Wherever the waves would take her

Prologue

She felt water falling on her face as Evie followed the waves, pushing her along. It felt like a dream, her body propelling her up to the surface as she struggled to gain some control over her body. Her thoughts were incoherent, a jumbled mix of sounds she could not begin to vocalise.

What am I doing here?

Where am I?

Snapping her eyes open, she heard a distant boom that echoed for miles around. She was completely alone in the middle of a lightning storm.

Which was strange because Evie didn't remember swimming to the ocean's surface to brave the cold.

Evie's tail splashed around her as she struggled to stay afloat. Her thoughts travelling to her warm bed back home, Evie contemplated diving back down to hide away from the storm.

She also considered the possibility of staying to watch the lighting illuminate the vast ocean around her from a distance. But one could never be too careful in avoiding being a lightning beacon, no matter how rare that occurred in oceans.

If she was on land she would have been indoors with a large fire. But she was alone in the middle of a vast ocean, all she needed to do was to ensure that she wasn't near the water surface.

Evie frowned, shivering not from the cold but from something else that she wasn't able to verbalise. Curiosity or excitement perhaps? She seemed to be waiting for something, her body resisting the urge to dive back into the water.

The ocean called to her. Playing a siren song that she couldn't quite make out.

But before she could react, she watched as the seas and skies light up around her body with a bright blue light, an inhuman shriek piercing her ears. It was only when she tried clapping her hands to her ears that she realised that she was unable to move. To the point where her body had gone completely numb from agony.

It felt euphoric despite the initial pain, power suffusing her limbs when she noticed that she was the one who was shrieking. She opened her eyes again to note that the scales of her tail were flashing brightly in the water around her.

She tried taking a deep breath in again, above water only to swallow a mouthful of seawater and coughed violently. Evie was trapped in the middle of the vast ocean, with no one else around her to witness her pain.

Darkness was the last thing Evie saw before she blacked out.