“Which is why you’ve helped me search for arcane items ever since. Even though you didn’t remember why you were doing it.” Ström watches Mikkel, his elbows around his knees, as we sit on the floor ofthe ship.
“Yes. We knew we owed it to you, somehow,” Mikkel says as sorrow fills him. “Even though Lærke and I didn’t remember why we felt indebted to you, we still always felt we needed to help. You never told us about your missing memories, and we didn’t recall ours, but I think somewhere deep down… we knew.”
“You knew you hadn’t been able to help Ström in the past, so you were trying to make it right all these years,” I say now, realizing Mikkel does have a good side to him, like I thought.
“Yes.” Mikkel hugs his sister closer in his lap. He brushes her hair back from her face in the wind, and I see another good side to Mikkel.
How much he loves and cares for his twin—no matter what.
A pause comes as we all switch from past to present now. Glancing around, we take in our current situation.
As we try to figure a way out of it.
“How did she get into your club?” I glance at Mikkel, then Ström. “And why put us on a ship at sea?”
“Alfhild is powerful.” Mikkel shrugs, even as he simmers with a dark hate. “You felt what she can do with her mind-magics. My club’s security has nothing on that, even though we’ve tried to bolster our clubs over the years against other Bone Mages with intense mind-magic. When she comes for someone, however… they fall to her power. Lærke and I fought when she arrived for us, but our battle was brief.”
“We couldn’t fight her at all,” Bjorn says, growling like thunder now as he sits beside me. “She just caught us like rabbits in a trap.”
“Sex is power for her.” Ström heaves a deep sigh. “It doesn’t have to be sex with her that does it. Her magic is strange; like a Vampire, her Bone Magic drinks from sexual energy, using it to power the curses she creates. That’s how she could easily trap us in the moment. Our trio had just finished having sex—and she used that energy to curse us.”
Bjorn growls low again, even as he heaves to his feet to explore the small ship and see what Alfhild left us. Mikkel gives me the saddest, most complex gaze, but he doesn’t rise like Bjorn. Instead, he takes the momentto investigate his sister’s condition more thoroughly; glancing in her eyes, he takes her pulse again, putting a hand to her heart.
I feel how even Mikkel’s powers are restrained, however, as we rock over the waves upon this ship. Alfhild did something to all of us.
Binding our power deep inside our bodies—unable to let it out.
Ström rises and holds out his hands. I take them, welcoming the help up. Thankfully, since my power is still inside me, I’m not cold in the gusting wind like I was when I had Magnussen manacles on. I brush my hair out of my face, pulling it back into a hasty braid so I can evaluate our surroundings.
Wherever we are, we’re way the fuck out at sea. I don’t see any land nearby. Only grey water, our boat, and scudding clouds as they pass in front of the sun, then come out again.
“We’re still somewhere near Copenhagen,” Ström says, as he surveys that vast spread of ocean.
“How can you tell?” I turn to him.
“The ocean smells different here in the south versus where I was born.” Ström shrugs, jutting his chin at the water. “I can’t explain it, but I noticed it as soon as I moved to Copenhagen. Still do.”
“Ström’s right.” Mikkel glances up from where he still sits on the ship’s bottom with Lærke. “I’d say we’re several miles off the coast of Copenhagen, in the Øresund. Visibility at sea is about three miles when you’re offshore, until you can no longer see land. In some places near Copenhagen, the Øresund stretches as wide as twenty miles. We’re most likely somewhere near there… other parts of Denmark smell differently.”
“Bad news; regardless of where we are.” Bjorn returns to us now, from investigating the small Viking ship. “There are no sails on the masts, the rudder is broken on the till, and there’s a small hole scuttled in the boat, back there.” He nods at the stern of the ship, while we’re all sitting in the bow. “We’re taking on water, though it’s slow. I’d say in an hour, maybe an hour and a half, we’ll be sunk. There aren’t any bailing buckets, either.”
“And we can’t shift,” I say, as I push my power through my bodyagain, but come up with nothing. “Alfhild did something to our magics; she didn’t want us to shift and fly out of this as our dragons.”
“She wants us to drown slowly, thinking about what we’ve done… until we’re dead,” Ström snorts, as the first of the water we’re taking on trickles up towards the higher bow deck. I watch it with a slow fascination, the little trickle that signifies our doom. Apparently, the hole in our ship isn’t big enough to sink us all at once.
It will kill us eventually, though—as we sit here, thinking about what we’ve done.
“What a bitch.” Putting my hands on my hips, I glance at Bjorn. “Can we plug that hole?”
“I already did, by ripping up some netting that was still in here and wadding it into the hole,” Bjorn says. “It’s still seeping water, but I think I may have bought us an extra hour… but that’s all.”
“We’ll have to swim it.” Ström gazes out over the water. “Like Mikkel says, it can’t be over seventeen miles to any shore, east or west. I say we jump in, stay together, and haul ass in human form if we can’t shift. We’ll make it to shore, eventually.”
It’s not a bad plan, as we dragons still have tremendous stamina, even in our human forms. But as I nod and Ström sets a hand to the railing to vault over into the water, it sears him.
A blast of energy hammers Ström; he goes careening into Bjorn and they both wind up on their asses in the pooling water down in the main hull of the ship. As Bjorn blinks and Ström snarls, growling at his hand, I can see it’s been blistered a nasty, burned red. The entire railing of the ship spreads in a wave of caustic violet-red Bloodrunes.
That we can see, now that we’ve just triggered them.
