Raging Sea (Undertow, #2)

“Can we cut the prayer down to fifteen minutes tonight?” I cry after her, but she says nothing.

I give the zipper on my hoodie another tug. It’s going to be a long, cold night.





Chapter Five


ON MOST NIGHTS I AM EAGER TO GO TO SLEEP, even if it is in the back seat of a stolen car. In my dreams, Fathom and I are together. He is healthy and alive. We are wildly in love. It is like the worst YA novel of all time, and it is absolutely delicious.

Tonight, we’re lying on a beach, not the gross Coney Island beach littered with cigarette butts and hypodermic needles, but a tropical island. It’s warm and bright, and the tide massages our toes. My cheek rides the rise and fall of his chest, and he clings to me like a drowning man holds a life preserver. Together we bake in the afterglow.

Or, at least what I think the afterglow must be like. I am still technically beforeglow, at least in the waking world. In my dreams, Fathom and I have been glowing almost every night—it’s all hands and fingers and lips and arms and legs and then the fade to black. The nocturne gives me what the real world will not.

Fathom watches me with his hurricane eyes. His fingers rake through my hair, and I lean into his hand, craving the tickles it conjures. He says something, but it’s gibberish, as if this dream has spent all its creative energy and is slowly unraveling. I feel a pang of anxiety. I’m happy. I don’t want to go. I like it here.

“Listen,” he says, his voice suddenly clear.

“Listen to what?”

He sits up abruptly and scans the milky tide with narrowing eyes.

“I don’t hear anything,” I say, holding his arm like he might suddenly be pulled away into another dream.

“They’re coming, Lyric Walker.”

“Who?”

Fathom leaps to his feet, takes my hands, and pulls me to my own.

“The monsters!” he shouts at me, his voice barely audible over a rising shriek that is all at once everywhere and growing with intensity. I turn to the ocean, only to see it rise, higher and higher like a black titan, a looming giant of wrath standing hundreds of feet over my head. It’s boiling and indignant, but I stand my ground, staring it down, daring it to come any farther. I plant my feet in the sand. My fists clench until they are red. My chin juts forward defiantly. In the water, I see forms emerge: arms, legs, claws, teeth.

I raise my fist, and it burns like a star, turning me into a lighthouse and illuminating the wave, which is suddenly no longer made of water. Now it is a living mass of Rusalka bodies stampeding toward the shore.

“Run!” Fathom shouts, but when I turn to him, he morphs into Bex. She grabs my free hand and tries to pull me away.

“We can’t escape this,” I say to her, but again she’s changing, morphing into Arcade.

“Kill them! They’re not worthy of your mercy!”

When I look back at the wave, it has changed too. It’s no longer made of Rusalka. It’s made of men and women in lab coats. They hold horrible saws and hooks and cattle prods in their hands, and at their center are my parents, thrashing for freedom.

“Let them go!” I scream.

A scientist leaps out of the murky soup and lands right in front of me. He’s followed by another, and another, until I am completely surrounded on all sides. The scientists are no longer just people. They are hybrids of Rusalka and men, walking death with bloody gums; black, soulless eyes; and golden, glowing lights that dangle like bait in front of their terrible, ripping fangs.

“Make an example out of us,” they taunt, and one last time they change. The monsters are gone, and in their place are hundreds and hundreds of identical copies of myself.

I wake with a jerk, all floppy limbs and foggy brain, and then WHAM! The crown of my head crunches against something hard and unmovable. My skull is a cracked egg with searing yolk dribbling down my neck, shoulders, and spine. Fireflies swoop in and out of my vision and the coppery taste of blood fills my mouth. I’ve bitten my tongue so hard, I’m worried I might have lost some of it.

“Calm down! You’re okay. You’re safe,” a voice says from above me. Its owner is sitting on my chest.

I push off the dream, telling myself I am not a monster. This is not Coney Island. I’m in a lime-green Ford somewhere in the middle of Texas with a one-hundred-and-twenty-eight-pound girl sitting on my chest.

“Bex,” I gasp.

Bex gives me a long, suspicious look as if she’s weighing whether or not I’ve gone crazy.

“I can’t breathe,” I squeak.

She rolls off me and into her seat. She’s sweaty, and it looks like someone poured a glass of water down the back of her T-shirt.

“You’ve been having a lot of crazy dreams lately,” she says, pointing to my hand. The glove is awake and pulsating. It’s never powered itself on before without my asking.