Page 5 of Beneath the Surface (Tendrils of Love #1)

T hey stopped, for a moment, to admire their handiwork.

Hands ran over his scalp, searching for soft spots, then slapped his stinging cheek just for the pleasure of it.

“Wake up, faggot,” one of them intoned, and another voice, higher and meaner, giggled: “Dude, he pissed himself.” They hooted, delighted, and Quinn’s vision filmed over with tears he couldn’t blink away.

The tears were hot, almost scalding in the cold, and he could taste them, salt and copper.

The men released him, and Quinn flopped on the shore, half in, half out of the water like a dead fish, eyes glazed and sightless.

His breath rattled in his chest, wheezed up his throat in labored, erratic puffs.

He didn’t know if he was still alive or if he was observing the scene from outside his body.

The pain remained, yet it felt dull, numb, distant.

The tall man bent down, passing through Quinn’s line of sight, but he was just a blur, his face fragmented into a million pixels.

Quinn barely flinched when he seized his arm, his fingers digging mercilessly into Quinn’s chilled, tense muscle.

His voice was rough and breathless as he spoke, “When they used to drown a woman accused of being a witch,” he panted in Quinn’s bruised and bloodied face, “they said if she sank, she wasn’t a witch, and if she floated, she was.

” His grin curled into a sinister smirk, eyes glinting with malice as he exchanged a knowing look with his broad-shouldered companion. “Bet the same goes for faggots.”

“Let’s find out,” the other man replied, delivering a sharp smack to Quinn’s bloody, silt-smeared cheek that sent another jolt of pain radiating through his head.

Quinn gasped in his delirium of pain, barely conscious as blood trickled from his nose, mouth, and ears…

maybe his eyes as well… or was it tears?

He tried to writhe against their hands as they hoisted him from the ground, but every movement was a scream of pain, and he went limp, unable to fight back as his head lolled and his mind closed down.

They held him horizontally by his shoulders and ankles. He hovered just above the water’s rippling surface, the cold mist rising to meet him as they waded deeper into the lake.

No… please…

The words never found their way to his lips. It was over; he could feel the icy tendrils of the lake reaching for him, promising a slow, suffocating death as the lake's frigid water crept closer, ready to claim him, breath by breath, into its unforgiving abyss.

“One... two...” The men laughed with malicious glee as they counted down, swinging Quinn like a jump rope. Each thrust sent him arcing back and forth, his bare skin skimming the cold surface of the lake.

Quinn's mind blanked out, a static buzz taking over. The men’s voices faded to a distant muffle.

“...three...” The men jeered in unison, their voices dripping with venom. “Sleep with the fishes, faggot!”

Quinn felt his chest swell with a futile breath, the air tinged with desperation, as the men hurled him into the lake.

For a moment, he was weightless— flying— and it was a peaceful sensation, almost serene.

Then he struck the water with a force that knocked the breath from his lungs and sank like a stone.

The icy water surged over his head, flooding his nostrils and filling his throat with a choking, suffocating chill.

A cascade of bubbles escaped from his mouth as the lake claimed him, drawing him down.

.. down... deeper into its shadowy, murky depths.

He didn’t fight it… couldn’t fight it.

The world around him dissolved into a swirl of greenish-black shadows, the dim light filtering through the water like a fading memory.

His lungs seared with an unbearable heat, and an excruciating pain radiated through his chest like a web of thorns.

He tried to pull against his bindings, but the twine was wound mercilessly tight around his wrists and ankles, biting into his flesh with every desperate struggle.

What remnant of strength that remained, drained out of him, and he let himself go… floating down… down…

He heard the distant roar of the men's triumph above, their taunts rendered muffled and hollow by the weight of the water, and then even that faded as Quinn tumbled deeper. The pressure built with every yard, cold compressing his chest. He couldn’t tell up from down; the world had become a wobbly, wavering darkness punctuated by a searing, hungry pain in his lungs.

Quinn’s ears rang with a soundless, internal scream as the lake’s cold compressed around him—an immense, seething pressure.

He flailed weakly in pure survival instinct, his shins colliding with hard water and then with the sudden yielding of something slick and alive.

In his suffocating panic, he saw nothing but darkness rimmed with blood-red, tasted nothing but copper and brine.

A memory—wind through the birches, his mother’s voice calling him in for dinner, Emily’s laughter—flared in the darkness and was snuffed out by the vise of his lungs seizing, then spasming.

He opened his mouth to scream and instead swallowed a mouthful of the lake, thick and silty and freezing.

It happened as his mind began to go—like a blackout at a party, a sudden drop through the floor.

A shape pressed to his face: soft, glistening, and impossibly strong.

For an instant, it was all mouth. It found his lips and pushed, and his jaw, slack with shock, let it enter—something rubbery, the diameter of his thumb, forcing a way between his cracked molars, over his bleeding tongue.

The tendril—slippery, not cold but eerily warm in the gelid water—slithered deep, choking him, then kept going.

He gagged reflexively, but the thing pressed on, slick and insistent. It filled his mouth, his throat, and as it plunged, the urge to cough or retch faded, replaced by something new and terrifying—

It slid down his throat with impossible speed and precision, and as it went, his lungs, a hair from rupture, convulsed.

Stinging, burning, a starburst of pain—and into that cavern of death, the thing burrowed deep and, impossibly, he breathed.

Not water. Not air. A third thing, thick and buzzy, a taste like salt and static, carbonating his veins.

The pain stopped. His chest expanded, skin prickling as blood thundered into his face and extremities.

For a heartbeat, Quinn convulsed: he tried to cough, to retch, to scream, but the thing held him open, held him alive.

He could breathe, but the world tasted of brine and slime and the sweet, chemical rot of the lake bottom.

His eyes goggled open. The world was no longer dark, but shot through with a greenish glow, a phosphorescent pulse radiating from the tendril in his throat.

All around him, the water was alive—alive with a luminous scatter of filaments, blinding as a hundred fireflies beneath the surface, all converging on him.

He screamed again, but now the scream was silent and internal.

The thing inside him churned, then relaxed.

From the murky depths, more shapes coiled, fins and ribbons and long, muscular arms looping around him, gentle but inescapable.

The thing in his mouth undulated, feeding him—oxygen, chemicals, a cocktail that made his vision burst and his heartbeat thunder back to full, frantic life.

He felt every cell of his body, the roots and pulsing nodes of nerves he had never before considered, and somewhere at the edge of this green-lit panic, he understood that he was still alive—if only because the thing in his mouth willed it.

Other shapes closed in, slick and smooth, no longer water but arms or legs, appendages that wrapped him in a kind of gentle caul.

They slid over his wrists and ankles, unspooling the twine with a touch so precise and deliberate it could only be intelligent.

The twine unwound like a snake losing interest in its prey, and the tentacles—he had no other word for them—held him as tenderly as a mother cups her newborn.

There was no violence, no choking, only the subtle and absolute pressure of being enveloped. He was lifted, not by force but by a coordinated ballet of touch, propelled upward through the viscous green shimmer, up and up, until his head breached the surface.

Quinn sucked in a desperate gasp, the tendril still slick and throbbing in his throat, and spat lake water and the taste of raw, ancient things onto the air.

His face bobbed just above the surface, vision hazy as he blinked against the white daylight, starlings of pain firing through his temples.

His naked body bobbed awkwardly, his skin marbled with cold and bruised purple along the ribs and hips, his chest and back a single, solid mass of pain.

The tentacle—no, more like a living, muscular hose—retracted from his mouth with a gentle, shivering pop, and Quinn coughed up a pint of brackish snot before sucking in another greedy, impossible breath.

He hovered there at the surface, mouth open, drawing air. The gentle waves lapped his face, spilling into his mouth, causing him to sputter and cough weakly, his pain-wracked body too limp and broken for even a good, strong hack to dispel the water from his throat.

Beneath the surface, the other tendrils—of varying sizes—held him at the crest, preventing him from sinking again.

He floated there, the sun on his bruised and bleeding face, and it was almost serene—until he heard the men on shore.

Their voices were a faraway hum, dulled by the water lapping his ears, and muffled by the pain racking his head and body.

Thoughts of escape drifted through his head as his mind struggled to function, to strategize, but Quinn didn’t move, couldn’t move as he simply bobbed there in the water.

The men’s nearly muted voices heightened in pitch, growing slightly louder. Getting closer. Words began to form out of incoherent, garbled noise:

“Fuck, there he is—”

“He’s floating! He is a faggot—”

“Let’s finish him—”

Quinn didn’t try to swim for his life. There was nothing left in him, not even a survival instinct—they had beaten everything out of him. So, he floated… and waited for them to reach him… and finish what they started.