“No.” My voice was quiet, but clear. “I can help.”

He shook his head, face bending with desperation. “Gods damn it,” he said through his teeth. “Quickly.”

The surface of the water began to ripple and roll. It had obeyed. It sped the girl toward me, but as I waited, the pulse in my chest began to burn like ripped skin. Like something was pulling against it. Fighting me. I gasped at the pain.

Theodore yelled my name from the shore.

I widened my stance as the body cutting through the water came closer. When, suddenly, it stopped. That ripping pain flared. I tried to command it to me once more, but it wouldn’t move. Something broke through the surface of the water, only feet away.

I couldn’t breathe.

Yelps and gasps and prayers erupted from the villagers on the sand.

A nekgya stood before me, holding the limp, adolescent girl in her arms. The girl’s body was slashed with oozing wounds. But her chest still rose and fell.

The thing holding her—the dead woman—had long, matted hair that had lumped into tentacle-like strands. They covered her chest and arms, curving through gray flesh like a thread through fabric. A small, violet urchin lived in one of her eye sockets, but the eye that remained watched me with familiar regard.

My voice quaked. “Give her to me.”

“There you are, dearest. I’ve waited so long.” The nekgya’s flat words came from its black-lipped mouth, but there was a second, identical voice that echoed the same words within my skull. The power in my chest blistered.

“What did you say?” Those words. I knew those words.

She moved toward me with hiccuping steps until she was close enough to set the girl into my outstretched arms. Her eye locked with mine. “There you are, dearest,” she repeated in a slow, awful voice. “I’ve waited so long.”

My shock had me stumbling backward through the water, clinging to the girl. Those were the same words I’d heard in my head when Evander had forced me into that tub.

The laugh that rasped from the dead woman was sterile and crackled like water was lodged in her chest. “Do not fear. You and I are one,” the nekgya said. “Bound with your given blood. Bound with the words. We cannot harm one another.”

“Bound to you?” I thought of the scars on my hand. Of all the blood I’d been forced to give over the years. Of the words—Nemea’s ritual prayer. A trickle of cold, complete horror ran down my body. “You’re Eusia.”

The nekgya didn’t answer.

Another body splashed through the surface of the water beside it, and I fell back another step. Her hair was fairer, the color of wet sand. The skin over her shoulders and ribs looked gelatinous, nearly transparent. Her large black eyes locked with mine.

“The bodies are reanimated by my power,” said the fairer nekgya in an identical voice to the first. In an identical voice to the one in my head. “And I am animated by yours, dear, generous girl. There you are. Just like your mother. I have waited so long.”

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With fumbling steps, I walked out of the waves and onto the wet sand. The girl in my arms moaned, her head lolling over my forearm, but I could only stare after the two nekgya. They had turned to walk back into the lagoon. On either side of their spines sat two grotesque knots of flesh.

Wing stumps.

Theodore was at my side. He scooped the girl from my arms, speaking to me in low, commanding tones, but I couldn’t grasp his words.

I could only think of the prayer I’d spoken over and over again, the blood I’d given. Shame stuck through me like barbs in my pitiful flesh. My knees hit the sand, mind spinning.

Bound to Eusia. To all the nekgya. That was why they didn’t hurt me. Because it was my power that ran through their decaying veins.

“Imogen, help.” Theodore had laid the girl on the wet sand behind me. His hands rested on one of the wounds on her arm that spilled red onto the sand. My stomach turned at the gruesome sight, at the heartbreaking way her mother dragged herself across the beach to be at her side. More villagers had filled in around them, torches in hand.

Even in the harsh, unsteady light, I could see how the crowd watched me. Carefully. With suspicion. On unsteady legs, I rose and set myself beside Theodore. I avoided the scornful glares of the onlookers, but I deserved each and every one.

My fingers shook as I touched a gash on the girl’s stomach and closed my eyes. With my heart racing, and my own power still pulsing through me, Theodore’s was easier to find and hold. It vibrated down my arm. Heat cascaded to the tips of my fingers. When I moved my hand away from the wound, the villagers gasped.

I’d healed it, leaving behind only a small white scar.

The girl’s mother looked up at me, aghast. A man behind Theodore asked, “What is she, Your Majesty?” The distrust in his voice was clear as the cloudless sky. “Is she a Mage? A spell woman?”

The teeth-bared, fear-drenched question told me precisely how fearfully a spell woman was regarded. There was only one Mage Seer permitted per kingdom, their magic and spell work heavily restricted. What could I tell them? I was Ligea’s daughter. Blood-bound to both their king and the monsters that hunt them. There was no way to explain who I was, what I’d done, without earning these villagers’ ire and sending a ripple of contempt through the surrounding villages.

Theodore was calm and collected beside me. “She’s your queen.”

My head snapped toward him. “What are you doing?”

He ignored me, tending to the last of the girl’s wounds instead. “Your daughter will be just fine with rest and care,” he said to the astonished mother. He took my arm, helped me to stand. “We need a hut for the night,” he said to one of the older women in the crowd, “if you’d oblige us.”

The request moved the entire party on the beach into action. The villagers voiced their thanks and their welcomes. Some rushed back toward the huts to prepare for us. Others held their torches high, lighting our path.

“Are you mad?” I whispered at his side. “What the hell are you thinking?”

His face was impassive as ever. Ever the king, he held himself straight as he went to the water to wash the blood from his hands and forearms. Then he was pulling me along, trying to keep some distance between us and the crowd as we made our way back toward the huts. “Not now.”

“Yes, now.” My guilt was too tremendous to shake. “I’m not their queen. I did this to them. I’ve given my blood—”

There was a jerk on my arm, a grunt of frustration, and then Theodore’s lips were on mine. They were soft, warm, but the kiss was forceful, laced with command. He pulled back just far enough to glare at me.

A quiet, forlorn moan rolled through my chest. “What are—”

His hand hooked around the back of my neck, and he spoke against my lips. “I am keeping you safe.”

“But—”

He kissed me again. This time it was gentle, lips moving against mine painfully slowly. When he pulled away, taking my bottom lip between his as he did, he spoke in a clipped, heated whisper. “Gods, you don’t know when to shut up.” Then, as quickly as he’d kissed me, he took my hand and hauled me toward the village with determined strides.

My only response was a breathy, involuntary protest.

A gray-haired woman led us to one of the larger huts. Theodore urged me inside before requesting that our horses be cared for. I blundered across the packed dirt floor, toward the quaint hearth. My eyes burned and I squeezed them shut.

“Bloody fucking Gods, Imogen.” Theodore forced the door closed and dropped the strip of wood into the metal anchors to bar it. Then he went about shuttering and locking the three little windows. “When I tell you not now, you listen.” He’d worked to rein in his volume, but not a bit of his anger. “The sea villages are superstitious and zealous. They honor the Great Gods wholeheartedly. They shun whatever power they cannot understand. If you were not under my explicit protection—if I hadn’t made a show of my care for and trust in you—they would have gone after you.”