Page 20 of Currents of Desire

I look at the wall of clouds. The eye is passing. The wind is starting to pick up again, a low whistle that will soon turn into a scream.

“Then I will die here,” I say. “In this box.”

“No,” Jack says firmly. He grabs my arm, careful not to touch the cracked skin. “No. I didn’t pull you out of the mud to watch you turn to dust.” He looks around wildly, his eyes landing on the bathroom window. “The bathtub,” he says. “We filled it, but it’s fresh water.”

He looks at me, a desperate idea forming in his eyes. “I have salt,” he says. “In the pantry. Rock salt. Cooking salt. Bags of it. I was going to use it for… it doesn’t matter.”

He grabs my hand again. “Come inside,” he commands. “Now.”

I let him pull me back into the house. The air inside feels even drier now, suffocating. My skin itches, a thousand tiny needles pricking at my nerves. The glow in my chest, usually a steady blue pulse, is flickering. It is dim like a dying ember.

I stumble as we cross the threshold. My legs feel heavy like stone. Jack catches me, his arm going around my waist. He takes my weight without hesitation.

“I’ve got you,” he grunts. “I’ve got you.” He carries me toward the bathroom. I lean against him, my head on his shoulder. His body heat and the steady thump of his heart. It is the only anchor I have left.

The storm is returning. The wind slams into the house again, shaking the foundation. The light from the eye is gone, swallowed by the gray. But as my vision blurs and the cracks in my skin widen, I realize something.

I am afraid of leaving him.

And that terrifies me more than the dryness ever could.

CHAPTER 8

Jack

I spin around to see Nerida is on her knees, one hand clutching the bathroom doorframe, the other scrabbling at her throat. The gray T-shirt I gave her is soaked through with sweat, but her skin…

God, her skin.

It looks like a dried riverbed. The beautiful, iridescent sheen is gone, replaced by a dull, ashy gray that seems to be flaking away before my eyes.

“Nerida!”

I’m at her side in a second, sliding my arms under her. She is burning up. Not the fever-heat of a human infection, but a dry, radiating heat, like a stone left out in the desert sun.

“Water,” she rasps, her voice a terrifying sound of grinding gravel. “Need… pressure. Salt.”

I scoop her up. She feels lighter than she did last night. It’s as if the moisture evaporating from her body is taking her substance with it. I kick the bathroom door open wider and practically throw her into the tub.

The water is still there from earlier, lukewarm and stagnant. I turn the tap on full blast, desperate to add more, to cover her completely. She sinks beneath the surface, her hair fanning out like dying kelp.

But as the water rises over her chest, she doesn’t relax. She thrashes. “No,” she chokes out, surfacing with a splash that sends water sloshing onto the tiles. “Too… fresh. It burns. It’s… empty.” She coughs, and a spray of something dark hits the white porcelain. Blood. But it’s thick, almost black.

“I need… the ocean,” she whispers, her eyes rolling back in her head. The bioluminescent lights on her skin are flickering like dying fluorescent tubes, stuttering, dimming, and failing.

I look out the window. The eye is still overhead, that eerie circle of blue, but the edges are fraying. The wall of the storm is creeping back.

“I can’t get you to the ocean,” I tell her, the panic rising in my throat. “The surge is too high. It’s full of sewage, trees, and power lines. If I put you in that, the debris will kill you before the salt saves you.”

She grips the edge of the tub, her fingernails scratching into the enamel. A crack appears on her shoulder, a literal fissure in her skin, revealing raw, red flesh beneath.

“Then… I die,” she whispers.

“No,” I snap. “No, you don’t.”

I rake a hand through my hair, my mind racing. Salt. She needs salt. Not a shaker of table salt, but the heavy stuff. The real stuff.

I think of the pantry. I have a bag of rock salt, maybe a kilo. It won’t be enough, though. It won’t even make a dent in a tub this size. I need concentration, something industrial.