Page 7 of Currents of Desire

Ripping the canvas open further, I expose her side. The piece of driftwood is jagged, splintered, and driven deep into the soft flesh. The scales around it are shattered.

Cracking the seal on the whiskey, I take a long pull to ground myself, then pour the alcohol over my hands.

“This is going to hurt,” I tell her. “I’m sorry. But it has to come out.”

I dump the rest of the whiskey over the gash.

The sound she makes isn't human. It’s a high, piercing shriek that rattles the windowpanes and makes my teeth ache. She violently arches off the floorboards, her hand snapping up to lock around my wrist. Her grip is like a vise. The bones in my arm grind together as her claws bite into my skin.

I don't give myself time to think. I grab the slick piece of wood with my free hand and rip it out.

It gives way with a sickening tear. Dark blood surges up immediately, spilling over her ribs and soaking into the floorboards. I drop the splinter, grab a thick stack of trauma pads from the kit, and shove them hard against the hole. I lean all my weight into it, pinning her down to stem the bleeding.

The fight drains right out of her. Her grip on my wrist goes slack, and her head rolls to the side, hitting the floor with a dull thud.

“Stay with me,” I command, pressing down harder.

We stay like that for a long time. Me, kneeling in a pool of purple blood and whiskey, and her, breathing in shallow, ragged hitches. The lights flicker twice, then die completely with a loud pop from the transformer down the street.

In the darkness, I see her eyes. They are glowing with a faint, bioluminescent pulse, fixed directly on me.

“You better not eat me when you wake up,” I whisper into the dark.

She doesn’t respond, but her breathing is steadying.

Reaching for the roll of gauze, I gently ask her to lift herself. She understands the intent, groaning with effort as she lifts her torso just an inch. Sliding the bandage under her, I wrap it tight around her midsection and tie it off.

Sitting back against the refrigerator, I leave the machete on the floor between us. Perhaps it’s a peace offering or maybe just a surrender to the insanity of the night.

“I’m Jack,” I say.

Blinking, the nictitating membrane slides across her eye and back. She opens her mouth. I tense, expecting a hiss, but instead, she makes a sound. It’s a click, followed by a low, melodic trill that sounds like water running over stones.

“Right,” I say. “Nice to meet you.”

Closing my eyes, I listen to the rain hammer the roof and the steady, wet breathing of the thing from the deep.

CHAPTER 3

Nerida

Sand. Glass. A thousand invisible needles are scrubbing the moisture from my gills. The atmosphere here betrays me, a dry, scraping poison that violates my lungs with every desperate, heaving breath.

My world is weightless, a cradle of crushing dark and silence. But this place is heavy. Gravity acts as a physical enemy, a giant’s hand pinning me to the floorboards, flattening the delicate arch of my spine until the vertebrae grind together. My scales, stripped of their protective slime, feel tacky and tight. They begin to itch, a maddening burn that screams of desiccation, of a slow, crumbling death.

I try to keen, to summon the distress call of the pod, but my throat produces only a dry, pathetic click. The delicate filaments of my gills are sticking together, suffocating me from the inside out. Gray fog eats the edges of my vision, narrowing the world to a tunnel of pain. It smells of dust, dead wood, and dying things.

Then, the heat returns.

The land walker looms over me, a tower of flannel and violence. He smells of the storm, but beneath that lies a scent far more potent. Iron. Salt. Blood. My blood smeared on his chest, and his blood welling on his arm where my claws found purchase.

He rumbles words I do not know, the vibrations traveling through the floor and into my cheek. The sounds are low and guttural, lacking the harmonic resonance of the deep, but they carry a frantic energy. He sees the panic in my eyes. He sees the way my chest hitches, failing to pull oxygen from this thin, dry atmosphere. His eyes, the color of shallow reef sand, go wide.

He reaches down.

A growl rips through my chest. I am a hunter of the trench. I do not submit to the touch of another, certainly not a soft-skinned surface dweller. I bare my teeth, needle-sharp and ready, but the threat is hollow. My limbs are lead. I cannot swipe. I am nothing but meat on a slab, waiting for the butcher’s knife.

He ignores the teeth. He slides his arms under me, one beneath the aching curve of my tail, the other bracing my shoulders. His body is a furnace. He burns against my cold skin, a shock of dry, mammalian heat that makes me flinch, but I have no strength to fight it. The flannel of his shirt is rough, an abrasive texture against the sensitivity of my flank.