They’d been freed from that nightmare—only to reach another one.
She clasped him tighter, so he could use both arms to swim. The water was lightening. At least there was a surface!
They were halfway there when her lungs reached their limit. She clawed him, needing air . . . about to involuntarily breathe water. He swam even faster, his heart pounding against her ear.
They breached the surface into a stormy day, sucking in misty breaths as they rolled on giant swells. She blinked against sea spray, trying to get her bearings.
“Where are . . . ?” She trailed off when Thronos’s head craned up. She twisted to look over her shoulder, saw water all the way up to the sky.
Inconceivably high. About to crash over them.
He’d already kicked for propulsion, shooting into flight. But if he couldn’t get high enough . . .
Her mind couldn’t accept the size of the wave—like a mountain of liquid toppling over. “Faster, Thronos!”
His jaw was clenched, his heart sounding like it’d explode. “Don’t let go of me, Lanthe!”
When the swell began to crest over them, he rotated in the air, wrapping his wings tightly around her. The wave collided with them so fast the water became as solid as brick.
The momentum hurtled them toward the coast, a jagged stone cliff. When they crashed into it, the rocks tore his wings like a monster with fangs, trying to rip her away from Thronos.
They clung to each other.
The wave sucked them back out to sea.
They clung harder.
The force raked them over coral reefs—before catapulting them back against the wall.
But when it receded the second time, they . . . remained.
Somehow Thronos had clung to the cliff with one quaking hand.
Gritting his teeth, he leapt higher, pulling them out of the wave’s reach. The next crest slapped just beneath their feet, foam licking their legs, but it couldn’t catch hold of them.
He hauled them up until they’d made the top of the cliff. At the edge, he shoved her ahead of him onto solid ground, then followed.
They lay on the stony ground, heaving breaths, coughing seawater. Beneath them, the cliff shook with each crashing wave.
“Melanthe, speak to me,” he said between gulps of air. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. Again, he’d kept her cocooned for the most part. “Just some wounds from . . . from where we were.” Swatches of her skin had been loosened by the acid, then sucked away.
She’d been food. Still would be, if not for Nïx. Except that the Valkyrie had sent them there in the first place! Why, why, why?
Most of Lanthe’s breastplate was gone; the scant remains of her skirt clung to her hips. “How long do you think we were in . . . there?”
“Could’ve been hours or days,” he answered. “Even weeks. I doubt our conception of time in Feveris corresponded to the actual duration.”
“Right.” She would never have words to convey to anyone else how horrific it’d been. Only Thronos could understand those tentacles, the pus, the burning.
Lanthe shuddered. She simply couldn’t think about that place right now without losing her ever-living shit.
When he rolled toward the edge of the cliff, scanning the waves as if searching for something, she noticed that one of his wings looked worse than normal, those scale mosaics even more skewed.
“How bad off are you?”
Over his shoulder, he said, “I’ve got a forearm and a wing snapped. I might’ve cracked my skull. Nothing major.”