by Sonya Blake
Now, she told herself, but found herself resisting, her human instincts still in charge. She was about to let go and let herself float upward, when some other, darker part of herself that had kept silent finally spoke.
What do you have to live for? the voice asked.
Dad. He needs me, she thought in reply.
The other inner voice laughed sadly. He’s been checked out since your mother died and he’ll drink himself to death before you’re thirty-five. Be honest with yourself. You know that the steady job, the happy family, the picket fence, those things will never be yours. And even if they could be, would you want them? You think there’s more, and there is.
Kaia screamed, using air she hadn’t known she’d been saving inside her lungs. She inhaled, and the water burned like a snort of wasabi. Then came the rush of energy, bolting through every atom of her being. In that moment she ceased to exist at all and became nothing but the sea herself, blue and endless. Yet at the same time she was so very small, no more than a tiny drop in the great big ocean. She was nothing.
Then, just as suddenly as that sacred nothingness had gripped her in its embrace, she became conscious of herself again. The ocean floor appeared before her: shadows darker, bright spots brighter, the colors of seaweed and rock more vibrant. Far in the bay, sunlight struck a school of fish and turned them to silver.
Something brushed past Kaia’s shoulder and she spun around. She realized it had been one of her own fins, and laughed. Powerful and articulate muscles lined her body from the waist down, freeing her to coil and dart, ready to fight. Feeling around her neck and ears, she located two new openings just beneath her jaw, and as she dropped her diaphragm she felt the water being sucked into these tiny apertures. She ran her hands down the sides of the thick, long tail. It had to be at least three feet longer than her legs, and double the mass. Stripes of buff and foxy red marked the scales. She’d never felt more strong, or more beautiful.
In a moment of pure joy, Kaia flipped and spun and swam away from land, celebrating her new body. She only had to spread the wide fin, which she found she could control with just a thought, and as she gently undulated her tail, she found herself moving at a speed that sent her hair flying away from her face and forced her eyelids open.
Out of nowhere, a booming sound hit her whole body with its vibration. Every muscle contracted as she heard the churning sound of a boat engine approaching from the north, heading into Quolobit Harbor. The mid-sized vessel came into view, a ferry perhaps.
“Shit,” she said. It came out like a burp.
Kaia turned toward the safety of the cove, where belts of kelp and mossy beds of laver waved among grass-like chains of bladderwrack. Waiting for the boat to pass, she busied herself observing the varied and delicate plant life, making sure her tail did not crest the surface. Small fish and crabs moved in and out of shadows; bright anemone opened questing fingers into the tide.
When the coast was clear, Kaia climbed onto the flat rock in the cove on the northern side of Foley’s Point. She lay there in the stinging breeze, gasping, and felt a moment of terror that she wouldn’t be able to return to her human form. She’d been betrayed by her body before. Two small surgical scars on her lower belly served as permanent reminders of her mortality.
She rested her hands over the marks and inwardly spoke the mantra that had gotten her through the painful weeks following the surgery that had scarred her.
I am whole. I am safe in this body.
Thankfully, the transition back to her two-legged form was far less traumatic and took only a few moments of breathing dry, frigid air, but she was nevertheless nervous that someone might observe her there on the rocks. As she stood unsteadily and stepped into the galoshes she had worn down to the water, she scanned the ragged edges of the rose bushes for her clothes and the blanket, but didn’t see them anywhere. The wind hit her wet, bare skin. She shouldn’t be able to cope with this. She should be unable to move, succumbing to hypothermia or worse, and yet she only felt cold—cold enough to hurt, but nothing more. There had to be something supernatural about it. She squinted back toward the tree line, thinking her things might have blown that way.
A dusky shadow moved between the pines and hemlocks.
Kaia felt the electric current of a gaze upon her naked skin. Whatever pervy jokester had thought it would be fun to steal her clothes and watch her would get the fire-crotch he’d come for, she decided, and started up toward the house. Heart pounding in a rush of panic and adrenaline utterly unrelated to the metaphysical transformation her body had just endured, she gave the general area of the woods the middle finger as she began to crunch through the thin crust of snow.
She had half expected to hear a catcall of some kind, but when there was nothing she turned and looked over her shoulder. Between the trunks of two trees, a corner of the blanket flapped then moved out of sight.
Kaia screamed at the top of her lungs. “Hey, asshole! I want that blanket back!”
Then she waited, teeth chattering. He’d want another look, she was sure of that. Who knew how much he had seen? He very well could have seen her in half-fish form down there.
A face appeared between the feathery pine branches. Shadows obscured the details, but the face was oval-shaped, its owner tall, raw-boned, and very pale, with long white hair and strangely colorless eyes. Kaia’s heart leaped into her chest. If the person hadn’t stolen the blanket and clothes, she would have thought him a ghost.
Now that she believed she was a mermaid, she’d have to believe in ghosts, she thought. She’d have to believe in everything.
“Screw it,” she muttered, and started off toward the woods, crunching through the thin layer of snow.
At her advance, the person began to move. Kaia’s heart pounded as she entered the forest, somehow keeping her warm from within even as the wintry air burned her naked skin. There had to be something about her newfound physiognomy that protected her from cold. Tree branches scraped at her as she chased after the white, fluttering blanket. It went in and out of sight as she trampled north along the coast, the galoshes slapping against the backs of her calves. Kaia came upon the blanket at last, hanging haphazardly from a broken tree branch.
“What the hell?!” she shouted, spinning around and searching for the prankster who had made off with her shirt and Sam’s boxers.
Fully flustered, Kaia wrapped herself in the blanket as she started back toward the house. She was within twenty yards of the shed when she noticed the rusted blue pickup parked in the drive.
“Shit,” she said, and stopped short as someone dressed in a suit and tie got out of the truck.
It took Kaia a second, but she realized it was Sam Lowell, staring slack-jawed at her. His arms were full of brown paper bags whipping in the wintry wind. In an instant he dropped the groceries into the snow and ran toward her at full bore. Kaia stumbled backward.
“What the hell happened to you?” he asked, his hands on her shoulders, in her icy hair. “Why’re you out here like this?”
His eyes scanned her bare legs beneath the blanket and Kaia wrapped it tighter around herself.
“I… I…” She was shivering now. The frailty of her human form had finally caught up with her, it seemed.
“Come on.” Sam bent and scooped her into his arms and started off toward the house. “You need to get inside.”
Her teeth were chattering so hard now she couldn’t bring herself to protest as he trundled her in through the kitchen and up the stairs, where he deposited her in the bathroom. As he bent to fill the tub, Kaia slumped onto the lid of the toilet and watched numbly.
I am a merm—no, I am a siren, she thought, remembering how her mother used to correct her whenever she used the fairytale term.
“But why do you call them sirens, Mommy?” Kaia had asked.
Fiona had answered, “Because they don’t like the word mermaid.”
Kaia had taken that as gospel, never questioned it, and never used the word again. Now, thou
gh, she was wondering if her mother had known something about her, something she was only just discovering about herself.
I am a siren. With a tail, fins, gills—everything.
She rubbed behind one ear, finding only smooth skin now.
Sam turned to her, straightening his tie. He looked like a fashion model in that suit, Kaia thought distantly. He tested the temperature of the water with his fingertips. “You get in there and warm yourself up,” he said. “I’ll leave your duffel bag in the bedroom and fix you something to eat.”
*
After a long soak, Kaia made her way downstairs dressed in a pair of leggings and a baggy sweatshirt. Smells of garlic and tomato filled the house. In the kitchen, Sam had removed his jacket and tie, untucked his shirt, and tied on an apron. He handed her a fresh cup of coffee and, though she’d been fully prepared for it, didn’t ask what was wrong with her and why the hell she’d been out swimming in January.
“Feeling better?” His dark eyes were filled with something she couldn’t define. Laughter or suspicion, or maybe something else. His gaze lingered in a way that made her squirm.
“Yep.” She took a sip of coffee and felt the warmth of it spreading through her. “Smells amazing. What’re you cooking?”
“Spaghetti marinara.” Sam opened the oven door and Kaia peered inside to see a glass baking dish full of sizzling tomato sauce.
“You make it in the oven?” she exclaimed.
Sam nodded. “Squish up some whole tomatoes, garlic, and anchovy, throw in half a stick of butter and let ‘er roast. It’s, um, cream and one spoon of sugar, right?” He gestured to the mug in her hands.
“Oh.” Kaia sipped the coffee again. It was absolutely perfect. “Yes.”
A man who could carry her up a flight of stairs without so much as a grunt. A man who could cook, and remember just how she took her coffee. He couldn’t be real. Sam’s eyes held hers as he sipped his coffee from a battered blue and white marbled enamelware mug. Kaia let herself gaze directly back, waiting for him to ask why she’d been naked and wet in the woods, challenging him to do so. Instead, he turned and lifted the lid off a pot of boiling water on the stove.
“You must think I’m nuts,” she said as Sam sank a generous fistful of pasta into the pot.
He shrugged, his back still to her. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, Kaia realized with a flash of clarity. It was that he didn’t want her asking him questions about himself in return. His secrets were his own and he wanted to keep it that way.
“There was someone watching me,” Kaia told him. “Someone creeping around in the woods.”
Sam turned around now, his eyes dark as a storm cloud.
“They grabbed my clothes and the blanket and ran off with them. Probably just some perv playing a prank on me while I was…” Kaia paused. Should she say it? “While I was… swimming.”
Anybody in their right mind would question the intelligence of swimming in the remorseless North Atlantic in the middle of January, but Sam just swallowed what she had said impassively and gave the pasta pot a stir.
“I left the blanket and my clothes on the rocks and when I came back in they were gone. I saw someone up in the woods with my stuff and ran after them,” she said. “But they disappeared.”
“Did you get a good look at him?” Sam asked.
Kaia frowned. “Not really. I saw white hair, a pale face. This sounds weird, but… do you know any albinos?”
Sam shook his head.
“I think you coming up the drive must’ve scared them off,” Kaia said, and sipped her coffee.
*
Sam sure as hell didn’t like the idea of someone creeping around Foley’s Point and spying on Kaia. A few times he’d been out here to check on things after renters had left and seen evidence of kids messing around on the rocks in the cove, leaving behind beer cans and cigarette butts, but nothing more. Something about what Kaia described made his hair stand on end, his heart beat a little faster.
“I’m guessing you lost your phone last night,” he muttered.
“It was in my coat pocket, so I’ve still got it, but…” Her pretty blue eyes gazed up at him. “It’s dead as a doornail. Still got my wallet though. I sure am lucky that’s all I lost.”
She looked tired. Haunted. Scared. He wished he could put his arms around her and carry her up to that big bed upstairs and—
Quit while you’re ahead, buddy, he cautioned himself.
“There’s a landline here if you need it,” he said, indicating the old pull-cord phone on the wall beside the refrigerator. “I’ll leave my number for you.”
“Are you leaving?” she asked with a tone of sudden panic.
“Not till I’ve eaten.”
He watched Kaia settle back into her chair, cross one leg over the other, and stare blankly ahead. It all made sense to him now: the fact that she’d been capable of saving him from drowning, the creature he kept seeing in his mind when he closed his eyes, the reason she’d been out swimming— in January, for Christ’s sake.
She was, like him, more than human.
“You okay?” he asked.
Kaia nodded, her damp curls bouncing. “Fine, yes,” she said, clasping her hands around her coffee mug.
She was a bad liar. He liked that about her, too.
“You, um, you have some lipstick on your shirt,” she said, wiggling a finger toward her own neck.
Sam looked down and saw a smudge of Violet’s nude-toned lipstick on his chest. He snatched up a dishtowel and dampened it to scrub at the stain.
“Girlfriend?” Kaia asked.
Sam shrugged, then turned to the oven to give the sauce a stir. It was almost finished and turning jammy. When his eyes met Kaia’s as he was transporting the pasta pot to the sink for draining, she wore an expectant expression.
“I don’t know,” he blurted out as he dumped the pasta into the colander, the hot steam billowing up around his forearms. “It’s not a real relationship,” he found himself adding as he tossed the pasta in the colander then dumped it back into the pot.
He brought the pot of pasta back to the oven and caught Kaia shaking her head disapprovingly, rolling her eyes at him. Great. Now she thought he was one of those guys. Well, he was one of those guys, wasn’t he?
Sam clenched his jaw and bent to pull the sauce out of the oven, tossing it into the pasta over low heat. When the sauce and pasta were good and blended, he mixed in parmesan cheese and a handful of chopped parsley.
“This looks amazing,” Kaia said as he set a bowl down in front of her. “Thanks for cooking for me.”
“You got it,” he muttered as he tucked into his own bowl, his belly growling enthusiastically.
They ate in silence for several minutes and Sam was thankful for it. He didn’t feel the need to entertain Kaia or explain himself to her. She seemed to be lost in her own thoughts, for that matter, and as hungry as he was.
“This is really good,” she muttered eventually, with her mouth full. “Like, restaurant good. Or even better. I mean, it’s the best spaghetti I’ve ever had.”
Sam smiled. “I usually only cook for myself,” he told her, “but it’s nice to hear a compliment.”
Kaia lifted her brows in appreciation and shoveled another twisted forkful into her mouth.
“Could also be it tastes so good ‘cause I’m starvin’,” she said, giving him a wink, her sweet little drawl coming out as she teased him.
He shrugged.
“Nah, I’m just pullin’ your chain!” she told him, reaching across the table to grab hold of his wrist. Her hand was warm on his skin. “It really is the best spaghetti I’ve ever had.”
Her hand slid away from his but her gaze lingered, questioning, before she went on eating.
Did you see? Did you see what happened to me last night? Her question from that morning came back to him.
He opened his mouth and tried to form his own question. “So, last night, what… what do you think happened to you out there?
”
Kaia let her fork rest on the edge of the bowl and chewed, eyes large and mournful as the ocean in winter. She swallowed, then wiped her mouth on the back of her hand.
“I was trying to figure that out,” she said, licking a spot of tomato sauce off the corner of her lips, “when you showed up here.”
“And did you? Figure it out?”
Kaia lifted her shoulders. She blinked at him. “I think so.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” he asked.
She swallowed again, nervously this time. Shook her head. “I dunno. Maybe not.” Her cheeks and nose grew red, her eyes shining like diamonds. “No, it’s not good.” She stifled a sob and clapped a hand to her mouth as tears dropped from her lashes. “I think I’m nuts, Sam. I mean, I think I really lost it.”
He shook his head and reached across the table to take both her hands in his. “I doubt that,” he said. “Tell me.”
Never tell anyone what you are, Sam, his father had warned him. To do so will lead only to trouble. How could he ask this of Kaia if he wasn’t willing to give her the same?
“It’s okay. I’m like you,” he said, even though it made his heart pound in terror. Sam drew in a long breath. Was he really about to tell her—this woman he had just met not even twenty-four hours ago? “I’m… I’m a selkie.”
Kaia said nothing for a moment. Didn’t even move. Sam considered running out the door. Then she pressed her lips together thoughtfully.
“A selkie?” she murmured. “Does that mean you can turn into a… a seal?”
Sam shrugged. “It’s more complicated than that for me, but yes. And, unless I’m wrong, you’re a siren.”
Kaia’s face went pale. She pulled her hands away from his as she stood and knocked the chair over behind her, running out into the hallway bathroom. He heard her puking. Something told him not to go offer to hold back her hair.