to move in nightmare slow motion, but it felt like that was happening anyway, as I followed the tentacle to the side of the ship, where it had slithered up the hull and seized the superstructure, attaching itself to it with dozens and dozens of limpet suckers—and went down to a vast, bulky shape in the water, something almost as massive as the boat itself.
That tentacle flexed, distorting in shape, and the ship screamed again, rocking the other way.
And a great, faintly luminous eye glimmered up at me through the waters of Lake Michigan.
A colossal squid. A kraken.
The Fomor had released the freaking kraken.
“Stars and sto—” I began to swear.
And then the waters of the lake exploded upward as what seemed like a couple of dozen tentacles like the first burst from the depths and straight at my freaking face.
Chapter
Two
Tentacles. That’s what I remember of the next several seconds.
Mostly tentacles.
Something hit me in the face and chest and it felt like getting slugged with a waterbed’s mattress. I was knocked sprawling back from the rail, and even as I went down, something began crushing my ankles together. I looked down to see a couple of winding tentacles holding my legs together, toothed suckers seeking purchase, fruitlessly for the moment—Molly’s spell-armored spider-silk suit still had enough juice in it to hold them off, and the gripping teeth couldn’t get through the fabric.
Then a third tentacle, this one much slenderer, whipped around my forehead, and I could feel the crackling sound as dozens of tiny teeth crunched through my skin and found purchase in the bone of my skull.
That’s the kind of noise that will make you panic right quick.
My head slammed against something and there were a lot of lights, and then my head and my feet suddenly got pulled in opposite directions.
I seized the tentacle that had me by the head and pulled hard enough to get enough counterpressure to keep it from snapping my neck—and it left me suspended uncomfortably, stretched out between the overwhelming opposing forces, just trying to hang on.
Story of my freaking life.
Harry Dresden, professional wizard. I’m a little busy or I’d shake hands.
I pulled hard with my entire upper body, and the tentacle, though incredibly powerful, stretched like a rubber band and loosened slightly, enough to let me gasp out a quick incantation: “Infusiarus!”
A sphere of green-gold fire, bright as a tiny sun, kindled to life in the cup of my right hand—which happened to be grasping a freaking tentacle of a kraken.
The creature itself apparently couldn’t make sounds—but it shuddered in pain, twisting and jerking away from the sudden fire, and the Water Beetle screamed in agony as the beast thrashed.
I shrieked as my head was encircled by a band of fire from the tentacles biting in—only to vanish into the weird cold-static sensation that the Winter mantle had used to replace most sensations of pain. The noise of it was incredibly loud, at least to me, as the scraping against my skull conducted the sound directly into my ear bones. Hot blood began to trickle down my face and ears and the back of my neck—scalp wounds bleed like you wouldn’t believe, and I’d just gotten dozens of them.
I cried out and forced more energy into the spell in my hands, and my little ball of sunshine blazed like an acetylene torch. There was the sharp scent of scorched meat, and the tentacle suddenly snapped, burning through, and I came down on the deck hard, forearms slamming against the boards.
An instant later, the tentacles that were wrapped around my ankles whipped me into the air and slammed me into the bitterly cold waters of Lake Michigan.
The impact with the surface of the water felt like hitting a slab of brittle concrete. I managed to curl defensively, spread the impact out a little, but it wasn’t enough to keep from having the wind blown out of my lungs just as I was plunged into frozen blackness.
There’s no cold like the cold of dark water. It’s . . . almost a predator, a living thing, and you can feel it ripping the heat out of you the instant you’re immersed in it. Go down past the first couple of feet, even in summer, and that water gets seriously chilly, fast. Get dragged to the bottom, with the sudden pressure on your ears, the shock of the cold on your body, and it would be real easy to panic and drown, regardless of what the damned