Windwitch (The Witchlands #2)v(94)

Just in time, for the shadows were almost to them. Tendrils reached outward, like death across the sea floor. Heavy. Hungry. Unnatural.

Vivia shoved through the door first, with Merik and Cam behind. The stone passage looped up in sharp spirals before it abruptly reached a flurry of floods. Just like the Cisterns, the water funneled past at a speed no man could fight. Vivia lunged forward, as if to try.

“Wait!” Cam shouted. “The flood stops! Every sixty heartbeats, it stops for ten! You just gotta know how to count!”

“But we don’t know how many heartbeats have already passed!” Vivia shouted. “In case you missed it, there’s a monster hunting us!”

As if in reply, the shadow man’s laugh oozed down the tunnel. “You need not fear me.”

“I don’t,” Merik said, though he wasn’t sure why he answered. He wasn’t sure why he even heard that voice atop the water’s boom.

It was then that the floods broke off. A tail of choppy white flung past, leaving damp stones and a matching tunnel ten paces beyond.

Cam pulled free from Merik and ran. Vivia followed.

Merik did not.

Oh, he tried to follow, yet his feet felt bolted to the floor. It took monumental effort to manage one step. A second.

Then it was too late. The shadow man reached him.

Black crushed over Merik, just as it had in Linday’s greenhouse, but tenfold stronger. A thousandfold stronger. This was not the soft snuff of a pinched wick or the gentle shrink of a Firewitched flame. This was sudden, and it was complete. One moment, Merik could see the tunnel ahead, could see Cam and Vivia wheeling into it.

The next moment, Merik was trapped in black. No up. No down. No sensing where he ended and the shadows began. Eclipse. That sensation of light where there was none, of pain with no source.

He fumbled forward, but there was no wall to guide him. Nothing at all to grab hold of. Only the words slinking up from behind.

“That song isn’t Nubrevnan, you know.” The voice was so close. A claw to scrape down Merik’s spine. “The fool brothers are older than this city, their tale brought down through the mountains. Back when I had a different name. Back before I became the saint you call the Fury.”

A wind trickled against Merik’s face. He inhaled deep, letting air circle to him. Letting magic gather in. He could feel the tunnel now. Could feel the floods approaching to his right. All he had to do was run.

Or so he thought as he kicked into a jog. The shadow man laughed. “Oh, Threadbrother, you should not have used your magic near me.”

With that statement, Merik went rigid. Threadbrother. It … couldn’t be.

As if in reply, the darkness slithered away. Light resumed from the glowing fungus that had been masked by the shadow man’s storm. It covered every inch of this tunnel—and it illuminated floods now hurtling this way.

They would hit Merik at any moment. He should move. He should fly.

He didn’t. Instead, he turned his head and watched as, one by one, tentacles of darkness wound into the man striding this way. A tall man. Broad. With hair pale as ash, even as smoky shadows traced and danced across his skin. Even as they licked off his limbs and blackened snow circled around his head.

Kullen smiled. A heartbreaking, familiar smile. “Hello, old friend,” he said. “Have you missed me?”

Merik had just enough time to think, It can’t be, before the flood hit him.





THIRTY-TWO

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be the girl Cam screaming at Merik to run while Vivia watched numbly.

It wasn’t supposed to be Merik, stolen away by shadows and flood.

But it was like this, and if ever there was a time to keep moving, it was now. “Get to the Keep,” Vivia ordered the girl. “Get help, and keep soldiers out of the underground.”

Then without another word, Vivia jumped into the flood.

The water swept over her. Stole her sight, her hearing, her touch. Friend. Mother. Self. All of it was a part of Vivia, and Vivia was a part of it all.

She felt Merik in the darkness, in the weight of these churning, booming underground waves. Ahead. Her brother was ahead. There was a fork in the tunnels; he was rocketing through. Spiraling right.

So Vivia launched herself, a creature of speed and power. She used her magic and her instincts to careen faster than Merik. Faster than the bone-breaking current.

She was a shark riding the tidal wave. A sea fox on the hunt.

At a tunnel’s fork, she shot right. Her lungs burned, but she knew that feeling. Welcomed it. The water was a mother to Vivia, a tyrant to anyone else.

She slammed into Merik, arms looping tight. If any air remained in his body, she had just punched it out.

But he was conscious—thank Noden—and his arms were around her now, and she was in charge. She could use the foam and the violence to propel them both.

Ahead, the tunnel would widen. She sensed a gap of air above the waves.

She cannoned them upward. They cleared the surface; Merik’s rib cage sputtered against her arms.

Then she dove him back under before the tunnel shrank once more.

Vivia pushed them faster, grateful Merik didn’t fight. That he instinctively elongated his body for maximum speed. It was the Windwitch in him, she supposed. He understood—he became—a creature of least resistance.