Chapter 213: Hostile Open Water

Chapter 213: Chapter 213: Hostile Open Water

Before the red sun, Alex had lived an hour’s drive from Erik’s door. It had been a simple fact, the kind of number nobody thinks about. On the water, in the mist, it turned into something else entirely.

The dock was dark when Erik came down the fire escape. Killian was already crouched beside the skiff with one palm flat against the hull, and under his hand the aluminum rippled and thickened like cooling wax.

"Four layers at the waterline," he said. "A sealed chamber under each bench. A round can punch through the outer skin and still not sink us."

Kai came down the stairs two at a time with a pack over one shoulder. "Mom made us eat before we left. Real eggs. If we’re not back by dusk, she’s coming to find us herself. I believe her."

"So do I," Erik said.

Hrimnir leapt into the bow without being told. At the top of the fire escape a small shape stood against the lighter dark, one hand on the rail. Penelope had promised not to come down, and she kept the promise by standing where he could see her. Erik lifted two fingers. She lifted two back.

The little outboard coughed at its lowest idle, the mist swallowed the sound, and the dock slid away.

They’d gone barely four blocks before the water showed them what it was. Cars lay under the surface like sleeping animals, and Killian read the street through the hull, calling out lefts and holds. Currents ran where no current belonged. Twice something long and pale turned beneath them and kept pace for a dozen strokes before sinking away. Nobody mentioned it.

"Realistically, how long?" Kai asked.

"Most of the day," Erik said. "For an hour’s drive."

The building was still a pale ghost behind them when Hrimnir’s head came up. Erik felt it a heartbeat later down the bond, a thin bright line of warning. Then the engines reached them, several, coming fast and not bothering to be quiet.

"Left," Killian said. "Three speedboats."

They burst from the mist in a loose wedge, throwing white wakes, ten figures in mismatched leather and rain slickers. They carried pipes, hooks, a rifle, and a bat wrapped in barbed wire. They circled the skiff once, wide and showy, and the wakes slapped against the plating.

"Well," drawled a heavyset man in the lead boat, one arm slung over the windshield. A gold tooth caught the light. "A little plated tub, out for a morning paddle."

"We’re passing through," Erik said.

"Toll’s the boat and whatever’s in it."

"It’s empty."

"Then the boat." The man’s eyes slid over the plating, over Hrimnir, over Killian’s still hand. "Somebody’s been busy."

A wire-thin woman in the second boat trailed her fingers through the water, and the surface twitched toward her like a dog. In the third boat a young man lit his palm, a sputtering flame the rain kept beating down. Erik counted three powers and ten bodies. "Turn around. Go home. We don’t want this."

"We do," said the man with the bat.

The woman flung her hand forward, and the water under the skiff heaved. Killian’s palm hit the hull, and the keel flattened into a broad shelf. The surge broke against it harmlessly.

Erik slammed his hand into the surface, and frost raced outward in a white fan. The lead boat’s wake locked solid with a groan, and its engine shrieked and died. Kai threw fire in a low arc at the third boat, and steam exploded across the water.

Gunfire cracked from inside the white. Killian lifted his open hand toward the sound and narrowed his eyes. He couldn’t see the rifleman, but he didn’t need to. The mist was a crowd of molecules, and he could feel the shape of a warm body standing inside it.

Thin it.

He pulled. The air around the rifleman’s head thinned to almost nothing, a pocket no bigger than a bucket. The man clutched his throat, mouth wide, and folded over the gunwale with his lungs spasming on nothing. Killian let go, and the air rushed back with a soft thump. A needle of pain slid behind his left eye.

"What did you do?" Kai shouted.

"Borrowed his air."

"Do the rest!"

"I’m working on it."

The steam tore open, and a stone-skinned giant landed on their bow from the second speedboat, his skin gone dull and gray as rough concrete. His first swing missed Kai by an inch and cratered the thwart. Hrimnir hit him from the side, claws raking across his ribs, and he staggered with a roar but did not fall.

Erik pressed his palm to the man’s chest and sent lightning through it, a blue-white thread. The stone shed most of it. The giant swung again and caught Erik across the shoulder, and Erik skidded across the deck into the gunwale. When he pushed up, his right arm hung strangely, fingers tingling and half-numb. Too much current, too fast. He flexed the hand and it answered slowly.

"Armor’s thick," he gritted out. "Killian."

Killian stepped in and set a palm on the giant’s forearm. The skin wasn’t stone, only flesh made dense, its mineral lattice packed tight and angry. He didn’t fight it. He loosened it. The gray crumbled like wet plaster, and a handprint of ordinary pink skin appeared, shocked and soft. It crept up the arm, and the armor slid off in chunks. The giant stared at his bare hand, then at Killian, and for the first time looked afraid.

Hrimnir went for his throat, and the man threw himself into the flood.

Killian swayed. Warm blood ran from his nose, and the needle behind his eye had become a hammer. Every use like that was a handful of coins out of a purse that was already thin, and he’d already spent a great deal.

The wire-thin woman had risen in her boat, both arms raised, and the water around her climbed into a wall. Kai threw a jet of fire at its base, but the wall only boiled and reformed. She was feeding it faster than he could burn it, and his palms were blistering from the heat he kept pouring through them.

"Killian!"

"I see it." Killian closed his eyes. She wasn’t commanding the water so much as its movement. He reached into the wall and changed what it was made of, drawing the bonds tight, packing the molecules close until the whole mass went thick and heavy as syrup. It sagged and fell in on itself with a wet slap, and the woman stumbled back as her power slid through her fingers like grease.

"What did you do to my water?" she screamed.

"Made it stop listening," Killian said hoarsely. His hands had begun to shake.

Gold-tooth was hauling himself onto the ice around his dead boat, screaming at his people to rush the skiff. Two men leapt across the gap with hooks raised. Erik caught the first with a slab of ice across the chest, though it came out thin and ragged. The second landed on the bow, and Kai took him in the ribs with a flaming fist.

"Left!" Killian shouted.

The man with the barbed bat had slipped around the stern. Killian wheeled and lifted a hand. The wood in the bat’s core went first, its long chains of cellulose cut at a thousand points, and the thing crumbled to sawdust in the man’s grip.

"Not fair," the man said, staring at his hands.

"No," Killian agreed. His knees buckled, and he caught the gunwale.

Behind them a speedboat wheeled around for a ramming run. Killian turned and pointed. He reached into its tank and unpicked the gasoline atom from atom until it was harmless vapor. The engine screamed once and quit, and the boat coasted to a stop twenty feet away. He didn’t feel the satisfaction. The world had gone gray at the edges, and the deck seemed to tilt under his boots.

"Killian," Erik said sharply. "Sit."

"Fine."

"Sit down."

He sat, because the alternative was falling. Bile climbed his throat. He pressed the back of his wrist to his nose and it came away dark.

The fight had changed. Erik could feel it as surely as the cold in his numb arm. The gang had been laughing when they came, certain of an easy mark. Now the giant was somewhere in the water, the rifleman was retching in his boat, and the wire-thin woman stood sobbing over her ruined power. A man on the stalled speedboat looked at the skiff and then at his friends.

"This isn’t right," someone muttered. "They’re not supposed to... this isn’t what he said."

"Back!" gold-tooth bellowed, hauling himself into the one boat still running. "Get in! Get in, damn you!"

They broke. It was ugly and sudden. Those still standing dragged their wounded over the gunwales and shoved off, abandoning the dead boats. The engine caught and roared, and the survivors tore off into the mist.

"You hear me?" gold-tooth screamed back, voice cracking. "Boss is going to hear about this! All of it!"

Erik lurched to the bow with his good hand raised, ice gathering in his palm. For a moment he meant to throw it, to chase them down and learn where they went.

Then his fingers went numb to the wrist, and the ice guttered and died.

He lowered the arm. The boat was already a faint whine in the mist, and then nothing at all.

"Let them go," Kai said hoarsely. He had sunk against the tiller with his burnt palms held away from his body, his face gray with the heat sickness that came after too much fire. "I can’t throw another spark. I’m out."

"Same," Erik said.

Behind them, Killian had bent forward over his knees, shaking. A thin line of vomit and blood ran onto the deck, and he wiped his mouth with a trembling hand. Hrimnir pressed against him and whined.

"Sorry," Killian said. "It’s only... too much. I should have paced it."

"You held back as much as you could," Erik said. "Don’t."

"Ten of them. Ten, and we almost lost it."

"But we didn’t."

Nobody said what they were all thinking. The fight had gone their way because the other side had panicked first. A leader who knew his trade would have killed them while they were still gasping.

"Boss," Kai said quietly, after a while. "Somebody’s giving orders out there."

"And now he knows our faces," Erik said.

They drifted for a quarter of an hour while Killian’s breathing steadied and Kai wrapped his hands in strips torn from his sleeve. Erik worked the feeling slowly back into his arm. Nobody spoke. The mist lay thick on the water, and somewhere out in it, ten furious people were running to tell someone what had happened.

"We could turn back," Kai said finally, without conviction.

Erik looked at the grey water ahead, endless and empty, and thought of Alex somewhere past it, and of the pull in his chest that had never once let go.

"No," he said. "But we go slower. And we stay off the open channels."

Killian lifted his head. His face was the color of old paper, but his eyes were steady. "Give me ten minutes. Then I’ll reshape the hull again."

"Five," Erik said.

"Ten."

Erik didn’t argue. Kai took the tiller in his wrapped hands, and the skiff slid forward through the fog, three men and a wolf and a very long way left to go.

A/N:

I know many readers are used to invincible male leads who can do everything without consequences, but that isn’t how power works in this novel.

No one here is all-powerful. My characters will get exhausted. They will experience backlash, injuries, and other consequences when they push their abilities past their limits.

And most importantly, they aren’t heroes.

They weren’t born knowing how to control these abilities, and they aren’t overpowered from the start. What they have is potential, and that potential has to be earned. They train. They make mistakes. They learn their limits. They get stronger through experience and, sometimes, through getting their asses handed to them. 😂

So when you see a character struggling with the cost of overusing their ability, it’s intentional. Power has a cost in this story, and that will stay true even as they get stronger.