Reeves threw himself behind the bike rack and peered up through the bars.
The serpent’s great head had shattered the boathouse with the force of a crashing meteor. Its horns caught on the roof and peeled the rafters off, throwing them across the beach like twigs in a windstorm. Reeves flung his arms up, protecting his head as one soared towards him. It crashed over the bike rack and snapped in two, the pieces landing on either side of him.
The slit pupils narrowed further as the serpent peered down on the chaos, as if inspecting its own efforts.
Further out, three men shot across the water in a speedboat, fleeing in the opposite direction. The small boat powered over the swells and whirlpools left by the serpent, and for a moment, Reeves thought they would escape unharmed.
Then a second serpent breached the water.
Its massive head shadowed the speedboat like an eclipse. The water cascading off of it was enough to flood the boat, which rocked violently under the deluge. The screams of the men on board carried faintly on the wind.
Reeves scanned the water, breathing hard. Was there an entire pack of them?
The immense jaws hovering over the boat opened with a noise like splintering wood. Saliva and seawater dripped from fangs that were each the size of a man’s arm.
Two of the men dove off while the driver cowered beneath the wheel. None of it mattered. When the serpent struck, its jaws closed over the boat and all.
Reeves watched the men disappear with mounting horror that numbed his body.
Finished with its meal, the second serpent swung around and followed the path of its mate onto the beach. It reached the shallows and—
Oh, no.The two heads were connected to the same body. This was a single leviathan, a head at each end.
The breath caught in Reeves’ chest. Dimly, he realised he was still clutching his phone and lifted it to his ear.
“Reeves! God dammit—”
“I’m here, sir.”
“We’re sending help. We need to nuke this thing before it takes out all of Kodiak.”
Reeves sank to his knees behind the bike rack, heart pounding. He’d spent his whole life training for this—from Cadets, to the Navy, through every screening, assessment, and boot camp, topping it all off with survival training at the Naval Special Warfare Cold Weather Detachment. So why did he feel so ill-prepared all of a sudden?
He looked at the serpent’s body, studying the hundreds of coal-black scales that glittered like armour. His gaze drifted to the water.
“What the hell is the procedure, here?” said Officer Miller. “Is this a natural disaster?”
There. Reeves’ eyes locked onto something that sent a chill through him. Perched on a rock next to a hazard buoy and watching the chaos unfold, black hair dripping beneath a black crown, was an enormous merman.
As Reeves watched, the demon raised and lowered his arms repeatedly. What was he doing? Reeves studied the odd movements, then turned back to the serpent in time to see one of the heads close its jaws around a parked SUV and crush it like it was made of spun glass.
The merman was still gesturing from the rock. Was the serpent responding to this in some way?
The merman raised his left arm as though pushing the air, and the second head moved along the shore, the great black body curling around itself.
With a glance around to make sure no more civilians were at risk, Reeves ran back to the road, staying low. The shoreline was ravaged, ghostly.
“Sir, I think this is related to the mermaids,” he said, panting.
A pause. “How do you know?”
“One of them is out in the water. A male.”
Over the tsunami siren, another wail pierced the air as several police cars peeled into the intersection. The officers leapt out, drawing guns and firing at once. The bullets ricocheted off the serpent’s armour with a series ofclinks. It didn’t surprise Reeves that the weapons did nothing.
“I think the merman is controlling the serpent, sir. It’s the way he’s moving.”
As he said it, he wished it wasn’t true. He knew what this meant.
