POV: Liora
His body slammed into mine. The tentacles found me first, wrapping around my ribs and pulling me against his chest, and I felt him twist so his back faced the water a second before we hit.
The cold shattered through us both. Underwater, his shoulder hit rock with a crack that traveled through his chest and into mine. His grip went loose, and the current tore us apart.
I broke the surface coughing and a wave threw me sideways, tumbling me along the base of the cliff until the rocks gave way to sand. I crawled onto the wet shore on my hands and knees, choking on salt water and blood, and the sky above me was grey and spitting rain.
"Why?" I shouted at the rain, at the cliff, at the sea that should have killed us both. "You had your grip around my throat and you did not care. Why did you jump after me?"
The waves gave me nothing. I turned my head and found him ten paces down the beach, face up on the rocks, tentacles splayed in the surf and moving only when the waves moved them. His eyes were closed and his mouth was open and blood spread from his shoulder, dark and steady.
He looked almost human like this. Still and broken and bleeding the way any man bleeds.
But the girls he had told me about filled the silence. The ones who screamed, the ones who prayed, the ones who walked into the sea. The ones he could not save and the ones he did not try to.
"Good," I said, and my teeth were chattering so hard the word came out jagged. "I hope it hurts as much as my throat does."
My body screamed when I stood. Cuts, bruises, the welts his tentacles had pressed into my skin still burning in lines across my ribs and thighs, the impact still ringing through every bone. I found a boulder at the waterline and pried it free with both hands.
I stood over him, arms trembling, rain hitting my face, his jaw and closed eyes right there beneath me. "You deserve this," I whispered. "Those girls they sent here, you watched them die."
He did not answer. The surf dragged at his legs and pulled back, patient and endless.
I lifted the boulder higher and my shoulders burned where his tentacles had wrenched them. But my arms would not obey, and I hated myself for the hesitation with a violence that tasted worse than salt water.
A sound cut through the rain, high and sharp. The creature burst from the tree line, scrambling over wet rocks, and ran straight past me to him.
It pressed against his side and nudged his face, and the sound it made was not a growl but a keen, thin and desperate, pulled from somewhere deep in its small feral body. Then it turned to me and snarled, every wrong tooth bared.
"I did not hurt him," I said, stepping back. "He jumped off a cliff. That was his decision."
The creature snarled louder and I dropped the boulder. It hit sand with a dull thud.
"Fine." My throat was raw and my voice was someone else's entirely. "I am leaving."
I turned and walked down the beach, away from him and the creature, away from all of it. I would find another part of the island and build a raft and never think about any of this again.
The keening followed me. A sound so raw and broken it did not belong to a creature with needle teeth and flat eyes. It was grief, animal and artless, the cry of a small thing that did not understand why the body it loved had stopped moving.
I stopped, and my hands were shaking. I had stood in that village square and taken the stone from a child's hand because I could not watch a helpless thing be fed to a larger one.
The creature behind me was small and helpless and keening over a body it could not save, and my legs would not carry me further.
"I hate you," I said to no one, to myself, to whatever broken part of me could not walk away from a bleeding man on the rocks. "I hate every single part of this."
I went back and dropped to the sand beside him, keeping my hands away from the tentacles splayed across the rock, because the sight of them still turned my stomach, black and slick and wrong against his human skin.
He was heavier than I expected, dense with muscle and the dead weight of those limp coils dragging behind him.
I pulled him three paces and had to stop, bracing my hands on my knees, my arms shaking and the soaked undershift clinging to me in the rain.
Then I pulled again, and again, moving him in short ugly bursts up the beach while thunder rolled low across the water.
The creature trailed three paces behind. "You could help," I told it. "Of course not. Why would anything on this island make my life easier."
Further up the shore I saw it, half-buried in sand, the skeleton of a wrecked ship. Small and old, hull cracked open, but the ribs of the frame still held and strips of torn sail hung from the mast.
I dragged him to the lee side where the hull blocked the wind. Torn sail for a roof, vine from the tree line for lashing, the cracked hull as three walls. Every knot I tied stung, salt in the cuts, but the canvas held.
"If you die before I get you inside," I told him, hauling him through wet sand, "I will find your ghost and I will scream at it until even the dead get tired of me."
I pulled him into the shelter and his skin was fever-hot, slick with sweat and salt, his breathing hitching wrong in a way that told me the wound was worse than it looked.
"Stay alive," I told him, though he could not hear me. "You owe me answers and I intend to collect every single one."
I tore strips from the sail and soaked them in rainwater pooling at the shelter's edge, then pressed cold cloth across his forehead and his neck. "You are heavier than you look," I told him, pressing another strip to his temple. "And you look heavy."
The creature slipped inside and curled at his feet, watching me with unblinking eyes. I wrung out another strip and laid it along his jaw.
"You can stop looking at me as though I poisoned him," I told it. "I am the one keeping him alive right now."
The creature did not growl. Its eyes tracked my hands as I worked, and every time I touched him it tensed, but it did not snap.
"Does he do this often?" I asked it. "Throw himself off cliffs after the people he is strangling? Or am I special?"
It blinked once, slowly, and pressed its body tighter against his ankle. That was the closest to permission I was going to get.
I needed to see the wound on his shoulder, and I rolled him onto his side, bracing his weight against my knee. My hand brushed a tentacle. I flinched and pulled away hard, but it did not move — limp and warm and smooth and dense, nothing at all what I expected against my fingers.
His shoulder was torn open, a gash from shoulder blade to ribs where underwater rock had ripped through skin, ugly and still bleeding but not as deep as I had feared.
I had seen wounds before, on fishermen, on myself the night my family's cruelty left marks that did not show on skin. But not on someone who had taken the blow meant for me.
"You do not make any sense," I told him, pressing cloth against the gash, his skin burning under my palm. "None of this makes any sense."
The rain came down harder, and I held my hand against the back of the monster who had tried to kill me, and I did not let go.