Page 67 of Raven's Dawn

The murky, slimy water slapped against my skin. The heat of it brought an instant sweat to my flesh.

Heavy. It was so heavy.

I knew how to swim, but this was like trudging through quicksand. My arms flailed, and my legs kicked, but to no avail.

Weight. So much weight pressed down on me. Not only the water, but him. His body.

I thrashed against it. Wailing my fists into him, I fought with all of my might to hold my breath. Eternal or not, I doubted this would feel very good in my lungs.

But when I hit him, I didn’t hit the fabric of his clothes or smooth skin.

Fur. My knuckles touched fur.

Like the fur of a pit bull or a lab. Never been much of a dog person, but I knew what skin felt like, and I knew what fur felt like, and?—

Something hard rammed into my cheek. I tried to open my eyes, to peer through the water—the mud—but all I saw was the glint of something shiny. Metal. Molded onto the hooves of a horse.

Kelpie. That’s what it was. That’s what he was.

Graham had talked about them like the boogie man when I was a teenager. “I had to kill one when I was a lad, you ken,” he’d said. “It wasn’t after me, though. Usually aren’t. They like women. We were walking home from school—a few friends of mine and a couple of older girls. We were crossing a bridge, and some young guy was standing under it. He called out to one of the girls. She had to have been fifteen or sixteen? But there was something wrong with his eyes. I said so, and she waved me off. Said she knew him.

“So she follows him down there, and as soon as she touches that water, he’s in there with her. Before her eyes, he turns into a horse. That’s when I knew. Grimy little bastards, they are.

“We all went down, trying to catch her before he took her too deep, but we didn’t know how to kill it. One kid tried stabbing it, but his blade was too small. It wasn’t doing any real damage. A friend of mine was hitting it, but the fucker wouldn’t go down.

“And I was the only one with power over water.” That part, he had spoken with pride. “So I manipulated it. I created rip currents. One for her, and one for the kelpie. Once they were separated, when he wasn’t pinning her under the water, we were all able to get a hold of him. We stabbed, and we stabbed, and we stabbed, and for a day, I got to be a hero.”

Grabbing ahold of the water around me, as if it were a layer of clothes atop my flesh, I pulled more and more water into it until I was in the center of a giant bubble of water. In heartbeats, those hooves only smacked the outside of the water sphere I had created. I willed it to move, to float onto the shore, and suddenly, I was spinning. No idea how I managed to hold my breath for as long as I did, but I was spinning and spinning until the water burst out around me.

Gasping, panting, I grabbed a hold of the air around me. I slung it under my feet, hoisting myself up toward the sky.

Good thing I had, because when I was a few feet above the ground, a neigh sounded. I blinked hard to clear the water and mud from my eyes. Still levitating above the ground, I watched the horse charge the spot I’d just left.

Finding that dagger on my hip, thankfully still strapped in place, I swung the wind in a 360-degree radius. It spread out, and I fell. I used the kinetic energy to guide me onto the horse’s back, still kicking and thrashing around the soil.

Using the air once more to stick my landing, I hit its spine dead-on. Struck by the sudden weight, the horse fought desperately to buck me off, throwing itself on its hind legs and thrashing around the clearing. No matter how hard It fought, it wouldn’t win. I wrapped an arm around its neck, my other hand still holding the blade of Elvan ore. Then I lodged that blade into its skull, and it squealed.

I stabbed again, and again, and again.

With each thump of my hand, blood sprayed. It was like a fountain of it, that much brighter and warmer because of the drugs in my system. Aside from the stars overhead, it was the only color I saw.

And it was beautiful. More beautiful than it had any right to be. All that blood, steaming when it hit the cold wind. The ache of my arm with each slash, and the relief that came with it. The power of knowing that I had done this. That I protected myself, just as I always swore I could, just as everyone around me seemed to believe I couldn’t.

Only when the horse was silent beneath me did I look at the damage I had done.

Its face was unrecognizable. If not for the body attached to the neck, I wouldn’t know what animal’s face this was. A horse, a cow, a dog—it could have been any of them.

That made my stomach turn.

Which wasn’t such a bad thing, because it reminded me that I hadn’t lost my humanity yet.

Panting hard, staring down at the bloodied, butchered horse, now able to tell that its fur was white, I grabbed one of the bushes nearby for stability.

Luckily, I was on the other side of the pond now. Right behind me was the other archway, leading to another path.

So that’s where I headed.

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