Other shifters tell me their changes are not so painful.
I think the agony is tied to the magic that holds us at our half-shape—never fully fish, and never, if the magic had its way, fully human.
We must overcome that stasis to force the move from fins to legs.
If it has ever occurred to other mer-folk to force the change to full fish, I have never heard of it.
Then again, I don’t exactly advertise my own experiments in that direction, either.
The transformation is the same every time, and yet each shift holds its own misery, in that way of great pain revisited.
Always, first, I feel the tug of skin under scales, pulling apart, wider and wider, until my fin rips down the middle with a horrible sound, rather like fabric being rent in two. For a terrifying instant, I feel nothing—only the dread of knowing what is to come next.
A black-red haze covers my vision as agony pulses up and over me in waves, each one borne only because it is now too late to go back.
Human women speak of childbirth in similar terms. At the end, however, they usually have a child.
All I have to pay me for my pain are legs.
This time was no different. The shift ripped through me in stabbing agony, a violence I perpetrated on myself, willingly.
The scales around my hips rippled and boiled, and it was all I could do to hold in a scream. Not that anyone would have heard—but long-practiced habit kept me silent. I swallowed the bile that rolled up into my throat as the agonizing blaze slid across my abdomen.
With both hands, I peeled away strips of scales and skin, ripping it off to hasten the change, and revealing pale, white, tender, human skin underneath.
Other shifters didn’t suffer so much pain when they changed. It varied from species to species to some degree, but the most I had ever heard of was slight discomfort. Some even experienced a sort of orgasmic bliss when they shifted.
I envied them.
I shoved the mer-skin down my hips as if I were rolling tight-fitting clothing off my body. As the acid-burn of the shift bubbled under my fin, chunks of flesh began to fall off into the seawater of the pool beneath me. If I had been shifting anywhere else, fish would have risen to the surface to consume the remains. This was The Hotel, however, and here, the discarded flesh constituted payment for my stay. It was an arrangement I had made with the front desk attendants when I had first learned of The Hotel, centuries ago.
The haze of pain faded from my eyes, and I watched as bloody hunks of my tail, now only so much chum, sank into the depths. It would be gone when I returned, absorbed into the ecosystem that made up this particular place, I assumed to feed other Hotel guests. Or maybe to sustain The Hotel itself. I had never dared ask.
The last bit to go was my fin. I had to wiggle my newly formed feet to dislodge it, its iridescent skin, usually so sensitive, now a senseless piece of flesh that might as well belong to someone else.
I kicked it off into the water, where it floated for a moment before sinking below the lightly lapping waves.
Standing always took some doing, too. Luckily, the handrail by the steps out of the water offered a way to balance myself. As I glanced down at my body—my new body, so heavy and ungainly and prone to falling over without the buoyancy of saltwater to catch me—I realized that the shift must have taken longer than usual. Long enough for some of the blood from the first part of the change to have dried and crusted on my hips and abdomen.
Yuck.
I took my first wobbly steps toward the showerhead The Hotel so kindly provided.
That’s when I saw the man watching me from the archway that led into the rest of The Hotel.
And in my surprise, I promptly fell over backward.
Zale
I must be drunk.
Those Greek beers packed quite a punch.
That was the only explanation for the last forty-five minutes.
Right?
Either that or Anna the Cranky Waitress dosed that last drink with something stronger than Santorini honey and hops.
I downed the beer, tossed payment and a tip onto the table, and taken off toward the door I’d been watching.
The elegant man who told me they were waiting—whoever they might be—was nowhere to be seen.
No one answered my knock—not when I used the Corinthian-capital-shaped knocker, and not when I rapped more loudly with my fist. Not even when I employed police-style pounding on the shiny black surface.
I hadn’t seen anyone else tap on the door, either, though, so I hadn’t really expected an answer. I merely wanted to give them a chance to invite me in.
I turned the handle, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.
The interior was cool and shadowed, patterned tile covering the floor of a foyer that led to an archway curtained with red velvet—a style completely at odds with the rest of what I had seen in Athens.
The place was completely silent.
The utter stillness was more than a little unnerving. Especially since I could feel a presence, like eyes watching me. I hated to take my eyes off that curtain, but I did a quick sweep of the room for cameras.
Nothing obvious.
Out of habit, I reached to my hip, where I normally kept my sidearm.
But I wasn’t here on official business. My investigation was tolerated out of professional courtesy only, so I hadn’t been allowed to bring a handgun into the country.
I should have requested Interpol help.
Instead, there I was, standing in a darkened foyer, with God only knew what on the other side of that curtain.
Time to cowboy up, Stavros, I told myself.
I steeled myself for whatever I might see when I stepped through the curtain.
But nothing I did could have prepared me for the sight that hit my eyes when I swept the curtain aside.
It really was a hotel.
Not a tiny bed-and-breakfast-style lodging, as I would have expected from the entrance. But a full-blown, lobby with a fountain in the center, staircase sweeping up to a mezzanine, elevator right around that corner kind of hotel.
The kind that couldn’t fit in the tiny, two-story building I walked into.
I dropped the curtain and stepped back outside, holding the shiny black door open, just to make sure nothing changed as I glanced up at the roofline.
Definitely two floors.
My heart pounded as if I had been running.
Fight or flight response, I thought absently.
Stepping back inside, I let the door close behind me. It was barely far enough away from the curtain to keep me from holding both open at the same time.
I stepped forward and clutched the edge of the curtain.
Some kind of optical illusion.
The fabric felt real enough in my hand—thick and rich, the nap of the velvet crushed in my grip.
I didn’t pull it aside.
Not yet.
I was a cop. I was used to taking in the facts, no matter how bizarre they might be, and putting them together to form a coherent picture. All too often, that meant buying into some perpetrator’s worldview long enough to get an idea of his motives, to understand why he did what he did.
I was good at my job, too. I could put myself inside a perp’s head better than almost anyone else in my department. So much so that I had been asked to present workshops to teach other cops how to turn off what they believed themselves so they could understand what someone else understood as the truth.
Normally, I did it without even thinking about it, clicked into that mode without any effort at all. When I opened a new case file, I cleared out everything I already knew and started gathering the facts.
Sure, some part of me shuffled those facts around according to the statistics. Most people are killed by someone they know, things like that. But even the numbers were sometimes wrong. I had to be willing to drop everything I already knew and rearrange information at a moment’s notice.
It was part of why Clay
and I had the best solve rate in the department.
This time, though, I was going to have to drop more than my own beliefs about people. To force myself to step through that curtain and into the lobby of that hotel—The Hotel—I was going to have to let go of my sense of basics physics.
I didn’t have to. Some part of me was acutely aware of that. I could open my hand, smooth out the crinkled velvet, step backward, and turn. The shiny black door would swing shut behind me as I walked away.
And I would never see my partner again.
Whatever had happened to him would remain a mystery, because it was somehow deeply intertwined with the strangeness behind this curtain.
I also suspected this was my only chance. If I didn’t step through the curtain right now, that ornate lobby would disappear. The next time I came through the door, I would find a perfectly ordinary house. Maybe a hotel, even.
But not The Hotel.
I don’t know how I knew that.
But I was suddenly, absolutely certain.
I had come to Athens to find Clay.
If I refused to step through to some Twilight-Zone weirdness because I didn’t understand it, I would loathe myself as a coward forevermore.
Fine. I could go with the flow—whatever that might be here.
With a bracing breath, I flung the curtain to one side and strode through.
“Ah. Detective Stavros,” said the extraordinarily tall, black man behind the desk. “We have been expecting you.” He spoke English, and his voice had absolutely no accent.
“You have?” My entrance into the lobby had been fairly anti-climactic. The curtain swished closed behind me, and a small, bearded man—a dwarf, maybe, or a midget?—in a bellhop's uniform had greeted me with a hello and waved me toward the front desk.
“Indeed.” The desk clerk tapped on a keyboard, as if this were any hotel, and scowled briefly at the screen. “It shows here that your room is already paid.” He sounded a little suspicious, but I chose to ignore that in favor of taking in more information than I gave out.
“Hmm,” I murmured, noncommittally.
“You will, of course, be billed for any incidentals.”
I nodded. “Do you need a credit card or something?”
The clerk’s nostrils flared as if I had insulted him. “No, thank you.”
Right. Well, then.
“Do I have a room?” I asked.
More tapping on the keyboard. “You have an appointment.”
“I see. Could you direct me to that meeting?”
Without looking up, he gestured to one side. “The statues will point your way.”
Of course they will.
I followed the motion of his hands and found a statue reminiscent of those all over Athens. This one was of a woman holding an urn in one arm and gesturing across the lobby with the other.
“Just go where the statues point?”
“Indeed.”
This whole scenario was insane.
But okay. Fine. I could play Alice down the rabbit-hole. As long as I didn’t come across any bottles that said, “Drink Me,” I could manage.
The statue seemed to point directly at a small elevator, so I walked to it. It opened as I arrived, and I stepped inside, prepared to try a floor at random if only to see what would happen.
However, there was only one button. No floor numbers. I stared at it blankly as the elevator door slid closed, then, with a shrug, pushed it. The button lit up and the elevator shuddered into motion.
After a moment, the door opened again, this time onto a long hallway decorated in warm shades of blue. In an alcove to the right of the elevator stood another statue, this one of a naked man, reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Drake, but with an arm outstretched and pointing down the hall.
Of course.
All the way down the hallway, statues stood in recesses, all in varying poses but with one similarity: they all pointed in the same direction.
I followed them to the very last door, then stood in front of it for a moment, trying to decide whether to enter or turn tail and run as fast and as far as possible.
If I leave now, I’ll never see Clay again.
Before I had more time to think about it, I reached down and turned the knob, and stepped into the room that held … the swimming pool?
No, I decided. Not precisely. A pool, yes, but it looked more like a natural formation than a hotel swimming area.
More interesting at the moment, though, was the woman sitting on a rock at the edge of the pool, turned so that she faced almost entirely away from me. Her hair streamed down her back, possibly covering any straps, but unless I was completely mistaken, she wasn’t wearing a bathing suit.
Not all that unusual in Europe.
Then she wriggled a little, reseating herself on the rock, and her bottom half flipped into view.
A fin.
A freaking fin.
This had to be some kind of trick.
Right. Like the hotel that didn’t fit into the house I had entered.
Like the statues that pointed where I needed to go.
As I stood there, mouth hanging open, the mermaid on the rock made a low, pained noise, and her fin ripped in two, right up the middle, with a sickening tearing sound.
All around her lower back, her skin rippled, as if being eaten away by acid.
Blood streamed from her bottom half, pooling around her and dripping over the side of the rock into the water. With almost frantic motions, she began pushing at the scales on her hips, rolling them off her like pantyhose, leaving her hands coated in bright-red gore.
My stomach heaved, but I felt somehow compelled to watch as if by witnessing her misery, I could take away some of the pain.
It was foolish, I knew, and voyeuristic, but I couldn’t stop.
Entire chunks of her fin plopped into the pool as she shed her fin.
If this was some kind of illusion, it was the best I had ever seen.
I didn’t think it was trick.
When she was done, she watched the last part of her fin disappear under the water, then sat for a moment longer, her shoulders heaving as if she had just run a long race. As she stood up, she seemed to notice for the first time the blood covering her body and scraped ineffectually at it.
She turned toward a showerhead against another wall, standing up and moving up the stairs, away from me.
I knew I should say something, but I couldn’t stop watching the way her hips swayed, her brand-new legs long and pale and slightly unsteady beneath her.
This is getting creepy, Stavros.
Okay, fine. I had to be honest with myself. It had passed creepy a long time ago.
I tried to force my muscles to move. I had just opened my mouth to say something, to let her know I was there.
Her wobbly legs gave out on her in that moment, and she slipped. I saw it happening, and in a heartbeat had calculated precisely where her head would hit the steps—directly on the sharp edge of the final step.
She could die.
I had to do something.
It wasn’t that conscious, of course—these things never are. I only remember it that way in retrospect. Before I had time to actually think about it, I was moving to catch her.
Instead of hitting her head on the edge of the step, she landed in my arms. I knelt on the steps where I had ducked in under her, and she stared up at me with oversized blue eyes made wider by shock.
We stared at one another for a long moment without blinking as I considered what I should do now that I had an armful of naked, bloody, amazingly beautiful, human-shaped mermaid.
I did the only thing I could think of.
I kissed her.
At least, I started to.
Circe
It took me a moment to regain my wits, to realize that I had not cracked my skull against the stone steps.
Instead, a human male had caught me and now held me in his arms—and in fact, unless I was very much mistaken, was about to try to kis
s me.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a prude. Far from it (as that shark-shifter could attest). But I do prefer to know a man’s name before I let him smooch on me. Moreover, it had been many long years since I had allowed a human man this close to me.
The last human I loved had left a bitterness in my soul that no amount of seawater could wash away.
If we’d been in the water, I would have wriggled out of his grasp and slipped away. As it was, the most I could do was turn my head away, so he missed my lips. Lucky for him, he had the sense to pull up short before he made any contact at all.
“I’m sorry,” he said, almost stuttering as he stood us up. “I don’t know why….” His voice trailed off.
If I’d been feeling kinder, I could have told him why. It was probably a side effect of the fact that I’m a Siren. We have that effect on some human men, the ones who are especially susceptible to our magic—often the ones who have some magic of their own. Our pull on them is stronger when we sing our spells, but it’s like a magnetic field around us all the time. That’s why there are so many stories of us luring human males to their watery deaths.
Not that it never happened—it did. But more often than that, men simply leaped overboard to get to a Siren, without any additional help from her at all. So, of course, the survivors blamed the Sirens.
Typical male fish-crap.
I wasn’t feeling nice enough to explain why he had suddenly wanted to kiss me, so I just pushed against him until he stood me entirely upright and let go of me. He stayed behind me on the steps until I was away from the pool, presumably to make sure I didn’t fall again.
At the showerhead, I turned to face him. “I’m about to turn this on,” I said. “Unless you need to bathe, you can go away now.”
He blinked, his dark brown eyes utterly expressionless—at least compared to mermen’s eyes, with the glow that showed their emotional state to every passerby.
“Actually, I’m not sure I can,” he said. “Go away, that is.”
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