But as the five of them got closer, their beady eyes terrifyingly flat and their mouths stretched in crooked, macabre grins, I knew they hadn’t hunted me down just to hassle me. Tiamat was making her move, trying to force me to join her while I was confused and vulnerable and isolated.
I had to get out of there, had to maneuver so they weren’t surrounding me. Adrenaline coursed through my body, made me shaky. Or at least that’s what I was blaming for the fine trembling of my hands—adrenaline, not total and complete terror.
I knew better than to let the nerves show. I had learned at an early age that the best defense really was a good offense, and though I wasn’t going to be the one to attack first, that didn’t mean I couldn’t play a little. Try to distract them.
Hi, guys, I projected telepathically. Long time no see.
Not long enough, answered the biggest one. You’re in Tiamat’s territory.
I froze for a minute, wondering if I had somehow managed to wander that far off course—I was still learning my way around down here and sometimes I made mistakes. But Tiamat’s territory was far north from my own clan’s waters, and from Kona’s as well. Had I been traveling in that direction all this time when I had thought I was traveling west?
I glanced around, but it wasn’t like there were street signs down here to help me get my bearings. There was, however, a huge trench to the left of me, and I recognized its odd zigzagging pattern. I was nowhere near Tiamat’s territory.
These are selkie waters, I told him defiantly. You have no business here.
You mean they were selkie waters, answered the big one. Now they belong to Tiamat. She has claimed them for her own.
A new spurt of alarm coursed through me. They were bluffing. They had to be. These were Kona’s family’s waters, and I knew Ari would never give up his territory, and his people, without a fight. He would have called for reinforcements and put up a battle of epic proportions. There was no way all of that had happened in the time I swam to my old stomping ground and back.
Now didn’t seem the time to call shark-guy a liar, though. Not when he and the others were circling me, moving nearer and nearer. Closing in for the kill, as Kona called it. Months before, he’d told me I had nothing to fear from the ocean’s sharks unless they were in attack formation. These guys were only half sharks, but I knew from bitter experience that this just made them more dangerous. They had a shark’s predatory instincts combined with human intelligence and Tiamat’s amorality. Not a good combination …
And especially not a good combination for me. If I didn’t do something quickly, I wouldn’t have to worry about Mark or Kona or what I liked and didn’t like about being mermaid. I would be too dead to care.
I didn’t realize things had come under new management, I said. I apologize. I’ll chart a course around this area from now on.
It’s too late for that, little Tempest, and I think you know it.One reached out to grab on to my wrist, but I jerked back. There was no way I wanted these monsters to touch me. But that quick movement brought me within arm’s reach of the one directly behind me and he latched on—one arm around my waist from behind and the other around my neck. The flat of his hand rested against the gills behind my right ear, making it difficult to breathe.
It hurt, especially as he started pressing his forearm into my throat. I struggled against him, but he was a lot stronger than I was. Everything my mertrainer, Jared, had taught me required distance—something I just didn’t have right now—so I searched my mind for the rusty self-defense maneuvers I’d learned a couple years before in PE. Nothing came to mind—at least nothing that I didn’t need legs for. And since I’d lost my bikini bottoms in that last shift, I really didn’t think it was a good idea. Not to mention that if it took me as long as it normally did to shift, I would be vulnerable for at least five minutes. I couldn’t afford that.
The more I jerked and pulled, the harder the guy pressed against my gills, until the ocean around me went even grayer than usual. My head started to hurt, and soon everything was spinning. I was on the verge of passing out, I realized with horror. And if I did, it would be game over.
If they’d wanted to kill me, they could have done that already—one teenage girl against five grown men who knew the ocean, and how to fight in it, a lot better than she did hardly stood a chance. But my death wasn’t what they were after. If I passed out, if I stopped fighting even for a second, they would take me to Tiamat. And I had a feeling what awaited me at her hands was far worse than death could ever be.
As things started to go dark, I knew I had only one shot to get away. Desperate, frightened, I drew every ounce of power I could from deep inside me. Then I wrapped my tail around shark-guy’s tail and yanked as hard as I could. At the same time, I drove my elbow straight back into his belly. The combined attack had him stumbling, his grip loosening, and that was all I needed.
Whirling away from him, I threw my hands straight in front of me and blasted out with the power I had amassed. It wasn’t as much as I would have liked—something about being strangled to near-unconsciousness made it difficult to gather energy. Who knew? But at least it was strong enough to shove the four men looming over me a good fifteen feet back.
I didn’t wait around for them to recover. Instead, I took off toward Kona’s place at top speed. As I swam, I heard them behind me, felt the vibrations of the water as they tried to catch up. I wanted to know how close they were, how much of a head start I had, but if I slowed down even a little to look over my shoulder, they would have me.
I felt fingers brush against my fins, and I lashed out with my tail, knocked the hand away as I dived straight down. The tactic didn’t work, though, because a minute later fingers had fastened on to the tip of my tail. They dug in with superhuman strength, and I screamed before I could stop myself.
And then we were spinning, somersaulting, spiraling through the water over and over again as I tried to shake him off. He held on like a limpet and I felt a sharp slice across my tail. It hurt like hell, but I didn’t have time to pay much attention to it, not when I was sure that his buddies were just waiting for their own chances to make a run at me.
And not when his fist was coming at my face at an alarming rate.
I ducked and twisted, managed to dislodge his grip on me a second time. But that didn’t matter, because his friends were right there to grab on when he lost me. A huge hand seized a chunk of my hair, fisted around it, and yanked.
I saw stars, but that second jolt of pain was just what I needed. Anger blossomed inside me, leaving no room for fear or worry or confusion. Instead, there was this overwhelming heat skating along my nerves, taking me over. Fiery, electric, full of rage at Tiamat for wanting me to turn to her side so badly that she was willing to resort to kidnapping to make it happen.
The heat was getting worse, the strange feeling growing until I was literally vibrating with it. I didn’t know what this feeling was, knew only that it was as different from the energy blasts I usually wielded as good was from evil.
It scared me a little, but not nearly as much as the men who were presently pinning my hands behind my back and trying to tie them with seaweed. The only thing stopping them was that I was trembling so badly they could barely get the strands around my wrists.