Red Silver coughed out water while blood dripped from his soaked feathers. Then red sand met our feet as Ian set us down on the beach, which heaved from the aftershocks of whatever had brought the house down.
“How did you find me in all that wreckage?” I gasped out.
“Locator beacon in Silver’s collar,” he replied. “Slipped it on him back at that villa in Athens.”
I choked on the laughter that bubbled up. “That’s how you found me at the Mycenae ruins.”
“I’ll always find you,” he swore, giving me a hard kiss.
Another round of aftershocks shook the ground, breaking our kiss. Gods, the house, filled with hundreds of people celebrating a ball when the walls came crashing down! How many had gotten out like we had? How many were still trapped?
I set Silver down. “Stay,” I told the Simargl. Then I grabbed Ian’s hand. “We have to go back and help!”
Something like a snort escaped him. “Knew you’d say that.”
We flew back to the house, me wiping the blood from my eyes, Ian muttering something I couldn’t catch due to the wind and the continued sounds of concrete smashing and people screaming. In the short seconds it took to get back to Yonah’s, his four-story mansion had crumpled to barely one level, with the sea pouring into a huge fissure that went from the ruins of his home all the way to the night-darkened surf.
Ian dropped down near a group of vampires who were digging in the rubble where the pool area had been. It was gone now, replaced by huge pieces of the house that had slid off and an even deeper hole that seemed to swallow the remains. I was about to join him when fresh screams sent me flying past him to the collapsed section of what had been the second-floor balcony.
“You take that section, I’ll take this one!” I yelled.
The balcony was on the ground, crushing anyone who’d been unlucky enough to be underneath it. The scent of blood and death was choking, but from the moans and screams, there were also some survivors beneath it. I began throwing aside the pieces of the former balcony, careful to aim them at the sand behind me instead of what could be more buried people around me.
“I’m coming!” I called out, digging and throwing even faster. I soon lost my grip on a hunk of railing because my hands were dripping with blood, but I would heal. The people trapped might not have that chance, if I didn’t hurry.
Something large and heavy landed next to me. Yonah, wings nowhere to be seen, pulling at the debris with a single-minded determination that matched my desperation.
“Stop,” he said, shocking me. “I can do this, but only you can halt the sea. Pull back the waves from the fissure, Ariel. Now, or we’ll never reach the human survivors in time.”
“I can control some water, but I can’t hold back part of an ocean!” I protested.
“Then do what you can!” was Yonah’s impatient reply before he disappeared to begin tunneling beneath the debris.
I was still furious with Yonah, but he was right; the biggest danger to mortal survivors now was the sea. Manipulating these waters might be against the Leviathan’s rules, but I couldn’t value a mere threat to my life more than the guaranteed deaths of the trapped human survivors if I did nothing.
I raised my hands and sent my senses down to find the water that I knew was churning beneath the rubble of Yonah’s house. Besides, I thought grimly. These parts of the sea had crossed onto here without permission. I was only sending them back.
I closed my eyes. Sight wouldn’t help me. Only senses, and I let them wrap around the energy in the water beneath the house’s ruins until I felt it pulse through me. Then I wrapped my power around that energy and pulled, trying to force it back from the countless crevasses it had filled while also trying to hold back the sea’s relentless flow into the main fissure.
But almost instantly, I was swamped by the crushing force of more power than I could ever understand, let alone bend to my will. Run! a shrieking, primal part of me urged. Run now or die!
At the same time, my other nature reached through the bars of her cage. Not only was she unafraid, she was intrigued by the potential of all the uncontrollable energy roiling around her.