Page 13 of Currents of Desire

“Warm,” I whisper.

My voice is different now. The dual-tone harmonic of the deep is gone, stripped away with my scales. My voice is higher, clearer, and sounds more human, but it still carries a strange, liquid cadence.

Jack shudders. His hands tighten on my waist, his fingers digging into the soft flesh. He looks like he wants to push me away, to run from the alien thing in his arms, but he doesn’t. He holds me tighter.

“You’re freezing,” he says, his voice rough.

“You are burning,” I reply.

I look at his throat and see the pulse hammering there, right beneath the skin. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. It is a frantic, terrified rhythm.

I could bite him. It would be so easy. My teeth are still sharp, though smaller now. I could tear out that throat and drink the heat directly from the source.

But I don’t.

I rest my forehead against his chest. I listen to his heart, let his heat seep into my cold, new bones. The Shift has taken everything from me. It has left me weak, trembling, and flightless.

But I am not alone.

I have a source of heat.

I have a guardian.

I have a mark.

And right now, standing in the wreckage of his bathroom, shivering in the circle of his arms, that is enough.

CHAPTER 5

Nerida

The sky screams.

It’s a sound that vibrates in the roots of my teeth, and a roar that dwarfs the breaking of any wave I have ever known. Thunder. It tears through the roof, shaking the timber bones of the structure around us. And with that violent crescendo, the artificial sun in the ceiling flickers, buzzing like a dying insect, and finally succumbs.

The bathroom plunges into suffocating blackness.

For a heartbeat, there is nothing. The world simply ceases to exist, leaving only the ringing in my ears and the sudden, frantic rhythm of the human beside me. Then, my biology answers the dark.

Deep within my cells, the ancient chemistry of the trench ignites. The bioluminescence on my skin, a pale, pulsing map under the harsh electric glare, suddenly flares into a brilliant, sharp glow. Azure lines and constellations swirl across the slope of my chest, spiraling down the length of my new, strange legs, and pooling in the delicate webs between my fingers. I’m no longer just a girl in a bathroom but a ghost of blue fire in a dead room, a living constellation illuminating the tiles.

“Dammit,” Jack hisses from the darkness.

Then, another death occurs. The low, constant hum that vibrates through the floorboards. The machine that breathes cold air into this dry box sputters and cuts out.

The silence that follows is heavy, almost physical. Without the machine pushing back the storm, the atmosphere in the house shifts instantly. The air grows thick, pressing against my skin with a wet, suffocating weight. The humidity skyrockets, turning the room into a swamp within seconds. To a human, it might have been stifling, a miserable oppression of heat and moisture, but to me, it’s strangely comforting. It feels like the pressure of the deep, like the heavy, crushing blanket of the ocean wrapping around me once more. My skin, which begins to itch with dryness, greedily drinks in the moisture.

I push away from Jack. My legs are still trembling, these new, unstable stilts of bone and meat feel so alien compared to the powerful thrust of a tail. Yet the darkness gives me confidence. I do not need eyes to see—in the absence of light, my other senses sharpen. I can feel the air currents swirling around the doorframe, the heat signatures radiating from the walls, and the electric charge of the storm lingering in the air.

I stumble out of the bathroom, my wet feet slapping against the tile.

“Hey! Wait!” Jack’s voice is sharp, laced with a panic that tastes sweet in the air.

A beam of yellow light cuts through the gloom like a handheld artificial sun. It sweeps wildly, jaggedly, catching the wet sheen of my shoulder, the curve of my hip, and the blue pulse of my markings. It dazzles me for a moment, blinding and harsh.

I ignore him. The need to understand my confinement is stronger than his command. I need to know the dimensions of my cage.

Crossing the threshold into the hallway, the texture beneath me changes. The floor is wood here, smooth and varnished, cool against the sensitive, uncallused soles of my feet. I trail my hand along the wall, my fingers reading the wallpaper’s texture, the raised floral patterns that mean nothing to me. A damp smear left by my touch marks my passing, a glistening trail like that of a sea snail.