Light was the refuge of the weak.
Mrs. Smith always waited until the light and noise was at a minimum before venturing outside. Eager to escape terra firma, Mrs. Smith entered her boathouse through the back door.
This close to the water, her skin began to itch. The muscles in her legs tensed. Her teeth and nails tingled.
She shed her robe and approached the channel cut through the middle of the floor. A sleek powerboat hung suspended above the water. Draped in ash-gray canvas, it looked like an orca’s carcass.
The boat could be lowered into the channel, which maintained a depth of six to nine feet, and eased out into the harbor through the main door. However, it was nothing more than a prop. The boathouse served another purpose. It allowed Mrs. Smith to enter the water without being seen.
She was very, very careful to avoid being seen in her human form and even more so after she transformed. Her survival depended on concealment.
As her ragged toenails scraped over the wood floor, she sensed her children waiting for her. They’d be just past the sandbar, wriggling with anticipation.
I’m coming, children.
The itching intensified, but a smile touched Mrs. Smith’sthin lips as she padded over the rough floorboards and jumped into the channel. The water embraced her, its liquid fingers cooling her skin.
The saltwater hot tubs in her house kept Mrs. Smith’s scaly limbs hydrated during the day, but she hated them. She hated their fiberglass basins and chrome dials. She hated their ridiculous jets and bubbles, their inane cupholders.
She spent most of the day languishing in one of several large tubs, reading books or flipping through magazines. She had piles of magazines because she owned a company that printed hundreds of them every month. She had piles of books, too. She belonged to the Literary Guild, the Dollar Book Club, the Book of the Month Club, and the Doubleday Book Club. She also had a library of antique books and would revisit old favorites when she couldn’t stand to face yet another vapid novel by the likes of Jackie Collins or Danielle Steel.
When Mrs. Smith grew tired of reading, she’d fall into a restless sleep and dream of a younger world.
She dreamed of oceans without boats, of jagged icebergs thrusting deep down into glacial waters, of colossal sharks and finned serpents. She dreamed of submarine-sized eels. Of creatures moving soundlessly through the depths. Creatures like her. Creatures with teeth. Powerful, magnificent, hungry hunters.
They were all dead now. All but her. And here she was, soaking in hot tubs and sneaking into the water under the cover of night. It was too dangerous to hunt during the day. Human eyes were everywhere. The time when she could doze in underwater caves, knowing she would never be discovered, had passed. She had to live a half-life among the creatures she despised most or cease to exist at all.
Mrs. Smith retained her human form as she slithered under the gap in the boathouse door.
She swam like a frog for several strokes—taking care to remain below the surface—before finally shedding her fragile human husk.
Her legs divided into thin, elongated limbs. At the end of each rubbery, eel-like appendage was a needle-sharp barb. Her skin darkened. Diamond-shaped scales erupted all over her body.
The bones in Mrs. Smith’s arms shattered and rearranged into spines. Her arms grew longer and longer, like pieces of pulled taffy, and her fingers morphed into hooked claws. As her torso stretched and narrowed, her breasts flattened into calloused disks. Her head swelled like an oval balloon, row after row of serrated teeth cutting through her gums. When she opened her flexible lower jaw, her ink-black tongue wriggled out of her mouth like an adder slithering out of a cave.
Gills sliced through the flesh of her neck, and for the first time in many hours, Mrs. Smith could breathe.
The transformation had been painful. It always was. But the pain was already fading as she swam away from the shore, as her eyes became bigger, rounder, and beetle black.
She had the cold, calculating stare of a great white, but the intelligence in her gaze made her far more terrifying. The most formidable sharks in the ocean ate without discernment. They’d bite anything once. Mrs. Smith was far more selective.
Tonight, she would spurn her diet of whales and fish. It was the summer solstice, which meant her season of renewal had finally begun. For nine months, she’d been fasting, eating only to survive. Now she would eat for pleasure.
These were the old laws—blood oaths put into place when humans first became a threat to ancient creatures. The laws between the species were binding. And eternal.
The oath had been sworn so long ago that the humans no longer remembered it. Their numbers had grown too quickly.Their lives were too short. They were born, reproduced, and died in the blink of an eye. Their blood became diluted. The oaths and old ways were forgotten.
But Mrs. Smith remembered. The laws were etched into her DNA. They’d been transferred from mother to daughter for millennia. Back when the humans were little more than apes dragging their knuckles on the ground, they had vowed not to hunt her kind.
In return, the Mother of Eels promised not to hunt humans unless they failed to give her what she needed at the end of her hundred-year life cycle. If they failed to sacrifice their own to her when she asked, she could take what she needed.
There were no sacrifices now, but all Mrs. Smith had to do was devour the flesh of nine man-children between the summer solstice and the fall equinox and she would be reborn.
Nine Pure Ones.
Nine unsullied pieces of flesh.
Nine was the number of power. The number of mastery. Of all timeless things. The creature in Mrs. Smith’s stained-glass window had nine tentacles. Seven sprouted from her hips and two from her torso. These muscular appendages propelled her through the water like a spear.
