Page 19 of The Princesses of Ruin
I scoop her up into my arms. Before she can get more than a squeal out, I jump. We plunge into cold darkness and she screams out the last of her air. Blue runes light up along her body and she transforms. Slits open along her ribs. Webbed skin grows between her fingers. Her legs and toes elongate, looking more like fins than feet.
She wriggles out of my grasp and throws me a nasty gesture with a broad grin. I let my full selkie form emerge. The sensation is akin to pulling off a wet shirt, except all over my body, all at once. The cold of the sea transforms from a sting to a caress. But unlike Reina’s smile, the loving embrace of the sea doesn’t calm my nerves.
Black rocks and stealthy predators loom just before a drop-off into the Deep, into Emerald Selkie territory.
“They will come,” Reina says in my native tongue, slipping her delicate hand into mine. Her warmth is hidden under layers of extra skin she’s grown over the past weeks, but her touch is reassuring all the same.
“I know,” I say. “I can hear them.”
“Are close?” she asks. Her vocabulary is still limited, but she’s learning so fast. A swell of pride takes up space where my worry sits, and I ease against her.
“Within minutes,” I say.
She leans into my side, kicking her webbed feet in tandem with my tail. “I’ll anger them?”
I wrap my arm around her waist and pull her closer. She wears a tight leather vest to match her shorts, which obscure her anatomy, but she’s otherwise bare to the water. The frilled gills along her ribs flutter with her exhale. I trail a finger up her waist to her neck and cup her cheek. Her large eyes shimmer green in the depths, and wisps of her blond hair float serenely out of her tight braid.
“You are different but not upsetting. They will be curious.”
“Curss?” she asks, fumbling the pronunciation of the word.
I stifle my grin and pull her lips to the seam of my mouth. She kisses me quickly, then pulls back and repeats the word with slightly better pronunciation and a furrow in her brow.
I rub my thumb down the wrinkles in her forehead to her nose, then kiss her again chastely. “Curious. To think about you. To want to know more.”
She smiles. “I understand.”
She repeats the word several times, and I watch her lips, caught up in the beauty of her. A shift in the flow of water raises the spines down my back on instinct. Tension fills my being and my gaze snaps toward the abyss.
“They’re here,” I say in Fynish, the syllables slow and difficult to form.
Reina’s head turns to follow my gaze, and her hand tightens on mine. The silhouetted shapes must be ghastly to her in the darkness, but to me, I see kin—and an old foe.
My talons flex as the ga’hanoi steals alongside the three selkie representatives. Its many limbs bloom like a flower before pushing it into a sharp spear that cuts through the water.
“What’s wrong?” Reina asks.
“Stay behind me,” I say, pushing her out of view.
The three selkies—Emerald, Crimson, and Onyx, respectively—approach with spines raised and fins flared, while the ga’hanoi stays back several waves. I focus on the chill of the water to calm my nerves and pray the scent of my fear doesn’t reach them.
“You’ve brought an outsider,” the Emerald representative says.
“My mate,” I say.
Onyx makes a sharp squeal of surprise and Reina flinches.
“The Opal Prince is mated to an abomination,” Crimson says, inciting anger to bleed through my fear. “Why have the gods punished us?”
“She is not what you say. She is Ki’ah Ohn, changed willingly through magic to adapt to the water.”
“We haven’t time for this. Why have you called us?” Emerald says.
“We’ve come to speak of the return of a dark goddess, Ashai.” The word burns like hot coals in my mouth. “Those able to stand against her must, or we will lose all of Gaien.”
“The land, perhaps, but not the sea,” Onyx says.
“She will boil the sea and eat every creature in it,” I say.
