Washed up on the rocks she tried desperately to fix the problem that the humans had started as she forced her lungs to expand in her chest for the first time in over six years. She brought her hands to either side of her neck and began sluicing water in and out of her gills, the first few attempts had her hacking out oil but it was starting to get better. Her eyes and ears and nose burned but the real hell was in her gills and chest but soon all she could taste was the relatively fresh water of the California coast. As a shark, she didn’t usually have this problem but when the humans decided that they were going to mess with the oceans.Humans were fucking crazy and if they didn’t stop the ocean was going to die.It started out when the king and his men stole the queen from her bed and slowly the ocean had been falling apart and now there was an artificial dead zone in the ocean the size of Texas of plastic bottles. Her people were calling for a complete genocide of the human species and to return the Earth to its natural state. That treaty millennia ago with the humans had turned out to be the worst mistake one could’ve made.How many hundred oil spills had occurred?How many chemicals were poured into their ocean?The humans had forgotten and were now raping the ocean for all it was worth from over fishing to downright negligence. Humans who threw things into the ocean to forget about them but what humans didn’t know was that they walked amongst them. What humans had forgotten was that in the beginning there was only one continent and they’d sunken Atlantis to prevent them from abusing their technology. But the almost virus like race was murdering their mother and now that the King was dead the Queen couldn’t be found.The true heir to the sea throne was elsewhere and she didn’t even know where to begin to look. If she stayed out in the sun for too long, just like her alternate form her skin would start to peel and crack and she’d dry out; the fate of hundreds in the last few years. She looked at the oil she’d splattered high on the rock so it wouldn’t drip back down and made a low rumbling noise in her chest, this was disgusting and she wanted nothing more than to just return to her home but that just wasn’t going to happen any time soon.Every muscle in her body tensed as the sixth sense she possessed kicked on high gear and she slipped down into the water as she watched the humans on the beach in their cars light a bon fire and begin a party on the beach. With a snarl she drew the enormous knife that was belted to her leg, and moved into the shallows.Bare as the day she was born except for the lashings for the knife and the lashings for the conch she slipped down into the slippery sand just below the wave’s role line and pressed herself flat. The nictitating membrane slide over her eyes and she abandoned breathing air in favor of gleening oxygen through her gills and waited. The carved bone handle in her hand smooth and slick as the enormous tooth that it was made out of, this weapon she knew well to be the second most dangerous thing in the sea besides the conch lashed onto her back.There would be no beer cans and chip bags on the beach tomorrow and none in the water… nothing but dead college students if she had her way.One of their females peeled her shirt off and left it on the beach before heading down to the water’s edge with her friends. She licked her lips almost already able to taste the blood there. Oh yes, no human trash tomorrow.
Sleep came fitfully that night for her, tossing and turning beneath the sheets as her dream swamped her. These dreams she was used to, at least one aspect of the dream that is. She would be swimming in the ocean except that she could breathe and see and function almost better than she could on land, under the water she would explore coves and reefs and caves but not tonight.The water was brown and murky and it hurt to inhale; the fine hairs in her nose were burning and there was intense pain in her ears like someone had shot her. Pressure was building in her skull and as much as she tried to swim away she didn’t know up from down and left from right now when her sense of direction was normally perfect. She opened her mouth to scream and oily water filled her lungs and choked her, she was drowning.Drowning.Drowning in water and she didn’t know why, she couldn’t see but knew that all the creatures had left from here and there was nothing left but man. Man and what he’d done to the world.Alexx came awake with a scream of absolute horror; the jolt to the mattress compressed the springs and sent her flying into the air before landing with a loud thump. The fish in the tank paid no attention to her as fish often do and instead they turned their attention to hiding from the cat on the other side of the glass. Heart beating in her chest like it was a wild thing trying to escape she took in sharply painful breaths but it still felt like she was breathing in the oil and sea water.Her chest was heavy and it was like trying to breathe on a day where it was 100% humidity and you were out running, it was like trying to breathe through a bucket of water with a three hundred pound weight on your chest. Her lungs burned and her muscles twitched with exertion like she’d actually been in the ocean fighting to get free of the oil spill. She put her head between her knees and took in long slow breaths through her mouth and out her nose.The world had a definitive blackness to it and around the edges was hazy and white; she fought through panic and curled on her side careful to watch her breathing as the world returned to being a definitive black all around her vision. Lifting her head carefully she saw the faint glow of the alarm clock, it was 11:51pm. For a moment she tasted the sweet copper of blood and before she could contemplate its arrival it was gone as if it had never happened.
The smell of acrylic burned her nose, wrinkling it against the offensive harshness of the scent and what it meant. Unlike the other girls being dragged out by her mother to the nail salon to watch people get their nails done offended her to the core of her beings… to be honest she absolutely hated her stepmother and her attempts to bond with a child that was not hers. They would have no relationship, they couldn’t have a relationship of that she was more than certain because there was something seriously… wrong with her. Some people would laugh at the evidence that she had piled up against her stepmother but there was something wrong with her something that made her skin crawl from time to time.She ended up road staring sitting in the middle of the mall trying to avoid all the questions her stepmother asked her, mainly about boys although if the woman knew anything it was that boys didn’t interest her and neither did girls for that matter. She honestly and truly believed that she was Asexual until she caught a glimpse of that person. Years ago at Six Flags of all people she’d caught a glimpse of a person that had made her heart race and made things below tighten in ways that she had never imagined before. The feeling that she experienced in the dream.
“Sheridan…” she rolled the name over her tongue, experimenting with the sound and watched the flare of unnatural in her stepmother’s eyes. She hadn't the faintest idea where the name had come from, it had just appeared as well as the burst of the scent of the ocean.
“What was that, Alexx?” she asked gently, prying, the darkness behind her eyes sparkling. Alexx flinched and resisted the urge to run out of the room.
“Nothing…”Sheridan lift her head, the ocean sun beat against her skin and back with a heavy warm pulsing sensation she'd heard the voice again for the first time in six years... the voice of her princess.