Page 79 of The Kraken Bride

Sebastian’s arm lifted, a deadly shadow tentacle aimed at Jokull. Then he stopped.

My husband’s head turned. Toward me. Something had disrupted that terrible nothingness. Broken through. His fingers flexed and muscle jumped beneath his eye.

Sebastian looked at Jokull’s exposed flank.

At me.

Back to Jokull. Then the kraken king crossed twelve feet of rising water and tore the tentacle from my throat, pulling me into his chest. Because he hadn’t just considered the east wall better ground. Or so I reassured myself, even as the flat gray of his eyes told me otherwise.

As I coughed up brine, he turned his back to the primordial and folded himself around me, taking the next blow with his spine.

He staggered, the shadow slicing through him, tearing a piece of the rune stone from his chest. I screamed, but he made a small sound. Then Sebastian Mórisi, King of Krakenströnd, crashed to his knees in the water, his arms still sheltering me, blue blood pouring from his mouth and his wound.

He looked at me. No recognition. No farewell. No final flicker of love. Just a man’s eyes, flat and gray and emptying, fixed on a face as if it belonged to a stranger.

“Stay with me.” I tried to patch his wound. Tried so hard. “Stay with me, stay, stay⁠—”

His eyes closed. His chest went still. And the brand on my chest snuffed out.

“Nein,” I said, shaking my head. “Nein. Nein.” He couldn’t be dead.

“All is not lost for you, girl,” Jokull announced behind us, horrifyingly smug. “Not yet. Not until I tear out the rest of it.”

The rest of it. Understanding. The biggest part of the rune was still lodged in Sebastian’s chest, where his heart should have been. I could feel it even now, cold and enormous and already looking past the ruined body it had lived in for six days, hunting its missing piece.

I realized then that simply getting through to Sebastian never would have worked. Whatever I did, the rune would’ve only put itself back together, the same way Jokull did with his body.

Because the ancient artifact wanted what we all wanted. To belong. That’s why it asked permission. Now, surrounding a heart, it could only act as a barrier. And it craved more.

Its pull intensified until the fragment flew from Jokull’s fist and came home. Sebastian’s chest lifted. Color returned to his cheeks. His eyes opened. Flat, gray, empty. Alive, and still gone.

I could think of only one thing to do. If the rune needed to belong, it longed for a family. And if it wanted a family with Sebastian, it was getting me, too. “I love you,” I told my husband. Then I leaned down, pressed my lips to his, and poured liquid fire down his throat.

He jerked as if preparing to fight me. But he didn’t. He gripped my shoulders and let the lava flow. Fire ringed his irises and charred his chest until I saw the rune stone in its perch, right where his heart resided.

The stone didn’t fight the fire, either. It welcomed it, melting into Sebastian’s heart, the two flowing into each other on the currents of my flame. Those currents ran back into me through the brand, and the three of us became one. Water, fire, stone. And the rune understood.

Beneath me, Sebastian drew a breath that shuddered all the way down. “Brona.” Bewildered. Wrecked. The gray broke in his eyes, and the sea rushed back in.

A cry of relief wrenched from me. For centuries the rune had waited in the dark to be let in somewhere. Centuries of asking permission and being refused, of hollowing out the ones who said ja, because a stone with no heart of its own could only ever steal the place of one. Now it had two.

The ancient relic had a wife, and a husband, and a realm, and a bond that no primordial had ever accounted for. For the first time since the world was young, the convergence rune had something to lose. And there, behind us, reassembling itself out of ash, was the thing that wanted to take it.

Ours? the stone asked.

“Ours,” Sebastian and I said in unison.

Jokull sputtered. “How did… why… what did…” With a snarl, he lunged for us, no longer content to play.

I unfurled my smokewings, burning him to ash. Ja, he immediately began to re-form, but I hadn’t done it to kill him. Only to buy a few extra precious moments.

Sebastian rose, and I rose with him, and for the first time since the artifact had swallowed his heart, we acted as one.

Jokull ran for the wall, his claw already moving, carving the shape of a door out of the stone—the same unhurried lines he’d drawn for me, except nothing about him was unhurried now.

A glowing tentacle from Sebastian seized his wrist an inch from the final stroke.

He tore free, ripping his arm loose and leaving a strip of himself behind, just so he could keep carving with the bone.