The shark-song stopped.

  Kimo turned, his movements slow, deliberate, the water swirling around him. His glowing eyes found her in the shadows, and a low, guttural rumble, a sound somewhere between a laugh and a growl, vibrated through the water.

  “So the blood sucker comes to die,” he hissed, his voice a distorted, watery thing, but the arrogance was clear. “You have brought the final offering. Your blood.”

  The water in the center of the amphitheater glowed. A sickly, greenish light pulsed from the circle of bone totems, illuminating the swirling shark-spirits, their translucent forms growing more solid, more defined. The ritual was building. The power was coalescing.

  Frankie pushed from the rock. An obsidian arrow. The glowing water of the circle swallowed her whole. She held a knife in each hand, the sharp, glassy points leading the way.

  A casual flick of his clawed hand.

  Not a blow. A dismissal.

  The impact was a silent thunderclap. The world tumbled. Green and black. Pressure shrieked in her ears.

  She righted herself, a blur of motion, and came at him again, this time from below. She drove one of the obsidian knives upward, aiming for the soft flesh of his underbelly.

  He caught her wrist. A vise grip.

  The bones in her arm ground together. A sickening, silent scream of a sound. He twisted, his immense strength undeniable. The knife spun from her grasp, a dark flicker swallowed by the gloom.

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  A backhand.

  Her head snapped sideways.

  A silent crack.

  The world went gray. The taste of her own blood, warm and metallic, filled her mouth.

  The shark-spirits swirled around them, a ghostly, silent audience to her humiliation.

  The water felt thick as mud. Every movement was a struggle. Her lungs were on fire, a screaming need for air. The pressure squeezed, crushing the breath from her body. She was too slow. Too weak.

  Kimo laughed again, a victorious, gurgling roar. He let go of her wrist, and she drifted backward, her body a collection of aches and bruises. He slammed her against a spire of volcanic rock, the impact a dull thud in the water.

  “You see?” his voice rumbled in her bones. “You are nothing here. This is my world.” He was on her in an instant, his claws tearing at her arm. “The world of the Mano Ha’i. Your family are weak… land-crawlers.”

  He spoke of his long, magical sleep, of his destiny to reclaim the island, to raise a new army from the depths.

  “And you,” he said, his glowing eyes fixing on her, “you are the key. Your mixed blood. Vampire and Pula. Night and Day. Land and Sea. It is a profane, powerful thing. A perfect sacrifice to the great shark-god.”

  His words, meant to be a final, crushing blow, had the opposite effect.

  You are not one thing, or the other. You are both.

  Her grandmother’s words, a warm, steady current in the cold, chaotic water. The self-doubt, the shame, began to recede. Kimo saw her blood as a profanity. Her grandmother saw it as a gift.

  And in that moment, Frankie finally understood.

  She was not a monster pretending to be a girl. She was not a Pula with a dark stain.

  She was both. That was not her weakness.

  It was her strength.

  The fire in her lungs went cold. The panic receded, replaced by an icy calm. The water no longer felt heavy. It felt like home. She looked at Kimo, at his arrogant, monstrous face, and she saw not an invincible demigod, but a predator who had made a fatal mistake.

  He had underestimated his prey.