Raging Sea (Undertow, #2)(86)

“I didn’t want to go with them. I want to be with you!” she shouts.

I scoop her up in my arms.

“Hold on,” I beg her, and then we’re running again.

Soldiers race in the opposite direction. I watch one pull the pin from a hand grenade and hurl it as far as he can. It explodes, causing an orchestra of shrieks. Riley waves them on, giving the children time to catch up with us. An Undine lands on Priscilla’s head. She screams, but before it can drive its spike into her neck, Harrison grabs it and hefts it back into the horde.

“They’re flanking us!” a soldier shouts, pointing to the left, where I can see a wave of Undine scurrying ahead. To the right of us, they are doing the same thing. In seconds the beasts have completely surrounded us and are pressing in to finish the job.

An Undine leaps at us and locks onto Suzie’s head. She cries out in pain, and I realize it has her now. Another one comes and grabs Ryan, and Eric next, and they are gone.

One crashes into my head, knocking me to the ground. I can feel it squirming around, its suckers gluing to my skin as it gets in the right position. I hear Chloe screaming and can feel Riley doing his best to pull it off. Fathom shouts my name, urging me to free myself, but it’s got me like a vise. I hear a sucking sound and then a crack, followed by several more, and a pain shoots into my skull. Suddenly the creature’s tentacles release me and it scurries away.

Riley helps me to my feet.

“What happened?” I say, reaching around to the back of my head.

Riley smiles. “The staples stopped it.”

I reach up and touch the wound and the clumsy staples Nurse Amy inserted to close it. I guess I owe her one.

An Undine crashes into Riley and latches tight to his head. I scream and try to help pull it off him as the red spike rears back to impale his spine. There’s a slice, and I see that Fathom has used his blades to cut the foul thing in half.

“We’re not going to make it!” someone shouts, and I brace for another attack, only the Undine have stopped their assault. Instead, they sit patiently, waiting quietly.

The sky fills with the loudest, shrillest roar I have ever heard. I look toward the ocean and see something that, despite all the impossible things I have seen, just should not be frickin’ possible. A tentacle as large as a plane rises out of the water. It’s almost as tall as an apartment building.

“The mother is here,” Arcade says.





Chapter Twenty-Three


WHEN IT SLAMS ONTO THE GROUND, it causes a shock wave that blasts us off our feet. As I stagger to stand, I help Chloe do the same.

“Hey, kiddo, talk to me,” I cry.

She’s groggy, but she mumbles that she’s okay.

Riley lies next to us, unconscious. In fact, all the children are down. Only Fathom and the rest of the Alpha seem to have suffered the calamity well. I move to see about the others, only the tiniest step kills me. I look down to see my ankle swelling. It’s almost twice its normal size.

Fathom puts his arm around my waist, and I drape one around his shoulder.

“You did well,” he says. It sounds a bit like surrender.

Another tentacle rises out of the water, then another, and another. Ten, twenty, a hundred more, join them, and together they drag a monstrosity onto the shore. I’ve never seen anything this big, short of a shopping center. It probably stands as tall as the Cyclone once did, and as wide as a city block, and it’s made up of legs and blubber.

I lift my hand and power my glove. I aim it toward the beast, but it seems silly and pointless, like I’m a mosquito trying to knock down a full-grown man. Still, I have to try. I focus, urging the water to push the monster back, but nothing works. Even when I bear down with every ounce of concentration I can muster, when heat sears my frontal lobe and blood pours freely from my nose, there is nothing I can conjure to stop it. I’m so tired, so broken, even holding my hand up feels like more than I can handle.

“Fight, Lyric!” I shout at myself. “You’re a wild thing. You’re a giant. You’re a raging sea!”

But my words are hollow. The monster towers over me, moving a fifty feet every second. The next tentacle falls hard and sends another shock wave into the ground.

We need to be stronger than the others, the water whispers. I’m so confused, I almost think it’s a hallucination, but the voice returns. We need you to be more.

“How?” I cry.

The water guides my thoughts until it finds the severed hand of a Rusalka. It’s encased in a glove.

There, the voice urges.

I will it to me. There’s a tiny splash, and it flies out of the water, crashing in the sand at my feet. There’s a click, and the metal slides off the dead flesh. I pick it up and realize it will fit my other hand.

The Undine mother continues her approach. I don’t know if this is a good idea. One glove might be frying my brain. Two might kill me, but I don’t have any choice. I slip it on and it clicks itself shut; then both my hands glow like suns, and—wow.



I am an erupting volcano, an avalanche, a supernova.

The voice in my head is no longer a whisper. It’s a shout, and it’s coming from everywhere—the sky, the wind, and the ocean. I can hear it in my blood and the blood of my friends. I can hear a storm in the ocean hundreds of miles away. I can hear the moisture in the air. It sings to me. It twists around me in beautiful colors and arcs, slipping through my clothes and fingers.