Nixie, a shark who’s recently moved to a town near Mensura, likes her lifeguard job but doesn’t like the reactions she gets for being “scary.” A new opportunity might be presenting itself, though…
Leaning forward in her lifeguard chair, Nixie squinted at the two swimmers—if you could call that swimming—about seventy yards out, well past where most casual swimmers dared. Was one of them in trouble? Maybe not. She swept her gaze around the rest of the beach, then back at them. Maybe. That was far enough out to catch a rip current if the ocean felt surly.
“Why do you have boobs?”
Nixie made a soft choking noise and stared down at the questioner, open-mouthed.
The rabbit boy might be all of thirteen. Just into puberty. Natch.
“You’re a shark, aren’t you? Sharks are fish,” he continued, as if he might be imparting new information to her.
“Unevolved sharks are.” She gestured at herself. “I’m not a shark in the same way they are. They don’t even have limbs to evolve into arms and legs, right? And these?” She touched one of her long, decidedly non-fishy ears.
“Or the boobs!”
“Yes. Or those. Where’s your mum?”
“Your accent is funny. Do you eat people?”
“Lovely chat.” She made a shooing motion. “I’m on duty. Scoot along now.”
He pouted. She made a point of looking back at the ocean, back at her two bad swimmers. Hm. That was definitely a flail, and they were getting farther out. Nixie stood up.
“Holy shit, you’re tall!”
At two point five meters—eight feet two inches in this country’s charmingly nonsensical measure—she was a veritable giant, except compared to the true giants supposedly over the hill in Mensura. Even so. “Does your mum know you use that kind of language?” The other swimmer waved frantically at the shore, and other beachgoers bobbing in the water had started to shout.
“What are you—”
She took off full tilt toward the water, diving in the moment she had enough depth.
Few creatures could outswim even an untrained shark. Nixie was a trained shark. She rocketed past other swimmers, trying to maintain a serene ignorance of the way they screamed and leapt away from her, sometimes inadvertently blocking her route. Sharks were a little scary. Big sharks were a lot scarier.
The flailer, a strapping wolf guy who looked like he might be, like Nixie, in his late twenties, clung to his willowy vixen girlfriend, threatening to pull her under as well. Great. Nixie circled around them, her back fin breaking the surface as she slowed.
“Shark!” the vixen screamed, just as Nixie popped her head up.
“She’s the lifeguard,” the wolf gasped.
The vixen flushed with embarrassment.
“Shark lifeguard,” Nixie confirmed. “C’mon, let’s get you both back to shore.” She easily grabbed both of them, the vixen with her left arm and the wolf with her right. floating on her back and holding them to her sides, keeping their heads above water, she propelled herself backward with her tail.
“Sorry, I thought you were…” the vixen’s mumble trailed off. They both looked acutely aware of their faces being pressed against the side of her chest, which was, as the rabbit boy had noted, far more mammalian than piscine.
“Everyone always does, unless they see me on the lifeguard stand. Sometimes even if they do. But the rip current warning signs aren’t a joke.”
“We’re good swimmers,” the vixen protested.
“Even good swimmers can get caught.”
“I bet you wouldn’t.” The wolf sounded partway between admiring and sulky.
She grinned, trying not to show too many teeth. “Ah, but I’m a great swimmer.”
They reached the beach, and she climbed out of the water, still carrying them under her arms. She crouched to set them down. “You both okay?”
“Yes.” The vixen sounded curt, her eyes on her wolf boyfriend, specifically on the way he was gazing up at Nixie. Apparently he’d decided she wasn’t a monster after all. Or that monsters could be sexy.
“Thank you,” the wolf said. “You saved me.”
“It’s my job.” She patted them both on their shoulders and straightened up to her full height, which made both of their eyes bulge. “You might want to take a break for a bit, and please, don’t go out that far out again.”
When she returned to her chair, someone waited there for her—two someones. A mouse and a cat, both middle-aged women, both maybe one and two-thirds meters high. Both pretty attractive, although she saw a lot of attractive people in this job. (As well as a lot of people who should have chosen different bathing suit styles.) The mouse had fairly short brown hair and hazel eyes, wearing a black bikini; the cat was all white, with luminous sky blue eyes, decked out in a burgundy one-piece.
“That was most impressive,” the mouse said.
“Just my job.” She took her seat.
“The point still stands. Have you ever taught swimming?”
She looked down. “No. Are you looking for lessons?”
“She’s trying to recruit you,” the cat said, tone amused.
The mouse laughed. “Not me. But I know our school’s looking for a swimming instructor.”
“I’m not great with kids.” Not true, at least back home. Here, though, it was the way the kids reacted to her. Except for the ones asking about boobs.
“It’s a college,” the cat said. “Mensura College.”v
She furrowed her brow, leaning over toward them. “The one with the magic and the giants?”
“That’s the one.”
That might explain why neither of them flinched at being loomed over. “So who are you, exactly?”
“I’m a librarian. Julia Webb.” She indicated the cat. “This is Arilin Thorferra, one of our professors.”
“Nixie Wilkinson.” She waved around the beach. “I’m flattered, but I wouldn’t be good at teaching. People here get…tetchy around sharks. Lifeguard’s a good enough job right here for someone like me. If your instructor position is something that’s part-time, maybe I can try to make it work with this, but…”
Thorferra shook her head. “All our positions are full-time. With good benefits.”
Nixie’s huge tail flexed, and she brushed back her own hair. Compared to the luxurious fluff of the two short women in front of her, the thick, wet strands made her feel like she had seaweed stuck between her ears. The lifeguard position paid decently, but it was only thirty hours a week, and didn’t include any extra benefits over the most basic government-mandated health insurance.
But a teacher? Her? As if. These two might not be flinching away, but she knew the proverbial exception to the rule when she saw it.
Webb studied her keenly for a few moments, as if reading her thoughts. “You might also find the college to be a more, hmm, hospitable environment than Santa Salchicha.”
“I don’t think I’d like to be that far from the ocean.” Mensura was only forty-five minutes away, assuming traffic was good, but the couple of times she’d visited it felt like another world.
“It’s the everything else I’m thinking about. But I won’t press. If you change your mind, Ms. Wilkinson, or just want to talk about the possibility, come by the campus in the next couple of weeks, to see me or just go to the employment office. You can give them my name as a reference.”
“If I do, I will.” Her left ear flagged. “I mean, if I go, I’ll give them your name.”
The cat lifted a brow fractionally, but the mouse just nodded. “Good. We won’t keep you any longer. Have a nice rest of your day.”
“You too.”
Nixie turned to watch the two head off to another part of the beach, then looked back out at the water, sinking down in her seat and crossing her arms. Hopefully she wouldn’t have to go back in the water again today. “Which is a damn ironic thing for a shark to think, isn’t it,” she muttered under her breath.
• • •
The rest of the week remained blissfully quiet at the beach, and the next week started out well enough. Tuesday, though? Tuesday was a shitshow.
It started out with someone knocking themselves unconscious with their JetSki. Nixie didn’t see it happen, and she couldn’t even picture it in her head. When you fall off one of the damn things, they shut off. Did he fall off in front of it? How do you even do that? Almost immediately after that, some rat kid managed to start drowning in the shallows, his mother screaming and flailing rather than just picking him up and dragging him out of the water. When the shark did exactly that, rat mom got even screamier and flailier, until Nixie finally snarled, “Do you want to keep insulting the lifeguard, lady, or do you wanna let her do her job?”
But those were nothing, nothing, compared to the divers.
She knew about the shipwreck a half-mile out—it was part of lifeguard training and, she suspected, part of local lore. As far as wrecks went, it was as unglamorous as it got, though. No old galleon, no sunken treasure, nothing worth exploring. A decade and a half ago, some weekend sailor type managed to sink their ten-meter fishing boat just offshore. The end. From what she’d heard, while there’d been a storm, it hadn’t been much of one; the boat just hadn’t been properly maintained.
So why were the divers bothering? She could only guess because it was relatively shallow. At about twelve meters down, most people without gills still couldn’t get to it without scuba gear, but aquatic mammals could. Like otters.
As usual, the first sign something was wrong was somebody starting to flail in the water, but this time the flailing was someone swimming strongly toward shore—almost as well as she swam—pausing to stop and wave and scream every few seconds. Leaping to her feet, Nixie ran into the water to meet her.
The otter didn’t look like she’d quite hit legal drinking age. When she saw Nixie barreling toward her, she stopped short, floating in the water, scream caught in her throat.
“I’m the lifeguard. What is it?”
“I—” To her (partial) credit, the girl forced down her obvious burst of fear over Nixie’s size and appearance. “It’s my boyfriend. We were exploring the wreck that’s out there and he got caught on something and it’s through his foot and I can’t—I can’t—”
Nixie’s eyes widened. “Is he still underwater?”
She nodded quickly, starting to point. “Y-yes. It’s—”
“I know. Get to shore and call 911.” Without waiting another moment, she dove forward, barreling into the water, keeping close to the ocean floor as she swam. Unlike an otter, she did have gills; breathing wasn’t an issue for her.
It only took a minute for her to get to the wreck, but she felt every second of it. The otter had to have been trapped there—somewhere here—at least five minutes, which meant he only had a couple minutes of oxygen left at best. And she could smell something ominous in the water.
Not on the shore side of the wreck. Naturally. But that scent, a thin, dark line—
Shit. Blood.
She followed it right to the otter, stuck by the ship’s stern. The blood was seeping out of his left paw. What in the everloving fuck, was that a fishing hook?
She swam close. Sure enough: the kind of hook you use fishing for tuna or swordfish, tied to a strong rope-like filament. It had hooked all the way through that paw, somehow. The cord disappeared under the wreck’s side—the weight of the boat itself held it in place.
The otter saw her swimming close, reaching out to tug at the cord, and his eyes bugged out. Despite being underwater, he screamed, wasting precious oxygen, and shoved at her with both hands.
Stop it, you idiot, she thought, trying to grab his arms with one hand while pointing at the lifeguard logo on her one-piece swimsuit. He wasn’t having it.
Fine. Whatever. The cord clearly wasn’t going to pull lose, and she was losing time. She had to cut it. No knife, so teeth it was.
As she bit into it, she heard—more felt—him scream again. He started pounding at her, weakly, until he abruptly went limp.
In a panic, she grabbed the filament in both hands and yanked back on it with her jaws. Damn, it was strong. It cut into her lip, adding her own blood to the otter’s, before ripping with a painful twang.
Grabbing the otter in both arms, she swam straight up, breaking the surface and holding his head and shoulders above it. “Come on, mate. Breathe.” Pulling him against her with one arm, she started swimming backward as fast as she could, using her other hand to start chest compressions.
Two-thirds of the way to shore, he coughed, spat up water, took a heaving breath, coughed up more water. Then looked around, screamed again, and tried to get out of her grip. “Help! Help!”
“Easy. I am help. We’re almost—”
“Help!”
“—to shore.” Swimmers and paddlers looked over at his screaming, some rolling their eyes at him, some flashing her fearful looks.
As they reached shore, he struggled more furiously, managing to squirm out of her grip and drop to the sand. He screamed again when he landed, not at her but at the feeling—and sight—of the hook in his foot. He dropped onto his butt, moaning.
The other otter ran up. “Help is on the way—oh, Three Lords!” She clapped a hand over her mouth at the sight of the hook.
“Pull it out!” the wounded otter gasped, too weak—or maybe just too panicked—to make it a full scream.
“Don’t.” Nixie crouched beside him, holding his arms still. “If you do, you’re gonna lose a lot more blood.”
“You tried to bite me!” He glared up at her accusingly.
“I bit through the cord that was holding you under.”
He shook his head. “Sharks go crazy at the smell of blood. Everyone—”
“That’s a myth.”
“She saved your life, Aaron,” the other otter hissed. “Stop being an asshole!”
“Mary—”
“You’re welcome,” Nixie said, tone flat. “Shut up and listen to your girlfriend.”
Fortunately for both him and her sanity, the paramedics were running up, a fox and a rabbit, carrying a stretcher between them. “Wow,” the rabbit said after they’d set it down by the otter’s side. “You did a number on your foot there, didn’t you?”
“He nearly drowned.” Nixie pointed at the ocean. “He got hooked in that old fishing boat wreck out there. I did compressions on him as I was bringing him back.”
“Feels like my ribs are broken,” the otter wheezed, tone petulant.
“Means she did it right,” the fox said. “So does you breathing.” He grabbed the otter’s shoulders; the rabbit carefully took his legs, and they lifted him onto the stretcher.
“Good work,” the rabbit said, looking up at Nixie. She didn’t act flummoxed by the shark, at least.
“Thanks.”
As the medics and the otters headed back to the ambulance, Nixie flopped backward into the sand, looking up at the bright blue sky, and groaned. She closed her eyes and gave herself a full minute of rest before trudging back to her post.