Page 28 of Currents of Desire

I turn to the second creature. It’s dragging itself toward the door, leaving a trail of slime and blood. It is losing the will to fight.

I let it go. It will carry the message back to the trench. ‘This territory is death.’

I stand there for a long moment, the adrenaline slowly draining away, leaving me cold and hollow. The monster recedes, sinking back beneath the surface of my mind, leaving me standing in the wreckage of the home of the man I love.

I can’t look at him.

I stare at my hands. They are stained black. I brought this here. I brought the violence of the food chain into his sanctuary. He’s seen me kill and tear a throat out with my teeth. He has seen the thing I truly am. He will be horrified and sick, and he will tell me to leave, to go back to the water where monsters belong.

I close my eyes, waiting for the rejection, waiting for the sound of the gun being leveled at me.

“Nerida.”

His voice was quiet. Steady.

I flinch. I don’t want to turn around and see the disgust in his eyes.

“Nerida, look at me.”

Slowly, painfully, I turn.

Jack is standing amidst the shattered furniture, the flare gun on the floor. He isn’t looking at the dead creature or at the blood on the walls.

He’s looking at me.

His face is pale, and his hands are trembling slightly, but his eyes are clear with no horror in them. There’s shock, certainly, but beneath it, something else. Recognition.

He walks toward me, stepping over the debris, ignoring the black slime on the floor. He stops inches from me. I hiss involuntarily, backing away, holding my gore-soaked hands up to warn him off.

“Don’t,” I rasp, my voice still distorted by the shift. “I am… dirty. I am dangerous.”

Jack reaches out. In his hand is a thick, white towel from the bathroom.

“You’re alive,” he simply says.

He closes the distance between us, uncaring about the heat radiating from my skin or the black blood that will ruin his clothes. He lifts the towel and wipes my cheek. The gesture is so gentle it feels like a physical blow. I freeze, entirely undone by the drag of soft cloth against my scales.

“I tried to help,” he says, his voice cracking slightly. “I wasn’t fast enough.”

“You… you stayed,” I whisper, staring at him. “You saw.”

“I saw you protecting me,” he replies and moves the towel down to my neck, cleaning the gore from my throat. “I saw you fighting for us.” He drops the towel, landing with a soft plop in the mess on the floor. He takes my face in his hands, his thumbs stroke the sharp ridges of my cheekbones, unbothered by the scales or the monster.

“I told you,” he says, leaning his forehead against mine, his eyes locking with my silver ones. “I’m yours. That doesn’t change because things get messy.”

A sob tears from my throat, fracturing into a snarl as I collapse against him. He catches me, his arms locking around my slick, bloodied back to hold me close.

The storm rages on, battering the house, trying to tear it down. But inside, amidst the corpses and the wreckage, I’m anchored.

I was held, and for the first time in my life, the darkness doesn’t feel lonely.

CHAPTER 11

Jack

For hours, the world has been nothing but a cacophony of the screaming wind, hammering rain, splintering of wood, and wet, tearing sounds of violence. But now, the volume has been cut. The wind has dropped from a howl to a breathless gasp. The rain has thinned to a drizzle that taps hesitantly against the remaining glass.

I am standing in the ruin of my kitchen. The island is cracked in half. There is a corpse, a massive, gray thing that smells of low tide and copper, heaped in the corner like a pile of discarded wet laundry.