Bite Me Harder (Guardians of the Deep 2)

“This is strange,” she told Rafe.

“Tell me about it,” he said. “And I’m the new one, remember? Imagine what it must look like through my eyes.”

“No,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s strange that all these humans were only hurt? Not killed?”

“Almost like it was more of a distraction than anything else,” Rafe said.

“Exactly,” she said.

“Officer Kane, Officer Kane,” a man’s voice bellowed out from Rafe’s radio.

Kane stumbled along beside them. Cobalt and Sylvia stopped walking and looked at them. The man on the other end of the radio sounded desperate and worried. Rafe took the radio from his hip and handed it to Kane.

“Kane here,” he said.

“We’ve got an issue out here on the water,” the voice said. “You said to let you know if I saw anything strange. I passed a boat a few miles off shore and I thought I saw something. I’m looking at it now through binoculars. Call me crazy but it seems like three men dressed like the ones y’all had there on the beach, in all black from what I heard over the radio. Well, I see three of them guys and a woman. They seem to be holding another woman hostage. She’s blindfolded and gagged.”

“Blindfolded and gagged?” Kane repeated into the radio.

“Yessir,” the man said. “And it looks like she’s pregnant.”

Chapter 28 – Sylvia

How could we be so stupid? How could I be so stupid?

Rafe had called it. He’d said something didn’t feel right all along. Evelyn was too smart. Now, as they soared through the water, trying to get Thane’s attention, Sylvia could see the whole plan as if written out on paper in front of her. Evelyn had Penny now. How she’d gotten past Rickshaw, she didn’t know, but two pregnant women and one mean ass shark in human form wouldn’t be hard to beat, not if Evelyn had a few of her thugs with her.

All that mattered now was getting Penny back. Sylvia knew that Evelyn had hated Penny since the beginning. Whether it was jealousy over Thane or simply hatred for Penny because she had once been a human and was now one of their kind, Evelyn had made it her mission to make Penny miserable. This was what it had all boiled down to? Kidnapping? What good would come of this? What was she hoping to attain from this? That Thane would agree to banish Penny? That Thane would see the error of his ways and rush back into Evelyn’s arms?

This is one crazy bitch.

“Thane,” Coby called out through his mental voice. “Where the fuck are you?”

As if trying to reach someone on a transistor radio from deep in a concrete bunker, the words fell on deaf ears.

“Thane,” he tried again.

“He’s probably out chasing the hammerheads,” Rafe said from somewhere behind them.

He and Kalina had hit the water at the same time they had, but Sylvia and Coby were much faster. They would reach the boat before anyone else if Thane wasn’t already on his way. Then, from the left and the right came friendly voices.

“Those motherfuckers didn’t stand a chance!” Beanie called out.

“Did you see the way I bitch slapped him? But like with my fin?” Squid asked.

“Yeah, brah,” Hightail replied. “I think if he were in human form he would have been like, ‘What? Huh? What the fuck was that?’”

“You bitch slapped him?” Sylvia asked.

“Totally, I was keeping up foreign relations. You know, giving him the bird,” Squid said.

“How did you manage that?” Sylvia asked, not realizing at the time that she’d fallen right into the young sharks’ Top Gun dialogue recitation.

“I was inverted,” Squid replied.

“Whatever,” she said.

“Can we concentrate on finding Penny?” Kalina asked.