Page 48 of Shielding Instinct

Hunching over to place their hands for balance, they were crabs skittering along the edge of a wave.

Around an outcropping, they found a young woman standing in hiking clothes, soaked head to foot.

With hands clutching chunks of hair, she looked out to sea.

Her chest heaved as she forced air into her lungs like a bellow, oxygenating a fire.

Then she tipped her head back, and her scream ripped the air, vibrating Petra’s skeleton until she could feel the tug on her tendons.

“Hey!” Petra shouted as she approached. “Hey!” Her voice was loud and commanding, but the woman didn’t notice.

Here were the bellows heating.

There was the scream.

Petra and Lucky turned toward the sea, scanning to see if they could decipher what was happening.

Petra stilled.

What was that?

Cocking her ear, focusing hard, she listened.

Could that be an echo?

No, the pitch wasn’t a lament but pain and terror.

And it was male.

Petra gripped Lucky’s arm and tapped her ear. They had to wait for a wave to come in—the normal kind of wave that she’d seen from the time they’d arrived.

It receded.

And nothing.

The woman was huffing again, and Petra folded a hand to her chest and swung it wide, backhanding the woman’s arm in a sting that brought her to her senses, pulling her out of whatever survival reaction her limbic had conjured.

“Be quiet,” Petra hissed. “I’m trying to hear.”

Another wave came and went.

There it was again. This time, instead of a scream, Petra heard, “Help! Help!”

She squeezed Lucky’s arm harder.

He was still wide-eyed, in shock from making his earlier save.

Understandably so.

Petra couldn’t imagine the bravery it took for this kid to leap from the safety of the cliff into the swell of the angry waters to grab a stranger by the hair and drag her back from the clasp of a hungry sea.

But Petra needed someone to snap out of it and help her figure out where that man could possibly be.

Petra saw nothing and no one who could be in danger.

The woman turned to them. “My fiancé. He was here. The wave.” She flung her arms. “He pushed me.” She pointed at the boulder, much like the one Petra had used to save herself.

This next wave was receding, and Petra held a finger to her lips and pointed another into the sky.

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