Sirens and Scales

by Kellie McAllen

“Ready?”

  “I hope this isn’t going to mess up my hair,” I quipped.

  “I’m going to ravage your hair, Stargazer.”

  And then we were off, my live chariot undulating beneath me and me flying like a flag in his wake. It was an exhilarating method of travel, and I was disappointed when we reached our destination and I had to relinquish my hold on those glorious shoulders.

  But only disappointed for an instant, because the geode caves were amazing, and soon I was drunk with wonder and didn’t even have a thought to spare for Coda and his mouth-watering muscles. On the rare occasion that I shot him a glance after that, he seemed drunk with wonder off of me in the same way, that molten glint nestled in his gaze as he admired my childlike, marveling glee. I smiled at him, enchanted, noticing the way the garden of crystals reflected a dazzling, shattered texture in his gaze, turning his silver eyes a fractured, dust-sparkling lavender.

  Great, inking Abyss, if I couldn’t have kissed him right then and there, just to taste that cotton-candy memory in the crumbling stardust grottos of the deep.

  And if I couldn’t have kissed him again at the underwater waterfalls, where we dived into an intricate network of craters and ledges rushing with velvety, silvery run-off, a funneling geological phenomenon pulling currents of water downward to an underwater river so deep we didn’t even dare go there, lest we couldn’t fight the many layers of currents back up again.

  I didn’t kiss him, of course–it was just a silly fantasy. I was neither promiscuous enough nor presumptuous enough, and there was plenty to appease me besides.

  When we were done exploring the hidden gems of the ocean around Atlantis, we went back to the palace–that place I was so determined to estrange myself from, at least on the record–and Coda took me to the organ cathedral.

  “Was it you?” I asked teasingly, eyeing the illustrious organ, “who called me here from the beginning?”

  “I’ve been found out,” he flirted back, slipping out from underneath me as I relinquished my hold on his shoulders. Hopefully no one had seen our little tandem-swimming technique on our way back into the city. Yet as much as I’d claimed I didn’t want to cause a stir by staying in the palace or draw any more attention by keeping his attention, he was the most comforting thing in this world of unknowns and newfound hostility. After all, who else could I trust? Dogga, perhaps, that peace-loving mer-hippie that I would probably never see again, or my new friend Brax. But I already felt like it was enough trouble for her to check in on me as often as she did. Not that she showed any indication of minding–in fact, she’d probably be appalled if I suggested any such thing–but where she didn’t mind, Coda clearly suffered from the opposite of minding.

  “Shall I teach you to play?” Coda offered, swirling lazily toward the organ.

  “Actually,” I said with a coy little smile, “I already know how.”

  Impressed, he turned back to me. “Is that so?”

  Well, piano, anyway. But…surely I could charm a decent composition out of this beast, in a similar fashion. I made my slow, languid way over to the instrument, hovering where I could place my fingers lightly on the abalone keys. They were smooth, polished and worn. I imagined how many times Coda’s fingers had rested just here, stroking them gently, and could almost feel the ghost of his touch.

  I closed my eyes, taking myself back to my adolescent years when music had opened a new depth inside me. With the first pressing of the keys, nostalgia and euphoria flooded my body. The notes played my heartstrings, releasing a liquid ache through my veins, full of angst and elation.

  It had been awhile since I’d played, but muscle memory puppeteered my fingers through the motions. The instrumental version of Hello by Evanescence hummed to life and reverberated through the cathedral, melancholy and moving, sweeping me into a world of sweet agony. I’d played it at my senior recital–thought I’d be nervous, but got so caught up and lost in the music that the audience might as well have not been there.

  That was the thing with music. You lost yourself in it.

  Apparently with archaeology too; I was lost down a rabbit hole of mythology and magic, utterly gone from the rest of the world, hardly even able to recall what it felt like above the Surface anymore. That dry rasp of air on your face, the weight of your feet on the ground…I felt so disconnected from it, almost like that was the dream all along.

  I was lost, so lost. Entrenching myself deeper in the spell all the time.

  When the last note paraded through the room, I had to shake myself from the clutches of the music. I all but shuddered coming back into myself, blinking away the all-consuming effects.

  How surreal, to play my own tune on the instrument that had called me into the Deep.

  I stared down at the keys, forgetting Codexious for a moment. Why have you brought me here? I implored the powers-that-be, for the hundredth time. What was there for me here? In a place ruled by fin and fang, where I didn’t fit in and yet was somehow the object of raging jealousy all at once. Because it made perfect sense to envy the misfit.

  “That was beautiful,” Coda’s voice brought me back to the echoing cathedral. I was almost afraid to look at him, lest the passion swirling around inside me decide to misconstrue the situation and project itself onto him. There was also a chance he’d be looking at me like he did in the geode caves, and I might not care to put forth the effort to resist him a second time.

  Or, let’s be honest, a tenth time–or however many times I’d found it difficult not to look at him like a dazzling piece of meat.

  When my gaze did cut to him, I didn’t seem to have mastered fighting the attraction. What if it wasn’t just the music? Wasn’t just the fact that he was a magnificent specimen of a lustful creature?

  Then–nothing. That was what. He’d already pretty much told me outright he was attracted to me, but to what end? There was nothing but an ill-fitted scandal to be had down that road. And I couldn’t even really believe I was entertaining the thought long enough to think it through. It was utter nonsense. Not why I was here, not what the underwater kingdom needed at a time like this, and what was I, some hopeless romantic who couldn’t resist a dreamy guy who’d shown her a good time?

  So I quenched the feelings like a good, logical girl, blamed the music, and offered him a friendly, casual smile. “It’s been so long, I didn’t know if it would come back to me.”

  “Why did you ever stop playing?”

  “Oh, you know…just a passing fancy, I guess.” And as I said it, I applied it to the scandalous subject turning about in my head of late, with every intention of putting it to bed for good.

  Ugh, don’t use a bed analogy.

  Fortunately, there were no beds in Atlantis. So, there, that was nipped in the bud.

  And with that, I considered the matter closed. I could be mature about this.

  “You shouldn’t have stopped,” Coda said. “You look transcendent when you play. It clearly brings something out from deep inside you. Just when I thought the ocean couldn’t get any deeper, you open a vein and a cavern of rapture swallows Atlantis whole.”

  “Ha. You make me sound like a whale.”

  “That was not my intent.”

  I was just trying to make light of the situation, refusing to let him sweet-talk me.

  “But whales are graceful, beautiful creatures,” Codexious defended them, refusing to let me derail his intent. “And you should be so lucky to receive such a compliment.”

  “Should I, indeed? Do you liken many girls to whales as one of your common methods of seducing them?”

  “Is that what you think I’m trying to do? Seduce you?”

  “I just meant–perhaps that is the real culprit causing a hindrance in your attempt to land a mate, and you just don’t know it.”

  “Ah, so you think the issue is with me, and I consequently get no credit for the noble reasons one might be picky and prone to stalling in choosing the heir to a dying kingdom.”

  I realized th
en it might easily become a touchy subject, and I probably shouldn’t joke about it. “Actually I don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, and I think I’d like to accept the compliment and rock the whale thing.” I frowned, suddenly. “But, out of curiosity–how does a female of the mer-species respond to being seduced with the unlikely flattery of being likened to the biggest, blubberiest creature in the sea?”

  Codexious shrugged, propelling himself so he was parallel with the ceiling and back-stroking casually about the room. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t go around seducing them.”

  “Ever?” I found that hard to believe.

  Curving backwards out of his drift, he circled back toward me. “Mermaids mate for life,” he said, surprising me. “You don’t go around seducing one unless you’re going to stick with her, forever.”

  How…unexpectedly noble. I’d just assumed, given the promiscuous behavior that I’d seen displayed among the flocks of mermaids, that it was rather the opposite. But evidently the lot of them were just…good and ready to settle down forever with the regent of Atlantis, and so did not hesitate to pull out all the stops. I could argue that the way Coda had danced with some of them didn’t exactly look platonic and innocent on his part, and he’d certainly been flirting with me lately, but there must still be a fine line between flirtation and seduction, which I was ignorant to distinguish.

  “Oh,” I said, rendered just a little bit speechless. Mating for life. What an archaic, beautiful sentiment.

  If only it was more that way in the human realm.

  I couldn’t help but look at him in a new light, cancelling all those prospective grandchildren I’d speculated he might have, recalculating the lustful, provocative image I’d developed of him into something far more principled and honorable.

  While I’d always entertained platonic relationships myself, I was rather a special case, plagued by unusually high standards for my generation, considered old-fashioned–and made fun of for it–by my peers, and otherwise scared away from revealing my anatomical abnormalities where temptation might quench my values. But how much self-control would it take to fight the urge for hundreds or even thousands of years?

  Even I was astonished.

  “Not so, above the Surface?” Codexious asked.

  I thought about it, becoming rueful. “For some. Fewer and fewer, though, it seems. It used to be this sacred thing, and it’s still celebrated like it is, but… Many seem to find it hard to stay the course.” Sandy and Vince were a prime example.

  Coda was frowning. “How hard can it be? Mortals live such short lives. It would be a fleeting commitment at best.”

  It was a difficult subject for me to discuss. Not so much because it was a sensitive issue that had affected my family, although that was part of it, but because it was hard to explain or even figure out where I stood. Growing up on the cautionary tale of Sandy’s misery and divorce had always made me determined not to end up like that, and I’d told myself my whole life I would take pains to find ‘forever love’. If I was aiming for it, I had to believe in it, and yet there was still that gray area–the part of me that simultaneously hated Vince’s guts for leaving Sandy but also recognized she was infinitely happier without him. He’d betrayed and freed her. I wouldn’t put them back together in a million years, and yet…there would always be a part of me that believed in the sacred thing they had started, a part of me that wanted to shake Vince and scream ‘It didn’t have to be like this!’

  I gave a wry huff of a chuckle at Coda’s comment, then grew thoughtful. “I don’t think it’s always about not being able to. Sometimes when there are more tears than laughs, they just decide life is better apart. It’s like they decide their lives are too short. That they’ll miss out on other, better things if they stick with one thing. Or that it’s easier to start over with a clean slate than fix complications. I don’t know. I’m more of a quality over quantity girl, myself.”

  “Perhaps your mermaid heritage showing through.”

  It was a disheartening suggestion, that such a trait might only be explained by the mer side of me, that the ideals I’d developed for my life on land could be something that was lost to the human race. “Perhaps,” I granted solemnly, wondering if the apocalypse had reached us as well, up above the surface–just manifesting in a very different way than the wastelands and famines of common prophecy.

  What if the apocalypse came from within, a matter of the human condition itself–the troubled waters of the soul, the wastelands of the heart, the polluted skies of human nature and the long, cold roads of wandering, lost spirits?

  A depressing thought, and yet I couldn’t help but feel it was the perfect analogy for so much of what plagued humanity, these days. An apocalypse of souls, burning and festering and rioting in the streets.

  My frown deepened. “I thought you said Atlas bore children with his ‘harem of mer-wives’. And I heard two mermaids gossiping about joining your harem at the ball. How does that fit in with mating for life?”

  Coda grunted, but it was the most eloquent grunt I’d ever heard–a fluid, almost creamy sound. Did you really just liken his voice to ‘creamy’? “A trendy fantasy among lovesick mermaids, harkening back to the one and only harem ever established in the mer-kingdom. My father’s. Successful perhaps because he was a first generation and still retained a level of promiscuousness from his pre-mer tendencies. But some would argue that it wasn’t successful at all, and contributed to his overall unrest and madness.”

  So the girls on the other side of the pillar at the ball had just been dreaming, courting toxic euphoria and madness same as so many humans did, with their drugs and unhealthy relationships and a dozen other indulgent fixations that weren’t always so great in the long run.

  There it was again. Signs of the inner apocalypse.

  Where were these profound little conjectures coming from? There I went, opening another vein and feeling like a cavern was spawning beneath me, this bottom-of-the-ocean sabbatical an ever deepening journey indeed. Curse that inking pipe organ, for tempting me back into the throes of boundless, ravaging emotion, music turning me into a dramatic, tormented artist type.

  And yes, it was undoubtedly the music’s fault. It couldn’t have been that conversing with Codexious sparked an intellectual, emotional side of me, that he got me thinking or left me moved, because then I’d have to accept that it was definitely more than his lustrous physique and exotic appeal that had me pegging him as a dreamy specimen of the male species.

  For the first time I didn’t have to hide the secrets of my physical being from a man I might deem a romantic candidate under different circumstances–indeed, my physical being was liberated and well on display–but circumstances being what they were, I had to hide everything else that clamored inside me to pull us closer toward one another.

  He had a queen to name, and I had a purpose to determine, and we were just confusing the two. I didn’t even know which world I belonged in, so I had no business treading anywhere near the path he had laid out for his queen. And as for my purpose, well… I was still waiting for the Deep to speak to me again. But that would not come in the form of Codexious whispering sweet whale nothings into my ear.

  I had a greater purpose in life than just being someone’s wife and queen. Somebody else could lay in Codexious’s non-bed moaning to flattery of blubber and immensity, and I…

  I would go to this ‘deep ocean’ that everyone spoke of, that infamous crater that lurked even beyond this fathomless dimension that hid the legend of Atlantis, and even if I had to sneak past the beasts that Atlas son of Poseidon had perished fighting–maybe at long last, the Deep would meet me face-to-face, and tell me what the hell it wanted from me.

  22

  I said that to myself, but it seemed every time the aurora changed color, I was back in that cathedral with Codexious, and somehow we were on to composing songs together, to see what a human-mermaid collaboration might sound like. I knew then that if I ever fulfilled my purp
ose down here and found my way back to the mortal realm, I would in turn find my way back to the instrument of my youth, and I would play the song we had coined and think of him.

  And forever after, the regent of Atlantis would be tied to that one mystical thing that could reel the heartstrings out of me like helpless fish on a line.

  He was gutting me, and I refused to acknowledge it.

  It was the music, always the music.

  The music that caused a constant state of euphoria in his presence. The music that made his eyes gleam brighter with luster and my heart beat faster with angst. The music that made his laugh like a symphony and the troubles he faced seem like far-distant matters for another day.

  The music that I looked forward to surrounding myself with every chance I could.

  I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d never thought I was much for lying to myself, but then again–I had spent the better part of my life pretending the ocean didn’t run in my veins, pretending I could walk away from my heritage and outdistance the tide and laugh off the call of the Deep that had always left a throbbing crater inside me. So, maybe I was actually an expert at lying to myself, had been my whole life.

  It was only a matter of time before somebody noticed. I was still living in a fantasy where time didn’t exist, thanks to Coda’s little riddle that banished night and day from Atlantean culture, but certain others were not so keen to let our little dalliance-that-wasn’t go on unchallenged for all of eternity.

  I was en route back to my turret after a day–that is, after a cerulean aurora–of pipe organ composition with Coda, when I was ambushed by a burly merman I’d seen far too little of lately, if regular bodyguard standards were to apply.

  “Inaja,” I said, surprised.

  The blue-haired merman loomed like a taciturn shark, very serious.

  “Um…to what do I owe the pleasure?” I glanced beyond him to the opening to my tower, where about six turquoise tendrils were peeking out around the edges of the entrance, Pastel always alert to my return. Sometimes he followed me to the cathedral and loitered about the cavernous chamber while we played, sometimes he preferred to lurk in the shadows of my room undisturbed and nap the day away.