Chapter One Selkie Mage

Gareth Keeler

Salishen Isles, Eastern Realm

Xishlon night

Gareth glances up at the purple moon through Noilaan’s translucent dome-shield, unsure he’ll be able to get through this Xishlon night without his heart breaking completely apart.

This love-amplifying purple moonlight . . . he knows it’s a source of festivity for the Noi’khin. His fellow Vu Trin soldiers are excitedly streaming off The Water Viper—the naval ship they’re all stationed on. Several other Vu Trin naval ships are docked here, just below where the huge Vo River meets the Salish Ocean, but the ship Gareth is stationed on is unique in that the majority of its naval soldiers are Sylphan Air Fae. His fellow Vu Trin barely spare him a glance as they disembark, having been granted a Xishlon-evening’s leave by their tough but fair-minded commander, the young Sylphan Air Fae Zephyr Quillen.

Gareth ties off one of the ship’s dock lines to a steel hitch and pauses, drawn in by the rippling violet water before him, the Xishlon moon a wavy reflection in it. As if the moon’s location is not in the lavender-star-splashed sky above but in the ocean world below.

The moon’s thrall is a mounting torment, filling his heart with a ceaseless, serrated longing for a Selkie who is oceans away, living in the waters’ great depths.

Where he can never follow.

Gareth fights the urge to jump through that shimmering violet moon straight into the Salish Ocean’s waters. To submerge himself and swim west without ceasing.

Until he finds Marina.

The bond they formed in Verpacia is always at the forefront of his mind, as is the kiss they shared in the foyer of the North Tower, not long before she regained her skin and power.

It was like all the tides of Erthia had broken free.

One kiss led to another and another, the two of them not able to bear being parted that evening. And so, they snuck out, and he let her lead him through the nighttime woods under a full moon like this one. The two of them journeyed through the dark toward the lake they could both sense, the body of water nestled deep within the Verpacian wilds.

Standing on the lake’s bank as wildlife softly chirred around them, Marina sinuously drew off his tunic and kissed the skin over his thrumming heart. She pulled off her own clothing, Gareth’s pulse quickening as desire raced through his veins in response to the sight of Marina’s moon-washed, naked form. And then, she took his hand in hers and, together, they walked into the water. Not into the sweet kiss of salt water that Gareth knew they both craved, but still, being in water of any type was always so much better than bearing the harsh desiccation of land.

Far under the water they pulled each other close and kissed unreservedly, giving in to the powerful draw they’d both felt building for some time. A draw Gareth had forcibly held himself removed from, especially given the particular cruelties Marina had endured on land.

That most female Selkies endured on land.

They stopped short of taking each other to mate that evening, even though it had felt right in a soul-deep way. Because they also knew that a life mated to each other would forever turn her into a cursed creature like him—trapped between two worlds.

Yes, if he remains very still, he can stay underwater for an unnaturally long time, but not long enough to make a life beneath the waves, his half-Selkie lungs cursedly dependent on air.

“If you were Selkie . . .”

Marina had ventured, her melodic voice tight with anguish, “I’d take you as my ooo’ohn’uuniahohn’.”

The vibration of her language through the dark water shivered through Gareth, his neck arching slightly as his bones resonated with its low frequency.

And Gareth knew, without Marina needing to translate, the meaning of her words.

The one you join your tides to.

But the terrible fact remained—he’s not full Selkie.

And he’s not fully a Mage either.

He’s always been able to sense the water power that flows through his affinity lines with the strength of an oceanic tide. But every time he was wandtested, he found himself unable to manifest even a drop of it.

His magic completely trapped inside him.

Strangled.

After Marina left that night, he remained on the lake’s bottom for a long time, alone in the dark, never wanting to emerge. Close to an hour later, he surfaced, raging and gulping for air. Cursing his very lungs over the need for it.

Cursing the very air he needed to keep living this trapped life.

“Do you even feel it, Crow?”

The familiar, taunting female voice hits like a hammer, shattering Gareth’s thoughts, hurtling him back to the present. He focuses on tying off one final line before rising to meet the Sylphan Fae soldier Xylo Skye’s confrontational storm-gray stare. There’s an unkind smile on her pewter lips, her slender form bracketed by a knot of other naval Vu Trin, their black uniforms, like Gareth’s own, marked with a blue dragon—the Goddess Vo’s water manifestation.

Xylo Skye points toward the violet moon above. “I bet the Xishlon moon doesn’t affect you.”

“Of course it doesn’t,”

blue-hued Thym’ellia Vyyr bites out from beside her. The Urisk soldier tosses Gareth an unfriendly grin. “Mages don’t have hearts, you know that.”

Gareth inwardly flinches as, laughing, they saunter off, making their way toward the purple-glittering port city of Salish. A cacophony of music dances in the air, sensual drumbeats resonating through Gareth as he stares after the soldiers. Stares over the bustling city as the moon’s thrall scours out his heart anew.

“Pay them no heed.”

Unable to swallow the ache in his throat, Gareth turns toward Commander Quillen and meets her steady gaze.

His young commander’s stance is strong, radiating her ever-present intensity, like a typhoon about to be unleashed. Her puffed hair is the mottled-steel hues of storm clouds, her skin the ashen black of a hurricane’s eye, her ears curving to sharp points.

He’s heard stories of his commander’s childhood years—taken in by the siblings Lucretia and Fain Quillen after Zephyr’s parents were murdered by Gardnerians. Lucretia and Fain were almost killed themselves by the tornado that six-year-old Zephyr summoned as her parents were cut down, the screaming, raging child raining down hail the size of boulders as Lucretia and Fain battled back her magic and got her off the Spine’s apex before the Gardnerians could murder her too.

“Did they give you a hard time about your hair in the West?”

Zephyr Quillen asks Gareth in that succinct way of hers.

She doesn’t need to specify what she means. Gareth knows she’s asking if he was tormented for his Selkie silver-tipped black hair back in Gardneria.

“They did,”

he replies, his words clipped and devoid of emotion. But he can remember the taunts as if it were yesterday. His ostracism in Valgard.

And the danger.

He was beaten more than once by other Mage teens, his only solace escaping by boat to the ocean. Or visiting with Elloren, Trystan, and Rafe Gardner. Especially Trystan, Gareth’s closest friend in all the world prior to meeting Marina, perhaps the only Mage Gareth knows who completely understands what it means to live on the reviled outside of things. And Trystan always seemed to comprehend, in his quiet, deep way, Gareth’s constant pain over being kept forever from the ocean’s depths. Forever skimming its surface.

Gareth can sense Commander Quillen’s understanding as well. It never fails to touch him, since her own life was ripped apart by Mages, a group he’s firmly slotted into here in the East. Yet, here she is, pausing with him instead of frolicking with the others under this cursedly beckoning moon.

“Many years ago,”

Zephyr says as she squints up at the violet orb, the metal hoops rimming her ears catching its jeweled light, “my people terrorized both the Kelts and what they called at the time the ‘Lesser Fae.’ Summoned wind swirls to slam them into distant targets for sport.”

She lets out a disdainful breath through her teeth. “Basically scared them into paying a land tax. I read about it in some Keltish history books in the Voloi University archives. The Sylphan aristocracy was monstrous.”

She sets her piercing gaze back on Gareth. “About three generations later, after a stormy revolution, the Sylphan monarchy was ousted and, over time, the Air Fae Court became a Sidhe voice for the oppressed—a true light in this world.”

Her lips thin. “But I keep my people’s cruel ancient history in my thoughts. A cautionary tale, if you will.”

She tilts her head, bringing her hands to her hips. “None of it defines me, Noi’khin. Neither the cruelty, nor the light. Nor should being a Mage define you. We make our own way in this world.”

A heartfelt note steals into her tone. “I see it in you, Selkie’kin. I see how land is not your true home.”

Gareth stiffens and looks away, his jaw tensing as the truth of her words prompts an upswell of yearning in his chest.

“Here,”

Commander Quillen says gruffly. Gareth turns to find her thrusting a small black cloth pouch toward him. “Your holiday pay.”

Her lips tilt up. “And a small stash of Sanjire root.”

She swipes her hand toward the city, her usual brusque manner returning. “Go. Take the evening off. ‘Find the moon.’?”

She cocks a brow at him, an amused glint in her eyes. “Or find some good wine, at least.” Her gaze hardens. “Tomorrow, we sail.”

To war.

A chill runs down Gareth’s spine.

But he’s ready. Ready to use his uncanny sense of ocean tides and incoming weather to aid the Vu Trin navy.

To fight the Magedom.

Gareth accepts the pouch, and Commander Quillen gives him a curt nod then strides off. When he glances down at the pouch once more, his gaze slides to the green glimmer of his Mage skin. A glimmer even the purple Xishlon moon can’t tint away.

The ache in his heart resurging, he thrusts the pouch into his pants’ pocket and strides off the dock and onto the large boardwalk that edges the beach. But not across it and into the festive city.

Instead, Gareth walks away from the city, ignoring the curious looks and glares cast his way by revelers he passes as he follows a pull on his heart that’s stronger than the Xishlon moon’s.

Some boisterous Noi children race in front of him, gripping streamers of linked violet runic orbs and sparklers crackling with lavender light, and Gareth’s gaze lands on a Wanted poster affixed to the boardwalk piling beside him. His steps slow then stop as he pauses before it.

Elloren.

He’s seen these postings before, and he fears for his friend. The news that Elloren has Black Witch power was shocking in the extreme. He’s sure she never knew it. Sure that someone tampered with her wandtestings. Made her a pawn in some hidden game.

Yes, someone knew.

That whole time they were at Verpax University, someone had to have known what she was. He remembers how he and Elloren promised to fast to each other if it came to it, when the threat of forced wandfastings loomed over everyone. How they were always there for each other, their friendship a solid, sure comfort in an increasingly cruel world.

Gareth tears his gaze from the posting and resumes walking, striding off the boardwalk and across the moonlit beach. Certain the Vu Trin are making a mistake. Because it’s clear from Elloren’s evil depiction on the postings that they’re not simply searching for her. They’re hunting her.

He’s spoken to Commander Quillen about it. Openly voiced his support for Elloren. Refuted the slurs aimed at her by his fellow Vu Trin mariners, which only reinforced his outcast status on his ship and in this land. Before his advocacy for Elloren, some of his fellow mariners were willing to give him a chance, but now they’ve stated that his “Mage blood”

is rising to the surface and “polluting”

the “slim bit of Selkie good.”

His life so oddly flipped. Reviled in the West for his silver-tipped hair and his host of odd aquatic abilities, and now, reviled in the East for the green glimmer of his skin.

Gareth pauses, finding himself alone on a blessedly isolated stretch of beach, his trapped water magic tingling with anticipation as he looks out over the water toward the forest of deep-purple mangroves in the far distance. The forest that is tugging on his Magelines. The ocean-loving trees are bunched near a narrow peninsula jutting out from the coastline, their roots arcing down into the water like curving stilts, tethered to the ocean’s floor.

Trees caught in the middle—half on land, half on sea.

Just like him.

The first time he encountered Salishen’s famed mangroves, he was mesmerized by them in an instant, sensing a soul-deep kinship that affected him profoundly and still does, to the point where his trapped water magic thrums to life and eddies through his lines whenever he makes contact with a mangrove tree’s slick bark.

The grove wakes up to his nearness, its enthralling energy swirling around him, prompting Gareth to draw off his naval tunic. Then his boots. His socks. He piles his garb on a rocky outcropping and, dressed only in his dark uniform pants, wades into the water.

The ocean laps over his feet and ankles, warm and embracing, and Gareth pulls in a euphoric breath, entranced by the ocean’s liquid beauty. Feeling like he’s coming home, he keeps advancing until he’s up to his neck. Then drops under.

As he launches himself into a smooth stroke, everything in Gareth yearns to inhale a deep breath of salt water. Iridescent silver fish close in around him in joyful welcome, and he swims toward the mangrove forest as if born in the ocean’s depths. He darts into the grove’s tangle of underwater roots, gliding just above the ocean floor.

Never wanting to surface.

His sense of homecoming increases as purple crabs scuttle boisterously around him and a violet manatee swims near to eye him with curious, affectionate interest. A school of translucent jellyfish ghost by, their ethereal beauty striking a chord deep in Gareth’s Selkie soul, and he lingers amidst the Noi Mangroves’ roots for a long stretch, everything in him blessedly merged with both water and grove and the kindred life they support.

But then, a tight pain in Gareth’s lungs pricks to life. At first, he ignores it, his usual outrage rearing, everything in him revolting against this merciless biological need of his cursed form. But the pain intensifies, and soon his lungs are burning, hot tears warming his eyes as he’s forced to swim toward the Xishlon moon’s shimmering, luminous form overhead.

He bursts through the water’s surface and gulps in air, raging against the moon, against every last thing keeping him away from Marina and the ocean’s deepest depths, the cruel moon’s light a merciless torture.

“Gareth!”

Caught off guard by Commander Quillen’s urgent, distant voice, he turns to finds her racing toward him over the shore. A naked, blue-hued, silver-haired Selkie strides just behind her, a silver seal pelt tied around her shoulders.

Gareth’s lungs seize, the whole world contracting. The crowd forming on the shore seems to blur as a child’s cry of “Mamma, look! A seal woman!”

cuts through the murmurs of amazement.

Commander Quillen slows, but Marina breaks into a sprint toward Gareth. He launches himself toward her in a rapid stroke, aching with gladness at how strong and sleek Marina looks splashing into the distant water.

“Gareth!”

Marina cries, and Gareth is swept into a powerful tide of love. A rasping bark escaping her lips, Marina dives into the water and swims toward him. They near each other rapidly, then meet in the waves.

Capsized by emotion, Gareth catches Marina in a desperate embrace before she draws him under the water in a swirl of crystalline purple, the sealskin tied around her shoulders flashing silver as it ripples behind her like a cloak.

Overcome, Gareth sweeps her into a passionate kiss that she enthusiastically returns, the two of them embracing until Gareth’s lungs begin to ache, then burn, and he has to make for the surface again.

Breaking through into the purple Xishlon world, he gasps in air as Marina surfaces beside him. She pulls him into another besotted embrace, his hand tangling in her waterfall of hair, his lips pressing a kiss to her temple, the Xishlon moon’s heart-opening lull intensifying his passion for her. “Marina, my love.”

“My tide,”

she manages against his cheek, her gills ruffling like feathers against his neck, her fractured, flutelike tones rife with feeling. “My ever-flowing tide.”

Tears warming his eyes, Gareth takes hold of her arms, wanting to draw her under the water and never surface. “How did you get past Noilaan’s dome-shield?”

he wonders.

She turns one arm over, revealing the small scarlet Amaz shield-safe rune emblazoned there. Gareth nods, remembering the measures the Amaz took when they helped the freed Selkies get back to their ocean home.

“Why did you risk coming here?”

Gareth implores, concerned even as his heart thuds with joy.

Marina’s ocean eyes darken with urgency. “To warn you, and to gain your help.”

She glances toward the shore where Commander Quillen stands, a crowd of Noi’khin surrounding her. “Vogel is coming for the Waters, Gareth,”

she cautions. “He wants to wipe out my people along with our ocean kindreds. He’s conjured a Shadow sea.”

Shock eddies through Gareth. “What do you mean?”

“The Mages,”

Marina continues, “they’re infecting the Western oceans with a mass of Shadow power that rolls over the waters like a tide and siphons up the oceans’ elemental power. I’ve warned your Commander Quillen of this. It’s only a matter of time before the Mages send their corrupted Shadow sea east. They’re going to consume the whole Natural Matrix of Erthia’s Waters with it. We need you, Gareth. Your Selkie’kin need you.”

“Come,”

Gareth says, motioning toward the mangroves. “Tell me everything.”

Gareth spares one more glance toward the crowd on the shore. Commander Quillen is now surrounded by a small contingent of Vu Trin, the knot of dark-clad soldiers standing out in sharp relief amidst the purple-garbed revelers.

He and Marina duck underwater and swim to the grove, gliding around arcing roots into the heart of the grove’s embrace before emerging inside a private, sheltered space above the water’s calm surface, the salt water inside the grove a gentle, lapping tide. They climb onto a partially submerged root and face each other. Jewel-toned dragonflies flit around them, the water skimming Marina’s full blue breasts, and Gareth ignores the rush of desire that sparks to life at the sight.

“Tell me what Vogel’s done,”

Gareth prods, taking hold of her smooth hand.

Marina’s face twists with anguish. “His Shadow sea is corrupting the Waters. Blotting out color and creating unnatural tides. It’s killing our kindreds. The seals. The octopuses and fish. All underwater life. He’s turning more and more of them into twisted multi-eyed creatures. Creating Shadow kraken. Gareth, he’s creating a weapon out of our ocean.”

Our ocean. Gareth’s heart tightens over her phrasing. As if he’s Selkie’kin. It guts him, her futile insistence on his inclusion.

Gareth motions north. “We received word that the Vo River has been marked by Death Fae runes filled with Asrai magic to ward off Shadow incursion. Could the same be done to the ocean waters?”

Marina shakes her head. “Shadow power can break through most runic wards.”

Alarm ripples through Gareth. “But . . . that could bring down the entire East.”

“That’s why your Selkie’kin need you. We need your power. Sheer might is needed.”

“Marina, whatever water power I have is trapped inside me.”

Her ocean-hued eyes narrow with blistering intensity. “Have you ever used a wand underwater?”

“I have. But nothing came of it.”

“Did you ever try water wood, instead of a wand?”

Marina waves a graceful blue hand toward the mangroves surrounding them. “Wood that thrives in salt water.”

Her gaze warms with affection. “Like you, my Selkie’kin.”

Gareth looks to the mangroves. Trees he can sense reaching out to him. Trees he never encountered until coming to the East . . . trees that stir the magic trapped inside him.

“I tried to access my power using a mangrove branch once,”

he admits, his lines burgeoning with bound-up water magic, achingly tight. “I thought . . . because I feel such a strong rise in my magic around these trees . . . I thought they could enable me to send my power through a branch instead of a wand’s layered wood, even though that’s something only the most powerful Mages can do.”

He shakes his head, the shard of longing cutting deep. “But my magic remained trapped.”

Marina is undaunted. “Did you try an underwater root? And did you use the words of Selkie’kin?”

Gareth’s heart quickens, the two of them exchanging a look of momentous import. “No,”

he admits.

“Give me the words to one of your Mage spells,”

Marina commands, tension mounting in the air.

Gareth sounds out a water spell in the Ancient Tongue. “It means ‘funnel up the waters,’?”

he tells her, pulse thrumming.

Marina breaks off a dark purple mangrove root from under the water, then sinks below the waves. Gareth dives with her, swimming down amongst the arcing roots to the ocean’s sandy floor. Pausing there, Marina sounds out a few flutelike words, then gives him a prodding look.

Gareth tries to mimic her intonation, struggling to draw the tones from low in his throat, the words almost impossible to form. Marina frowns but seems resigned that this is the best he can manage. She hands him the root with a look of encouragement.

Gareth sounds out the spell in the Selkie language.

Energy sizzles through his lines, and his lungs tighten with shock as a sliver of his water magic breaks free and flows through his lines and arm into the root. A slender, swirling funnel of water bursts from the root’s tip and twirls up through the purple water.

Gareth gasps, drawing in too much salt water.

Choking, he makes for the surface, grasping hold of a large root to propel himself faster. He breaks through, coughing and sputtering as Marina bursts up beside him. Stunned, he looks at the mangrove root in his grip, his wand hand thrumming with elemental energy, the conjured funnel’s expanding ripples spreading out around them in concentric circles.

Gareth’s astonished gaze locks with Marina’s as he clings to one of the mangrove’s massive roots, his magic alight and streaming through his lines, his skin tingling at every point of contact with the tree. “I thought . . .”

he gasps, his heart in his throat. “I thought I was forever powerless. How could you possibly know this?”

“There’s a Mage,”

Marina begins, lips trembling. “A Light Mage. His name is Alaric Fynnes. He and his shunned Selkie mate, Nerissa, sought me out to tell me their story, which sparked ideas concerning your magic. Alaric was cast overboard several years ago, when Vogel obtained the Shadow Wand . . .”

Gareth listens as Marina tells the tale. How this young Gardnerian priest-apprentice, Alaric, was thrown overboard by Vogel’s Shadow-corrupted magic and rescued by a Selkie, Nerissa. And how Nerissa helped Alaric survive on a small, deserted island, the two of them eventually falling in love and Nerissa being cast out of her Selkie enclave when she refused to forsake him.

“And then Alaric and Nerissa joined their tides,”

Marina says with a look of great significance at the mention of the Selkie mating bond, passion flaring in her eyes, an unmistakable invitation there. The very air seems to shift between them, Gareth’s heart skipping a beat. It’s a struggle not to be swept into an unfightable storm of wanting her, the purple moon above only amplifying the draw.

“Gareth,”

Marina says, gills flaring, “when Selkie’kin join their tides in a love bond, they link their abilities and merge them. That happened with Alaric and Nerissa, even though Alaric is not Selkie’kin. He gained water power and the ability to wield it through the roots of water-bound trees instead of a wand made from the branch of a land-bound tree. And Nerissa gained a thread of his light power. An actual Mageline of it.”

Marina pulls in a deep breath, gills ruffling with emotion. “My love, I believe there’s a chance we might free even more of your magic if we joined our tides as they did.”

A hard pulse of want surges through Gareth, the two of them poised on a precipice. But he holds back, the painful awareness that taking her to mate would inflict on her an inescapable reality. Marina would likely be shunned, like Nerissa. Forever cut off from her close-knit family. Her beloved sister. Gareth knows how much Marina loves her underwater home. Her life as a linguist and diplomat and musician. And her kindreds—she’s told him of her close relationship with several octopuses, the intelligent, color-shifter creatures enamored of her, as well. It’s a rich life she has, under the ocean’s waters. A joyous life.

A life he cannot rip her away from.

“We spoke of this back in Verpacia,”

he says, voice rough, his want for her like a straining tidal wave caught in his center. “Mating for you—and for me, as well—it’s for life. You’d be forever trapped between two worlds. Like I am.”

“Gareth,”

she presses, eyes storming, “Alaric can breathe underwater now.”

They stare at each other for a protracted moment, and Gareth feels as if the entire world has paused.

He swallows. “If we mate . . .”

he begins, barely aware of the buzz of dragonflies and the gentle lapping of the water “. . . our abilities may not manifest the way we would hope.”

Their eyes lock. “It’s a risk,”

he finally manages.

“Worth taking,”

she insists without hesitation, and he can tell from the passion firing in her eyes that she’s already decided. “I don’t want anyone else,”

she breathes out, adamant, gills flaring. “I’m already caught in the middle. So let me be caught there. With you.”

Gareth’s heart leaps, then expands, his love for her a powerful, surging tide.

He sets down the mangrove root and reaches into his wet pants pocket for the damp money pouch, then fishes out the vial within. “We were all given this,”

he says, swallowing thickly as he hands her the vial, letting his gaze briefly wander over Marina’s form, his pulse thudding. “For Xishlon. It’s Sanjire root.”

Marina nods and draws closer, giving him a heated look as she unstoppers the vial and takes out some of the root, then places it on her blue tongue.

Gareth’s gaze skims over her full breasts. Her blue nipples. Her cascading silver hair. His cresting desire surges as he takes in the curves that lie below the shimmering purple water. And then Marina pulls him into an embrace and kisses him, the warm press of her body and the salt water on her lips sparking a heat that quickly intensifies to storming heights in the Xishlon moonlight.

Gareth groans and gives in to it fully, gives in to his bottomless love for her, as they pull each other under the waves, the mangrove roots twisting and arcing around them. Marina tugging at his pants. Then tearing at them. Shredding them off, her eyes bright with a want that further fires up Gareth’s own.

She presses her body against his, skin to skin, and he eagerly returns her feverish caresses, his arms encircling her as he captures her mouth with his. And then she wraps her legs around his waist, and his hard want surges as he kisses her ravenously, heatedly aware of how her thighs are open to him. She draws him closer, angling her hips in invitation, sliding against him.

Unable to hold back any longer, Gareth fully joins with her, a cry torn from his throat, the rush of ecstasy an unstoppable tide. Love and pleasure eddy through him in an ever-swelling current, and then . . . a series of stings blooms along the sides of his neck.

He pulls in a deep breath of water.

Stunned, he pulls in another breath, holding Marina tight, the salt water flooding his lungs, magic exploding to life within him as the entirety of the Waters links to his lines. He catches Marina up in another kiss and senses her awareness of the change in him from the new urgency in her touch. The two of them passionately joined, they float down until he’s pressing her into the ocean’s floor, deep inside her and shot through with unbearable excitement. She pushes up against him, the two of them falling into a rapidly cresting rhythm until pleasure and love overtake them both in a hot rush and he cries out as their tides fully merge.

They stay like that for a long moment, wrapped tight around each other amidst the mangrove roots as a multitude of fish joyfully encircle them.

And Gareth pulls in breath after breath of glorious, salty Ocean.

“I can breathe,”

he finally murmurs against Marina’s warm skin, stunned to find the words coming out of him in the Selkie tongue. He reaches up to find gills newly formed on the sides of his neck, his underwater voice incredibly clear. All the Ocean sounds around him incredibly clear, distant whale song resonating through him, sparking a reflexive ecstasy. “I never want to touch land again,”

he huffs out in Selkie, overcome as tears heat his eyes and mingle with the cooler water. He takes hold of Marina’s hands, drawing back slightly to take her in, feeling wonderstruck. “My mate,”

he says, the tears flowing. “My forever love.”

Marina is crying as well, a look of Ocean-deep love in her eyes.

“Do you feel the merging of our powers?”

Gareth asks Marina, anticipation brimming.

She nods. “A line of tingling energy, forming inside me. I can both feel and see our combined magic flashing through it in the back of my mind . . .”

The purple light of the moon above the waves snuffs out, startling them both into silence, the underwater world snapping to gray. Gareth’s pull toward the mangroves intensifies with the energy of alarm.

Gareth meets Marina’s gaze, the shock racing through him mirrored in her eyes. They swim toward the water’s grayed surface and break through to find the moon turned to shadowy steel.

A sudden disturbance in the water has them glancing down. Another wave of surprise eddies through Gareth to see schools of fish and other Ocean animals rapidly fleeing north.

He exchanges a fraught look with Marina, fighting off the grove’s mounting, almost grappling, draw toward its center. The two of them launch into a fast stroke away from the grove, the Salish Ocean’s vast, gray-tinted expanse now spread out before them. Vu Trin alarm horns pierce the air, all the distant shore music and revelry extinguished.

Peering west toward the horizon, Gareth gives an inward start. There’s a rapidly enlarging mass of dark gray advancing over the water like a demonic tide.

“The Shadow sea,”

Marina breathes out, gazing at the mass with wide-eyed dread.

Defiance churns to life inside Gareth’s lines. He dives below the water’s surface just as one of the larger mangroves releases a stout purple root and the Waters float it toward him, the power of the entire Ocean roaring through him once he grabs hold of it.

Gareth thrusts his wand arm upward as he launches himself back toward the surface while murmuring a wand spell in the Selkie language, the low tones flowing smoothly from the base of his throat, the translation effortless.

Power shoots through him with such force that it rattles his wrist. Energy blasts from the root and breaks through the water’s steel gray surface just before Gareth emerges, his huge waterspout bolting high into the air.

A blaring Selkie battle sign.

“We’ll fight Vogel’s Mages with all the magic we can summon,”

Gareth says to Marina as they exchange a look of determination . . . and launch themselves toward the Shadow sea.