“It might take me a few minutes to adjust my buoyancy here,” said Mike. “Fresh water and sea water have different densities.”
While Mike played with his equipment and spells, I experimented. Achieving neutral buoyancy was easy for me. I used natural magic, while Mike depended on magically activated tattoos to achieve nearly the same effect.
I released my grip on the raft and slid under the surface, halting about ten feet down. Beneath us, the water went down another one hundred meters. Even my eyes couldn’t penetrate the darkness more than another ten meters.
I shivered at the thought of getting lost in that Stygian darkness, then threw it off. This was nothing compared to a real ocean.
Then Mike’s body dropped past as he sank like a rock.
He must have tweaked his spell wrong. I dove in pursuit before finishing the thought.
I managed to snag him by his tank before he passed thirty meters. The sudden pressure change had affected him; his eyes were unfocused in the tiny light from my headset.
My feet churned the water furiously to keep us both from sinking further. Trying to pull him up was like dragging a boulder to the surface.
I can’t swim to the surface and I can’t keep this up much longer. Sheer strength wouldn’t help here. We needed to lighten him up to get back to the surface. I thought of tweaking his oxygen mask spell to make him more buoyant, then dismissed the idea. Magic is fickle. Tweaking the spell in a swimming pool or on shore would be no problem. Attempting it here, twenty meters below the water, would be insane.
Mike was fumbling around with his weight belt, his fingers too clumsy to work. He had the right idea, but was moving too slowly.
I extended a razor-sharp claw and slashed through his weight belt, the straps holding his tanks, and his hoses. All of his life-sustaining devices sank quickly out of sight.
With the equipment gone, I only had to tread water a bit to maintain our depth. I started to ascend, pulling Mike with me when he tugged on my arm desperately.
If only we could talk, I thought, followed by, Luna, you’re an idiot. Of course you can talk.
A tiny modification to my oxygen mask spell linked our two air bubbles.
“Mike, what the hell happened? Why did you sink?”
“My buoyancy compensator failed. When I tried to expand my air bubble to compensate, my head shot up and my body dropped down. I almost broke my neck.”
I flashed back to an old story about an inventor who created an inflatable-ring life preserver that fit around the swimmer’s neck. It was designed to keep the swimmer’s head out of the water. Great idea, until someone tried diving into the water with the damn thing inflated.
My oxygen mask spell, which performed perfectly in air and worked great for my werewolf-strong neck in water, was a danger to humans.
A mental command expanded my air bubble, increasing my buoyancy so that we started to ascend. It was still a strain on my neck, but not insurmountable.
We ascended slowly to give Mike time to adapt to the pressure changes.
While drifting up through the darkness, I thought about this air bubble spell. Did it have to enclose only my head? Just making it into a giant sphere wouldn’t work; that would result in a lot of drag. It would be like swimming with a huge sail behind us.
We popped to the surface. The stench of dead fish, oil slicks, and smog was a joy to my nostrils.
A tiny bit of luck had kept us within a short distance of our raft. If it had drifted a few hundred feet farther, we never would have found it in the dark.
Mike was gasping for breath when we reached the raft. I pushed him up onto the inflatable and stayed in the water.
“You might as well come up here, too,” he said. “I’ll find the radio so we can call for an emergency pickup.”
“We have to finish the mission.”
“Luna, I screwed up. I couldn’t handle the buoyancy issue and lost all of my gear. I can’t free-swim that far with my weight. I think you need to accept that this might have been a bad idea.”
“It’s not your fault. The oxygen mask spell didn’t work as planned. We could tweak the spell and get it to work better.”
Mike ran his hand over his chest, rubbing the mystical tattoo that powered his spells.
“Maybe we could tweak the spells that keep me alive in a swimming pool instead of in the Persian Gulf during a mission?”
“Smartass,” I said. “But you have a point. We’ll have to get to shore before I tweak your spell.”
“Get to shore? How? Do you have some kind of magic propulsion spell that’ll push this glorified inner-tube where we need to go?”
I cataloged the spells available to me. Using air to push us was unpredictable. Too little would barely move us, too much and we would be swamped. Using water to create a current to carry us to shore would exhaust all my magical energy before we made landfall. Earth and fire spells were useless out here on the water.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “I’m going to try an experiment.”
I pulled off my tanks, weight belt, snorkel, and all the other equipment, and dumped it all into the raft, leaving me in just a wetsuit and flippers. I even pulled off the rubber hood and tossed it into the raft.
“I’m going to swim down a bit and tweak my spell to see if I can get it to work better,” I said. “Shouldn’t take more than ten minutes.”
“How long can you hold your breath?”
“Why does that matter? I have my oxygen mask spell, so I won’t need to hold my breath.”
“And if you tweak your spell the wrong way? How long can you hold your breath?”
“Maybe twelve minutes? I’ve
