“What kind is it?” Candy asked.
“Probably a tiger shark,” Teague said, and I hated that he got it right.
“The ones that eat surfers?” Candy asked.
“Don’t sound so jazzed about it,” Ben said. But it was in his voice too. The excitement.
You and me, we’ve seen it a hundred times. People eating it up, the idea of the evil shark hunting humans with a malevolence usually reserved for serial killers and haunted clown dolls. But you know what I know: When it comes to sheer carnage, sharks have nothing on cars. Or guns. These rubberneckers, they sit in their living rooms watching Shark Week, gripping the armrests, while just outside, they’ve got a death trap parked in the driveway. A few feet away, in the bedroom closet, there’s a loaded gun under a pile of sweatshirts. And there they are, watching the nature channel and saying, Uh-uh, no way I’m going into the water.
Bunch of idiots.
“Okay, guys,” I said, leaning my head back against my tank. “Enjoy your shark porn.”
I tried to slip out of my gear, but my hands shook, and the release at my waist was really jammed, damaged when I slammed against the ladder. I gave up, exhausted, and watched the top of the food chain swim on by.
The tiger rounded the bow of our boat and disappeared, then popped back up on the port side. Something about the way it moved caught my attention. Swimming in jagged patterns, jerky and fearful. Not at all the way sharks act.
Captain Phil stood on the sunroof, watching, still wearing that purple stone wife beater, which now had wide, dark pit stains. Mom climbed the ladder back to the roof to wake Felix from his pile of beach towels, leaning close to his ear to give the science lesson, pointing at the show. He smiled wide and leaned over the railing.
I closed my eyes, thought about what Felix and I would do when we got home, and how maybe I’d use tip money from yesterday’s dive to take him for milkshakes at Amy’s Cafe, let him ask his big sister little kid questions about sharks. And I remembered something you showed me in a magazine once, the images of a surfer’s leg. The creepy indentation where it had healed up without a pound of flesh. How you closed the magazine when Felix toddled by, showed him the picture of the clown fish instead. That’s become my job since you went away—flipping the page to show him beautiful things, hiding the ugly bits.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement. The water buckled a few yards from our engine. As if something large pushed from below. Before I could turn toward it and see it full on, it was gone. My imagination, I told myself.
More shouts from Matt’s charter. The girls who’d been sun-tanning yesterday were huddled together on the roof—scared and loving it.
Slosh, thunk. Against the hull. Driftwood, I thought. Or sea trash. Something that fell off a container ship ten thousand miles away riding the currents toward our shores. Slosh. But for some reason my body didn’t believe it. Adrenaline kicked in as I searched the water for the source.
The tether between Matt’s boat and ours tightened and groaned.
The sun slanted its light over the water. The waves slapped the boat. The passengers on the Ruby Pelican and the Last Chance watched the tiger circle. The line groaned again. Splash. Some doofus had thrown a Coke can and pegged the dorsal fin.
An odd instinct in me rose, like bubbles from a regulator, telling me we were all dead. Sudden and irrational, hitting me hard, like the shark had earlier, knocking me off balance. I struggled to get the tank off my back, fighting with the stubborn release.
One of the girls on the Ruby Pelican called out, “Look!”
The tail of the shark flailed in the water.
Teague stood near Ben and watched it writhe and thrash. “It’s eating something,” he said.
Next to the stern ladder, a ridge appeared in the water, and I stopped fiddling with the releases on my BC. Something moving just below, pushing up the top layer. A faint glow pulsing in dim morning light. Green. Phosphorescent.
The feeling of unease, the thing that had dogged me since we dropped our anchor here, that’s when it opened up. I saw what was inside. Just for a second. And it was ugly, and terrifying, and inside my chest hard as stone roots. I couldn’t breathe for a full ten seconds. So I leaned against my tank, gripping my knees until my knuckles turned white.
Wrong. All of it. My body felt light. Another weird thought hit me—I’d left some important part of myself in the wreck. Or worse, brought something up with me.
A cry from Matt’s ship. The shark had stalled in the channel between the boats, thrashing its long gray body in a frenzy. The sun slanted rays on it. A cloud of blood bloomed in the water.
Teague stepped up next to me and leaned over the side to get a better look. “What’s it doing?”
Something thick wrapped around the shark’s massive body. A clear rope of some kind, cutting into it. My first thoughts were seaweed, then tentacles, both wrong. Two more strands wrapped around it, one around the shark’s jaws, near its gills. More blood. And then, before any of us realized what was happening, the cords pulled the tiger shark down. Pulled deep until the gray of its skin faded into black and it disappeared entirely.
A shocked silence settled over both boats.
Movement again, to my left, near our dive platform. A flash of something whitish gray. I turned, and in my memory, that turn took forever. My gaze had been fixed on the red cloud in the water, and then I pivoted toward the little flash of gray-white, past the silver cleat on the gunwale, past the ice chest near the stern. The smell of a clogged drain drifting through the scent of sea brine hit me before I could focus on what it was.
As thick as a rat snake, but almost see-through, its tip rose from the water and reached across the diving platform. Three more came with it, long and thin, like filaments of a jellyfish, trembling pink as the light of the rising sun hit them. Past the ice chest, the silver cleat. The moment I screamed, the thick one whipped up and wrapped around Teague’s thigh.
He cried out, high-pitched, as the thing yanked his feet out from under him. I stepped back, my gear throwing me off balance. I fell. My head slammed into my tank, stars exploded in my vision, and the world flipped. Teague flailed out, his fingers scrabbling across the slick deck before grabbing on to my head, my hair, and then my gear, my face. Yells came from all around me. Ben. Candy. A thunder of feet on the roof deck.
Teague screamed again, and I slid with him, gliding across the slick fiberglass deck. Toward the water. Toward the thicker part of the root snaking out of the water to take whatever it could. Hands clung to my tank, my hair. I caught the edge of the bench, but my wet neoprene greased right over. Someone grabbed my arms to keep me from going over, but Teague held on, screaming. My shoulder popped, and I cried out. Pulling me apart, I remember thinking, until I’m in pieces.
Candy dug her fingers around the tentacle and the filaments circling Teague’s thigh. Then she jerked her hands back as if she’d been burned.
Teague and I slid another foot and slammed against the edge of a bench.
And he screamed, the same thing over and over. “Pull it off!”
I couldn’t get enough air. The world blurred into a panic of high-pitched voices and pain in my shoulders as my rescuers pulled me apart.
Another tentacle, wrist thick, whipped out of the water and wrapped around his waist. Three filaments followed. Tightened. His eyes went wide, and he stopped screaming. The hand he’d threaded into my long hair tightened, and God, the white-hot pain as a fistful came out by the roots. Out of instinct, I grabbed for his T-shirt. Mom rushed past me, catching his wrist. He slipped to the edge of the platform. My grasp slipped, and he tumbled over the side.