Page 1 of Guarded By the Vodnik

Chapter 1

Vodyan

The soft sand of the lake bottom brushed my tentacles when I followed the cargo walker along the main road between Yeseera, the vodnik city, and Copper Harbor on the shore. I’d made this trip dozens of times in the past year.

It was a long, arduous walk, usually uneventful. The cargo walker was a simple platform on six crablike legs that slowly navigated the lake bottom. The eighteen-mile trip, which would have taken me just over an hour if I could swim freely, took about eight hours at the walker’s speed.

The road connecting the vodnik city to the shore was marked out along the shallowest parts of the lake bottom, but it was still over 150 feet underwater. It was dark and cold, the waters of the lake calm and quiet. Just as I liked them.

I pushed away from the bottom, my tentacles flexing with power. Propelled upward, I spread them out to float easily and did a full sweep of the area, focusing on the sparse plants that could potentially hold a lurking thief. My cargo was beyond precious, which was why I had been chosen to guard it.

Below me, the cargo walker crawled steadily up the road, faint lights mapping out the route. It wasn’t really a road in the human sense. Outside Yeseera and the graveyards, nobody built on the lake bottom. But it was the safest, shallowest route connecting the human world to the vodnik city, and as such, it was marked with flickering red lights placed at regular intervals.

They looked eerie in the cold, dark depths.

Walking along the road, my cargo was dangerously exposed, but this was the fastest route. Then again, it wasn’t like I minded a fight. An attack would do nicely to break the monotony of my assignment.

For now, all was clear, no suspicious shadows lurking around. I floated back down to the walker, letting the cold of the dense, clear waters numb my skin. My senses were still keen, but my scales felt porous, my body’s temperature matching the water.

I was one with the unfeeling, deadly mass of the lake.

Some time passed like this, and I lost myself in the soothing rhythm of travel. The red lights flickered, the sandy bedrock passing evenly under my tentacles, and the darkness around me stretched into infinity. I let my mind fill with the cold nothingness of the deep, keeping my senses alert.

Down here, the only currents were the ones caused by my and the walker’s movements. All was still and felt safe, but that didn’t lull me into carelessness. The cargo, stacked high on the walker’s platform and secured with chains, was the most expensive thing that ever graced the depths of Lake Superior.

Shanta.

It was a plant that grew only in the post-glacial, clear waters of the Great Lakes. Cultivated exclusively by vodniks, who possessed the secret to making it thrive, shanta yielded a substance that healed neural degeneration in humans and other species with similar brain physiology.

It was our wealth and the source of our significance. While humans measured their worth in gold, vodniks measured theirs in the units of shanta they produced.

The neat boxes of medicine were stamped with the official seal of the Yeseera extraction plant. And as one of MSA’s most highly regarded underwater agents, I had the task of protecting the precious cargo.

Shanta fetched incredibly high prices in legal sales, but on the black market, it was beyond invaluable, mostly because I’d never let a shipment slip. The little that made it to the surface illegally had been stolen in the production plant by unscrupulous employees that were quickly found out and punished.

Stealing shanta was as despicable as murder and as severely punished—with mutilation. That didn’t deter greedy vodniks and other creatures from trying their chances, though.

The shipment I guarded was worth millions of dollars, which was beyond tempting. Over the course of my service, many tried stealing my cargo, though only true water dwellers posed a risk.

I’d been attacked by human divers a few times. Disabling their breathing gear was child’s play, and for my effort, I got the dubious pleasure of watching them drown. It was an ugly, weak death, but then again, humans were a weak species. Fragile and too soft, they posed no threat to a vodnik.

Lamias, on the other hand, were mighty opponents.

A cold current brushed my back tentacles, my flexible muscles contracting instinctively. I kept moving, seemingly unaware of the disturbance that I knew wasn’t caused by my movements.

Somebody stalked me.

“Keep walking,” I said softly to override the walker’s programming that would force it to stop once it detected an anomaly.

Its light blinked blue to let me know it understood the command.

I followed the walker at an even pace, suppressing the urge to reach for the jet gun strapped to my arm. I’d never used it on this assignment before and, at this point, not needing it became a matter of pride. Unless forced into a corner, I was going to protect shanta with my arms and tentacles alone.

The water was still now, but that didn’t fool me. If I had been less experienced, I might have dismissed that brush of a current as an accident, but I knew better than that.

There were no accidents. Not down in the deeps.

But my stalker was careful, I had to give it to them. They kept their distance, moving cautiously. Since I knew this route by heart, I suspected where they planned to attack, so I relaxed and waited. I’d soon pass one of the underwater graveyards, a human shipwreck surrounded by a cage-like dome that guarded it from desecration.

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