Children of the Sea 03 - Sea Lord

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    But everyone who could help was already here, blind and voiceless as mannequins in a department store window.
    She grabbed Griff on her other side. Energy sparked and snapped through her body. Her pulse jumped.
    Her nerves sizzled. Like jamming a fork in a toaster. As if her touch had completed a connection.
    Griff groaned and took a shuddering breath.
    Fear and urgency overrode her relief. She tightened her grip on his arm. “Conn?”
    Griff blinked bleary eyes at her. “Too deep,” he murmured. “I could not—”
    She had no time for explanations. No patience. Love sharpened her brain. Fear pressed like a knife at her throat. She shook him. “ Help me,” she said fiercely.
    “Lass ...”
    “Like this.” She would not release her hold on Conn, so still, so cold beside her. With her free hand, she reached past Griff, fumbling for the woman on his other side. “Hold her. Her arm. We need to . . .”
    What?
    “Make a circle,” she decided. “All of us.”
    Griff shot her a confused look but obeyed.
    The woman beside him gasped and stirred.
    Lucy danced from foot to foot in an agony of impatience as the wardens woke and grumbled, as Griff prodded them into a circle, linking hands like reluctant fifth graders forced to square dance.
    The silver-haired man, Morgan, took the arm of the man beside him. He looked at Lucy, his mouth compressed. “Why?”
    She bit her lip. She had no answer. She only knew, with a teacher’s instincts, what to do in an emergency. Hold hands. Stay in line. Stay together. So no one is lost.
    The pressure swelled in her chest. Her breath escaped on a sob.
    Oh, Conn.
    He wept without tears. Screamed without sound, without throat or mouth. Throat and mouth were burned away; being and memory, gone. Only his will remained, a spider thread stretched across the door of Hell.
    Oh, Conn.
    A name raked from the ashes.
    His name, in a voice . . . Her voice. His beloved’s. She was saying his name and crying.
    Her tears were sweet balm and precious rain to him. He roused, trying to summon strength to answer, to thank her for her tears, but there was not enough of him left to respond.
    He closed his lidless eyes and burned.
    But her voice would not let him go.
    Her words dripped into his arid soul, trickling along his veins, seeping into the marrow of his bones. Her golden tears opened channels for other streams to follow, springs of strength, rivulets of power. Griff’s.
    Morgan’s. Enya’s. The streams joined and mingled. The gush became a spring, the spring a torrent that thundered through Conn like a flood. He was battered, blinded, deafened, grateful.
    The golden flood rushed along the passage and scorched through his soul, drowning out the roar of the fire, inundating the threshold of Hell. He was taken up, taken over, by a great wave of power that flung him up and cast him on the shore.
    When he opened his eyes, he was in the caves under the castle, and Lucy was holding him as if she would never let go.
    She smiled at him with tears in her eyes. “Welcome back.”
    “Walk with me?” Conn invited in his cool, uninflected voice.
    At the word “walk,” Madadh lurched from the hearth, panting at the prospect of escape.
    Lucy knew exactly how the dog felt. “Outside the castle walls?”
    Conn nodded.

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    She eyed the sword at his hip. “Is that safe?”
    “The portal is closed,” he reminded her. “Thanks to you.”
    She shook her head. “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.”
    “You united us. You enhanced our power.”
    “Did I? I just . . . I had to do something , you know?”
    “Yes.”
    He didn’t need to say more. More than anyone else, this son of Llyr understood that you did what you could with what you had in the face of overwhelming odds.
    He looked . . . not his age, exactly. But he looked tired tonight. Human. The strain of the day had etched deeper lines at the corners of his mouth and drawn the skin taut across his cheekbones. Concern tightened her throat.
    “I’ll get my cloak,” she said.
    He smiled at her, the rare, brilliant smile that transformed his austere face. But the shadows lingered in his eyes.
    Warrior’s eyes, she thought with another quick squeeze of concern. She could drag him back from the brink of Hell, but she could not ease the memories of what he’d suffered there any more than she’d been able to help