Salt. He was choking on salt. Not the salt of blood, but the salt of the ocean. He tasted the sea in his mouth and coughed, his body clenching as he spat up seawater onto the floor.
Seawater? He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, his heart pounding. He’d gone nowhere near the ocean today. And yet he could hear it in his ears, as if he were listening to a seashell. His body ached, and his parabatai rune throbbed.
Shocked and dizzy, he placed his hand over the rune. And he knew. He knew without knowing how he knew, knew it down in his soul where his connection to Emma had been forged in blood and fire. He knew in the way that she was a part of him, the way her breathing was his breathing, and her dreams were his dreams, and her blood was his blood, and when her heart stopped he knew that his would too, and he would be glad, because he wouldn’t want to live one second in a world that didn’t have her in it.
He closed his eyes and saw the ocean rise up behind his eyelids, blue-black and depthless, charged with the force of the first wave that had ever crashed on the first lonely beach. And he knew.
Whither thou goest, I will go.
“Emma,” he whispered, and took off at a run.
Emma was not sure what terrified her most about the ocean. There was the rage of the waves—dark blue and tipped with white like lace, they were deceptively beautiful, but as they neared the shore, they closed in like fists. She had been trapped by a breaking wave once and she remembered the feeling of falling, as if she were plunging down an elevator shaft, and then the force of the water pinning her to the sand. She had choked and struggled, trying to free herself, to push her way back up to the air.
There was also the depth of it. She had read, before, about people who had been abandoned out to sea, how they had gone insane thinking about what was below them: the miles and miles of water and the dark and toothy and slippery things that lived in it.
As she was slammed through the porthole door and into the ocean, salt water swallowed Emma, filled her eyes and ears. She was surrounded by water, blackness opening up below her like a pit. She could see the pale square of the porthole door, receding in the distance, but try as she might, she couldn’t kick her way toward it. The current was too strong.
Hopelessly, she looked up. Her witchlight stone was gone, sinking through the water below her. The light from the ever-receding porthole lit the area around her, but she could see nothing but darkness above. Her ears were popping. Raziel only knew how deep down she was. The water near the porthole was pale green, the color of jade, but everywhere else it was black as death.
She reached for a stele. Her lungs were already aching. Floating in the water, kicking out against the current, she jammed the tip of the stele against her arm and scrawled a Breathing rune.
The ache in her lungs eased. With the pain gone, the fear came crashing in, blinding in its intensity. The Breathing rune kept her from struggling for air, but the horror of what might be around her was nearly as intense. She reached for the seraph blade in her belt and pulled it free.
Manukel, she thought.
The blade came to life in her hand, spilling out light, and the water around her turned to murky gold. For a moment Emma was dazzled; then her vision cleared, and she saw them.
Demons.
She screamed, and the bubbles rose up around her, silent. They were below her, like nightmares rising: lumpy, slippery creatures. Waving tentacles crowned with jagged teeth flailed toward her. She swung Manukel and severed the spiked limb reaching for her leg. Black blood exploded into the water, billowing up in clouds.
A scarlet, snakelike thing shot toward her through the water. She kicked out, collided with something fleshy and soft. She gagged on revulsion and stabbed downward; more blood spilled. The sea around her was turning to charcoal.
She kicked up toward the surface, carried on a billow of demon blood. As she rose, she could see the white moon, a blurred pearl on the surface of the water. The Breathing rune had burned off her skin; her lungs felt as if they were collapsing. She could feel the churn of water under her feet, didn’t dare to look down. She reached up, up toward where the water ended, felt her hand break the surface, the chill of air on her fingers.
Something caught at her wrist. Her seraph blade fell from her hand, a glowing point of light that tumbled away from her as she was hauled to the surface of the water. She gasped in air, but it was too soon. Water filled her lungs, her chest, and darkness slammed into her with the force of a truck.
Idris, 2009
It was at Emma and Julian’s parabatai ceremony that she learned two important things. The first was that she wasn’t the only Carstairs left in the world.