by Bethany-Kris
“Pack up! Only your robes and gowns. All else is not needed. Head for the entrance. Keep in line. Carriages will be waiting!”
Outside the room, the orders echoed.
What did they mean?
A revolt at the sea?
“Well, give me a moment to—”
“Now,” one of the guards barked.
The blacksmith made a dismissive grunt under his breath, then gave Arelle a smile as he pocketed her leather collar. “Seems you won’t be needing this, and I’ll be taking my leave until we meet up again.”
That was the last thing the blacksmith said to Arelle before she was pulled from the room by the guards.
Without her collar.
• • •
The carriage rocked hard to the left again, followed by severe cursing outside at the front before the crack of a whip sent the horses crying out.
Arelle dragged in a shaky breath, sad for the poor beasts being beaten for the errors of men. They should have known better. With roads made of dirt in the season of storms where rain poured until the ground was nothing but soft muck, travel became a dangerous event. It wasn’t the animal’s fault the two right wheels became buried into a pit of mud.
“Ay, you’re a fucking fool,” a man shouted, his air catching in the racing winds. “Stop rocking it; you’re making it go deeper!”
A hiss sliced through the carriage, followed by the click of a tongue. The surprising use of their own language had even Arelle turning her head away from the windows overlooking the guards struggling outside to free the buggy.
Listen to the wind.
She wasn’t sure which mermaid said it; it also didn’t matter when every mermaid in that carriage suddenly lifted their heads in tandem as wind swayed the carriage with its next blow. Not a single one of them spoke.
They didn’t need to when they could all hear it.
Not one call.
Or two.
Or even ten.
Their kind had many calls. For family. Their young. A mate. Royals. It was only one call that would cross any amount of land or sea—that of a mate. Because it was in their hearts. But so was the sea, and the wind that moved it. The other calls would travel, too, just in a different way.
Right then, it sounded like hundreds of calls were reaching them in the wind.
We’re coming.
Hold the land.
Fight.
Find me. Find me. Find me.
So many, in fact, that it had some of the mermaids in the carriage chaotic until they found their way out onto the ground. The guards shouted, their demands lost to the sudden calls from at least four of the women in her carriage answering back.
“Get in the carriage! What are you doing?”
Arelle heard the hiss of the whip outside at the same time all those calls echoed around her that one stood out.
Find me, my little mermaid.
Eryx.
A scream echoed from the woman who had taken the first crack of a whip. Hisses answered it before grunts followed. Arelle watched out the window for a brief second as the women attacked the guards.
She listened for Eryx again.
He was still there.
Her attention drifted to the front of the carriage where the guards had left the small door open between the inside and the tented bench where they sat to steer the horses. Horses that were now standing just a few feet away tucked close together, untied, to brace for the weather.
“You heard them,” one of the mermaids said, “hold the land.”
They could make their own choices.
She would make hers.
Arelle headed for the door as the last mermaid followed behind her but exited from the side to help her sisters finish the men outside. She slipped on the wet wood of the bench when she climbed out the door and stumbled from the carriage into the mud below.
The shouting and struggle behind her had her heart aching. She wanted to help, but this might be her only chance.
And faced with the decision of staying to help her kind or going to follow the call of her mate … well, there was only one right choice.
She mounted the closest horse. Her thin, loose white gown was already soaked through and plastered to her skin.
Arelle grabbed tight to the reins of the horse, struggling to stay atop it when her heels dug in hard. How she stayed on when the horse took off, she would never know.
Luck, maybe.
Or just a bit of magic.
It took a bit before she felt comfortable on the horse, but it was easier hearing Eryx when all she really had to do was just pull one way or the other on the reins to make the horse follow.
Her heart pounded as the beast rounded a corner and the sight of an overturned carriage a little way down the road had her slowing. She recognized the gold detailing on it and the high, curved top because she’d watched it carrying the king away from the court earlier when they had been shuffling the mermaids into the ones waiting for them.
But it wasn’t the carriage that stunned her the most. In the travel of the royal caravan over the last day, many fell behind or moved farther ahead. Sometimes they caught up and other times, they went hours without seeing anyone. It wasn’t a shock there had been one close to where they lost theirs in the mud.
It was the man straddled over another man on the outside of the carriage that had her swallowing hard. They rested a few feet away from where horses lay with broken legs, and the four guards remained motionless with bloody, beaten heads and dead eyes watching the sky on the rocky, muddy road.
The only man moving was the one using the man on the ground as a chair. For a second, the cloak over his head kept him hidden, but a hard gust of wind sent it flying back as he looked up at the sound of an approaching horse.
“The king is dead!” she heard him call out. Another gallop forward, and he shouted again, relief clear in his voice, “The king is dead!”
Arelle thought time slowed for a moment as the living man’s eyes widened when he finally realized who was coming closer.
Mattue turned to watch Arelle pass. She cared not for the lives lost, or the odd scene of men with beaten in heads, and Mattue sitting on a dead king with his hands clenched into bruised fists. A day would come for him—the advisor—but it wouldn’t be on this one.
Not when her mate called her home.
THIRTY-FIVE
Eryx
THE IRONY WAS not lost on Eryx that he found himself back at the same bay where he’d caught Arelle. It seemed like the best place, given the abandoned structures, some of which still stood well and tall, that many people on Atlas assumed were no longer safe to use. They believed the storms had weakened the stone watchtower near the entrance of the bay or compromised the integrity of the scattered houses on the upper rim.
Some were, sure.
But given its easy location to the sea, and the lack of activity from anyone on land, it was the one place he thought would be safest to wait.
After he arrived, unsure of the time or the day because it felt like he’d been traveling for longer than he could comprehend, Eryx let the horse go, knowing he’d no longer need the animal. He removed the reins and the small satchel along with the saddle and gave the horse a slap to its rear thigh to send it running into the forest surrounding the bay.
The animal would be okay.
Nature of the beasts, he knew.
Under the mostly safe covering from the trees, Eryx pulled the few items he’d managed to keep with him over the last few days. A knife. The bit of fresh water in a small ceramic jug with a corked top, and bread that had somehow gotten wet hidden inside the leather satchel. His mother’s journal also.
That, too, was wet.
He let out a sigh and carefully peeled back the front cover to find exactly what he thought he would. He’d not even had the chance to fully read through the journal and now he never would because the ink had bled through the pages and smudged beyond recognition from the rain.
Un
caring when he tore a few delicate, damp pages as he flipped to the very back, he did find one single paragraph that he was able to read. It felt appropriate—a goodbye, of sorts.
I worry, Anthia had written, though he didn’t know what she’d written before those words higher on the page, because he seems so much more like them than us. But I keep hoping it’s inside him like it is us. And if he ever needs it, he’ll know how to use it.
The date written below that final entry was three years before his mother died. One of her final trips to the stable house. Because it was around that point when his father decided Eryx spent just a little too much time with Anthia and made an effort to separate the two.
His mother hoped he was like her. He hoped she’d died knowing he was.
The wind tunneled around Eryx and the items on the ground. Pages from the journal pulled with the force of the wind, tearing at the spine from its fragility because of the wetness. He could have tried to save it, but he didn’t bother.
Everything—up until the moment he’d caught Arelle in this bay—had been for the sake of his mother. From his rage to the loneliness and even the vengeance it attempted to inspire. All of it had been for her. It felt appropriate that he’d come back here to finally let her go, too.
He stood and turned into the wind to listen. It was easier when he closed his eyes to do it, and this time was no exception. The low hum in the back of his throat started, and the scrapes on his palms from the cuts that he’d received both running and fighting over the last few days stung when he clenched his hands and they reopened.
He’d noticed it before, but never told anyone. Not even Arelle.
His blood no longer ran red. It made lines down his palms, snaking over his long fingers and gathering at the tips before dripping to the ground in the same hue that Arelle bled.
The purple color splattered to the green moss covering the rocks and uneven ground.
She needed something else to follow because he was so tired. After everything, his body seemed unwilling to give him anything more. He’d pushed to his breaking point, and then beyond. His body screamed enough now.
I smell you. I hear you.
Her words came with the wind.
He smiled.
“Time to come home, my little mermaid,” he murmured.
• • •
He knew the moment she reached the bay. He couldn’t hear the horse she rode over the thunder clapping high above or the pounding of the rain, but he felt her. Without meaning to, Eryx had found a place to rest at the base of a rather large tree that had given him decent cover from the weather. When he tipped his head down … his eyes just happened to close.
How long was he sleeping?
It didn’t matter.
The shout of his name carrying over the bay had his eyes wide open in a second.
“Eryx!”
That was not her voice in the wind. It wasn’t her call echoing in his heart. It was her.
She was there.
He was up from the ground in the next breath and then he moved to the line of the trees where he could easily scan the bay and the rocky ledge surrounding it like a high tower meant to protect whatever was waiting behind it.
And there she is.
He found her at the top—right in the center. Atop a horse that she jumped down from when she called his name again. In the whipping winds, and with the black backdrop of a stormy sky, the white dress she wore seemed like it haloed around her. This time, he answered her call back.
“Arelle!”
He sensed the moment she found where he stood at the bottom of the bay, directly on the other side of her. She had cliffs to climb down and an entire body of water to cross before he had her again. The relief wasn’t there like he thought it would be, but he knew why.
Eryx needed to touch her.
Look in her eyes.
Be one.
He swore he saw her raise a hand—was she waving? He did the same.
Then, before he even understood what happened, Arelle darted forward. The skirt of the flowy dress blew out behind her and he took one step forward as his chest tightened with the realization of what she was going to do.
She jumped from the cliff.
No hesitation.
No fear.
Just … jumped.
His first instinct was to follow her. At least, he had mind enough to shed the cloak on his shoulders, and the rest of his sopping, ruined clothes before he headed for the shore of the bay. He couldn’t see her in the water; the darkness had started to bleed together, but that didn’t matter. She was close enough for him to feel.
That was all he needed.
Eryx walked naked into the water, the chill barely an annoyance to him now. It was as though he’d become so used to being cold and wet that it wasn’t even a discomfort anymore. He kept walking forward, hands skimming the surface of the water, until he was up to his throat and he only had a few more steps before he’d be in over his head.
For the most part, the water was calm. Small waves, despite the storms. Still as black as the sky, but he was no longer afraid of what waited under the water for him.
Arelle broke the surface only a few feet away from him. Her hair slicked back from the water; rivulets ran lines down her face. For a second, time stopped when their eyes met. The world remained still as he took her in, and she did the same.
“How?” she asked.
“Luck,” he decided. “A lot of luck.”
Her laughter echoed. His gaze fell to her throat—the collar was gone. Behind her, her fin and tail twisted in the water, making little ripples all around them. He noticed how the shimmering green-blue scales that matched the spattering at her temples covered her entire lower half as she inched closer in the water.
How had he never admired her like this?
Well, he knew.
He’d been too busy catching her.
“Come closer,” he demanded.
She did.
All at once.
No questions asked.
Her lithe form cut through the water and slammed into him. The force of it was enough to send him stumbling back several steps in the mucky bottom of the bay. Her mouth found his, and those hands of hers pulled through his hair with a sting that spoke of desperation and hope.
He understood that feeling all too well, now.
Because of her.
Everything about them had been desperate.
But hopeful all the same.
He found her scales were as soft as silk when her tail wrapped around his legs. At some point in her swim from the other side of the bay to him, she’d taken off the gown. It floated around them in the water, now transparent and useless. His palms slid down the curve of her stomach and her waist before drifting lower to where smooth skin met shimmering scales. All the muscles that made up her tail flexed at his touch, tightening around him even as his legs fought to free themselves from the hold.
Not because he wanted to get away, but rather, he wanted so badly to do the same to her. Coil himself around her, keep her right where she needed to be—hold her still until she understood.
Never once did their kiss break, even as the struggle between them neared closer to the shore, and he was no longer neck deep in the water. Her tongue slashed against his; her taste became the sweetest drink to him, taking him higher and making him crave more.
Now, the water only came to his chest and so did she when she dipped lower to drag in water through her mouth like she was taking in a breath of it instead of air.
She didn’t want to change yet, he realized.
Eryx’s hands drifted over her jaw. “You miss this.”
Being in her true form.
The sea …
All of it.
A sly, knowing grin answered him back. “I need both.”
Somehow, he would give her that.
Raising from the water, but not releasing the pull of water she’d taken into her lungs, she took his hands and pulled
them lower while she continued to stare up at him. He felt the way she guided him until he reached what she wanted him to find. A small cleft in her tail just below the curve of her hips. Slit in the same way the paradise he’d found between her thighs, it was the only similarity.
His fingertips graced the cleft, and he was surprised to find it warm and soft like the rest of her. Arelle released a quiet hum, and her lashes fluttered closed when she shuddered from the touch.
“Is it different like this?”
“No,” she said, the word coloring her next moan. “Not to me.”
Frankly, he found it wasn’t all that different for him, either. Her form might have changed, but all those sounds still fell from her lips as he stroked her cleft in and out with two twisting fingers sounded exactly the same. Her silken heat drew him closer; her hands wrapped around his cock and tightened with fast pulls that had him hard in seconds. She was still beautiful—still wild in her need.
She closed what bit of distance remained between them. He lost his words when her lips grazed his, her body molded against his, and with just a shift of her lower half, she’d fitted his cock into the tightness of her cleft.
“Fuck,” he grunted against her lips.
She laughed an airy sound.
And then she bit him. Hard enough to draw blood from his bottom lip, he was sure. All the while, she moved against him—riding him, in a different way. Except all around his cock, muscles shuddered and pulled though he couldn’t move because her tail had enclosed his legs again.
This time, it was his turn to laugh. Even when she was sweet, she still wanted to be his animal. Wild. Uncontrolled. Entirely untameable. He certainly didn’t mind fucking her like one, either.
• • •
The watchtower was both old and wet.
It smelled like it, too.
However, it was the only structure that Eryx felt was safe enough for them to use for the night. At the moment, it also smelled like his mate, him, their sex, and the crisp breeze coming in through the slated windows. That bit of wind brought with it the scent of smoke, too, but neither of them mentioned it though he knew she had to smell the fire like he did.