Page 87

Chapter Seventy-Eight

LUNA

Nose just above water, hand on the raft part of the boat, my toe finds the ledge. Calling for Carmine gets me nothing back, of course. What did I expect? An answer from a guy stuck underwater?

I’m near where he fell. If he tipped into the deepest part of the lake, I won’t be able to swim to him. Panic rises in my heart, and my body responds by flooding my bloodstream with adrenaline.

“Fuck. Stop it.” There’s noise from the shore. I won’t look. I can’t think. I have to focus. Breathe. I have magic. I can open locks and make knives fly across a room. “Shut up.”

The confidence itself is a distraction from finding him. The attention needs to be outward, until I forget I exist. I press my lips together and hum “Happy Birthday.”

When the song is someplace else, hummed by someone else, heard by ears that aren’t mine, I am quiet enough to feel the thrall tug inside me.

“ Dear Carmine, happy… ” I whisper-sing to myself. “Ah. There you are.”

I duck under.

The shadow of a man sits with bent knees and floating arms, sinking into the deep part of the lake. His emotional shapes are tiny in the distance. Fear and acceptance. A panic that’s outward-directed. His valence lines are bright and sharp.

You can move mountains with that power.

I can. But he’s far. So far.

With one hand gripping the boat, I hold out one hand for his lines. They buzz my fingertips, but the connection is oblong, as if they’re glancing off me.

He’s so tiny. Barely discernible in the shadows. My chest hurts. The valence lines are my touch-sense power. Fuck. I need both hands.

I let go of the boat. My arms and legs want to flail, to swim upward to safety. Still. I have to stay still and hold out both hands.

It’s him or death—a choice between the pricks on my palm or drowning right now.

I make a nnn sound in my throat and bubbles come from between my teeth.

I open my palms, feeling for him. When I turn my attention to the lines, my love goes with it.

Holding it back is not possible. I cannot control my compassion, my self-interest, my panic for him and the survival terror inside my body.

My attention is flung forward faster and more powerfully than I anticipate.

He gets bigger.

He moves toward me like a rocket through the water, crashing into me at breathtaking speed.

We are wrapped together, hurling toward the shore.

My ears whoosh . My lungs expand and I breathe water.

It stabs and burns. My insides try to lurch outside.

Those seconds flying through space in his arms feel like launching into death.

My back scrapes sharp stones, and we stop. He’s on top of me, soaking, dead pale, blue-lipped, beautiful.

“Luna.”

“You’re alive.” Except I don’t get past the first word before my chest heaves and expels a lungful of liminal water in his face.

He gets off me, and I roll over to finish throwing up.

“Ario,” he says, holding back my hair.

His muscle-vampire casts a shadow over us. They talk in Italian as I let my entire chest twist and tighten to send up another half teaspoon of liminal water.

“It’s quiet.” I fall back on my haunches, wiping my mouth with my wrist.

“The sun is up.” Carmine’s still stroking my hair. “That took care of a lot of the young ones.”

Ario crouches next to me. “The rest… that kid is taking care of.”

I follow his gaze to Scout, guiding a hobbling bag of rage and starvation in the other direction—toward Charles, who’s faced with a few dozen of the same.

He’s backing away slowly. They’re following him.

I can’t tell if it’s to kill him or worship him.

Their emotions are hidden by a cloud of hunger.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

Ario puts my shoes in front of me. “Viaro said to make sure you got these.”

Carmine sits me down and arranges my legs so my feet are in front of me. I am limp to his touch. Because of my exhaustion and shock, or his thrall, he takes complete control of my body.

“He’s still too young for the sun.” Carmine snaps open a sock. He kisses the top of my foot before sliding the sock on it. “He’ll find your mother as soon as it sets.”

My face stings as if it’s been slapped from the inside.

“I forgot about that.” The sting turns wet, and I crumble into sobs because it was terrible and I didn’t think about it for one minute. I let my fears go when they needed to be held. Anything could have happened to her in that time. What if she died or suffered when I wasn’t thinking about her?

Carmine picks me up and carries me out of the liminal.