At that point, I was so overwhelmed with grief and horror that I honestly didn’t care what else Grace had up her sleeve. Until I found out what it was, of course.
The Fae, even slender, willowy females like Aunt Grace, are way stronger than mortals. Which is why Grace had no trouble grabbing me, lifting me off my feet, and flinging me over the side of the railing to follow the path of her phone.
I was too shocked to scream, though both Alistair and Ethan cried out. I flailed around in the air, trying to control my entry into the water, but when I hit, I was flat on my back. I tried to dissipate some of the force by slapping my arms down, just as Keane had showed me, but it didn’t help much.
It wasn’t a horribly long fall from the bridge into the moat—not the kind of fall you’d expect to die from, at least—but it wasn’t just a little hop, either. The water slammed into my back like a slab of concrete, forcing all the air from my lungs and momentarily stunning me.
That moment was long enough for the murky, muddy water to close over my head and begin to suck me down.
chapter twenty-six
I’m not the world’s best swimmer, but I can generally dog-paddle with the best of them. When I recovered from that initial stunned, breathless moment, I started kicking and flailing, trying to get to the surface. I was scared, but not exactly in a panic. Not yet. It was just water, after all.
But for all my flailing, I didn’t seem to be finding the surface. My heavy wool sweater seemed to weigh about ten tons, and my feet couldn’t seem to move much water in my good walking sneakers. Lungs burning, I pried the shoes off with my feet and was able to kick more effectively.
With another couple of kicks, I probably would have made the surface and been fine. Except one of those kicks connected with something. Something soft and yielding, like flesh. Something that wrapped around my foot and held me.
I broke the hold easily enough, but the terror of being grabbed by something under the water, combined with my increasingly critical lack of oxygen, caused me to try to gasp. I sucked some water into my lungs. And that was when I started to panic.
I had to cough the water out of my lungs, but you can’t cough if you don’t have any air. I clapped a hand over my mouth and pinched my nose shut to keep myself from taking another reflexive breath of water, but the need to cough was overwhelming. I couldn’t fight it, even though a small corner of my mind knew that if I tried to breathe, I would die.
The reflex became too much, and I let go of my nose and mouth to gasp in another breath of water.
I was dimly aware of the sensation of hands grabbing my arms, but I was far too panicked to feel any relief or to try to cooperate with my would-be rescuer. I was half-convinced it was a near-death hallucination anyway.
But those hands had a firm hold, and a moment later, I burst through the surface of the water into the beautiful, wonderful, life-sustaining air. Unfortunately, I’d sucked so much water into my lungs that even with the air so tantalizingly near, I couldn’t breathe.
The hands that held my arms moved until they were wrapped around my waist, one arm squeezing brutally hard and upward. It hurt, but it also caused a gout of water to come flying out of my mouth and nose. Eww, gross!
I managed a sip of air, but then the coughing seized me. More water left my lungs, burning my throat fiercely on the way up. I got a little more air in, so I was almost able to scream when something once again wrapped around my ankle.
“Damn it!” my rescuer cried, and I realized it was Ethan.
I felt him kick whatever had grabbed me, and the grip loosened.
“We have to get out of the water, Dana!” Ethan yelled at me.
I was so with him!
I was still coughing and choking too much to swim on my own, so Ethan towed me. I blinked water and tears from my eyes and saw that Ethan was taking me under the bridge.
Whatever was in the moat made another grab, and I felt a hair-raising pulse as Ethan threw some kind of magic at