Page 29 of Currents of Desire

But I’m not looking at the monster. I’m looking at the light.

Through the shattered sliding glass door, the sky is bruising purple and gray, but a tear rips through the clouds. A single, sharp shaft of sunlight pierces through, hitting the muddy floodwaters below the house. It’s a cruel light that illuminates the wreckage. It shows me the mud slicked across the floorboards, the blood spray on the walls, and Nerida collapsing in my arms.

She is incredibly heavy.

Just minutes ago, she was a force of nature, a creature of torque and muscle that could snap bones like dry twigs. Now, she is dead weight, her long tail dragging limply against the ruined floor.

“I’ve got you,” I say, my voice raspy. I scoop her up, straining under the dense, awkward mass of her lower half. I carry her toward the sofa, which is miraculously still upright, though soaked. “Just rest. I’ve got you.”

I lower her onto the cushions, her massive tail spilling over the edge and resting heavily on the floorboards. I see the tremor immediately. It starts in her hands and ripples up her arms, shaking her shoulders and traveling down the length of her tail. It isn’t the shivering of cold but the vibration of a machine running out of fuel.

Her skin, usually a lustrous, pearlescent wonder, looks dull. The vibrant blue bioluminescence that traces her ribs is flickering out, pulsing weakly like a dying bulb. The scales along her tail that had hardened into armor during the fight are flaking, turning ash-gray and brittle.

She looks small. Terrifyingly small.

I grab the towel, the one I used to wipe the blood from her face, and try to wrap it around her shoulders, but she hisses. It’s a sound of pain, not aggression.

“It burns,” she whispers. Her voice is a dry rattle. “The air… it’s too dry. It scrapes.”

“I’ll get water,” I say, panic flaring in my chest. “I can fill the tub again. The pipes might be broken, but I have bottled water. I can…”

“Jack.” She reaches out and grips my wrist. Her hand is cold. Not the cool, refreshing temperature of the sea, but the clammy cold of meat left on a counter, and her grip is weak. “Stop,” she says.

“I can fix this,” I insist, though I know I’m lying. I’m looking at the blood under her fingernails and the gray pallor of her cheeks. “We just need to get you hydrated. You used too much energy fighting them. You need to rest.”

“If I stay…” she says, looking up at me with eyes that are slowly losing their silver-mirror shine, returning to a dark, human brown, “… I rot.”

The word hits me like a physical blow. Rot.

“Don’t say that.”

“It is the truth,” she says. She pulls her hand away and looks at it. The webbing between her fingers is cracking. “My body… it was made for the pressure and the cold. I pushed the change too far for too long. The land is rejecting me, Jack. And I am rejecting it.” She takes a shallow, wheezing breath.

“And the scent,” she adds. “The pheromones. They are still here. If I stay… more will come. Stronger ones. I cannot fight them again, not like this. And you…” She looks at the shotgun lying on the floor, then back to me. “You cannot fight them alone.”

I want to argue. I want to tell her that I’ll board up the windows, buy a thousand pounds of sea salt and turn the bathroom into an ocean, and I’ll buy a bigger gun. I want to scream that it isn’t fair, we just found each other, the storm was supposed to be the hard part, and the morning was supposed to be the reward.

But I look at her, really look at her, and the argument dies in my throat.

She is drying out.

She is dying.

Keeping her here is an act of murder.

“You have to go back,” I say. The words taste like ash.

She nods, a single, jerky motion. “Now, before the tide turns completely.”

“Okay.” I swallow the lump in my throat. “Okay. Let’s get you to the water.”

I don’t ask if she can move. I just bend down and gather her into my arms again. She wraps her arms around my neck, her heavy tail hanging limply over my arm as I heave her up. I stagger toward the door, carrying her over the debris of my life, the shattered lamp, the overturned books, the dead intruder.

We step out onto the deck. The air is thick and humid, smelling of ozone and wet earth. The storm has passed, but it has left the world raw.

The stairs down to the ground level are slick with rain and slime. I take them one by one, moving sideways, terrified of slipping under her weight. Step. Pause. Step. Pause. I can feel the heat of her body fading against my chest, the heavy fluke of her tail dragging over the wet wooden steps behind us.

Beneath the house, the ground is a slurry of mud and churned-up grass. The floodwaters are receding, pulling back toward the creek that leads to the bay, and eventually, the open ocean. The water is brown and churning, carrying branches and trash, but to Nerida, I know it looks like a highway. It looks like home.