Spellbreaker by Blake Charlton

turned for a while longer and then gave up on sleep and walked out to her deck.
    The morning was darkening as a fat cloud occluded the sky above the pool. She looked down into the water, a few scattered rain drops were falling. A light, warm tropical rain.
    It was high tide now and the torch left on the dock was still burning. Leandra looked down into the pellucid water and was shocked to see a massive, nightmarelike figure slip through the now submarine opening that admitted her catamaran. The creature swam a powerful circle around the pool, causing the surface to churn into small whirlpools and eddies.
    Leandra hurried to the rope ladder. “Should I follow—” Dhrun asked before Leandra interrupted. “No, stay here. I’ll send for you in a moment.”
    She hurried down the ladder and across the boardwalk. By the time she reached the dock, Holokai was already sitting at its edge, wet, humanoid, naked. He was breathing hard but grinning. “Fast, huh?” he said with a grin. “I told you I was feeling strong. I think even more people have been praying for me lately. But, I could eat for three days straight.”
    â€œPoor hunting on the way back?” she asked. Usually Holokai returned from a long swim with a belly full of harbor seal.
    He shook his head. “No time. About five miles outside the Cerulean Strait, I circled a few times below an inbound Southern ship. But when I came near the surface, I woke something up. Never felt a presence like that before. Hey, Lea, why don’t you tell me next time you send me to surf a tidal wave, huh?” He laughed.
    Leandra’s belly began to hurt. “What do you mean?”
    â€œYou know … you know how it is. My kind, in my element, I can feel another like me. I don’t like getting too close, especially in open water. But maybe that’s just me, you know?”
    â€œHolokai,” Leandra interrupted, her patience thinning, “what did you sense out there? Another god?”
    His face became thoughtful. “Yeah, like another god. But not another god, I don’t think. It’s funny, Lea, the presence … it was like … like…”
    Leandra’s belly began to ache with anxiety. “Did you breech?”
    â€œVery briefly, just got one eye above the water. Some of those Southern sailor boys like to get brave with harpoons and I’m hungry, yeah, but I’m not that hungry.” He grimaced, maybe remembering the last time he had eaten a sailor.
    â€œBut the ship’s name, Kai, the thing written in gold leaf on the side of the ship, what did it read?”
    Holokai frowned. Reading was not his strong point when his eyes were all black. At last he said, “ The High Queen’s Lance .”
    Leandra groaned. Her parents had fallen in love during the political intrigue in the Spirish city of Avel that involved a Spirish airship named the Queen’s Lance .
    â€œLea, you know what I think the presence was that I felt. It was like … well … from what you told me I think it was like…”
    â€œLike a dragon?” Lea asked.
    â€œHey, how’d you know?”
    Leandra growled a word in two clipped syllables as only an irate adult child can: “Moth-er.”

 
    CHAPTER SEVEN
    Nicodemus and the neodemon wearing his daughter’s face stared at each other with incomprehension. “Your daughter’s face?” the River Thief asked.
    â€œYou’re…” Nicodemus stuttered. “You’re impersonating her?”
    â€œLeandra Weal? The Warden of Ixos?” the River Thief asked. “She has my face?”
    â€œYou have hers.”
    The River Thief’s eyes narrowed with sudden comprehension. “So…” All six of her hands tightened around their knives.
    Nicodemus dodged just as the neodemon’s right uppermost arm flicked back and then forward. Her throwing dagger passed within an inch of his