Marlowe shouted when the swan rushed at them, reaching the stern.
The frogs had gone silent. The bird strayed to the side when slimy ripples disturbed the water underneath it.
Muck sloughed away as a monster rose from the water, the hollowed body of the swan clinging to its head as it towered over the boat. Caution tape snapped, and the bird’s decayed skull lunged at them.
Heather made a choked sound and scrambled back toward the bow. Vision blurred as the monster slipped back underwater, sweaty palms lost their grip on the oars, and a hiss wrenched from Marlowe as she scrabbled for her backpack, for the knife that wasn’t where she left it, a chorus of “fuck, fuck,fuck”stumbling from her numb lips.
At the stern, webbed, fleshy hands inched over peeling paint. Arms roped with muscle strained, twitching and bulging under muddy brown spots. Its sinuous chest lurched over the edge and it bared pale needle teeth.
At the bow, a faint splash.
Marlowe didn’t have to turn around to know Heather was gone.
The rowboat listed and groaned under the monster’s weight and Marlowe’s vision tunneled to three sharp lines slicing through its neck. Ragged, scarlet-tinged gills flashed, gaping open.
Vulnerable.
Marlowe brought her flashlight down in a vicious arc.
Nerves pulled her blow and it crunched against the side of the boat.
Heavy vibrations rattled the stern as the monster snarled. Thin lips pulled back from rows of sharp, nearly translucent teeth. Its chest thrummed, pale underbelly undulating and pulsing, the sound burrowing in Marlowe’s ribcage, throbbing in time with her heart, strangling her throat.
The pit of her stomach went cold and brittle. Marlowe gritted her teeth, breath coming short and fast, shaking hands slippery. Useless.
She was going to die in a shitty little boat. She was going to die in a shitty little boat, and she didn’t even get one last fuck.
Scales hissed across the boards.
A croaking whimper squeezed from Marlowe’s throat as she pressed back against the bow.
The monster leaned in, round eyes unblinking and cracked golden in the moonlight.
Strands of pondweed grew from its scalp and a small crayfish anchored there, claws raised.
Fleshy cat-fish-like tendrils snaked out between the lanky strands and left a damp trail across Marlowe’s cheeks, curling around the lines of her clogged throat, dragging over her trembling lips.
Marlowe’s tongue flicked across cracked lips and brushed against the strand. The tang of decaying lake bed and fish tossed carelessly to the shore leached into her mouth. The monster tilted its head as it tasted her with one, careful tendril curled at the corner of Marlowe’s mouth.
It—she,Marlowe hazily considered, the same way boats were calledshe—reached out knobby fingers, tips even with each other and twice as long as a human’s. Translucent webbing stretched between each knuckle that was the same spotted, slick skin as the rest of her. Her hand was clammy against Marlowe’s forehead, then temple, then jaw. Two vertical slits in the center of her face fluttered open, a swampy gust wafting over her as the creature exhaled.
A deadly sense of peace Marlowe hadn’t experienced since the flooding in that damn cabin washed over her. Crouched on the top bunk with a soggy Bible waiting for the water level to rise was different from being trapped ona sinking boat with a creature who shouldn’t exist—but the same peace still wormed into her mind, the peace of someone who faced death.
It blinked. Clear membrane shuttered and retracted over its eyes.
Marlowe should have struck. Fingers squished into eyeballs, an oar to the skull. If she hurt it enough, maybe she’d be able to get away.
But she saw the same glaze on the creature’s face as she saw in her own cracked mirror at home. Loneliness, medicated by shitty sex with shitty people, unwilling to let go even if it killed them.
Marlowe’s anger at Heather spiked at the faint scent of pine-vanilla lingering in the boat, and she shifted up on her elbows like surfacing from quicksand.
“Go on. Make it quick.” Her mouth tasted like stale smoke and rot, and she spat over the side.
It watched her.
The crayfish in its pondweed hair burrowed away.
Rain swept in with heavy mist turning to fat droplets as the storm hit.
