Page 22 of Currents of Desire

“I need salt,” I say, breathless. “The heavy stuff. The crystals you sell to the deep trawlers.”

She stares at me. Then, she sniffs the air.

Her nose wrinkles. She inhales deeply, her nostrils flaring.

“You smell all musky,” she murmurs. “And blood and…” she pauses, her milky eyes widening slightly. “Reef Mer.”

I freeze. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t lie to a hybrid, Jack,” she hisses, though there’s no malice in it, only a strange, detached curiosity. “You’ve got one in your tub, don’t you? A stray. Blown in by the cyclone.”

I don’t have time for this. “She’s dying. She’s drying out. The fresh water is killing her.”

Mrs. Gable stares at me for a long, agonizing second. Then, the slat slams shut.

“Wait!” I yell, raising my fist to pound again.

But the door groans and swings inward.

Mrs. Gable stands there in the gloom of the shop. She is tiny, hunched over, wearing a yellow fisherman’s slicker that is three sizes too big. In her hand, she holds a heavy glass jar. It’s filled with crystals the size of my thumb, dark blue and jagged.

“Deep salt,” she says, holding it out. “Harvested from the Mariana Trench. Highly concentrated. It mimics the pressure and salinity of the crushing depths.”

I reach for it, but she pulls it back.

“Listen to me,” she says, her voice dropping to a serious, vibrating low. “This isn’t bath salts. This is potent. It will burn her. It will hurt like hell, but it will stabilize her cellular structure. It will stop the desiccation.”

“Give it to me,” I demand.

She shoves the jar into my chest. “Half the jar. No more, or you’ll pickle her alive.”

“Thank you,” I gasp, clutching the jar like it is the Holy Grail.

“Go,” she commands, pointing a gnarled finger toward the door. “The eye is closing. Run, Jack Ford, before the sky falls.”

I run.

I throw myself back into the ute, tossing the jar onto the passenger seat. As I slam the door, the wind hits.

It didn’t build up this time.

It just… arrived.

A gust slams into the side of the ute, rocking it on its suspension. Debris skitters across the hood—shingles, branches, and a plastic lawn chair. The eerie blue circle above is gone, swallowed by a bruising purple darkness that rolls in from the East like a tsunami of cloud.

I spin the ute around, tires screaming.

The drive back is a blur of adrenaline and terror. The wind is already howling, tearing at the trees that had survived the first round. Rain begins to fall, not in drops, but in sheets, hammering the cab’s roof so loud I can’t hear the engine.

I drive like a madman. I run a stop sign that’s bent at a forty-five-degree angle. I swerve around a dumpster, sliding down the middle of the road.

Don’t die, I pray, gripping the wheel. Just hold on. I’m coming.

I think of her in the tub. The way she had looked at me. ‘Don’t leave me.’

I spent years hating the water, the chaos of it, and the way it took things without asking. And now, here I am, racing through a hurricane to save a creature made of the very thing I feared.

I skid into my driveway just as the sky opens up completely. The rain is torrential, a vertical river. The wind screams, tearing a gutter loose from the roof with a screech of metal.