Panic flooded him, worse than the panic of not knowing where he was in the water for the first time…well, ever…
Trust your magic. Even if it’s wonky at times, trust it.
The voice in his head sounded like his great-aunt’s voice. Great-Aunt Josie was the only Donovan who’d really believed in him, probably because she was a wild witch and her own magic was unconventional.
He had no idea if he was hearing her ghost or just remembering something she’d said, but the magic was his only hope at this point. The Pacific Ocean knew where the surface was, where the shore was. He forced himself to relax, open to the water, let the water take him.
The water was dark, darker than it should be at this time of day. He couldn’t find the sun at the surface, couldn’t find where up was. Whenever he thought he was about to break through to air, he was turned upside down again. His legs still worked fine, and his right arm, but pain and fear made him clumsy. Every cell of his body screamed for oxygen.
Even though his panicked body wanted to tense, wanted to strive, he let go. Let the magic take over. His power felt dimmed, maybe by pain, but, yes, the surface was that way. Let go some more now, let the water help him rise…which it had better do fast because his body wasn’t being cooperative.
The next thing he knew, an animal nudged him.
Sleek, dark fur. Long and lithe. No longer native to this part of the Pacific Coast.
A great surge of love surrounded him.
Then the animal became a naked man and Kyle’s strong arms were supporting him. Kyle pressed his mouth against Deck’s and Deck dimly wondered at the timing of the kiss until he realized Kyle was sharing a breath with him. He began to swim, dragging Deck with him.
No! He was going the wrong way, paralleling the shore, taking them away from Meaghan. Deck pounded on Kyle with his good hand, but Kyle chose not to notice.
They surfaced down the beach from where they’d been, around a bend in the shoreline. Deck gasped, filling his starved lungs with air. “Got to get to Meaghan,” he said once he had breath, and was shocked by how ragged his voice was.
“Got to get you to shore and hidden. You’ve been shot.”
Deck meant to argue, but before he could open his mouth, Kyle pulled them both underwater again.
Somewhere along the line, as they tried to make their way through the surf, Deck allowed himself to pass out from the pain.
When he woke, they were tucked behind a dune and Kyle was using his hands to apply pressure to the wound in Deck’s shoulder. It hurt like loss. Deck rolled away, stifling a cry of pain, and forced himself to his feet. Meaghan. Had to get to Meaghan. Now that he wasn’t drowning he could feel her silver cord. It was still pulsing strong, but he sensed her fear, the danger she was in.
“You’re bleeding, asshole,” Kyle hissed. His voice was just above a whisper, but it carried the force of a shout.
“Doesn’t matter.” Meaghan was in danger. If Meaghan was, so was the rest of his family. And he was a Donovan. A fuckup Donovan, but a Donovan. He’d do what he had to do.
He managed to run three steps toward where he thought Meaghan was before his knees buckled. Kyle was with him before he hit the sand, easing him down so he lay with his head in Kyle’s lap.
“When I said you were bleeding, I meant you’re losing a lot of blood and I’ve got to stop it before you die. Got it?” Kyle pressed hard on the wound again. This time it didn’t hurt as much as it had.
Deck suspected that wasn’t a good sign. Shock was bad, wasn’t it? Made whatever else was wrong with you worse, and if his injury felt better all of a sudden and his grandmother and Aunt Jan were nowhere to be seen, that probably meant shock.
Still, he had to try one more time. “Meaghan…”
“The water says she’s still all right. Scared but all right. Fighting better than either of us could at this point.”
Deck wasn’t reassured, exactly. Duals didn’t lie, but they could make mistakes just like anyone else could, and he had no idea how Kyle was getting his information. Duals could communicate through telepathic silentspeech with each other but it didn’t work well with humans, even witches.
At least not most witches. He suspected Kyle and Meaghan might be able to learn, assuming they all lived that long.
He tried to ask questions. Tried to impress upon Kyle that it was way more important to make sure Meaghan was all right than it was to patch him up. Tried to say something at all. Death’s just death, he wanted to say. The Agency can only kill me. They’ll do worse to Meaghan, and to Jocelyn, and probably to you.
But words wouldn’t form. His head swam as, despite Deck’s efforts, the blood flowed out of him.
Swam. Flowed.
Deck pushed through the haze of pain and shock. Blood was liquid, largely water. He knew how water worked. And like all young Donovans, he’d studied the basics of healing, though he didn’t have a knack for it.
This was an emergency.
He took a shuddering breath and called his magic.
It took more time to reach the magic than it should—even injured, being this near the ocean should have boosted his power—and when he managed to call a flicker of power, it hurt like the bullet had pierced something vital in his spirit as well as tearing into his flesh. But the cool blue power answered his summons.
He took only a little of it, afraid that if he pushed too much, he might break something else while trying not to bleed to death.
He used that little bit of power to tell the blood pumping out of the wound to slow down and start coagulating.
He just hoped he was doing it right and wouldn’t end up with gangrene in his arm or something because he cut off too much blood flow. But one of his relatives could fix that, assuming they all survived. Living was the first step.
Finding Meaghan was second.
And fucking up whoever did this would be third.
Eventually Kyle eased up that ghastly pressure and ventured a rickety smile. “Thank the Powers,” he breathed. His aura was glowing, and Deck suspected he’d been praying frantically all along.
“Let’s go!” Deck struggled to rise.
“Okay.” Kyle looked grim. Deck wouldn’t have believed, until now, that an otter could look grim, but with blood on his hands and smeared on his legs and torso, his dark eyes wild, he looked as fell as anything Deck had ever seen. “But only because I know you won’t stay if I go off without you and I can’t stand not being with Meaghan either.”
Kyle ran. Deck ambled behind him. He couldn’t move fast, but the slower pace meant he could pull power from an ocean that looked much angrier than it had before and send it to Meaghan without regard to how much it hurt.
Overhead, the sky darkened with storm clouds and lightning flashed.
Chapter Eighteen
Meaghan felt a disturbance in her shields. She made her shields the way Deck did, liquid energy, flexible yet impenetrable—in theory—and he’d reinforced them. The way they were constructed meant she sensed the attack like someone poking at her but unable to penetrate the bubble of energy around her.
She remembered what Deck had shown her. Shut down her visions tight, imagining a steel door like the ones at the Agency facility slamming closed and locking. Pull energy from the water to augment her shields.
But still they faltered.
And the sense that she was hidden inside layer upon layer of the Donovan estate’s shields vanished, leaving her exposed. Raw.
Her head swam, not like she was about to have a vision, but like something was interfering with the currents of magic, as clear to her as the currents of the ocean. Frantic, she tried to send a warning down the pulsing cord of energy that connected her to Deck and Kyle, but she didn’t know how, especially since she was afraid to open up too much. She didn’t want visions, and she didn’t want anyone getting into her head because no
w she knew people could do that and she suspected that someone in the Agency had been doing so all along.
She ran instead toward the sound of the water, calling her lovers’ names. A ride didn’t take long. With luck, they were close to shore, maybe already coming onshore to steal a kiss.
But she couldn’t find them, and the wind and waves drowned out her words. Maybe if she went into the water, Deck and Kyle would notice her and realize something was wrong.
She was knee-deep in frigid chop when she heard an odd noise. Almost not a noise, a soft pop that she suspected a sighted person wouldn’t have heard at all. But without the distraction of vision, that out-of-place sound rang loud and clear above the waves.
Deck cried out, loud and pained, and then was silent.
A shot. That sound had been a gunshot, either a long way away or nearby with a silencer—terms she’d picked up from movie sound effects and audiobooks, now all too real. The Agency was here.
And they’d shot Deck.
She reached out again down the cord of energy that connected them, not caring at this point if someone managed to come along for the ride. Just a quick touch…and then nothing.
She thought of following the waves to Deck and Kyle.
At first, she couldn’t sense the waves, but after a panicked moment of scrambling to ground and center, she found them again. They seemed dim, distant, but welcoming.
And they let her know Deck lived. She couldn’t tell more than that, but he was on the other end of the cord and still alive, though dazed and in pain. She envisioned energy, energy she desperately yanked from the water and energy of her own feelings for Deck, going down that cord to make Deck stronger. She had no idea if it would work, but she couldn’t do nothing.
Damn it, they’d been together, connected like this, for only a couple of days, and she’d been using her magic consciously for not much longer than that. Not that she expected an Agency raid to be politely timed or anything, but it would have been nice if she’d had a chance to learn how to defend herself and the others.
Which suggested they’d timed it this way on purpose, an extracreepy notion.
A quick check revealed that Kyle was safe for now, otterside and hiding in plain sight in the waves. Love you, she thought, not knowing if the otter Kyle would understand.
There. She’d done what she could for them.
She turned toward where she felt the water meet the sand. Before she could walk more than a step or two, strong arms captured her and a hand clamped over her mouth.
Not Deck. Not Kyle. Cold energy that smelled of sulfur and metal, and a big, unfamiliar male body. Agency.
Meaghan bit down on the hand that covered her mouth. It probably wouldn’t do any good, but it was satisfying.
At the same time, she dropped all her shields and screamed a mental warning. She concentrated on Portia, how Portia felt in her head, the trace of herself the telepath had left behind in Meaghan’s head when she’d examined her. Concentrated on Roslyn, who had spent more time with her than anyone except Deck and Kyle. Concentrated on reaching anyone who might be listening. Concentrated on finding the water magic in the Donovan estate’s shields and slipping down through that energy, crying out her warning with all the strength of her spirit: The Agency’s here. Deck’s been shot. Help us if you can, but protect the baby.
The man picked her up as if she weighed no more than little Jocelyn, slung her over his shoulder. She kicked and writhed, but his arms gripped like iron and her bare feet might have been striking stone for all he reacted. She kept screaming with her mind and screaming with her voice too, although she was pretty sure the man would have gagged her if he’d thought anyone could hear. Agency officers were efficient that way. They were traveling away from the ocean and she couldn’t tell how far they’d come or exactly where they were heading, not with him carrying her like a sack of dirty laundry, upside down so her spatial sense was disoriented.
But they hadn’t gotten too far from the water yet.
She already knew she was unlikely to drown. And even if she did, it beat several possible alternatives.
Drawing on her rage and her fear and her determination that she wouldn’t go back into Agency hands or let the baby end up their tool like she had been for so long, Meaghan called a wave.
She didn’t have time to do it delicately, to see a few minutes ahead, observe the wave patterns and direct a wave already slated to be larger than average to hit in a directed way. She just threw energy into the water and hoped. Get these assholes out of here. Don’t hurt Deck and Kyle and try not to harm anyone else. But wash the Agency bastards out to sea.
Seconds before, her connection to the water had been tenuous, but it had bounced back stronger than ever. She’d barely finished the thought when she felt the wave approaching. She took a deep breath, prepared for cold. A male voice shouted just as what felt like a ton of frigid water crashed over them.
The man’s grip tightened on her, but she touched the water with her mind, not even sure what she was asking of it, and she was yanked from his grasp by the force of the water. Yet it felt like rescue, not danger. The man’s hand closed around her ankle briefly, but she kicked and got away. She started to swim.
She hadn’t known she could swim. When she’d tried to drown herself, the current had carried her along and she’d thrashed and paddled until her strength failed, but now her body seemed to know what to do and she moved through the waves with confident strength that didn’t feel like her own, as if she were channeling Deck’s training and Kyle’s natural abilities through her own body. Freaky, but at this point she thanked the Powers that Deck and Kyle called on and any other deity that happened to be listening.
She let her instincts and the ocean guide her to a safer place to come ashore. The waves were fierce, stronger than they had been earlier in the day, though not as wild as the great wave she’d called, and bitterly cold. Thunder boomed and rumbled overhead. Not the best time to be in the water, she supposed. But a thunderstorm from a previously clear sky meant that Deck was alive and conscious and pissed as hell, so it made her feel safe, safe as the arms of the ocean did.
Guide me to them, she begged. For what seemed like a long time, but was really only a couple of frantic heartbeats, nothing happened. Then a current that hadn’t been there before bore her…not deeper into the ocean, she sensed, but in toward shore, until a wave caught her and deposited her, not too gently, on the sand.
Someone tripped over her and let out a soft cry of “Meaghan, thank the Powers,” just above a whisper but penetrating.
Kyle, and he was wet and naked and helped her scramble to her feet. “Deck’s hurt,” he whispered urgently.
“I know.” He didn’t ask how. “How badly?”
“Bad enough, but he patched himself up for now. He’s behind us, but keeping up.”
Meaghan’s head spun with questions, but Kyle was running and pulling her along after him and she didn’t have time or, soon, breath to ask questions, even the most obvious one: Are we running to something or away?
Deck saw Meaghan’s dripping hair, heard Kyle’s whispered words.
She was all right. Wet, but all right. Probably stunned, but in better shape than he was at the moment. And he’d bet she was responsible for the big wave he’d glimpsed hitting the main beach while mysteriously missing the stretch of shoreline where they were.
All he wanted to do was grab her, hold her close and say, over and over again, like a prayer, “You’re safe. You’re safe.”
Except it wasn’t that simple.
While she might be all right, there was no telling if Jocelyn and everyone else at the house were.
For that matter, he wasn’t exactly all right himself. He’d managed to slow the bleeding down and draw enough energy from sea and earth to keep going, but he’d been shot and sooner or later, probably sooner, it was going to catch up w
ith him.
They burst onto a beach swept clean of everything. Even the big driftwood logs were gone, washed away by Meaghan’s wave.
Meaghan slammed to a halt. “Is anybody…”
“No,” Kyle answered, and then calmly, “good job.”
Well, that proved she wasn’t a long-lost Donovan cousin, some annoying part of his brain pointed out. If agents had been on the beach, they were washed out to sea now, good as dead unless they were exceptionally strong swimmers or just plain lucky. But Meaghan had survived just fine, meaning the ocean—and her magic—didn’t reject her.
It was good to be a wild witch sometimes. Especially when someone was trying to put you in a world of hurt and you actually had options for fighting back.
“Where to now?” Kyle panted.
“Main house. Take Meaghan. I’ll check Elissa’s guesthouse.”
He was already running as he said it. It hurt to talk, let alone move, and the wound was bleeding again, but it was a slow drip rather than a gush so he ignored it. He’d done more painful things to himself surfing. Of course, to himself was the key difference.
But he didn’t have time to worry, so he pushed on.
Lightning struck the ground about ten feet from him, sizzling a bush. Behind the now-smoldering bush, someone shouted in alarm, and a black and fuchsia sorcerous spell fizzled harmlessly as he ran past.
Okay, the lightning could be handy, if only he could figure out how to direct it. No time to experiment now, though. He had to keep moving.
Another lightning strike, and this time the screams were more pained than frightened. At least they were alive to scream, and he didn’t care if a few Agency asshats were charred around the edges. He dodged a shot by flinging himself onto the ground and started a low crawl that would be a hell of a lot easier if his arm worked right.
The farther he got into the estate, the more chaos surrounded him. A lion roared in the woods, and a mountain lion’s scream answered. Something gurgled in between those noises and he couldn’t decide whether he should feel sickened or grateful that Elissa had married two big carnivores. Magic flared everywhere. Familiar Donovan spells, though many of them felt weaker than usual. Meaghan’s wild, improvised water magic. Formal spells that felt like Donovan magic that he didn’t recognize—probably Paul, who had an uncanny ability to remember obscure Gaelic wording he’d read once in passing and who, married to a fox and a Trickster avatar, liked shaking things up. Sorcery. Occasionally an earthy magic that wasn’t either witch magic or sorcery.
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