Page 9 of The Water Witch (Fairwick Chronicles 2)

They have hooks?buzzed the undines in thrilled and horrified voices.

No, no, I assured them.That’s only a story…we just have to stay together and find our way out. I see a light ahead.

Now that my eyes had adjusted I made out a number of lights ahead, although none as bright as the chink of light I’dseen at the bottom of the pool. Where had that light gone? As I led the undines toward a faint green glow, I wondered if that other shimmery light had been a trick to lure us into this netherworld.Or maybe, a sly voice inside my head suggested,youwantedto go here because it’s whereheis. Suppressing the thought—and hoping that my companions hadn’t heard it—I swam toward the light.

Nearer to the dim glow, I saw what happened to those who had been left in the watery Borderlands. A tangle of bleached white limbs littered the bottom of the pool, so crowded together it was difficult to make out what sort of creatures they had been in life. I made out human limbs and faces, but also fishtails and deer antlers, bird wings and…heaven help us…beaver claws. No matter what their shape, all their flesh had been bleached white and emitted a pale greenish glow, like some kind of radioactive decay. A fine luminescent mist rose off them that I thought at first was light until I noticed that it was clinging to my hand.

I tried to rub a greenish slime off on my arm—the undine was still gripping my other hand—but it only spread. It crept up my arm. I tried to pull my hand away from the undine so I could get the stuff off me but our hands seemed welded together. Turning to her, I saw that she was also covered in the chalky green silt. Her face was frozen in a silent scream of horror. Only her moss green eyes remained and the silt was seeping over them…except that it wasn’t silt. In the glow she gave off I saw that the dust was actually composed of tiny creatures knitting together some kind of hard shell. All around us the undines, coated with the nacreous shells, were sinking onto the body heap. I heard the undines’ terrified cries in my head as they sank—one hit the bottom and cracked in two, half her face falling away—but even worse, I heard the tiny minds of the shell creatures. Once they sealed my limbs insidea shiny hard carapace that bore my shape, they would feast on my flesh.Slowly. They enjoyed a feast of live human flesh…Mmmm, even better than undine…and they intended to make it last.

I heard a silent scream inside my head and knew it was the undine whose hand I held. She was still alive under the chalky carapace, but soon wouldn’t be. I felt her consciousness flicker…

Raspberry, I said silently to her.Remember the taste of raspberry. Then I squeezed her hand and directed my energy toward the hard shell encasing her. If a spell worked for opening doors, maybe it could break other barriers.Ianuam sprengja!I commanded.

The shell burst into a million brittle shards.

Swim up!I screamed to her and to the rest of the undines.Shake it off!

I tried to swim upward but my limbs were weak. Already the shell creatures were regathering on my skin. I made one last desperate stroke upward…and felt something grab my hand. Above was a dark swirl, some other predator, perhaps come to tussle over my bones with the shell creatures. But this creature was at least pulling me toward bright gold that looked like sunlight. Anything was better than spending the next hundred years as the shell creatures’ live snack.

I called out the opening spell again to break the shell creatures’ grip on the undines and then sent a message to the undine whose hand I held to grab one of her sisters. Their hive mind still worked, even half-encased in shell goo. By the time we reached the surface, I was trailing two dozen undines behind me. They wriggled out of the water, shucking the last shell fragments off like last year’s dowdy hand-me-downs—and shucking their tails as well. Somehow in the journey their tailshad split into two legs. They jumped up and ran along the grassy bank showing off their slim calves and long, trim thighs with nary a thought for the poor undine who had died in the Borderlands.Thoughtless.

Thought-less?I heard one of them think as she turned around to look at me over her shoulder. She had red tangled hair and I recognized her as the one who had shared her breath with me in a kiss.But she is always in our thoughts. She is part of us forever. Then she turned back to her sisters and joined them as they ran over a grassy hill, leaving me gasping on the bank, beneath a weeping willow tree, feeling all the more alone for the absence of their buzzing hive mind.

Alone except for the dark creature who had saved me.

It was still in the water—a swirl of oily black on the surface. I struggled to my knees and leaned over for a closer look…and the black swirl coalesced into a face.

Hisface.

Liam.

But not Liam.

In the months he’d spent as a bodiless entity in the Borderlands he’d lost some of the features of Liam Doyle, the shape he’d assumed to seduce me so I’d fall in love with him…

You almost did.

I heard his voice in my head. His lips were parted in a rueful smile, an expression I recalled so well that I automatically reached my hand out to the surface of the water where the image of his lips appeared…and touched flesh.

“You haven’t forgotten me,” he said, this time moving his lips as his head cleared the water. As I watched, he took shape.

“Your desire for me is giving me form,” he said, his chest—his bare, nicely muscled chest—rising from the water.

I laughed…or tried to. The sound came out hoarse andraspy. I must have swallowed some water. “I don’t recall you being quite so…buff, Liam…or should I call you that? You’re not exactly him anymore, are you?”

“I can be him,” he said with the Irish lilt and cocky tilt of his chin I recognized as Liam’s. “I can be anything and anyone you want, lass.” The Irish lilt had roughened to a Scottish brogue (he’d called me lass before, I recalled), but the glint in his dark eyes was pure incubus. He stood hip deep in the pool now, the water lapping teasingly at his groin. I tried to keep my eyes above the waterline…but didn’t quite succeed.

“Um…I didn’t orderthat,” I said, blushing.

He laughed and took a step toward the bank, and I sat back on my heels, poised to stand and…what? Run? What was I afraid of? He wouldn’t hurt me. Was I afraid that if he touched me I would give in to my desire for him?

I didn’t get to find out. Something tugged him back into the water. He fell to one knee, those sweet lips twisting in pain. Instantly I forgot my fear and moved toward him. His right arm was twisted painfully back behind his shoulder, his wrist dragging in the water. Leaning over the bank, I reached under the water for his hand…and touched cold iron.

It was the iron bracelet I had clamped onto his wrist four months ago to banish him. Once the bracelet was on his wrist all I had had to do was turn the key to the right to send him into the Borderlands, but at the last minute I hadn’t been able to do it. Touching that cold iron now I remembered how I’d chosen to dissolve into the shadows with him rather than lose him. I had begun to merge with him—a piece of mehadmerged with the shadows—a piece that still felt like it was a part of his dark matter. I looked up into his face and saw that his eyes were on my chest.

Typical guy, I thought, aware suddenly of how my wetT-shirt clung to me, but then I realized it wasn’t my breasts he was looking at; it was the iron key that hung between them.

He looked up. “You still wear it. That means…”

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