Page 57 of The Demon Tide

“What do you seek?” my renegade great-aunt asks Trystan.

She holds one black-taloned hand out to him in dangerous offering, her nails filed to points and stained with tattoo ink. Bright black metallic hoops decorate her eyebrows, pointed ears, nose, and the side of her mouth. A scarlet dragon tattoo depicting Vo’s warrior goddess manifestation twines down her arm.

“This is my great-aunt, Sithendrile,” I tell Trystan, wishing I’d more carefully avoided my fully empathic great-aunt, having thought her visiting the Salishen Isles. I’ve always been close to her, but right now, I don’t want her reading my feelings for Trystan or learning what’s going on inside his mind. I throw a lash of water power out to her, willing her to look my way. She gives a short laugh and eyes me slyly as she effortlessly throws her own storm aura around mine and presses my magic down until it’s flat on the tiled ground, a cloud of white vapor briefly forming around the three of us. She narrows her sharp gaze at me and does not lower her hand.

I cock a stubborn brow. “He should know you’re empathic before he touches you,” I chide her and warn Trystan at the same time, a fitful energy rising through my power.

Because I’m clear what this handshake is about.

The Wyvernguard has a sizable number of Wyvern apprentices, and it’s likely that she’s heard from at least one of them that an attraction has been sensed. And now she wants to read it for herself—my impossibly strong draw to this Gardnerian. This Mage whose tears I want to kiss away. Who invades my dreams and has turned my world upside down.

Trystan doesn’t hesitate. He meets my great-aunt’s intimidating stare, reaches out, and takes her hand.

She gives him an amused look as her taloned fingers clamp tight around it.

“I seek transformation,” Trystan says, throwing the words down like a gauntlet. “I seek to be who I truly am.”

My great-aunt loses her smile and inhales, her pierced brows knotting as she holds on to him, her expression morphing to one of astonishment. I pick up on her sensing the vast power that lives inside him—the constant lethal storm that abides just under his skin.

The storm I increasingly yearn to throw myself and my power into.

She closes her eyes and bows her head as she reads him, nodding a few times, sometimes with apparent surprise, sometimes as if with dawning understanding.

When my great-aunt finally opens her eyes, there’s a weighted gravity there.

“You will come with me,” she announces to Trystan as she releases his hand. When she beckons him to enter her shoppe with a curl of one onyx-clawed finger, he goes inside.

I move to go with them, and she holds up her palm. “No, Vothendrile. This is between Trystan, me, and Vo above. This is beyond you at the moment.”

I bristle, stung.Beyond me? The person who has been shadowing this Mage for over a month now? Who pulled him from the depths of the Zonor?

I step back, suddenly hollowed out by a grief I don’t understand.

My great-aunt’s expression softens. She raises her hand and caresses my cheek, and I bite back an intense swell of inexplicable loneliness. By any measure, I shouldn’t be lonely. Despite my support of Trystan, I still have a number of friends and family who are supportive of me.

But I also know that most of my family would recoil in revulsion if they knew how much I want to kiss Trystan Gardner. How I yearn for the courage to pull him into my arms like I did in the waters of the Zonor, but not to rescue him this time.

To have him rescue me.

“I see what you are feeling for each other,” my aunt says softly.

Sweet Vo, she’s reading it all in her touch.

I flinch away from her, ashamed by my deepest thoughts and inability to understand the difficult emotional terrain I’ve landed in.

“Don’t leave the Zonor,” my aunt says to me, her stare blisteringly intent. Her unexpected words pierce my soul. “That’s where you’ll find your strength,” she insists. “And your transformation. Don’t fear it, Vothendrile.”

“Our people are wrong to want to wall off the West,” I blurt out to her. To this renegade aunt of mine who is often tactlessly blunt, caustically revolutionary, and seems to regularly position herself at odds with the Zhilon’ile Regency and most of my family. Much like my friend Min Lo. “It’s different,” I confide in her. “Different to see it with your own eyes. People are dying trying to get here. Children. Whole families. I have nightmares about it. Every night for a week now. I can’t get what’s happening there out of my mind.”

“Then go back,” she challenges, lightning in her gaze, “and take a stand. Even if you lose everything.” She squeezes my arm affectionately, over the fabric of my uniform this time, where we both know she can’t read me. Then she turns and follows Trystan past the curtain, leaving me behind.

Trystan

“What would you have me do?” Sithendrile asks, her shoppe lined with neat rows of every color of tattoo ink imaginable. I pull off my tunic and sit on the long table before her.

On the wall nearest me, there’s a shelf of metal jewelry of every conceivable style, larger bottles of dye just above it, and bins upon bins of cosmetics and kohl pencils to line the eyes, as is the style here for Noi men.

I think of the little girl screaming in the boat. Screaming in terror when she caught sight of my black hair. My Gardnerian features.

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