The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance

by Trisha Telep

  “Seems prudent,” he agreed. We set off across the hot, sparkling sands, dodging around a few blankets and beach umbrellas and people who were standing around, still watching the show. “Are you going to leave him there?”

  “Oh, he’s OK. I didn’t squeeze him or anything. They can dig him out, if they want.”

  “Jo, you—” David stopped talking, and he also stopped walking. He turned to look out over the water. “Do you hear that?”

  I concentrated. All I heard was the constant rushing roar of the surf, with the continued ranting of Muscles floating over the top. “Hear what?”

  “Someone calling for help.”

  Even as David said it, I spotted a human shape stumbling out of the waves just a little further down the beach - a boy, maybe sixteen. He fell to his hands and knees in the hissing foam and vomited up an impressive fountain of water.

  I grabbed a towel out of my bag and raced to him. “Hey! You OK?” I got the towel around his shaking shoulders and rubbed vigorously as he choked and coughed and got out the rest of the sea he’d swallowed. There was some white spittle around his mouth and nose. He’d come really close to drowning. “Here. Sit. David, help me with him.”

  We got the boy up the beach and settled on dry sand, covered in towels. He was still shaking. His skin - a light cocoa, normally - had an unhealthy ashen pallor to it, and his eyes were blank and traumatized.

  I took his hands in mine and squeezed. Slowly, his gaze refocused away from whatever horrible memory he had been seeing in his mind’s eye. “What’s your name?” I asked, keeping my voice low and gentle. “I’m Joanne.”

  “Cal,” he said. “Calvin Harper.” As if that was some kind of key to the lock on his mind, his face suddenly filled with emotion. With panic. “Where’s Parker? Did you get Parker?”

  “Who’s Parker?”

  He didn’t answer me. He tried to struggle to his feet, but I put my hands on his shoulders and pushed him back down. Skin-to-skin contact woke my Earth powers, which travelled up in a slow, warm pulse from the soles of my feet and out through my fingertips, ghosting through Cal’s body in a golden wave. He was all right — exhausted from fighting the ocean, and he still had water and foam in his lungs, but I concentrated for a moment and cleared that out. Otherwise, he was just full of pure anxiety.

  “Parker,” I repeated. “Who’s Parker?”

  “My girl,” Cal gasped. He rubbed his face and close-cut hair with both hands, trying to scrub off the feelings of misery and fear. “I left her. I couldn’t get her. She’s in trouble out there.”

  I turned and looked at the waves. I couldn’t see anybody out there.

  I turned on my heels to look at David, who dropped the picnic basket on the sand. “I guess we’re going swimming,” he said.

  I didn’t see any way around it.

  The thing that surprised me was that swimming felt good. It had been a long, long time since I’d voluntarily waded into the ocean. The first cold splash of the water was a livid shock, but then my body adjusted and, by the time the surf was cradling my knees, I felt comfortable.

  David, next to me, was scanning the horizon. His eyes had taken on a hot golden shine - a whole lot more than human just now. A shimmer of bronze crept over his skin, giving him the appearance of living metal.

  “See anything?” I asked.

  “She’s there,” he said, and pointed. “I’ll bring her in. Wait here.”

  That wasn’t the agreement, but blip, the next wave that crashed down erased him right out of the picture. David could go anywhere he liked at a whim, but he couldn’t take me with him. I had to travel the old-fashioned way.

  Which was why he’d told me to stay put. The problem was, David was going to have to bring the girl back the old-fashioned way, too - faster than a human could swim, granted, but he couldn’t blip her from point A to point B without leaving pieces of her behind.

  I hate to wait. I wasn’t intending to swim out there, but I kept pushing forwards, and suddenly I was floating, so it seemed like the thing to do. The cool rush of water over my body was exhilarating, and the little-worked muscles on the insides of my arms began to burn in a pleasant kind of way. As each wave rose towards me I dived into it and came out a little further out, a little deeper. I still couldn’t see David. White clouds drifted by overhead, a few scudding at the horizon like steam from the waves.

  Pretty soon I was swimming steadily out in the direction David had indicated.

  My awareness spread out around me, like sonar through the water - an instinctive kind of thing, nothing I planned to do. At first I was only aware of the darting shapes of fish near me that stayed well clear of both the roiling surf and my kicking feet; but then my sense of the ocean deepened, focused, and I felt the vast network solidifying around me. It was different than living in the air - closer somehow. More connected. I was an alien element in a world where I wasn’t necessary, and it was a very odd feeling.

  I felt the rushing heat of David’s approach across the water, and adjusted my course to meet him. Something odd was happening near him - no, around him. He was slowing down.

  David was slowing down. That didn’t make much sense. I swam faster.

  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.

  I hardened the water between us to the consistency of gelatin. She tried to swim forwards, hit the wall and bounced, and I recognized the look of bafflement that sped across her fishy face. I was supposed to be easy prey, wasn’t I?

  Not hardly.

  Oddly enough, that seemed funny, although it wasn’t. I knew I should be afraid, but I was weirdly amused. In fact, I was choking back a manic attack of giggles, and losing my focus. The hardened water turned softer and she lunged for me again. I was able to hold her off, but the urge to laugh kept getting more and more insistent. I was breathing in and out way too fast to get the necessary benefit. Hyperventilating, I thought. My chest hurt. Nothing looked right.

  David’s warm hand closed around my wrist, and I realized that I’d forgotten to re-oxygenate my mixture; black dots were swimming in front of my eyes, and I was starting to lose it. I relaxed and let David’s strength pull me towards the surface. My concentration had to be focused inwards, on adjusting my body to the changing pressure and closing up the wound on my leg. The last thing I wanted to do was attract sharks right now.

  I saw the merman and his mate chasing us, rising out of the depths like pale fish, flickering in the twilight and struggling to adjust to the decompression as we neared the surface. They were deep-water creatures, and the female dropped off first, heading back to the safe, crushing darkness.

  The merman’s bony claws brushed my foot, but failed to grab hold, and I saw him give a pained hiss of frustration before flipping his muscular tail and diving, heading straight for the bottom.

  We broke the surface with so much speed we literally rose into the air about four feet, and then we splashed back down. David’s arms went around me, warm and real, and I dragged in breath after breath of moist, sweet air.

  “I told you to get to the surface!” he said. “Do you have to fight with everything you see?”

  I didn’t bother to argue that I was, in fact, trying to flee at the time. “I’m OK,” I said, which was the answer he was looking for even if he wasn’t asking. “I’m OK, David.”

  He let out a breath, and I felt his arms tighten around me.’ ‘This time you are,” he said. “No more games, Jo. Back to shore.”

  I didn’t have to swim, only float; David towed me, making for shore with steady, tireless strokes. I caught sight of the bubble I’d formed around our rescued girl. She was almost to shore now, swept in on the waves. I popped the bubble as the final wave crested, and she toppled into the surf and ended up on the sand, caught up in Calvin Harper’s arms.

  A happy ending, after all.

  “What are they?” I asked David. “Those . . . creatures?”

  He said a word I couldn’t understand, much less pronounce. It sounded like dolphin clicks. “They’re powerful,” he said. “Even for the D j inn, they’re dangerous. To humans, even to Wardens—”

  “Deadly. Got that part.” I coughed out a stray mouthful of salty ocean and pushed streaming hair off my face. The surf was pounding now as we neared the shore. I could feel the ocean bottom rising to meet us, and the warmer waters felt welcoming. Almost safe. “What set them off?”

  “Nothing. They hunt for prey. Sometimes it’s humans,” he said. “But once they realized I was in the water, and you were a Warden, they wanted us.”

  “To eat?”

  “You, maybe. Me, to keep,” he said. “They have Djinn trapped below, not many, but over the millennia there have been a few, here and there. We can’t save them.”

  I imagined a zoo, far in the dark, crushing emptiness of the deep ocean - Djinn, held captive, unable to break free. I imagined that happening to David, and felt ill. “What do they want them for?”

  David shook his head. “We don’t know.”

  That was . . . unsettling.

  David slowed our progress as our feet touched the sandy bottom. A wave crested and lifted, then lowered us gently down.

  I turned into his embrace.

  His lips tasted of salt, hot metal, urgency. His skin was warmer than it should have been, as warm as bronze left in the sun, and it felt so good against my chilled flesh. I shivered against him and held on as tides swept us towards land.

  “Well,” I whispered, as our lips parted for a breath, “you wanted me in the water. I’m here.”

  “So you are.” His hands travelled over me, pouring heat into me with every brush of his fingers on my skin.

  “We should check on the girl,” I said - not really feeling the urgency th
ough, because his touch was waking all kinds of other thoughts instead.

  I saw it mirrored in his smile. “She’s being well cared for,” he said. And he was right, absolutely right. A small crowd of people had formed around Cal and his girl, and I saw the distant flashing of emergency lights heading in from the street.

  I could even see that Muscles was out of any danger; his friends were digging him out of his hole. After that, and the arrival of police and paramedics, they’d be withdrawing from the field of battle as fast as their stumpy legs could carry them.

  David recaptured my focus with a gentle kiss on my forehead. “I love you, Joanne.”

  It wasn’t that he hadn’t said it before, or that he hadn’t meant it, it was the intensity with which he spoke that made me shiver down to my bones. I put my arms around his neck and stared into his eyes - hot copper, shimmering with passion and almost-alien power. “I know,” I said. “I can feel it, every moment. And I love you, David. More than my life.”

  His thumbs smoothed wet hair back from my cheeks and lingered in a caress. “Then I’m very lucky,” he said. “Luckier than I’ve ever been in all my lifetimes. And I’m going to make sure your life is long and rich, my love. Despite your willingness to throw it away.”

  He kissed me, and this time it was full of fire and need, and it melted me into a hot, glowing puddle inside. I hardly felt the waves lifting and rolling us; if the ocean chose to strike at us, it would find me entirely unaware.

  But I surrendered to David, and I knew, in that moment, that he could protect me. He would. Not from the obvious threats I faced every day, by chance or choice, but from myself.

  His hands dragged over me and, where they touched, my wet bikini faded away. Top first, and then bottom. He’d already disposed of his swim trunks.

  I could feel how much he wanted me, and it took my breath away. He slid his fingers slowly from the notch of my collarbone, down between my breasts, gliding through the warm water all the way to the softness between my legs.