Page 72 of Panther in the Shadows
Then she rises.
Catalina breaks the surface slowly. Deliberately. Like she has all the time in the world and wants us to see every moment of her emergence. Wants us to understand exactly what she's become.
She's barely human anymore.
Corpse-pale skin stretches over delicate bones. Her hair floats around her head in white tendrils, moving independent of the wind. Each strand looks like salt bleached it from the inside out.
But her eyes are the worst. They glow with necromantic blue light. The color of deep water where sunlight never reaches. Where pressure crushes anything living. Where death is the only constant.
She's beautiful and terrible, everything human about her twisted into something that shouldn't exist.
"Moira Flynn." The words carry across the water, amplified by magic. "The little sea witch who couldn't save her sister."
The accusation hits like physical blows. Guilt and grief rising fresh despite years of trying to bury them.
"And Rafael." Those glowing eyes find Rafe. "My faithless betrothed. Together at last. How touching."
"You died, Catalina." Rafe's tone holds no emotion. "You drowned yourself rather than accept exile. Whatever you are now, you're not the woman I knew."
"I became better. I merged with the ocean's darkest depths and learned what death really means." She glides closer without swimming, moving through the water like it's an extension of herself. "I discovered how to walk between life and death without being trapped by either."
"You murdered people." My hands grip the bowl tighter. "Marco. Brigid. Others. You killed them for power."
"I freed them from meaningless lives. And I found something precious in the deep places, Moira. Something that belongs to you."
The water erupts around her.
Figures rise like puppets on strings. Human-shaped but their movements are unnatural. Joints bending at impossible angles. Heads tilting in ways that would break a living neck.
Marco. The man who worked for Rafe and died in his arms. His eyes are empty. His skin has the same corpse-pale quality as Catalina's.
Brigid. The artist whose paintings hung in the gallery on High Street. Young and vibrant in life. Hollowed out in death.
Others from the island. People who had families. Friends. Lives that mattered.
All of them bound. Trapped. Forced to serve the woman who murdered them.
But Old Tom isn't among them. He's still alive somewhere. Still has a chance.
"You're wondering about the old harbor master." False sympathy drips from Catalina's words. "Don't worry. He's safe. For now. I need him alive to make sure you cooperate. To make sure you come to me willingly when the time is right. Sea witch blood freely given is so much more powerful than blood taken by force."
Heat floods my chest, burning away the fear that's been choking me. "You won't touch him."
"Won't I? Who's going to stop me? You? The exiled panther? The brotherhood of broken shifters who can barely protect themselves?"
The bound spirits move.
Not like people. Not even like the dead should move. They glide through the corrupted water as if gravity means nothing, as if the laws of nature broke when Catalina raised them. Their limbs bend wrong. Their heads tilt at angles that should snap necks. And their eyes—those empty, glowing eyes—fix on their targets with the single-minded hunger of predators who can't be killed because they're already corpses.
They don't swim toward shore.
They attack.
Marco launches himself from the water like a missile, droplets of corrupted liquid spraying from his body in an arc of black. He covers the distance to Declan's boat in seconds, moving faster than anything dead should move. Faster than anything human ever could.
Grayson's roar splits the night as he shifts mid-leap from the shore, eight hundred pounds of grizzly bear meeting the corrupted spirit mid-air. The collision sounds like boulders crashing together. They hit the Sound's surface in an explosion of spray, both disappearing beneath the oil-slick water. For three heartbeats, there's nothing. Then the water erupts in thrashingviolence. Fur and pale flesh. Claws raking. Jaws snapping. The sound of something tearing.
Brigid and others peel away from Catalina like sharks scenting blood. They don't run across the water. They skim it. Elbows and knees bending backward, propelling them forward in movements that make my stomach lurch. The artist I knew—the woman who painted seascapes in the gallery, who laughed over wine at the inn—is gone. What wears her skin is a puppet animated by death magic and Catalina's will.
