Chapter 247: It’s A Shark Not A Barracuda [Edited]

Katie floated near the surface of the reef lagoon with her yellow mask pressed over her face, kicking herself through the clear water with a pair of oversized pink fins.

She was moving so enthusiastically that bubbles streamed behind her as she chased every fish, shell, and patch of coral that caught her attention.

"Nicholas! Look! Down there!" Katie’s voice bubbled out through her snorkel mouthpiece, completely muffled.

She popped her head out of the water, spitting the tube clear and pointing with a plastic-gloved hand toward a shallow sandy plateau fifteen feet down. "Nicholas! Look at that sea star! It’s huge!"

Floating effortlessly beside her, Nicholas adjusted his low-profile diving mask with one hand.

"That’s an Acanthaster," Nicholas said. "Don’t touch the spines. They’ll make your hand swell."

"My Hands swell! Bad star! Katie won’t touch," she declared solemnly, kicking her pink fins to drift closer to his shoulder.

Marina was a little farther along the reef, examining the anemones with an underwater slate in hand, while Vixen and Nectron had gone deeper toward the edge of the channel.

Selena stayed closer to Nicholas and Katie, occasionally diving beneath them to get a better look at the fish weaving through the coral.

Selena surfaced, pushing her mask onto her forehead and wiping sea mist from her eyes.

"She’s been kicking for forty minutes straight. Where does an eleven-year-old get that much energy?"

"Dried fruit crisps and sugar crackers," Nicholas answered deadpan. "I warned you about the snack bag."

"You let her bring it," Selena pointed out with a smirk.

"Marina was meant to deal with that. Don’t blame me," Nicholas countered. "I merely provided transport."

Selena laughed, diving back under to follow a bright yellow butterflyfish weaving through the coral branches.

Nicholas turned his attention toward the deeper water. Something about the movement beyond the reef had caught his eye.

His gaze drifted past the vibrant shallow reef, scanning the deep-blue sea where the seabed suddenly plunged into the oceanic trench. The water out there turned from clear aquamarine to an impenetrable, ink-colored navy.

He noticed a shift ripple through the current.

Through the clear water, forty yards out along the edge of the drop-off, a streamlined, slate-gray shape emerged from the gloom.

A huge barracuda emerged from the darkness, easily eight feet long and thick enough to make the smaller fish scatter around it. Its body was scarred from old fights, and when it turned toward Katie, Nicholas caught the flash of its teeth.

The barracuda changed direction, drawn toward the frantic movement of Katie’s pink fins near the surface.

The fish locked onto the movement, its fin twitching twice before it accelerated in a sudden, explosive burst of speed.

It closed a large distance in less than two seconds, shooting like an iron torpedo straight toward Katie’s trailing legs.

Selena was twenty feet away, her back turned as she watched an eel in the coral. Marina was too far back. Vixen and Nectron were fifty feet down near the seabed.

Nobody had spotted it.

Nicholas saw the barracuda coming. A flash of white Qi crossed his mind, but he dismissed it immediately. One mistake could tear through the reef and hurt Katie along with the fish. He couldn’t let that happen.

He kicked off the water and moved.

With a single, powerful whip of his legs, Nicholas cut through the water like an otter.

The barracuda lunged and Nicholas moved at the same instant, sliding between its open jaws and Katie’s legs before the girl even realized what was happening.

He caught the fish just behind the head with one hand and hooked his other arm beneath its body, letting its own momentum carry them past him.

For a moment the massive fish thrashed wildly, churning the water into a cloud of bubbles, but Nicholas held on and twisted with it rather than trying to overpower it.

He turned the animal away from the reef, released it, and gave its tail a hard shove toward the deeper water. The barracuda disappeared into the blue, leaving nothing behind but a trail of bubbles and a very confused school of smaller fish.

The entire sequence took less than two seconds.

The water settled into quiet ripples.

Nicholas surfaced quietly beside Katie, not a single breath out of place.

Katie had just popped her head up to adjust her snorkel, completely oblivious to the fact that an eight-foot set of razor blades had just passed six inches from her toes.

"Big brother!" Katie said, turning around in the water.

"Did you see that big gray fish? It was very fast! It did a loop-de-loop right beside you!"

"I saw it," Nicholas said calmly, reaching out to adjust the strap of her mask. "It was playing around in the wrong place."

"Did you tell it to go away?"

"I gave it good guidance," Nicholas replied.

Selena surfaced a moment later, swimming over with a puzzled look on her face. "Did something just blow past here? I felt a heavy current surge."

"Just local marine life passing through," Nicholas said, his face an unreadable mask of innocent composure.

"A giant gray torpedo fish!" Katie supplied eagerly, flapping her hands in the water to demonstrate its size. "Big brother did a spinny-hand move and told it to leave our reef! It was cooler than the cartoons!"

Selena stared at Nicholas, her eyes narrowing with sharp, amused suspicion. "You wrestled a deep-sea predator with your bare hands, didn’t you?"

"I redirected it," Nicholas corrected.

Selena shook her head, a helpless, radiant smile breaking across her lips as she treaded water beside him. "You are utterly incapable of being a normal tourist."

Katie suddenly let go of her kickboard, lunging forward to throw both of her skinny arms around Nicholas’s neck, nearly dragging both of them under the water with her enthusiasm.

"Nicholas is the greatest big brother in the whole wide world!" Katie declared loudly, her voice ringing out across the sun-drenched cove for Marina, Julie, and the gulls to hear. "Leo back home in Detroit said his older brother can do three backflips on a trampoline, but that is totally boring! His brother cannot even fight a shark! Nicholas is ten billion times stronger and cooler!"

"It wasn’t a shark."

"It had shark teeth." Katie retorted.

"That’s not how classification works." Nicholas chuckled lightly.

"Still cooler. Or does big brother disagree with me" Katie asked, frowning with a pout that made her look even more adorable.

"I wouldn’t dare, you win Miss Katie, it was in fact a shark" Nicholas floated steadily in the warm, crystal-clear water, supporting the little girl’s weight with one arm while the tropical sun beat down upon his shoulders.

Nicholas looked at Katie’s wide, gap-toothed grin, then at Selena laughing beside him. For once, there was no blood, no work waiting and no city burning somewhere in the distance.

There was only warm water, sunlight, and his family enjoying a day together.

"Trampolines are a safety hazard anyway," Nicholas murmured, the faintest trace of a real smile touching his mouth. "Let’s go find that sea star again."

’At least, now she won’t talk about that Leo boy again. To think I’d be jealous of a little kid’ The thought made him laugh.

"What’s so funny, big brother?" Katie asked, her eyes beaming with curiosity.

"It’s nothing"