Page 47 of Enchantment of Silver and Sea
It had eaten a person.
It had eaten a person whole.
Was that Kieran? Nya? Cecil? Even Xiomara, I wouldn’t wish such a fate on.
I was crying then, in a way I hadn’t cried since I was a child. I was crying for someone. For Irene, or maybe even my parents. I couldn’t explain who I was crying for.
“Help!”
The scream came from nearby.
I whipped my head back and forth, scanning the waves until I caught sight of a dark shape. Then a wildly gesticulating hand. One of the Strangers, a teenage boy whose name I never caught.
Instinctively, I headed for him.
The ebbing of the ocean must have sucked me deeper, because I was now submerged up to my thighs. As I smashed through the onslaught, waves breaking against my face, it was only moments before I was in water up to my waist. Then my ribs.
A wave lifted me, and for the first time in my life, I knew what it was to be weightless. I kicked as hard as I could, trying to stay upright. As soon as the soles of my feet connected with the sand again, I continued on.
“Please! Help me!”
As I neared, I saw that the boy was screaming at me and also screaming at the world, eyes terror-stricken and unfocused. His blood clouded the water around him.
“I’m here!” I called back.
His curly head kept bobbing out of sight. Each time, I feared that he was gone. Then he would pop up in a slightly different spot than before, choking and sputtering. Behind him, the Leviathan was still swinging its mighty head andtail, teeth bared. Who knew how much more of it there was beneath the surface?
Then I had him. I grabbed the boy under one arm, my head over his shoulder, trying to pull him to shore.
“I’ve got you,” I repeated over and over, through his screams.
But he wasn’t calming down. The harder I pulled, the more he thrashed. Hysterical.
“Please!” I shouted. “I’ve got you!”
I could feel my feet slipping. A wave sailed over us, submerging us completely. When we resurfaced, we were both choking and sputtering.
“Please, I—”
And then I was down. Not just below the surface, but really down.
In his desperation, the boy had shoved me beneath him until my knees hit the bottom. I tried to resurface, but his arm smacked my face as it floundered. There was a tangle of limbs and the whirring of bloody water swirling around me, and then I was completely disoriented.
My brain blitzed through everything I’d ever read on swimming.
I kicked my feet again, trying to pull myself through the liquid, cupping my hands. But I wasn’t breaking the surface. I didn’t even know where the surface was anymore. I had swallowed saltwater on the way down, and my lungs burned with a pain I’d never experienced before. I wasn’t getting enough air.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I was drowning.
This was it. I was going to die.
For an uncertain amount of time, I thrashed there. The pain bordered on unbearable. The edges of my vision darkened.
And then there was a light.
Was I at the surface?
