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Angie holds his gaze a little longer, then turns my way. “You want to know about the Mer?”

“Everything you can tell me.” I step closer and drag Ezra along.

She points at Josiah without looking. He snaps his fingers. A thick leather-bound spellbook appears in the air beside him. His magic riffles through the pages with a dry rustle and stops near the middle. Warm golden light spills up off the paper and over my face.

The room falls quiet as a hologram rises out of the glow. Goosebumps prickle up my arms. My wolf stirs. She’s met the real thing in the water.

The female figure is soft gold down to every scale and the webbing between her fingers. Her broad torso tapers into a tail lined with fins that fan out in layers. Her face is beautiful and strange at the same time. It’s all angles, with wide-set eyes and a strong, sharp jaw. I could study her for hours.

“Most people think of the Mer the way human stories have told them,” Angie says. She wipes her hands on a cloth and comes over to stand beside the hologram. “Pretty women with fish tails singing on rocks. That’s not what they are.” At Angie’s touch, the Mer woman turns until we can see the thick muscle along her back and another set of gill slits under her ribs. Even her tail looks heavy with bone. “Unlike most shifters, where your animal shares your soul but you’re two separate spirits tethered to one body, the Mer don’t work that way. There is no division between beast and person. They are their creature, completely meshed, one being with one consciousness. A wolf shifter can argue with their wolf. A dragon can fight their beast for control. The Mer don’t have that. The instinct and the intelligence are the same thing, woven so tightly together that separating them would kill the host.”

“That’s why they’re unpredictable,” Josiah adds as he circles the hologram. “When one of the Mer feels threatened, there’s no rational mind pulling the reins on the animal response. The threat and the reaction happen simultaneously. No hesitation. No internal debate.”

Eden rubs a spot on her arm. “That’s why she bit me.”

Angie sweeps her hand through the image. The figure shrinks, and gold spreads out around it into an entire pod of Mer swimming in formation through black water. The only light comes from the markings glowing along their tails and fins.

“They live in the unknown,” Angie says. “The darkest depths of the ocean, places where sunlight doesn’t reach. The pressure down there would crush every creature in this room in seconds, and the Mer thrive in it. Their bones are three times denser than a shifter’s. Their blood carries compounds that allow them to process oxygen from water at depths where the pressure alone should collapse their lungs. They were made for the deep.”

The pod keeps diving until their markings are all I can make out. I can’t imagine living somewhere the sun never touches. The thought has my wolf pacing. She’d lose her mind.

“For thousands of years, they wanted no contact with the surface world,” Josiah says. “They didn’t need it. They built ecosystems, hierarchies, an entire culture that developed independent of anything happening above the water. The first surface creatures they ever formed a bond with were dragons.”

At another snap of his fingers, a massive dragon bursts up out of the waves with its wings stretched wide. Lightning crackles off its scales and over the ocean. Underneath, the pod rises toward it and flickers in answer to the charge. Heat rolls off my mate beside me.

“Stormscale,” Josiah tells him. “Your ancestors, Ezra. They were the bridge between sky and sea. Their lightning was a beacon the pods could follow through water so deep and dark that even their own senses weren’t enough. Stormscale flew above the surface, the Mer sensed their electrical fields from thousands of feet below, and the pods tracked them across entire oceans.”

“In return,” Angie says, “the Mer provided fish. Stormscale dragons were unique among their kind. They fed primarily from the sea. The Mer would drive massive schools of fish to the surface, and the dragons would feed.”

No one speaks. The only sound in the hall is Angie’s cauldron bubbling in the corner. Ezra grips my hand harder and can’t stop staring at the dragon. “My father,” he says. “He always craved fish. Treated it like a delicacy when I was a hatchling. He never told me why.”

When I squeeze back, he turns to me. Smoke and salt come off him together. I didn’t know he could smell like grief. My mark throbs with it. My wolf strains toward him with everything she has. I lean my shoulder into his arm.

“Why are they leaving?” I ask. “Why don’t they want to stay?”

Angie glances at Ezra. “Because they believe they’ve disrespected a Stormscale.” She jerks her chin at him. “You know, the way you disrespected House of Zorah.”

I drop my head back. Of course she had to throw that in. I love my aunt, but the woman never misses a free shot.

“They’ll only listen to Ezra,” Josiah says.

Eden tucks a stack of journals from the nearest worktable under her arm. “I’m going to get back to work.” Her curls tickle my skin when she kisses my cheek. “Catch up with me on this at the spa on Sunday.”

“Okay,” I say, and beside me Ezra glares. A thread of smoke leaks out of his nostrils.

I bite back a giggle. “What?” I ask him.

He groans. “Nothing.”

Josiah chuckles. “He’s experiencing that same possessiveness I get with my Layla when she goes to the spa. Don’t worry,” he tells Ezra. “We’ll just hover and wait at the entrance like the rest of the men.”

Angie caps the vial of whatever she’s been brewing and tucks it into her apron pocket. At a flick of Josiah’s wrist, the hologram sinks back into the pages, and the spellbook vanishes.

“We’re heading over to speak with them again,” Josiah says. “Would you like to join us?”

“Yes,” I blurt. My wolf is already pulling me toward the doors.

Ezra doesn’t move. “Hold on.” He glances after Eden, then at Josiah. “Tell me more about them being spicy.”