Liza didn’t have time to suck in a deep breath before the strange monster dragged her under the water. She thrashed against him, fighting desperately against his claws, lungs burning and eyes shut tight.
Was this really the end? Would she really die being dragged under water by some sort of mysterious beast?
She wasn’t giving up that easily.
Her head felt like it might split open as fear and desperation rushed through her veins. Her terror was so powerful that she could feel her skin tingling where the monster pressed against her. She tried to scratch but the thing’s skin was weird. Scaly in some places, smooth in others.
In the one second where she got a look at him before breathing became her only focus she had the strangest impression of a dragon mixed with a shark.
She was going crazy.
At the exact moment she was sure her lungs would give out, when she couldn’t keep her mouth closed anymore and had to suck in a breath, even if that breath would mean her end, they burst through some weird wall in the water and the water washed away, replaced by air.
An air bubble?
If Liza was going to survive this she had to push the questions aside until she was safe. Or safer than she was right now with a monster intent on eating her.
The shark-dragon-man let go of her for a moment and Liza had the opportunity to take him in. Her eyes widened in terror. It was humanoid in form yet undeniably malevolent, with almost luminous blue skin stretched tightly over a powerful frame and two arms ending in clawed hands.
His head was completely bald and when he opened his mouth to growl, all she could see were rows upon rows of razor-sharp teeth glinting in the subdued light. His snout seemed to be shrinking as if the air around him had a transformative effect on his flesh, changing it from strange beast to more humanlike monster.
He stalked closer, looming over her menacingly with a growl vibrating from his throat like thunder. She felt small next to him, peering up at a figure that seemed to go on forever. Taller than any human she’d seen except for maybe the tallest basketball player ever. Seven feet? Eight?
Liza wasn’t about to get out a ruler to check.
The monstrosity of a man lurched forward. “Mate!” He swiped forward, giant claws on his hands aiming for her clothes.
Mate? Not a chance in hell.
Letting instinct drive her, Liza did the only thing she could think to do when confronted with a shark. She slammed her fist into the dragon shark’s snout.
It was the same hand that she had used to punch her kidnapper earlier and she let out a yelp of pain as the impact reverberated up her arm.
The dragon shark froze as if stunned. There was no way it would last for long. Mind racing with fear and more than a little confusion, Liza looked for an escape. It looked like they were floating in an air bubble, but that couldn’t be right. There were rocks on the ground, and driftwood. Had those things also floated in through the bubble? Could it collapse around her at any moment?
She sucked in deep breaths of air as if she could store it for later.
She didn’t see a way out.
Her water dragon man made another sound at her, whatever had stunned him was wearing off right then.
There was driftwood at her feet and Liza scooped it up, holding the branch like a baseball bat. If that thing got within two feet of her she was swinging. If she couldn’t stop it from… She didn’t want to consider what he might do to her when he called her mate.
But if she couldn’t stop him, at least she would make him hurt.
A hysterical laugh escaped her throat and for just a minute Liza wished she was back home, back in her father’s house where he yelled at her for leaving dishes in the sink and demanded insane rent payments. She knew how to handle that. She could deal with his tempers and his demands. She’d been doing it her entire life. And never once had she been threatened with being eaten by a weird shark dragon monster thing. There was nothing familiar about this world or this creature.
She was going to die here. No help was coming. How could anybody help her? She didn’t know where she was.
This was not any place on earth. Had she been abducted by an alien?
Thinking while she was supposed to be fighting for her life was going to get her killed even faster.
Maybe she could jump out of the bubble. She could swim desperately for the surface and hope she made it in time. But she wasn’t quite sure which way was up and the dragon had swum underwater with way more speed than she could ever hope to match. If she left the bubble she would drown.
“Mate!” The shark dragon screamed and charged. But before he could come get closer, her own original kidnapper burst through the air bubble and shot fire out of his hands and mouth. The flames roared toward the shark dragon, filling the cave with a blast of heat so intense that Liza had to dive away as the fire swept over them.