Ethan.
“You do not wish to make an enemy of me or my house,” Ethan told it through gritted teeth, and the look on his face would have scared anyone—or anything—that had two brain cells to rub together.
With a final sullen hiss, the creature let go of me and sank back into the water. The moment I was free of its grip, Ethan hauled me all the way out and onto the ledge.
chapter twenty-seven
I was on my knees on the narrow ledge, back hunched with strain as I tried to hack up a lung for what felt like the better part of forever. Ethan patted my back and murmured comforting words, but I was too miserable to be comforted.
My throat and nasal passages burned from expelling all that water from my lungs. My chest ached from taking all that water in. And all my joints throbbed from being a tug-of-war toy between Ethan and the moat monster. I was also soaked through and chilled to the bone, my whole body shivering violently.
When the coughs had calmed some, Ethan pulled me against him, wrapping his arms around me and holding me close to the warmth of his body. It was only then that I noticed he was wearing nothing but a pair of pants. Even so, his body felt like a furnace compared to mine, and I curled into myself and huddled against him.
“What was that?” I rasped, shuddering at the memory of that awful, evil face in the water.
“It was a Water Witch,” Ethan explained. “They are natives of Faerie and at least nominally belong to the Unseelie Court, which is probably the only reason I was able to make her let go. There are dozens of them in the moat, and they will attack anything, Fae or human, that falls in. If the moat were just empty water, then people—and Fae—could enter and leave Avalon at will and the Gates would mean nothing.”
I shuddered again at the thought of dozens of those horrible things patrolling the moat, hoping for a free meal. Not that I was sure the Water Witch had planned to eat me, but with those teeth she’d flashed, it didn’t seem out of the question.
I started to cry, then, for once not ashamed of my weakness. I remembered Grace yelling the fateful order into her cell phone moments before she threw it—and me—into the moat.
“She killed my mom,” I sobbed against Ethan’s chest.
He held me tight and rocked me. “Maybe not,” he murmured. “I called your father after I called mine. He said he’d send Finn to rescue your mother. We can only hope that he made it there in time. I wish I could offer you something more certain, but I think my cell phone is at the bottom of the moat by now.”
I sniffled and tried to hope. Finn did this kind of stuff for a living. If anyone could have saved my mom from Kirk, it would be him. But everything had happened so fast, despite my attempts at delay. Would Finn really have had time to get to the hotel before Grace ordered my mother’s death?
“I want to go home,” I said, though I couldn’t rightly say where home was anymore.
“I know,” Ethan said. “But the purpose of the moat is to keep people out of Avalon, so there isn’t exactly an easy exit. There’s a trapdoor in the bridge above us, but my father’s going to have to get someone to undo the locking spells on it, and then they’re going to have to haul us up somehow. We’ll be stuck here for a while.”
I was so cold I felt like I’d never be warm again in a million years, and the contrast of Ethan’s warmth only made me feel colder. He scooted backward until his back was against the concrete piling. He had to let go of me to do it, but then he patted his lap.
“Come sit on my lap,” he said. “I’ll keep you as warm as I can.”
I thought briefly about what had happened the last time I’d found myself on Ethan’s lap, but I shoved that thought to the side. Even Ethan wasn’t enough of a player to make a move on me now, of all times.
So I crawled onto his lap, and he wrapped himself around me. His arms surrounded me, and my face was pressed up against his bare chest while his body heat seeped through my sodden clothes.
“Aren’t you cold at all?” I asked