“They’re beautiful,” I whisper.
Kael’s hand moves to my back, pressing, and I feel the tide of me tilt toward him the same way the sea tilts toward the moon.
“You’re beautiful, Lady Phoebe.”
The pull is physical—an ache in my chest and a soft warmth between my legs—but it’s larger than lust.
It is a magnetic tug, gentle and inexorable, like the current that guides a boat.
He is so unlike anyone I have ever seen—Lord of Water, Demon Lord, the man with a bite in his throat—and yet my fondness for him is building in small, dangerous increments.
I’m beginning to care for him the way a plant leans toward sunlight.
“You missed me today,viyella?” he asks suddenly, but it feels like an accusation wrapped in velvet.
I want to be indignant.
“I—no. I am perfectly capable of not missing conceited men who get their jollies and leave their women hanging in the lurch.”
He laughs, a low sound that makes the rigging hum.
“Such eloquence. Correct me if I’m wrong,Telya, but you weren’t complaining last night.”
“Shut up,” I mutter, and he kisses the corner of my mouth—soft, quick—and the world narrows to that small, ridiculous contact.
My pulse stutters. I am both furious and thrilled.
The sound of footsteps has me turning where I stand, but Kael doesn’t loosen his arms, and I find I am actually moving more completely into his embrace.
A strange man walks onto the deck, and he looks every bit as formidable and powerful as Kael only his hair and skin are paler than moonlight, and he has enormous black wings protruding from his back.
He looks like some holy avenging angel, and shivers race down my spine, making Kael pull me more firmly against him.
The stranger simply snorts.
“You two are unbearable,” he says, but there’s warmth under the teasing. “Stop flirting like children and mind the tide.”
“It’s not flirting if it’s territorial,” Kael says, dry as salt. “It’s claiming.”
“Please, Kael, you know I can’t stand this incessant rocking. Steady the damn boat before I leave you something to mop on this infernal deck,” the stranger grits.
“And that, Lady Phoebe, is Dagan, Lord of Earth,” Kael introduces me with a roll of his deep blue eyes. Then he raises his hand, steadying the waves, and making the water less choppy for our boat ride.
“Yes, I’m his better looking friend, and you are entirely too good for him, Lady Phoebe,” the man, Dagan, says with a half bow in my direction.
I almost say something teasing back, but then a gust of kelp-sweet air hits me and I inhale the smell of the sea—brine and old rope and citrus from the fruit stalls—and the memory offluorescent lights and antiseptic hospital air in the med pool feels like another lifetime.
My skin tightens where his hand rests on my hip. And the mark on my neck prickles with memory and heat.
In the hollow under the collar of my blouse, it’s as if the bite is alert, awake, whispering the same thing the creatures in the water say with their bright, coin-splash leaps.
She belongs here, too. She is one of us.
And for the first time since I arrived in Nightfall, I want that to be true.
We pass a line of small boats where old women fry tiny silver fish over coals and the scent is delicious.
“Look there, an elder is pouring a cup of salted wine into the hand of that visiting captain as a blessing. It is a good sign, Telya,” Kael murmurs.
