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He couldn’t keep me safe now, not when he couldn’t even leave the boat. My life was in my own hands, and I needed to see what I was up against.
Darkness should have crowded my vision, but my eyelids opened under the murky water, and long-forgotten magic rippled beneath my irises, distorting and reshaping my sight.
The old magic flowed readily, and my senses sharpened, eagerly awakening after years of disuse. The effect was dizzying. Opaque lines and phantom shapes of unknown objects crowded my vision, and I strained to focus. It was almost too much stimulus for my brain to take in, but I needed to make sense of things if I wanted to escape.
Escape?Yeah, that didn’t seem likely.
Even with magical adrenaline pumping my perception into overdrive, my brain still couldn’t find the command that would control my tail. I had to think of something.
“I’M AN ANCHOR!” a deep voice roared, reverberating through the overhead water like the call of a horn. A splash of gold cut through the murk as the long slash of a tailfin moved through my vision.
A tailfin? Now that seemed really unlikely.
Ribbons of some dark material fell around me in a shower of debris, and it wasn’t until a scrap danced over my nose that I recognized them for what they were: shreds of denim.
Leander’s lengthy body had plunged into the water, and the ocean seemed to brighten with his arrival. Possessive arms curled over mine, locking me against an immovable wall of muscle, and a spine-chillingcrackthundered through the water as the frontal spine of Leander’s golden tail whipped, striking my assailant flat on the side of the jaw.
The pressure against my tail gave way as the attacker’s mouth opened, revealing innumerable rows of jagged, spear-like teeth. Thrown off by the unexpected blow, the creature reared back, silently retreating into a dark bed of seagrass below. All I could see was the dark slash of a fin cutting a line through the water as it vanished into the shadows.
“Fuck.” Leander scraped a hand across the underside of the boat, and the barnacles there roused under his fingertips, emitting a soft amber glow that projected down to the seafloor. Twirling and twinkling, a lone scale reflected the barnacle’s light back at me before disappearing into an overgrown bed of algae coating the seabed.
My scale.
Or at least it had been. I certainly wasn’t going to go looking to get it back.
Dread filled me, and I studied my tail in the light of the barnacles regardless. A red haze collected in the water next to the bigger gashes where my scales had been. Thankfully, it didn’t look like anything I couldn’t recover from when I got the heck out of here and transformed back.
I let in a shaky breath. Thank Poseidon the original mer tails had been crafted with magic, making them substantially more armored than the conventional fish I gutted each morning.
Leander didn’t seem to share my relief. A hiss whistled through his lips as he folded me up in his arms to further inspect my tail.
“That fucking fish is gonna pay,” he growled, but my brain hadn’t finished processing why he’d even transformed into a merman in the first place. Was the curse already broken? My heart beat faster at the thought.
If that were true, then they wouldn’t even need me.I could go home today and never have to go in the water again.
But what was it he yelled out as he transformed?
“You’re an anchor?” I said, testing the phrase. His only response was another growl, his eyes wild with fury as they scoured the seagrass. Well, okay then. That sure cleared things up.
“Want out. WANT OUT.”
A raspy voice suddenly invaded my mind, loud and invasive enough to suppress all my other thoughts.
“Want OUT.”
I winced—it wouldn’t stop. Scrunching my face, I pulled my hands to the sides of my ears, desperate to muffle the words bombarding my brain, though my efforts weren’t enough to silence it.
“Leander, I—I think…” Practically shouting, I fought to get the words out over the raucous scream knocking around my head. “I think it might—”
Every muscle in Leander’s body tensed, and my eyes shot back open.
Gray-brown skin peeked through the cover of the seagrass, the flesh dappled with a pattern of new and old scars. It disappeared again in a blink. My instincts gnawed at me. It wasn’t done with us yet.
The creature darted forward, parting willowy strands of seagrass as it went, its well-equipped mouth poised to strike at us again. When its monstrous torpedo of a body came into the light of the amber glow, I knew exactly what we were up against.
A bull shark.
One arm holding me up suddenly retreated, and my tail slid down Leander’s body like a wet sack of sand. His hand tightened into a fist. He drew his right shoulder back.
