Excerpt: Paper in the Water

The Mist swallowed them up with a loud swoosh, casting them into a suddenly deeper darkness.
“That’s different,” said Marcy. She had gotten used to the Mist, but she had gotten used to it creeping, seeping, and swirling. Not a big black wall of swoosh.
“Something is wrong,” Euterpe noted at once. “We haven’t set sail. The Mist has claimed us of its own accord.” There was a hollowness to her voice that suggested fear. Marcy,at least, found it terrifying.
Hippocampus began to lurch and groan beneath their feet. The entire party, Muse, mortal, and feline alike, stood huddled together on the observation deck. The ship shot forward with an audible moan, moving forward fast enough for Marcy to feel air blow through her curls. She coughed. The wind was laced with wisps of Mist.
The orange cat hissed.
“Time to go,” said the orange cat.
“Goodbye, Marcy,” said the white cat. He looked up at her with wide, frightened eyes. “You have good taste in pre-packaged lunch meat. Please don’t die.”
The cats turned simultaneously and ran forward, shimmering and fading away as Marcy watched, absolutely dumbstruck.
There was a moment of thick, tangible silence as the enormity of what just happened smacked them full in the face.
“The cats just jumped ship!” Calliope hissed hysterically. “If you intend to panic, now would be the opportune moment!”
And just like that, the wall of Mist vanished into the sky as though someone had raised a curtain. They were in the middle of a wide, blue ocean. The sun was shining and the air was salty and crisp. It was a beautiful day in… wherever they were.
Urania squinted up at the sun before dashing off to the cabin door that was center left. Marcy could see enough through the open door to know that Urania was in the map room. When she emerged a moment later, her normally pale skin was outright ghostly. She had lost even the pretense of color.
“We are back in our own reality,” she said without emotion, but there was doom written on her face. “Poseidon has borrowed the strength of his brother Zeus to summon Hippocampus home.”
Calliope began to cry.
Without warning, the deck tilted wildly to the port side, throwing half of them flat on their faces in time to avoid being caught up by a massive, pink tentacle that exploded out of the ocean and glided over their heads like a giant windshield wiper. Anything taller than Calliope, begging the gods for mercy on hands and knees, was wiped away as though it had never been, including Euterpe, Polyhymnia, and Mike.
Marcy shrieked. She reached a hand out to Mike as he was whisked backwards over the side of the deck, his eyes locking briefly with hers in helpless shock.
Of all of them, Melpomene was the first to regain her senses. She sprung up from the deck, her taste for knee length gowns aiding her in her sprint to the cabin. She swung open the first door she could reach. The room became an armory unlike anything Marcy had ever imagined. Swords and crossbows lined the shelves next to modern guns and rows of ammunition. Someone who knew more of these things than Marcy could probably find an item from any given time in human history and some from eras completely unknown to this reality if he took the time to look.
“Arm up!” she cried, laughing with madness. She pulled a chainsaw out of the armory and revved it up. “We fight, or we die!”
Three more tentacles shot out of the water. The first one poised itself at Melpomene like a scorpion’s stinger, jabbing straight for her chest. She responded by lowing the chainsaw in its path. A piece of the monster fell to the deck, writhing with leftover nervous impulses.
The sea monster reeled back into the depths. It must not have expected a fight, Marcy though, but after surviving King Arthur’s misguided castle guards and a horde of chickens from hell, she was NOT about to let an overgrown octopus take her out. She raced to the armory as soon as she could find her legs and immediately discovered the hole in her line of reasoning.
She didn’t know how to use any of these.
She decided on something more or less blunt that she could wave around like a baseball bat. A sturdy looking stick with a spiked ball at the end would do. Marcy picked up the morning star and weighed it in her hands. It was heavier than she had thought, but adrenaline birthed of sheer terror was coursing through her veins. She could handle this.
Yoosun and Jamie both chose short, light blades, probably using the same logic as Marcy.
“Anyone who has ever fired a gun, step forward!” Erato demanded.
“I grew up on Fort Bragg,” Thomas said immediately. “My dad served with the 82nd Airborne.”
Erato threw open the lid on the wall that could have belonged to a fuse box. Instead, it contained a giant red button. The muse slammed her fist into it. Above their heads, mechanical parts began to stir.
“I’m raising the turret!” Erato announced. “Grab as many of those green ammunition cans as you can carry and follow me up to the roof!”
“It’s back!” Melpomene shouted over her roaring chainsaw. Another monster limb fell to the deck with a wet thud, but she couldn’t fight them all at once. The monster smashed a portion of the railing on the starboard side with a loud crack, throwing a shower of wood shrapnel across the deck and catching Urania in the shoulder. She gasped in pain.
The freshly armed company attacked their assailant with a vengeance. The monster reached around the ship from every side, restraining them with its size and strength and preventing their escape. First two, then six, then ten tentacles smashed into the deck, pounding and stabbing with blind malice. Jamie screamed, stabbing anything that came close enough to stab. Not far from her, Marcy swung her morning star around and around, screaming a battle cry that sounded like a garbled string of obscenities.
The monster squeezed the hull. Even over the screaming, hacking, smashing, gunfire, and chainsaw, each and every one of them heard the loud crack from bellow that shook the foundation of the ship.
“It’s going to sink us!” Calliope blubbered, punctuating his sentence with a blast from his shotgun. A tentacle reeled back, twisting and bleeding from a dozen bullet holes in one soft pink suction cup. “Our only chance lies in the Mist! Someone, take the helm!”
Urania was already gone.

“Get lower,” Terpsichore said to Yoosun, grabbing her arm and dragging her down the stairs to the third level. “We can’t enter the Mist while the monster holds us,” she explained hurriedly.
Yoosun nodded. They raced through the ballroom, which was currently empty of all furnishing and décor, and took the first door out to the deck. Slimy tentacle were clamped to the deck, pulsing gently as they clung. With deadly silence and a disquieting gleam in her dark eyes, she started down the deck hacking and slashing at the appendages with her short sword until one by one, they released their hold. Terpsichore glided the other way, twirling her double headed flails with accuracy and precision, taking tentacles out two at a time.
The monster had enough of this. It reattached itself with newfound determination, cracking the hull again so that Yoosun could actually feel the breech. She and Terpsichore had come full circle around the deck from opposite directions, but their ship continued to lurch and sway with the monster. They could hear screams of pain and terror on the observation deck above them.
“Lower!” Yoosun called, and at once they both dashed back into the ballroom and down to the second level deck.
Terpsichore slammed all four flail heads into the first meaty tentacle she saw through the door. The monster roared like a screaming blue whale dragging its teeth across a chalkboard the size of an aircraft carrier. “I think that got its attention,” she said, taking off down the deck and repeating her attack again and again. “Don’t let them reattach!”
Yoosun was already on it. She followed behind Terpsichore, slicing wildly at anything that returned within striking distance of the deck. All of a sudden, the ship lifted sharply as Hippocampus was hit from bellow. Yoosun toppled over, landing hard on her knees and hands. She dropped the sword to catch herself and it went sliding across the deck. She winced helplessly as it disappeared over the side.
A tentacle reared back, poised to strike, and shot at Yoosun with the speed of a canon. She threw her arms up in a futile gesture of defense, but the blow never struck. Terpsichore’s soft voice and gentle features took on the caste of a warrior as she intercepted the sea monster. Her flails twirled so fast that they became wheels of deadly metal, pounding into the attacking monster again and again, tearing off chunks of slimy flesh as it fought to exterminate the pesky deck dwellers that had caused it pain.
Yoosun was again on her feet, helpless and without a weapon. She backed up against the wall, enthralled by Terpsichore’s display of raw power and fluency. The Muse’s hair flew around her dancing form like fire. Her face and gown were flecked with blood and tissue torn from the beast.
A second tentacle attacked, dividing Terpsichore’s attention. She held off the first and second tentacles without missing a beat, but the third appendage was on her before she could move to stop it. One moment she was there and the next she was gone, torn from the deck before Yoosun’s eyes without even enough time to scream.
Yoosun stood in shock. Her breath stopped. The sounds of battle ceased abruptly in her ears, replaced by a high pitched ringing that only she could hear. Her vision darkened and closed around her until all she could see was the point of light directly in front of her eyes. Yoosun moved, but she couldn’t feel it. When she found herself on the floor of the ballroom, curled up and wailing, she had no idea how she had gotten there.

Mike’s mind was stuck in slow motion as he felt himself being knocked backwards off the observation deck. His eyes met Marcy’s and he wished desperately that he could call out to her, but his voice stuck in his throat and all he could communicate was fear and vulnerability. He broke contact with her when the world fell away and time instantaneously sped up again. He was free falling, unable to stop himself as Marcy’s voice pierced the air around him and turned his blood cold.
Icy cold water enveloped him with a sharp sting. The silence was vast. His eyes burned with salty sea water, but he couldn’t close them. He had caught sight of the monster, a giant squid with hundreds—no, thousands—of limbs moving in every direction at once. Its body was longer than the ship and covered from end to end with coral and deep ocean vegetation. Mike could see its skin crawling and writhing as millions of parasite fish burrowed, clung to, and sucked at the monster. He was suspended under the water just a dozen meters from the beast’s milky white, sightless eye.
His lungs were on fire. His reflexes seized him, forcing Mike to gasp for breath and suck salt water into his body. Tentacles shot up around him, waving and darting through the water. Mike did the only thing he could. He grabbed one of them in a bear hug.
Mike felt himself fly. His head broke the surface of the waves and breath returned to him with a series of coughs and sputters. Mike rode the monster like the theme park ride from hell. Flashes of light and sound assaulted his senses until. He couldn’t figure out where he was in relation to the ship until he smashed into it with the full strength of the aquatic beast. Mike felt his shoulder crack and several of his ribs crush with the impact and still managed to hold on out of pure desperation. The deck came soaring towards him again. Mike threw caution to the wind and reached with both arms for the third level railing.
He missed.
Falling and flailing, Mike caught his already injured arm on the second level railing instead. He jerked to an abrupt stop, tearing his arm from his cracked shoulder socket with a horrible stabbing pain. Mike fought against the pain to maintain his grip and his consciousness, but he knew instinctively that it wouldn’t be long.

Marcy’s power and coordination with a morning star was a display of surprising aptitude. Every swing, every shriek, every movement was fueled by unadulterated rage and her indomitable will to survive. Simply put, she was kicking some serious tentacle monster ass.
The muzzle of Thomas’s machine gun flashed in short bursts of shocking sound. A spray of gunfire pushed back a freshly surfaced appendage, sending it back into the water with a cry from the beast.
“More ammo!” He shouted over the noise.
Erato had the next bandolier ready and waiting.
The last few shots blasted from the business end of the gun and in almost one fluid motion, Thomas flipped the weapon to “safe,” threw open the cover, shook the brass off of the feed pawl, the feed tray, and out of the chamber as Erato fed the next belt of ammunition into the freshly cleared tray. Thomas slammed the cover back down, swiveled the turret to the left, returned the weapon to “fire,” and pumped another burst of lead through the steaming hot barrel and into a tentacle that was rushing straight for him. He cut a clean line of bullets across the width of the limb and drove it back into the ocean.
Bellow him, the monster was beating itself against the port side of the ship. His eyes widened in horror as one of the tentacles reared up, waving wildly with a soaking wet Italian man wrapped tightly around the limb for dear life. The tentacle smashed Mike into the side of the ship once, twice, and Mike was thrashing about for a handhold and managed to catch the railing one deck down.
Thomas shouted and screamed to Marcy, Jamie and the Muses on the observation deck, but no one could hear him over all the turmoil.
“Take the gun!” he screamed, right in Erato’s ear. He waited for her to nod and climbed right out of the top of the turret. Thomas slid down the slanted roof of the cabin and landed with a thump on the observation deck before falling and rolling to absorb the impact. It still hurt like a bitch.
Jamie was across the deck with Calliope and a crossbow wielding Clio, stabbing and dodging as best as her recently healed ankle would allow. Marcy was closer, swinging a wide arch with her morning star and connecting with a suction cup hard enough to tear a piece of it right off of the monster.
“Marcy!” he called from a safe distance. “I found Mike! He’s in trouble!”
Marcy shook her head as though to throw off a daze. “Where?” she stammered, hurrying to follow Thomas without waiting for an answer. They picked the cabin door on the far right and were hardly surprised when it opened directly to the second level deck, foregoing even the pretense of a staircase.
“Mike!” Marcy shrieked, grabbing his arm with her free hand and holding on to him despite his cry of pain.
Thomas grabbed him by his shirt collar and together they worked to drag him back onto the surface of the deck.
“I thought you were dead!” Marcy practically sobbed, throwing her arms around him and squeezing tight.
Mike winced, but raised his good arm to squeeze her back.

Up at the turret, Erato was running into trouble. She was being forced to swivel the turret in an almost constant circle, cranking the swivel wheel with one hand and holding the trigger firmly in place with the other. The machine gun fired cyclic. Steam and smoke rose from the weapon thick enough to skew her vision while she was battered from every direction at once.
The weapon jammed with a sharp click. Erato knew before it happened that she was done. The monster tore both gun and Muse from the top of the ship in one clean sweep, sending them both flying through the air. She heard the bullet trapped in the scolding hot chamber of the severed gun go off with an explosion. Pieces of the weapon erupted in a fiery ball of metal and carbon.
Erato blacked out before she hit the water.

Without warning, the monster changed tactics. All of its limbs sunk into the ocean at once. There was an unearthly calm that lasted all of four seconds before the giant squid surfaced in all its glorious monstrosity not two hundred meters from Hippocampus, bringing with it a flood of cascading water. It fell from the beast in sheets and the resulting shockwave rocked Hippocampus precariously to the side, threatening to capsize the vessel.
The ensuing flood of water washed Thomas, Marcy, and Mike back towards the open door behind them and towards the relatively dry fourth level observation deck. Thomas caught hold of the door frame with his finger tips and managed to stop himself from sprawling out across the ship in an uncontrolled heap. He was hanging half on the port side of the second deck and half on the starboard side of the observation deck two levels above, screaming for his life while his body tried to orient his equilibrium. Marcy and Mike slammed sideways into the door, trapped between the wooden frame and the wall of water rushing over the deck to drown them.
Everyone who was still left shrieked and screamed, clinging to anything that might save them from falling into the sea. Clio’s handful of damaged railing snapped off at her touch, leaving her to spin headlong across the width of the ship and over the side.
Jamie and Calliope winced as they heard the splash. Calliope had dropped his shotgun and now held on for dear life with one arm, Jamie’s waist with the other. He tightened his grip to keep them both from following Clio into the raging ocean.
The ship was at more than a thirty degree tilt.
“We’re going over!” Jamie screeched frantically. They could all feel themselves lifting from the deck as they held frantically to either the rail or the door with aching muscles and screaming wounds.

Urania panicked at the helm. The wheel spun wildly and she didn’t have the strength to stop it. But the monster had made a fatal error in releasing its grip. Summoning the last of her strength, Urania spoke to Hippocampus, threw herself into the wheel with all of her weight to steady it out, and cast them into the Mist.