The current had pinned me against the grillwork, one of its bent spikes lancing my left hip and thigh. Though my right arm was free of the water, my left knee and arm were pinched between two iron slats. Try as I might, I could not gain enough leverage with my free hand to raise my head above the swiftly moving current.

Metal screeched underwater—I could feel the gate bending with the torrent, but still I could not release myself from its embrace. Hold on, Zachary.

My chest was on fire now, my inflamed lungs demanding relief. Experience urged me to remain calm while my right foot and knee fought against the current, searching for a foothold to gain leverage… something… anything to lift myself higher.

But the river was timeless, and my muscles were lead.

I was drowning.

Again!

The mere thought was so humiliating… so exasperating—yet it filled me with a strange sense of relief, for I knew the monster could smell me and was closing in, and drowning was a far better way to die… better than Sir William Wallace, who had been drawn and quartered, better than Johnny C.

And so I opened my mouth and inhaled the acidic, bitter waters of Loch Ness, letting it take me.

My body convulsed as my mind shattered, my thoughts poisoned with dark, desperate images from my first drowning, intertwined with subliminal flashes of my second death in the Sargasso Sea.

My life was a Greek tragedy, and I laughed at the Grim Reaper as he circled me, for what was I to be scared of.

And then the pain and cold were shunted, and the visions washed away, replaced by my lifeless body, lying on a rocky shelf.

The image from my dreams.

Hold on, Zachary. Hold on… Zachary. Zachary. Zachary…

* * *

"Zachary!"

I opened my eyes. Belched up water. Gagged. Then heaved a breath of life.

I was staring into my father's face.

"Are ye a' right, son?"

I tried to speak but instead ejected a bellyful of icy water tainted with oil. Rolling over, I gagged and wretched some more.

"That's it, son, let it a' come oot o' ye. Ye're gonnae be fine. Christ knows ye've got mair lives than a cat. Still, if I were ye, I'd take up somethin' safer. Like skydiving. Or maybe alligator wrestlin'."

I sat up, my left side bleeding and sore from where the iron gate's spike had caught me. Above our heads, flames rolled along the ceiling like wisps of orange fog, casting the cavern in a surreal hellish glow.

I coughed and spit until I could speak. "How? How'd you find me? How'd you get out of jail?"

"All guid questions, but first… where's the monster?"

I shook my head and pointed. "The passage opened. It was in the water. Probably in the North Sea by now."