Finally, she lurched toward the bow.
Through the haze of smoke, she saw a figure hunched over the rails. It took Jill a moment to recognize that the woman with the whirlwind of silver hair was Una.
“UNA!” Jill croaked. “We need to go!”
Una’s hands clutched the rail. Her eyes bulged as she stared into the water. She rocked back and forth, muttering something Jill couldn’t hear over the mayhem.
Wrapping her hand around Una’s wrist, Jill was about to tug her away from the rail when a pillar of flame rent the sky. It lit up the water around the bow, illuminating the thick shadow moving under the surface.
It wasn’t a solid mass like a whale or a big shark. It was almost arrow-shaped with a rounded head, streams of hair, and a nest of rippling arms.
It was the creature in Mrs. Smith’s stained-glass window. The creature in her garden. The creature with the woman’s face and tentacles for arms. It was the monster.
And it was swimming toward the kids in the water. The kids trying to reach the cluster of moored boats.
“Hey!” Jill shouted. “There’s something in the water! It’s coming your way! Come back!Hurry!”
Her smoke-scratched voice was lost in the smack of the lifeboat hitting the water. She tried again, but the noise of the fire chewing through the teak decking drowned her out.
The air was polluted with the smell of gunpowder and melting plastic. When Jill sucked in another breath, the grime singed her throat.
Next to her, Una kept muttering. She said something thatsounded like “swan” over and over as she watched the monster draw close to the group of swimmers.
Suddenly, a head disappeared under the surface.
“No,” Una whispered. “No, no, no.”
Another head vanished. And another.
The swimmers began to scream. Some put their faces in the water and swam as fast as they could, racing back toward the burning yacht. Others kept moving toward the moored boats.
The fire shifted in the wind, and the spotlight of flame that had lit up the water beyond the bow winked out.
Jill strained to see what was happening in the dark. She heard howls of terror. Brief and terrible shrieks of pain. She heard desperate splashing.
And then, just as one of the swimmers got close to the bow, Jill saw the monster hovering directly beneath her.
She saw a woman’s face, distorted by a flattened nose and too-wide eyes. Saw a mouth filled with daggers. A flash of scales.
“Oh, God,” she whispered.
Two arms, long and eel-like with hooked claws at each end, wrapped around the swimmer.
“HELP!” the girl keened. “HELP ME!”
Jill reached out a hand in a futile gesture. A sob rolled up her throat and tumbled into the night as Mrs. Smith’s arms tightened around the girl and pulled her under the surface.
In the illumination of the hull lights, Jill saw the water cloud. She saw a severed arm float by, a cord of flesh flapping out of the shoulder like a puppy’s tongue.
“Jill!”
Jill was lost in a fog of horror. Adrift in fear. She thought she heard her name, but the sound was swallowed by too many other sounds. Even when a hand rattled her shoulder, she didn’t move. She couldn’t look away from the water.
“Where is she?” she murmured.
Next to her, Una said “swan” again.
Suddenly, Charles shook Jill’s shoulder. “What are you guys doing? We have to go down and wait for the lifeboat! They’re going to drop people on the beach and come back for us.”
