What are you? I mouthed into the water, salty brine washing over my taste buds, morbid curiosity overcoming rational sense.

“I am your enemy, the one that will strip your flesh from your bones and bathe in your blood.” The voice was masculine, deep and resonant within my head. I wanted to push it out of my mind.

It—he—rumbled and rolled in the water, taking me with him, end over end until I no longer knew which way was up. Finally he stopped and began to pull me into the depths of the ocean, the water getting colder with each inch we moved deeper, away from the sun and air.

Air. How could I still be under the water and not need to breathe? As soon as the thought came, it was gone; I didn’t have time to think about that, as strange as it seemed.

Movement further below and to the right stole my attention away from my own situation. It was Ashling, fighting with a monster very much like the one on my own leg. They were tumbling in the water, her hair floating about like tentacles as she fought the thing off. How could she be in this deep, for this long? How could I? Again that once hollow piece of me responded. This was why we’d never fit in, these abilities, this magic, these monsters. Though my head said that none of this was real, my heart and soul spoke louder.

This was real, this was happening, and if I was to save Ashling I had to move now. That thought broke through the last of my fear, its hold dissolving within the reality I had accepted.

I grabbed my knife out of the sheath and slashed at the monster that held me in his mouth, slicing through the bulbous eye, white fluid pouring out of it. He jerked away from me, releasing my leg—a spray of blood clouding out around me—as he writhed in the water

He screamed, wordlessly, the echo of his pain reverberating in my skull.

Turning my back on him, I swam hard towards Ashling, holding the knife in my mouth. Twenty feet, fifteen, ten. I was nearly to her before she looked up.

She saw me coming and kicked the monster that held her tight, sending it into a spin away from her. Ashling swam for me, her lips tight, eyes wide and dilated. Five feet. Three. I reached for her, my hand wrapping around her slender wrist. I didn’t pause, just turned and started to swim for the surface. Together we swam hard neither of us looking back.

“She is ours, you will not have her!”

We were yanked to a stop in mid-stroke, the surface only a few feet away, the sunlight streaming down through the waves with tantalizing nearness. I turned in the water and looked down. Ashling had a sea monster on each leg. Her pale green eyes were so wide they seemed to fill her face as the creatures jerked her from my hands and sped back into the depths faster than a rock sinking. Her hands reached for me, futilely.