Page 134 of Of Rime and Ruin
Come find me, they chirp, reprising my message for Ramona, and my stomach sours. No. I can’t desert him. I won’t.
I latch onto a glosswhale’s dorsal fin.Swim, I command, imprinting an image of us playing in the shallows. Eagerness sparks in its mind, and the glosswhale kicks its tail, dragging me along as the pod speeds for the shore. My muscles relax, grateful for the respite.
Aethan, I’m sorry. I’m coming.
A boom shakes the sea. The water trembles. The glosswhales screech as panic floods their minds. Scales rise along my spine, tracing an icy path over my scalp. The glosswhale I’m holding twists out of my grip and tears away with a burst of speed.
Something’s not right.
A mass of fish soon follows, rushing past me, hundreds of slippery bodies whipping their tails as fast as they can go.
What the fuck?
I stop short, treading water as I peer into the endless stream of fish ahead of me. My heart drops.
A wall of ice presses through the water. Grating. Rumbling. Sliding toward me from sea floor to surface. Fish bolt away from its reach, the unlucky ones caught and suspended in the ice. Frozen solid in an instant.
If I don’t reach open water in time, I’ll be consumed by it, too.
I slap my tail, adrenaline burning through my muscles. With furious pumps, I dive for the exit, still several paces out of reach.Slick bodies press around me. Glosswhales and pikewhales fight through the crowd, slapping smaller fish out of their way as we all funnel through the same tight spot.
I glance over my shoulder. The wall of ice rumbles, pressing closer. Too close.
Shit. I’m running out of time.
I angle my body against the flow of fish, fighting toward the surface. If I can breach the waves, I can get on top of the ice before it crushes me against the glacier. The skylights dapple through the waterline. I stretch my fingers, kicking harder.
A desperate, shrieking cry echoes around me. For a moment, the fish cease their movement. Stunned.
My body alerts as a shadow rises from below. I canfeelits presence, all around me—like a god among the fish—before I spot its form in the dark waters of the night. The blue-scaled body, a long thrashing tail between powerful hind legs. Long, white hair parting around gnarled horns. A chiseled jaw. Sharp and glinting white teeth.
Then the fish renew their vigor around me, growing more frantic, their bodies wriggling with impossible speeds, as I stay still.
The clawbeast.
Relief courses through me. Aethan is here. Aethan has come after me. The Beast survived, somehow. I’ve been a fool to think he’d give up. I left him behind, but still he came to my rescue.
With a stir of my magic, reaching for his mind.Aethan!I call out, pouring all my love into his name as part of my mind spirals in his direction.
But I smack into a mental barrier, cold and calculating. Foreign. Female.
Not him.
In the water, the clawbeast cocks her head. Her eyes snap to my face, locking onto me with a predatory gaze.
Chapter fifty-five
Aethan
HowcouldIlosesight of her? She was with me not twenty minutes ago, and now…She’s gone.
I charge into the Rime, leaving the shore behind me. Icy water swallows my bare legs, but I push forward. My knees lift and fall as I cut through the tide, and I scan the water for signs of her—a flash of golden tail or a splash of water. But the ice floes crowd the surface, monotonous piles of snow blocking my view in the darkness.
Gone.
I plunge deeper, wading to my waist as panic rises in my throat. I should have gills by now, and a thrashing tail. I should be gliding through the water, racing to bring her home. To explain everything so she understands.
But the Beast is gone, and I do not transform. My bare skin grows numb from the cold, refusing to sprout scales.
