Page 9 of The Merman's Kiss
“I don’t kn—” one of them started to respond, but I was already gone, speeding as fast as I could toward the quarry. With my heart hammering in my chest, I crested the rise to find something that will probably be burned into my memory every time I close my eyes for the rest of my life. Instead oftwogiant snails in the quarry, there werethree. The third was a towering snail that matched the others in size, but unlike our colorful, bright-eyed livestock, it was the jet-black color of squid ink.
It wasn’t a giant snail at all. It was a kelpie, disguised as a harmless creature so it could trick an unsuspecting victim into coming closer. In the quarry below was a nightmare made flesh, something we’d all heard stories of as warnings from the elders but I’d never seen with my own eyes. Amata, one of the two youngest children, swam toward me frantically, panicking and crying for help. Marlen hung limply, slowly being absorbed intothe side of the black ‘snail,’ a handful of algae scattered beneath him as if he’d been trying to feed it. His arm dangled below him with an outstretched hand like he was still reaching for the algae. Black ooze extended from the side of the creature like a tentacle and enveloped his body, covering his face and torso with more long finger-like projections that speared up into his gills.
I shot over the edge of the cliff like I’d exploded out of a ship’s cannon, plummeting into the depths below as I propelled myself faster than I’d ever swam before, and I hit the kelpie in a fury of spines and venom, claws and desperation. There was no time to go for help. I didn’t even know if Elias or Leo had followed me. I just threw myself into the creature’s destruction more fiercely than anything I’d ever done in my life. Venom poured out of the spines that lined the backs of my arms, and I slammed them into the kelpie, puncturing it over and over again as I clawed at the tendrils of inky blackness that pushed into Marlen’s gills. That was the biggest threat to him at the moment. The tendrils began to retreat as I gulped down water and fought with all my strength. Finally, enough of him was freed that I could grab his arm and tail and wrench his little body free from the side of the kelpie. Just as I got him into my arms I heard the whistling voices of Elias and Leo as they cried out in shock at the mouth of the quarry.
“Get Amata! Take him to his father immediately” I yelled to Elias, turning to see both of the bigger boys frozen in fear at the top of the rock face as I moved to put distance between us and the kelpie. “Elias,now!” I screamed, and he snapped into action, cutting a short path to the still panicking merling and scooping him up into his arms.
Amata wailed in Elias’ arms the whole way home to the dense kelp stands where we live and Leo gave the warning call that we use as an alarm to signal that there are dangerous predators in the area, which kept me from needing to actively watcheither of them to make sure they were still with me. I wrapped Marlen’s unconscious body in my own arms, ignored the painful pounding of my heart, and focused on getting him to safety as fast as I could. The two elders moved faster than I remembered them being capable of, one gathering Marlen from my grip and listening to our garbled recitation of what had happened before swimming off to call the rest of the shoal. The other took Amata and ushered us out toward the open water and away from our home. Once the whole group of us made it into the open ocean, they led us to a neighboring merrow community. When we arrived, a hunting party fifteen-men strong—my own father included—went back to kill the kelpie. I wasn’t allowed to join, and no one was allowed to return home until the kelpie was found and destroyed.
It took two long weeks before they returned victorious because of how crafty it was. The kelpie was killed and its body disposed of in a yawning chasm in the ocean floor several leagues away, to keep it from fouling the waters where we lived. The creatures that lived deep in the chasm would feast on the deadfall for years, the elders said.
When our shoal had finally returned home, my landwalker was gone. I wasn’t able to find her anywhere, though I returned to the cove every day, watching and waiting. I called to her with her song—even daring to crawl from the water to the edge of the path that snaked through the large trees when the sun was low one evening. There was no sign of her though. Her buried box remained untouched. All the treasures that we’d spent the summer gathering sat unmoved from their position each day. But still… I waited, hoping that she would return. I wondered if perhaps she had traveled early to a winter territory the way that my people did when food became scarce. Maybe she would return to me when there was more food. Or maybe her peoplewere nomadic like some of the other merrow cultures were, and she wouldneverreturn—I would have only the memory of her.
I tried to parse through my memories of all the many things she told me over the summer about her life and how her family lived, but I hadn’t always been able to understand her mouth-words, even though I had tried very hard. I just didn’t know.
So, I continued to watch the cove, and I thought about her often, and every time I found an object I thought she might like, I brought it to her box and placed it inside. It helped a little with the ache that lingered in my chest when I thought of her and made me feel a connection to her in a small way.
Eventually, when the elders decided it was necessary to move to our wintering waters, I didn’t want to go. Because what if she returned while we were gone? But the whole shoal moves as a group—even our giant snails come with us, by trapping large bubbles of air in their shells so that they can float and allowing themselves to be pulled along by their harnesses for the entire distance of our winter migration. After much fin dragging on my part and making my displeasure known, I was finally convinced of the elders’ wisdom, but I felt itchy in my skin the farther south we traveled. We rode the current that flows along the coast to shelter with other shoals of merrow in the southern communities where daylight doesn’t wane as much and food continues to be plentiful throughout the winter.
The solstice celebrations took place while we were there, as they do every year with so many of us in one place. Sirens moved about in quiet packs, giggling together as they scouted the new arrivals for potential mates. Those mermen interested in being mated—and claimed with a crown of coral—joined in the festivities in hopes of catching the eye of a pretty siren. But Elias’s curiosity about the sirens nearly got him in trouble this year when he ventured too close to the merry-making, and his dad taskedmewith helping to keep a close eye on him for therest of our time here. Not that any siren would be interested in claiming a child for a mate, of course. We weren’t even allowed to join the festivities until we were of age, but an accidental bonding wasn’t completely unheard of, and it would have made him absolutely miserable.
Between being in a place I didn’t want to be, with festivities I wanted nothing to do with and wouldn’t be allowed to join even if Ihad, and then being tasked with minding a boy merely a year younger than me—who blushed every time he caught a distant glimpse of a siren—I’d beenbeside myselfwith relief when we finally began the long migration home. The return journey was always the hardest part without the assistance of the currents that carried us on the way down, but fortunately we ate well enough at the wintering waters to be able to store up enough energy for the migration. I was at the front of the shoal each day, taking turns pulling snails and anything else I could do to help move the group along quickly, careful to never utter a single complaint about the way my muscles ached the way the other boys did, lest the elders think we needed to stop more often for rests than we already were.
I was disappointed but not surprised to find Sadira’s heavy box untouched and her beach unmarred by prints from her feet, but at least we were home. We’d only been gone for a single cycle of the moons’ phases since the winter solstice passed.
But I would wait four more cycles of our moons for her to come back.
Present Day
Mylandwalkerhadreturned.
I’d spent the entire winter season not knowing if she would ever come back, and when I heard the drifting, quiet notes of hersong from a distance, I thought for sure I was hallucinating. I’d frozen in place, listening in shock for several beats. It was like my brain was unable to make sense of what I was hearing, before I finally understood and raced to the cove as fast as I could go. And she was here! My shock at hearing her song this morning was rivaled only by my relief at seeing her face again.
In my haste, I’d apparently made the mistake of allowing the other boys to see where I went, and now they had followed me and seen my landwalker. This annoyed me for multiple reasons, but mostly because they had interrupted my time with her by telling me they ‘needed’ me. This seemed doubtful, but I was feeling strangely territorial about her toward the other boys, so I joined them in order to lead them away from her cove. I didn’t want to share my landwalker with anyone, but especially not with them.
“What do you need?” I asked the younger boys as I passed through the mouth of the jetty to join them. “I’ve already finished my work for the day.”
“Were you trading with her?” Elias asked, confusion coloring his tone.
“No,” I answered, and left it at that. I brought her items often, and she gave me things sometimes too—like the shiny metal ‘botternyfe’that she said she found in a ‘droor’—but it wasn’t specifically a trade. They were gifts.
“You shouldn’t be talking to her,” Leo, the youngest, said to me. He floated next to Elias and clutched his whalebone spear, something his father had gotten for trade at the wintering waters and he’d kept it close ever since. He still seemed to be looking for kelpies around every rock.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the marbled grouper swimming back and forth at the outcropping of rocks where it lived, trying to catch my attention. “I can talk to whoever I want,” I replied to Leo absently, so happy to see her againthat, despite my annoyance at their interruption, I couldn’t even muster the proper frustration at Leo pretending to be my father. I was used to the people in my shoal always trying to mind their neighbor’s business.
“What if you bond to her?” he asked, gesturing animatedly. “Tell him, Elias!” he demanded of the other boy. “What if Marcus found out?” he asked, referring to my dad as he turned to me again.
“He already knows. He’s fine with it,” I lied. Well, kind of. He knew of what he exasperatedly called “my obsession” with watching for Sadira to return. He didn’treallyapprove, and he didn’t know I spoke to her with mouth-words or how much time I spent with her, but he was mostly just worried about me like any parent would be, I suspected. But he simply shook his head and asked me if I was going to stare at the landwalkers again when I finished with my tasks each day.
Elias shrugged uncomfortably, his cheeks flushing immediately—probably remembering his reactions to the sirens he’d seen at the wintering waters. “She’s not a siren,” he said, looking back toward the cove where they’d seen Sadira. “Can we even bond to people who aren’t merrow? I don’t know how that works. And Lorn’s not even of age yet. I don’t know, Leo,” he repeated. He shrugged again, clearly not wanting to be put in the middle of it.
“But she wastouchinghim,” Leo protested, either shocked or outraged, I couldn’t tell. Maybe both. But yeah, my dad obviously didn’t know I’d let her touch me. Her singular touch had soothed away every ounce of pain that speaking to her had caused me, sometimes even as soon as I felt it. I was still amazed. Nothing that the sea witch had on his shelves worked that fast. But I couldn’t tell Leo that because then he would know that it hurt me to talk to her, and I couldn’t fault his reaction. The way mermen bonded to our mates was a biological reaction meantto keep us with our offspring until their mothers were finished nursing, and just because I hadn’t reached the arbitrary age that my people had decided was appropriate for that bonding to occur didn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Physical contact, we’d always been warned, accelerated that process. But she’d only been healing my injured vocal cords… somehow. Surely that was harmless.
And we were still just children.
Leo clutched his spear tighter, clearly torn and wanting to argue with me about it some more, but I spotted the grouper trying to catch my attention again. He was ‘dancing’ now, swimming quickly back and forth, obviously trying to direct my attention to the lunch he knew I would give him. I’d created a monster. Now that he saw I had noticed him, he swam to the ledge beneath his rocks where his prey liked to hide, but he had grown too big to reach them.
“Give me your spear,” I said to Leo, realizing he’d still been talking and I’d ignored whatever he had just said. It was just as well. I held out my hand and waited.
