Page 89 of Innocent Until Proven Witch

I ignore him and sweep my gaze across the crowd instead. "You know me," I say. It's true—most of them do. I grew up here. I know these people, and they know me. "Something is coming," I add, and the words settle heavily over the square.

The councilman interrupts immediately. "This is ridiculous."

"No," I say, my voice sharpening enough to silence him again. "The storms. The disappearances. The attacks." I let my gaze sweep across them once more. "They weren't accidents."

Several townspeople exchange nervous looks, and the councilman opens his mouth to argue, but I cut him off before he can.

"Look around," I say, and the words echo through the square. People obey this time. The barking grows louder, the birds keep fleeing, and even the air feels different now—heavy, charged, wrong.

Reina steps beside me, and the bond hums steadily between us, like we're finally standing together against the same storm.

The councilman shakes his head. "You're spreading panic."

I point toward the sky. "Then explain that."

Everyone looks up at once. The change has happened almost instantly—moments ago the sky was clear, and now dark clouds roll across the horizon far too fast to be natural. Color drains from several faces as the wind rises sharply, whipping market banners overhead and rattling the lanterns strung between stalls. Merchant tents shudder against their ropes, and the crowd's murmuring grows louder and more afraid.

Another council member steps forward, trying for calm. "We should remain steady," he says.

Nobody listens, because the sea has just changed.

A deep roar rises from the harbor, silencing every conversation, every argument, every excuse at once. People turn toward the waterfront, and my stomach drops at what I see.

The waves are rising—not naturally, not gradually, but surging upward like something alive. The crowd gasps, someone screams, and a bolt of lightning tears across the sky hard enough to shake the square itself. Children cry out as merchants stumble backward, and the next strike hits near the harbor bridge, splintering the wood apart in an instant.

People scream. Real panic arrives at last, no longer whispers or rumors but pure terror as the bridge collapses into the water below.

The crowd surges backward as more lightning follows, the wind howling through town hard enough to overturn market stalls and tear tents free from their anchors. The festival vanishes beneath the chaos completely.

Reina grabs my arm. "Finn."

I already know. The storm isn't finished, not even close.

Out in the harbor, fishing vessels fight violently against the rising waves. Some try turning back while others can't, the water twisting around their hulls the same way survivors once described it, the same way the old reports described it, the same way my father's accident was described to me as a boy.

The realization hits like a strong wave. People are about to die again.

The crowd scatters in every direction, shouting, crying, running for whatever safety they think still exists. Moonhaven has finally seen the truth, though unfortunately, it has arrived with the storm itself.

And the storm has only just begun.

33

REINA

The sound reaches me before the wave does — a sharp crack splitting through the roar of the storm, followed by another, then another, each one cutting through the wind with a precision no thunder could replicate. My stomach drops before my mind catches up with what my instincts already know.

Ancient wards. The realization settles over me like ice water, sudden and suffocating. They are failing — not one or two, but all of them, all across Moonhaven, unraveling beneath the weight of whatever Aldric has unleashed beyond the harbor. A piercing shriek echoes from somewhere along the coastline, the sound of magic breaking, of protection collapsing, generations of safeguards dissolving under pressure that should never have reached them. The panic already spreading through the streets doubles in an instant.

They shatter one after the other. Without those wards, Moonhaven has no shelter — not from the sea, not from magical assault, not from anything lurking beyond the coastline that the storm might be hiding. Lightning splits the sky overhead, and for one brief, terrible moment the harbor becomes visible through the darkness. What I see in that moment makes the air leave my lungs entirely.

A wall of water is racing toward town. Not a wave — something far worse. The sea has risen to a height no natural storm could produce, a living, heaving mass of fury barreling toward streets and homes and people who stand completely frozen, unable to comprehend the scale of what is coming. It crashes into the harbor before any of them can move. The impact shakes the ground beneath my feet, a violence I feel in my teeth. Wood explodes. Docks splinter. Fishing boats slam into one another with the sound of breaking bones, and the sea surges through streets that have never known flooding, indifferent and relentless.

The crowd erupts. People run in every direction — shouting, crying, parents grabbing children, merchants abandoning their stalls, visitors shoving blindly through the chaos in search of anything resembling higher ground. Another ward breaks, the sound slicing clean through the storm. My instincts take over before conscious thought can intervene.

"Finn!" His name tears from my throat, barely surviving the wind. His head snaps toward me immediately. Water is already rushing around our ankles, cold and fast, the flood spreading with a speed that leaves no room for hesitation. Finn's gaze moves across the scene and sharpens in the way I have come to recognize — not panic, but calculation.

Row appears at his side, already scanning the worst of it. "What do you need?" he asks, directing the question at Finn with the clipped efficiency of someone who knows how to work inside a crisis.