Bingo.

I reached out for current. The source I’d tapped for the cloaking spell was almost dry, but that’s why I wanted Christie’s weather knack on idle until I was finished. I concentrated and searched farther away, waiting to catch something in the storm. I found it almost immediately and tugged.

Lightning was so raw and wild. It fluctuated. Ebbed and flowed. One second I was pulling as hard as I could and getting nothing—the next I was flooded with current. My insides roiled. Skin itched. Breath stolen. Heka roared inside me, bouncing around my cells as it sucked in the electricity I was siphoning.

One of the Rusalka’s heads snapped toward me. Crud.

I wasn’t ready—I needed more Heka. The captain was supposed to distract her—we’d discussed this. He knew I needed time to charge the trap. The bastard was too caught up in his own cold sweat to help me.

“Hey!” Lon shouted, redirecting her attention.

Helpful, but not ideal. Lon could handle himself, but I didn’t want the creature’s attention shifting beyond him, where Kar Yee’s and Jupe’s faces peered from their hiding place at the foot of the bunk.

All the hairs on my body stood on end, and I felt as if I might implode. That was my saturation point.

Just as the creature hunched down and prepared to attack Lon, I touched the chalked edge of the triangle with the tip of the caduceus and pushed.

Heka flew through the wooden stave and lit up the trap like a spotlight in a Broadway show.

She tried to leap at Lon and slammed into the magical barrier.

Got her!

An eerie, out-of-tune keening echoed through the cabin as she looked down and realized what had happened. But I was too busy feeling sick to boast more than a fleeting bit of triumph. My stomach dropped and knotted in pain, bringing tears to my eyes. I balled up like a cooked shrimp outside the trap, half certain that I’d seriously injured myself. Maybe the lightning strike on the bridge had done more damage to me than I’d originally thought.

Lon’s voice rumbled near my ear. “Breathe.”

As his warm hand rested on my back, I forced myself to calm down and follow his instruction. Breathing was good. Breathing was normal. My muscles eventually slacked. Insides unknotted. I stretched out of my I’m-going-to-die position and rolled over to face the demon. Roaring like a caged tiger, she railed against the barrier in a whirlwind of impossibly fast kicks and punches, gills rapidly opening and closing, teeth gnashing.

“You tricked me,” the Rusalka said to Christie in her triple voice.

“I’m sorry,” he said, still flattened against the wall as if he didn’t trust the trap.

All three heads lunged toward him as she pointed a webbed finger at his face. “We have a pact. You hid from me. You tricked me.”

“Now, Onna . . . I, uh . . .”

I slanted a glance at the captain as Lon helped me to my feet. “What is she talking about?”

Onna’s heads rotated toward me. “Who are you?”

“I’m the one who trapped you. You are bound by me so you must answer me honestly.” A simplified version of a standard magical contract that magicians had been using for hundreds of years.

“Are you Richard’s lover?” Onna asked.

“What? God, no.”

“She’s just a passenger,” the captain said.

Onna’s left head rotated toward me. “But she’s a mage.”

“And something else,” the middle one added, her eyes narrowing suspiciously.

The third head joined the other two, and they spoke in unison again. “If I am bound by rules, then so are you, mage. This Earthbound man has entered into a pact with me that he dishonored. I demand you release me from this prison and allow me vengeance.”

I glanced at Christie. “What is she talking about? You didn’t say anything about a pact.”

“Yes, well, I’m not sure it was exactly a pact, per se. It was more like a gentleman’s agreement—”

“Lies!” Onna’s three heads shouted. “I gave you my body to consummate our agreement.”

Several of us groaned at the same time.

“Captain Christie!” I prompted.

He looked at me, wiped his sweaty forehead with the sleeve of his shirt, then looked to Lon. “Come on. Think about it—three mouths. How could I resist?”

“Gross,” Jupe murmured from the bunk.

Great. Now he’d be asking about that later.

“Did you make an agreement with her in exchange for sex?” I asked the captain.

“My body was not the bargain,” the demon said. “It was the seal. The bargain was that I would teach him ancient secrets about dark magicks.”

Some Æthyric demons had magical knowledge: it was the main reason magicians summoned them, to learn new tricks. “What kind of magick?”

One head swiveled in my direction. “Magick to control the weather.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Kar Yee mumbled.

“You aren’t realidtren’tly a cloudbuster?” I asked. “That’s not your natural knack?”

The captain offered me a sheepish smile. “I don’t have a knack. She taught me a simple trick, that’s all. And it doesn’t work like I thought it would—it only keeps clouds away. I can’t change the temperature or make it rain.”

“It keeps storm clouds away,” Lon corrected, looking out the small, round window over the bunk, where a sliver of blue sky was beginning to clear around the yacht. “That’s a pretty fucking handy knack for a sailor to have.”