Page 73 of A Storm in Every Heart
My own wings spring from my back as I run toward her, lifting off the ground without even thinking about it.
I reach Dessa in seconds. She screams again as I scoop her into my arms, rising into the air just as another tentacle smashes into where she stood seconds prior.
“Are you alright?” I shout. It’s such a basic question and not nearly enough to describe the terror and adrenaline that flooded me the moment I saw her, but it’s all I can get out.
“I think so?” Odessa screams back over the wind. “Are you?”
“Barely.”
I look around frantically for a place to put her down out of harm’s way while I go back and help Jett, but there’s nowhere. We’re in the middle of the godsdamn fucking ocean and—wait.
“I’m going to put you in the water,” I tell her. “I need to go get Jett.”
“No!” she screams, a stronger note of panic than I’ve ever heard before rising in her voice.
“You’ll be fine. I’ll come right back.”
“Please, no!” she screams again. She reaches out with both hands and grabs my face, forcing my eyes to hers. “Do not put me in the water, Kastian.Please!”
I stare into her wide violet eyes and for half a second I can’t think, I just nod. I don’t know what she’s so scared of—a siren shouldn’t be afraid of a sea monster—but I can’t deny her anything when she’s looking at me like that. “Okay, I won’t.”
Odessa lets go of my face and releases a breath. “Good. I swear to the gods, if you do, you’ll never see me again.”
My mouth twists with annoyance—no,anger.
Even now, hovering in the air over the wreck of the ship I just rescued her from, she’s so determined to hate me she’d threaten to disappear. “You don’t have to threaten, Princess. You could just ask.”
She stiffens in my arms but doesn’t say anything else, twisting to look down at the nearly ruined ship below us. I fly lower, searching for Jett, all the while trying to figure out how I’m going to reach for my sword without putting Odessa down.
Mercifully, in a flash of indigo blue feathers, I spot Jett flying low over the ship below. I let out a relieved breath and feel Odessa do the same.
I have no fucking idea how he escaped the monster’s grasp, but he seems fine. He’s whooping through a mouthful of blood, face split open in a wild grin as if fighting monsters was his true calling in life.
“Jett!” I shout to get his attention.
He turns midair to look at me and I swear he seems disappointed to be leaving the fight behind as he flies toward us.
Jett and I rise into the air and I squint into the distance, searching for the nearest land.
“Head south,” I tell Jett, jerking my head toward my homeland.
He gives me a long look, but doesn’t comment on it as we turn to fly toward the land on the horizon.
Just before we leave, I risk a glance back at the ship just as another tentacle punches clean through the keel, snapping centuries-old beams like dry reeds. At the prow, silhouetted against the setting sun, stands Captain Connell—somehow alive, absolutely refusing to die.
He’s caked with blood but still upright, sword flashing as he hacks at anything that moves. He laughs—actually laughs—as if he’d been waiting all day for a disaster to validate his existence.
Then a tentacle as thick as a chimney wraps around Connell’s waist and hauls him straight up off the deck.
He catches my eye at that moment and grins like a lunatic even as his ribs are nearly crushed by suckers the size of soup plates. “Let’s pray this time it sticks!”
My stomach lurches uncomfortably.
I already hate myself for what I’m about to do.
“Jett!” I yell over the din. “Grab him!”
“Are you fucking kidding?”
