“After this is all done we can unpack the whole you and me thing, okay?” Marcus said.
Who knows, maybe Marcus knew of a way around the Hunters-and-Wilds-are-mortal-enemies thing. “If you help me that means you’ll be outnumbered, around groups of Wilds who loathe the fact that your kind exists,” I warned. “Your Hunter response will kick in, too. You’ll get bigger, stronger.” The thought of never hugging him again, never feeling his mouth on mine left me wanting. My racing heart slowed. I took a cleansing breath. “But I’d appreciate the help.”
“That’s all I’m suggesting.” Marcus stood and closed the gap between us. “Well that and a hug goodbye.” Smile crinkles formed beside his chocolate eyes. “And the getting stronger thing isn’t permanent. It flares up around Wild Women, goes crazy when they change near me. But it dies down when I’m not around them anymore. It’s only temporary.”
I wondered if he understood the meaning behind his words: our relationship could only be temporary. But I kept my mouth shut in favor of feeling him wrapped around me one more time before I left. “I could take a hug,” I said, opening my arms and accepting Marcus into my embrace. “And a crap-ton of good luck.” His scent engulfed me. Calming, my mind spun a little slower.
“Good luck.” Marcus kissed the top of my head.
I lifted my chin to meet his lips with mine.
An idea blossomed and I pulled away. “How much are you willing to help?” I asked.
“Why does that question scare me?” he joked as he draped his arm over my shoulder.
“What if you were to re-join the brotherhood? It’ll be easier to break in and find Shawna if I have help from the inside.”
“I was going to bring that up after you confirmed all the Wilds were on board. Because if I do this, most all communication between us will be severed until after you attack,” Marcus said. “I won’t be able to help you with anything on the police end either.”
I considered his words. “I think we’re past the point of police reports,” I said. “They’re a show anyway, at least the ones referring to missing Wilds.” A snag occurred to me. “Unless you think they’ll notice that you’ve gotten stronger? They’ll know you’ve been cavorting with the enemy.”
“No. I’ll tell them I’ve been hitting the gym in preparation to re-join.” Marcus blew out a puff of air. “It shouldn’t be too hard to get back in.” His chest rose and his smooth skin touched my face.
His heartbeat sped and I knew he was lying to keep me from worrying too much. There had to be some form of atonement he’d have to pay for abandoning the brotherhood. I looked into his eyes. “You’re going to step back into the role you were born into so that I and my kind can have the freedom to live in the abilities we were born to have. Thank you for doing this for me.”
Marcus’s eyes softened. “Don’t get me wrong, I do agree that you and your kind deserve the freedom to be who you were born to be. But I’m not only doing this for you.”
He didn’t need to declare his motivator. I was sure his mother filled his thoughts as much as mine filled my own.
“Well then, I hope that one day you’re able to find her so that she can glow with pride for her son.” I kissed Marcus on the lips, grabbed the manila envelope of paper and zipped it into my suitcase. I left the tacky hotel room with the gorgeous Hunter inside, hoping beyond hope that I’d see him again.
Twenty
The spruce and fir trees of Mt. Mitchell, North Carolina called to me. My body responded with yearning, begging me to sit among the plants and take in their offerings. I jumped from an old evergreen and landed silently on the balls of my feet. Ferns grew from the pine needle-covered dirt, reaching my knees.
I stood with my hands on my hips and took in the deep greens and browns for one last time before retrieving Gabrielle and leaving the state. Hopefully she’d convinced the harpies to join our cause during their time together and we could be off to our next destination. I inhaled the pine scent with a smile. Truth be told, I liked that the mermaids called me a tree woman. If my heart held a connection to anything, it’d be the trees.
When I approached the harpies’ home, soft rays of the autumn sun sparkled across Gabrielle’s scales as she lounged in the glass-lined pool.
“Your tail,” I said, rudely staring at the Wild I’d known for all of three days. I hadn’t seen her or any of the mermaids in this form during my visit to their island. Emerald scales sprinkled her body and covered her thick tail. Her fin looked a lot like a folding fan opened so tightly that it may tear at any moment.
Gabrielle slapped her tail into the water and splashed me. I wiped the droplets from my face. Ugh. Saltwater.
“I know what you’re wondering. Why do I have my tail on in such a small place where there’s nowhere to swim,” she said.
Her comment settled it for me: mermaids weren’t able to read minds. “No, I wasn’t thinking that at all,” I said. “I’ve always known mermaids had tails, but it’s different than I imagined. Shorter and more…” I searched for the word. “Buff.”
She swam to the edge closest to me. “You can touch it if you want.”
“Does it feel like a fish?” I asked. “Or the scales on your arm?”
She nodded. “Like a fish, but not as slimy.”
“I’m good, then.” I stood with my hands on my hips and stretched to the side. My night with Marcus had pulled a muscle behind my shoulder blade and tree-jumping had brought it to the surface. It was worth it, though, on both accounts.
“Where are our harpy friends?” I asked, looking around.
Gabrielle pointed to the glass bottom of the pool where the harpies’ room appeared, blurry through moving liquid. “Sleeping.”
“Seriously?” I squinted my eyes, which didn’t help with visibility whatsoever. “We need to get moving.”
“Harpies hunt at night when they’re hidden by darkness,” Gabrielle explained as she played with her hair. “Rushing them will only be counterproductive. Trust me; it’ll be worth the wait.”
I rolled my eyes and rested them back on her shiny tail. Her resemblance to the stereotype of her kind almost made me smile. “Do you know everything about every group?” I asked.
“Uh, no, I most definitely do not. But probably more than most groups know. We don’t have to fear the Hunters, so we’re able to research, learn more of the truth without being detected. Well, we didn’t have to fear them.” She narrowed her eyes. “What’s so funny?”
“You just need a mirror and a rock and you’ll belong in a child’s coloring book.” I shook my head and snickered.
“Oh please,” she said. She jutted her fin from the water. “The public’s rendition of mermaids is either soft and sweet or murderous. I’m in the middle, but my fin cuts through flesh. So maybe I’m more murderous.”
I squatted at the edge of the pool and took the opportunity to stretch as I leaned forward. Gabrielle closed her fin. One line of what looked like green, flesh-covered bone stuck straight out from her tail. She fanned it open again. “I pull this open nice and tight, and the edges slice through the skin and muscle of anything thinking it can attack me. It's like my own personal knife.”
Eonza, Salis, and Lapis sauntered up from the stairs with messy hair and sleepy eyes. They each wore loose, flowing silk night shirts and pants that mimicked a lighter shade of their wings. Not that their wings were in view. On first glance they, like the rest of us, looked like human women.
“Your talking woke us up,” Eonza complained.
“Good. We have business to discuss,” I said as I stood and faced them, only barely wincing in the process. I knew Gabrielle wanted us to wait for the harpies to give some hint that they were ready to talk, but I’d been patient enough.
Lapis groaned and sat on the cement, clearly too tired and pouty to stand.
“No, I’d prefer we not talk out in the open. We never know who’s listening,” I said.
“No one comes up here. Trust me, we’re alone.” Eonza c
rossed her arms.
“That’s what we thought, too,” Gabrielle said, swimming toward the steps of the pool. Her green scales faded into her skin and each long bone of her fan-like fin retracted to form toes before she pulled herself from the water to join us.
“I suspect the Hunters know where we all live,” I said.
Lapis stood. “Where is your proof?”
Gabrielle must have spent more time in the pool than she’d spent recruiting the harpies. The thought ticked me off. A lot. I had trusted her to do her part, to be in as much of a hurry as I was. Yet her entire attitude screamed the opposite. It made me want to yank her from the water.
“They’ve been coming to the homes of Wilds, to their work,” I said, as a painful memory of Shawna speeding away in the backseat of a Hunter’s car played through my mind. “They can find us by our last names, based on which goddess we worship, which goddess our priestess foremothers served.”
“Then we should continue this in the house,” Eonza said, as though it were her idea in the first place. She led us down the cement steps, into the crevice in the mountain that was their home.
When the large wooden door shut behind me, I asked, “What do you three hunt at night?”
“Small woodland animals. It keeps us sharp,” Salis answered.
“And you attend the monthly Hunter screenings?” I asked.
“We do, but they don’t screen us for eating animal meat. Humans eat meat every day,” Eonza added. “They screen us for hunting men. For luring them with our voices.”
I couldn’t begin to imagine how the Hunters would know if a harpy called to a man in her siren voice.
“We have the siren voice, too,” Gabrielle added. “Sometimes we practice using it, because we never know when it’ll come in useful. We create a storm first, so nearby boaters won’t absently hear us and feel drawn to our island.”
“I’ve never tried to utter a sound of it,” Eonza said. “They’ll know. Every month, during our screening, they prod us. They don’t care that we grow feathers, or if our wings are strong. It’s our voices that they deem dangerous. So they jab us with a cattle prod.”
I winced, and not because of my right shoulder blade, which now seemed worlds away. I imagined waiting in line with my sisters, not to have my lower back examined, but to be electrocuted. I wondered if the Hunters took pleasure in watching. I bet they did. Then I thought of Marcus. Well, maybe not all of them, but most, surely.
“When the electricity enters us, we open our mouth to cry out,” Eonza continued. “They measure the octave with another device. The Hunters wear devices over their ears to protect themselves. If we’ve been using our siren’s song, traces of it will come out in our screams. It’s impossible to control it with such pain.” Eonza lifted her shirt to show the remnants of a red circular mark on the right lower side of her stomach.
I considered her words. When I was a teenager, our coterie held a sacred ritual for Olivia and Celeste’s commitment ceremony—when my two older sisters had become adults and pledged loyalty to our coterie. While walking through the woods to the place of ceremony, I had tripped and landed in a blackberry bush, thorns and all, and yelled a colorful array of curse words. One of my aunts, shocked at my foul mouth, reminded me that the words a person uses in the comfort of daily life tend to sneak from their mouth in their moments of lost control. Eonza and her sisters did not practice their siren’s song for fear it’d sneak out under the Hunter’s force.
“I’m so sorry you have to go through that. It’s awful.” Gabrielle shuddered. She turned to me. “Our siren songs are a higher octave than most humans can hear audibly, but their brains hear it, or register it, and are pulled in. The human has no idea why they feel the need to come to us. We speak to their natural instincts. They’re unable to interpret which instinct: run for your life or come hither. So they usually come hither.”
A memory rose to the surface of my mind, of one of the few times my mother took me tree-jumping without the others. It was summer and we’d traveled east of Granite Falls, toward White Horse Mountain. After hours of tree-jumping we neared a fast-moving river and my mother bounded for the riverbank and plunged her feet into the cool water. She’d urged me to do the same, but I muttered something about mermaids getting me. My aunts had told my sisters horror stories of other Wilds, including mermaids—no doubt taught to them by Hunters. My sisters had in turn told me.
My mother didn’t force me to put my feet in the water that day, but she did have me sit beside her while she told me stories of mermaids using their powerful abilities for good. One in particular stuck with me. According to my mother, a group of Vikings had plundered a town where a mermaid had been recently hung for witchcraft. As the Vikings rowed away, their boats heavy with spoils, another ship, whose captain resided in that town, gave chase out to open water after the Vikings. The mermaids wanted the townspeople to pay for hanging their sister, and they figured helping the Vikings was a great start. After the captain’s ship began to close the gap on the Vikings, a number of mermaids circled the fleet of Viking ships and created a roaring storm from the outside, but kept it calm on the inside. The other mermaids focused on the British ship. They began singing what sounded like a hymnal at first, but it quickly transformed into what my mother called a “choir of water angels.” Within minutes the crew on board were reworking the boat’s lines, in an effort to sink the ship and be closer to the angels in the water.
The Vikings were able to see the ship go down, and they say a mermaid told their leader what was happening as it happened. They brought the story home with them, which is how the huldra heard it and passed it down through the generations.
I wondered how hearing both mermaids and harpies sing the siren’s song in unison would affect the Hunters. Badly, I hoped.
“We’re told our siren song will put us into a killing frenzy and we’ll lose control.” Lapis leaned against the cement wall beside the life-size impression of her winged goddess, Inanna. “We’ve never seen or heard it.”
Gabrielle answered, “It doesn’t work on Wild Women, but we can certainly hear it. It’s glorious, like the most beautiful musical instrument played by the most talented of them all. The frenzy part is a lie conjured to make you fear your voice.”
We all stared at Gabrielle. She ran her fingers lightly along the shells attached to the roots of her hairline and then smoothed down her hair. “What?” she asked, realizing we'd been watching her.
“Have you hunted men?” Lapis asked.
Every female in the room held her breath. Pin pricks crawled along my skin. The harpies hadn’t seen my bark. I wondered if they knew mine wasn’t supposed to be as dark and pronounced as it was.
Well, I knew. I knew I was the only Wild in the room that had killed a human man.
“No, of course not,” Gabrielle said. “Although, my boyfriend does like me to sing to him. And on those nights when I feel like driving him crazy with want, I sing my siren’s song. He has yet to complain.” She gave a wink and I smiled. “It’s probably one reason he stays with me, though we can’t see each other on a regular basis.”
If mermaids lived in Nevada they’d make a killing—in profits, not in death. Well, maybe in death too, if they wanted.
“I didn’t know you had a boyfriend,” I said, wishing hope for Marcus and me wasn’t the first place my mind took her comment.
“Yeah, maybe you’ll meet him sometime,” Gabrielle said. “He’s in the Navy.”
That made so much sense and included more than a lot of irony, too.
I shook my head and put my hand out in front of me. “We’re getting off topic. Sorry, my fault.”
The others leaned in, ready to get down to business. Sunlight filtered in through the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the forest below and settled on our little group of Wilds. Gabrielle’s skin glistened.
I turned to the harpies, reminding myself to ask Gabrielle later if her scales stayed below the surface. “Lapis, Eonza, Salis
, I know you said your mother is an only child, but did she ever have sisters?”
“Yes,” Lapis answered. “One.”
“And she went missing.” I said. “About twenty years ago.”
The three tall females nodded.
“How’d you know?” Eonza asked in her steady voice, revealing no emotion.
I retrieved the envelope Marcus had brought me from where I’d stuffed it under my shirt before tree-jumping up the mountain. I explained the correlation between their mother’s disappearance and disappearances twenty years ago. “These females never made it home, but they could still be alive. We think—” I stopped myself and started again. “I mean, I think, they’re being taken for the same reason now as they were twenty years ago.”
We needed them to flip the bird to the Hunters and learn how to sing their siren’s song. It’s one thing to have a mermaid sing the song and lure a Hunter into the water where she’s strongest, but a harpy can sing it on land and hold the Hunters like putty in their talons.
“Together, we can save your mother, and possibly her sister,” I said. “But it won’t be safe or easy.”
“Tell us, and we will do it,” Eonza spoke for her flock.
“I’m glad to hear that.” I stood. “If everything is understood and agreed upon, Gabrielle and I will pay a visit to the rusalki. After we meet with them, we’ll fly back to Washington. We’ll be ready for you then, in about three days.”
The harpies nodded. Salis furrowed her brow and Lapis worried her inner cheek. I watched Eonza, though, who seemed ready for anything, including battle. Something told me I’d be thankful to have the stoic harpy on my side.
“I guess it’s time to go then,” Gabrielle said, opening her arms for hugs goodbye.
Eonza cut off the hug headed toward her by sticking out her arm. She shook Gabrielle’s hand instead.
I stifled a laugh as I compared the Eonza who talked up the bartender last night to the Eonza standing before me. Night and day. The lengths some people will go to procreate.
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