Page 77 of Waves
Instead of the desolation I’d just experienced, my entire body was subsumed with desperation. Frantic urgency that I realized was not my own—it was his. His pulse was pounding, dragging my heart through a wild race, like a chariot hitched to a stallion whose driver had been thrown. The throbbing in my veins grew faster until it was out of control and making me dizzy.
Confusion addled me. My vision was already speckled with dark flecks, my mind hazy, and I couldn’t grasp the full significance of what was happening.
The dragon shook me, jostling my arms and snapping my wrists.
The ocean took my movement as a sign, a signal, and it gave a pitch-bending howl that almost sounded like a war cry before it bounded forward in a rush, eager—less like an instrument and more alive than ever. Almost as if the water had realized it was about to lose the one person capable of hearing its song. The last sprite.
Water gushed through the gills on my neck and rushed into my lungs, the bubble around us collapsing, the dragon and I sinking, his weight making us drop like a stone.
I gulped water, uncaring about his hold as oxygen revived me and clarity sharpened my sight.
Still, his tongue lashed and lips moved in the same pattern again and again—stubbornly repeating the same message despite the water he was clearly taking on as fewer and fewer bubbles escaped from him with each repetition.
As breathing slowly restored my mind, I was finally able to decipher his frantic message.
Help.
Help him? The djinn who’d nearly destroyed Evaness? Who’d suppressed his own people? Who’d just attacked me?
Did he actually think I would?
It was a ludicrous request, one that almost made me laugh angrily. But I stopped myself. Even though I fully planned to end us both, what if I extracted information from him first? Information that could protect Okeanos from whoever was working with Raj.
It was worth a try.
I shoved my palms down and the sea erupted beneath us like a geyser, shooting us upward and breaking his grip on me. His wings splayed out in an effort to keep his balance as the water hurricaned upward. We split apart the surface of the waves and rose and rose until we hovered thirty feet above the sloshing surface. Above the ocean and beneath a storm, where dark clouds glimmered with lightning, billowing gray silk lined with jagged gold lace.
This time, I didn’t shove the ocean away from my body and force an air barrier to choke the dragon and myself. Instead, I let the foaming waves rise and fold themselves into a cloak thatstreamed down my shoulders, over my folded wings, tickling my neck while my gills received a steady stream of liquid oxygen.
“Who has the ring, Raj?” I hissed as a fork of lavender lightning seared across the sky around us.
Thunder shook our bones before the dragon opened his mouth. And when his lips parted, his head jerked upward, and his claws spread out…he resembled a marionette as his head swung down and his gaze zeroed in on me and the inside of his mouth began to glow.
He wasn’t in control.
I dove sideways.
Beneath my feet, waves leapt up, keeping me aloft and shoving me along so that I seemed to skate upon the water. One moment, I was right in front of the dragon. The next, my cloak of foam was streaming out into the stormy air behind me, and I was thirty feet away.
A stream of fire smashed into the water where I’d just hovered, leaving steam billowing up in a white veil that temporarily blinded me.
Raj burst through the haze a moment later, mouth snarling as more flames flickered along the edges of his dagger-sized teeth.
Whoever was pulling his strings clearly wanted a fight.
"Is it Valdez?" The accusation turned his name into a curse word, flying from my mouth with anger, without any sort of assurance I’d get an answer. I didn’t know where Raj began and ended, where the person who held his ring was—what was him and what was them. But I had to take the chance.
The dragon screeched, Raj’s head reeling from side to side in a quick denial before his mouth popped open as if his jaws had been pried apart.
Another jet of fire shot toward me, a spiraling sword of pure yellow flame.
My arm flew up on instinct in a blocking motion. A spiraling shield of water rose from the ocean and the flare slammed into it, sizzling into oblivion.
But the sea didn’t stop with my gesture, didn’t create the shield and then await my next command. It went rogue.
A bright horn sounded in my ears, a trumpet signaling attack. The note warbled as wave after wave rose up in front of me in a jagged wall that separated me from the airborne dragon. And then one, by one, like soldiers, those waves marched forward, swelling up until they crashed into the dragon’s belly, battered his wings, and threw Raj off balance.
As he tumbled back in the waves, flapping and struggling to regain his balance while the ocean punched into his ribs again and again, I heard a plaintive call.
