But Aeslinn did. He paused, with that huge body in the shallows, almost close enough to bring one of those massive feet down on my head. But he just stood there instead, looking more confused than anything, as if he didn’t understand what was happening.

He’d almost healed, in the few moments that he’d been slogging upstream, so the surprise on the regal features was easy to read. And so was the fury the second he figured it out. Or when someone told him.

I laughed again, not intentionally, but because I couldn’t seem to stop. I pulled and I laughed, and I laughed and I pulled, and for a moment, it was sweet, sweet, so freaking sweet I couldn’t believe it.

And then he pulled back.

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

The jerk was so hard and so unexpected that it sent me staggering. I ended up waist deep in freezing water, not sure how I got there or what I was supposed to do now. Because the power drain wasn’t stopping. If anything, it was getting faster and harder as he pulled from me.

And not just me. I suddenly realized that I’d put others in danger as well. Mircea, along with his whole family, and Pritkin… could Zeus drain them, too, through me?

I very much feared that the answer was yes.

Will you gamble with your world, he’d asked? And I guessed I had. Because they were my world—

And he didn’t get to do this to them, I thought, fury swamping me.

He didn’t get to do this to anyone.

Not when that wasn’t even Zeus, not fully, or I’d have been dead by now. That was Aeslinn, somehow channeling the power of a god. And while I couldn’t stand up to the real thing, a fey king with delusions of grandeur?

Was a whole different ball game.

I staggered back up, looped the power around my fist, and pulled back.

And then more than pulled, because in a contest of strength I didn’t know who would win, especially if it dragged on. I needed to end this fast, and I didn’t care how. Pritkin had taught me that, when you’re battling for your life, anything goes.

So, I took his advice and flung an abandoned barge right at Aeslinn’s oversized crotch.

My aim had never been great with guns, and it wasn’t any better with the Pythian power, but a nine-story tall fey king was a hard target to miss. The barge connected with enough force to make him yell, a furious, bellowing sound like a clap of thunder, and try to stomp me. But I shifted to a sinking boat, out of harm’s way, and threw the bonfire at him.

All of it.