Page 8 of The Merman's Kiss
And then immediately started in on me again.
“Isearchfor you,” he very nearly growled. “I even climb out on the sand and look, but too young to change still.” He sent an angry look at his beautiful tail and swallowed hard again.
I replaced my hand on his throat and delivered a bit more of my magic, shaking off the odd feeling it gave me, but this was already beginning to drain me. Maybe if I left my hand where it was and delivered it in smaller drips it wouldn’t be so hard? I nodded for him to continue without removing my hand this time.
His expression turned shy and unsure as he paused and laid his larger hand over mine, gently pressing my whole palm to his cool skin and holding it against his throat as if it were a comfort. He explained, “I watch for you all winter and just hope… I hope you come back.” My heart broke at the thought of him going through the same uncertainty that I had, not knowing what had happened.
Every time his voice began to get rough again, I directed more energy into soothing his discomfort. Finally he slid his eyes closed, simply holding my hand to his neck and looking as content as I’d ever seen him as he heaved another labored breath.
“I wanted to say goodbye,” I told him quietly. “You stopped coming to the beach and I had to return to my schooling.” I could hear the bitterness in my voice at the end of my last sentence.
Lorn visibly drooped before I’d even finished speaking, and when he spoke, he continued to hold my hand firmly against his neck, as if its presence alone could take the pain away. “The… eater came that time. I take our young and swim for safe… place. When came back, you gone.” He was clearly doing his best to convey a difficult concept with limited words, but I didn’t understand.
“You have… young?” I asked, latching on to his comment about ‘our young’ immediately. Lorn was my age, or close to it, at least I thought. How did he have a child?
But he gave me that rumbling laugh that came from deep in his chest and squinted at me sideways. “Notmyyoung.Ouryoung,” he said, gesturing as if toward the whole ocean. “Other father’s young. My people’s young. We all help.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. And what is an eater? Like a predator? Sharks?” I lifted my hand to make a claw shape with it. His gesturing had me immediately slipping back into the miming actions that we had used last year to explain things to one another.
He gave a little bit of a nod and a half shrug, like I was close but he didn’t have the words for it. His world was clearly so different from my own, and it only confirmed that my anxiety about his safety hadn’t been entirely misplaced. He started to say something else, but then his head snapped up and he glared with hawklike focus at something out in the water. Suddenly, a piercing, wordless melody—high-pitched and ringing like the choirs I’d heard singing after the winter solstice celebrations in the capital—penetrated our discussion, causing Lorn to tense where he sat until two heads surfaced in the water out by the jetty. He gave a long, shrill note that raised in pitch at the end in response, somehow managing to make the sound from his chest without even opening his mouth. They gave an answering call again, and he grumbled and bared his teeth playfully at them, picking up tiny stones from the sand and chucking them into the waves toward the newcomers, though they fell far short of their targets.
“Are they your friends?” I asked him, feeling oddly possessive of my time with him after so many months spent away.
He gave an eye roll and said, “They tease me for talking to girl,” and I noticed a pink tinge beginning to rise in his cheeks.
“What’s wrong with talking to a girl?” I asked, immediately defensive. I was irritated at their intrusion and that they were teasing him at all, let alone aboutme, but when I looked closer at them, they didn’t really look like they were teasing. It was hard to read their expressions from this distance, but it almost looked like they were afraid.
Lorn shook his head at me and flopped over into the surf, letting the waves wash over his head and neck for several minutes, and I could see his gills fluttering gently beneath the surface. He did this sometimes when his gills and skin got too dry, and then eventually reemerged before taking another rasping breath to answer me. “Our mermaids are sirens,” he explained. “They have hooks in their words,” he said with halting speech, miming the grasping motion with his claws for the ‘hooks’ just like I had. “We must hide from them.”
That seemed… like an odd dynamic. Most of the kids I knew attended gender-specific schools, so we didn’t have atonof interaction but we didn’t hide from each other. Something about the other merrow who stayed back near the jetty caught my eye: their ‘hair’ hung in odd rivulets with far more quills covering their heads than Lorn had, and the color was different. One had ‘hair’ the color of the sea, making him very difficult to see in the water, and the other had deep green—maybe it was fins?—for hair instead of the familiar blond strands that Lorn had. One of them gave a whistling trill that caused Lorn to sigh.
“They need me,” he said. “I come again.”
“I probably need to go unpack my belongings before someone comes looking for me anyway,” I said with a sigh. “Lorn?” I asked, as he began to push himself up, and he turned his curious smile to me. “Why doesn’t their hair look like yours?” I hoped it wasn’t rude to ask.
He opened his mouth and closed it, as if unsure what to say, and then reached for my hand, pressing it against the frontof his throat. I gave him a small push of my magic and he grinned. “Because I… you?” He lifted his hand in a questioning expression and then tentatively stretched his dark-tipped claws to my own hair and ran a few of my long strands through his fingers, his expression suddenly serious and wistful.
“You’re me?” I asked, confused. “You mean… you’re part elven?”
His answering smile could have rivaled a sunrise for the way it lit up his face as he turned and entered the sea.
“I come again,” he repeated.
It felt like a promise.
Chapter 7
Lorn
Nine Months Earlier
WhenIwasyounger,I’d enjoyed working as a group to do our morning chores together. We would talk and joke as we worked side by side, but as I’d gotten older I’d begun to value how quickly I could get things done when I worked alone. That left more time for me to play and explore and search for my treasures. But then the oldest boys in the shoal had grown up and left to be taken as mates by sirens from the surrounding waters, which left me as the eldest child, and since it was most efficient for the adults to work quickly, I was the one tasked with working with the younger boys. While it did usually make chores take longer, at least Elias was nearly as efficient as I was, and Leo learned quickly… most of the time.
This morning I was digging for clams with the other two boys. Our fathers and grandfathers were busy hunting urchins that ate our kelp roots, sharpening knives, making rope—all the daily chores that are needed by the shoal. The merlings, Amata and Marlen, were gathering algae together for the snails. We all keep an eye on the youngest ones as a community, either givingthem jobs near an adult who can watch them while they work or assigning them a job in an area we know is safe so that they can learn to contribute to the community and grow in independence. The areas where they work and play are generally safe, and we are watchful for any predators or dangers when they are in areas that we feel might not be as safe. The ocean is rife with dangers.
While I was gathering black clams with Elias and Leo, the littlest ones were in the quarry nearby, floating bundles of algae into the crevices where we kept them for storage. I could hear them giggling and chattering to one another as they worked, probably distracted by petting the snails in their pens. Nobody expected their chores to get donequickly. I had half a mind on the little ones and half a mind on keeping the clams from slicing my hands open, but then I heard a whine—something that didn’t sound right. It made the hair on the back of my neck and the spikes on the back of my arms stand up.
“What was that?” I asked the others, my clam falling from my fingers and wriggling away into the sediment unnoticed.
