Jenna Black - Glimmerglass

“No!” I screamed, but Grace shut the phone with a snarl and hurled it over the side of the railing into the waters of the moat below.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alistair get up, shaking off the effects of the near miss, but all I could think about was Grace giving the fatal order. I didn’t even try to stop the tears this time.

“That was not the wisest move,” I heard Alistair say, his voice calm and unruffled. I wanted to kill him for that calm when my mother had just been murdered because he wouldn’t let us go. “Even you can’t withstand a murder charge,” he continued. “Not with three witnesses.”

“You have always underestimated me, Alistair. Just like my brother has.”

At that point, I was so overwhelmed with grief and horror that I honestly didn’t care what else Grace had up her sleeve. Until I found out what it was, of course.

The Fae, even slender, willowy females like Aunt Grace, are way stronger than mortals. Which is why Grace had no trouble grabbing me, lifting me off my feet, and flinging me over the side of the railing to follow the path of her phone.

I was too shocked to scream, though both Alistair and Ethan cried out. I flailed around in the air, trying to control my entry into the water, but when I hit, I was flat on my back. I tried to dissipate some of the force by slapping my arms down, just as Keane had showed me, but it didn’t help much.

It wasn’t a horribly long fall from the bridge into the moat—not the kind of fall you’d expect to die from, at least—but it wasn’t just a little hop, either. The water slammed into my back like a slab of concrete, forcing all the air from my lungs and momentarily stunning me.

That moment was long enough for the murky, muddy water to close over my head and begin to suck me down.

I’m not the world’s best swimmer, but I can generally dog-paddle with the best of them. When I recovered from that initial stunned, breathless moment, I started kicking and flailing, trying to get to the surface. I was scared, but not exactly in a panic. Not yet. It was just water, after all.

But for all my flailing, I didn’t seem to be finding the surface. My heavy wool sweater seemed to weigh about ten tons, and my feet couldn’t seem to move much water in my good walking sneakers. Lungs burning, I pried the shoes off with my feet and was able to kick more effectively.

With another couple of kicks, I probably would have made the surface and been fine. Except one of those kicks connected with something. Something soft and yielding, like flesh. Something that wrapped around my foot and held me.

I broke the hold easily enough, but the terror of being grabbed by something under the water, combined with my increasingly critical lack of oxygen, caused me to try to gasp. I sucked some water into my lungs. And that was when I started to panic.

I had to cough the water out of my lungs, but you can’t cough if you don’t have any air. I clapped a hand over my mouth and pinched my nose shut to keep myself from taking another reflexive breath of water, but the need to cough was overwhelming. I couldn’t fight it, even though a small corner of my mind knew that if I tried to breathe, I would die.

The reflex became too much, and I let go of my nose and mouth to gasp in another breath of water.

I was dimly aware of the sensation of hands grabbing my arms, but I was far too panicked to feel any relief or to try to cooperate with my would-be rescuer. I was half-convinced it was a near-death hallucination anyway.

But those hands had a firm hold, and a moment later, I burst through the surface of the water into the beautiful, wonderful, life-sustaining air. Unfortunately, I’d sucked so much water into my lungs that even with the air so tantalizingly near, I couldn’t breathe.

The hands that held my arms moved until they were wrapped around my waist, one arm squeezing brutally hard and upward. It hurt, but it also caused a gout of water to come flying out of my mouth and nose. Eww, gross!

I managed a sip of air, but then the coughing seized me. More water left my lungs, burning my throat fiercely on the way up. I got a little more air in, so I was almost able to scream when something once again wrapped around my ankle.

“Damn it!” my rescuer cried, and I realized it was Ethan.

I felt him kick whatever had grabbed me, and the grip loosened.

“We have to get out of the water, Dana!” Ethan yelled at me.

I was so with him!

I was still coughing and choking too much to swim on my own, so Ethan towed me. I blinked water and tears from my eyes and saw that Ethan was taking me under the bridge.

Whatever was in the moat made another grab, and I felt a hair-raising pulse as Ethan threw some kind of magic at it.

“Kick with me!” he commanded, and I did the best I could despite my continued struggle to breathe.

It was an agonizingly slow, terrifying swim. I sensed the moat monster lurking below us in the depths of the muddy water. Waiting for us to show a sign of weakness. Or maybe just waiting for Ethan’s magical attack to wear off.

I’d recovered enough of my mental faculties to see that we were heading for the base of the bridge, but what I saw there didn’t exactly give me warm fuzzies. There was a narrow concrete ledge that jutted out of the water, but it would take a pretty big reach to grab on to it, and I knew that even if I grabbed it, I wouldn’t have the strength to haul myself out of the water.

“Almost there,” Ethan said, but though he was trying to comfort me, he sounded scared himself, which was not comforting at all.

A few more frantic kicks, and we butted up against the concrete.

“I’m going to give you a boost,” Ethan said, panting with the effort of swimming for both of us—and fighting off unseen monsters to boot. “Grab hold of the edge.”

I still didn’t think grabbing hold of the edge would do me much good, but I wasn’t about to argue. Ethan shifted his grip once again, and in any other situation, I’d have objected to where his hands ended up. But somehow, I didn’t think he was trying to cop a feel at the moment.

Ethan pushed me up out of the water, and I reached my hands above my head. They connected with the ledge, but I was still in the water from the butt down. It meant I didn’t have to support my full weight as I hung there, but it wasn’t enough to give me the strength to pull myself up. If I survived this, I was going to have to spend some time in the gym building up some upper body strength.

Beside me, Ethan lunged up out of the water, his hands grabbing the ledge without any helpful boost. Unless the monster was helping, which seemed unlikely.

“Hold on,” he ordered me, then easily pulled himself up and onto the ledge.

His hands had just closed around my wrists when the monster grabbed me again.

“Ethan!” I screamed, kicking wildly.

“I’ve got you!” he assured me, and started to pull.

The monster had let go with little encouragement the last couple of times, but maybe it saw that its prey was getting away and decided to make a last stand. Whatever the reason, it didn’t let go when Ethan started pulling.

I couldn’t help glancing down at the water, trying to see the creature that was trying so hard to pull me back in. The water was so murky, and the area under the bridge so dark, that I couldn’t see anything under the surface.

Something wrapped around my other leg, and I screamed again. Ethan cursed, but held firmly to my wrists as the two played tug-of-war for me.

A ghastly, dead-fish-white face rose from the water near my legs. Hair like sticky gray spiderwebs flowed all around its colorless head, moving this way and that, not—at least as far as I could tell—affected by any kind of current or wind. My stomach cramped as I realized it was the hair that was wrapped around my legs.