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Chapter 1

Penelope

I finish collecting the soil with the auger and stuff the sampling tube into my underwater collection locker. Checking my air tank gauge, I realize I’ve got barely enough time to take one final sample before I need to go back up to the surface.

If I could only grow gills so I could breathe underwater and stay here. In the comforting cold weight of these watery depths, life always seems lighter. It’s a testimony to how shitty my life has become on the surface that the rocky sea floor of the Atlantic Ocean outside of Claw Bay Harbor sounds more appealing than dealing with the fallout of my failed marriage.

At least here, unlike my hometown, there is no one to criticize my every move or remind me of all the ways I’m failing to please someone. It’s only me, the marine life, and the beauty of the quiet, cold sea.

That’s the point of the sabbatical. I’ve retreated to this quiet fishing village for the fall semester to lick my wounds, study the reproductive success of lobsters for the postdoc research grant I’m working on, and figure out how to adult. Getting married at age nineteen, ten months into an affair with my undergraduate professor, seemed romantic and whimsical at the time. A decade later, after catching Daniel fucking yet another bright-eyed freshman, I was finished playing house and more than ready to move on.

But it’s hard to know which pieces to pick up after everything falls apart. Which of those fragments need to be let go and which should I collect? How do I learn to trust that small voice inside after ignoring it for so long?

Not the time for an existential crisis.

I glide along the rocky bottom until I spot another lobster through the murky water. Snatching it, I quickly measure and record specimen details on my tablet before snapping a picture with my underwater camera.

In my peripheral vision, there is a flash of crimson. I whip my head in the direction of the unexpected color and see nothing but an outcropping of rocks. Without really seeing, I click the camera again. My body tenses, fear spiking in my veins. I survey the area frantically, shaken by the feeling that I am no longer alone. A ripple behind me causes me to twist.

Something is out there.

Another flash of an unusual color. I snap wildly with my camera, hoping to capture whatever it is. A shiver runs down my spine and my stomach drops with the overwhelming feeling that I’ve become prey. I narrow my eyes and still my movements, trying to see through the upturned silt.

There. I squint. Speckled crimson.

It’s too bright to be a shark. An octopus possibly?

Not likely off the shores of Maine in the Atlantic, Penelope. Don’t you know geography?

My snarky inner voice sounds a lot like my ex, and I block it out.

The presence darts. Another flash. This time it’s an unearthly glowing gold that sparks for a moment then fades. A dark figure swirls around me in the water, creating a current until I’m tossed and tangled up at the center of a cyclone of bubbles. My tool bag gets twisted around my thigh, a hard piece of metal digging into flesh. My camera falls—forgotten—as I try to right myself, to stop the dizzying turning.

Breathe slower. Don’t panic.

But it’s no use. Tentacles, slick and strong, wrap around my legs, squeezing them together. Another slithers and circles my waist, pulling me against something hard. A squid? An octopus? But it feels as if I’m being cradled against a chest. A human chest.

This doesn’t make sense.

The tentacles tighten, the pressure so intense I lose focus. It’s so snug, almost possessive, that for a moment, the fear dissipates, and my muscles loosen. My touch-starved body misunderstands, confusing being strangled with the hug of a lover. Give me a sexless marriage and nothing but a fantasy dildo for years and my mind decides to take the slightest touch as pleasure.

A tentacle wraps around my chest, the long pointy tip flicking up to swipe my lip where it meets my mouthpiece and along my mask, clouding my vision.

I’m going to die. It’s going to strangle me. Or dislodge the precious tubes that give me air and allow me to venture to underwater world humans were never meant to invade.

The tentacles writhe and circle, a vibrating wave of pressure all along my captured body. It doesn’t hurt. It feels too good actually. My nipples pebble.

Shame, hot and sharp, burns my gut. Daniel was right, I’m a freak. What kind of person gets turned on when being drowned to death by a sea monster?

Jerking, I try foolishly to free myself, or to at least turn and see my captor. Claws wrap around my throat and squeeze. Black spots cloud my vision, and a blanket of nothingness descends.

My last thought isn’t about the pleasantness of death, though I feel a great sense of peace wash over me. No, my last thought is to wonder if my fantasies weren’t so farfetched. Maybe sea monsters do exist.

“That’s it. Breathe.” A hand claps roughly along my back.

I jolt, coughing and sucking in crisp burning air. The harsh sunlight forces me to close my eyes again. My throat is on fire, stinging sparks that light up as each breath passes my lips. The cold pricks and gnaws at my limbs. My body is paying for the dive. However I managed to become free of the creature, it was a fast ascent.

Almost dying isn't feeling so great right now.

I try to sit up, but Odis, the boat captain, holds me down. “Not yet, Dr. Hart.”

I open my mouth to ask what happened, how he saved me, but the words come out as a jumbled croak from my abused throat. Through squinted eyes, I try to inspect my surroundings. I’m laid out in the back of the commercial fishing boat I’ve chartered for my data collection. There is no creature, and my equipment appears to be missing.

The older white man, with his bushy silver mustache and bald head, reminds me of a grandpa. His rich chestnut eyes are kind as he hands me a bottle of water. My attempt at twisting the cap proves feeble and he opens it for me, cradling my head and helping me to take a few sips.

“What happened?” I manage to rasp.

“I was hoping you could tell me.” He leans forward and studies me, knowing eyes sharp and measuring. What did you see, they seem to ask.

I look away, embarrassed by my wild imagination and my near brush with death. Turning away from his stare, I attempt to sit up. I’m woozy, the boat swaying beneath me, but I make it. “I don’t remember much. Some kind of animal attacked.”

He hums, a thoughtful sound. There’s no way he could guess what I’m hiding, but the sound is chiding all the same. It’s not like he can discover how my depraved mind works or that I conjured myself a sea monster when the reality is far more likely that I was attacked by some kind of cephalopod.

He doesn’t know you fantasize about monsters. Chill the fuck out.

Odis grabs a blanket and tosses it around my shoulders. “I was watching the water. You were due up the line, but you burst from the surface. Shot out like a cannon and landed face-down in the water. I had to fish you out.”

My eyes widen in surprise. Does that mean that whatever had me underwater let me go, brought me to the surface? How? Or more importantly, why?

“Did you see the animal? A dorsal fin? Tentacles?” Who knows what parts of what I thought and felt were real. At this point, it could have been a merman, a regular squid, or Poseidon himself.

Odis looks out at the choppy water. “No. I didn’t see nothing out there in those waves. But I’ve also never seen anything like that neither.” He turns back and looks at me for a long moment before mumbling a prayer under his breath. “It was like the sea spared your life.” The old man stands and offers me his open palm, pulling me up on shaky legs. “Better come on, Dr. Hart, before the sea changes its mind.”

He moves to the helm, and I brace against the side railing, wrapping myself up in the blanket to block the icy wind. I look out at the vast expanse of water only a mile outside of Claw Bay Harbor. It's desolate and lonely. Maybe the sea sensed a kindred spirit and Odis was right, maybe it spared me. My eyes scan the surface, searching the waves for a glimpse of crimson, but there’s only the white of a misty sky and the dark churning of a restless sea.