He held her tight and listened to her weep, staring at the black beyond the window glass. This place he thought he could belong. This place he had sought peace, and failed to find a single, solitary moment of it. His voice was an echo in the darkness, darker still.
“We’ll go home.”
He squeezed her tight as she sobbed in relief.
“But not without saying good-bye.”
34
THE JAGGED SHORE
The iron pulled him beneath the waves with half a breath in his lungs, dragging him down like an addict to the bottle’s lip. Ilyitch clawed at the harness, fumbling in his gloves, wasting precious seconds to slough them off. He kicked at freezing water with leaden boots, the call of the waves above an all-too-distant roar. His fingers found purchase, iron buckles finally snapping loose. Twisting underwater, he shrugged the harness off his shoulders, watching it spiral away into the dark beneath his feet.
And then he saw them. Long ribbons of silver, snaking up through the depths below. Mouthfuls of needles, the kind of eyes that stared from children’s closets in the dead of night. A stab of terror in his chest so sharp he actually screamed, wasting what was left of his breath, rushing over his lips in a bubbling flurry. Hundreds of perfect spheres, glass-smooth, tumbling up, up, up toward the surface. With all the speed his panic could muster, he followed.
The silver shapes did the same.
Yukiko saw Ilyitch break the surface, sucking in a desperate lungful and spending it immediately in a terrified wail. He was fifteen feet from the ledge, struggling to keep his head above water and suck down breath enough to scream again.
Buruu’s eyes were locked on the snarling nomad, circling to attack again, but he risked a quick, desperate glance as she kicked aside her oversized boots, sloughed off the rainskin. The rope was wrapped around her waist, the knot looped through copper coils as tight as she could make it.
YOU CANNOT DO THIS.
He did the same for me!
I WILL NOT LET—
He saved my life, Buruu! When you couldn’t even hear me screaming for help. I’d have drowned if not for him.
Without looking over her shoulder, Yukiko dove arrow-straight into the seething black. She could feel them in the water around her, spiraling upward in broad, lazy circles, nowhere for their prey to run. Gleaming and slick, eyes of slitted gold, ribbon fins along their flanks and spines undulating in the water at the whim of the thrashing swell.
Forked tongues and razors.
She struggled through the waves, barely able to swim herself. But her dive had taken her most of the way, and a crashing wave got her close enough to throw her arms about Ilyitch’s neck before he sank again. Buruu glanced over his shoulder, roared a warning as a long, serpentine head broke the surface, slowly rising from the water just five feet away. It moved like a cobra, rearing back and spreading the fins at its throat in a broad, shivering fan, dripping salt water and venom. A long, chattering hiss spilled from its needle-lined maw.
BEHIND!
A second dragon rose from the depths, echoing its cousin’s rasp, cutting off retreat. A third dorsal fin sliced in a broad arc around them, all spines and scales and long, smooth lines. Buruu gathered himself on the jagged shore, ready to dive into the waves and stain the ocean a deeper red. But the nomad crashed onto him from behind, the pair falling into a snarling, screaming heap, clumsy as children fighting over a new toy. Buruu bellowed with rage, lashing out with all his strength, tearing and biting in a desperate attempt to break loose from the nomad’s grasp. Knowing he was too far away to help. That it was already too late.
NO! YUKIKO!
Six cold reptilian eyes peered down at Yukiko and Ilyitch, angry hisses spilling through bared fangs. Thunder rocked the heavens, wind shrieking like a wounded oni. Ilyitch closed his eyes, muttering what sounded like a prayer, struggling to remain above the rolling, crashing swell. A blinding arc of lightning reached out across the sky. The largest dragon snarled and swayed, spines at its throat rattling, drawing back and opening its jaws for the death strike.
And Yukiko held up her hand.
Water sparkled on her skin; tiny droplets pooling along the underside of each fingertip before falling back into the ocean around them. The storm held its breath. The rain became a hushed whisper between loving cloud and gentle earth, Raijin stilling his drums with broad, flat hands, time crawling upon its belly for the sheer wonder of it all.
And the sea dragons fell still.
Breath hissing in the caverns of their lungs, venom dripping between translucent katana teeth. They narrowed their eyes, heads tilted, leaning so close she could smell the poison and salt upon their breath, see tiny silver shards amongst the smooth gold in their eyes. They watched her watching them. And they wondered.
Ilyitch clutched the rope connecting Yukiko to the lightning tower. Wrapping his legs around the girl’s waist, he hauled them both toward the shore, desperate, half-mad with fear. The dragons watched them go, snakes before the charmer, swaying to the ocean’s pulse and the music of her mind. Ilyitch reached the island, bellowed at Yukiko. The girl slung her arm about his neck, one hand still extended toward the dragons, staring at them through half-closed eyes. Towering waves crashed against them, battering them on the stone, threatening to drag them down into cold and empty black. And with her holding tight, Ilyitch climbed the sodden rope, teeth gritted, muscle and tendon stretched to tearing, dragging them both from the sea.
The arashitora were still locked together in a screaming, tumbling frenzy. Buruu managed to finally break loose, kicking the younger thunder tiger away with his hind legs. The nomad rolled backward, landing skull first upon shattered stone. Buruu was on his feet in an instant, pounding back toward the island’s rim, eyes alight with panic. He saw Yukiko’s rope taut with weight, sawing across razored shale, coming apart strand by strand.
Two tons of blindside crashed against his ribs, spinning him up onto a sharp outcropping. Shards splintered in the impact, iridescent metal screeching beneath his furious roar. The nomad was on him in a blink, foot planted on his wing. Beak descending toward his exposed throat, shrieking like an oni fresh from the gates of the Nine Hells.
“Stop!”
Yukiko’s roar was louder than the storm above, echoing like thunder. The nomad froze, turned to the girl with a snarl. She lowered her chin, eyes narrowed, dripping floods of seawater onto the stone.
“Don’t you touch him.”
She spoke with lips and teeth and tongue, but her words echoed down the Kenning, swimming in their thoughts as burning, living things. Her hair was a smooth sheet of black draped over one half of her face, single eye glaring between closing curtains. The rain fell upon her skin as if she were stone, trickling down her cheek and beading in her lashes. Stepping forward, the boy splayed and coughing on the rocks behind her, she held up one bloody hand, the other curled into a fist. Trembling, pale and rigid, teeth clenched, a spray of rain from bloodless lips accompanying every word.
“Do you know what I am?”
The force of her bore down on the nomad like deep summer and a noonday sun. Raijin bent double and pounded his drums as if the world itself were ending. The Kenning fairly rippled with the heat of her, voice resounding in the umbra as she took another step forward. The nomad took one step back, cringing low to shattered stone, her words burning in his mind.