Page 30 of Rune Assassin

That was easy for him to say. He wasn’t drowning. Or was he? Shouldn’t he have been?

Terror turned to befuddlement as I stared at his perfectly calm expression except for the concern in his eyes. That’s when I noticed his mouth was open and he wasn’t taking any breaths. I also realized the water didn’t feel quite as cold as before. In fact, it was almost balmy.

Tegan squeezed my arms. “Take some deep breaths if you need to but you don’t have to.”

I did as he instructed and shivered at the uncomfortable sensation of water rushing down my throat. A coughing fit came over me and Tegan drew me against him. There we floated a few feet above the surface as I managed to get a hold of myself.

I drew away from him and opened my mouth like a snapping alligator. The water was now in and around me, the same sensation as air but with a touch more pressure on my chest.

Tegan patiently watched me acclimate. “Are you alright?”

I nodded. “Y-yeah, I think so.”

Then I slapped him. The motion was hard enough that his head snapped to one side.

“Don’t do that again!” I growled.

Tegan turned back to me with an apologetic smile. “I did deserve that, didn’t I?”

“And then some!” I added as I stabbed a finger into his chest. “You could have given me a heart attack!”

He grasped one of my hands and set my palm against my own chest. “Not right now.”

I dropped my gaze to my hand and some of the color left my face. There was no familiar thumping sensation in my chest. I gave a big gulp and looked up at Tegan. “I know Conrad said this was temporary but maybe we should’ve tested this out first on something else. Like Lusio or someone.”

A crooked smile slipped onto Tegan’s lips. “Too late now, so why don’t we enjoy the sights?”

“Sights?” I wondered as he floated to one side.

My clear eyesight revealed the strange underwater world just off the shore. Seaweed swayed to and fro with the tide and parted to reveal the thick corals that covered the ocean floor. Their thick tree-like branches stretched out of the sandy bottom and mixed with algae to create a soft glow of life. Fish and crustaceans scurried away as we held hands and waltzed through the waters. Every step was a bounce and I couldn’t help but laugh at the sensation of weightlessness.

“This must be what it’s like to walk on the moon,” I commented.

Tegan lifted an eyebrow. “Have your people been there?”

I grinned. “That depends on who you ask, but yeah. Anyway-” I turned my attention back to the vast expanse ahead of us, “-where do we go from here?”

He nodded to a spot a little to our left. “I think I feel a heavy vibration coming from there.”

I spun around and grabbed his hand with both of mine and gave it a tug. “Then come on before we find out when our fishy functions stop working.”

We swam through the myriad of fauna and soon rediscovered civilization in the form of a huge shipwreck. The boat had once stretched for some two hundred feet and half that for the width but nature and bad luck had brought it down. Enough of the hull remained to create a sort of rib cage with bits of planks stretched over the ribbed wood to create the horrible imagery of rotten flesh. Though the ruins were scattered about the place I noticed a trail of broken planks leading from a huge rock formation some five hundred feet further out to see. The ship had struck the stone and sank.

Hugh floated a few yards above the wreck while about two dozen vampires worked away at shovels. They stirred up a mess of wet sand that made it difficult to see the bottom.

Hugh turned at our coming and smiled at us. “So you have come.”

“We didn’t want to miss admiring your work,” Tegan returned as we joined him in floating in the water. It was still so surreal to watch through vampire eyes the work being done in the remains of a sunken ship. Tegan nodded at the mess of the ancient sunken ruins. “How did a wreck this close to the shoreline remain untouched?”

Hugh returned his attention to the shipwreck and shook his head. “This ship has been salvaged before but not beneath the timbers. We’re trying to dig those out right now to see if there might be treasures buried in the sand.”

“Is Lusio that desperate for stuff that he’s re-digging ships?” I wondered.

Hugh folded his arms over his chest and furrowed his brow. “That is the assumption, though Mr. Lusio hasn’t told us as much yet. There is also the difficulty in the current further out to sea. Many vampires have been swept away these last twenty years because the proper assessment wasn’t made for the water flow.”

A little color drained from my face. “The vampires came back, though, didn’t they?”

Hugh pursed his lips as he stared ahead. “Not all of them.”

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