The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance

it the muscular, iron-grey tail of a dolphin. He shimmered with iridescent scales in the bottled firelight, and his eyes were huge, all dark except for white vertical slits for pupils.
    He had a lot of teeth, and they were all pointed at me.
    I found myself swimming backwards, trying to put water between us as quickly as possible. There was something so utterly wrong about this thing that I felt sick, as if my understanding of the world had been turned upside down. Odd, because I lived in a world most normal people would find upsetting in the extreme.
    David slammed a fist into the merman’s face with enough force to pulverize granite. The merman just hissed in fury and sank his teeth into David’s wrist. He had claws too, long bony things that scraped at David’s chest and opened pale gouges. No blood. David had changed his body structure far enough from human to prevent real damage.
    “Get out of here!” he yelled at me. His words came loud and clear, if a bit oddly high-pitched. “Surface! Get to shore!”
    He was right. If this creature was beyond David, it was beyond me too. I could feel the power inside of it radiating outwards; it was a match for the Djinn. The water-world equivalent, maybe; something Wardens rarely encountered, if ever - or survived, if they did.
    I was going to follow David’s advice - really, I was.
    But just as I started to arrow for the distant blue world above, something caught me by the ankle in a crushing grip.
    Bony, astonishingly strong fingers.
    I looked down, and in the murky swirls of Oversight, saw a second merman. No . . . this one really did seem to be a mermaid, complete with small, protruding breasts.
    She wasn’t any prettier than the male of the species.
    I’m not supernaturally muscular, but I have powers that your average mermaid might not expect, and I took full advantage of this. I sent a violent burst of energy crackling through my body, electrifying my skin and burning her hand where she gripped me. She let go and swiped at me with her claws. I mostly avoided the slice, but she drew shallow red stripes across the back of my right leg, just above the ankle. I responded by kicking her, hard, right in the bony part of her chest. She flipped her tail and righted herself almost instantly, and came for me with her shark-like jaws wide open.
    I hardened the water between us to the consistency of gelatin. She tried to swim forwards, hit the wall and bounced, and I recognized the look of bafflement that sped across her fishy face. I was supposed to be easy prey, wasn’t I?
    Not hardly.
    Oddly enough, that seemed funny, although it wasn’t. I knew I should be afraid, but I was weirdly amused. In fact, I was choking back a manic attack of giggles, and losing my focus. The hardened water turned softer and she lunged for me again. I was able to hold her off, but the urge to laugh kept getting more and more insistent. I was breathing in and out way too fast to get the necessary benefit. Hyperventilating, I thought. My chest hurt. Nothing looked right.
    David’s warm hand closed around my wrist, and I realized that I’d forgotten to re-oxygenate my mixture; black dots were swimming in front of my eyes, and I was starting to lose it. I relaxed and let David’s strength pull me towards the surface. My concentration had to be focused inwards, on adjusting my body to the changing pressure and closing up the wound on my leg. The last thing I wanted to do was attract sharks right now.
    I saw the merman and his mate chasing us, rising out of the depths like pale fish, flickering in the twilight and struggling to adjust to the decompression as we neared the surface. They were deep-water creatures, and the female dropped off first, heading back to the safe, crushing darkness.
    The merman’s bony claws brushed my foot, but failed to grab hold, and I saw him give a pained hiss of frustration before flipping his muscular tail and diving, heading straight for the bottom.
    We broke the surface with so much speed we literally rose into the air about four feet, and then we splashed back down. David’s arms went around me, warm and real, and I dragged in breath after breath of moist, sweet air.
    “I told you to get to the surface!” he said. “Do you have to fight with everything you see?”
    I didn’t bother to argue that I was, in fact, trying to flee at the time. “I’m OK,” I said, which was the answer he was looking for even if he wasn’t asking. “I’m OK,