I hated that I agreed with the demon. I might not be capable of believing Ereshki after what she’d done to me, but spells didn’t lie. The question was, where did that leave me and the many, many other people who had only me left to speak for them? Should this Ereshki pay for the crimes of her former self? Or did having all memory of that Ereshki ripped from her mind make the woman standing before me technically innocent?

I was still wrestling with that when Ian said, “It also proves Ariel’s version of events, so we’ll take Ereshki and go now,” with such deadly silkiness, it was clear he wasn’t suffering from a crisis of conscience.

Ereshki burst into tears. Hearing it tugged at a place in my heart I’d thought was long dead when it came to her. Even Yonah gave her a sympathetic look. Then he stared at Ian.

“Unaccept—”

He never finished the word. The floor heaved, then a huge crack appeared that the sea immediately filled. Water was up to my knees before I could even react.

Silver! If I didn’t get him out of here, he’d drown! I dashed out of the room, then ducked because Yonah flew over me with Ereshki clasped in his arms. That’s right; she was human again so she was susceptible to drowning, too.

I flew down the hall, ignoring Ian’s shout to stop. By the time I reached our room, the water was already higher than the doorknob. I kicked it open right as a tremendous quaking caused multiple cracks to appear in the ceiling. Silver flew out as if he’d been fired from a canon. Now, the only dry space left was around my head. I clutched him to that while fighting to fly above the water line. More horrible crashing sounds above had me glancing worriedly at the ceiling. Whatever catastrophe had happened—an earthquake, maybe?—it sounded like the roof would cave in any moment.

“Ian!” I shouted, not seeing him in the hallway with its rapidly rising water and ominously increasing roof debris.

I thought I heard his voice farther ahead, but I couldn’t be sure. The water was now so high, I could no longer fly, and walking through it while holding Silver’s nose above the water would take too long. More collapsing sounds proved that. We only had seconds before this entire hallway crashed in on itself.

I yelled, “Hold your breath!” to Silver, prayed he understood me, and dove beneath the water, holding him.

I kept one arm in front of me to punch aside any debris as I swam as fast as I could. My other arm protected Silver’s head and the rest of him was tucked against my body. I fought panic as new crashing sounds reached me even through the churning water. More debris began to pile up, blocking my path. Silver could be dying right now, and where was Ian? Vampires couldn’t drown, but he could be trapped under something while the house collapsed upon him with enough force to rip him apart—

Something hard slammed into me, yanking me up. I thought I felt someone’s body next to mine, then there was nothing except pain from the multiple concussive impacts and noise that made the previous sounds pale by comparison. When I could see again, it was through a sheen of blood that turned my vision red.

Red Ian had me clutched against him while flying us free of the house, which pancaked onto itself with horrifying rapidness. Red Silver coughed out water while blood dripped from his soaked feathers. Then red sand met our feet as Ian set us down on the beach, which heaved from the aftershocks of whatever had brought the house down.

“How did you find me in all that wreckage?” I gasped out.

“Locator beacon in Silver’s collar,” he replied. “Slipped it on him back at that villa in Athens.”

I choked on the laughter that bubbled up. “That’s how you found me at the Mycenae ruins.”

“I’ll always find you,” he swore, giving me a hard kiss.

Another round of aftershocks shook the ground, breaking our kiss. Gods, the house, filled with hundreds of people celebrating a ball when the walls came crashing down! How many had gotten out like we had? How many were still trapped?

I set Silver down. “Stay,” I told the Simargl. Then I grabbed Ian’s hand. “We have to go back and help!”

Something like a snort escaped him. “Knew you’d say that.”

We flew back to the house, me wiping the blood from my eyes, Ian muttering something I couldn’t catch due to the wind and the continued sounds of concrete smashing and people screaming. In the short seconds it took to get back to Yonah’s, his four-story mansion had crumpled to barely one level, with the sea pouring into a huge fissure that went from the ruins of his home all the way to the night-darkened surf.

Ian dropped down near a group of vampires who were digging in the rubble where the pool area had been. It was gone now, replaced by huge pieces of the house that had slid off and an even deeper hole that seemed to swallow the remains. I was about to join him when fresh screams sent me flying past him to the collapsed section of what had been the second-floor balcony.

“You take that section, I’ll take this one!” I yelled.

The balcony was on the ground, crushing anyone who’d been unlucky enough to be underneath it. The scent of blood and death was choking, but from the moans and screams, there were also some survivors beneath it. I began throwing aside the pieces of the former balcony, careful to aim them at the sand behind me instead of what could be more buried people around me.

“I’m coming!” I called out, digging and throwing even faster. I soon lost my grip on a hunk of railing because my hands were dripping with blood, but I would heal. The people trapped might not have that chance, if I didn’t hurry.

Something large and heavy landed next to me. Yonah, wings nowhere to be seen, pulling at the debris with a single-minded determination that matched my desperation.

“Stop,” he said, shocking me. “I can do this, but only you can halt the sea. Pull back the waves from the fissure, Ariel. Now, or we’ll never reach the human survivors in time.”

“I can control some water, but I can’t hold back part of an ocean!” I protested.

“Then do what you can!” was Yonah’s impatient reply before he disappeared to begin tunneling beneath the debris.

I was still furious with Yonah, but he was right; the biggest danger to mortal survivors now was the sea. Manipulating these waters might be against the Leviathan’s rules, but I couldn’t value a mere threat to my life more than the guaranteed deaths of the trapped human survivors if I did nothing.

I raised my hands and sent my senses down to find the water that I knew was churning beneath the rubble of Yonah’s house. Besides, I thought grimly. These parts of the sea had crossed onto here without permission. I was only sending them back.

I closed my eyes. Sight wouldn’t help me. Only senses, and I let them wrap around the energy in the water beneath the house’s ruins until I felt it pulse through me. Then I wrapped my power around that energy and pulled, trying to force it back from the countless crevasses it had filled while also trying to hold back the sea’s relentless flow into the main fissure.

But almost instantly, I was swamped by the crushing force of more power than I could ever understand, let alone bend to my will. Run! a shrieking, primal part of me urged. Run now or die!

At the same time, my other nature reached through the bars of her cage. Not only was she unafraid, she was intrigued by the potential of all the uncontrollable energy roiling around her.