I caught a glimpse of him as I rode the next wave’s crest. He was still making forward progress, and he had a young, limp-looking girl in a rescue hold.
As I watched, they both disappeared under the water as if yanked by an invisible cord.
Crap.
I dived.
I found the girl first, floating free in the water - a drifting ghost, peaceful and silent. I grabbed her and arrowed back for the surface, where I got her face into the air again. She wasn’t breathing. I did a Heimlich to force water out of her lungs, and was rewarded with a sputtering, coughing eruption, and a gasping breath. She flailed wildly, but I managed to keep her above the surface.
Where the hell was David?
I extended my net of perception down instead of out, driving into the darkness and pressure where humans wouldn’t normally be found. Lots of life down there - cold, odd life, with little in common to my own human condition.
David was down there, and he was fighting something big. Something strong, obviously, because you just don’t manhandle a Djinn and get away with it. I could feel the shocks not just through the water, but up on the aetheric level as well - the level of reality above the one we inhabited. Energy was swirling, turning on itself in ugly and destructive ways.
And the ocean was reacting to the fight. I could feel the growing agitation as energy fed into what was essentially a closed system . . . and I didn’t like where things were going.
“Hold on,” I told the girl breathlessly. “You’re going to be all right. Be calm, OK?” Then I formed a shell of air molecules around her, permeable enough to allow gas transfers, but solid enough to keep out the water. It was like a soap bubble, slightly tinted in the glimmer of the sunlight. I let go of her, and closed the bubble seamlessly behind me; she battered at the shell trying to reach me, but right now she was better off as she was. She’d calm down in a minute, once she realized that she was safe, dry and drifting towards shore (something I made sure of with an application of force in the right direction).
I sucked in a super-oxygenated breath and dived into the darkness.
The water was a chilly turquoise roof overhead, sparkling with glitter from the wavelets, but as I descended the blue deepened to twilight, then to darkness. Pressure increased, crushing in on me. I had several choices of how to handle it, but I went for the simplest; Earth powers allowed me to adjust my body chemistry to cope with the changes, and my ability to form complex chemical chains out of the air in my lungs and the water around me helped me come up with a kind of temporary rebreathing mixture, the kind deep-sea divers would use. Invisible shields helped my ears hold against the increasing stress; the last thing I needed was a punctured eardrum at this depth.
I adjusted the structure of my eyes, letting in more light, but even that
failed as I descended. I had to rely on Oversight - a kind of overlay heads-up display that showed me the aetheric patterns of the world around me. It was unsettling how crowded this environment was, and how little of it I could see. Animals darted around me, mostly uninterested in something my size but a few clearly wondering if I could be a potential new protein source. I didn’t like sharks. Not at all.
But the strangest predator was yet to come, because I found David locked in battle with something that I didn’t recognize -and then, I did. Not from science, but from mythology.
A mermaid.
Well, to be fair, not so much a maid as a man. This creature had the upper-body structure of something like a human, although the muscles seemed to be moving in world-bendingly odd ways around bones that didn’t quite look right. I couldn’t see it clearly, and I instinctively wanted to. Needed to.
I called fire into a small, self-contained bubble between us, and lit up the sea.
The merman turned on me with the speed of a striking eel, and he’d have had me if David hadn’t gotten in the way. Well, I’d wanted a look, and I got one - a terrifying one. That was no romantic, Byronic prince of the sea. That was what you might get if you blended the Creature from the Black Lagoon with an albino shark, and gave it the muscular, iron-grey tail of a dolphin. He shimmered with iridescent scales in the bottled firelight, and his eyes were huge, all dark except for white vertical slits for pupils.
He had a lot of teeth, and they were all pointed at me.
I found myself swimming backwards, trying to put water between us as quickly as possible. There was something so utterly wrong about this thing that I felt sick, as if my understanding of the world had been turned upside down. Odd, because I lived in a world most normal people would find upsetting in the extreme.
David slammed a fist into the merman’s face with enough force to pulverize granite. The merman just hissed in fury and sank his teeth into David’s wrist. He had claws too, long bony things that scraped at David’s chest and opened pale gouges. No blood. David had changed his body structure far enough from human to prevent real damage.
“Get out of here!” he yelled at me. His words came loud and clear, if a bit oddly high-pitched. “Surface! Get to shore!”
He was right. If this creature was beyond David, it was beyond me too. I could feel the power inside of it radiating outwards; it was a match for the Djinn. The water-world equivalent, maybe; something Wardens rarely encountered, if ever - or survived, if they did.
I was going to follow David’s advice - really, I was.
But just as I started to arrow for the distant blue world above, something caught me by the ankle in a crushing grip.
Bony, astonishingly strong fingers.
I looked down, and in the murky swirls of Oversight, saw a second merman. No . . . this one really did seem to be a mermaid, complete with small, protruding breasts.
She wasn’t any prettier than the male of the species.
I’m not supernaturally muscular, but I have powers that your average mermaid might not expect, and I took full advantage of this. I sent a violent burst of energy crackling through my body, electrifying my skin and burning her hand where she gripped me. She let go and swiped at me with her claws. I mostly avoided the slice, but she drew shallow red stripes across the back of my right leg, just above the ankle. I responded by kicking her, hard, right in the bony part of her chest. She flipped her tail and righted herself almost instantly, and came for me with her shark-like jaws wide open.