Revel

by Maurissa Guibord

  “It smells the blood!” Jax shouted.

  The Icer was closer now, moving more purposefully toward us. My chest contracted with fear as I tried to think. I wasn’t going to let that thing near Gran again. I wiped my hand against her cheek and it came away wet and red. I stood up and took a step to the side.

  “Hey!”

  The warty head with its expressionless eyes turned toward me.

  “Yeah. Over here!”

  I plunged farther away from Gran, into the water, shouting as loudly as I could. Jax yelled something at me but I couldn’t hear him.

  “Hey, you! Over here. Come and get me!” I screamed, and splashed and waved my blood-scented hand until I saw the thing veer away from Gran and come at me.

  The water washed over me and I took comfort in the dark embrace. I ducked down deep, my frenzy overtaking logic. As if I could hide from it here. This is a sea creature, Delia. I kicked back hard, swimming away as it surged toward me. Filmy eyes with a central dark circle of black loomed closer. The mouth gaped, forming a ring of glistening teeth. The yellow glow of the luminescent tentacle lit the inside of its mouth. The red, rugated gullet contracted obscenely, as if it was already anticipating the food to come.

  As I saw the horror that was going to end me, a single coherent thought shot through my mind. It was clear and as brilliantly intense as a laser.

  Hate.

  My hate for this creature was pure. There was no fear. It had attacked Gran. I wished it dead.

  I inhaled deep, through my mouth.

  “Die!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

  The Icer’s head exploded in a burst of yellow gore.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Icer’s body had only an oozing stump of neck left between its hulking shoulders. It pulsed blood as it sank into the water, leaving only a trail of yellow, glowing bubbles behind.

  What just happened?

  The water was quiet. My frantic breaths grated the air. I spun, looking for whatever had killed the Icer. It looked like a gunshot had taken its head off. Had Jax done it somehow? Had Sean come back to the beach?

  Jax waded into the water. Blood streamed from the gash in his shoulder. He stared at the gruesome remains of the Icer that floated past him on the waves.

  “Did you do that?” I panted. “How? Never mind. I need to get Gran out of here. Get help. Her face, Jax. I think it’s her eye. It nearly killed her!” I practically bounded through the water toward the shore.

  Jax put a hand on my shoulder, stopping me. “You’re safe.”

  “I know. I’m okay. But Gran …” I shifted away, impatient, trying to move past him.

  “Wait.” Jax bracketed me with two strong arms. He pulled me to him, wrapping me in a sheltering embrace; then he laid his palm on my chest. It was a gesture I remembered from the first time he touched me. It had calmed me then, just as it did now. “Shh,” he whispered close to my ear. “Your grandmother is alive. She will recover. But you have to calm yourself before you go to her.” He paused. “Do you have any idea what you just did?”

  “Wh-what? No.”

  What I did?

  Maybe I did know, but my brain couldn’t accept it. My teeth began to chatter and my legs felt like they weren’t there anymore.

  “You killed the Icer with your voice,” said Jax. “I should have known, from the very beginning, that first night.” He drew back and touched my hair, my cheeks, my arms, as if taking a gentle inventory to make sure I was okay. “There was something about your voice that drew me. You’re a siren, Delia. Listen to me. This is very important.…”

  Jax’s voice was coming from far away. So far away that I couldn’t hear the words. But he’d said that Gran would be okay. And I believed him. That was enough.

  My vision contracted into a small dark tunnel.

  And then I was gone.

  CHAPTER 25

  I woke up in the bed in my mother’s room. The gentle rumble of the sea was a soothing white noise, and the scent of roses wafted over me. I sighed, nestling deeper under the covers. I lay there for a long time, warm and only half awake, trying to remember the events of the night before. Slowly, the snatches of a bad dream came back to me.

  Blind, milky eyes. Gaping mouth. Teeth. Blood.

  You killed it, Delia. With your voice.

  Restlessly, I turned. My muscles ached. I was sore all over.

  I opened my eyes, cold sweat dampening my forehead. I was still wearing the Revel dress. It was dry but dirty and clung to me in gritty, wrinkled bunches.

  “Gran?” I shouted, sitting up in the bed.

  “Down here. No need to yell.”

  I could have cried with the relief of hearing her gruff voice. I stumbled downstairs to Gran’s room. She was in bed. A bulky white bandage covered her right eye, and her head was wrapped with gauze, obscuring the entire side of her face.

  “Oh my God, Gran,” I said, rushing over to put my arms around her. “Your eye!”

  She shook her head. When I started to cry, she patted me on the arm. “There, there. No time for blubbering. My other one’s sharp enough for two. I’ll be fine.”

  “It must hurt. Do you have something for the pain? We should take you to a hospital.”

  “I’m fine, Delia,” she said. “Ben Deare brought a boatload of fancy medical supplies over and has had Flora fussing over me for the last two days. That’s how long you’ve been asleep. My whole dresser over there’s cluttered up with antibiotics, morphine pills, sterile bandages. Makes me look like some kind of dope fiend.”

  I tried to smile but couldn’t.

  “But I’m gonna be fine,” she said firmly. “Jax, that’s the First One’s name, isn’t it? The one that pulled the Icer off me?”

  I nodded.

  “He told me what happened. What you did.” She folded her hands together. “He said you’re a siren and that there hasn’t been anyone like you in these waters for hundreds of years.” She huffed. “I could’ve told him that.”

  I sat on the edge of Gran’s bed and smoothed the coverlet over her. “I don’t want to think about that right now. I can’t.”

  “You’re gonna have to. You saved yourself from that thing,” said Gran, tilting her head in a cautious way to look at me. Her left eye was just as strong and commanding as ever. “And you saved me. Whatever it is you’ve got, it’s nothing to run away from. You need to use it.”

  Standing up, I looked down at myself. “What I need is a shower,” I muttered.

  Gran nodded approvingly. “That’s my girl.”

  I collected some clean clothes and went into the bathroom. It felt so good to peel off the sandy dress. Looking at the soiled and torn garment on the tile floor, I had a feeling its Revel days were over. It certainly wasn’t going to get passed down to anybody. Stepping into the shower, I lifted my face to the warm spray of water, grateful for the cleansing, soothing pressure. My arms ached and the muscles in my abdomen throbbed as if I’d done a hundred crunches. With a washcloth I scrubbed the remnants of the Revel symbols from my skin. Rubbing the soap over my belly, my fingers suddenly stopped. Something was different. I looked down and swept away the suds.

  I took a breath in on a hiss.

  About an inch to either side of my belly button, my skin was sliced open.

  Maybe my brain just refused to accept what I saw, but my first thought was that I’d cut myself somehow. I had that sickening feeling that comes after you stub your toe, right before the pain comes. But it didn’t come; there was no pain. The two cuts just felt raw and sensitive. Open.

  Trembling, my fingers slipped on the controls as I shut off the shower and stared down at my abdomen. Where my skin was split, tiny, clear bubbles formed and popped. I took in a surprised breath and saw the slits pucker and lift. Felt the air ache inside me. Felt the thirst of those tiny mouths. For water.

  They were the same slits I’d seen on Jax’s abdomen.

  Okay.

  I had gills.

  I stood in front
of the mirror and surveyed the slits that enclosed my belly button like long, pink parentheses. “This is just gross,” I said softly, tilting my head. I had holes in me. New apertures that opened and closed when they wanted to. My body had betrayed me, changed without my consent.

  What was next? The fin, I supposed.

  Maybe even scales. Or a tail.

  I felt myself breathing hard with distress, imagining the freakish possibilities, and as I did, the gills fluttered, breathing too.

  Don’t hyperventilate.

  Then I let out a semi-hysterical laugh at the irony of that.

  I had gills. Hyperventilating was probably what I did best.

  The first thing I did was run down and show Gran. She was unfazed, of course, and told me that everything would be fine, everything happens for a reason, and I would be healthy and strong, no matter what changes I went through. All the nonsense that I desperately needed to hear.

  I dropped my head to her lap, feeling comfort in the warm bulk of her.

  “How did you get to be so brave, Gran?” I whispered.

  I felt her long exhale as she ran a hand over my hair. “I’m not brave. I just keep going.”

  “But what if I keep going?” I asked, closing my eyes tight. “What if I get, I don’t know, scales or a tail? Or another head?”

  Gran sounded tired but still had the same wry spark to her tone when she gave a gentle yank on my curls and answered, “Then I’m sure it’ll suit you just fine.”

  “Do you think Mom knew what I was going to be?”

  A monster.

  “I don’t think so,” said Gran. “How could she? She just didn’t want the life here. For either of you. But I’m proud of you, Delia. Proud of the way you spoke up on the beach. You be what you are.”

  “What should I do?” I asked.

  Gran reflected. “Times like this, I usually make coffee.”

  CHAPTER 26

  I was glad to take care of Gran while she recovered. Her right eye was lost, the mangled skin of the lid healing in a thickened red scar. Helping her gave me something to concentrate on other than turning into a merwoman-siren-demigod, or whatever the heck I was. I took on most of the housework, and when it was time to go down to the gardens, I drove the golf cart for her. This made Gran furious, but with sight in only one eye, she had terrible depth perception and would have run us right off the path.

  She still collected the trapweed and insisted on feeding the Glaukos creatures herself from the high bluff. It was as if she didn’t trust anyone else to do the job. We also brought a basket full of the resinous leaves home to be dried on a wooden rack and stored in airtight containers in the cellar.

  The only thing I didn’t like doing for Gran was taking the occasional trip into town for supplies. If I thought I’d been treated coolly when I first arrived on Trespass, then this was the Arctic tundra. No one said hello or waved. They didn’t even look at me if they could help it. And they crossed the road to avoid me. I knew the islanders weren’t accustomed to mixing with the First Ones. But they knew me. Sort of.

  Were they afraid?

  It couldn’t have been what happened with the Icer, because nobody except Jax and Gran had seen me kill it. The Icer’s body had been discovered, washed up on shore the next morning. Everyone just assumed it had been killed by a Glaukos. As for how the Icer had gotten through the Hundred Hands, Mayor Ed was apparently launching an investigation and had placed, as he put it, a moratorium on swimming for all islanders.

  Though I decided that his swimming ban didn’t apply to me, because I was a First One now. Plus I was pretty sure Mayor Ed wouldn’t mind at all if an Icer got me.

  So the islanders weren’t shunning me because I had this siren voice thing. They didn’t know about that. It was just the fact that I was Aitros, a First One. Sean had certainly made it clear that he saw me differently. How had he put it? Oh yeah. I was on “their side.”

  Terrific. Now we had sides.

  I tried a few times to find Sean at his house, but his mother always told me he wasn’t there. It made me angry that Sean could turn his back on me like this. I was still the same person inside. Despite my extra … attributes. Zuzu and Reilly didn’t come over either. Not even to see Gran, and that hurt. Everyone on the island knew by now that she’d been injured. They’d seen me assisting her, seen the patch that she would wear over her eye for the rest of her life. Just because they wanted to avoid me, my grandmother shouldn’t have been punished too.

  I thought of going over to Zuzu’s house, or to the dock to look for Sean, but I was afraid of making things worse. On top of everything, we were still waiting to hear what the fallout would be from Revel.

  So far, according to Ben, the Council had remained silent. Just as Jax had said, I wasn’t a Lander, so the rules about offering myself as tribute didn’t really apply. Apparently they hadn’t yet decided what was to be done with me.

  Gee, didn’t that have a familiar ring to it.

  Zuzu’s insult to the First One called Darius, on the other hand, was a punishable offense. Not physical punishment, thank goodness, but her family wouldn’t be allowed to take their share of supplies from the deliveries the First Ones made to Wreck Beach for a year. Gran said that they would be able to manage; the other islanders would look out for them and make sure they had what they needed.

  It seemed ridiculous to me that Zuzu’s whole family could be punished just because she called someone a jerk. It wasn’t fair. I would’ve liked to tell Zuzu that, or done something to help, but maybe she wouldn’t want my help. Maybe she thought I was responsible for the whole mess.

  I wouldn’t really blame her.

  It was one week after Revel when the nor’easter struck. Gran had an old-fashioned-looking barometer on the wall near her back door, and that morning the needle swung down to Stormy and trembled there all day. In the afternoon the sky turned dark. Not just storm-cloud gray, but with an acid green tinge that was unbelievably eerie.

  “That can’t be good,” I said, closing a window.

  Gran told me to fill buckets with water in case the electric pump for the well died. She also had me check the batteries in the flashlights and fill the kerosene lamps.

  It was evening when the storm struck. Gran was in bed; she got tired in the evenings, which was no wonder, given how hard she pushed herself all day. I heard the wind first, battering branches of the lilac and forsythia bushes against the windows. When the rain began, it came in pelting icy drops. Then the wind picked up and moaned. Really moaned, like the air was distressed, as if it were having a heart attack or something. The lights flickered and went out.

  “There it goes. Like clockwork.” I was sitting in the kitchen. Gran’s bedroom door was open; I could hear her muttering. “I’ve got the candles ready in the kitchen,” she called out in the darkness.

  “I’m right here, Gran,” I answered. “Don’t get out of that bed.”

  With the candlelight it was a little less spooky, but I still jumped when a knock came at the back door. I carried my candle, set in a mason jar, to answer it.

  Sean stood outside in the darkness holding a lantern in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. His tall frame filled the doorway and was backlit suddenly when a flash of lightning streaked across the sky. “I thought I’d check on you, see if you need anything,” he said, his voice raised against the wind and the battering rain. “That’s what I usually do when we get a bad storm like this,” he added, as if he had to explain himself.

  “Come in.” I clutched my robe closer and waved him through, then nearly shut the door on Buddy, who yelped and wriggled past me.

  “Buddy, sit,” Sean ordered. He twisted the plastic bag in his hands. “I’ve got some D batteries here, extra kerosene in the truck if you need it.”

  “Thanks,” I said with a smile. “That was really nice of you. But I think we’ve got it covered. Gran told me what to do.”

  “Is that Sean?” yelled Gran.

  I stepped ov
er to her bedroom door. “He’s checking to see if we need anything.”

  “We’re just fine,” she answered. “Take the Tupperware on the counter, Sean. The tea for your mother’s in there.”

  “Thanks, Miz McGovern,” Sean called to her, and tucked the container into the plastic bag and set it by the door. He pointed to the living room and I nodded, following him in.

  “How’s she doing?” he asked in a quiet voice when we stood by the window.

  “Okay. She’s healing.” I shook my head. “She’s amazingly tough.” I looked up at him. “I’m glad to see you, Sean. I was hoping we could talk.” I peered at him. “Are you okay?” In the wan light afforded by my candle, Sean’s face looked different, the bones of his face more prominent, his eyes more deep-set. But it could have been a trick of the shadows.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “I never got a chance to thank you. For what you did at Revel.”

  “I didn’t do anything but get my ass kicked,” said Sean with a rueful smile.

  “I’m sorry you got hurt. Are your ribs okay?”

  He shook his head. “I’m fine, Delia. Really.” He paused. “You look good.”

  I let out a surprised laugh. “Um, thanks. Where’ve you been all week?”

  “Working,” he said with a shrug. “Same old.” He cocked his head. “No, I mean it. There’s something really different about you.” He reached out and wound a coil of my hair around his finger, stretched it out and let it go.

  I leaned back slightly and cleared my throat. “Yeah, I guess we all know what that is. My dark fishy side.”

  Sean smiled, stepped closer and put his hands on my waist. “I wanted to see you tonight, Delia. I’ve been thinking about something for a while, trying to decide. And the other night I decided. So I’m feeling better about things.”

  I tried to back away, uncomfortable with this sudden intimate touch, but Sean pressed closer.