Page 227 of A Winding Wave of Magic
Hurry, called a voice older than time.
“Gods, you’re soaked.”
“I’ll be fine.” I tugged on his collar, unable to stop myself, and kissed him, quick and hard. Relief and ever-present desire charged through it, even in a moment. “How did you get across anyway?” Frantically, I looked around, hoping in vain for a separate entrance, maybe. A mode of escape.
He gulped. “My father—his magic carried me.”
He didn’t have to say more than that. I could easily imagine those swirling shadows binding Jonathan and sending him across the water to this ledge, from which there was nowhere else to go.
“And he bound yours too?”
He nodded. “I would assume. His magic knows mine. The kinship allows him to suppress it, which means I can’t do much.But this…” His thumb brushed the water from my face. “There’s new power in you.”
“It’s borrowed.” I didn’t have time to explain the way the water had flowed through me, first from the vial, then through the river, which lingered on my hair and skin. But a thought occurred. “If you can feel it, can you use it?”
He frowned. “From you?”
“You can read my mind when you touch me. The watermoves, Jonathan. Can you move things with it if you touch me?” I offered my still-wet palm.
His distaste was obvious, but tentatively, he set his hand in mine.
Disappointment hummed as he shook his head. “It’s not enough.”
Come. It wasn’t exactly a word I heard, but that voice—the river’s voice—beckoned just the same.
I leaned down and put my hand into it while keeping hold of Jonathan’s with the other.Please.
Power surged through me.
His eyes lit up. “Mygods.”
“Can you do something now?”
“I…more than before. It’s incredible, Cass. I don’t know…so fluid. So reckless. I don’t know how to describe it. Is this what you feel when you’re in the water?”
“Jonathan!” This wasn’t the time for waxing poetic. “Can you get us out of here?”
He looked around with eyes like bursting stars. “I—no. No, it’s not the same. I can’t See the rock in the same way. There’s no way to move it, to ask it to change.”
And it was true. Through my own Sight, his own only only extended to the river—the one element that wouldn’t help us.
“There you are.”
Darkness fell across the doorway, crossing the spare bit of light that had lit Jonathan’s face. Caleb Lynch had returned, looking significantly better than before. Shadows spun and moved around his body, which had taken a more ethereal form than before but was somehow more stable than when he was fully present as flesh and bone.
“Naughty,” he said. “Leaving Perumal like that. Wouldn’t have thought you were capable, but it seems you have a few more surprises to reveal, Ms. Whelan. I’ll have to ask you and my son to come with me.”
The ledge under us started to move.
“Jonathan!” I cried as I stretched down for the water.
But it was out of reach.
We traveled up and over the current, floating toward the mass of shadow that spread, ready to welcome us both into its deadly embrace.
“No,” I said to myself. Then, more loudly: “NO.”
Then, before he could even think to protest, I wrapped an arm around Jonathan’s waist and used every bit of my strength to roll us both off the edge and into the water below.
