Page 142 of Cherish

“That’s it?” Flint asks. “Seriously? A little water and a swim, and he thinks it’s soooooo dangerous?” He strikes out toward shore without another word, his powerful biceps eating up the distance like it’s nothing.

Heather takes off after him. As a lifelong member of the swim team, she’s pretty much in her element in anything water, and Eden follows directly after her.

“Show-offs,” Macy mutters, and I have to agree with her.

I love swimming—which is a good thing, given how I grew up a few steps from the Pacific—but loving it and being great at it are two very different things. Especially when everyone around me stands close to a foot taller than me, even Macy.

It isn’t long before she leaves me in the dust, which isn’t a big deal. I mean, sure, I never leave them when they’re in a sticky situation, but what’s a half-mile swim between friends…or mates, for that matter?

Jaxon and Hudson decided to race, and if their shit-talking is to believed—I still can’t see much of anything—they swim faster than they fade and are getting the rest of the gang to take sides and declare a winner. Which of course means everyone is now on shore except the short girl who is still very much in the creepy water, in the even creepierfucking dark.

No big deal. I’m not out here alone with scenes fromOpen Waterplaying in my head all of a sudden. Nope, not a big deal at all.

Though I have to say, after all Polo’s warnings about how terrible and precarious this journey is, I’d be lying if I said this didn’t feel kinda anticlimactic. A little cold water, an uncomfortably long swim…none of that actually spells terror the way Polo led us to believe.

The worst thing about it is the darkness, but the closer I get to shore, the more lights there are. Not just the sun leaking in from some hole above the beach, but a bunch of fireflies free-floating over the water that are beautiful. Like, really beautiful.

Maybe I’ll try to paint them when I get back home to San Diego, see if I can get their color just right. They’re a beautiful, glowing shade of purple I’ve never quite seen before. In fact—

“Grace!” All of a sudden, Flint yells my name and starts jumping up and down as he waves from shore.

I wave back and keep swimming, though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t taking my time at this point. I mean, why not? The others are drying off, and it’s really beautiful out here. Besides, it serves them right to have to wait in wet clothes forthe friend they left behind.

“Grace!” I guess it’s Macy’s turn to shout at me to hurry.

I start to wave back, but she’s not waving like Flint. Instead, she’s pointing behind me, a look of abject terror on her face.

Which, now that I think about it, isn’t that different from the expressions of everyone else on shore. What the hell?

I stop moving forward and dog paddle in a circle, trying to figure out what it is that has them so freaked out, but there’s nothing to see except unrelenting fucking darkness in one direction and those little purple lights in the other as I whip back around toward shore again.

Normally, I might not worry much, but I am an ocean girl—even though I don’t see anything, this sure as shit feels like aJaws, get-the-hell-out-of-the-water moment, so I start swimming as fast as I can, visions of sharks and giant squids and the Loch Ness fucking Monster suddenly dancing in my head. And that’s before Hudson takes a running leap back into the water—aiming straight for me.

My heart is beating against my chest like a drum now, and I suck in as much air as I can between strokes and swim and swim and swim. But still, the shore seems miles away, even though logically I know it can’t be more than a hundred yards.

“Grace!” Macy is screaming at the top of her lungs now. “Hurry, Grace!”

What the ever-loving fuck is going on?

I tell myself not to turn around again, tell myself to just keep going, but I have to know what’s back there. I just have to.

So I turn around one more time—as my friends start screaming so loud that I think one of them is going to have an aneurysm. And that’s when I see it.

Terror seizes the breath from my lungs as I realize that those beautiful purple fireflies weren’t fireflies at all.

They were lures.

Dangling over me from the tail of the Shadow Realm’s version of the ugliest, most disgusting-looking, bigger-than-a-fucking-houseanglerfish.

And I am the ridiculous little blue Dory fish it has in its sights.

Shit. Shit, shit,shit.

It leaps at me, and I scream. Thank God a year of everything trying to kill me has given me pretty solid fight-or-flight instincts, because without even thinking, I dive deep to try to get away from it. The only problem is that a fish that’s twenty feet tall has a pretty giant mouth, and I am right in the freaking center of all those massive, razor-sharp teeth.

The first time it goes for me, I manage to twist and dodge away at the last second, but I know that’s not going to last. The second time, it gets so close that I feel the edge of a tooth scrape against my hip. And the third time…the third time, I’m pretty sure I’m screwed.

There’s only so many ways to evade a colossal, gargoyle-hunting fish monster, and I’m pretty sure I’ve already used them all. So I do the only thing I can think of. I stop trying to swim away from the fish, and instead I whip around and pump my legs as fast as I can—and head straight for its giant mouth.

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