by Rachel Caine
And the ocean was reacting to the fight. I could feel the growing agitation as energy fed into what was essentially a closed system . . . and I didn’t like where things were going.
“Hold on,” I told the girl breathlessly. “You’re going to be all right. Be calm, OK?” Then I formed a shell of air molecules around her, permeable enough to allow gas transfers, but solid enough to keep out the water. It was like a soap bubble, slightly tinted in the glimmer of the sunlight. I let go of her, and closed the bubble seamlessly behind me; she battered at the shell trying to reach me, but right now she was better off as she was. She’d calm down in a minute, once she realized that she was safe, dry and drifting towards shore (something I made sure of with an application of force in the right direction).
I sucked in a super-oxygenated breath and dived into the darkness.
The water was a chilly turquoise roof overhead, sparkling with glitter from the wavelets, but as I descended the blue deepened to twilight, then to darkness. Pressure increased, crushing in on me. I had several choices of how to handle it, but I went for the simplest; Earth powers allowed me to adjust my body chemistry to cope with the changes, and my ability to form complex chemical chains out of the air in my lungs and the water around me helped me come up with a kind of temporary rebreathing mixture, the kind deep-sea divers would use. Invisible shields helped my ears hold against the increasing stress; the last thing I needed was a punctured eardrum at this depth.
I adjusted the structure of my eyes, letting in more light, but even that failed as I descended. I had to rely on Oversight - a kind of overlay heads-up display that showed me the aetheric patterns of the world around me. It was unsettling how crowded this environment was, and how little of it I could see. Animals darted around me, mostly uninterested in something my size but a few clearly wondering if I could be a potential new protein source. I didn’t like sharks. Not at all.
But the strangest predator was yet to come, because I found David locked in battle with something that I didn’t recognize -and then, I did. Not from science, but from mythology.
A mermaid.
Well, to be fair, not so much a maid as a man. This creature had the upper-body structure of something like a human, although the muscles seemed to be moving in world-bendingly odd ways around bones that didn’t quite look right. I couldn’t see it clearly, and I instinctively wanted to. Needed to.
I called fire into a small, self-contained bubble between us, and lit up the sea.
The merman turned on me with the speed of a striking eel, and he’d have had me if David hadn’t gotten in the way. Well, I’d wanted a look, and I got one - a terrifying one. That was no romantic, Byronic prince of the sea. That was what you might get if you blended the Creature from the Black Lagoon with an albino shark, and gave it the muscular, iron-grey tail of a dolphin. He shimmered with iridescent scales in the bottled firelight, and his eyes were huge, all dark except for white vertical slits for pupils.
He had a lot of teeth, and they were all pointed at me.
I found myself swimming backwards, trying to put water between us as quickly as possible. There was something so utterly wrong about this thing that I felt sick, as if my understanding of the world had been turned upside down. Odd, because I lived in a world most normal people would find upsetting in the extreme.
David slammed a fist into the merman’s face with enough force to pulverize granite. The merman just hissed in fury and sank his teeth into David’s wrist. He had claws too, long bony things that scraped at David’s chest and opened pale gouges. No blood. David had changed his body structure far enough from human to prevent real damage.
“Get out of here!” he yelled at me. His words came loud and clear, if a bit oddly high-pitched. “Surface! Get to shore!”
He was right. If this creature was beyond David, it was beyond me too. I could feel the power inside of it radiating outwards; it was a match for the Djinn. The water-world equivalent, maybe; something Wardens rarely encountered, if ever - or survived, if they did.
I was going to follow David’s advice - really, I was.
But just as I started to arrow for the distant blue world above, something caught me by the ankle in a crushing grip.
Bony, astonishingly strong fingers.
I looked down, and in the murky swirls of Oversight, saw a second merman. No . . . this one really did seem to be a mermaid, complete with small, protruding breasts.
She wasn’t any prettier than the male of the species.
I’m not supernaturally muscular, but I have powers that your average mermaid might not expect, and I took full advantage of this. I sent a violent burst of energy crackling through my body, electrifying my skin and burning her hand where she gripped me. She let go and swiped at me with her claws. I mostly avoided the slice, but she drew shallow red stripes across the back of my right leg, just above the ankle. I responded by kicking her, hard, right in the bony part of her chest. She flipped her tail and righted herself almost instantly, and came for me with her shark-like jaws wide open.
I hardened the water between us to the consistency of gelatin. She tried to swim forwards, hit the wall and bounced, and I recognized the look of bafflement that sped across her fishy face. I was supposed to be easy prey, wasn’t I?
Not hardly.
Oddly enough, that seemed funny, although it wasn’t. I knew I should be afraid, but I was weirdly amused. In fact, I was choking back a manic attack of giggles, and losing my focus. The hardened water turned softer and she lunged for me again. I was able to hold her off, but the urge to laugh kept getting more and more insistent. I was breathing in and out way too fast to get the necessary benefit. Hyperventilating, I thought. My chest hurt. Nothing looked right.
David’s warm hand closed around my wrist, and I realized that I’d forgotten to re-oxygenate my mixture; black dots were swimming in front of my eyes, and I was starting to lose it. I relaxed and let David’s strength pull me towards the surface. My concentration had to be focused inwards, on adjusting my body to the changing pressure and closing up the wound on my leg. The last thing I wanted to do was attract sharks right now.
I saw the merman and his mate chasing us, rising out of the depths like pale fish, flickering in the twilight and struggling to adjust to the decompression as we neared the surface. They were deep-water creatures, and the female dropped off first, heading back to the safe, crushing darkness.
The merman’s bony claws brushed my foot, but failed to grab hold, and I saw him give a pained hiss of frustration before flipping his muscular tail and diving, heading straight for the bottom.
We broke the surface with so much speed we literally rose into the air about four feet, and then we splashed back down. David’s arms went around me, warm and real, and I dragged in breath after breath of moist, sweet air.
“I told you to get to the surface!” he said. “Do you have to fight with everything you see?”
I didn’t bother to argue that I was, in fact, trying to flee at the time. “I’m OK,” I said, which was the answer he was looking for even if he wasn’t asking. “I’m OK, David.”
He let out a breath, and I felt his arms tighten around me.’ ‘This time you are,” he said. “No more games, Jo. Back to shore.”
I didn’t have to swim, only float; David towed me, making for shore with steady, tireless strokes. I caught sight of the bubble I’d formed around our rescued girl. She was almost to shore now, swept in on the waves. I popped the bubble as the final wave crested, and she toppled into the surf and ended up on the sand, caught up in Calvin Harper’s arms.
A happy ending, after all.
“What are they?” I asked David. “Those . . . creatures?”
He said a word I couldn’t understand, much less pronounce. It sounded like dolphin clicks. “They’re powerful,” he said. “Even for the D j inn, they’re dangerous. To humans, even to Wardens—”
“Deadly. Got that part.” I coughed out a stray mouthful of salty ocean and pu
shed streaming hair off my face. The surf was pounding now as we neared the shore. I could feel the ocean bottom rising to meet us, and the warmer waters felt welcoming. Almost safe. “What set them off?”
“Nothing. They hunt for prey. Sometimes it’s humans,” he said. “But once they realized I was in the water, and you were a Warden, they wanted us.”
“To eat?”
“You, maybe. Me, to keep,” he said. “They have Djinn trapped below, not many, but over the millennia there have been a few, here and there. We can’t save them.”
I imagined a zoo, far in the dark, crushing emptiness of the deep ocean - Djinn, held captive, unable to break free. I imagined that happening to David, and felt ill. “What do they want them for?”
David shook his head. “We don’t know.”
That was . . . unsettling.
David slowed our progress as our feet touched the sandy bottom. A wave crested and lifted, then lowered us gently down.
I turned into his embrace.
His lips tasted of salt, hot metal, urgency. His skin was warmer than it should have been, as warm as bronze left in the sun, and it felt so good against my chilled flesh. I shivered against him and held on as tides swept us towards land.
“Well,” I whispered, as our lips parted for a breath, “you wanted me in the water. I’m here.”
“So you are.” His hands travelled over me, pouring heat into me with every brush of his fingers on my skin.
“We should check on the girl,” I said - not really feeling the urgency though, because his touch was waking all kinds of other thoughts instead.
I saw it mirrored in his smile. “She’s being well cared for,” he said. And he was right, absolutely right. A small crowd of people had formed around Cal and his girl, and I saw the distant flashing of emergency lights heading in from the street.
I could even see that Muscles was out of any danger; his friends were digging him out of his hole. After that, and the arrival of police and paramedics, they’d be withdrawing from the field of battle as fast as their stumpy legs could carry them.
David recaptured my focus with a gentle kiss on my forehead. “I love you, Joanne.”
It wasn’t that he hadn’t said it before, or that he hadn’t meant it, it was the intensity with which he spoke that made me shiver down to my bones. I put my arms around his neck and stared into his eyes - hot copper, shimmering with passion and almost-alien power. “I know,” I said. “I can feel it, every moment. And I love you, David. More than my life.”
His thumbs smoothed wet hair back from my cheeks and lingered in a caress. “Then I’m very lucky,” he said. “Luckier than I’ve ever been in all my lifetimes. And I’m going to make sure your life is long and rich, my love. Despite your willingness to throw it away.”
He kissed me, and this time it was full of fire and need, and it melted me into a hot, glowing puddle inside. I hardly felt the waves lifting and rolling us; if the ocean chose to strike at us, it would find me entirely unaware.
But I surrendered to David, and I knew, in that moment, that he could protect me. He would. Not from the obvious threats I faced every day, by chance or choice, but from myself.
His hands dragged over me and, where they touched, my wet bikini faded away. Top first, and then bottom. He’d already disposed of his swim trunks.
I could feel how much he wanted me, and it took my breath away. He slid his fingers slowly from the notch of my collarbone, down between my breasts, gliding through the warm water all the way to the softness between my legs.
I bit my lip on a gasp and closed my eyes, giving myself up to the dizzying sensation of his hands, his fingers, his mouth waking sharp points of heat along my throat. The water warmed around us until the caress of the tides felt as overpowering as David’s touch - a thousand individual whispers over my skin, shredding my focus into a gauzy mist of sheer pleasure.
I wrapped myself around him, guiding him into the core of me, and he cradled me in his arms - weightless in this beautiful and silent moment, as if we had left all bounds of earth behind. The lovemaking was slow, thorough, sweetly tense. His skin tasted of the sea, of life, of all the beauty in the world. I let myself drift with him, helpless on the currents, feeling the waves of pleasure crest even as the other waves, the ones fuelled by wind and water, pounded over us.
David wanted me in water. I wanted him forever.
There, off the beach, in one stolen afternoon, we both got our wish.
Author Biographies
Rachel Caine
Award-winning author of the Weather Warden, Red Letter Days, and Morganville Vampires series.
rachelcaine.com
Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters 162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2009
“Blue Crush” © by Roxanne Conrad. First publication, original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author.
The right of Trisha Telep to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
UK ISBN 978-1-84529-941-5
First published in the United States in 2009 by Running Press Book Publishers
All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher.
US Library of Congress number: 2008942197 US ISBN 978-7624-3651-4
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