Luce didn’t try to answer. For some reason she wondered again how Dana was doing and why she never came to visit anymore. Probably Dana was furious that Luce had hurt Jenna, even in self-defense. Still, Luce thought, she should try to make up with Dana sometime.

She kept meaning to head over to Anais’s territory to look for Dana and Violet. And she kept putting it off. Why risk a fight when it was so much easier to dream in Dorian’s arms?

15

Prisoners

Violet was lying on the sloping white leather couch of the submerged cabin, her arms behind her head and her straight brown hair weaving around her with each tiny fluctuation of the water. Her tail flopped across the armrest. She looked over at Dana, who was asleep on the floor ten feet away, a steady stream of bubbles seeping out where her full lips met the trailing hose that was the cabin’s only source of air. Violet knew she couldn’t take the hose away without waking Dana, so she did her best to endure the painful craving growing in her own lungs. As long as she stayed very still, Violet found, she could go without air for longer than she would have imagined possible. It was hard to know exactly, but Violet guessed she’d held out already for almost an hour. It helped that they weren’t more than a dozen yards below the surface, so the pressure wasn’t too overpowering. Most of the yacht had remained lodged between two underwater crags when it sank, though parts of it had broken free and tumbled much deeper.

When Violet couldn’t stand it anymore she slipped over the edge of the sofa and swam across the electric blue carpet. In the water-warped bluish glow Dana’s full mouth took on a purple tint; she gasped and half opened her eyes as Violet gently tugged the hose free. A stream of bubbles surged upward, dancing with blue light. “Sorry,” Violet whispered, then inhaled urgently. The hungry ache in her chest subsided and she thought she could feel the oxygen tingling in her blood and lighting up her cells. It felt like electricity sweeping back through a city gone dark, golden light bursting from all its windows with a movement like an oncoming wave.

“ ’Sokay . . .” Dana murmured drowsily. “Take your time, Vi.” With only one air hose between the two of them they were forced to take turns sleeping, and the one who remained awake would draw on the air as rarely as possible. Even so they were both constantly exhausted from being woken at regular intervals as the other came for her ration of breath.