Undertow (Whyborne & Griffin #8.5)(28)

The blade and hilt of the knife flashed red-hot. Oliver shouted in pain and dropped it; the blade narrowly missed me.

“Get away from her,” Persephone said.

She stood a few feet away, backlit by flames and shadowed by smoke. Her tentacles waved around her face, and her eyes seemed to burn with fierce determination. In her hand, she held the bone mask.

“You!” Oliver scrambled away from me and moved into a crouch. Clearly, he thought Persephone the greater danger. “You’re a ketoi and a sorceress. But how? They have no sorcerers of their own. Who are you?”

Her mouth split open in a grin, revealing row upon row of teeth. “My land name is Persephone Whyborne,” she said. “But the ketoi call me Sings Above the Waves.”

And so saying, she placed the mask on her own face.

*

Persephone spread her arms out to either side and tipped back her masked face. The world responded to her. The ocean heaved the ship like a toy; lightning exploded all around us; and the wind screamed like a mad thing. A strange, blue glow began to shine from her eyes, and a moment later they burned with magical flame. The cabochon began to glow as well, its fire spilling into the rune carved around it.

Then she began to sing.

As with the siren’s song, I couldn’t understand the words, but I felt their intent in my bones. Persephone’s song was a call to arms—to rise up, to fight back. To use hope as a shield, and determination as a sword. It was a song not meant to control, but to uplift.

The ketoi were free. And they were angry.

They swarmed the ship in a mass of sharp claws, stinging hair, and razor teeth. Side by side with the librarians, they fell on the remaining cultists. The cultists fought back, but they had no hope of overcoming such a force, and within minutes the last of them had been dragged screaming over the side.

“No!” Oliver staggered to his feet, his face twisted with fury and hate. “You can’t win!”

A hand closed on my arm. I gasped, but it was only Mr. Quinn. His pale face was streaked with blood, though none of it seemed to belong to him, and he still clutched his dictionary. “Miss Parkhurst! The librarians are falling back. They’re already cutting the boat free—we must hurry!”

I turned back to Persephone. She stood alone, shining in the night, that strange blue fire burning through the mask. The cabochon on the forehead blazed, searingly bright. “Something’s wrong—something’s happening to Persephone.”

A clawed hand caught my other arm, and I recognized Heliabel. “We must leave,” she said, though her gaze remained fixed on her daughter. “Now.”

“You can’t win, I said!” Oliver repeated. He’d almost reached Persephone now. “I spent years planning my revenge. Years studying; years learning the blackest of arts. And I’m not the only one. The Fideles won’t stop. They won’t leave the maelstrom in your hands!”

Persephone’s song ended. In the abrupt stillness after, the whole world seemed to hold its breath.

When she spoke, it was in the voice of something ancient, dredged up from the very depths of the earth. “Foolish land dweller,” she said, and her eyes blazed like twin suns. “I am the maelstrom.”

An enormous tower of water lifted from the ocean, like a great fist held high above the ship.

“Oh dear,” Heliabel said. Then she hooked her strong arms around both Mr. Quinn and me. I had just enough time to glimpse Oliver cowering in terror, before Heliabel hauled us over the rail, and we fell.

The column of water smashed down onto the ship, even as we struck the water. The surge of the ocean sent us tumbling, and I didn’t know up from down. Terror exploded in my breast, and I struggled, my lungs aching for breath, my limbs trembling in the icy cold.

Then the arm around my waist pulled me upward. My head breached the surface, and I took in great gasps of air.

Nothing of the whaling ship remained but shattered wood and other flotsam. A few feet away, something white bobbed on the surface. I reached for it, and lifted up one side of the bone mask. It had cracked in half, the cabochon shattered and dark, the rune burned all the way through from the outside in.

“Persephone?” I whispered. Fear chilled me, even more than the icy water weighing down my clothes. “Persephone!”

Fins broke the water all around us, and the librarians’ ship nosed through the debris. Heliabel called out in the ketoi tongue, though whether for Persephone or someone else, I didn’t know. Within moments, two other ketoi had surfaced.

Heliabel let go of us and dived. One ketoi caught me beneath the arms, while the other took Mr. Quinn. “Where is she going?” I asked frantically. “Is she looking for Persephone?”

The ketoi didn’t answer; perhaps they didn’t speak English. Instead, they hauled us to the ship. A rope was thrown out, and within moments, we were both on board.

Someone tried to wrap a blanket around me, but I shoved them off. “We have to find her,” I said. My teeth chattered from the cold, but I didn’t care. “Persephone!”

“Miss Parkhurst.” Mr. Quinn stepped in front of me, forcing me to look up at him. To my surprise, his pale eyes held an expression of sympathy. “There’s nothing we can do.”

“You’re wrong. There has to be.” She had to be all right. The ketoi were resilient—hadn’t she said so herself?