running out of time.”
Dread clawed up in his chest, but he lowered her hand. “Then I will do it.” This was not a sin he could let his Nahid commit herself.
Manizheh hesitated. Her lips were pressed tight, her spine rigid. And then she nodded, stepping back.
Dara took the mace. He headed for the human, closing himself off from the man’s sobs, from the voice screaming inside his own head.
He smashed his skull in with a single strike.
A moment of horrified silence seemed to hang in the air. Then Aeshma spoke, his voice strained. “Burn him. In the water.”
Sick to his soul, Dara grabbed the human he’d murdered by his bloody collar and dragged him farther into the shallows. The smell of viscera swept over him. Around the dead man’s wrist was a blue string knotted with jade beads. Had someone given that to him? Someone who’d be waiting for him to return?
Demon. The whispered accusations that followed Dara in Daevabad rose in his mind. Murderer.
Scourge.
Crimson blood stained the clear water, ballooning out from the body like a storm cloud overtaking the sky. The water simmered against his ankles. Dara hated it. He hated everything about this. Fire poured down his hands, rushing to consume the man’s body. For a moment, Dara could not help but wish it would consume him as well.
A high, thin screech tore the air—and then the lake attacked.
The water drew up so fast Dara didn’t even have time to move. A wave twice his height lunged for him, towering over him like a ravenous bear …
And then the wave fell apart, collapsing around his body with an angry hiss of steam. The water tried again, flattening and then twisting around his legs as if to drag him down and drown him. And again it lurched back, as though it were an animal that had been burned.
“Afshin!” he heard Manizheh cry. “Watch out!”
Dara looked up. His eyes went wide. In the churning depths, a ship was re-forming. Barnacle-covered wooden ribs and broken deck planks rushed together, a skeleton of sunken wrecks. An enormous anchor, the metal orange with rust, flew into place on the bow like some sort of battering ram.
Dara stepped back as the boat rushed forward, his first instinct to protect Manizheh.
“Stand your ground!” Aeshma shouted. “Command it!”
Command it? Too shocked to argue and at an utter loss for how else to confront the nightmarish wreck hurtling toward him, Dara found himself raising his hands. “Za marava!” he cried, using the words the ifrit had taught him.
The ship burst into ash. The flakes drifted in the acrid air, falling like snow, and Dara stumbled, shaking badly.
But the lake wasn’t done. Water dashed over the dead human, frothing as it doused the flames covering his body.
And then the man stood up.
Water streamed from his limbs, seaweed wrapping his arms and crabs skittering up his legs. Triangular fins spiked from his shoulders, tracing down to meet reptilian clawed hands. Mollusks covered his crushed skull, and scales crept across his bloodied cheeks, a snarled mess of shells and decayed fishing nets replacing his soiled clothing. He straightened his broken neck with an abrupt crack and blinked at them, the whites of his eyes vanished under an oily dark film.
Dara recoiled in horror. “That is what Alizayd looked like,” he gasped as Manizheh and Aeshma rejoined him. “By the Creator … it really was them.”
The dead man eyed them, and the temperature plummeted, the air growing clammy with moisture.
“Daevas,” it hissed, speaking Divasti in a reedy, whispering voice that set Dara’s teeth on edge.
Aeshma stepped forward on the smoking sand. “Marid!” he greeted it, sounding almost cheerful. “So you salt-blooded old fiends are still around. I was beginning to fear your sea-beast of a mother had devoured you all.”
The marid hissed again, and Dara’s skin crawled. The thing before them, a dead, twisted nightmare from the depths of the dark water, seemed wrong in every sense of the word.
It bared a set of reptilian teeth. “You killed my human,” it accused him.
“You killed me,” Dara snapped. He had no doubt now, and fresh fury was coursing through him. “One of you did anyway. And for what? I did nothing to your people!”
“Ours was not the hand that slayed you,” the marid corrected, an odd defensiveness creeping into its breathy voice. A muddy snail glided along the scaled fin of its shoulder. “You were killed by a man of your own race.”
“So kill him again,” Aeshma said casually. “He has