Page 56 of The Princes of Stone and Steel

Steele.

He didn’t appear to be breathing.

“Steele,” I cried out. “What have you done?” I splashed into the water, sloshing toward him.

“Stop.” The word sounded like a song and shouldn’t have been commanding, yet it was, halting my feet mid-step. “The prince lives.”

Her lyrical voice lifted my spirit like an out-of-body experience, yet in an instant I saw a vision of the beautiful pink lake below me, polluted with puddles of oil and other chemicals floating on the surface. And those naked sprites became wrinkled hags, as wrinkled as the hag ravens, the glow to their skin snuffed out. They were bone-thin, no curves. Their silver hair flattened to a garish gray, hung in gnarled strands.

My spirit slammed back inside my body. Beautiful women stood before me once again. The vision was given to me by them, but to what point? Was that a will be or a could be?

“What was that?” I asked.

Not one woman answered, instead, simply staring me down, waiting for the answer to come to me.

“You’re dying,” I said to the women. “The outliers are dying. The Forfex drilling for oil. The Vráchos mining. The what? Scientific advancements of the Papyrus overused. It’s poisoning all of you.”

“You are making the connection, flesh.” A beautiful sprite with the longest corkscrew curls reaching her bottom bowed her head slightly.

“Please, we have to save Korrigan.”

“What will you give up?” the closest sprite to me asked in a repeated chorus.

“What will you give up?...What will you give up?... What will you give up?”

More and more and more.

“What will you give up?”

I hated the taunting because I knew what they were asking. The problem being that of the three things on the short list to give up, there was no way I planned to give up any of them. Not Steele. Not Korrigan. And not the Outliers.

While I pondered this, my skin suddenly started to glow. Likeglow, glow. Some sort of new magical flesh mojo took me over. I could heal them—heal the lake. Right here. Right now. I knew it. Ifeltit.

Spreading my hands out flat, I placed them to float on the surface of the water.

I breathed in and out slowly. Concentrating solely on the task at hand. Pulling the toxins from the lake, absorbing carcinogens into my cells. Bloating them. I needed to vomit as the pressure pushed down on my distended stomach.

My head became dizzy, causing me to sway from side to side, intoxicating my system from the foreign chemicals. My skin glowed brighter. The heat was so intense, water droplets on my skin rose and turned to vapor in front of my eyes.

And then—a small flash.

The toxins burned from my body.

The algae glowed a neon pink.

The skin of the sprites glittered like the brightest star in the sky.

Their hair shimmered platinum above silver.

Only now did I see that my beloved Steele lay without a shirt. Why was he shirtless?

“You may retrieve your prince.” All the sprites sang in unison as they broke the circle, opening a path for me to move through.

I waded in deeper, the water rising from my ankles to my knees, then higher. I finally reached Steele when the pink liquid rested above my waist, almost chest-high.

Gloriously, the fragrance perfumed the air once again. None of the muddy chemical remained, leaving only honey, citrus, lavender and Steele.

His scent of persimmon and wintergreen encompassed me, suffused my nose and mouth. Every bit the fragrance I loved because this represented Steele.

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