And through that cloud suddenly appeared lean, sinuous shapes, striking fear into the base of my brain that no amount of being a grown-up would ever entirely erase.
Sharks.
Bull sharks, blunt-nosed and with that glassy, quietly desperate stare. Maybe a dozen of them emerged from the murk, the smallest one at least twelve feet long.
Oh come on. This isn’t even fair.
Someone, I reminded myself, and I’m not sure who, just got done telling Murphy that when Ethniu’s forces came, they would have no intention of fighting fair.
The kraken thrashed in agony in the water.
And the sharks rushed the monster.
And, man, did that get messy fast. Tails threshing. Teeth flashing. Eyes rolling back white. Earth’s oldest superpredators went up against a monster out of a madman’s nightmares, and the result looked deadly and savage and beautiful.
Lara’s eyes widened as two more sharks, fifteen-footers, came gliding out of the darkness straight toward her—and between them, gripping a pectoral fin of each, came the Winter Lady, the deputy to the Queen of Air and Darkness—my friend, Molly Carpenter. Molly had been tending to her duties as the Winter Lady all evening, but she’d still found time to provide me with sneaky backup magic in the true tradition of the Fae. She must have had the Little Folk keeping a watch along the shoreline for my return from the island.
Molly wore one of those surfer’s wet suits, with patterns of deep purple and pale green on it in the streaks and rings of a highly venomous sea snake, her mouth stretched into a madwoman’s grin. Her hair, luminous silver in the weird light, spread out around her head in an otherworldly aura.
She and the sharks went at the kraken. She bore a knife in her hand and immediately went to Lara’s aid. The kraken wasn’t done, though. Its jaws gaped and the beak came down on one of the smaller sharks like a pair of enormous scissors. One bite and snip, and it had cut the thing neatly in half.
There was a splash from above, and then Freydis arrived, the lean woman cutting through the water with nearly as much grace as Lara. She swooped down, kicking smoothly, headed for the knife at the back of the thing’s head. Tentacles threatened her, but the Winter Lady flicked her wrist and half a dozen bull sharks rushed in, jaws ripping and tearing.
Freydis reached the knife, seized it in one hand, ripped the pin out of a freaking grenade that she’d been holding, and shoved it in the same hole where I had put the flare. I could see the outline of her fingers and hand through the creature’s flesh in the illumination of the still-burning magnesium.
I started kicking for the surface as fast as I could. I wasn’t worried about shrapnel from the grenade, but water is a noncompressible liquid. The blast would carry through it excellently, causing far more damage than the same explosion in open air. If anyone was too close to it, they’d get their lungs pancaked, and I had no way of knowing exactly how far the force of it would carry.
Freydis pushed off the thing contemptuously with her legs and had caught me in an embarrassingly short amount of time. I looked back to see Molly gripping the dorsal fin of the largest bull shark, rushing away from the wounded monster. Lara held on to Molly’s ankles, dressed in the shreds of her underwear now, her pale skin covered in cuts and circular sucker marks, oozing slightly-too-pale blood in little streamers, and we all ran like the last fighters at the end of Star Wars.
The grenade went off behind us, wrapped in the flesh of the kraken, and maybe a quarter of the thing’s head just turned into a cloud of chum. Its skin suddenly flushed pale, and the tentacles stopped thrashing so much as just spasming wildly. Leaving a cloud of blood and meat behind it, the thing started sinking toward the frigid bottom of the lake.
I broke the surface, gasping in a lungful of air, and started coughing. My head felt decidedly odd after that soulgaze, drunken in the worst kind of way. But, God, the air felt good. It felt so good I just sucked it in for a while, and only dimly realized, a moment later, that Molly and her big shark were just sitting there in the water next to me.
“I swear,” she said. “I look the other way for like five minutes, and already you’re in trouble.”
“Bite me, Padawan,” I muttered.
The smile she gave me grew extra sharp.
“Sharks, seriously?” I asked.
“They’ve been finding decades’ worth of bull-shark baby teeth in the Great Lakes for years now,” she replied. She ran a hand fondly over the beast’s back. “Plenty of these bad boys around.”
“Lara?” I called.
“Here,” said a voice behind me.
I looked over my shoulder. Lara looked like hell. She’d had no protection at all against the toothed suckers on the tentacles, and it showed. Her pale eyes were steady, though, glistening like the edge of a sword, as Freydis trod water beside her, helping her keep her head above the drink.
I kicked at the water a few times and said, “Uh. How do we get back up to the boat?”
In answer, a line fell over the side again, splashing into the water near me. Murphy appeared in the glow of chemical lights and said in a hushed, angry tone, “Jesus Christ, people, keep your voices down. If someone onshore has a night scope and hears you, they’ll pick you off like cans on a fence.” She looked down at me, and some kind of strain eased out of her face. She made a snorting sound. “Well? It’s not like I’m going to pull you all out.”
Wearily, I started lugging myself toward the boat through the water and made sure the others were coming after me. It took a hell of a lot of effort, but I hauled my bloodied ass to the boat, braced my foot on the hull, and climbed up it like the old Adam West version of Batman, only clumsier and a lot more bedraggled.
I made it to the deck, flopped over the railing, and just lay there for a minute, weary.
“You all right?” Murphy asked quietly, as the others began to climb out the same way.
“Gotta tell you, Murph,” I sighed back. “I got a bad feeling about this.”
“Speak for yourself,” Murphy said. “I just gave my last grenade to a Valkyrie and ordered her to blow up a kraken. I’m having a ball.”
Well.
Wasn’t much I could say to that, all things considered.
Murphy and Molly between them had just saved our collective bacon.
I closed my eyes for a second.
I hadn’t even seen what was coming for Chicago, and I was already bloodied and exhausted.
This was going to be a long night.
Chapter
Three
I piloted the Water Beetle back into dock, while Molly and her squadron of sharks escorted us the rest of the way in. I secured the ship, and by the time I’d gotten the last line tied off, there was a crackling sound, and the end of the dock was suddenly coated in ice. Molly stepped up out of the lake on the icy stairs she’d created, patterns of frost forming in her wet hair. She studied the city as she came, her eyes distant.