Chapter 13
Voren
It’s a tidal wave of water in the wake of the breaker, sucking back in a riptide that even my godly strength is struggling with.
“Powers are back on,” Dastian shouts, flicking electricity around like we aren’t standing waist deep in water. The fucking moron.
“Where is she?” Dreven roars.
I taste her ending like iron on my tongue and shove straight into the water.
Plunging my hands into the freezing water, I close my eyes. “Find her,” I command, and the drowned come.
They rise out of the green like bad thoughts. Fishermen with ropes around their throats. Sailors with kelp in their hair. A girl in Sunday best with stones in her pockets. They dive into the rush, trailing chill.
“Nyssa,” I call into the dark. Not a shout. A name laid flat as a coin for fate to choose. My power pours out. The sea tries to eat it. I feed it more.
Cold answers, arrow-true. The drowned take my command and scatter, pale smudges slicing through green. I follow them with my will, feeling for the soul that is Nyssa Vale.
Caught in a churn just beyond the break, held down by the weight of that stupid, stubborn choice. I step into the cold.
She hangs in the water like a question mark, hair streaming, fingers loose around her blade. Her soul is half a breath off her skin, already peeling.
Not dead. Between.
“Mine,” I tell the water, the waiting dark.
It doesn’t argue, which is good because I’m feeling unreasonable.
I put my hands on her shoulders and still everything. I stop the part of her that knows how to leave. The drowned circle us, a ring of quiet faces, holding the riptide like pallbearers. I thread a ribbon of wraith-light through her spine. It bites. I bite back.
Her body bows suddenly, and her eyes fly open. Relief floods me, and I hold her tighter to lift her to the surface, but she doesn’t give me a chance. She rears out of my arms, out of the water, cutting the surface like a water goddess, upright and magnificent.
I swim to the surface to see her riding the crest of the Tidewraith, her hair flying back behind her, bone dry and every bit as radiant as she should be.
For a heartbeat, I forget to be a god.
She stands on the back of the wave like she was born in a storm, hair streaming, skin lit from the inside. The Tidewraith rears beneath her, a column of dark water shaped by a will that isn’t mine.
Her gaze cuts down to me. Not distant. Not gone. Brighter. The Wraith Crown shimmers into view on her head, a circlet of gold that drinks the light and still somehow gleams.
Dreven surges up on my left, shadows slick with salt. Dastian pops out of the foam on my right with the expression of a man who’s been told the fireworks are back on.
The Tidewraith hesitates, the counting paused mid-beat. It should be hungry. It should be cruel. It is neither under her feet. It becomes wild but obedient.
“Down,” she says, voice low. The sea hears her.
The wave sinks without collapsing, the Tidewraith folding like a bow. She steps off onto the sand that wasn’t there a moment ago, and the water withdraws, sulking.
I wade to her, reaching out for her and crushing her in my arms. “Stop being a fucking hero,” I growl in her ear.
She snorts. “Last time, I promise.”
“Liar,” I murmur against her neck, because we both know that’s bullshit. Nyssa Vale doesn’t stop; she just finds new and creative ways to give me a coronary.
I pull back, keeping my hands on her arms to make sure she doesn’t dissolve into sea foam or ascend straight to the Pantheon. Up close, the change is visceral. She’s a furnace. The light beneath her skin is a steady, golden burn.
“You’re bright,” I state, squinting slightly. “It’s obnoxious.”
“Sorry to ruin your goth aesthetic.” She grins. She looks wrecked and magnificent.
Dreven stalks out of the surf, dry and fuming, and fixes Nyssa with a gaze that could strip paint. “You drowned yourself.”
“I improvised,” she corrects.
Dastian grins at Nyssa, his eyes flashing molten gold. “So, the Crown’s awake. You’re glowing. The sea is terrified of you. What’s the plan, your holiness?”
Nyssa wipes salt from her eyes, her expression hardening into that familiar slayer steel. “Now we figure out how any of this is supposed to help me kill the Devourer, because… yeah. Zero clue.”
I chuckle. “Who knows? Sadly, that is something we will all have to figure out, and fast.”
“Was I this when you saw my final death?” Nyssa asks.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “We have made changes, but it doesn’t mean you are safe. Not yet. Not until that thing is gone.”
She nods slowly. “We need to go back to the Pantheon realm and find it. But I need tonight. I need to spend time with Rynna like it’s a normal day. Can you give me that?”
I cup her face and brush my lips against hers. “Always, slayer.”
We don’t walk back. Walking is for mortals who haven’t just surfed a Tidewraith.
I wrap the mist around us, a cold, grey blanket that wipes the beach from existence and deposits us at Marrow House, where fewer eyes are watching.
The transition is jarring, the silence of the countryside loud after the roar of the Atlantic.
Nyssa stumbles slightly—divinity or not, the adrenaline crash is coming—but she waves off Dastian’s hovering hands.
“Normal,” she reminds us, pointing a finger that still glows faintly gold at the edges. “That means the three of you need to stay away and give this to me. I will come here when I’m ready.”
“Do we at least get to fuck before we head off into the fight of our lives?” Dastian asks.
She smiles. “Always. But after I come back. I need to see Rynna.”
Nyssa gives me a slow nod, then turns on her heel and walks down the hill, her blade in hand, the crown invisible again, but its presence is felt.
“So that happened,” Dastian says, punching Dreven on the arm. “Why so glum?”
“This is wrong,” he says. “She is not the goddess of water. Why is she commanding the waves? The Tidewraith? Why did the Crown make her drown herself to ascend?”
“Because she didn’t ascend.”
We turn to the old crone, who is hovering in a lavender bush outside the front door.
“Meaning?” I ask.
“Voren,” Tabitha says, moving forward. “How awful to see you again.”
“Back at you, you old bitch. What did you mean?”
“She didn’t ascend,” Tabitha repeats, plucking a twig from her coat with infuriating calm. “She woke up. There is a difference, you great brooding lump.”
Dreven shakes his head. “The light was unmistakable. She commanded the sea.”
“She commanded a wraith, you moron. With the Wraith Crown. The Tidewraith obeyed the Crown, not her. It recognised the authority of the dead, not the element.”
Fuck. The old witch is right.
“She hasn’t shed her mortality. She’s just wearing her divinity like a coat over the top of it. It’s messy. It’s unstable.”
“And it’s dangerous,” I add.
“Dangerous isn’t the word,” Tabitha says, tossing the twig aside.
“She is a beacon now. A lighthouse with a cracked lens. She thinks she has time to play happy families with her sister? The Devourer doesn’t need to hunt her anymore.
She just sent up a flare that pinpoints her exact location.
” Her sharp gaze lands on me. “You witnessed her end.”
Which one? But I nod.
I look down the hill where Nyssa disappeared. My gut twists. I promised her tonight. I promised her normal. But gods don’t get normal, and neither do slayers who play chicken with the ocean.
“We need to get her back,” I say, turning to the others.
“No,” Tabitha snaps. “If you interrupt her now, you break the only tether she has left to her humanity. Let her say goodbye. Just be ready to catch the fallout when the Devourer comes knocking. Because he isn’t waiting for an invitation.”
“Goodbye,” I mutter. “Once she sets foot into the Pantheon, she isn’t coming back.”
“One way or another, it ends with her,” Tabitha says.
One way or another. Then we have to make sure it ends with her standing. No matter what it takes.