Chapter 24 #3
Then he lets go. A hand fists in my hair, slams my head into the ground. The shorter guy is basically sitting on my back, keeping me in place. I’m strong, but I’m also injured and he has no trouble holding me down when my face is mashed against the floor, no matter how hard I fight against him.
“Huh?” I mumble. My voice is muffled by the tiles.
“The people who closed off access,” the short man snarls.
That sounds bad. For half a second, I stop struggling. “What?”
“They closed everything off.” Jordan gestures around us, like this should make sense to me somehow. “We need access. This is how we’re gonna reopen it.”
“No,” I argue. “Whatever you’re doing—”
“It was so easy to get you here,” he says, laughing. “Werewolves are a dime a dozen. Worth a couple hundred thousand at most. You don’t know anything.”
“Fuck you,” I hiss.
He shrugs. “That’s just business, baby. And we’ve been in business a long time.”
“Who’s we?” I spit blood onto the floor.
Jordan looks down at it in disgust. “Hunters, obviously,” he says, scowling at me like I’m being intentionally obtuse.
I deflate at his words. He’s a hunter. I kind of already knew that, but hearing it spoken out loud makes my heart sink.
“How did you know about me?”
A laugh. “You think it’s hard to put together?
You and Duncan Stirling—who is an obvious fucking shifter, by the way, clearly nobody at Halea is checking—get back from the hospital after a dip in the ocean, and suddenly you’re wearing rain boots on the beach and clinging to him and whispering?
It’s pretty obvious that something is up with you.
And the damn symbol.” He rolls his eyes.
“The fuck are you doing drawing that on yourself? Just cemented all my suspicions.” Laughter rolls out of him like thunder.
“And then we called you and asked and you didn’t even deny it! ”
I really need to stop drinking. All of this could’ve been avoided if I’d just been sober when I answered my phone.
There’s a knee in my back, a sharp reminder that I’m still pinned.
“Look,” he says. “Don’t feel bad. You never had a chance. I was always gonna find you. It was only a matter of time. Tobias is dead, but your mom went to an awful lot of trouble to keep you alive. Which is really too bad,” he adds. “Because this is gonna suck.”
I’m scrambling for extra time. I don’t know what’s wrong with that pool, but I know that I’m fucked if they shove me in there. “What’s in here? What do you need?”
“You wouldn’t understand in a million years,” he sneers. “You did your job. Now we take what we need.”
“I don’t understand,” I plead, but his face is closed off. A purple bruise spreads across his cheek, his chin.
If he’s gonna kill me, then I’m glad I managed to get in a couple of good hits. I may be dead, but his face will hurt for a few days, and right now, that’s the closest to revenge I’m ever gonna get.
“You don’t need to understand,” the short man says. He breathes heavily into the back of my neck. I flinch, stiffen. “It was closed. Now it’s open. Now you need to die.”
Hands close around my throat. I panic, thrash, but I can’t throw him off.
Not when I’m already struggling to breathe, beaten to a pulp, dehydrated, weak.
No amount of writhing and kicking dislodges him.
I wrench at his arms, but it’s no use—he won’t fucking let go, even when I tear with all my strength, then try to pry his hands free.
Thick fingers crush my windpipe. The pain is agonizing.
It rips through my neck, down my chest, up into my jaw.
Tears pour down my face. I wheeze, but my lungs are empty, I can’t pull in air—
And then, just as I start to lose consciousness, he releases me. As I’m gasping for breath, Jordan shoves me into the pool.
I’m too weak to fight back. I plunge into the water and drift down toward the tile floor.
Wake up, I think. Move. But I’m sinking, and my arms feel like they’re made of lead. I inhale water when my lungs convulse involuntarily. It burns all the way down my throat. I cough, gag, choke on more water. Darkness eats at the edges of my vision.
And then somehow, in spite of everything, the shift happens. Agony ripples through me. My bones change shape. Scales burst out of my skin. My entire body transforms in a matter of seconds and the whole process is completely outside of my control. Everything is raw, exposed, ripped open.
The pain fades, and I am staring up at the surface of the water, clutching my still-aching throat. Talons pierce my skin, but I hardly notice.
I can breathe again. I’m not inhaling through my mouth or nose, but I can breathe. I don’t understand how it works and I’m afraid to question it at this point.
Gills, Duncan said, and that’s probably the only explanation.
I don’t dare move. Jordan said I was going to die. But I’m not dead. Does this mean I have the jump on them?
For the first time, I really look at myself. It’s dark in here, but that doesn’t matter. My vision is much improved. I’m careful to remain motionless, just in case Jordan doesn’t realize I’m still alive.
Fins flutter gently in the current. I can’t stop staring at them.
Like Duncan said, they’re turquoise. Long and elegant, shot through with stripes of blue and yellow. The scales along my tail are delicate, sharp, gleaming.
I stare and stare. Am I horrifying? Am I a monster?
How is it that this is the most comfortable I’ve ever been in my own skin, in a body I don’t understand? Is this how Duncan feels on the full moon?
I’m in so much pain. There’s blood in the water—I can smell it. Submerged as I am, I shouldn’t be able to smell anything, but then again, sharks can smell blood, right?
It would be way cooler if I was a shark.
I drift. I think I’m probably dying. If I’m not, I want Jordan and his stupid crony to think I am. Maybe they’ll leave and I can figure out how to get out of here.
And then I’m going to hunt them down and kill them. Preferably slowly.
My fragile serenity shatters when a hand plunges into the water.
I startle, try to swim away, but I’m not fast enough and even though it’s just a hand, even though this is my domain and I should have all the power here, I don’t escape.
Something hooks into my neck, right into my gills.
It’s sharp and it burns and I know if I try to swim away it’s going to rip my throat open.
Besides, there’s nowhere to go. This pool is only a little bigger than a coffin.
I’m yanked up to the surface and plucked from the water screeching and flailing.
It’s all so much worse because Jordan and his crony are crowding around me, saying, “Dude, calm down,” and, “It won’t hurt if you relax,” and one of them is making shushing noises that are probably supposed to be soothing, and I will not be condescended to like this, not when one of them is clutching a hunting knife and the other one is holding the hook currently stuck in my gill.
“Fuck you!” I spit, and my voice is weird, all echoey and low. Is it because of my new body, or because I was nearly strangled to death a few minutes ago?
My captors aren’t accounting for the talons, for the strength of this form. I slash Jordan across the face. Blood fills his eye. The torn lid flaps as he screams and brings his hands to his face.
“I told you we should have drugged him,” the smaller man cries. His eyes are wide behind his mask.
Somewhere far away, I hear faint footsteps. Panic seizes my chest.
This can’t be good. There shouldn’t be anyone else here.
I don’t know what the fuck kind of magic lurks in these halls and I don’t want to.
If my parents sealed this place away, then they probably had a good reason, and I don’t want to meet it.
I want to be a fucking student. I want to learn about the fae world.
I want to fall in love and live my life.
I don’t want to deal with the shit my parents couldn’t bother preparing me for.
I’ve had enough. Nobody is going to kill me today. I will burn this entire place to the fucking ground before I let that happen.
I give into my instincts. My legs feel wrong because they’re actually a tail now, and I whip that fucking thing, fins and all, in the direction of the short man. I manage to throw the knife from his hand, then knock his legs out from under him with enough force that a scream rips from his mouth.
I realize then that I don’t actually want to kill anybody. What I want is to get the fuck out of here in one piece.
But that’s not going to be possible, I think, stomach sinking. As long as I’m alive, they’re going to try and remedy that. And I can’t run in this body. Can’t transform easily.
I rake my claws across the shorter one’s face, mostly on accident. I was aiming for his torso (make him bleed, my instincts scream, so I do), but he falls onto his hands and looks right at me just as I slash, and—
Well, at least he’s used to wearing a mask.
I’m not prepared for the sheer horror that runs through me as I stare at his wide eyes, at the exposed white bone beneath his flesh. I’ve carved ribbons into his face, and—
Oh, fuck, I don’t want this.
Outside, the footsteps have grown thunderous. I can feel their vibrations through the floor.
“Leave me alone!” I scream.
Something warm and wet seeps around me. It’s blood, I realize. The shorter man is pouring blood and he’s screaming and clutching his face, and I hate this I never wanted to hurt anybody—
And then Jordan leaps on top of me, hunting knife in hand. I screech and he bellows, and the knife misses me by a couple of inches. The hook is still in my neck. All he has to do is grab the handle, drive it a little deeper, and rip. I’ll have no chance. They’ll have everything they want.
He realizes this just as I do, and seizes the hook’s handle, narrowly dodging a swipe of my claws. I snatch at him again, aiming to rend flesh from bone.
The door flies open with a bang just as the knife plunges into my chest.