My God. Is this a…
River finished my sentence for me, her voice choked with horror. “A mermaid?”
She screamed again as the creature brought a fist down against the reinforced glass. She slammed against it so forcefully, I felt the floor beneath me tremor. If she continued to hit like that, I didn’t know how much longer the glass would hold up.
I moved closer to her, baring my fangs and giving her a menacing look, hoping to scare her back.
It didn’t. If anything, it only aggravated her. Now she began bringing both fists down at the same time. I could hear her snarling through the water.
Dropping into the control seat, I ramped up the speed of the submarine suddenly, tilting downward, then upward, sideways right and left, hoping to jerk her off the vessel. But she remained clinging as though her hands had suckers on them.
There was a thud against the roof of the submarine. A few seconds later, another equally hideous creature slid down the window, taking up a place next to the first. This one appeared to be badly injured, however. She had a deep bloodied gash in her torso. It was bleeding so much, it was staining the water.
Mermaids. What are they doing here?
Is there a gate nearby? Somewhere in the water? How else would they have gotten here?
I had left The Shade with a map of gates connecting the human and supernatural realms. Unfortunately, it had later been confiscated by hunters, but I couldn’t remember noticing a gate in any seas or oceans. I could only guess that the map was not comprehensive.
The two creatures began punching the glass in unison.
Crap.
In my panic, I performed maneuvers with the submarine that I hadn’t thought I was capable of in my continued attempt to throw them off, but it was futile.
“Ben,” River gasped. She clutched the arms of her seat with white knuckles. “There’s another one.”
Sure enough, barely a second later, another slammed against the glass. Now all three pounded away.
I stopped trying to shake them off and this time focused on rising to the surface as fast as I possibly could. As the first crack formed in the glass, we burst up above the waves.
These were fish. I expected them to immediately start gasping and writhing, but they did no such thing. Although their natural habitat was in the water, they could clearly survive for some time above the surface. Encouraged by the crack that had appeared, they beat harder against the glass.
I grabbed River’s hand and pulled her out of the control room, slamming the door behind us.
Gripping her head, I forced her to look me in the eye. “Lock yourself in a cabin. Don’t come out until I say. Understand?”
She looked terrified, but nodded and raced away.
A hellish screech assaulted my eardrums as I hurried up the ladder and pushed open the hatch in the roof of the submarine. Hauling myself out into the night, I glared down at the three creatures still clinging to the window. I was furious to see that one of them had managed to punch a fist right through the glass by now. She didn’t seem to be at all concerned about the fact that her fist was now a bloody mess. She was still gripping the jagged glass, trying to make the hole bigger.
Extending my claws and baring my fangs, I moved toward them, slashing the nearest one to me across the face. She howled and went tumbling down into the water.
One of the remaining two launched toward me with alarming speed, her hands outstretched and aiming for my foot. I dodged her, and she went rolling off the side of the submarine, back into the sea. The third one—with an injured torso—had now managed to make a hole big enough to slip through. Grabbing hold of a pole so I wouldn’t go skidding into the water, I reached for her. She slipped through too quickly, and although I managed to grab the tip of her tail, it was too slippery for me to hold onto.
I was about to slip through after her when a squelching sound came from above me on the roof. Turning to face the open hatch, I was just in time to see a tail disappear through it, and then a loud thud came from inside the submarine.
Damn.
Why the hell do they want to get in our submarine?
Rushing through the open hatch, I laid eyes on another creature squelching away from me across the corridor. But this one looked different than the others. With shorter hair, broad square shoulders, and a thick waist, this was clearly a male.
I caught up with him in a few strides and gripped the back of his neck. He squirmed beneath me and twisted round on his back to look up at me, revealing a face that was no less hideous than the women’s. He tried to bite my wrist with his sharp black fangs, but I struck him hard across the face. I was about to slit his throat when I noticed that he was wheezing badly. He looked so ill and pathetic as he lay beneath me, I decided to just leave him there and deal with the other who had made her way toward River’s side of the submarine.
Following the trail of dark blood the mermaid had left along the floor, I found her, to my surprise, curled up in a fetal position in a corner of an empty cabin. The fin at the end of her long tail was splayed out to cover her face. Her whole body trembled as she too had begun to make a wheezing sound.
I hurried back along the corridor to fetch the merman and dragged him into the cabin along with the female. I wasn’t sure what to do with them. I really didn’t want to kill them, but I also didn’t see the point in throwing them back in the water when they clearly didn’t want to be there. It seemed that they would rather die up here. Locking them both inside, I headed back to the control room to examine the broken screen.
I breathed out in frustration. Great. After all the trouble we’d undergone to find a submarine, now we were going to have to spend the rest of the journey above the waves.