A Trail of Echoes (A Shade of Vampire #18)(25)

By the time I was finished with my musings, I heard the bathroom door click next door, and River’s footsteps as she stepped out of the shower.

There was a knock at my door, and then she stepped inside. Her long hair was wrapped up in a towel, and she was wearing her black robe again.

“I was thinking how Lalia wasn’t marked with a tattoo,” River said, taking a seat next to me on the bed as she unwrapped her hair and began drying it with the towel. “Neither was Hassan or Morgan. I wonder why?”

I shrugged. “Perhaps because they’d been intended solely for, uh, consumption.”

River shuddered. “Thank God we got them out of there.” Parting her hair into three bunches, she began working it into a braid. “I also keep thinking about that vial in my bag. I-I just can’t shake the feeling that it’s something to help my brother. That dream I told you about, where I imagine having a normal conversation with him, it keeps coming back.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but would you really risk giving it to him? What if it was something else?”

She looked nervous at the thought. “Yeah, that’s what I’ve been—”

The submarine jolted, sending River flying off the bed. Before I could catch her, she’d slammed against the wall. She cursed, rubbing her head. I would’ve gone flying too had I not gripped hold of the bed to stop myself from crashing into her.

As the submarine steadied, I crouched next to her and examined her head. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll survive,” she grumbled.

I hurried out into the corridor and entered the control room. I stared through the window at the murky waters, trying to get a clue as to what had just happened. Something had obviously collided with us. But what? It must’ve been some kind of large creature—a shark, possibly even a whale. River joined me a few moments later and the two of us scanned the waters.

My heart leapt into my throat and River let out a scream as a creature shot up from beneath the submarine. A creature unlike anything I’d seen in my life.

She appeared to be a woman, with scaly green skin and matted purple hair that covered her bare chest. Her hideous face was pressed right up against the glass, her thin lips parting to reveal fangs. She slid upward against the window, glaring down at us through yellow eyes. She moved higher and her bottom half came into view—the tail of a fish.

My God. Is this a…

River finished my sentence for me, her voice choked with horror. “A mermaid?”

She screamed again as the creature brought a fist down against the reinforced glass. She slammed against it so forcefully, I felt the floor beneath me tremor. If she continued to hit like that, I didn’t know how much longer the glass would hold up.

I moved closer to her, baring my fangs and giving her a menacing look, hoping to scare her back.

It didn’t. If anything, it only aggravated her. Now she began bringing both fists down at the same time. I could hear her snarling through the water.

Dropping into the control seat, I ramped up the speed of the submarine suddenly, tilting downward, then upward, sideways right and left, hoping to jerk her off the vessel. But she remained clinging as though her hands had suckers on them.

There was a thud against the roof of the submarine. A few seconds later, another equally hideous creature slid down the window, taking up a place next to the first. This one appeared to be badly injured, however. She had a deep bloodied gash in her torso. It was bleeding so much, it was staining the water.

Mermaids. What are they doing here?

Is there a gate nearby? Somewhere in the water? How else would they have gotten here?

I had left The Shade with a map of gates connecting the human and supernatural realms. Unfortunately, it had later been confiscated by hunters, but I couldn’t remember noticing a gate in any seas or oceans. I could only guess that the map was not comprehensive.

The two creatures began punching the glass in unison.

Crap.

In my panic, I performed maneuvers with the submarine that I hadn’t thought I was capable of in my continued attempt to throw them off, but it was futile.

“Ben,” River gasped. She clutched the arms of her seat with white knuckles. “There’s another one.”

Sure enough, barely a second later, another slammed against the glass. Now all three pounded away.

I stopped trying to shake them off and this time focused on rising to the surface as fast as I possibly could. As the first crack formed in the glass, we burst up above the waves.

These were fish. I expected them to immediately start gasping and writhing, but they did no such thing. Although their natural habitat was in the water, they could clearly survive for some time above the surface. Encouraged by the crack that had appeared, they beat harder against the glass.

I grabbed River’s hand and pulled her out of the control room, slamming the door behind us.

Gripping her head, I forced her to look me in the eye. “Lock yourself in a cabin. Don’t come out until I say. Understand?”

She looked terrified, but nodded and raced away.

A hellish screech assaulted my eardrums as I hurried up the ladder and pushed open the hatch in the roof of the submarine. Hauling myself out into the night, I glared down at the three creatures still clinging to the window. I was furious to see that one of them had managed to punch a fist right through the glass by now. She didn’t seem to be at all concerned about the fact that her fist was now a bloody mess. She was still gripping the jagged glass, trying to make the hole bigger.