She shakes her head, backing a step.
The water clings to her, rising with her panic.
“Telya? That’s not my—I mean, what? I don’t know you. I didn’t call?—”
“It’s the word my people use for a strong current. Andyes, you did call out to me. I heard you, felt you over oceans of time and space,Telya. Now, I am here to answer that call.”
I lift my hand. The whirlpool blooms, the veil peeling open with a roar of water.
“I didn’t call,” she whimpers.
“You did. And now I’m calling you back.”
The pool surges, and my heart pounds.
Foam climbs her thick thighs.
She stumbles, catching herself on the rim of the tank, but the current drags her toward me. Just like I command.
“Wait—stop!”
Her voice is the sea itself, wild and unwilling.
My chest aches with it.
I have no business doing what I am doing, but nothing in this world or any other can make me stop. Because when I started this search, I didn’t do it like I told the others—to fake a bond. I did it to find my true viyella.
And I think I just have.
“Please,” she whimpers, eyes wild as the water rushes around us both. “What are you doing?”
I cant my head, catching the way the pulse at the base of her throat moves rapidly as she tries to understand what’s happening.
She can’t.
I know that. But I’m doing it anyway.
She reaches for me—out of instinct, out of terror, out of something deeper—and our hands meet just as the whirlpool swallows us both.
“I’m taking what’s mine,Telya.”
Salt and shadow wrap her body.
“I’ll drown!”
“You won’t,” I try to reassure her.
The glass, the lights, the sea lion’s bark—all shatter in the cacophony of magic rising around us in the swirling pool where the portal opens and closes at my whim.
I try to ignore the feel of her, so warm and soft, against me, but that requires a strength I do not possess.
Phoebe is—well—she is perfect.
But I must focus. I’m not doing this to satisfy a carnal itch.
Ahead, Castletide waits on the brink of ruin.
“Why?” she asks.
