Page 47 of Hymn of Breath and Bone

“Skies, you alwaysweresuch a snake,” I snarled, trying to decide how much his information was really worth.

“And proud of it.” He grinned and drained his glass. “Decide now, or I’ll be calling my friends in.”

“What’s your price?”

“Your pretty mate,” he said, grinning in a way that had probably won him a lot of his contracts. “I want to meet her. You can leave a message here and choose the time and place, but it has to be public. Let me meet her, and I’ll tell you who paid me to kidnap her.”

“Or I can kill you and figure it out for myself.”

“You could try.” He shrugged. “But choose quickly. I’m growing tired of this conversation.”

“Why now?” I asked, still confused about one part of this. “Why take this job now when you’ve been in hiding for fifteen years? Why resurface at all?”

“Money’s good,” he replied. “And I need something to retire on.”

“You knew I’d come for you,” I pushed. “Why now?”

“My reasons are my own,” he replied. “Boys!”

His command startled me, and I stepped back as three burly males entered the room through the interior door. Another dwarf and two sirens, all armed to the teeth and glowering.

“Two of our friends fell asleep on the job,” the Stormcrow said, not turning to look at his thugs. “Slit their throats for their incompetence, then escort His Majesty out. In pieces, if necessary.”

“This isn’t over, Ilya,” I growled as the two sirens advanced, the dwarf remaining back to guard his boss.

“I certainly hope not, Cas,” he drawled, leaning back in his chair and resting his boots on the table. “I expect your answer by this evening.”

It took every ounce of my willpower to walk out of the room without attempting to slit Ilya’s throat.

Chapter 18

“He’ll be fine,” Zephyrsaid for the eighteenth time as I practiced molding fog into different shapes. I scowled and floated a fog seagull toward her.

In the last three days I’d done nothing but train, drink tea, and practice harnessing wind. As soon as Caspian suggested I might have the ability, it was like something broke open inside of me. Suddenly, speaking to the sky and wind was as simple asspeaking to the sea.

Zephrus above and Undine below. The sky and the sea joined forever at the horizon.

Not for the first time, I wondered where that left Melusine.

Zephyr looked at me unamused as the seagull flapped its foggy wings once and disintegrated into shapeless mist.

The idea for the fog shapes had struck me yesterday as we sailed through a particularly dense cloud, and I’d been entertaining myself—and the sky, if I wasn’t imagining its regular rumble of masculine amusement—with fog animals ever since.

“So you can really speak to the sky?” she asked, waving at a cloud of fog ineffectually.

I asked it to coalesce a little to the right, and it obliged with a tiny gust. “Apparently.”

“That’s not a normal selkie thing, right?” she pushed. Zephyr had kept me company all morning, and we’d been over this already, but I knew she was trying to distract me from Caspian’s absence.

He should be back any minute, if he hadn’t been killed or captured. The warm glow of the bond in my chest told me he hadn’t, but I gnawed on my lower lip regardless.

“It’s not.” I debated for a moment how much to reveal to her, but decided to keep my theories to myself. “He thinks someone named Theia will have answers. Have you ever met her?”

“Once.” Zephyr shuddered, and I raised a brow at her. “She was…odd. Unsettling.”

“What happened to her?”

“That’s her story,” Zephyr replied, giving me a wry smile. “And I couldn’t tell you the whole truth of it even if I wanted to. Only Cas knows it.”