“Home.” She squeezed so hard he couldn’t breathe, pushed her face into his neck, skin slick and warm with tears. “We have to go home, Kin.”
He held her tight and listened to her weep, staring at the black beyond the window glass. This place he thought he could belong. This place he had sought peace, and failed to find a single, solitary moment of it. His voice was an echo in the darkness, darker still.
“We’ll go home.”
He squeezed her tight as she sobbed in relief.
“But not without saying good-bye.”
34
THE JAGGED SHORE
The iron pulled him beneath the waves with half a breath in his lungs, dragging him down like an addict to the bottle’s lip. Ilyitch clawed at the harness, fumbling in his gloves, wasting precious seconds to slough them off. He kicked at freezing water with leaden boots, the call of the waves above an all-too-distant roar. His fingers found purchase, iron buckles finally snapping loose. Twisting underwater, he shrugged the harness off his shoulders, watching it spiral away into the dark beneath his feet.
And then he saw them. Long ribbons of silver, snaking up through the depths below. Mouthfuls of needles, the kind of eyes that stared from children’s closets in the dead of night. A stab of terror in his chest so sharp he actually screamed, wasting what was left of his breath, rushing over his lips in a bubbling flurry. Hundreds of perfect spheres, glass-smooth, tumbling up, up, up toward the surface. With all the speed his panic could muster, he followed.
The silver shapes did the same.
*
Yukiko saw Ilyitch break the surface, sucking in a desperate lungful and spending it immediately in a terrified wail. He was fifteen feet from the ledge, struggling to keep his head above water and suck down breath enough to scream again.
Buruu’s eyes were locked on the snarling nomad, circling to attack again, but he risked a quick, desperate glance as she kicked aside her oversized boots, sloughed off the rainskin. The rope was wrapped around her waist, the knot looped through copper coils as tight as she could make it.
YOU CANNOT DO THIS.
He did the same for me!
I WILL NOT LET—
He saved my life, Buruu! When you couldn’t even hear me screaming for help. I’d have drowned if not for him.
Without looking over her shoulder, Yukiko dove arrow-straight into the seething black. She could feel them in the water around her, spiraling upward in broad, lazy circles, nowhere for their prey to run. Gleaming and slick, eyes of slitted gold, ribbon fins along their flanks and spines undulating in the water at the whim of the thrashing swell.
Forked tongues and razors.
She struggled through the waves, barely able to swim herself. But her dive had taken her most of the way, and a crashing wave got her close enough to throw her arms about Ilyitch’s neck before he sank again. Buruu glanced over his shoulder, roared a warning as a long, serpentine head broke the surface, slowly rising from the water just five feet away. It moved like a cobra, rearing back and spreading the fins at its throat in a broad, shivering fan, dripping salt water and venom. A long, chattering hiss spilled from its needle-lined maw.
BEHIND!
A second dragon rose from the depths, echoing its cousin’s rasp, cutting off retreat. A third dorsal fin sliced in a broad arc around them, all spines and scales and long, smooth lines. Buruu gathered himself on the jagged shore, ready to dive into the waves and stain the ocean a deeper red. But the nomad crashed onto him from behind, the pair falling into a snarling, screaming heap, clumsy as children fighting over a new toy. Buruu bellowed with rage, lashing out with all his strength, tearing and biting in a desperate attempt to break loose from the nomad’s grasp. Knowing he was too far away to help. That it was already too late.
NO! YUKIKO!
Six cold reptilian eyes peered down at Yukiko and Ilyitch, angry hisses spilling through bared fangs. Thunder rocked the heavens, wind shrieking like a wounded oni. Ilyitch closed his eyes, muttering what sounded like a prayer, struggling to remain above the rolling, crashing swell. A blinding arc of lightning reached out across the sky. The largest dragon snarled and swayed, spines at its throat rattling, drawing back and opening its jaws for the death strike.
And Yukiko held up her hand.
Water sparkled on her skin; tiny droplets pooling along the underside of each fingertip before falling back into the ocean around them. The storm held its breath. The rain became a hushed whisper between loving cloud and gentle earth, Raijin stilling his drums with broad, flat hands, time crawling upon its belly for the sheer wonder of it all.
And the sea dragons fell still.