Chapter 546: Had To Be Close. Had To. Fuck.
They were halfway to the surface when the water ahead split open.
Something enormous barreled towards them from the dark above, descending at speed, and Gavriel’s blood went cold the instant his Fae senses registered what it was.
Shark-like, but warped. Mutated. Built wrong on purpose, the way dark magic built everything, functional and nightmarish in equal measure. Its jaw was hinged too wide, hanging open at an angle that shouldn’t have been anatomically possible, and inside that jaw were rows of jagged teeth that spiraled inward like a funnel designed to ensure that anything that entered never came back out.
It was headed straight for Serena’s leg.
The spike. The goddamn spike still embedded in her leg, still pulsing dark magic, still broadcasting her blood into the water like a dinner bell that had been ringing since the tentacle put it there. Mr. Shark had tasted her and was coming to collect.
He should have pulled it out right away. Should have ripped it from her leg the second he saw it, pain and blood loss and all, because a wound heals and a beacon doesn’t stop. He’d made the wrong call. He’d chosen speed to avoid more tentacles and now every creature in this lake knew exactly where she was, and the knowledge sat in his stomach like a stone he was going to carry long after they left this water.
They couldn’t stop now. She needed air.
A new sword materialized in Gavriel’s hand and he swung in a single, savage arc that connected with the creature’s snout before it reached her. The blade split flesh and cartilage, and the thing reeled backward, shrieking through the water in a frequency that vibrated in his teeth and tasted like copper.
Mr. Shark wasn’t dead. Gavriel knew it wasn’t dead because nothing built by dark magic died from one hit, and the shriek it made as it spiraled back into the black wasn’t pain.
It was surprise. It hadn’t expected him to fight back, and the three seconds it took to recalibrate were the only three seconds he was going to get from this dark magic horror fish, and he was going to spend every damn one of them swimming his ass off. Gratitude later. Velocity now.
He pulled her flush against him, one arm banded across her chest, her spine locked to his torso, and drove them upward. His sword arm swept behind them in slow arcs, the blade’s green glow painting the water in strobing emerald as it moved.
Every shadow looked like a jaw and every jaw looked like a death sentence and he was so fucking sick of water that if he survived this he was never going swimming in a lake again and anyone who had a problem with that could go fuck themselves.
His Fae senses were screaming data at him faster than he could process, pressure changes and temperature shifts and the faint, rotten taste of dark magic trailing behind them from Serena’s leg like a blood trail he couldn’t stop.
He could feel it circling. A dark magic apex predator was taking fucking notes, and Gavriel Sterling, who had graduated top of his class in combat strategy, was the damn curriculum.
Fantastic. A goddamn smart shark. Because what this situation really needed was an aquatic nightmare with a fucking learning curve.
Gavriel: Almost there. Stay with me, Serena.
She didn’t answer. The silence through the matebond was worse than the fear had been, because fear meant she was conscious and fighting and present. Silence meant she was conserving. Silence meant her body was triaging, deciding what functions to keep and what to shut down, and the fact that communication was the first thing it cut told him exactly how close to the edge she was.
His arms were going numb from the sustained effort of swimming one-armed through water that fought every stroke while holding a woman against his chest and a sword behind his back.
His body had officially filed a formal fucking complaint and his brain had told it to shut the hell up because quitting was not on today’s schedule. The muscles in his shoulder had stopped burning ten seconds ago, which meant they’d passed through pain into the territory beyond it, the place where the complaining takes too much energy.
He kicked harder.
The surface was close. It had to be. Because if it wasn’t, then they were two bleeding idiots at the bottom of a frozen lake inside a volcanic crater on a mystery island, and that was such a profoundly stupid way to die that he refused to give the universe the satisfaction.
Serena gave his arm a soft squeeze, like she was trying to comfort him. In that same second, the tentacles came back.
They rocketed from the dark below, rising fast, thick and black and spiked and far too numerous to count. Of-fucking-course they fucking did. Because why would anything in this hellhole stay dead when it could come back angrier and with more goddamn friends.
One coiled around Serena’s ankle with a grip that could’ve crushed bone. Another wrapped her thigh. A third slammed around her waist so hard the impact knocked bubbles from her mouth.
THWOOM.
She was ripped from Gavriel’s arms so fast, it sounded like a current under water.
The separation was instantaneous, violent, her body yanked backward into the darkness so fast that the water between them exploded in a burst of bubbles and displaced current. One second she was against his chest. The next she was gone, swallowed by the black, and her terror was flooding into his chest at a volume that nearly shut him down.
Gavriel swam after her.
He moved with everything he had, arms cutting through the water, green magic blazing around him, the sword still in his grip. Every ounce of her fear was pouring through the matebond and the Fae connection simultaneously, a dual-channel broadcast of pure panic, and it was taking every shred of training he’d ever received to keep his body functional while hers was being dragged into an abyss.
His arms were fucking empty and the thing that had emptied them was dragging her into the dark, and the rage that detonated in his chest burned hotter than any magic he’d produced all damn day.