13. Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Thirteen
Beatrice
Noah had laid eggs in me! Freaking eggs!
Shock kept me pinned to the mattress as the green skinned sailor made a bee-line for the upper deck.
In a blink he was gone, leaving me alone in the dark.
That’s when I started to spiral.
Getting fucked by a tentacle man and then getting filled with his eggs was all fun and games in books. In actual practice, though?
Exhilaratingly terrifying.
Oh fuck. What if they hatched?
Flashes of the movie Alien had my stomach churning. What if they burst out of me face-hugger style? What would Ripley do?
Not far off, a radio crackled, interrupting my slightly nerdy panic attack. I could call for help—should call for help.
I struggled to a standing position in the narrow walkway between mine and Noah’s bunks. Even without the aggression of a storm picking up fast, making it impossible to stand straight, it would have been difficult to use my legs. They were as limp as half-cooked pasta.
Books spilled from their stacks as I tripped over them, and with my heart in my throat, I grabbed for whatever clothes I could find. One of Noah’s favorite shirts that advertised an Alaskan Salmon tinnery. It was a tent on me and smelled of him.
My vision swam with unshed tears.
All this was my fault.
I shouldn’t have pushed him to put on the mask. His hesitance hadn’t gone unnoticed, and I’d asked him anyway. He must have sensed something wrong with it. Yet he did it to please me.
Now, we got so much more than we’d bargained for.
He’d been warped into some kind of eldritch monster and I was carrying its eggs.
My hand dropped to the small hard bump in my lower belly.
And how fucked up was I that I hadn’t hated every second of it?
The purr of the ship's engine jerked my attention away from my internal crisis, my heartbeat pounding in my throat as the anchor started up too. We were moving.
Hope lifted in my chest. Was Noah steering us out of the storm? Regardless of where he intended on taking us, this confirmed that my captain was still alive. Because what were the odds that the fish monster knew how to operate our trawler?
My feet slapped as I made it to the communications area, which was barely more than a closet in the bulkhead where we kept a radio and a chair. I plopped onto the chair, head whirling as the new weight inside me shifted some.
Heat flared in my core, and my thighs squeezed together in a pathetic attempt to quench the ache. “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is the Clamburglar. We need help!”
Nothing came back. Every channel came back fuzzy. But it wasn’t exactly static, something maybe meant to mimic static. It made my blood go cold with morbid curiosity. Was Noah’s new form fucking with the radio waves?
When that same eldritch word it had repeated over and over in my head came out of the speakers, my chest squeezed.
This time, it sounded like my captain more than anything else.
“Hello? Noah? Can you hear me?”
“Bea—”
The transceiver smoked, then short-circuited, sending me tumbling back to dodge the sparks.
Okay, so the radio was a dead end. Now what?
Come on Bea, think. I needed a plan. Too bad options were pretty much nilch since the captain was currently distracted with the storm, plus the whole eldritch mutation thing.
It scrambled and fried all our communications and navigation equipment.
I had to get that mask off him.
Then what would we do with it? Bring it back home to prove we were right about Cthulhu and the sunken city all along?
That didn’t seem so important anymore. There was a reason NASA had abandoned sea exploration to study space instead.
Most humans had survival instincts to stay away from the darkest dredges of the ocean.
Not me.
My hand pressed over the hard spot in my belly again, my pulse quickening with a cocktail of dread and adrenaline.
As a biologist, I was exalted with joy at the new discovery.
As a normal human woman, I was afraid. For my friend and for myself.
And as a self-proclaimed sea monster armourist, I had twisted, wicked, complicated feelings about the particular development in mine and Noah’s hook-up.
The scream of a distressed whale call suddenly rumbled from beneath the vessel, chilling my blood more than the cold ever could.
Motion drew me to peer outside the porthole. Not that I could see anything beneath the water, or even on top of it. The weather had taken a turn for the worst, snow and ice making it nearly impossible to see anything.
Strange.
Ice storms usually didn’t happen this time of year here, even as far north as we were.
Something huge and pale swept past the window. I strained for a better view, and shot backward when green flesh slammed into the glass.
Noah hit the window with the speed of a pitched baseball, with enough heft to his brawny form to crack the thickly laminated glass.
Before my brain could parse what just happened, pale tentacles wrapped around his torso and plucked him from the deck like he weighed nothing. A moment later, whatever it was out there with him, slammed him back into the glass.
Another pale tentacle hit the window, and fastened to it. Unlike Noah’s tentacles, this one had puckered suckers filled with ravenous teeth, like hundreds of little lamprey mouths. Equal parts fascinating and horrifying.
Noah put up a good fight. Punching and clawing at the tentacles that kept him pinned, though it didn’t seem like he’d be winning this fight. The pale beast was too large, by a metric fuck-ton. Every time it shifted, the boat shuddered and groaned.
The Clamburglar wouldn’t take much more of this.
At this rate, the pale beast would sink the ship and we would drown. If it didn’t eat us first.
I jumped into action, scrambling to get dressed in my heavy duty weather gear. Didn’t bother with undergarments. No time for that. I only needed layers to avoid freezing to death.
Frantically, I searched for a weapon. The first thing my hand closed around was the abandoned tentacle toy.
“Fuck!” I needed something better than this. “Flare gun!”
There was one in the emergency kit beneath my bunk. I dropped to my knees and tore through stacks of books, until I found the case and ripped it open.
I wasn’t thinking. Only acting on adrenaline. So I flung myself out into the storm, flare gun in one hand and the tentacle dildo in the other. Guns—at least figuratively—blazing.
I saw the shape of the monster clearly now.
It looked like a large porpoise, all pale with those terrible black veins and translucent skin.
But, instead of a head, it had a huge mass of tentacles like a giant squid.
The array of limbs opened up, revealing a huge, black beak sitting at the center of its flesh.
Was it a tongue? No, it was a rigid protrusion. Squinting through the snow, I realized what it was. A spiral horn, like a unicorn’s, but covered in black ichor.
With a blood-curdling roar, it shot the horn like it was a freaking harpoon, straight at Noah.
He managed to twist in its tentacles, and it embedded into the metal bulkhead as easy as a hot knife through cheese. Another horn pushed through the flesh, like the creature was loading the gun and took aim…
I wasn’t so sure it would miss its mark this time.
“Hey! Over here!” I shouted to get its attention, and when it didn’t notice the noise I made, I hurled the dildo at it with all the strength I could muster.
Luckily, the wind was on my side. An arctic gust sent the silicone tentacle hurtling at the creature’s head. The suction cup feature attached itself to its smooth head and wobbled as it latched on.
The monster screeched its annoyance and turned its blinking eyes on me.
Noah screamed something in my head. The eldritch words were lost on me, not because I didn’t understand—it was a safe bet to assume he wanted me to go back below deck—but because I wasn’t listening.
Pointing and aiming, I shot the flare straight into its beak.
Bullseye. Squid’s eye? Whatever.
This time, its scream was that of pain. Its grip on Noah loosened enough for him to slip free. He extended a hand toward me, his open palm waiting expectantly. “But, there are no flares left.”
He hissed something unintelligible, demanding the flare gun.
Swallowing, I handed it over.
Muscles rippled down his naked back, and he hurled the flare gun at the creature. His aim was true, and it bounced off its eye hard enough to leave it blind. At least in that eye. Due to the squid-shape of its head, it couldn’t see us at all until it turned over. Buying us precious seconds.
Noah scooped me up into his arms and bolted across the deck toward what appeared to be a large black rock protruding from the sea. A natural rock formation jutted out, creating a dock-like protrusion leading to the opening in the rock. A cave?
Another pale tentacle exploded from the water at the port bow. Cutting off what seemed to be our only exit strategy. It whipped toward us and coiled around Noah’s ankle, and with one tug, yanked him off his feet.
There was no clawing himself free, not with me occupying his arms. As he stumbled forward, he threw me with just enough force to send me tumbling onto the rocky ledge at the cave’s opening.
Pain shot through me at the impact. I didn’t care. I was screaming for other reasons.
“Noah!” My voice was lost in the storm. There was nothing I could do. I was all out of dildos and flares, with no other tricks up my sleeve. I was helpless to do anything but watch as the creature dragged my captain and his many flailing appendages across the deck.
With one last tug, it pulled him over the railing—taking much of it with them—and plunged into the impossible depths below.
***
The cavern was warmer than it had any right to be.
The bewildering humidity had me scrambling out of my heavy layers until I was barefoot, in nothing but Noah’s T-shirt.
The thin cotton was soaked with sweat within seconds, as if I'd stepped into a sauna instead of a cave in the middle of the arctic ocean.
My train of thought drifted from the temperature as I wandered toward the center of the cave where a large hole in the floor opened up to the ocean. It was an almost perfectly circular hole, at least ten feet in diameter.
Erected in another perfect circle were fifteen statues depicting eldritch deities. They’d been hewn into the rock face and positioned around the blowhole at the center of the sea cave. Only one of the statues had a face, though it wasn’t carved into the stone.
It wore a mask, just like the one we’d found in the crab pot. This one reminded me more of an angler fish than the tentacled one we found.
Did that mean there were thirteen other masks scattered at the bottom of the ocean?
It would be impossible finding them all, like a needle in a haystack. But what would happen if all the masks were somehow found and returned to each of their statues?
Unease thrummed through my circulation as I ventured toward the statue nearest to me and placed my hand on the smooth stone. Hot to the touch.
If only Noah were here to see this.
My throat swelled with emotion.
He’d saved me from the creature, confirming my suspicions once and for all that Noah hadn’t been completely consumed by the mask.
Now he’s gone. Probably eaten by the hulking mutant. What was I supposed to do now? The Clamburglar was still intact, and while Noah had taught me how to operate the boat, our navigation system was fucked. Meaning getting back to land by myself would be complicated, if not impossible.
Oh, and then there was the fact that an alien had laid its eggs inside me. For all I knew I was a ticking time bomb.
It was too much for one marine biologist to deal with.
I need a distraction. Something to cool my brain, maybe slap a plan together.
My field journal!
Going back to my abandoned weather gear, I fished my worn notebook and pencil from my coat pocket, sat on the floor and began to sketch.
It wasn’t until I got to the statue belonging to Noah’s mask—I could tell by the groin area with the four sections that locked together to create one massive unit—that a fresh wave of heat twisted through me.
This time, it had nothing to do with the sweltering atmosphere.
My pulse accelerated. An ache settled between my thighs and once again I was painfully aware of the foreign objects nestled against my cervix.
Closing my notebook and setting it to the side, I laid back and pulled Noah’s shirt up to expose my center. Taking a breath, I pushed two fingers inside me as far as they could reach and gasped when I felt one of them. Too deep to pull them out.
Maybe… Maybe I could squeeze them out.