Page 36 of The Blood Rites

I nearly bump into someone standing outside my room again. This time it’s the Waterborn boy.

His back faces me, pale blond hair damp against the collar of his tunic. He sways slightly where he stands, not enough to seem unstable, but enough to remind me of long grass blowing in the breeze.

“Excuse me?” I ask carefully.

He doesn’t respond.

I slow as I approach him. Up close, his clothes are visibly wet, fabric clinging darkly to his skin without dripping a single drop onto the floor. Even the air around him feels cooler somehow, damp enough that it prickles faintly across my arms.

Something about it unsettles me. I reach out cautiously and touch his shoulder, but he still does not react. Moving around to face him, I immediately wish I hadn’t.

His eyes are clouded over completely. Not blind, but moving.

The pale blue of his irises churns slowly like a rainstorm trapped behind glass, unfocused and distant.

A chill crawls over the back of my neck.

“Are you alright?”

Nothing.

Then suddenly his body goes rigid.

“There are whispers in the water,” he says softly.

The words leave him strangely, delayed somehow, as though his voice is travelling from somewhere very far away before finally reaching me.

“Some currents do not drown,” he continues. “They wait.”

The corridor feels colder and his voice reminds me too much of the Mother Shard from my dreams. That same awful sense that something ancient is speaking through a human mouth.

“You do not feel empty,” he murmurs, the words thick and distorted, almost gargled. “The Veins stir within you.”

My heartbeat batters painfully against my ribs.

Again someone sees something in me they should not.

I have spent years making myself smaller. Quieter. Forgettable. Yet ever since entering the Embrace, strangers keep looking directly at the parts of me I have spent my entire life trying to bury.

It feels dangerous. Like I am a drop of blood in water.

“Something in you moves like tide beneath stone,” he whispers. “The sea remembers what the sky forgets.”

Then, just as suddenly, clarity returns to his face and his eyes fade back to pale blue-green, focusing slowly on me as though surfacing from deep underwater. A faint smile curves across his mouth.

“Hello, Luceris.”

I blink at him, still trying to understand what just happened.

“I saw you step in front of Lyssandra earlier,” he says warmly. “I thought it was very brave. Perhaps slightly reckless. But brave nonetheless.”

For a moment I can only stare at him, trying to decide whether he remembers any of the things he just said.

“You…” I hesitate. “Are you alright?”

“Oh, certainly.” His smile widens faintly, though there is something distant about it. “I drift sometimes.”

That explains absolutely nothing.