Cursed Tides

by Jade Kerrion

  She lunged at the remaining mermaid. Ashe did not have any talons, but fury was a perfectly adequate substitute. She closed one of her hands around the startled mermaid’s throat. With her other hand, she grabbed the mermaid’s hair and yanked it back. What the hell are you doing?

  The mermaid stared into Ashe’s eyes—swirling blue and green like tossing ocean waves, flecked with the gold of sunlight’s kisses. Eyes that uniquely marked the stamp of Beltiamatu royalty. Surprise rendered the mermaid speechless for a moment, before her voice flowed like music across the current. “You…you can’t be— You’re the king’s— You’re alive, and here? But how—?”

  What are you doing to the ocean?

  Flinching as if struck by the accusation, the mermaid snarled, “We’re changing the rules. You wanted to change the rules too, didn’t you? Only we are succeeding where you did not. Our lord will not be merciful. When I take you back to Shulim—”

  Don’t you have to catch me first? Ashe released her grip on the mermaid and swam toward the grotto.

  The mermaid, with her tail, was faster. She seized Ashe’s left leg. Ashe kicked hard but could not shake the mermaid off. A blast of air in the mermaid’s face, however, did the trick. The mermaid tumbled off, her talons tearing long gashes down Ashe’s leg.

  Playing fair was never part of the rules.

  This was not a race between a mermaid and a human, but a mermaid and a Daughter of Air.

  Even in the water, Ashe was not without power.

  The air molecules in the water rallied to Ashe’s command, rushing ahead of her to reduce friction and clustering behind her to slow the mermaid down, just enough to keep Ashe within arm’s reach.

  Getting caught would be inconvenient. Ashe could abandon her human form entirely and be as untouchable as the air itself, but the transformation required astral energy she could not afford to spare.

  Besides, the plan was to catch, not to be caught.

  The outlines of the grotto appeared in the distance. Ashe added more speed and hoped Varun was paying attention as she dashed past the underwater video cameras she had installed on the cave door. The artificial stone concealed the raised bars of the cage as the mermaid lunged in after her.

  The water vibrated as the cage door slammed down behind them both.

  Ahead of her, the second cage door was slowly closing.

  The mermaid’s snarl of fury gave Ashe a split-second warning before a sudden burst of speed sent the mermaid tumbling over her.

  Claws and fangs were in her face. The mermaid’s swirl of long hair made it hard for Ashe to get a fix on exactly what to attack. The mermaid’s powerful tail propelled them both forward, slamming Ashe’s back against the bars of the cage. “You should never have come back! You don’t belong here. You never did!”

  Ashe spun air molecules and released them in the narrow space between their bodies.

  The miniature underwater tornado ripped Ashe and the mermaid apart, flinging the startled mermaid away from her. Ashe darted toward the closing exit, slipping out under the door before it slammed down.

  “What are you doing?” The mermaid reached out between the bars of the cage, her fingers raking the water.

  Ashe hovered just out of the reach of the black talons. Saving the ocean.

  “Why now? You damned it when you left hundreds of years ago.” The mermaid’s accusations screeched into Ashe’s thoughts, audible despite the churning of water as the powerful gears on the Veritas began to pull the cage up and out of the water. “You! You did this!”

  Chapter 9

  Varun leaned over the rail of the Veritas. Heavy cloud cover concealed the moon’s silver glow, but the running lights on the deck provided enough light to see the outlines of the cage as it rose toward the surface. Behind him, the crane’s engines huffed and puffed. The gears cranked noisily. Absently, he made a note to have them greased.

  Ashe broke the surface right next to the ship. He offered her a hand as she climbed up the ladder. His eyes widened. “You’re hurt.”

  Ashe looked down at the gashes on her left leg. Crimson blood trailed like rivulets to stain the deck.

  Jinn, perched on the rail, screeched, “Just scratches.”

  “Your face too.”

  “Got closer than I liked. It’ll heal.” She did not bother to reach for a towel. The formfitting swimsuit she wore, he suspected, was more for his peace of mind than her comfort.

  Together, they watched as the cage was lifted partly out of the water, slowly revealing its captive.

  Varun’s jaw dropped open as his gaze took in the mermaid, from her strands of pale violet hair to the tip of her tail. “They’re real,” he murmured. He was not descended from a bunch of crazy kooks after all.

  Jinn spoke for Ashe. “Yes, and this one is diseased. Her skin should be blue-green, not off-white. Both her hair and tail have lost their luster.”

  “You mean they’re normally even prettier than this?”

  Ashe glared at him.

  He shook his head. “But I’ve never seen anything so lovely.” The mermaid was the perfect amalgamation of human beauty with the grace of a sea creature.

  “Remember that when she tries to gouge your eyes out. Mermaids have talons and fangs. They’re not afraid to use them. A solid flick of that tail can stun an orca. Just think about what it can do to a man.”

  “All right. Noted.” He turned to Ashe. “So, you said she was diseased?”

  “Yes. Their diseased blood is poisoning the ocean and creating the dead zones. I need to know why.”

  “Okay. I’ll have to tranq her to get a blood sample. We’ll have to lift the cage all way out of the water to get her into the lab. Can mermaids breathe in air?”

  “Yes, their lungs are more efficient than human lungs.”

  “Did not know that,” he murmured. And how do you know so much about them, he wondered, but did not voice his thoughts aloud. He pressed a button to raise the cage entirely out of the water and reached for his stun gun.

  Within the cage, the mermaid’s eyes widened with alarm. She cowered in the far reaches of the cage and curled into a fetal ball.

  Varun grimaced. The mermaid may indeed have been diseased, but he still felt like the gun-toting bad guy.

  He aimed carefully and pulled the trigger.

  The dart shot out.

  The mermaid uttered a hollow moan that sounded like old trees creaking in an ancient grove. It was unlike anything Varun could have imagined coming from so delicate a creature.

  Ashe rolled her eyes. Jinn mimicked her. “She’s faking it.”

  “Are you sure? How do you know?”

  “Because they’re tough buggers.”

  The moan rose into the wail of a haunted forest.

  Varun winced. “Aren’t mermaids supposed to have beautiful voices?”

  “Only underwater. You’re mistaking them with sirens.”

  “And are sirens real too?”

  Ashe looked at him, her eyebrows furrowed. He could almost imagine her saying, “Are you crazy?”

  But he was. He had just tranqed a mermaid. He would never have, in his entire lifetime, imagined he would have done such a thing.

  The mermaid suddenly slumped over. Varun cursed under his breath. “That was fast. Too fast. It shouldn’t have worked that quickly. I must have overestimated her weight—”

  Ashe shook her head. “They have more effective blood circulation systems than humans. The drug just worked faster, which means it will also wear out faster. Let’s move her into your lab.”

  When Varun lifted the mermaid, he realized he had not overestimated her weight. She was not heavy, but her long tail was unwieldy. With Ashe’s help, however, he was able to carry the mermaid into the laboratory and strap her down to the table.

  Finding her veins was not difficult. They stood out like blue rivers against her pale, clammy skin. “Is this normal?” he asked Ashe. “This layer of mucous?”

  She shook her head.


  “I’ll get a sample, then. It’s probably worth checking out.” He scraped some of the mucous off the mermaid’s skin into a sterilized petri dish. He also took some skin cell samples before reaching for a syringe.

  Finding the vein had been the easy part.

  Extracting the mermaid’s blood was ridiculously difficult. It was viscous, and resisted all attempts to enter a syringe. In the end, Varun had to apply a tourniquet and squeeze a few drops of black blood out of the mermaid.

  “Not normal either?” He looked to Ashe.

  She shook her head.

  He nodded, the motion tight and tense. “How do you know so much about what’s normal in a mermaid?”

  She shrugged and refused to reply. Jinn, perched on the doorknob, meticulously preened his feathers as if grooming were the most important thing in the world.

  For several minutes, Varun worked in silence, preparing the samples he had obtained for testing. When the machines were finally whirring through their analysis, he turned around to look at the mermaid on the examination table. “I might have to apologize to my father, my grandfather, and their fathers before them.” A smile touched his lips. “I dismissed them as crazy kooks for believing.” He did not look at Ashe, but it was comforting to know that she stood next to him, listening. “There’s an old story in my family about mermaids. One of my great-grandfathers—it might have been about three hundred years ago—was on a ship out on the Levantine Sea when a storm came upon them in the night, so violent, so vicious, that it ripped the ship apart. Most people onboard the ship died, but not my grandfather. He was found the next day on the beach, almost delirious. He kept saying that a woman with a fish’s tail had pulled him from the sinking ship and carried him to shore.

  “He couldn’t put a name or a face to the woman; it had been too dark to see clearly. No one believed him, and in time, he stopped believing it too. Who knows what happens to a mind that believes it’s dying? Several months later, though, he saved a young woman from the sea, or at least he thought he did. He found her, naked and bedraggled, on the shore. She was mute; she couldn’t say who she was or where her family was, so he brought her back to his home.

  “She was beautiful, so the story goes, her grace unmatched. He was fond of her but not so fond as to break off his engagement to the daughter of a wealthy merchant. As his wedding day approached, the woman he had saved grew sadder, more distant. On his wedding night—it was early the next day, actually, just before dawn—he snapped awake and saw the woman standing over him, a dagger in her hand.

  “Perhaps she had come to kill him, but he knew that it wasn’t his waking that had saved his life. He saw, in her eyes, that she had already decided not to kill him. There was no anger, no hatred, just profound grief. She dropped the dagger and ran out to the cliffs. He chased after her, begging her to stop, but she leaped high and dove into the water. The moment her hands touched the water, he saw the most amazing thing. Her body transformed—her legs melding into a mermaid’s tail. And then she was gone, vanished beneath the sea foam.” Varun took a deep breath. “He never saw her again even though he searched for her every day for the rest of his life.”

  Ashe’s eyebrows formed a skeptical arch.

  Varun continued. “He realized then that he hadn’t imagined the woman who had saved him from the sea. He lived out his many years in regret, always wondering what he had allowed to get away from him, what he had been too blind to see. His obsession with the mermaid wrecked his marriage. He and his wife stayed together, even had children together, but their marriage—which had all the potential for contentment, if not joy—fell apart on their first morning as husband and wife. Much to her dismay, he passed on his fervent conviction that the mermaid was real to his children and his grandchildren, and they passed it on.” He shrugged. “Generations of Zale have grown up believing the mermaid story as absolute fact, and never laid eyes on one. Me? I dismissed it as a fantasy, and guess who gets to actually see one? Life is crazy that way, isn’t it?”

  Ashe said nothing and did nothing, but the expression in her eyes seemed unusually compassionate.

  “How long do mermaids live?” Varun asked. “Do you think this one might know the one who had saved my great-great-whatever-grandfather?”

  Ashe shrugged.

  Varun swallowed hard through the tightness in his throat and the chill stiffening his spine. “Are there many of them?”

  She nodded.

  “Entire communities underwater?”

  She nodded again.

  Varun inhaled shakily, his worldview trembling on an unstable foundation. “How have they remained hidden from humans for so long?”

  Ashe held out her hand, and Jinn flew from his perch to rest on her shoulder. He affectionately nuzzled her cheek with his beak. Her fingers flicked, and the parrot spoke. “They have not been hidden. Human stories about mermaids are almost as old as time.”

  “Yet never verified.”

  “It is only in the age of science and burgeoning technology that verifying things started to matter. Before, it was enough to have a story.”

  “We’ve had hundreds of years of science and oceanography.”

  Ashe snorted. “Those short excursions in the deep-water craft don’t count. Do you have any idea how vast the ocean truly is and how little of it man has actually seen? You’ve seen nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Why? A story wouldn’t be enough for you. That’s not the kind of man you are.”

  He stared at her, astonished by her blunt insight into him. “No,” he said slowly. “But I want to hear them.”

  “I have no time for stories, and neither do you. I have a ship to captain, and you are trying to save the ocean.” She turned away from him.

  He grabbed her arm before she could leave.

  Jinn squawked and dive-bombed Varun.

  “Hey!” He brought up his arms to shield his face.

  The parrot, huffing indignantly, retreated to Ashe’s shoulder. Varun saw that Ashe was laughing, her mouth open in a smile more sincerely delighted and amused than any he had ever seen on her. It transformed her from perpetually annoyed to stunningly beautiful. Her fingers danced, the motion so graceful it was almost hypnotic. “He’s protective.”

  “I figured that,” Varun said. “I just…I want to know what else is out there. You want my help, and I’ll provide it—anything you need, anytime—but I may not always do the best thing, or even the right thing, if I don’t know as much as I can about the situation. This mermaid only scrapes the surface of what exists in the ocean. There are other variables that will affect any decision we make and any action we take to fix what’s wrong with the ocean. I need the facts, Ashe, all of them. We can’t screw up. We can’t afford it. I’m not going to be like my grandfather—blind to what stood in front of me, and then mourn over a picture for the rest of my life.”

  Ashe stiffened. “A picture?”

  “He drew pictures of her to try to preserve her memory. At least one still remains. It’s a family heirloom.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “Once. When I was young.” He frowned, trying to reform the memory from the bored indifference of the child he had been. “It was just a headshot. She didn’t look anything like a mermaid to me. She seemed quite ordinary, but then, I hadn’t been looking for magic.”

  “There is nothing magical about a mermaid. They are physical beings adapted for life underwater.”

  “How did that mermaid save my grandfather?”

  “Probably by being a better swimmer than he was. It comes with having a tail and being able to breathe underwater.”

  “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone more detached or clinical than I am—until now. Until you.” He frowned. “What about that rumor about a mermaid’s kiss?”

  “Which rumor is that?”

  “That it bestows the ability to breathe underwater.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Really? You believe that?”

 
“I don’t know what to believe unless you tell me.”

  “You wouldn’t believe anything until you could touch it with your hands.” She shrugged to dismiss him.

  “Then the power of a mermaid’s kiss is just a rumor.”

  “Yes, it is. There is nothing magical about a mermaid, Varun. I’ll say this one last time: They are physical beings adapted to life in the ocean. There is a logical and scientific explanation for anything they can do, and they cannot bestow on human lungs the ability to magically breathe underwater.”

  He had to have imagined it then—Ashe’s kiss—the sudden infusion of air into his lungs when he knew he was drowning, dying. Mermaids could not do that, but Ashe wasn’t a mermaid. So, what then, was she?

  And what was her stake in the ocean’s fiasco?

  Footsteps sounded on the metal corridor outside the door, then stopped in front of it. A fist rapped sharply on the laboratory door. Ondine’s voice rang out. “Is anyone in there?”

  Her heartbeat skittering, although she did not know why, Ashe stepped out of the laboratory and closed the door behind her. Jinn, perched on Ashe shoulder, glared at Ondine and clicked his beak.

  The other woman’s eyes widened, and she peeked past Ashe’s shoulder, as if expecting the door to reopen. “Is Varun—? Where are we? We’re no longer in the Sargasso Sea, right?”

  Ashe’s fingers flicked. Jinn managed a bored squawk. “Correct.”

  “You said there were storms outside of the sea. Why did we leave?”

  “Were you planning on living the rest of your life on this ship?”

  “You didn’t tell me you were taking the ship away from the sea.”

  Ashe’s eyes narrowed. “I wasn’t aware you possessed any skills critical for navigating this ship from the Sargasso Sea. This isn’t a planned cruise, Ondine. I do not inform my guests when I make a decision that changes our destination or schedule.”

  “But Varun wasn’t done with the Sargasso Sea. He said he needed more samples—” Ondine’s jaw dropped when the door opened and Varun stepped out. “You were…” Her gaze shuttled between Varun and Ashe as a slow flush crept up her cheeks. “You were in there with her?” Incredulity and fury drove her voice several pitches higher. “Are you—? Do you think that just because you’re the captain of the ship you can take whatever you want, including seducing my fiancé?”