Free Tempest Revealed by Tracy Deebs Page B

of me. Heavy enough that it meant something was there right now disturbing the algae.
    I shot forward, using every ounce of power and strength I had to swim faster than I ever had before. I got there in seconds—I’d never been more thankful for the whole mermaid thing—and then dove deep, circling the lit-up area much like a shark did its prey.
    And that’s when I saw him, floating along beneath the surface. His arms were above his head, his legs slightly open. His eyes were closed, his face lax, and I knew. I just knew that I was too late. That my father was dead because I hadn’t been strong enough to stop it.
    I arrowed through the water toward him, so close to hysteria that I forgot how to breathe through my gills. Instead, I opened my mouth and ended up gulping in huge swallows of salt water, choking on it.
    My human body wanted to cough, to expel the noxious stuff, but I held it down with sheer will alone. If I had any chance of doing CPR, of getting the water out of his lungs, every second counted.
    I reached my father moments later, wrapped my arms around his waist and used the powerful muscles in my legs, muscles I’d spent the last year building, to kick us straight up to the surface.
    As I broke through the water, I dragged air into my abused lungs even as I tried to figure out if my dad was breathing. He wasn’t—of course he wasn’t—so I whirled around in a desperate bid to find shore. In just the last few minutes the ocean had grown much choppier, though I didn’t know if it was from the incoming storm or my own freaked-out emotions. It didn’t matter either way, I supposed, not when the end result was the same. We’d been pushed farther out to sea by the seething, roiling waves, shore much too far away to reach in time to save my dad, even for me.
    Wrapping my arms around him again—this time above his waist and below his breastbone—I drove my fist directly back and into the bottom of his lungs. Water shot from his mouth, so I did it again and again and again. It was awkward as hell with the waves building up all around us, but I forced my body to relax. To just ride out the waves. Soon, I had determined the timing of the ocean and which part of the wave I needed to be at to squeeze the most water from my father’s lungs.
    I rode the waves for long seconds, not attempting to fight them or get closer to shore, but simply trying to clear my dad’s lungs enough that he could breathe. I was focusing so completely on the task that when it finally happened, when he spit out a huge mouthful of water and then started to cough, I could barely believe it. I kept pounding my fist into the spot below his sternum until he started struggling against me.
    And even then, even as I heard him draw one loud, shaky breath into his lungs, I still didn’t believe it. “Daddy?” I shouted to be heard above the roaring of the waves, slipping back into the childhood endearment as if it were a comfortable old slipper that had just been waiting for me to find it again.
    “What happened?” he gasped between coughing fits.
    I was hoping he’d be able to tell me that. “I don’t know. Are you okay?” All his limbs were attached and he didn’t seem to be bleeding, but he’d obviously been attacked out here. By something that seemed less and less like an animal and more like—
    At that moment, something wrapped itself around my ankles and tugged. Hard.

Chapter 7
    I went under much as my father had, without any warning or fuss. Of course, it was kind of hard to throw a fit, or protect myself, when I was completely blindsided. Which I shouldn’t have been—I’d known something was out there when he went under. But I’d been too busy trying to get my dad to breathe to worry about the same thing happening to me. As I went under, all I had time to do was release my dad so I didn’t pull him down with me and shout, “Get to shore. Now!”
    I prayed that he would listen to me. That, first of all, he was