Page 10 of The Demons in the Deep: Extended Edition
But when she got belowdecks and reached her tiny cabin, she scrunched herself onto the narrow bunk, pulled her knees up to her chest, and let herself shake with quiet sobs.
Because shehadfelt the dipping thrill, the fluttering in her chest, the heat rolling over her skin. Only one person had ever triggered that reaction in her, and he wasn’t even human.
Rake was dead, along with her chances of ever feeling those exquisite, bewildering sensations again.
Broken, abnormal, perverted. She must be all those things. Why else would she be dead to the normal sensations of her own kind, yet wakened by the touch of a monster?
4
Rake was weary of swimming.
When he was young, and he’d thought of the open ocean beyond the mermaids’ domain, he’d pictured it as a place teeming with inexhaustible, beautiful life. And it was, but it also held dangers he’d never imagined. Dangers that exhausted him as he swam persistently toward Stragnoag.
Once, when slithering through indigo water between tall columns of black rock, he came face-to-jaws with a shark twenty times his length. He barely evaded its hungry maw, and he spent a long while in a crack of the rocks, fretting over the lost time while the shark slid dead-eyed past his hiding place again, and again, and again. At last it glided off in search of easier prey, but Rake was leery of the open water for hours afterward.
He fell asleep in a sea cave that night and woke to find his body entirely wrapped up with frilly eels that glowed orange and pink. He panicked at first, but they didn’t seem to be venomous, so he carefully shook them off and kept moving.
Then there was the wall of quivering fish, half of whom glowed scarlet intermittently—some sort of mating ritual, Rake guessed. He swam up to the surface to avoid them and immediately encountered giant rays leaping from the water and slapping back down onto it with a thunderous crack. He watched them for a moment as they sprang out of the sea, white bellies flashing, spray glittering as they arced through the air and crashed back down to the undulating surface. Strange behavior, but fascinating. Probably related to mating again. Waseverythingrelated to mating?
He swam along the surface for a while, until a huge pair of claws smashed through the waves and clutched his body, yanking him from the water.
Rake yelled, twisting to reach the short spear he’d slung on his back. The enormous bird poked its head down toward him, cocking it curiously, inspecting him with one striated yellow eye. And then Rake realized it hadtwoheads, and he nearly dropped the spear. He managed to renew his grip and drive the weapon upward, skewering the bird’s stomach. It screeched in agonized shock and opened its claws, while Rake tumbled back into the welcoming depths.
Blood spiraled in thin threads from the scratches the bird had made in Rake’s flesh. He found some shillaweed, a gummy plant the breeders used to treat wounds after a mating session with the Queens, and he packed his wounds with it to staunch the blood. Despite his efforts, several sharks came shooting out of the dark, hunting him, and Rake had to speed ahead, propelling himself with his powerful tail and with occasional sweeps of his arms. His heart hammered against his ribs and his gills quivered, desperately trying to process enough air for his body.
By the time the sharks gave up, Rake had covered more distance than he’d hoped to travel that day, making up for the earlier delay.
Weary as he was, he kept swimming, tugging the bits of shillaweed out of his cuts once they’d stopped bleeding. His kind healed faster than humans. He would be whole again soon.
At night he rose above the waves and checked his position against the stars. He’d committed Takajo’s map and accompanying star chart to memory, and the images in his mind kept him on track for Stragnoag.
He had other images in his mind, too. The Horror had imprinted his brain with memories of underwater buildings crumbling, bursting, disintegrating as the Entity exploded from beneath the ocean floor and roared into the open sea. He even had a scrap of memory from the surface—a recollection of the human city that paralleled and adjoined the mermaids’ domain. That city had been a beautiful place of sloping walks and tall towers, until the Great Upheaval had flooded it with molten rock and hissing water.
But not everything had been ruined. According to the Horror and its counterparts, there were parts of both cities, above and below, that had not entirely collapsed. And perhaps those places held useful information, bits of technology—something to explain how humanity and mermaids had co-existed and shared scientific discovery.
Rake craved the secrets of those ruins with every muscle in his body. So he pressed on, through gloomy depths that winked with the seductive lights of skeletal predators; through maze-like reefs studded with moldering shipwrecks; through kelp forests where sunlight slanted in limpid golden rays; through violent rolling waves and sucking currents churned up by storms. Days merged into nights, until he couldn’t be sure how long he had traveled. He only knew his whole body was sore and his very scales seemed to ache. He’d pushed himself hard, so hard he was sure he must be catching up to theWind’s Favor, especially if anything had occurred to delay her.
In the daze of his weariness, he looked far ahead into the murky blue, and he thought he saw a swirl of something black, like rippling locks of hair. He imagined Kestra far ahead, facing him, beckoning him but constantly retreating, luring him onward. In his mind’s eye, her generous curves were just as luscious as ever, and she wore rippling garments of translucent green that ribboned away into the depths.
Somehow the fantasy wasn’t as tantalizing as he’d expected. She belonged to Flay, and that fact itched in his mind, spoiling his fun.
Flay. Just as beautiful as Kestra, in his own way. Rake recalled bobbing on the ocean’s surface, catching sight of theWind’s Favorand its golden-haired captain. He remembered the way the sun gilded Flay’s handsome face, the freedom and glory and beauty of him in that moment. And Rake remembered how he’d spied on Kestra and Flay in the captain’s cabin, when they touched each other in that soft, seductive way.
He wanted them—both of them—or wanted to be them. Wanted what they had. It looked so different from the rough mating habits of the Queens.
At the bare thought of the Queens and his mating duties, Rake’s entire exhausted body stiffened. An overwhelming panic raced through him from tail to throat. He nearly choked on the memories as his gills spasmed and his chest heaved.
He shot ahead through the gloom, trying to push the thoughts away. They were like claws, snagging at his tail, scraping his skin with the memory of a hundred phantom bites and slashes. He thrashed his tail and streaked faster ahead in an attempt to outpace them. He tried to focus on the rush of liquid past his face, on the ripple of liquid through his gills, on the taste of the water in this part of the ocean. Water had flavor and odor, different in every zone, and here the salty taste was blended with a metallic tang, and a hint of sourness that made him panic even more—it was a miasma of decay, an aftertaste of poison and death.
Rake gagged and then pressed his hand to his stomach in shock. He had never vomited until he’d gone on land and eaten human food, though tides knew he’d had occasion to feel ill, with all the grotesque and torturous things he’d seen in the Realm Below.
Instead of continuing to flee blindly, he halted and took a moment to breathe. He sorted through his memories, trying to find something, anything, to steady himself and give him strength. None of the usual images were working—nothing he’d received from the Horror and its fellows, nothing from his own life. Even the thought of Jewel didn’t inspire him—it made him anxious and guilty.
His heart thundered, vibrating through his whole body as he curled in on himself, alone in a dark abyss that smelled of toxin and teeth. He couldn’t see anything—not the surface, because it was night above—and not a rock, a fish, or a strand of kelp below. He felt tiny as a new spawn, vulnerable and weak.
Alone, alone, and empty except for the twisting horrors of his past.
He coiled tighter, clutching his own arms, dragging his sharp claws along his skin. Maybe he should claw a little deeper and let the blood come, let the predators slither out of the black and consume him. Then the wrenching anguish in his mind would be over. Would anyone except Jewel care if he didn’t come back?
