A shadow below caught his eye. The Lady was still hovering just above the surface of the calm Caspian Sea. This was at Phipps’s insistence-if Gavin’s wings had failed, he wouldn’t have fallen far, and the ocean would have provided a more pleasant landing than hard ground. Perhaps five miles ahead of the ship lay a sliver of an island, and just beyond that, a rocky coast. The shadow was moving beneath the water, growing larger and larger beneath the Lady as whatever cast it moved up from the bottom of the sea. The thing was nothing natural. Unease bloomed quickly into concern and fear. Gavin tucked and dove, his wings pulled in tightly. He didn’t dare dive too quickly-he didn’t know how much the harness could take, even though his mind was automatically calculating foot pounds and stress levels. He shouted a warning to Alice and Phipps and felt the vibration of his vocal cords, sensed the compression of air, knew the sound would scatter helplessly long before it reached Alice’s eardrums, and still he shouted.
Half a mile below him, a pair of enormous black tentacles rose up from the shadow and broke the surface of the water. At seven or eight feet thick, they easily looped themselves up and around the Lady with incredible speed, even though she was the size of a decent cottage. Fear chased Gavin’s heart out of his rib cage as he dove closer. He could hear Alice shrieking and Phipps yelling in thin, tinny voices that were ballooning into full volume. Air burned his cheeks as he dove past the envelope, now wrapped in suckered black flesh, and he caught the rank smell of ocean depths and old fish.
Instinct rushed him ahead. He had to reach Alice. He had no other thought but to reach her, get her to safety. Even the Lady’s distress didn’t matter.
Below and just behind the ship, a black island rose from the waves. Eight other tentacles trailed in oily shadows beneath the ship, and a wicked horned beak large enough to crack an oak tree snapped open and shut. A single eye the size of a stagecoach stared up at Gavin, and he caught his own reflection in the dark iris. Inside Gavin, a monster equal to the one below him roared its anger. For a mad moment, he wondered if he could dive into the eye, punch both fists straight through the cornea into vitreous goo, and force the creature away. Grimly, he ended that line of thought as foolish. Instead, he made himself fling his wings open and end the dive with a sharp jerk that sent a red web of pain down his back and into his groin, where the flight harness was strapped to his lower body. He skimmed through a gap in the tentacles and the rope web that supported the Lady’s hull, twisting his body in ways that were already becoming reflexive, until he could drop to the deck. His wings folded back into a metallic cloak that dragged at his back and shoulders once the blue glow faded and the chime stopped.
Susan Phipps had drawn a cutlass of tempered glass-only fools used sparking metal on an airship-and was hacking at one of the loops of tentacle that encircled the ship in a rubbery tunnel. Her mouth was set in a hard line, and her graying black hair was coming loose from under her hat and spilling over her blue lieutenant’s uniform. The blade gleamed liquid in the sun and it distorted the black tentacle as Phipps slashed again and again, but the edge made only shallow cuts in the rubbery surface, and if the creature noticed, it gave no indication.
Alice, meanwhile, kicked open a hatchway on deck, and a finger of relief threaded through Gavin’s anger when he saw she wasn’t injured.
“Are you all right?” he demanded.
“I’m fine,” she barked, then shouted into the hatchway, “Out! Out, out, out!”
From belowdecks burst a cloud of little brass automatons. Some skittered on spider legs; others flew on whirligig propellers. They sported arms and legs and other limbs of varying sizes and shapes, but most had points, and a little pride fluttered in Gavin’s chest at the way they obeyed Alice. She pointed at the tentacle above Phipps’s head with her gauntleted hand. “Attack!”
The little automatons rushed at the tentacle. Their blades and pincers slashed and poked. The cuts oozed bluish ichor but otherwise seemed to have no impact. Wood creaked in protest beneath the smelly tentacles, and Gavin felt the Lady’s distress as his own. His stomach tightened. Water sloshed below, and a breeze stirred.
“We told you we knew something like this would happen, Ennock!” Phipps shouted. She was still slashing at her tentacle with the help of the little automatons. “We told you dropping this close to the water in unknown territory was foolish.”
“Does that matter now?” Alice yelled back. She cast about the deck, looking for something to do, then flung her arms around Gavin’s neck. “I’m so glad you’re all right. I was terrified the entire time you were up there.”
Suddenly the squid didn’t matter. He held her even as wood and rope creaked all about them and seawater dripped from loops of black tentacle; his wings, no longer glowing and heavy now that he had landed, cupped protectively around them both. For a tiny moment, he let himself feel as if he had created a safe island for them both, and Alice was warm against him. It seemed they never really had moments to themselves, when they could enjoy just being together. Their time together burned away like a dying candle, and Gavin hated it. He just wanted to spend time alone with Alice, love her, raise children with her, but one crisis after another stormed over them. For one moment, at least, he held her, and she let him.
“Oi! Lovebirds!” Phipps called over her metallic shoulder. The red lens of her monocle was hard as a ruby. “We need to figure out how to handle this before it drags us under!”
“The creature isn’t dragging us down.” Gavin released Alice. “It’s towing us.”
Phipps stopped hacking, and even the little automatons above her paused for a moment. “What?”
Alice ran to the gunwale and peered over. The ship shuddered and creaked, moving forward instead of down. The creature’s tentacles were towing the Lady the way a child carried a balloon on a string. “Good heavens-he’s right. How did you know, darling?”
“I felt the breeze. Besides, this thing could crush the Lady in seconds,” Gavin said. “It hasn’t, which means it doesn’t want to, or someone is stopping it from doing so. I don’t think this creature is natural. Someone made it. Someone’s controlling it. Someone who wants to capture us, not kill us.”
“That makes me feel so much better,” Phipps snapped. “Instead of being crushed or drowned, we’re being kidnapped by someone who breeds giant squid for private amusement.”
Jaw set hard, Alice swatted controls on a deck panel, sending the nacelles into full reverse. The engines whined and protested. The Lady bucked and shuddered, fighting the creature’s grip, but the towing barely slowed. Alice was growing desperate. Gavin knew she hated and feared being unable to control her world, and her fear made him angry at whoever-whatever-was causing it.
“We need more weapons,” she said, still pounding at the controls. “What do we have?”
Gavin shook his head. The Lady used to have a number of weapons, but they’d all been destroyed or rendered useless during recent events in France and Ukraine, and Gavin hadn’t had time to make any more. In fact, the only real weapon they had was-
His blue eyes met Alice’s brown ones, a meeting of sky and earth. In that instant, the same thought went through both their heads; Gavin could see it.
“No,” Alice said. Her eyes showed the whites.
“We don’t have anything else,” Gavin countered.
“No.”
The Lady picked up speed. Ahead of them lay the island, thin as a knife, and it was growing larger.
“No what?” Phipps demanded. Then she got it. “Oh. Oh God. No, Gavin. We can’t. Can we?”