Cara flicked the rune over the side of the pilot launch…and counted. She swore. Only five seconds before the knuckle bone was nothing more than a stream of magic-soaked dust trailing in the air above the ripples of dark water. The aether was hungry tonight.
“It likes to play with you.” The skipper of the launch, Silas, settled down beside the tiller. His gnarled fingers firmed their grip on the length of wood. “‘Here’s Cara Howe,’ it says to itself. “Best be wild.’”
She slid the old man a hard glare. “It comes for the big airships, not me.”
“Carry on believing that, Cara.” He signalled for his apprentice to recover the mooring ropes. “But your family has piloted this stretch of the Thames for what? Five generations? Admit it girl, there’s more aether than blood in your veins.”
She ignored him. Piloting at night always washed her up with Silas and his belief that she was a child of the aether. More ravenous ghost than woman. She had the hard urge to bare her teeth at him, threaten to cut the wrinkled flesh from his frame and devour him. Though his weathered old bones would be sour and crack away like dust.
Cold sea winds scoured the exposed skin of her face and she stared out over the dark estuary, tasting the mixed scents of salt and sand. The black expanse of the rolling North Sea—under a clear night with shining stars—met the Thames, the grey twists and furls of aether stretching to clutch at the open water and sky.
Aether didn’t usually come out so far into the estuary, certainly not to stretch its fingers to the Warden Pilot Station. And not with such a deep hunger as shown by the lingering sparks of the rune she’d tossed into the air. The lap of the waves against the hull echoed…and churned within was something else. Voices. Pushing over themselves in a rush of sound and whispering her name.
Her heart missed a beat and her fingers dug into the black bag looped through the belt at her waist, the one holding her supply of bone runes. Leather stretched against her hand, the magic straining to reach out to her. But the echo of her name didn’t die away.
Silas’ words cut too close. She couldn’t admit that the push of her voice came too often now, growing in sound every time she took to the air. The voices of her ancestors reaching out from the aether that had devoured them. And calling for her. Calling her to her own death.