Page 55 of Soulgazer

My lungs clench, arms flailing through the water.

A song hums in my ears.

A call…a warning?

The magic.

Lorcan swims past, and I grab at his shirt. “Not in there.” The words are garbled, round like the bubbles that escape my lips, but they’re enough. He casts me a strange look, then holds up a hand for me to wait and swims after Oona, who’s already halfway through an opening inside the ship.

Daughter of the…knowing sea…

I catch hold of the railing until it crumbles beneath my fingers and squeeze my eyes tight against the words. Force one unnatural breath after another through the gills, because that song is not out in the water.

It’s insideme. Drifting through my mind.

But I can’t listen—can’t give in. Not here.

Every muscle strains as I fight the curse, pain tearing across every spiral of the tattoo and sinking deeper into flesh and bone. Whatever fight I have, it’s not enough.

Unnatural cold floods my veins. Colder than the ocean’s kiss or winter’s bite. Colder than the Stone King’s gaze. It coils around my body from my wrists to my ankles and pulls me down, down, down—

And that’s when I see her.

Gráinne.

My grandmother.

Her face is familiar and foreign—a hazy dream of a dreamstillborn inside my head. She wraps blue-tinted fingers around my ankles as her lips part wide in the silent shriek of death. Yet her eyes are what arrest me: fathomless. Empty.

I’m still searching for a person in them when that whisper of sensation turns to iron at my ankles, pulling me down.

My scream is lost in a stream of bubbles, ears ringing as she drags me into the kelp. It doesn’t make sense—ghosts can’ttouchmortals—but she jerks me through the emerald clusters until my elbows scrape against broken shells and coral littering the seafloor.

“Please stop—please!” I scrape the sand for anything to hold on to—to strike against her ghost. But just as my fingers close on something long and thin, her grip falls away and the world goes dark and quiet again.

Even the faint song is gone.

Panic creeps higher up my throat, threatening to break free, when a weak ray of light pierces through the silt, illuminating the shape of a skull inches from my face.

I jerk my hand away, and a splintered portion of bone comes with it. When I tip my head back, I can no longer see the ship. The sky is a distant blur, barely lighter than the waters surrounding me. She must have dragged me down a ledge.

My frantic breathing slows as I stare at the bone in my hand, then squint harder, waiting for the debris to calm and the pathetic light to trickle through until I see it. An entire skeleton, brittle with age, nearly grown over by coral so thick, it’s as though my grandmother wears a peony gown in her death.

I trace the curve of her skull with a fingertip and shudder when it cleaves in two. The halves drift apart in lazy spirals above the seafloor, revealing—

Her soulstone.

Nestled in a bed of coral framed by the curve of her jaw, itripples with light and color—pink, silver, lapis, lilac. My fingers form a cage around it before I’ve made the conscious decision to move. A bluish light glimmers in the water as my grandmother’s spirit returns, hovering over her remains—no longer terrifying but longing.

Desperate.

I grind my teeth together.

I can do this. I wasmadeto do this.

My back throbs in protest, but I take as deep a breath as I can tolerate and then close my hand, nails dragging through sand until the soulstone rests directly against my palm.

A palm that’s puckered and scaled with age. Yellowed nails curve too tight together, veins bulging beneath my wrist. When I force the bent fingers open, it is not a stone in the center, but a ring unlike any I’ve ever seen.

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