In the Veins of the Drowning(65)

“Chaos. Ruin. Death,” she whispered through a flash of bluish teeth. Her wrinkled mouth pulled back in a smile. “I’ll tell you what I would do if I were still young and beautiful like you.” Her white eyes shone. “I would keep him. I’d use his power and body to keep myself safe. Your journey to sever your bond with Eusia will be dangerous. You’d be a fool to go it alone.” Her vines brought her even closer to me, but I was too stunned to recoil. “Damn the war I feel brewing in the water. You are a Goddess-queen. Take what you want while you can.” Her voice dropped low. “For someday you will be like me.”

I batted her hand from my face. Her laughter was coquettish, completely at odds with the monster before me, but her guidance struck me square in my chest with intoxicating force.

Keep him. I wanted to. Desperately.

Despite all the destruction Rohana saw following in my wake, despite there being no clear path toward remaining together, I yearned for it. My stomach turned with sick, my eyes burned with tears, but I refused to fall apart in this hellish place.

Unanimated vines still draped Theodore’s body, and I tried to focus on his power within me. I set my fingers to them, fighting to command them to drag Theodore the rest of the way to the door. They were slow at work, sputtering under my weak control, but I managed to get him near enough that I could drag him the rest of the way myself, out into the daylight and sea air.

The waves churned against the rocks. I tried to let the sound soothe me, but each word of Rohana’s prophecy was a needle-thin blade, slipped through my skin. There they sat now, aching, refusing to be ignored. I pulled Theodore farther into the clearing and slammed the door.

“Goodbye, Rohana. I hope you rot.”

In the light of day Theodore looked so much worse. His golden-brown skin had been drained of its glow and was beaded with cold sweat. The rise and fall of his strong chest had lessened, now nearly too shallow to see.

“Shit, shit, shit.” I cupped his clammy face, dragged my hands down to his neck. His pulse had grown sluggish.

I squeezed my eyes shut and saw Nemea’s face once more. I remembered bouncing on his knee as a girl. The terror his nasal voice would send ricocheting through my body. The gifts he’d lavished upon me after he’d been particularly cruel—gowns and jewels and books. His thumb digging into my flesh to take my blood. The unsettling, empty way he would lose himself to some remote place while looking at me. I wondered if it was my mother he thought of then. My mother—whose wing hung upon his wall.

I lurched to the side and vomited onto the rocks.

Coughing, I swiped at my mouth and crawled halfway over Theodore’s inert body. “Theodore. Please.” I hit his chest with a fist. “Theo. Get up.”

He gave a hoarse groan.

“Theo.” I grabbed his face again, begging. “You need to get up. We need to get back to the shore.”

The water in the channel was high. The storm gusts turned its surface into a frenzy of toothy white peaks. I rose to my knees, tugged on his heavy hand. His head lolled to the side.

Panic rammed me so powerfully that I was certain something cracked. I was alone. Utterly alone save for a confluence of fear and fury, crashing through me like the sea. I stood and walked over the jagged rocks, down toward the edge of the water. I stared and stared at the waves. “Listen to me,” I said through my teeth. “Listen.”

The power in my stomach rose, and I focused, focused on twining it and the sea together until they could not be rent apart. Until they were indistinguishable.

Finally, when I pulled in a deep breath, the surface swelled. When I blew it out, it ebbed. I told it to steady, and the frothy peaks smoothed. A narrow path of water between Rohana’s island and Varya’s shore went flat. Calm. I could feel the waves at the tips of my fingers, and with the curl of my hand, the sea rose up the rocks, toward me.

Higher and higher the gentle flood climbed, until it rolled around Theodore’s body. The dark fan of his lashes fluttered at the contact, but he didn’t rouse.

“Theodore?” My voice cracked at the sight of him. “Shit. Wake up, please wake up.” I urged the water to move quicker. It cradled him, carried him down over the rocks and into the now-glassy channel. With a hand clamped around the severing draught in my pocket, I followed. Cold water met my hips, my navel. When it reached my chest, I swam.

He looked like a dead man. Motionless, empty. I swam faster, commanding a current to aid me, and when my boots hit the other shore, I ran up the sand and urged the water to carry Theodore up the beach, toward the vine shelter and our tethered horses. He sprawled over the black sand, white shirt clinging to his skin. He made an aching sound, cracked his eyes.

I fell to my knees. “Theo.” I forced a smile, swiped the wet hair from his brow. “I’m going to take care of you. Tell me how to get to Hector and Antonia’s. Can you tell me?”

His eyes shut. I tapped his cheek too hard, and this time he opened them wide enough for me to see the faceted green of his irises.

“Road,” he croaked, before he dropped away again. A bead of dark muck dribbled from one of his nostrils. Like oil. Like black blood. I frantically swiped it clean and bent to place kiss after kiss on his cold lips, his chin. He didn’t flinch.

In my single-mindedness, I lost all sense. I cursed and focused to near exhaustion and somehow commanded the vines of the shelter that Theodore had built us to help me bundle him up and over his horse. I sat behind him, straining to keep him steady, and started us down the road with my horse’s lead in my hand.