark, a chaos of foam and shadow.
Then, like a bell striking something inside me I didn’t know I owned, the bond answers.
It is low and fierce and all his and all mine at once.
Enough.
I press my palms to the top of the water and send everything I can think of through that thin bright line between us.
Help him. Go to him. Protect him. Help Kael.
The plea isn’t elegant.
It’s raw and scared and small, the sort of thing you throw at the world when you have nothing else.
And then I surprise myself.
The call bends outward, skimming the surface, sliding into the sea like a stone skipped by grief.
It finds the whales, the sharks, the otters, the sea tigers—whatever I can name, whatever I can imagine.
Names and images and need tangle together, and the creatures answer.
At first, it’s a ripple—fins, flukes, a wall of mottled backs.
Then the blackness begins to retreat, not all at once but like a curtain being peeled away.
The inky stain that had been swallowing light thins to bruised blue, then to clean, living water.
Voices rise—calls of animals I didn’t think I could call—and they rush at the place where Kael fights.
Minutes that feel like hours pass.
I keep shouting into the bond, into the sea, into whatever thread ties me to him.
Do not give up. Hold him. Bring him back.
Then the water splits like a mouth opening, and he rises.
No longer that towering, unknowable Titan that had been more god than man an instant before—he shrinks, the colossal coils folding, the abyssal scale falling away until he is almost the man I know, only Kael was never a regular man.
He is a Demon Lord. A Lord of Water. And he’s mine. Wet and wild and burning with the aftertaste of battle.
He lunges for me, “Phoebe!”
For a moment, the world narrows to the press of his arms, the ache in his chest, the frantic throttle of his heartbeat against mine.
I sob without shame.
“I thought I lost you,” I cry, the words spilling out ragged.
He buries his face in my hair, and his voice breaks when he answers.
“Never. You’re mine to keep safe, viyella.” His hands cup my face, rough and trembling. “And I—I love you. I love you so much.”
It’s not a proclamation born only of triumph. It’s the truth laid bare, the vow that carried him through the dark and the damnation to find me.
I feel it thrumming in the bond, in the whale’s slow breathing beneath us, in the hush that has settled over the wounded sea.
For a dizzying second, I want to claim the magic back—tell him that he is the thing that saved me, that his roar and his tenderness and the way he bent the world are the miracles I didn’t know I needed.
But even saying nothing, I think I understand it all.
Nightfall is the magic I didn’t realize I had been looking for my entire life. And Kael? He’s the one that makes everything worth it.
All the trials and tribulations.
All the danger and confusion.
Knowing he loves me?
It’s—it’s everything.