Chapter 17

SEVENTEEN

Jesse

Merrick was hesitant to go with Calypso, but we didn’t have too many choices, and she was clearly a powerful ally. If an entire clan of mer-guys was after us, that could prove handy. That was clear to see in the tension in his muscles, and how his eyes kept darting back and forth between us. Ever since I’d shown up with a tail, he wouldn’t look me in the eye, yet I caught him staring at me when he thought I wasn’t looking.

I really hoped this didn’t make things weird between us, though that ship had most definitely sailed by now.

And I was still pissed he’d tried to trap me in a cave.

And I was a mermaid. A siren born.

The word itself caused a shiver to run up my spine in a way ‘mermaid’ certainly didn’t. I was a descendant of … sirens, I supposed. I could almost wrap my head around that.

I was having more trouble with the whole ‘my legs could turn into a tail’ thing.

As Calypso instructed Merrick to grab onto the massive whale in front of us, I tried to see if I could do it again, scrunching my eyes closed.

Tail. Gills. Webbing between my fingers.

“Jesse?”

I blinked at Merrick, who was looking at me with his head tilted to the side. He held out a hand to help me further up onto the back of the whale. My pathetically human legs remained so, and a quick slack on the side of my neck revealed nothing but smooth skin.

Whatever I had been thinking, it hadn’t worked.

“We must hurry. The others will not be stunned for long, and they will hunt for you. We must be long gone by then, leaving no scent behind,” he urged.

I nudged him with my elbow as the whale gave a mighty kick of his tail and propelled us forward along the surface. We were out in the open ocean, with nothing to see for miles around. At least the strange octopus woman seemed to know where she was going. And the whale.

The sight of all of that open water tightened my chest. How far away were we from shore? Javi was probably blowing up my phone. If he hadn’t already figured out it was still back on Mike’s boat in the employee locker.

Oh fuck—what if he’d called the police?

I must have gone white because Merrick wrapped an arm around my waist and hauled me into his chest like I was half my size. We were both on our stomachs. His long, golden-flecked tail stretched out behind him and went down the whale’s back.

“I can’t stay out here, Merrick. I have to go back home. The police are probably looking for me. If I leave the house empty for too long, they’ll call my family and then … and then—”

They’d find out I was kicked out of the program. It would just draw attention to me when I couldn’t really explain who Merrick was or where he came from.

No. I’d have to figure something else out.

“Jesse! You are breathing too fast! Sit down!”

But I couldn’t calm down. Terrible thoughts raced around and around in my mind, and didn’t show any signs of slowing down. Fingers dug into my hair and grabbed my face, shoving it into the hard planes of a chest. Merrick’s scent of the sun and the sea filled my nostrils: salt, driftwood, and peace.

Incredibly, my breaths slowed. My mind calmed. Just in time for Calypso to undulate toward me on those tentacles of hers, a wicked gleam in her eye. My muscles tensed and Merrick growled at her, to which she just laughed.

Then I realized the whale was diving.

“Merrick!”

“I suggest you think back to the desire you had to be with your mer earlier, because air is hard to come by where I live.”

In the stories, the sea witch was evil. This one seems helpful so far.

But something just still seemed off. Had Merrick and his clan known about her? If not, why? I had too many questions, and no answers. And fucking Calypso? Like the one from the Greek stories?

No way.

Four tentacles shot out and wrapped around my arms and legs, pinning me down to the whale. Merrick lunged forward, grabbing the dagger he had in his pack and slamming it down on a tentacle. Calypso hissed, but two more tentacles shot out and knocked him off the whale, while another replaced the injured one to hold me down.

“MERRI—”

Another tentacle wrapped around my mouth, slimy and cold.

The whale descended, leaving Merrick behind, floating unconscious on the surface. I thrashed and writhed before realizing I was wasting what air I still had. I went still and willed my body to change.

Come on. You’ll die if you don’t. Come ON!

Nothing happened. My legs stayed legs, wrapped in Calypso’s tentacles. My neck didn’t sprout gills, and I fought the urge to open my mouth and breathe in water.

Down, down, down we went, until the darkness swallowed us and I was half-convinced I was already dead. Only the persistent burning in my lungs told me otherwise. It was hopeless. Even if Calypso let me go this instant, I’d never make it back up to the surface.

Killed by a mythical sea creature … who’d have thunk it? I dimly wondered. I just hoped my family didn’t end up selling the house because of me…

WHAM.

Something slammed into Calypso and me, and the tentacles holding me let go abruptly. I didn’t swim; I couldn’t even use my arms and legs. It took all of my focus and concentration not to inhale water, to keep my lungs dry—

Merrick’s arms grabbed me, and his lips descended harshly down onto mine.

Now doesn’t seem like the time, unless he’s saying goodbye, I vaguely thought.

A blast of pure oxygen went down my throat, and I jerked in surprise. Merrick grabbed me and sealed his lips to mine again, holding me tightly.

He was breathing for me!

I held him to me as my literal lifeline, internally promising to reward him thoroughly for this later. His tail kicked beneath us, and we shot toward the surface. His chest heaved with effort as he tried to suck oxygen through his gills as fast as possible to give to me, and also keep himself moving.

Then he was ripped away from me, disappearing down into the inky darkness.

No. NO!

The darkness was absolute. I didn’t know which way was up or down. I had to help Merrick! I needed to find him! I’d look for him even if it meant using my last morsels of air.

Like a switch being flipped, I felt rather than saw the changes. Instead of two legs jerking out into the black depths, I suddenly only had one long, powerful muscle. I could suddenly breathe as my neck itched, gills opening down my neck and sucking in water. Merrick’s scent suddenly trailed out in front of me, as obvious and easy to follow as a blood trail through clear water.

I shot out toward his scent blindly, pushing myself as hard as I could.

Merrick’s scent led down into the darkness, then into the mouth of a cave. There was another scent around him—a scent similar to his, but with a cloying, sick sweetness that made me nauseated. The sea witch’s scent was there as well, smelling like heavy perfume dumped on a bed of kelp.

Bleh.

I dove into the cave, and then it rose sharply up, up, up. Light filtered back into the water, and in surprise, I broke through the surface. I blinked in the dim bioluminescence light, keeping my neck below the water so I didn’t automatically switch to lung breathing just yet.

Merrick rammed into my side, wrapping his arms around me and tugging us away from the sea witch and the male mer by her side. She sat like a queen propped up on a throne of carved rock and coral that jutted harshly out of the water. The dark mer threaded water underneath her, glaring at us with black, glittering eyes.

I hadn’t seen a mer with eyes like that until now.

He looked like he could have been from Merrick’s clan … but not. The edges of his scales and fins weren’t gilded like Merrick’s, but tinged with black that almost made it look like the scales were rotting off. He had large bald patches here and there on his tail, showing scaly, pink flesh underneath. Dark, black hair fell to his waist in dreads like Merrick’s. His face was pale and gaunt.

And the tentacles.

They shot out awkwardly from the waist of his tail, small but muscled. There were four, and they hovered around his back and waist, like little snakes waiting to strike.

“There you are, dear!” Calypso trilled as if she hadn’t just tried to murder me. “My apologies for all of that. Caspian doesn’t get out much, let alone scent a siren in the water for the first time in a millennium. No harm done.”

Merrick let out a ragged breath at hearing that, and I didn’t blame him. No harm done … Was that twice now I’d almost died in twenty-four hours? Not to mention, the sea witch insinuated that this odd mer in front of us was a thousand years old?

I blinked. That’s what he looked like a zombie mer with tentacles . Did Merrick even know what a zombie was? Probably not.

Great, now I was trying to stop giggling at the thought of zombie mers.

“You tried to kill Jesse,” Merrick snarled at her, baring his fangs. Ever since I’d changed, he’d gone totally over-the-top feral on me.

I liked it.

“I almost drowned,” I confirmed, not trusting this sudden appearance of yet another storybook character into my life, but also realizing she likely had valuable information.

Her tentacles waved in the air dismissively as she used them to gesticulate indifference instead of her hands, which were busy patting the zombie mer’s head like a well-behaved dog.

“You didn’t drown,” she sniffed. “You shifted. Have you figured out how to control it now?”

I didn’t like her tone. By the rumbling of Merrick’s chest, neither did he.

“Depends,” I replied. “Are you gonna try to kill me again if I haven’t?”

Her eyes lit with a nasty gleam.

“I like this one,” the witch commented off-handedly to Caspian as if Merrick and I weren’t there. “She is a fighter. Unlike her predecessors who simply gave up.”

Merrick tried to tug me away. I didn’t know how to express to him I agreed; this sea witch woman gave me the heebie-jeebies, and I certainly didn’t trust her, but I needed to learn more.

“Can you tell me anything about what I am?” I asked instead, keeping my tone neutral.

“And what he is,” Merrick butt in, eyes narrowing toward the zombie mer. The creature in question snarled and jerked forward, but Merrick held his ground and hissed back.

“Caspian, behave. We have guests.”

The zombie mer huffed but relaxed as Calypso gently ran her fingers through his dark, matted hair as best she could.

“I’d love to tell you all about your boring heritage, but you’ve got a much bigger problem on your hands currently,” she remarked casually. It was as if she was talking about the weather.

“You mean the clans,” Merrick clarified, never one to beat around the bush.

“Yes, frightful males.” Calypso sighed. “If you go back, they’re likely to tear the poor girl apart.” Calypso pouted, tapping her chin with one long, claw-like fingernail. “Or themselves. Probably both.”

She beamed at Merrick and I. This … Calypso was insane.

“Don’t expect us to hide here because we won’t. My clan won’t hurt her. They won’t let the others hurt her, either. They were just … surprised when she showed up.”

I bit my lip to keep from snorting. Saying his clanmates were surprised to see me was as close to a bold lie as I’d ever heard him utter.

Calypso shot forward from her throne, tentacles flying toward us as she fought to contain her anger.

“You think mers will protect her? You don’t think they would fight and take and steal to be the one who impregnated the first siren in centuries? You don’t think that the others would immediately kill the male who succeeded? If you go back, they will fight and tear and kill until one mounts her, then he will be killed and the next will mount her, again and again and again until she dies from being raped repeatedly.”

My hands covered my mouth at such a horrifying description.

Merrick drew back. “You sound like you speak from experience, but—”

Calypso cut him off. “I’ve seen what happens when you foolish mers lose your possessions. What do you think happened to the other sirens, eh? Their numbers dwindled and dwindled because their own males drove them to extinction!”

Merrick’s jaw dropped, horrified. was shaking his head back and forth. “No. No. That can’t be right. They didn’t teach— ”

“What’s the matter, little one? Did they not teach you history in guppy school? Didn’t you ever find it odd no one ever said why the sirens were gone?”

Merrick looked devastated and traumatized all at once. “They wouldn’t … They couldn’t …” He was muttering to himself now, not talking to either Calypso or me.

I put a hand on his arm, and he jumped. “Merrick,” I began softly, “do you think I’m safe with your clan?”

He blinked rapidly, grabbing onto my hand as if it were an anchor. His brow furrowed in thought.

“With the young males … no. But my father would keep you safe. I know everyone lost their head for a moment, but they weren’t expecting you. I wasn’t expecting you. If I sneak you back in, I know he will keep you safe. The other leaders will keep you safe.”

I wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince more: me or himself. But I did remember the utter reverence with which the older, white-haired mer had looked at me. If nothing else, I believed in that.

No one had ever looked at me like that before, human or otherwise.

“I trust you, Merrick. If you tell me it’s safe, I’ll go back with you. Just … maybe give them a bit to calm down first?”

His bright turquoise gaze glowed in the semi darkness of the small cave.

“I … yes, if I sneak you in and we have my father’s protection, I believe you’d be safe.” He bit his lip. “I want to believe you’d be safe. But you are right. We should wait. Or I should go back first, to ensure they have calmed down.”

I clasped my hand in his. “All right then, we’ll go back.”

Calypso scoffed. “Leave, then. It is so tedious how history repeats itself. Your ancestors trusted their mers, and look what happened to them. You have a chance to save yourselves, and you squander it. Stupid males.”

Calypso’s laughter followed us even as we dove back into the water and out through the tunnel.

Merrick and I swam in silence as he headed back toward his clan. I felt numb with fear and anxiety. Along the way, he kept pointing out things in the water, and showing me how to make small adjustments with my tail and webbed fingers to change my speed or trajectory.

It all felt odd though—as if it were happening to someone else and I was merely a spectator observing. It was clinical and automatic, with no joy of discovery or feeling.

Merrick was scared. And if he was scared in his home in the sea, then I should be terrified.