Born of Water: An Elemental Origins Novel

by A. L. Knorr

  It was good that he'd put it that way. At least he thought that I was hiking along the shoreline and picking trash up off the beach instead of dragging the net along miles of ocean.

  The trash tended to gather in eddies. I used my sensitive tail to detect where the currents on the top of the water met, creating large, slow moving whirlpools which collected floating refuse.

  "If I have to. I have to take the truck back. The dump closes at three," I said and headed around to the driver's side. I hoped he wouldn't kick up a fuss at me driving without an international licence. At least they drove on the right hand side of the road here so it was easy for me.

  He followed me around to the driver's side. "Targa," he said, and the sincerity in his voice gave me pause. I had a feeling that my lack of a license wasn't on his mind. "I know you've been avoiding me, but will you please just let me talk to you for a minute?"

  I took off my glasses and rubbed at the tender spot on the bridge of my nose. I looked him in the eyes, expectantly, "So talk." My human self knew that I was being unnecessarily rude, but my siren self didn't care, even if my heart was straining through my ribcage towards him. Sirens didn't get their mates by being polite. Manners had gone from a necessity of life to something that just took too much energy.

  As soon as I'd looked at him, he stopped approaching, and something in his face changed. "You... look different," he said, slowly, his eyes taking me in.

  I sighed, but didn't say anything. He hadn't asked a question, and I didn't feel like making up some dumb excuse.

  "How are you even paler than when you first arrived? Haven't you been spending every flipping day outside?" he asked, his eyes scanning down my legs. "You haven't been in your suite, that's for sure."

  I chose to redirect. "Did you come here to talk about my skin tone?" I responded, drily.

  "No, I didn't." He sighed. "I came to say, first of all, that it's not necessary for you to avoid me like I have some contagious disease. And second of all..." he paused, looking as though he was searching for words. Then, "This is really dumb. I get it, you played a prank on me to show off to your friends. You apologized. Can we just put it behind us now and be friends? I miss hanging out with my Canadian buddy."

  Now he sounded more like the Antoni I knew, the platonic one that I'd spent the first week with. I wished that I could go back to my old feelings, the new ones were so complicated. I took a breath, feeling myself softening, my defences coming down just a little. I was infinitely grateful that the wind was blowing his scent away from me.

  "You're not mad? What I did wasn't nice," I said.

  He shrugged. "I'm not mad. I was a teenager once too. We've all done stupid shit." I suppressed a laugh. It was the first time I'd ever heard him say 'shit' and it sounded funny coming out of his mouth.

  We stood in silence for a minute. He finally raised his eyebrows at me. "Friends?"

  "Friends," I agreed. "But, you know the job is more than half over. I'll be going home soon anyway."

  "Yes, the salvage is going at an unprecedented rate. I was hoping you wouldn't bring that up," he sighed. "Look Targa, I do feel something for you, something amazing that I've never felt for anyone before. And I'm trying not to imagine how I'll feel when you go home. If what you said was true..." he trailed off.

  So, he still wasn't convinced. I couldn't tell if I was happy or sad about that. Everything was muddled.

  "If what you said was true then I'm happy just to have met you. You are truly one of a kind and I can only hope that there will be a woman in my future who makes my heart feel like it does when I'm around you."

  This sweet monologue was so humble, so vulnerable and so honest that it made me feel like a complete shit. How could I think that the desire he had shown me wasn't real after a speech like that? He cared about me enough to let me go because that was what he thought I wanted.

  I wanted to tackle him into the sand and cover him with kisses. I wanted to tell him that he made my heart want to explode out of my chest. He made violins come out of my throat for crying out loud. I wanted to scream with frustration.

  Instead, I lied to him again. "I hope that woman is in your future too." Something wilted inside of me like a blossom charred by the sun. What was I supposed to take away from this? Was I even doing the right thing?

  He stepped forward to give me a hug and I turned away from him and opened the truck door. "Now, help me get rid of this heinous load of crap, please." I got in and shut the door.

  For a moment he didn't move and I could see him in my periphery, through the open driver's side window. I couldn't turn my head and look at him, this was already hard enough. I turned towards the passenger's side and grabbed a bottle of water. A hot tear slipped down my cheek and I angrily rubbed it away. I opened the water bottle and chugged it.

  "Ok," he said, quietly. "I'll follow you so you don't have to come all the way back here and drop me off."

  I nodded and he disappeared.

  As he followed me the few miles to the dump, I couldn't stop the flow of hot tears. I wasn't sobbing; my eyes just wouldn't stop watering. This was new. Was this the way mermaids wept?

  When we got there I had to make a show of splashing my face with bottled water to make it damp so it covered my tears.

  As we unloaded the trash together, I could feel Antoni watching me but I still couldn't look at him, and I kept my sunglasses on.

  I didn't feel strong enough to keep denying what I wanted most. Only a few more weeks to go, I thought to myself. But the emotion that came with that thought was not relief but heartbreak.

  Twenty-Six

  After the day on the beach, Antoni was back to his old self. By which I mean he was perfectly behaved and professional. I stopped avoiding him, and there were no more seduction attempts from either side. I made sure that I kept my physical distance whenever we spent time together, which wasn't as much as before because I still wanted to be in the ocean as much I could, and it was hard to be around him.

  I was running out of time. The job was winding down and we were scheduled to leave in a little over a week.

  Towards the end of the job, I'd stopped going out to The Sybellen with my mom at night. She said there wasn't much left to do and she was happy to do it on her own. She told me to enjoy my time in the Baltic before we headed home, and to build up my strength as much as I could, so I'd been swimming all day everyday.

  I collapsed on the couch in our suite with a cup of tea one evening. It was after dinner and I was full and tired. It was one of those evenings where I felt the deep exhaustion from the last few days' activities and suspected that I'd be dead to the world for 16 hours or so. My mom was in a meeting to talk through a few things about the final schedule with the team.

  My eyelids had just begun to droop when the door to our suite slammed open and my mom came in. I jumped and my eyes snapped open, my sleepiness vanished. "Mom!" I said, my heart skittering.

  She had a hard look on her face so I knew she was upset about something, but she winced and said, "Sorry, sunshine," and closed the door with more care than she'd opened it. "I didn't realize you were sleeping."

  "Such manners," I said, impressed with her polite apology. Interesting, I thought to myself. Since we'd arrived in Poland, my mother's manners had improved, while mine had degenerated. She'd been spending a lot of time in nearly salt-less water, a huge change from the Atlantic, while I'd gone from human to siren. I supposed it made some kind of strange sense.

  "What's wrong?" I asked, pushing myself up straighter and setting my teacup on the coffee table. "Do you want some tea?"

  "No thanks." She came in and sat in the chair across from me. She put her fingers to her temples as though she had a headache. "It's Eric. He's quite a piece of work."

  "Why, what did he do now?" I asked. Eric had been making himself a thorn in everyone's side for weeks. He'd been surly and disagreeable, he been distracted and disorganized in meetings and he'd been rude to both the Novak employees and his ow
n teammates.

  At one point, when I had gone to the beach to help the team unload artifacts at the end of the day, I heard angry voices as I came over the bluff. It was Jeff and Eric, who were supposedly friends. Jeff was saying, "Get out of here, Eric. You need to cool down."

  I could see them standing on the beach and facing off. Jeff gestured to some men who were bringing gear off The Brygida, the Novak vessel they took out to the site of The Sybellen everyday. There was a mix of Bluejacket and Novak employees among them.

  "They've got nothing to do with your problems, so you either figure out a way to be civil, or you get on the first plane home. We don't need your garbage attitude. You're spoiling a good thing, mate." Jeff's voice was harsh but there was also sympathy in it, like he knew why Eric was behaving the way he was, he just didn't think it was right.

  Eric had planted a hand on Jeff's chest and shoved. "What, are you giving orders now?"

  "That's enough you two," said Simon as he emerged from The Brygida's cockpit. "Honestly, sometimes I feel like a babysitter. Eric, we already talked about this. Go back to the estate, you're done for the day."

  Eric had stormed off the beach, muttering to himself. He'd passed by me without even noticing that I was there. As soon as he'd left, the mood of the team completely changed, it was like sunshine after a storm. Soon, they were laughing and talking as we worked, me among them.

  I imagined that my mom had been dealing with something similar, but normally she never let stuff like that get to her. "I thought you didn't really care about your colleagues, Mom? What's got you so riled up?" I asked.

  "Eric's been an jerk, I mean he's never been a bowl of peaches, but he's really cranked up his inner asshole lately. I've always had the label of being the prickliest person on the team and that's the way I'd like to keep it. But Eric's become a real bastard." She sighed and leaned back in the chair. "Simon negotiated performance bonuses with Martinius before he signed the contract, he always does that. Payment should be partially made based on how successful the dive is and we're always successful so it's good business to do it this way. The client is happy, too, since it means that if they don't get what they want, then it doesn't cost them so much," she explained.

  "My guess is that you're the reason the guys get those bonuses every time," I commented. Her team would never know how much they had to be grateful to my mom for, and for her trouble she was either ostracized or hit on.

  She gave me a tired smile. "Yes, I suppose I am." Her smile faded. "Since the dive has been going off like clockwork, Eric has been harassing Simon to renegotiate the terms of the contract."

  "What? He can't do that," I said. "Even I know that."

  "I know. And he knows we can't and wouldn't even if we could, so I don't know why he's got this insane idea. He pestered Simon about it to the point where Simon blew up at him on the deck of The Brygida one day when we were working out at the wreck. Simon has been so happy to have gotten this job that it seemed like nothing could get him down but I guess Eric finally frayed his last nerve."

  "Did he stop, then?" I asked, pulling the teabag out of my cup and setting on the saucer. "Eric, I mean."

  "No, he got worse!" she said, throwing her hands up. "Tonight at dinner, he actually brought it up in front of Martinius. Can you believe that?"

  "He brought up money in front of Martinius again?" I said, shocked. "What did he say?" I was horrified and embarrassed for Simon and the team. I was surprised by how bothered my mother was about it though; I'd never seed her ruffled by dissension at work before.

  "Martinius was congratulating the team on some of the artifacts we'd managed to bring up," she started.

  "Thanks to you," I interrupted. "What were they?" I imagined gold bars or a tiara encrusted with jewels.

  "A set of hand-carved chair backs," she said, brightening. "Actually they are really cool."

  "That is so not what I expected you to say, but go on," I said, amused.

  "Anyway, Big-Mouth jumps in and says that since the haul has been even better than expected, that the contract should be amended to stipulate that a percentage will be paid based on the value of each artifact. Not only that, that there should be an additional bonus given if we recover every single item on the manifest because that never happens in diving, period."

  I was horrified but also amazed. "Are you going to recover every single item on the manifest?" If anyone knew the answer to that it was my mom.

  "Yes, we are. The team doesn't know it yet but I do. I've already located all the items and planned out how they're going to find everything and when. It's in the bag. All except for one thing, but it's not on the manifest, so it doesn't count."

  "What's the one thing that's not on the manifest?" I asked, curious.

  "The bell," she said, snagging my cup and taking a sip.

  "Oh right. Martinius said that at the dinner on the first night," I recalled, and my mom nodded.

  "But really, what Eric suggested was not only completely ridiculous but insulting and in poor taste. I mean, poor Martinius," she said. "The guy doesn't deserve that."

  "Wow, Mom," I said, genuinely impressed. "We might make a human out of you yet. I've never seen such empathy. And I don't think I've ever heard you condemn someone for 'poor taste' before."

  She laughed. "Must be the lack of salt. The Baltic is leeching all the salt out of my system with every dive. Soon I'll be a big softie just like you."

  I laughed too. "I don't know about that. Sometimes it feels like I'm well on my way to becoming the prickly-pear that you used to be. I did mean to ask you about the whole salt thing, actually. I've never swam anywhere else, is it really different swimming in the Atlantic?" I asked, draining the last of my tea.

  "Yes, it's night and day," she said, easily.

  "What do you mean?" My curiosity about swimming in saltier water was already piqued but I wanted to prepare myself better for what to expect.

  A thoughtful look took over her face. "Do you remember when your dad and I took you to that ranch outside of Saltford one summer?" she asked. "The one that your dad's friend owned, what was his name..." She paused. "Grant, that was it."

  I nodded. "One Tree Farms," I said, wondering where she was going with this. "They were into horse racing."

  She nodded. "Do you remember the little Shetland pony that you took a ride on?"

  I laughed at the memory. "Yes, Shortcake. I was amazed that a pony could come in pink, she was a dream come true for a little girl."

  The pony wasn't actually pink but she was as close as a horse could get. Her hide and mane were a strawberry blonde colour, and she was cute and tiny. I had gone crazy as soon as I'd seen her, begging my parents for a ride.

  "Right," my mom continued, smiling. "And what was she like to ride?"

  "She was a breeze. I was a bit nervous that she'd run away with me but the owner told me that she never misbehaves with little kids on her back. And she didn't, it was like she knew that it was my first time on horseback. She really took care of me."

  "Yes, exactly. Now do you remember the one that your dad rode?" she asked, cocking an eyebrow.

  "Oh," I said, and my eyebrows crept up my forehead as understanding dawned. "Esquire." I said, recalling the animal's name.

  A vision of the huge bay stallion filled my mind's eye. He'd been a gorgeous creature. He was a bay – a glossy brown colour with black legs, mane, and tail. He'd also had three white socks up to the ankles. He'd been kept in his own paddock away from the other horses because he was as fiery and aggressive as stallions were known to be. He was a two-year old and being trained to compete.

  The owners of One Tree were involved in a horse-racing event called steeplechase. It was a dangerous sport requiring the horses to leap huge fences with water troughs on the other side. Esquire had shown promise in the event because he was powerful, a great jumper, fearless, and full of the grit that a champion needed. My dad's eyes had lit up at the sight of him. Grant agreed to let my dad take Esquire out f
or a ride while we all watched nervously from the fence.

  I had perched up on the top of a fencepost holding onto my mom's neck. She steadied me with her arm around my hips as we watched dad mount the stallion. My father had been a good rider, he'd grown up on a farm just outside of Saltford and was comfortable around horses, although it had been years since he'd ridden.

  We watched as he took Esquire around the training track a few times, first just at a trot and eventually at full speed. I watched wide-eyed as Esquire's hooves flew and clumps of dirt spewed out from underneath him, leaving chewed up track in his wake.

  I'll never forget the pounding sound of the animal, the incredible surge of speed he gave down the home stretch, legs moving like pistons, driving his considerable weight forward. His nose stretched out front and his nostrils snorting and flaring.

  When my dad had finally slowed him down, Esquire had reared and pawed the air as though he didn't ever want to stop running. His flanks were wet and his ribs were heaving. I remembered being frightened that dad would get bucked off but instead he got the animal under control, with some effort, then cantered the beast up to the fence, keeping a safe enough distance from us. My father was not afraid; rather his face was alive with energy and joy. He was breathing hard, even though it wasn't he who'd done the running.

  I had snuggled close to my mom as the animal had approached. The stallion had looked straight at me – no, through me. He looked as though he'd ridden straight up from hell and he'd come for my soul. I couldn't have put words to it then, I was far too young. But I felt the power and spirit of the animal so keenly that day, and I'd had an intense respect for horses ever since.

  "What are you saying?" I asked. "That the Baltic is Shortcake and the Atlantic is Esquire?" I wasn't sure if it was dread or excitement pooling in my belly, probably both.

  "It's a poor metaphor," said my mom, "but basically, yes."

  "No," I said, shaking my head as I recalled the look in the stallion's eyes. "I think it's the perfect metaphor. And on that note, I do believe I shall turn in. Thanks for the terrifying comparison."