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The shark attacked out of nowhere. One minute we were gliding slowly upward. The next minute a sleek gray body was arrowing toward us out of the deep.
If I’d been a real human, we would’ve been goners. But my lupine senses kicked in just a hair before the beast’s arrival. Whisking Stooge around along with me, I spun to face the threat, slamming one heel into the shark’s massive shoulder as it surged past.
I might as well have kicked a brick wall. The animal neither flinched nor retreated. Instead, it flipped head over tail in balletic smoothness and curved back around to face me yet again.
My opponent’s rows of incisors were awe-inspiring...and very much visible as the animal gaped its mouth into a wide, toothy grin. “Sharks are curious critters,” I remembered one of my instructors telling us back in dive school. “They just want a little taste to see what strange being has landed in their swimming hole.”
Little taste, my ass. If that great white chomped down, we’d be history.
As if hurt by my snarky mental commentary, the massive shark retreated for the moment and gave me time to check Stooge over. My partner’s eyes were wide open and he was still sucking air from tank to lungs. But before I could assess him further, I caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye as the shark reentered the fray.
This time, though, the predator didn’t aim towards me. Why should it when Stooge was already partway skinned and oozing an endless stream of delicious blood? No, the beast had circled around while my attention was elsewhere and now it dove directly toward my injured friend with jaws stretched wide.
I didn’t have time to think, just to react. So I didn’t consider the fact that jumping into a shark’s mouth while wearing sensitive diving equipment was a fool’s errand. I didn’t take the time to consider how Stooge would react if he was suddenly thrust into an oceanic battle assisted by a werewolf instead of by a human partner.
No, I just took a deep breath and shifted, feeling my human equipment sloughing off and sinking away beneath my feet. Then I thrust with awkward lupine legs so that I, rather than Stooge, ended up directly in the shark’s flight path.
The beast replied by chomping down in what felt like a living and breathing rendition of that torture device so lovingly dubbed an iron maiden. If my ribs hadn’t been aching and my lungs screaming too dramatically to allow any gratitude to seep out, I would have blessed the padding of my fur.
***
YOU’D THINK THAT BECOMING shark bait would have been a negative experience...but you would’ve thought wrong. Instead, the world grew sharper and my mind clearer as I battled for survival. My chest expanded with pleasure despite its current lack of oxygen, and my muscles tensed as if preparing to run a marathon.
It was brilliant.
The beast had chomped down in a glancing blow, my hindquarters sticking out between its teeth like the legs of a frog being swallowed by a snake. And just like its distant land relative, the shark knew there was only one solution to the ornery problem—spit me back out and line me up to go more directly down the gullet once again.
Unlike a frog, though, I knew what was coming. So as soon as the grinding pressure eased away from my body, I was already aiming for one of the few spots where a two-hundred-pound being can apply enough pressure to make a one-ton shark feel pain—the eyes, the gills, or the snout.
The shark twisted around for reentry and I spun in sympathetic resonance. Wolves aren’t really made for undersea explorations, though, so my movements weren’t quite as smooth and elegant as I would have liked. Instead, my opponent beat me to the punch...quite literally.
The ocean dimmed as tremendous jaws blocked out the sunlight above my head. Tiny apertures on my left and right allowed me to see through to the outside world, but everything above and below was filled with vast expanses of sharp, serrated teeth. The mouth was so gargantuan, in fact, that I braced myself to be swallowed whole just like Pinocchio’s father had been in my favorite fictional tale.
Yes, I braced myself...but I didn’t give up. Instead, I scrabbled vainly against the wall of teeth beneath my paws, doing everything in my power to escape before the trap slid the rest of the way shut around my lupine body.
I wasn’t going to be fast enough though. Not when my task involved pulling sodden fur through five feet of ocean water while the shark only had to clamp its mouth shut in order to eat me alive.
Not a bad way to go, all things considered. Dramatic. Memorable. A hero’s passing.
I was nearly gasping for air as I mentally penned my own eulogy. My vision dimmed, and not just because the shark’s jaws were blocking out the illumination that filtered down from the sun above.
But all I could think about was Stooge. Had my partner brushed off his rusty self-preservation instincts and begun swimming back toward the light as soon as the shark attacked? Or would he be the next one to slide down the gullet?
The correct answer, of course, was none of the above. Instead, a sudden jolt thrust me out of the shark’s abruptly opening mouth, half of the hairs on my back scraping away in the process.
Twisting around, I found my supposedly injured buddy whaling on that shark like a three-year-old whose brother had stolen his allowance. Booyah! Stooge appeared to be focusing his attention on the beast’s nostrils, so I dog paddled around to the closest eye to join in the frenzy using my sharp teeth and claws.
For a span of time that felt like eons but was actually roughly fifteen seconds, the pair of us attacked relentlessly. With every blow, the mighty beast twitched and thrashed, unable to evade our united front. Blood was once again turning the water cloudy—and this time it wasn’t Stooge’s—when my partner’s gaze met mine across the vast expanse of gray shark hide.
The skin covering Stooge’s cheekbone twitched as he recalled my current, four-legged form. But we were a team and had worked together for so long there wasn’t any need to speak in words...or to explain away small surprises like tails and fur. Instead, we shoved off in tandem, pushing ourselves away from the marine predator even as the shark arrowed away, down into the deeper waters from whence he’d come.
As my dive-school instructor had promised, our opponent wasn’t interested in difficult, hominid prey. Instead, nearly as quickly as it had arrived, the beast was gone.
