A column of water struck me in the ribs and drove me sideways across the deck. My shoulder slammed into the rail. Pain flared through the joint.
“You’re not going to win this fight,” Orion said.
I pulled myself up. My shirt was soaked, the fabric heavy and cold against my skin. He was right, but not entirely for the reasons he spoke of. If I let loose—if I truly unleashed a storm into this wet steel hull—the current would find Orion. But it would also find Andromeda, trapped somewhere below my feet. I couldn’t risk it. And Maris knew it.
“You came here to die,” Orion drawled. “I respect that. But this is my turf, Stormwright. And Andromeda has already chosen how this will end.”
I needed a different approach. My aura. I’d used it on dockworkers in Catania, on guards and terminal directors and bureaucrats. My father had used it on me. We’d tried to help Andie with it. There was no reason I couldn’t try it on Orion, too.
I pushed it outward. Everything I had, aimed directly at Orion Maris.
He staggered. One step back, his bare foot slipping on the wet deck. His pupils dilated. For a fraction of a second, the sea around the yacht trembled, its directed intelligence faltering as Orion’s concentration broke.
Then the Strait reasserted itself. The current surged upward through the hull, a massive pulse of cold pressure that dropped me to my knees.
“Impressive.” Orion straightened, breathing hard. The aura had cost him something. A thin line of blood ran from his left nostril. “On land, that might have worked. But here, the ocean fights for me whether I ask it to or not.”
“And without the ocean?” I spat blood onto the steel. “What are you without it, Maris?”
“I’ll never have to find out.” He raised his hand.
The water came again. The Strait rose over the port rail, a heavy, surging wave sweeping across the deck toward me. Orion advanced with it. His movements had changed. He was no longer the composed diplomat. His eyes had gone a deeper shade of green, almost black. The veins in his forearms stood out like cables beneath the skin.
I threw lightning into the crest of the incoming water. The sheer heat tore the wave apart, dissolving it into a blinding, white-hot mist, and I used the cover to roll sideways and get back on my feet. My ribs ached where the first blow had landed. My knees throbbed from the impact. Every breath tasted of salt and ozone.
Orion came through the steam like he’d been born in it. A wave swept across the deck and caught my ankles, yanking me forward. I hit the steel face-first. Before I could rise, the current pinned me, a flat, crushing pressure across my back that ground me into the planking.
“Stay down.” A shadow fell across my back. Orion, above me. “This doesn’t have to be prolonged.”
“Is that all the ocean’s got?” I gritted my teeth and pushed my palms flat against the deck. “Fourteen generations of sea gods, and the best you can manage is holding me down?”
I couldn’t electrify the hull. I couldn’t risk the current traveling below deck. So I pulled the lightning inward, letting the searing heat of it bleed into my own skin and the steel directly beneath my chest.
The sudden, blistering heat met the freezing water pinning my back. The crushing weight boiled instantly. Steam exploded upward in a violent, scalding hiss, breaking the ocean’s grip just enough.
I heaved upward, breaking free. Blood ran from a cut above my eyebrow. My shirt was shredded. I could feel the exhaustion pulling at the edges of my vision.
Orion waited five feet away. He wasn’t untouched. The aura had rattled him, and the sudden heat of the steel had forced him back. Even so, he’d recovered his balance. Behind him, the Strait churned with a dark energy I could feel in my teeth. Charybdis. The ancient thing beneath the surface, awake and attentive and hungry.
“I told her I would be ready.” Orion looked at me, and there was genuine regret in his face. “I’m sorry it came to this.”
“You’re not. You’ve been waiting for this since Samos.”
He didn’t deny it. “Perhaps. But I take no joy in it.”
The water rose around me. From everywhere at once. The Strait was climbing the hull, pouring over the rails, filling every inch of open space. A rising tide that reached my ankles, my shins, my knees. Cold and dark and impossibly heavy, carrying the weight of the entire Mediterranean basin behind it.
I gathered what was left of my lightning. Almost nothing. The repeated discharges had drained me further than I’d ever pushed before, and my desperate restraint had cost me the rest. What I had was enough for one more strike. A last, brilliant bolt that would either save me or be the final charge I handed to the Strait.
Then I heard her.
“Orion.”
Andromeda’s voice came from the stern. I turned, and the movement cost me. The water surged against my body, pressing me back, as though the Strait didn’t want me to see what was behind me.
She stood at the top of the companionway. Barefoot, dressed in a white shirt that I recognized as Orion’s. The Mediterranean sun was behind her, turning her hair into a dark halo. She looked rested, steady, and beautiful. The sight of her knocked the breath out of me more thoroughly than anything the ocean had managed.
“Andromeda.” Orion’s shoulders dropped a fraction. The water around my legs eased slightly—not releasing me, but hesitating. “Go back below. This will be over soon.”