Page 4 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
The brand on my left shoulder shone in startling contrast. The opposite of silky, it was a rough red design of singed skin that formed a circle and a bulbed, five-pointed star. The same as everyone else’s on the island of Eshol, although the Good Council themselves sported a bright red dot in the center to distinguish themselves as superior.
Everyone else besides Gileon wore similar suits, but Lander himself began to change from the head down, his ebony-colored skin slickening while his form became more tapered. In the spanof time it took for me to blink water from my eyes, he’d become an upright shark-like creature that dove headfirst into the water.
“Damn,” I said, watching the ripples where Lander had plunged through expand and shrink again when he didn’t resurface. “I think that might be the creepiest form he’s ever donned.”
“Oh, you haven’t seen him as a piranha,” Emelle said, then turned to Wren and Rodhi with a teasing glimmer dancing in her wide brown eyes. “May the best Wild Whisperer win.”
She jumped in after Lander.
And despite the pain unfurling in the back of my head, despite the sense that another cavity in my memory had just opened up, I followed.
CHAPTER
2
Wren and Rodhi plunged in after us. When all four of us were paddling in the water, Gileon waving us goodbye and Lander still somewhere beneath us in his shark form, I hauled in a sharp breath.
Then sunk beneath the surface.
Murky gloom filmed my vision, but I kept my eyes peeled open and propelled myself deeper, until I came face to face with a few angelfish.
“Don’t make eye contact,” one of them glubbed to the other.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” the other glubbed back.
Fine, then. I didn’t want to talk to them either.
I came up for a quick gulp of air, then barreled deeper than before, my cupped hands brushing past seaweed that swayed peacefully and sang heavenly melodies that made me want to close my eyes.
And suddenly my eyelidswerefluttering shut at the thought of just… floating here. Forever. By the orchid and the owl,floating feltniceafter three months of constant weight pressing in on my bones.
But no. I had a job to do. Catch Coen Steeler. Make him give my sanity back. Hand him over to the Good Council and watch him burn.
I opened my eyes against the sting of water.
And found myself facing a giant, flaming orange eye.
The octopus was bobbing along the lake floor, but when it saw my attention move from one eye to the other, its tentacles began to sway in fluid, lazy motions, and its skin… its skin went from warty brown to bright blue quicker than I could try to propel myself backward.
“I remember you.”
I almost made the mistake of gasping in a lungful of water. Not because the octopus was talking to me, but because its gently swaying body was utterly silent on this underwater floor—yet I still heard the words as if they were floating in the water. My Wild Whispering magic was translating the sign language of the octopus’s tentacles into something I could understand.
“You took a midnight swim with that lover of yours,” the octopus continued, drifting closer, and my heart stuttered.
A midnight swim with a lover? I couldn’t remember doing such a thing—which meant the octopus could only be referring to one person.
“Oh, yes.” It nodded. “You were clinging to each other like coral and algae, your limbs so beautifully intertwined. I saw—”
“Pervert,” I hissed at the eight-limbed creature.
A mistake. With the last of my breath leaving me in a torrent of bubbles, I kicked upward for the surface.
But a tentacle wrapped around my torso, reeling me closer to those massive orange eyes as large as the palms of my hands. My chest screamed with white-hot flames, and it took everything I had not to inhale a lungful of lake water as the octopus broughtme even closer to its body, the whole of it flickering into a mellow orange color.
“Where is your lover now, hmmm?” its free tentacles said.
I didn’t have enough air left to answer, and there wasn’t a single sign of Emelle or Lander in his hybrid shark form to save me. I didn’t have Element Wielder abilities, couldn’t conjure a pocket of air or make the water disentangle the tentacle from around my body.
