Children of the Sea 01 - Sea Witch

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    Taking a deep breath, she jumped, fully clothed, into the sea.
     
    The clothes, she realized almost instantly, were a mistake. Her full skirt wrapped around her legs, impeding her movements as she kicked her way to the bottom. Her human eyes were not designed to work in the filtered light. That was all right. She did not need to see.
     
    Like a fish at the end of a line, she swam through cool, murky water teeming with life, drawn by the glinting thread she recognized as Caleb.
    Her nostrils were sealed underwater. She could not smell demon. But she felt the elemental’s presence like an ache in her sinuses, like ash in her throat. His menace breathed like a beast in the darkness beneath her, baleful, hungry, huge.
    Margred shivered, flailing her thin, weak human legs, her long, pale human fingers.
     
    She followed Caleb’s dwindling spirit and the demon’s dark spoor down, down, to where Caleb’s blood curled like a plume of smoke through the water.
     
    Almost . . . There .
     
    Her heart stopped.
     
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    Caleb drifted in his chains, his strength gone, his air gone, his skin like wax. His body swayed to the gentle urging of the surge like unheard music.
     
    A terrible mix of hope and grief swelled her lungs. Her throat constricted. Her chest burned. Was she just in time? Or too late?
     
    The current nudged Caleb’s head, lolling on his neck. His lids lifted lazily.
     
    And the demon looked out of his eyes.
     
    She stumbled back.
     
    Tan , Caleb had named him, or he had named himself. The old Welsh word for “fire.” His spirit flamed.
     
    The thin, bright thread connecting her to Caleb snapped.
     
    Her mouth opened in a silent cry of grief.
     
    The demon was trapped, drowning, dying with Caleb, but he looked at her with hate and no thought of defeat in his eyes. He was older than she was. She could feel his age press on her, centuries of malice and resentment and power, immortal, elemental. He did not believe he could lose.
     
    Margred’s heart quailed. The pressure in her sinuses built.
     
    She did not believe he could lose either.
     
    Tan saw her—another body, another host—and hurtled himself at her, a fireball at her head, smoking through the water in a gout of fury and will that sent her tumbling and scraping along the ocean bottom. She fought for balance, for boundaries, for breath.
     
    “ You have power in the water .”
     
    But she could not breathe.
     
    Dimly, she was aware of Dylan’s great black seal form plunging through a cloud of bubbles. Too late. Tan’s malice overwhelmed her. He
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    was fire, seeking, consuming, hot. He assailed her, the tender tissues of her mouth and eyes, the secret places of her womb and soul, shriveling, probing, possessing. Margred recoiled. He was strong, stronger than she was, an elemental fixed on her destruction. She was only human, and Caleb was dead.
     
    Just for a moment, temptation licked along her nerves and flickered in her brain, a spark, a flame. If Tan took her over, if he possessed her, her demon lover, would she be made immortal again?
     
    “ There are worse things ,” Caleb had said, “ than death .”
     
    Ah.
     
    She stopped thinking. She stopped breathing. She could feel her heart—her puny, human, broken heart—still beating. She was not defeated yet. If Caleb had died . . . Loss shuddered through her. Well, it was up to her to make sure he had not died in vain. She pulled the water to her, called her power to her, drank it in like blood, like wine. Life-giving. Intoxicating.
     
    She felt the demon’s surprise, his pain and surprise, as her magic rose within her like water and flooded her, enveloped her, enveloped them both, forcing him back, forcing him out. She cast her spirit around him, arched like the curl of a wave, shining as pearl.
     
    Tan, I bind you !
     
    She poured her soul in a shining silver membrane that wrapped him, trapped him, like a globe of melted glass. The demon’s rage pulsed like a heartbeat through the translucent walls. Colors battled and slid over the curved surface, red and blue, green and gold, as Tan battered and blazed against her. Layer upon layer, each one harder, stronger, more opaque, exhausting her spirit, extinguishing his.
     
    Layer after layer encompassing him, encasing him, in a great, blue green, glowing ball, until the demon’s fire snuffed out.
     
    And everything went dark.
     
    Maggie .
     
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    She floated like one of the seaborn, a thing of tide and