Azul was back in the school laboratory, monitoring three cauldrons full of his latest experimental cure—all bubbling in various shades of purple. With some of his arms he stirred, with others, added ingredients from the cold, black shelves. Wary of the moon rising high outside, he marked the hours until this private space would be invaded by classes and students. He had a mistake to remedy. A reputation to maintain. Azul Ashengrotto had never failed a promise before.

  Except, as he reminded himself, he hadn’t made any promise or deal except with himself. There were things he still wanted to say to Yuu, and, well, doing them with any amount of sincerity simply wasn’t going to be possible with a set of his teeth marks in her skin.

  Human women, he’d heard, tended to frown on things like that.

  He made to add a bowl of crushed butterfly wings to the largest cauldron, confident that this time, it would remain stable until the end of the procedure. However, as soon as the glossy powder touched the surface, the surface hissed and fizzled, and took on a life of its own.

  To his horror, several large black tentacles, mirrors of his own, shot from the cauldron, absorbing the goo and pulling him into the belly of the container—but it was no longer a cauldron. Azul was in the grips of a rushing current, his very human lungs and legs useless against the strength of the water around him. He struggled, anyway, fighting against the tentacles that bound him.

  One minute. Two.

  He had just passed the two minute mark, when Azul reached the gut-wrenching conclusion: he was going to drown. He, a merman, was going to drown, and he had no one really to blame but himself.

  Oh to have gotten himself into this mess! Helpless to get himself out.

  It was as mortifying as a ghost tripping over its own sheet. It was worse than a locksmith dying in his own vault. A merman drowning.

  Panicked and struggling for breath, his vision was beginning to fade when a voice met his ears. A lovely, honeyed sort of voice called to him through the bubbles that surrounded his head. He knew that voice.

  Then, a hand gripped his, wrenching him from the pull of the water, and tugging him toward the surface.

  His head broke the surface, gasping for air, and the voice, lovely and low, cajoled him into swimming for shore. It was several minutes before his salty eyes cleared enough to see Yuu’s face, peering down at him with genuine concern. Azul’s reaction was to cringe at the thought of what she’d just done for him. How was he ever going to repay her?

  But… but Yuu isn’t like that, he had to remind himself. Again and again, she surprised him. This magicless human with a magic of her own, who never expected anything in return for her kindness. At first, he’d thought her thoughtless. Naive. But she was neither of those things. Yuu was both clever and kind, and Azul always had a hard time organizing those two things in his head.

  “It’s you,” he said, sitting with her on the sand.

  She still had his hand in hers, and was beginning to pull away from her, when he caught her, leading her closer to him, instead.

  “It is you. Isn’t it?”

  She said nothing, letting him pull her to sit on his legs—his very human legs.

  It felt like ages since he’d seen her, the pang of desertion, and loneliness bleeding fresh in his heart as he saw her. It was enough to make him do things he wouldn’t usually—like pull her knees to the sides of his hips so that their torso’s could connect, and to hold her face closer, taking in every curve, and every angle, as hungrily as if they’d been apart for months—as if he might not see her again.

  She let him get closer. She didn’t move away. She didn’t say a word. His vision was soft at the edges, blurred like the surface of water rippling beneath moonlight. Azul wasn’t entirely sure when the kisses had begun—only that he was already lost in them, searching her mouth with his own for a response—hovering between control and something far more dangerous.

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  “Where have you been?” she murmured against him—into him—and a tremendous mix of guilt and satisfaction hummed through his chest.

  Something in Azul insisted that his mind was betraying him, but when she reached for him—when her fingers brushed against his skin, featherlight and unapologetically bold—he found he did not care.

  She kissed him like she had always known him.

  It was not a thing of hesitation, nor something stolen in secret. It was certain, deliberate, like a promise written in salt and seafoam. The insistent sounds and motions she made against him brought warmth back into his extremities like he hadn’t felt in days—long, anxious days spent in cold labs, and colder disappointment.

  More, her kisses seemed to demand, and his world tilted, and the careful walls he had built around himself—walls of ink, ambition, and fear—began to crack.

  Her touch burned through him, leaving embers in its wake, and Azul could do nothing but chase the feeling, the taste of warmth where he had expected cold. He pulled her closer, as if he could anchor her there, as if holding her tighter could stop this from slipping through his fingers like all things eventually did. He hooked hands around her knees, pulling her strongly against him.

  An unbearable heat flooded them both when her hips sunk into his, sending her fingers raking up his spine.

  Are you sure? he wanted to ask. Are you sure it’s me you want to be here with?

  However, as he pulled away, a flash of red dust sprung between them, choking them both. The red clouded his vision, dissolving into the darkness as his senses slowly returned to him. The pressure of her lips, the heat of her touch—all of it vanished like a tide retreating from the shore. Azul awoke, still bent over his mother’s desk, her stacks of useless notes beneath his hands, breathless and infuriated, the phantom feeling of the kiss still lingering on his soul.

  A dream. Of course, a dream, he realized, peeling his eyes open slowly. Though, for a dream, it was maddeningly potent. The heat of it still clung to him, curling like phantom fingers along his skin, refusing to let go. It was infuriating, how the mere thought of her could unravel him like this. How something as simple as a glance, a touch—a whisper—could sink so deep beneath his carefully laid defenses, into places even he had not dared explore.

  It was raw, demanding, utterly unacceptable.

  He clenched his fists, on the desk, forcing himself to focus.

  You will never be her final choice, he told himself. And even if you have a shot at being a temporary choice, I am a bloody, sodding gentleman, and I will do it on my own terms—terms which would be mutually beneficial.

  That’s what his contracts are, are they not? And why would he not extend the same courtesy to Yuu?

  And yet, in the quiet of his room, with the echo of her laughter still threading through his mind, he didn’t dare close his eyes again, because though his human legs were gone, replaced by the damnable tentacles, and the bubbling splotchy sounds from his mother’s cauldron still rung in his ears, here between his hands, on the desk beneath where he’d set his head down for a few minutes’ rest, laid Yuu, staring up at him as breathlessly as if she’d really been there, wandering through the dream with him.

  What in the name of the trenches… He stared, blinking. Jade and Floyd were right, he decided. He had worked too hard, and now was hallucinating.

  This could, of course, be another dream. Another chance for her to incense him, and again slip through his fingers.

  “Will you leave me in my dreams, too?” he mumbled tiredly, bending down over her face, her breath the only warmth for him in this frigid laboratory.

  Something slid off his shoulders with the movement.

  A jacket? Yuu’s Jacket?

  She put a hand on his chest and pushed him away, very gently, fingertips grazing his bared stomach. They were warm, truly so, unlike anything in the last dream…

  “I’m really here, Azul. Just…just let me go and I’ll be out of your hair.”

  His eyes widened.

  “Yuu?”

  He couldn’t fathom how it had happened, and his tired mind raced to keep up. Yuu was really here, at the bottom of the ocean, in his mother’s family home.

  Probably trying to solve the problem that you couldn’t, he scolded himself.

  But before he could ask her any questions: like how she got here, or how she got in, or how she managed to end up underneath him while he slept, they were interrupted by the very thing he’d been waiting for—the very thing that, before he’d fallen asleep, couldn’t happen fast enough. Now, it all happened far too quickly as a booming voice from the recesses of Azul’s childhood filled the room.

  “Am I….interrupting something? Madame Nerissa Ashengrotto swanned into the room in a dramatic unfurling of long, black tentacles. “In my own laboratory?”