The water shifted around them.
Sera stilled beside him, her body angled like a blade ready to cut any direction. Lachlan felt it too—not sound, not sight, but pressure. A heaviness that pressed into his chest as surely as a hand.
The current paused, then reversed. That wasn't right. Currents moved like rivers; they didn't stop and breathe.
Something big had changed the water.
The creature inside him rumbled in warning, the same way thunder warns the earth before lightning ever shows itself.
Turn. Now.
He turned, heart hammering, lungs filling with water-air that no longer felt strange.
The black wasn't empty anymore. It had a shape, and the shape was coming for them.
At first it was just absence—dark within dark, blotting out the faint shimmer above. Then came the flicker of white: teeth. So many teeth they blurred into a single crescent of pale lightning.
