The silence after that had teeth. Helena’s eyes met mine, and the look in them carried the weight of every decision that had led us here. I looked away first.
Andie stared out the window. Helena stared at her hands. I leaned my head back against the seat and breathed through my mouth, trying to filter out the scent of my mate.
The minutes passed. Helena murmured something about the meal service, and Andromeda declined without looking up. I declined, too. The thought of eating made my stomach turn. Outside the windows, the coastline of southern Greece gave way to open water. The distant gray smudge of mainland Italy appeared on the western horizon. We were making good time. Ten hours, Helena had said. Less than nine now.
I was counting down the hours until I lost her. And the worst part was that she was right there, close enough to touch. And I could do nothing except sit in the back of this plane and wait for it to be over.
Then the plane shuddered. “Just weather,” Helena said to Andie. “Southern Italy gets rough air.”
She was wrong. I could feel it the way I felt my own pulse. Turbulence wasn’t unusual, but I should have felt any potential storm much sooner. I sat up and pressed my palm flat against the armrest. A deep structural vibration hummed through the Hephaestus alloy and resonated in my teeth.
A second, harder shudder made the glasses on the service counter rattle together. The air outside the hull felt wrong, thick with energy that didn’t belong. Something vast and cold was building beneath us, rising from the ocean with terrible purpose.
The plane dropped. The stomach-lurching plunge threw Helena sideways against Andie and sent unsecured items crashing off the counter. The engines screamed as the autopilot fought to compensate.
I was on my feet before the aircraft leveled out.
“I don’t understand.” I moved toward the port window and pressed both hands against the reinforced glass. “The skies were clear until a few minutes ago.”
Helena had gone still. She wasn’t looking at the window. She was looking at me, and the expression on her face stopped me where I stood. It wasn’t surprise or fear. Recognition.
“I do,” she said. Her fingers whitened on the armrest. “This storm isn’t natural. We’re over the Strait of Messina.”
Everything rearranged itself behind my eyes.
The Strait of Messina. The narrow throat of water between Sicily and the mainland, where the two seas collided. Here, the ancient energy of House Poseidon saturated every current and every depth. Just as the lightning-infested waters of Maracaibo were sacred to House Zeus, the Strait was Orion Maris’s holy ground. Here, his power was absolute. The residual hunger of the ancientmonster Charybdis still saturated every molecule of salt water churning between those cliffs.
I’d stood in my father’s sacred waters and begged Zeus for a way to save my mate. Now Orion was standing in his, and the ocean was answering with a fury that shook the sky.
“He wants us to land,” I said. “He’s trying to force us into his territory.”
At this point, not even Helena could pretend Orion meant well. “Can you get us through?” she asked.
The plane bucked again, hard enough to crack the overhead compartments. I braced against the bulkhead and pushed my awareness outward through the hull. The alloys conducted my power cleanly, but outside, the storm fought back with a weight I hadn’t expected. The energy rose from the Strait itself, pulled upward through thousands of feet of air by a will that played the ocean like an instrument.
But I was still the master of the sky.
“I can hold it,” I said through clenched teeth.
Taking a deep breath, I built a buffer around the plane. The gift of House Zeus isolated the jet from the chaos outside. The turbulence immediately eased. But Orion wasn’t willing to let us go. The storm surged, and I had to push harder, pouring more of myself into the hull. The cabin flooded with blue-white light, and the emergency strips along the floor kicked on in pale green.
Every scrap of my attention went into the sky. My vision narrowed to the interface between my power and the storm. The cabin shrank to a distant hum behind the roar of energy flowing through my palms. Everything dissolved into a single burning need—to keep this aircraft in the air.
Helena’s scream shattered the trance.
“Andie, no!”
Jolted, I ripped my hands from the hull. The buffer collapsed, and the storm slammed back against the plane with renewed violence. But I couldn’t think about that now.
The rear emergency exit was open.
Wind tore through the cabin in a horizontal gale. The depressurization alarm shrieked. Loose papers and napkins whipped into a vortex of debris that stung my face and blurred my vision. Helena was on her feet, braced between two seats, one hand stretched toward the gaping doorway.
Andie stood at the threshold. She held the doorframe with both hands, her hair whipping across her face in dark, violent streaks. The wind battered her body, pressing her clothes flat against her frame. She was looking out at the churning gray water below with an expression I had never seen on her face before. Calm.
“Andie.” I moved toward her. The wind resistance was enormous, and the plane lurched and shuddered with each gust. Through some kind of miracle, I managed to keep us in the air,but actually reaching my mate would be tougher. “Step back from the door. Whatever you’re feeling right now… you can’t trust it. It’s Orion. He’s manipulating the—”
“He’s not manipulating me.” She turned her head. Her eyes found mine through the chaos of wind and light and screaming metal. “He saved me before. Why not now?”