Page 30 of Cursed Waters

“Yeah,” he said, the word airy, as if his mind was leagues away. “Let’s hurry back so we can let the others know.”

The closer we got to where the shark lay, the tighter Leander’s arms wrapped over my shoulders. When we were a tail’s length from the bottom of the harbor, we spun to a sudden stop.

He tapped a finger against the center of my lips, and I nodded, easily understanding his meaning. I wasn’t stupid enough to startle a knocked-out shark.

My intuition had been right—there was a net tangled around its belly. Deep lines of scar tissue ran across its back like an intricate maze. I held out my knife.

Okay, maybe I was a little stupid.

But the shark had called out to me for a reason, and if I could help, why not try? Moving the knife into my right hand, I reached up and tapped Leander on the side of the jaw. We inched forward.

This is fine, I thought, silently gulping as I leaned in to get a better look at what I was getting myself into. Shadows were around us, and I squinted, trying to make sense of the weird opaque lines my magical vision picked out in the dark. Looking through the darkness had seemed so much simpler when I was still a child.

Leander’s streaming breath tickled my ear as he leaned in and pressed his palm down on a mossy rock. When his hand moved away, the rock looked practically radioactive, a green glow covering its surface.

Show off.

But the light helped, and I sucked in a hiss when I fully saw what horrors one old net could do to a mighty bull shark. There was no telling how long the net had been tangled around it, the ropes even wrapping around the entirety of one pectoral fin. Thank Poseidon the shark’s gills were mostly unaffected.

Worrying at my lip, I brandished the knife, wondering where to begin. I tested the net in a few places, but the twine was wound so tightly it looked nearly impossible to cut without risking further injury to the shark.

That is, if you weren’t someone who had spent half their life driving blades into the sides of fish. The knife felt like an extension of my hand, and I worked its tip into a deep groove, careful of the puckered scar tissue growing around it. When the first strand cut loose, my pulse quickened, and I moved on to the next.

I went to work, slicing and pulling, working my way up across the shark’s back as Leander anchored my hips, saving me from drifting away. When I made it to the front of its pectoral fin, its eye slowly opened, the dark circle focusing as it caught the movement of my knife. I froze.

How long had it been awake?

“You’re going to be okay,” I whispered, bracing for a response to force its way into my head, but the shark only stared in silence. My knife hurried for the next thread.

“You think maybe this is just a little bit reckless?” a velvet murmur breathed against my ear, and I couldn’t really argue—Leander had a point.

But agony and hopelessness had melded with the shark’s projected words, its raw desperation striking as if it were my own.With just a glimpse of its pain nearly incapacitating me, there was no way I could return to the surface knowing I’d left it to suffer.

Particularly deep weaves sank into the skin under the shark’s fin, and I held my breath as my blade slid into the lines covering its sensitive belly. This was the last section. It was almost free.

The shark seemed to sense it too, and when eagerness drove its tail to flick back and forth, Leander was already pulling me away. My knife caught the very last strand just as he yanked me back, and the shark thrashed in triumph. Its fins reawakened in a mad frenzy, churning up sand from the seabed as it shook off the last section of netting.

“I knew you couldn’t trust a shark,” Leander spat, drifting away from the cloud as it spread. The dark plague of sand extinguished even the rock’s magic glow. “Stay alert.”

Loose grit stung my eyes, but I fought not to blink. Leander veered off, heading for the surface, and an overwhelming sense of relief eased through me.

“OUT.”

The shark’s enormous body rounded out of the cloud, and its snout moved like the needle of a compass before settling in our direction.

“Fuck,” Leander cursed under his breath. He scooped up my tail.

“Wait, it’s trying to tell me something!”

“Whaleshit it is.” His tail seemed to double its effort. “What’s it going to tell you? ‘Thanks for saving me. You both look delicious’? It’s a shark, Claira, not a dolphin calf!”

We were almost to the surface, but I craned my head over his shoulder, looking back at the shark as it trailed in our wake.

“You’re welcome! Stay safe out there,” I called out. Leander nudged my head back under his chin with a tired sigh. But I’d already seen proof that the shark understood me. With just those simple words, the shark had stalled its chase, slipping silently into the murky underbelly of the harbor.

13

Claira

---