Read Online Storming Paradise by Rik Hoskin - Free Book Online Page B

grabbed it, felt the pressure in his arm as it was almost wrenched from its socket. A conga line of bubbles escaped Hercules’ mouth in that moment, forced from his lungs with the sudden jolt of his body.
    The thing that Hercules had grabbed swam on for a moment, slowing as it realized it had picked up a passenger. Hercules felt the extended body turn, flipping through the water as it doubled back the way it had come. An instant later, Hercules saw the thing’s face, drawn in flashes in the moonbeams, a blunt nose with dead eyes to either side and a grin of teeth as long as his forearm stretched around to the sides of the monster’s head.
    Hercules did what he did best. Out of breath, out of time, he bunched the fingers of his free hand into a fist and drove a mighty punch—slowed by the water’s drag but still impressive—straight into the thing’s nose, right smack between the soulless eyes.
    What happened next was confusion. Hercules felt his grip loosen on the thing’s—tail? tentacle?—and then he was hurtling away from it in a wash of bubbles as his breath charged out of his mouth and nose. Something hurtled past him, a ridged body, a rigid fin, a man. The man was the boat’s captain, Hercules realized as he tumbled away in the darkness, and he had the presence of mind to grab for the man and hold him as they both went careering through the water in the backwash of the sea creature.
    â€œHercules!” Iolaus shouted, scrambling along the deck of the boat. “Come on, buddy—where are you?”
    The ocean stretched out before Iolaus, a shimmering dark blanket lit only insubstantially by the slip of a moon. It had not seemed so bad when they were just sailing through it, Iolaus lamented, but once you were looking for someone in that undulating darkness it suddenly seemed a whole lot scarier.
    Long moments passed. Iolaus considered jumping back into the water, wondered what good that would do if he didn’t know where Hercules and the boat’s captain were, let alone what they were facing. Granted, he was already wet, but still—diving into darkness was not his idea of a smart plan.
    As Iolaus debated this, Hercules reappeared, thirty feet away and clutching the static figure of the fisherman.
    â€œHercules!” Iolaus called. “Over here!”
    â€œIolaus!” Hercules called back as he turned towards the boat. “Watch the water. There’s something out here. I don’t know what it is.”
    Hercules took long strokes to bring him back to the boat, dragging the sea captain with him. After a moment, the sea captain began to struggle, and Hercules thanked all the gods that the man was still alive. “It’s okay, I have you,” Hercules told him. “Don’t struggle, I’ll get us—”
    â€œHercules!” Iolaus shrieked. “Behind you, right behind you!”
    Still swimming forwards, Hercules looked over his shoulder and saw the creature emerge from the water like a tidal wave. It was large—its body at least fifteen feet in length, larger than it had seemed even in the water. It barreled up out of the water, leaping and diving in an undulating mass of muscle. The head was gray-white, with the blunt nose and wicked grin of a shark. But the body was not a shark’s—instead it appeared to be something snakelike, thick like a boa constrictor, some kind of water snake perhaps, darker than the face with a single jutting fin poised along its top like an up-thrust blade. Following that, last of all, came the ridged thing that Hercules had mistaken for a tentacle. It was not a tentacle, he saw now—it looked more like a crocodile’s tail, great armor plates running along its length with two stubby legs protruding from its sides.
    Hercules did not have a name for it, but he had an idea of what it was. A trick of the gods, an amalgam thing made of the welded aspects of three animals.