Page 123 of I Summon the Sea

“You’ve hardly told me anything at all. Who areyou? How come you have such powers, ordering dragons about, playing with the shadows?”

“Idon’t knowwhatI am,” he says quietly. “Or who I am. My memories of the past are a muddled mess. My mind shies away from them, and no matter how fucking hard I try, I can’t break through that wall. As for the fae king… One day, I hailed down a great dragon, this power surfacing in me. The king sent for me when he heard of that. And I don’t order dragons around. I talk with them.”

“But you can command them.”

He frowns. “Yes, I can command draks, and I have done it when the hour called for it.”

“What about the Great Dara?”

“I don’t command the Great Dara, or the darakin. Nobody does. But one thing I know is that pain can change you,” he says. “Death can change you. It changed me.”

Death.It strums a chord inside of me.

“Come, Jai,” I whisper. “You speak in riddles and expect me to just nod and accept it as the truth?”

“You want me to tell you everything,” he retorts, dark brows bunching together, “but you’re telling mefuck-all.”

We’re both breathing hard, glaring at one another.

“You’re in a position of power,” I remind him. “The King’s Sword. The king’s favorite. So excuse me if I can’t tell you everything.”

“I’m not his favorite, I’m his fucking tool. It’s Phaethon he wants, and that’s why I’m fighting him. Don’t you think I—” He gasps, jerks. “Fuck, Rae, listen?—”

“Jai?”

A grimace twists his strong features for a fleeting moment, then vanishes as his eyes…shift.He’s not normally so… sloe-eyed, is he? Or is it the dark blooms on his cheekbones that shift?

His dark lashes lift, and the look he shoots me is so cold and calculating, I flinch.

“Listen to you, little human, asking so many questions.” Jai sneers, and I jolt at the change in his voice, the oily clang in its depths. “Why wouldn’t we help the king? He offers what we need.”

We.

Okay.

“And what do you need?” I ask carefully, resisting the urge to back away from him.

“As if we’d tell you. As if we’d tell anyone.”

Phaethon.

An image comes to me. Jai smiling. Jai sneering. The black blooms on his cheekbones shifting as his character switches from nice to nasty. Gold flashing in his dark eyes.

“He’s offering you something you need, and that’s why you can’t kill him,” I whisper. “An alliance?”

“He found us, recognized us.” A burr has entered Jai’s voice, not the roughness of his voice when he kissed me, but a whirr and clank like distant metal cogs turning. “Don’t you see it, Leli? He promised to help us, keep us sane, and aid us in our mission, he—” Jai staggers back, hands clenching into white-knuckled fists, blunt nails digging into his palms, broadshoulders hunching. His teeth are gritting, jaw flexing. “Fuck. No. I said, no!”

I observe this with concern and fascination. The struggle. The cursing. The fight to regain control. I’ve seen it before. And I believe him now. I believe that he’s two-souled, as the telchin had said.

“Fuck…” He’s panting. A thin trickle of blood runs out of the corner of his mouth, and he spits a wad of crimson. He either bit his tongue or the inside of his cheek.

My hands twitch with the need to touch his face. “Is it still Phaethon talking, or are you Jai now?”

“Jai.” His voice is full of grit, but somehow, he sounds like himself again. “Fuck, I’m sorry. I told you, I’m learning how to control him.”

“How?” I whisper. “If you’re carrying another soul in you, an Eosphor’s soul of all things, how are you going to change that?”

His eyes blaze as he straightens fully to his impressive height. “I’ll find a way to tear him out of me like a fucking weed.”

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