Hailed by Fiends (The Heart of a Monster Book 4) by Eva Chase

Author:Eva Chase [Chase, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ink Spark Press
Published: 2022-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Crag

As I soared over the depths of the Atlantic, I couldn’t help thinking that this was really Torrent’s domain. I might have spent many hours coasting on wafts of wind over ocean waves, hunting for marine life and enjoying the scenery along various coastlines, but he was most at home in the actual water. I’d rarely dipped in other than a brief dive to snatch a particularly tasty looking fish.

But he had his own task to see through, and I couldn’t say I’d have done a good job of making a verbal appeal to the Highest. I’d probably have ended up offending them with whatever blunt comments slipped out. There was no reason I couldn’t travel through the darkness beneath the waves nearly as easily as he could. The currents barely tugged at our shadowy bodies.

It turned out, though, that I didn’t have to plunge in just yet. In the distance, I spotted a few sleek heads poking from the water. Their short gray fur gleamed wetly under the early morning sun. They looked every bit the seals they were pretending to be, but real seals wouldn’t have swum out this far. I could tell from that and my growing sense of their presence as I approached that these were shadowkind. Selkies.

I slowed as I came up on them, starkly aware of how my gargoyle bulk might unnerve them. “Hello,” I called out, wishing my voice wasn’t quite so rumbly. “I was hoping—”

Two of the four dropped beneath the waves with barely a ripple, vanishing from view. The other two bobbed farther away from me at the surface, their faces transforming into human-like ones: a man and a woman.

The man flashed animalistic teeth. “What do you want?” he hollered.

The two of them were clearly tensed, ready to swim away at any second. I stopped where I was, still twenty feet distant, hovering with swift flaps of my wings. “I’m not with the one who’s been stirring up the seas,” I said quickly, figuring it was important to make that point first. “I assume you’ve seen some of his minions riling up the waves near the coasts.”

The frowns that crossed both the selkies’ faces confirmed it without either of them speaking. “This could be some trick,” the woman spat at me.

They seemed awfully hostile despite the leviathan’s watery schemes not reaching this far out. How had it even affected them?

“Why would I want to trick you?” I asked, honestly puzzled. “The leviathan is making the beings under him do what he wants with sorcery, but he’s the only shadowkind who’s grabbed that kind of power. Many of us are working out a way to stand up to him and end the destruction, but I don’t see how I could force you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

The words might have come out a bit gruffer than I’d have preferred in my confusion, but to my relief, I thought the selkies relaxed a little rather than becoming even more defensive.

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