I pulled David ashore, the waves tugging at our bodies, threatening to drag us back into the abyss. The sand was cold and coarse beneath my trembling fingers as I dragged him further up the beach, away from the relentless pull of the tide.
He was shockingly light. All the vibrant energy that had pulsed within him, whether his own or the entity's, was gone, leaving behind a fragile shell. His face was pale, almost translucent, and his lips were ashen. I ripped off my dive gear, fumbling with the buckles, and frantically began to administer CPR.
"Come on, David," I pleaded, pressing down on his chest, forcing air into his lungs. "Don't you dare give up now. You fought so hard."
Each compression was punctuated by a desperate hope, a silent prayer that he would respond. The rhythmic rise and fall of his chest was the only sound besides the crashing waves and my ragged breathing. Time seemed to stretch into an eternity, each second a torturous reminder of how close I had come to losing him.
"whoosh~~~"
My head whipped around, saltwater stinging my eyes. The rocky outcrop was barely large enough for the two of us, a slick black fang jutting from the churning grey sea. There was no one else. Nothing but the endless water and the distant, uncaring silhouette of the Triton.
"H-hello?" I stammered, my voice a pathetic croak.
Only the shriek of a gull and the rhythmic slap of waves against the rock answered.
Hypothermia, I told myself, the scientist in me desperately clawing for a rational explanation. Auditory hallucinations. Your brain is starved of oxygen, you're in shock.
I forced my attention back to David. His lips were blue, his skin unnervingly cold beneath my trembling fingers. I tilted his head back, pinched his nose, and sealed my mouth over his, forcing my own precious, burning air into his lungs. His chest rose shallowly. I pulled back, preparing for another breath.
And the whisper came again, impossibly close, a sibilant rush of air against my cheek. "Yesss... that feels... good. Give me... more."
I recoiled as if struck. It wasn't my imagination. It was real. And it wasn't coming from the air around us. It felt like it was resonating from David's chest, vibrating up through my hands which were still pressed against his sternum.
My blood turned to ice. I remembered the dive. The frantic descent into the abyssal trench, chasing an energy signature unlike anything we'd ever recorded. We found its source: not a geological feature, but a lifeform. A vast, web-like lattice of pale, phosphorescent filaments, pulsing with a cold, blue light in the crushing dark. It was beautiful and terrifying. David, ever the bolder one, had drifted too close, reaching out a hand just before our comms crackled with static and his dive light went dark. Then the struggle, the panicked ascent, dragging his inert form from the crushing blackness.
With a surge of dreadful certainty, I tore at the zipper on David's wetsuit, pulling it down.
There, spread across his chest like a ghostly tattoo, was a faint tracery of lines, a delicate network of veins that glowed with that same, cold, impossible blue light. It pulsed faintly, a parasitic star system on his skin. It was inside him. It had come up with us.
"He is so cold," the whisper sighed, a thought that bloomed directly inside my mind, bypassing my ears entirely. "He is almost… used up. But you… you are so warm. So full of… fire."
I scrambled back, away from David, my hands scraping raw on the sharp rock. He was no longer just David. He was a host. A vessel for the thing from the deep.
His eyelids fluttered. My heart leaped with a sliver of hope, a hope that was immediately and brutally extinguished. The eyes that opened were not David's warm, familiar brown. They were two pools of shimmering, liquid blue, utterly devoid of recognition. They fixed on me.
A hand, David's hand, lifted with a jerky, unnatural motion. It wasn't the movement of a man regaining consciousness. It was the movement of a puppet. The blue light in his chest flared brighter.
His lips parted, and this time, it was his own voice that spoke, but the cadence was all wrong, a hollow and hungry echo. "Don't... go," he rasped, the words pulled from him like threads. The whisper slithered around the edges of his voice. "We want... more."