the assault, and I dropped back into the water, which was suddenly veiled red with my own blood. Quentin thrashed below me, trying to pull me down. I pulled my flukes out of his grasp, keeping him from doing more than tugging.
The attack had come from behind. My skull was already healing, flesh and bone knitting back together with horrifying speed, and the blood in the water was focusing me, filling my nose and mouth as I breathed it in, creating an invigorating feedback loop. My strength is in the blood, even when it’s my own.
Whatever hit me, it had been too wide and blunt to be anything other than an improvised weapon. Someone was trying to keep us out of this room. That was a good thing. Torin’s guards had been carrying tridents, brutally pointed, with barbed, cutting edges. If I’d taken a trident to the head, I would be in a lot more pain. Logically, whoever had just attacked me wasn’t one of Torin’s men.
My head didn’t hurt anymore. Here went everything. I turned around in the tight tunnel, so I’d be facing the direction the last attack had come from, and pulled myself up for a second time, spitting out water as fast as I could.
“Dianda sent me!” I said, once I could form words again. They still came out a little garbled by the water in my throat and lungs. “Dianda sent me to find Peter!”
The room was small, and dark, and lined with shelves, each of them filled to bursting with supplies that did better when kept dry, flour and sugar and beans and rice. There was even a shelf of what looked like office supplies, which made a certain amount of sense. The Undersea Kingdoms didn’t exist in total isolation. They needed a way to communicate with the land, and paper messages sent by courier was probably easiest, as well as being fairly traditional.
A surprising number of fae nobles have email these days, mostly due to the efforts of Countess January O’Leary and her daughter, April. But there’s always going to be a place for the traditional ways.
The room was also apparently unoccupied. I couldn’t see any sign of the person who’d assaulted me before, although I was pretty sure I could see the weapon: a large box of pancake mix was near the edge of the hole, dangerously close to the water. I thought of the Cephali guard I’d seen before, the one who’d been able to blend into the wall until he decided he didn’t want to. We weren’t alone. We just seemed to be.
I closed my eyes, spat out the last of the water, and breathed in, tasting the air for traces of fae blood. Someone doesn’t have to be actually bleeding for me to read their heritage; they just need to be close enough for me to pick up on their presence.
My first breath was all saltwater and the lingering scent of my own blood. My second blossomed bright with Cephali. Not Helmi—it wasn’t a familiar flavor, for all that I recognized its source—but Cephali all the same.
“I know you’re here,” I said, opening my eyes and squirming farther out of the hole, until I was sitting on the edge. My scales glittered in the gloom. I tried to remember what Dianda had taught me about transformation, about knowing who I was and who I wanted to be and letting that be enough. The scent of cut grass and copper rose around me, faint but clear, and my scales melted away, replaced by my more familiar legs. My rag-cut skirt also returned, shorter now, stopping just above my knees. Well, that was efficient.
Carefully, I pulled my legs out of the water and stood, barefoot and unsteady on the storeroom floor. Quentin’s head broke the surface a second later, hair slicked down and dark with water. I bent to offer him my hands.
“Come on,” I said. “We’re being watched, but it’s cool. I think they’re a friend.”
“They tried to smash your head,” he objected, coughing up water. Somehow, he managed to look dignified and elegant even with water running down his chin. Sometimes I hate purebloods.
“Sure, but whoever it is, they’re protecting something really important, and they didn’t realize it was me. There’s no harm done.”
Quentin looked dubious. “I don’t like you acting like major head trauma is ‘no harm done.’ It would have been a lot of harm done if they’d hit me.”
“And that’s why I go first.”
Quentin snorted, taking