Lords of the Deep (2 page)

Not completely unknown. The one tall, heavily muscled one with black hair, she remembered instantly. He’d thrown a net over her, dragged her from the boat when she leaned out to help him in, and beneath the surface of the water.

Then he’d jolted her with something electric.

Scrambling away from the two men, she screamed. One of the men left immediately. The other, the one who’d nearly drown her, surged toward her. She screamed again.

He winced and then retreated toward the door, closing it, sealing her in.

Angie stared at the door, too terrified for a while to wrap her mind around anything. She was cold and wet, though, and her discomfort eventually penetrated her fear enough to redirect her mind.

Dismay filled her when she saw her clothes had been cut away. The front of her shirt was slashed and her shorts and panties were completely gone. Why would they cut her clothes off, she wondered blankly?

Uncurling finally from the tight ball she’d been holding herself in, she examined herself for injury as it occurred to her that that might be what they’d been doing, trying to remove her clothes to treat her for some kind of injury.

There wasn’t a sign of a cut, though, no huge missing sections of flesh from a shark bite or something of that nature.

Not that she remembered anything like that happening anyway ….

The room was bright, but the light looked strange, had an odd blue-green cast to it. When she lifted her head to look around, she discovered that both of the men were standing at a window, staring at her. She screamed again when she discovered that, covering herself and glancing a little wildly around for a place to hide.

The room was empty, though, except for the strange gurney she’d been lying on when she’d first come to.

Where the hell was she?

Ignoring the men for the moment, she focused beyond them at the room behind them and discovered it looked more like a laboratory than a hospital.

Shivering, she closed her eyes, trying to think.

She couldn’t remember much of anything after she’d gone into the water besides the sheer terror of discovering she couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t fight her way to the surface.

It must be a hospital, she decided, even if didn’t really look like any hospital she was familiar with.

Then again, it was undoubtedly a foreign one. It hadn’t just been her state that had prevented her from understanding what they were saying. They hadn’t been speaking English. Beyond that, they’d been too far from the states for her to have been air-lifted to a hospital there.

She struggled for a short while to try to recall where they’d been and what country she might have been taken to, but they’d been a long way from land in any direction.

She heard a deep rumbling of voices and opened her eyes again, discovering she could hear the two men talking to one another. Or rather, she heard the man with black hair say something to the one with golden brown hair. The second man stared at her hard and finally moved away from the window. A few moments later, she felt warm air begin to blow into the room. It raised more goose-bumps on her skin, but after a few minutes she began to feel warmer. Her jaw stopped cramping from the effort of trying to keep her teeth from chattering.

“Why am I here?” she asked in a quavering voice after a few minutes. “What is this place?”

The two men stared at her as if she’d grown another head and then looked at each other.

* * * *

“It’s … she’s trying to communicate,” Miles said in surprise, rising excitement in his voice. “She’s intelligent.”

Damien frowned, turning to look at her again. He felt oddly … tense, almost lightheaded every time he looked at her. It worried him, made him wonder if she’d done something to him, though he discovered he was reluctant to say anything. Partly that was because he realized Miles already suspected she was a dangerous creature and he didn’t want to say anything that might convince Miles that she was too dangerous to keep alive for study. But partly, he realized, it was because he actually knew exactly what it was about her that made him feel that way and it wasn’t something he particularly wanted to examine. “You think?” he asked a little hoarsely, realizing the queasy feeling in his stomach was certainty even though he’d asked. “You’re saying it isn’t an animal?”

Miles sent him a look. “Of course it’s an animal! We’re all animals. I’m suggesting this creature must be more intelligent than I’d thought—certainly more than the myths suggest.”

Damien swallowed with an effort. “She’s frightened,” he said, trying to keep any inflection from his voice. “It would be bad enough if she was a dumb beast. I don’t like this.”

Miles’ jaw tightened. “I don’t like it any more than you do,” he said coolly, “but we can’t learn about them if we don’t study them.”

Damien turned to consider him assessingly. Clearly, regardless of what he’d said, Miles didn’t give a fuck whether she was intelligent, and scared half to death, or not. He was too much a scientist to consider anything of more importance than his quest for knowledge.

Miles’ lips tightened. “If you’re so worried about it being frightened, help yourself. Try to soothe it. You’re supposed to be so damned good with animals. Don’t blame me, though, if she stings you or something!”

“If she had stingers, she would’ve done that when I caught her,” Damien pointed out. “She was fighting for her life, then.”

Miles shrugged. “As I said … it would actually be helpful if you could tame her, at least to handling. Don’t let it get loose in my lab, though.”

Damien gave him a look. “I don’t know a fucking thing about these things!” he snapped. “This isn’t like training a damned dolphin!”

“And very likely she isn’t even as intelligent as a dolphin! I don’t see why the same methods wouldn’t work, though. An animal is animal.”

Feeling his throat close, Damien turned to look at her again a little doubtfully. She did emit sound waves that were nearly as painful as the dolphin was capable of. He wasn’t sure his ears could take any more of that at the moment without rupturing. She seemed a little calmer now, though. “What do think she might eat?”

Shrugging, Miles studied her thoughtfully. “I’ve got no idea. The
above
is practically desolate, though, from everything I’ve heard. Probably pretty much the same things we eat. We could try some table scraps. If it doesn’t seem to affect her adversely ….”

Damien frowned. He didn’t particularly care for the idea of coaxing her to eat something that might hurt her. Aside from the fact that he didn’t want to hurt her, it might break what little trust he managed to build by feeding her. “Something fresh might be better.”

Miles narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “This should be the first order business,” he said decisively. “We need to determine what it eats to keep it alive anyway. Why don’t you go gather an assortment of fresh food and I’ll see what I can find that it might be interested in in the preserver? Then, we’ll fix up a tray with the different things and see which it finds most appealing?”

“She,” Damien said, an edge to his voice.

Miles nodded. “Right.” He studied Damien. “Don’t get too attached to it. I can see you’re thinking along the lines of a pet, but I need to study it—I sent you after a lab animal—and it may not live.”

Damien felt a faint flush rise in his cheeks, but he didn’t deny it. Instead, after studying her a moment longer, he turned and left. “Wait until I get back,” he said, pausing at the door.

Miles chuckled. “Oh, don’t worry about that! I’m not ready to go near it until I’ve had the chance to study it a little more and make sure it isn’t dangerous!”

* * * *

It unnerved Angie when they didn’t respond to her questions. It seemed to spur a rather lengthy and involved conversation between them, though. She listened intently to the voices muffled by the glass that separated them, trying to figure out what they were talking about. Try though she might, she couldn’t figure out what language they were speaking.

When both of them turned to leave, she eased upward to see if she could tell where they were going.

A jolt went through her when she’d risen to her feet.

Both men were stark naked!

That discovery was almost as jolting as waking to find herself in this strange place to begin with, but not quite as jarring as the discovery that the skin below their waists was an almost iridescent blue-green, patterned, with odd little protrusions near their ankles that looked almost like narrow fins. She’d almost decided that they must be wearing
something,
even though she could clearly see their buttocks, when she realized that both men had the same fin like protrusions on their elbows and wrists and those were
clearly
bare. She could see that their entire upper bodies were bare, though their skin was as pale as hers, almost pale enough to look like white, form fitting knit, except that their faces and hands were just as pale, which she was sure precluded that possibility.

Under the circumstances, it wasn’t nearly as big a shock to see that both men had hair that flowed almost to their buttocks, but it still came as a surprise.

This just got more and more weird!

When they’d left, she moved to the window and stared at the room beyond her cell. Nothing in it looked more than vaguely familiar, but there was some similarity to the equipment that made her more certain that what she was looking at was a lab. The benches alone seemed to suggest that and there was a … sterility to the place that added to that impression—no gurney of any kind that she could see.

She was still staring at the room when the golden haired man returned carrying a tray that was covered with a cloth.

Her belly clenched with fear at the sight of the tray, images springing into her mind of medical instruments. He set it down and lifted his head to look at her.

She backed away from the window. Abruptly remembering she was naked, she covered her breasts with her arms.

He frowned, his gaze instantly sharpening at the movement. After hesitating a moment, he strode across the room toward the window.

Her gaze zeroed in of its own accord on his groin, her eyes widening.

Definitely naked, her shocked mind registered.

My god at the tool he was swinging!

She was so focused on it that he walked right up to the glass before she recovered her wits. She wasn’t sure she would have then except that the wall below the glass cut off her view, effectively breaking her mesmerized focus on his cock.

Reddening, she jerked her head up and stared up at him.

Christ! He must be nearly six and a half feet tall!

Either that or he was standing on something.

She hadn’t realized her jaw was at half-mast until she scurried further from the window. Closing her mouth, she moved as far away from him as she could, backing into the far corner.

She discovered his gaze had dropped. Belatedly recalling that she was as naked as he was from the waist down, she shifted one arm to cover her breasts, and dropped a hand down to cover her thatch.

His head jerked upward to meet her gaze when she did.

He tilted his head curiously, his eyes narrowing, though the expression seemed more thoughtful than angry.

He turned his head away after a moment, looking at something beyond her view, and then began to speak, gesturing toward her.

The black haired man appeared at the glass a moment later, studying her as curiously as the other man had.

The oddest sensation flickered through her.

She felt, suddenly, as if she’d woken to find herself in a zoo—as an exhibit.

After a moment, the black haired man disappeared again. Her belly tightened. She didn’t know why it unnerved her. She should’ve felt relieved that she didn’t have both of them staring at her.

It connected in her mind why she’d been uneasy when she heard the door latch click. She jerked her head toward the door as it slowly began to open, her heart leaping into her throat. After staring at it, too frozen with fear to move for several moments, she managed to
make
herself move.

The cell was small, though. There wasn’t anywhere to run.

She dodged behind the odd-looking gurney, cowering on the floor, trying to force her chaotic mind to think.

He was carrying the tray she’d seen the other man bring in and she thought for several moments that she might pass out from sheer terror. He stopped just inside, carefully closing and locking the door behind him.

For several moments, he merely stood there, as if he was as frozen as she was. Finally, releasing a slow, controlled breath, he sank slowly into a crouch, peering at her under the table.

She stared back at him, wide eyed.

He pursed his lips, making a kissing sound.

She blinked at him blankly, but her heart was thundering so loudly in her chest from fear that she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what in the hell he was making kissing noises at her for.

She didn’t want to find out either. Dragging her gaze from him, she darted several quick glances around the cell. No exit magically appeared. He was standing in front of the only one she’d noticed.