Riordan reached for him, but the man forded the water, waist high and rising, to catch the body cresting the surface. Long hair streaming out, as red as undersea corals, falsely alive. “Grace!” he shouted.
“Jack!” Riordan shouted. “Leave her.”
The agent dropped her, but it cost him something; his pace slowed, his gaze dragging him backward. It slowed him, slowed them all.
Sylvie gritted her teeth, kept moving. They didn’t have time to waste on argument.
One hundred forty feet.
“Mermaids,” Riordan said. “Mermaids.”
His lips were blue; Sylvie assumed hers must be likewise. She knew her steps were slowing, dragging through the water. Movement was an act of will, a heavy shift of hip and numb leg, left, then right. Leaning forward. Simply trying not to topple in. Keeping her hands raised above water, awkward strain on her shoulders.
“Fuck,” Riordan said. “Why the hell can’t the water flow toward the door?”
Sylvie forced her lips into a grimace. It was meant to be a smile. “Think there’s enough bodysurfing going on in here, already,” she said. His face darkened. Graveyard humor. Never an ISI trait.
“Shit.” The curse slipped free. Behind Riordan, the count had changed.
They were down to three. Jack was gone, drifting back to join with his dead partner. Lost in the dark waters, lost silently, lost among the jetsam of floating bodies.
One hundred feet. Only halfway there.
Riordan turned. Sylvie grabbed his arm, dug her nails in, and yanked. “No. We stop. We die.” As if her words were carried by water, as if her pointing out that there were still living agents was overheard, the mermaid song kicked up to a new, angry volume. The water jumped and bubbled with its force.
The two ISI agents stopped cold, faces slackening.
Sylvie shivered, loss biting as hard as the cold. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t save them. The water was an icy hand at her heart. The distant door glimmered, water rising unnaturally to fill the gap.
Riordan, thank God, was still alert. “Grab one of them,” Sylvie snapped. She wrapped her numb arm around the nearest agent and dragged him after her, saw that Riordan was doing the same to the other. Eighty feet left.
She’d save anyone she could. If she could get the door opened again—
The agent writhed in her grip like seaweed being torn from the seafloor, went slick and slippery in her arms. Her nails drew blood, a warmer, rosy drift in the gelid water. She couldn’t hold him. The water was actively dragging him out of her arms, fighting her.
“I can’t hold on. Help me,” Riordan gasped. He went under as if he’d been yanked downward. A sinuous ripple of faster water suggested that was exactly what had happened. The mermaids were getting more and more precise in their song. A cold coil of water wrapped around her thigh, impossibly colder than the rest of the water, altered by magic. It tugged; she clawed at it with one hand, feeling the same spell that had been stretched over the doorway—the mermaids’ song given physical shape and intent.
The agent in her arms slipped free of her one-handed grasp. The water rope rose out of the water, lashed around her waist, and dragged her under. She fought the riptide, felt the purpose behind it, and finally, clawing and kicking, got her head up and out of the water, sucking in great gasps of air.
She’d lost ground. A hundred feet to the door.
Warm skin brushed hers, and she yanked, came up with Riordan, sputtering, breathing. Alive.
His face was fierce, her grip on her hands brutal. “Don’t let go.”
“I won’t,” she said.
“God, won’t they stop singing!” he said.
He was still aware, still fighting. It looked like it hurt him, though; his face contorted with effort.
“Watch our backs,” she said. “We can’t afford to get sucked under again. Even if we survive it, we can’t lose the time.”
Her feet were floating, rising above the carpet; she grabbed at the molding on the hallway wall, scraped her way forward, kicking off from doorjambs. Riordan was close to a deadweight on her back, all his energy going to fighting the song, to keeping an eye out for a single ripple of water in an entire hallway of moving waves.
Leave him, her little dark voice said.
No, she thought.
Forty feet.
He’s a witch, her voice said. Or he wouldn’t be able to fight off the song.
All the more reason to save his ass. She needed a witch who owed her one.
Twenty.
The door. Sylvie clung to the jamb, forced Riordan’s weight between her and it, kept him floating, contained. Looked back.
No sign of the others.
She clawed for that magic netting; the thing she’d torn so easily before. As before, it tried to elude her grip. As before, she caged it in her hands anyway, guided not by physical sensation—her hands were utterly numb, useless meat—but by the revulsion that magic woke in her blood.
“Hurry,” he whispered, his teeth chattering. If he was a witch, he wasn’t a helpful one. His urgency raised hers to a painful level. She clawed faster.
This time, though, the netting refused to tear. She hung her entire weight on those magical bindings, kicked against the doorjamb, her face underwater, her breath bubbling out of her. It glowed under the water, with an icy bioluminescence, thick, anchored at a dozen points, fifty points, more …
That rope of water reached out again, wrapped her leg tight to Riordan’s, geared up to pull them away from the door. Her chest heaved; her lungs burned. She didn’t have time to fight it, too. Riordan slipped from between her and the door, his lips parting, whispering spells, whispering let us go, let us go. She could feel the shiver of intent, and it seemed to be working, at least minimally. The water trying to pull them down faded, gave her just that much more time to fight with the seal on the door.
As long as he could keep murmuring spells. There wasn’t enough air to make her think he could do it for more than another minute, tops.
Sylvie grimaced, peeled the first of the anchors away. Despair got her nothing. Effort might pay off.
She doubted it.
Fear, bright, sharp, nearly overpowering, danced through her veins. She’d done this all wrong. Had been overconfident. Had been stupid.
She was going to pay for it. And she wasn’t ever going to find out if Demalion had survived.
The mermaids’ song—a vibration traveling her skin, the walls, the building—broke off on an awkward screech. Riordan jerked, flailed, sought air that didn’t exist.
The spell on the door weakened.
Sylvie yanked and yanked and tore and scrabbled, using her hand, her feet, her teeth—the taste rank and vile, rotten oysters, scabrous and greasy in her mouth.
The netting tore.
She and Riordan tumbled headfirst into the stairwell; Sylvie gasped for air, lost the breath with impact against the far wall, whooped for air again.
She and Riordan skidded to the next landing and stopped, water streaming over them. Riordan groaned, got to his knees. “The others?”
“I don’t know,” Sylvie said. She forced herself to her feet.
“What happened?”
“Mermaids stopped—” Sylvie frowned. No, they wouldn’t have stopped. Something or someone had stopped them.
Sylvie limped down the stairs, Riordan staggering and sliding after her, scratches livid on his neck where she’d clawed him in her attempts to keep him above the waterline. “Where are we going?”
“Out,” she said.
The lobby’s floodplain was draining out into the streets, draining back into the canal. People were waking all over. Sylvie could hear them screaming.
After the mermaids’ song, it sounded like music.
The screaming took on a new and frantic pitch and Sylvie burst out into the sunshine, squinting, half-blind with exhaustion and sun dazzle.
“Holy mother of God,” Riordan said from behind her. He fell back and sprawled on the concrete, crossing himself.