Page 16 of Darkest Dredge

I couldn’t even begin to understand the language and the dark magic behind it. Most scientists dismissed this kind of thing as fiction. I was of the mind that all science felt like magic at one point, until the explanation was discovered.

His eyes gleamed, brighter than they ever had before. Brighter than what should have been possible. It wasn’t a trick of the light, or my imagination, or even the rum.

Noah’s head jerked at an unnatural angle, making me jump with a yelp.

Choking out more words I didn’t understand.

“Bea… trice… R’lyeh…”

Chapter Nine

Beatrice

At first, it seemed as though Noah was having a seizure. Panic cracked through me like gunfire. “Are you okay?”

I couldn’t see his eyes, or any other part of his face for that matter, which made reading his expression impossible. Going off body language alone, something was wrong.

The sound of creaking wood sawed through the fog of dread encasing my head. “Captain? Noah?”

My stomach flipped with fear when it dawned on me that it wasn’t wood making that sound.

It was his bones.

Noah’s body shifted horribly inside of his skin as it began to stretch and elongate. His skeleton seemed to be breaking and reshaping itself as his body grew. Taller. More muscular. Noah wasn’t a hairy man, but he wasn’t baby smooth either. His dark hair vanished in a blink, and his skin changed hue—becoming green and velvet soft.

And the mask, oh fuck, the mask. It fused with his face, becoming one with him like a parasitic creature who’d finally found a host to latch onto. As I watched the horror unfold, I wondered if that wasn’t exactly what was happening.

The mass of tendrils attached to his jaws came to life, lengthening and writhing with alien coordination.

All the breath disintegrated in my lungs.

The suckers. Countless nubs of flesh all puckered and twitching, each little suction cup desperate for something to grasp on to.

Noah’s mouth, if it was still there, disappeared under the mass of writhing tendrils that stretched down to his belt-line, and his nose was nothing more than a skeletal hole at the center of his monstrous physiognomy.

His eyes were the most striking thing of all. No longer amber, but gold—five of them, all gleaming with alien intelligence through the murk of the cabin.

The beast before me was easily eight feet tall now, and he had to stand at a hunch to fit inside the cabin.

So much muscle. He could easily weigh three times what he used to.

An intense combination of terror and fascination washed over me in a cold sweat. This was the mask’s doing.

It occurred to me that he must have felt something was off with the mask. When we were drinking in the galley, he’d turned it so the eyes were facing away from me.

I’d spotted the hesitance behind his expression, and he still put it on, all because I’d asked.

Guilt swallowed me whole.

There was no way either of us could have known this would happen. Still. It was stupid not to secure the artifact until it was back home in a lab where we could study it in a secure location.

But I’d been drunk with rum and lust.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Tamping down on my nerves, I forced my breathing steady and spoke to the beast in as calm a tone as I could muster. “N-Noah? Are you in there?”

No answer. It only blinked at me. None of its eyelids moved in sync with each other, making for an eerie toad-like effect that left my mouth dry, and—to my horror—my pussy wet.