by Various
She eases up, shaking off the silt like an octopus coming out of hiding. Her lip quivers and she points to the back of her head. Grom tries to swallow his heart. “You’re hurt.”
She shakes her head and reaches around to pull a tangle of hair forward. “My hair,” she says, her eyes bigger than he’s ever seen them. “It’s singed.”
Grom cocks his head, flirting with the idea of strangling her. “Seriously?”
She shrugs, dejected. “I know it sounds petty. It’s just that…well, I really loved my hair.” She dangles it in front of her as if it’s a crispy dead eel.
They both remember Freya’s existence when she groans—apparently something else did the job of knocking her out without Grom’s assistance.
Nalia snaps out of it first and helps her friend, who gasps at the sight of her. “Oh, your hair! What will your father say?”
Grom pinches the bridge of his nose. Has the entire world gone mad? “It’s just hair,” he grits out. “It’ll grow back.”
Freya scolds him with a look. “It’s never just hair, Highness.”
“No,” Nalia says quietly. “He’s right. It’s time I let it go.” Throwing Freya’s arm over her shoulder and hoisting her up, she looks at Grom. “My father always said my hair was the exact same color as Mother’s. It felt like keeping a part of her with me, I guess.”
Grom stares at her, stunned. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Freya, you simply have to cut it for me,” Nalia says, setting her jaw.
Her friend pulls back, eyes wide. “Oh no. Not me. I’m not doing it. Your father will have me arrested.”
Nalia settles her gaze on Grom. “Will you do it?”
He tries to look away, but the pleading in her eyes softens him. He nods.
She scans the floor, picking up pieces of debris and inspecting them, presumably looking for something with a sharp-enough edge. Grom and Freya can’t bring themselves to help. At least Freya can claim an injury, he thinks to himself. But how can I cut off her hair if it means that much to her?
Finally, Nalia finds what she’s looking for. She swims over to Grom and hands him a thin piece of metal, disfigured and burnt, but sharp enough on one side to accomplish the task at hand.
He palms it, inspecting its capacity for cutting hair, and doubting his own. “You’re sure?” he says, unable to look at her just yet. “You’re sure this is what you want?”
“Someone’s coming,” Freya says, stiffening into the classic Tracker pose. “Better get on with this.”
Nalia nods. “Do it,” she tells him. “Before anyone sees me like this.” She turns her back to him and offers up her burnt locks.
He turns the metal shard in his hand. “You’re sure?”
“Poseidon’s beard, just do it already!”
Before she’s done yelling, he’s holding her severed hair in his hands. She gasps and whirls around. He hands it to her. “I’m sorry.”
She cradles it in her hands like one of his mother’s human relics. Then, of all things, she laughs. “Can you believe that just happened? And we lived through it?”
When he doesn’t immediately respond, she shakes the mangled locks in his face. “Admit it, Triton prince. That’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to you. And you’re welcome.”
Grom bites back a smile and swats her hand away, but she persists until he’s forced to grab her wrist and restrain it behind her back. By now, he too senses Yudor, the Tracker trainer, approaching with others he doesn’t recognize. “I saved your life, then cut your hair,” he says, letting her go. “You’re welcome.”
The smile fades from her face. She looks back, obviously sensing the party coming to investigate the explosion. She turns back to Grom, hesitant. “About that,” she says, inching closer. The water between them seems to heat up, but that can’t be right, can it? When her nose almost touches his, she says, “Thank you for not leaving us.” Then she presses her lips against his, soft and slow, and he feels an explosion, just like the one from the death ship, only this one is coming from inside, and it feels like a hundred electric eels slithering over him, every part of him, shocking him to life.
There’s no reason to think about pulling her closer; his hands do that all on their own. There’s no reason to worry about who sees; he couldn’t care less. There’s no reason to think about his plan to woo her, then reject her; he knows now that there will never be a time when he will reject these lips.
These lips, this kiss, they’re everything he never knew he wanted.
Nalia pulls away suddenly, looking every bit as stunned as he feels. She clears her throat. “I’d better get going.” But her expression tells him that maybe she’d rather stay, that maybe she’d rather keep kissing.
Grom nods, in agreement with it all. She’d better get going. He wants her to stay. He wants to keep kissing.
She lets the carcass of her hair sink to the mud below them, and for the longest time, she only stares at it, won’t meet his eyes. The Tracker party is close, within sight, Grom knows, but still she stays, immobile and hesitant and stunning.
Then, without another word, without meeting his eyes, she turns and swims away.
He finds her with Freya, sitting on the outer rocks of The Crag, the deep chasm etched into the seafloor, where you could swim down for hours and never touch bottom. They’re both peering over the edge of the cliff, as if they’re actually contemplating going down there.
“Don’t even think about it,” Grom says. “Your lionfish spike won’t work on a giant squid.” He’s amazed how natural it feels to settle down next to Nalia and hang his fin over the ledge.
She smirks up at him. “We waited for you. You’re slow.”
He laughs. Freya would have sensed him for a while before he arrived, but did Nalia? Can she sense me as strongly as I sense her? “Some things are worth the wait.”
“You’re slow and delusional,” she says without bluster. She peeks back down into The Crag. “I want a tooth from a dangle fish.”
Grom shakes his head. Dangle fish live in the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean, where they dangle a light in front of themselves as a lure to attract unsuspecting prey. Their teeth are as long as his hand. The Crag is a good place to hunt for dangle fish. “What could you possibly need that for?”
She scrunches up her face.
Grom raises a brow at Freya, who sighs in defeat. She has gotten used to this game. “She wants it to make a gift for you. For your mating—Ow! Poseidon’s teeth, Nalia, he’s a Royal!”
Nalia points her finger in Grom’s face, almost up his left nostril. “You need to stop bullying her. Sometimes it not your business.”
Grom captures her hand and uses it to pull her closer. Her eyes go wide as she glances at his lips but she doesn’t squirm, doesn’t try to move away. He feels himself melt a little at her touch. His bones feel like the water around him. “You were making me a gift?” He glances at Freya. “Freya, how rude would it be if I asked you to—”
Freya shrugs, then spirals up and over them. “Some Triton Trackers found a new human mine,” she says, winking at Nalia, who flinches as she passes by. “Guess I could go help them set it off.” Freya told Grom that whenever the Trackers come across a mine, they set off the explosion from a distance, using rocks they hurl from the surface. She said when one of the floating metal balls burst, they all do.
“That sounds exceptionally fun,” Grom calls after her. When she’s gone, he grins at Nalia. “Don’t tell me you’re all of a sudden shy, princess. We’ve seen each other every day for the past month.”
Nalia lifts her chin. “I heard you feel the pull for me.”
That is unexpected. From the sound of her voice, she doesn’t like the idea. And he takes slight offense. Suddenly the tiny pearl in his hand feels like a burning rock from the hot beds. “Is it so bad for me to want to be your mate?”
“That’s just it. The pull is mindless. It tricks your feelings. It’s not what you wan
t, it’s what the pull wants. To make stronger offspring. But I want something real.”
A whirlpool of relief swirls through him. She wants something real—from me. “But you have to mate with me, pull or no pull. What does it matter if the feelings are real? There could be no feelings at all, and we’d still have to mate.”
“I’d rather there were no feelings at all, than be tricked by the pull.” She crosses her arms. He’s spent enough time with her to know this is her gesture when she’s unsure.
“And if I don’t feel the pull for you?” He caresses her lips with his eyes.
She swallows. “Don’t you?”
“Hmmm,” he says. “I’m not sure. Wouldn’t you feel the pull toward me, if I felt it toward you?” He’s hoping his mother knows what she’s talking about, hoping that she didn’t just make this ridiculousness up.
She considers. “I suppose so. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway.”
“And?”
“And I suppose it would make sense for us to be pulled together.” She tucks a short piece of hair behind her ear. “Firstborn, third-generation Royals, right? To pass on the Gifts of the Generals to our fingerlings. If anyone would be pulled, it would be us.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Do you feel the pull for me?”
She bristles like an anemone. “Oh, just forget it!” She turns away, but he catches her arm and whirls her around.
“I don’t believe in the pull,” he blurts. “I think it’s a bunch of superstitious muck. Besides that, I think the pull would pale in comparison to the way I feel about you.”
She lets out a tiny gasp, swirling the water in front of her and spooking some fish close by.
Grom pulls her closer, wanting this moment to be right, wanting the right words to appear in his mouth, wanting the contrary ones to disappear from hers. “If it was the pull, surely it would have brought us together before now. I’ve been old enough to sift for a mate for three seasons now. Don’t you think that if the pull were at work, I would have sought you out already?”
“I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. About you and me. And…not long ago in the Cave of Memories,” he says, “you told me that I was mean to you when we first met, at your mother’s entombing ceremony all those years ago. Do you remember that?”
She bites her lip. “I was just a fingerling when she died. Nine mating seasons old. It wasn’t what you’d said. It was how you said it. As if I was unimportant. As if it was a bother for you to be there.”
Grom nods, cringing on the inside. That had been exactly how he’d felt when he’d had to make an appearance at the ceremony—imposed upon. “I’m so sorry.” He brushes her cheek with his fingers, something he wishes he’d done all those seasons ago. Something, anything to comfort her instead of set her on edge like he did. If he hadn’t been so self-occupied, maybe they wouldn’t have avoided each other all this time, missed out on each other. Maybe they’d already be mated. The thought bears down on him with the weight of a great whale. “I have no excuse,” he says softly. “But something you said back then stuck with me. Do you remember what you told me? When I offered you my condolences?”
Nalia shakes her head. Then she sends the thrill of a thousand electric rays running through him when she rests her hand on his. “No.”
“You asked how I could understand your loss, when I didn’t even know your mother. But you were wrong. I did know her, before you were born. And I liked her.” He offers his fist between them, then opens it. When he picks up the black pearl, her eyes go round and soft, luring him closer like the light of the dangle fish she’d wanted to hunt down. “I remember she had a pearl like this one,” he tells her. “I remember how happy she was when my mother gave her a human string for it. She put it through the pearl and wore it around her neck, always.”
Nalia accepts it into her palm, rolling it around with her finger. “She was entombed with it,” she breathes. “I wanted to keep it, but I thought it would be selfish, so I didn’t ask Father for it.” She lifts her scrutiny from the pearl to his face. “This looks exactly like hers. It must have taken you forever to find one just like it.” She bites her lip. “That’s what you’ve been doing in the shallows every day before you come to meet me and Freya.”
He nods. Every single day since he was forced to cut off her hair, he’s been harvesting in the oyster beds. Sure, Freya could have used her Tracker abilities to locate him. But by Nalia’s expression, he knows that’s not the case. “You can sense me, then. The way I sense you.”
“Is that the pull?”
He grins, scratching the back of his neck. “I thought we just agreed that the pull doesn’t exist?”
“Then why do we feel this way?”
“I was thinking of calling it ‘love.’ Of course, I can’t speak for you—” He’s cut off by her lips on his, her body against his, her arms wrapped around his neck. This kiss is even better than the first. This kiss wraps heat around them, between them, through them. It makes the ocean seem inconsequential, the moon unimportant, everything else nonexistent.
It fills all the empty spaces inside him, the ones he didn’t know were there, and the ones he thought he’d already filled. And the future is laid plain before him. Their future.
“We’re almost there,” Nalia giggles, keeping her hands pressed tight on his eyes as he swims clumsily forward. He warbles a little, for effect. She giggles again.
Grom smiles. “Did you pick the farthest island from our parents, then?” Syrena custom normally calls for the male to pick the mating island, to find a private, uninhabited place for the newly mated couple to consummate their vows—which they can only do in human form. But Nalia had asked—no, begged—him to let her pick the island and set it up for their stay there.
“Sort of. But the surprise part isn’t who we’re farthest from—it’s who we’re closest to.”
Finally, after what seems like an entire season, his fin skims sand. “Are we there yet?”
She uncovers his eyes, and he’s shown the underwater landscape of a slowly ascending ocean floor littered with coral reefs and rocks and colorful fish. They couldn’t be more than thirty fins deep, which means the shoreline is close.
Nalia pops to the surface and motions for him to do the same. She points to their destination, and Grom drinks in the small island, the breeze dancing through the luxuriant green canopy, the lazy waves of ocean licking the shore. He holds up his hand to shield himself from the sunlight reflecting off of the bright sand, almost blinding him as his eyes adjust to dry air. Then he sees it. “Nalia,” he says, his mouth gone suddenly dry. “You can see the Big Land from here.”
She claps like a seal. “You noticed! Aren’t you excited? But that’s not the whole surprise. Let’s go on shore.” She pulls his hand, but he holds back.
“You’d better just tell me the rest of it. Because we’re not going on shore so close to the human land.”
Her face falls. “But that’s the surprise.”
Grom pinches the bridge of his nose. One thing he adores about Nalia is that she’s adventurous, fearless. She could never be boring. But this is a bit much. This is not a small law to break. This is the biggest. Through gritted teeth he says, “Why would we want to go to the Big Land?”
She won’t meet his gaze now, finding something terribly interesting to look at beneath them in the water. “Well, for one thing, it’s fun.”
“Please don’t say that means you’ve done it.”
She bites her lip.
“How?”
“I have what the humans call a rowboat. I do feel bad about stealing it, but I need it to take me to shore after I change into dry human clothes on the island. I feel bad about stealing those too—”
“How long have you been doing this?” His voice sounds gruffer than he intended.
She crosses her arms now, apparently in short supply of shame. “Why
don’t you ask your mother?”
“My mother?”
“Ask her where she gets her human treasures. You can’t really believe that she scavenges for them herself.”
Actually, he did. The idea that his mother knows about—no, encourages—Nalia’s escapades makes his insides catch fire. “This has got to stop,” he says before he can hold it back. Before he can twist the words into something more diplomatic.
The way her eyes pool into huge drops of water on her face. The way her mouth curves into a soft frown. The way her crossed arms seem to relax into a gentle self-hug, as if she’s trying to hold something in and comfort herself all at the same time. She’s disappointed in him.
Without another word, she slinks below the surface.
And he learns something new about Nalia. She is very fast. He cannot keep pace with her, but finds that the best he can do is not get left behind altogether. She moves farther and farther ahead, deflecting the attempts of others who try to greet her. They toss confused looks in his direction as they realize he’s actually chasing her, calling out to her. And she’s ignoring him.
He can’t imagine the size of the spectacle they’re making, but right now he doesn’t care. He knew they would eventually have their first fight. Triton’s trident, they started out fighting, didn’t they? He knew they couldn’t live in euphoria for their next two hundred years together. But he’d been expecting to argue about silly things first, like who is the better kisser, or what to name their first fingerling. Things that he’d be more than willing to surrender on.
But this fight is big. It’s not just about her interest in humans and he knows it. It’s about her freedom. And about how much control he’ll have over it once they’re mated. This is not a fight he’s anticipated. He’s always known she is fiercely independent, but he thought he could reason with her, coax her into seeing that there is always more than one point of view to any situation. And maybe he could, if the first words out of his mouth hadn’t sounded like some unbending command.
He curses under his breath. “Nalia, please stop,” he calls out. “Please.”