Chapter 10
Nerida
The storm outside has not abated, but inside the bedroom, the air is heavy with a different kind of pressure.
We have moved from the flooded ruin of the bathroom to the bed, a raft of dry linen in a house that feels increasingly like a ship taking on water.
Jack is asleep. He lies on his stomach, one arm thrown carelessly over the side of the mattress, his face turned toward me.
In the dim light filtering through the rain-lashed window, he looks impossibly fragile.
His skin is soft, unarmored, lacking the protective scales or the dense muscle fibers that knit my body together.
He’s warm, radiating a heat that I can taste on my tongue, a furnace of mammalian life that fascinates and terrifies me.
Humans sleep; my kind merely drifts. We power down part of our consciousness to let the tide take over, leaving the rest anchored in the dark, always watching for the shadow of a shark or the sudden flicker of a squid.
But here, there is no current, only the static, dead air of the dry place, and the rhythmic, thumping bass of the wind against the siding.
Knees to my chest, I lean against the headboard and watch the door.
The salt bath left my skin humming, my bioluminescence fading to a bruised, pulsing blue.
I don't blink. My eyes were made for the lightless deep.
In this dim room, the scuffed brass handle and the grain of the wood are perfectly sharp.
I sit in the terrifying quiet, bracing myself.
The scent in the room is overpowering. To Jack, it probably just smells of sex and the sea, musk, salt, and sweat. But to me, to my sensory organs that can taste a drop of blood in a million gallons of water, the air is thick with a chemical scream.
Pheromones.
The mating frenzy has triggered a biological release I didn’t anticipate.
In the ocean, these chemicals will disperse, carried by the currents to signal their availability to males miles away.
Here, in this sealed box of a house, they are concentrated.
They are leaking out through the cracks in the floorboards, seeping under the door, drifting out into the storm.
I’m a beacon and a flare fired into the night sky, signaling every hunter in the radius that a female is fertile, vulnerable, and on land.
They are here.
The thought arrives before the sound. It isn’t a conscious deduction but a vibration in my lateral line, a phantom pressure against my skin that screams threat.
I go rigid. My lights flare, spiking from soft blue to a harsh, warning violet.
Jack stirs, groaning low in his throat. “Nerida?” he mumbles, his voice thick with sleep.
“Hush,” I whisper, my hand shooting out to cover his mouth. My skin is cold now, the heat of the mating drained away, replaced by the icy calculation of the kill.
Then, the sound comes.
It isn’t the wind but a heavy, wet thud against the pilings beneath the house.
The house shudders. Then another thud. And another. A dragging sound, like wet leather being pulled over sandpaper.
They are climbing.
Jack’s eyes fly open. He feels the tension in my body, the way my claws have partially extended, pricking the skin on his shoulder. He sits up, reaching for the bedside table, where the heavy flashlight and the flare gun lie.
“What is it?” he hisses, fully awake now.
“Scouts,” I say, my voice vibrating with a growl that isn’t human. “Trackers. They smell us.”
I slide out of bed. I don’t bother with clothes since they would only hinder the shift.
My body is already changing, the biological imperative of fight overriding the form I wore for love.
My spine elongates, cracking audibly. The webbing between my fingers thickens and spreads.
The soft skin of my thighs and stomach hardens, the pearlescent scales darkening to the color of bruised iron.
“Get the gun,” I command, moving toward the bedroom door. “But do not fire unless they touch you.”
“Nerida, wait…”
“There is no waiting!” I snap, turning to look at him.
My eyes have changed. The pupils are gone, replaced by reflective, silver mirrors that catch the scant light.
My teeth have fully descended, a double row of serrated needles.
“They are not like me, Jack. They do not want to talk. They want to claim.”
The sound of splintering wood comes from the living room—the front door.
They didn’t bother to pick the lock. They simply applied the pressure of the deep to the frame until it gave way.
The wind howls into the house, bringing with it the intruders’ smell. It’s a vile scent of rotting kelp, stagnant trench water, the copper tang of old blood, and the smell of the scavengers, the bottom-feeders who pick the carcasses of whales.
I move into the hallway. I don’t walk, I flow. My center of gravity drops, my movements becoming serpentine.
Two of them.
They stand in the ruin of the living room, illuminated by the lightning that flashes through the open doorway.
They are massive, hulking shapes that barely resemble the humanoid form I favor.
Their skin is a mottled, sickly gray, slick with mucus.
Their heads are blunt and wide, like hammerheads, with small, dead eyes set too far apart.
Gills slash their thick necks, pulsing rapidly as they choke on the thin, dry air.
They are suffocating, which only makes them more dangerous. Pain causes them to become frantic.
One of them, the larger of the two, opens its mouth and lets out a sound that shatters the air, a clicking, high-pitched shriek that’s used to stun prey in the dark.
I don’t flinch.
I roar back.
My bioluminescence explodes. I don’t just glow, I strobe. I turn my body into a weapon of light, flashing a blinding, stroboscopic pattern of white and red design to confuse and disorient.
The leader hisses, shielding its sensitive eyes with a webbed claw. “Female,” it rasps. The language is old, a series of clicks and grunts that hurt the human throat to produce. “Breeder.”
“Leave,” I say, the word dripping with venom. “This territory is claimed.”
The second creature, smaller but faster, lunges. It moves with a terrifying speed for something out of water. It launches itself off the sofa, clearing the distance between us in a single bound. Its claws, black and hooked like gaffs, aim for my throat.
I don’t dodge.
I meet it.
I drop low, letting its momentum carry it over me, and as it passes, I strike upward. My claws, now hard as obsidian, rake across its soft underbelly. Hot, black blood sprays across the hallway walls.
The creature crashes into the wall behind me, shrieking in fury. It scrambles up, ignoring the wound, and turns, but I’m already moving. I spin, my heavy tail whipping around with the force of a falling tree, and catch it in the knees.
Bone snaps. A wet, crunching sound that’s audible, even over the storm.
The creature goes down, thrashing, its legs useless, but the leader is on me.
It hits me like a landslide. Its weight is immense, pinning me to the floorboards. The wood groans and cracks under our combined masses. Its hands, thick and slimy, clamp around my throat, cutting off my air. It doesn’t care about the claws I rake down its arms, its hide is like tire rubber.
It leans close, its foul breath washing over me. Its jaws unhinge, revealing rows of teeth designed to crush crab shells. It intends to bite my neck, to sever the spine and paralyze me so it can drag me back to the deep.
I can’t breathe. The edges of my vision begin to gray.
The sound is deafening in the confined space. A blast of heat seared the air above us.
Jack.
He stands in the bedroom doorway, the flare gun smoking in his hand. He didn’t fire at the creature but at the ceiling, creating a shower of sparks and blinding red light.
“Get off her!” he screams, racking the gun to load a fresh flare.
The creature on top of me flinches, distracted by the sudden fire and noise. It turns its head toward Jack, its dead eyes narrowing. It snarls, shifting its weight, preparing to launch itself at the new threat.
“No!” I scream.
The thought of those claws touching Jack, tearing his soft, warm skin, snapped something inside me. The fear and strategy vanish. There’s only rage.
I don’t need air.
I need leverage.
I coil my heavy tail inward, wedging the thick, armored muscle directly against the creature’s chest. With a roar that tears my throat, I unleash the full strength of my lower half, muscles designed to propel me through thousands of miles of ocean.
I thrust upward.
The creature launches backward. It flies through the air, smashing into the kitchen island where granite cracks and wood splinters.
I’m on it before it can recover. I don’t give it time to stand. I leap, landing on its chest, my claws pinning its arms to the debris. I look down into its face, my lights burning a furious, blinding white.
Its eyes widen. It finally understands I’m not just here to breed.
I lunge, sinking my teeth directly into its throat.
Copper and rot flood my mouth, but I lock my jaw, biting down hard until its windpipe snaps.
I wrench my head back, tearing flesh. The creature thrashes once, hard, before going completely limp.
The room falls dead quiet, broken only by the rain, my wet breaths, and the pathetic whimpering of the second one with the broken legs out in the hall.
I stand up slowly, shaking. My chest heaves. I’m covered in gore, black, viscous blood that slicks my scales and drips onto the ruined floor. My hands are claws, and my mouth is a ruin of red.
I turn to the second creature. It’s dragging itself toward the door, leaving a trail of slime and blood. It is losing the will to fight.
I let it go. It will carry the message back to the trench. ‘This territory is death.’
I stand there for a long moment, the adrenaline slowly draining away, leaving me cold and hollow. The monster recedes, sinking back beneath the surface of my mind, leaving me standing in the wreckage of the home of the man I love.
I can’t look at him.
I stare at my hands. They are stained black.
I brought this here. I brought the violence of the food chain into his sanctuary.
He’s seen me kill and tear a throat out with my teeth.
He has seen the thing I truly am. He will be horrified and sick, and he will tell me to leave, to go back to the water where monsters belong.
I close my eyes, waiting for the rejection, waiting for the sound of the gun being leveled at me.
“Nerida.”
His voice was quiet. Steady.
I flinch. I don’t want to turn around and see the disgust in his eyes.
“Nerida, look at me.”
Slowly, painfully, I turn.
Jack is standing amidst the shattered furniture, the flare gun on the floor. He isn’t looking at the dead creature or at the blood on the walls.
He’s looking at me.
His face is pale, and his hands are trembling slightly, but his eyes are clear with no horror in them. There’s shock, certainly, but beneath it, something else. Recognition.
He walks toward me, stepping over the debris, ignoring the black slime on the floor. He stops inches from me. I hiss involuntarily, backing away, holding my gore-soaked hands up to warn him off.
“Don’t,” I rasp, my voice still distorted by the shift. “I am… dirty. I am dangerous.”
Jack reaches out. In his hand is a thick, white towel from the bathroom.
“You’re alive,” he simply says.
He closes the distance between us, uncaring about the heat radiating from my skin or the black blood that will ruin his clothes. He lifts the towel and wipes my cheek. The gesture is so gentle it feels like a physical blow. I freeze, entirely undone by the drag of soft cloth against my scales.
“I tried to help,” he says, his voice cracking slightly. “I wasn’t fast enough.”
“You… you stayed,” I whisper, staring at him. “You saw.”
“I saw you protecting me,” he replies and moves the towel down to my neck, cleaning the gore from my throat.
“I saw you fighting for us.” He drops the towel, landing with a soft plop in the mess on the floor.
He takes my face in his hands, his thumbs stroke the sharp ridges of my cheekbones, unbothered by the scales or the monster.
“I told you,” he says, leaning his forehead against mine, his eyes locking with my silver ones. “I’m yours. That doesn’t change because things get messy.”
A sob tears from my throat, fracturing into a snarl as I collapse against him. He catches me, his arms locking around my slick, bloodied back to hold me close.
The storm rages on, battering the house, trying to tear it down. But inside, amidst the corpses and the wreckage, I’m anchored.
I was held, and for the first time in my life, the darkness doesn’t feel lonely.