Page 6 of Sink or Swim

I shake my head and crouch down, pointing to my neck to indicate he needs to climb on to my back. Nick hesitates for a moment, and I’m scared he’s going to dart off again, but then he latches onto my neck and squeezes. He can’t actually hurt me. It would take more pressure than that to squeeze my trachea. But it’s unpleasant, and I tap his thigh with my claws to get him to loosen up a bit.

He doesn’t. Fine. I’ll make this quick, then.

Letting out a growl, I hoist myself up onto the rope and start the slow ascent. Carrying the extra weight means I take an extra five minutes to make it to the top, but when I’m finally up there, I feel like a bad bitch who just single-handedly took down a grizzly.

Nick releases my neck and slides off my back to immediately put space between us, and when I turn to look down at him, he’s trembling.

“You can’t be serious. It’s not that high up,” I say, looking down at the ground. “We’ll be safe from predators up here. It’s why I made it.”

Nick looks around the tree house, popping his head into the other small rooms that took me months to build. No, there is no reason I had to make my living space so damn big, but I did anyway. He finds the kitchen and looks inside my larder, then gasps when he reaches inside to pull out a glass jar filled with pickled newt eyes. My favorite snack before bed, or when I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m feeling peckish.

“What?” I ask, moving toward him and taking the jar out of his hands before he does something stupid like drop it. “Do you want one? You can have some if you want.”

His pale skin turns green as he shakes his head vigorously.

“Wow, okay. You could have just said no. I understand that word,” I rumble, then shove the jar back into the larder. If he won’t eat the food I have on hand, what else will I feed him? Plants? I have no clue which plants are even safe to eat because I’m a carnivore.

Nick hovers nearby, his presence feeling like an anxious botfly flitting around. I turn and snatch his face in my claws, and he lets out a panicked little yelp as he tries to pry himself free from my grasp. Then I jam my claws into his mouth and try to force his jaw open.

“Stop that, I need to look. Let me look,” I say, and run my claws across his back teeth. Just as I suspected. Flat. He’s got mostly flat teeth and a few pointier ones in the front, but they’re nothing like my incisors. This little asshole is an omnivore, which means I’m screwed unless I can figure something out.

I release him, and he rubs his jaw while glaring at me.

“Oww,” he groans, then says something to me that I can’t understand. It sounds angry, though. Oh, well. He can be mad if he wants, but I don’t know what I don’t know, and without a shared language between the two of us, we’re going to have to keep playing this game until we either figure out a better way or die from old age.

He mutters something else, and I stare at him blankly.

“What? I know, it’s a pain in the ass that we can’t communicate,” I say, sighing. “I’m going to need to teach you how to speak my language. You can make the sounds, right?”

Clearly, I understand nothing about human biology. I should probably take him back home to the humans, but that’s many miles away, and on foot, it’ll take us a couple weeks. Weeks of travel in the lagoon? No. Nope. Uh-uh. We’d both end up dead by day two, if we’re lucky.

I open the larder up again and pull out another jar and open it. The sickly-sweet smell of coagulated snake blood wafts into the air, and Nick runs to one of the windows to empty his stomach. Okay, so this isn’t to his taste, either.

I put the lid back on and call out, “Thank you for not doing that inside!”

NICK

Ineed to get out of here. That much is obvious. This creature, Oona, is going to end up killing me before the day is out if I stay.

But where would I even run to? She’d just catch me again and drag me back. But I also don’t want to risk being bitten by a snake to die a slow, torturous death, either. That leaves me to the mercy of the creature, who looks like a frog got into a fight with the Toxic Avenger.

When she opened up the jar of dark stuff, I couldn’t stop my stomach from unleashing itself. I know she’s trying to figure out how to feed me, but there’s no way to tell her what I need or want. And what I need is to get back to human civilization. And it’s not like I’m confident she’d listen to me even if she could understand.

“Please, stop trying to feed me,” I plead as she rummages around in what I can only assume is her pantry. I scrub a hand through my dirt-caked hair as sweat glides down my neck and back. The lagoon at this time of day is sweltering, and the humidity only makes it worse.

Suddenly, I feel the painful bite of something on my arm, and I let out a sharp hiss before swatting at a massive fly. Only it’s not a fly, but instead some sort of mutated bee out of my worst nightmares.

Oona snarls as she leaps into action, plucking the mutant-bee from my arm and smashing it between her claws. It dies with a satisfying snap and explodes like a grape. My blood, along with its innards, splatters across the floorboards of the living room. She hisses again, no doubt peeved it just made a mess of her home, and I wince.

“Sorry,” I mutter. “Didn’t even know that was there.”

She grabs my arms and clicks her tongue to chastise me again.

“H-Hey, watch it. I’m fine, you don’t have to?—”

But then I realize that I’m not fine. The area where the bug bit me is now rising into a vicious, eggplant-colored welt. Yeah. That’s definitely concerning.

Before I have a chance to react, however, my new friend’s tongue darts out from between her fangs and slathers the welt with sticky, green saliva. My stomach roils again, but there’s nothing to toss up, thankfully. Whatever she just did soothed the infection, and the bump recedes until there’s nothing there. No bump, no mark, no nothing. She lets go of my arm and shakes her head at me, no doubt as exhausted as I am from everything that’s happened so far.

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