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Chapter Six
If the shark’s new red eyes weren’t proof enough that this was Denise, the fact that it was carrying me out of the cave instead of eating me did. Sure, I knew that being branded by a shapeshifting demon years ago had given Denise the ability to transform into anything she wanted to, but I’d forgotten that anything meant, well, anything. I’d also forgotten that in many ways, the transformation was literal. Unlike the glamour used to cover the cave entrance, this wasn’t a magical mirage. Denise didn’t just look like a shark; she was one, as the water rushing through her gills and her toothy grip attested.
Don’t know how fish stand breathing that, she’d said when she choked on the water, followed by a muttered, this’ll be weird.
She must have realized the only way she’d get out of this unscathed was to breathe water like a fish, and not just any fish. The most badass fish in the sea. I might have been too heavy for her to carry before, but now? She glided us both through the waves like a hot knife through butter. If not for the searing pain in my shoulder, this would almost be fun.
In minutes, we were out of the cave. I expected Denise to drop me now that we were free of that labyrinth, but she kept swimming parallel to shore, adjusting her bite every so often when her many rows of teeth nearly severed my shoulder and almost sent me tumbling out of her mouth.
Each new bite had me mentally gritting me teeth. How did you spend your girls’ getaway, Cat? Oh, getting eaten by my best friend. No, not in the fun way. In the wow-that-hurts! way.
I was starting to worry that Denise had taken her transformation a little too literally when she suddenly beached herself and spat me out with a painful rip. I lay there healing while the shark next to me shuddered several times before skin replaced scales and then Denise rose naked from the sand.
“Weird as fuck,” she pronounced, spitting what was probably little bits of my flesh out of her mouth. “But it did the trick. There’s the hotel, and unless I’m wrong, there’s our cottage.”
I had to take her word for it since I couldn’t angle my head to look. Denise gave me a sympathetic glance, and then dragged me by the shoulders up the beach. I saw the steps of our cottage moments later, and then felt a hard thump from each of them as Denise dragged me up the stairs.
Once inside, she positioned me so I was sitting on the floor with my back braced against the couch. Then, she left my line of sight. Moments later, she was back, wearing a robe and a contemplative expression.
“Can you blink?” she asked me.
I tried and found that I could. She made a relieved noise.
“Okay, blink once for yes, twice for no.”
I blinked once to show I understood.
“I saw a naked kid run out of what looked like a solid wall in the bluffs. He was cut up and screaming about witches and monsters, so I gave him my jacket, helped him up the incline, and told him to head for the hotel. While I was going back down, two women ran out of that ‘solid’ wall as well. So, I knew it was fake, and since you hadn’t come out yet, I went in to find you. Were those women really witches?”
I blinked once.
“What about monsters? Were those real, too?”
I blinked twice.
“Guess that’s good,” she said in a weary tone. “So, if they were witches, a spell did this to you?”
I blinked once.
“Fuuuuck,” she breathed out.
My thoughts exactly.
“I’ll call Bones,” she said.
I blinked twice in rapid succession. I couldn’t wait to see him again after coming so close to death, but Bones wasn’t an expert on magic, and we needed someone who was. Before I worried him halfway to his grave with my condition, I at least wanted some facts about it first.
Denise sighed. “I get it. You don’t want him to see you like this until you know if it can be fixed.”
I blinked once while fighting back tears.
Yes, exactly.
“Ian, then,” she said. “Between him and Veritas, they’ve forgotten more magic than these witches probably ever learned in the first place.”
I blinked once, hard. Yes, Bones’s rebellious vampire sire, Ian, had been illegally practicing magic for centuries, and his several-millennia-old new wife, Veritas, was half-vampire, half demigod, so she almost had magic coming out of her pores.
Denise left. When she came back, she had her cell phone. “Calling and texting both of them now.”
