by Michelle Fox
Alec flew the boat to the island and dropped it to the ground where it broke in half, metal screaming and plastic snapping. I waited until the boat was still and then sang the next song. Another lure, but softer, gentler. The slavers stumbled forward, their faces and bodies slack under the spell of my song. I lined them up, pleased to see we had caught so many, and changed tunes, lulling them to sleep.
While I did that, Alec shifted and pulled on his clothes again. Grabbing a knife from one of the men, he found some rope on the boat and cut it, handing it to me.
"Let's tie them up, lass. We don't want any trouble if they should wake."
"They won't wake. Not unless I sing the antidote," I said.
"Humor me. It's my brother's life at stake. I don't want anything to go wrong." He moved from man to man, roughly tying wrists together.
I went to the other end and worked from there to meet Alec in the middle. "You haven't met too many mermaids, have you?"
"Nay. We have not."
"Because you would trust my song if you had."
"I mean no insult lass. I just want Niall back hale and hearty. If something goes wrong, I don't want these blokes rising up against us. Who's to say the witch won't betray us somehow and take these men to use against us? "
I shrugged, unconvinced.
"I've seen magic in war, have you?"
"No. I haven't."
"Things can turn on you like that." He snapped his fingers. "There's just the two of us."
"And Siya," I said.
"Three of us then. And that witch is like an overfed nightmare. So let's be careful."
"They're all tied up now." While we'd been talking we had finished weaving the rope around the mens' wrists.
"Good. Call the witch. I'll stand in the back where she can't see me. If something happens, I want to be able to surprise her."
"Okay," I said, perplexed by his sudden anxiety. Since it didn't cause any problems that I could see, I let it go. I just hoped Alec was wrong.
I filled the air with deep, unpleasant notes, bellowing like an angry beast as loud and fast as I could. The witch must not have gone too far as my song quickly found her. A sharp tug on my voice nearly pulled me off balance. I backed off on my song, giving her space to come to shore.
"She's coming," I sang to Alec, slipping my voice into a breeze headed his way.
"I'm ready," his voice reached me despite the distance between us, carried by the playful wind, which had stuck around even after I'd stopped singing my lure to the slavers.
As before, she slowly rose from the sea, her wide body looking like a black hole in the horizon. Her tentacles felt their way up the beach and to the palm trees, hoisting her up and out of the water. She still held Niall, clutching him against the black of her protruding gut.
My sister joined us as well, but swam to the opposite end of the beach to come up behind me instead of in front like the witch had.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
She nodded. "I don't think she saw me."
"Did she do anything to Niall?"
"Not that I saw. Remember the little rock that sticks out of the water that way?" She pointed.
"Yes. What about it?"
"She set him there and then submerged herself in the sea. I think she took a nap. Based on the water shooting out of her gills, she snores like a whale."
I bit my lip, resisting an inappropriate urge to laugh. The witch was used to scare children into obedience. Her darkness shadowed every mermaid in the sea. We heard the warnings to avoid her and the horrible things that would happen if we didn't from birth. The idea of her doing something so mundane as snoring struck me as funny. Perhaps she wasn't as powerful as we believed.
Or maybe magic had no cure for snoring.
Siya whacked my shoulder. "Don't laugh."
"I'm not." I composed my face in an effort to look serious.
"You called me?" The witch's voice filled the air like a boom of thunder.
"I have your price," I said waving to the slavers.
Using her tentacles, she dragged herself over to where they lay sleeping. "So many morsels. I'll have extra left over." Her tentacles fanned out and prodded the men. She sighed as her tentacles wove themselves around the slavers. "So much juice."
Siya went still next to me.
"What is it?"
"Those are the ones who took me. I recognize that one...with the scar on his cheek." Her fingers curled into fists.
"Good," I said.
"Good?" Her voice rose. "What's good about that? They cut out my tongue. They took everything from me." Tears slipped down her cheeks.
I laid a hand on her shoulder. "And we're going to take everything from them. That's a good thing."
"I want to cut open their soft parts and let their insides spill out. I want them awake to see it, so they can watch what they are losing as it slips away from them." She shook off my hand and shoved herself toward the slavers, her back rigid.
"Siya, no." I hurried after her and grabbed her hand, trying to pull her back. "Let the witch handle it."
She shook me off and glared at me over her shoulder. "Where's my justice then?"
"Are you saying you're going to do worse to them than the witch?" I raised an eyebrow at her. She'd always been stubborn, but she had to see reality here. "Nothing we could do to them would be worse than the witch ripping out their souls. They might not be awake, but they'll know once the abyss takes them."
She hesitated, thinking. Finally, her shoulders slumping, she retreated. "Yeah. Okay. You're right."
I hugged her. "I know how much they hurt you. I'm glad it's them that answered my lure. This way we'll know they can't ever touch you or anyone else ever again." Turning to the witch, I said, "We've paid your price. Now do as you promised."
The witch nodded, the thick locks of her seaweed hair moved with the motion to cover her face. She brushed them away with a tentacle. "This will take some time, and I warn you, it may not work like you hope it will. I make no promises."
"I understand. Just do what you can."
"Wait." She paused. "What is this? Rope?" The fine point of her tentacle rubbed across the rope we'd used to tie up the men.
"We didn't want them to get away," I said.
The witch growled. "No. No. It's not right."
"What's wrong?" I asked.
She stretched herself as tall as she could and then craned down to peer into my face. "The sacrifice must be willing. Did these juicies choose their fate?"
I blinked. "What? You didn't say anything about that."
"They must choose," she said, hissing the words at me.
"That's not the bargain we made, witch."
"The abyss doesn't care about our bargain. I could kill them all, drink their guts while they scream and the abyss will not accept them as payment. They must offer. You must offer. A life for a life. An even trade for the abyss' count." She threw back her head and roared, her tentacles thrashing. "You wasted my time." One by one she dropped the slavers into the sand. My magic held, and they slept through the rough landing.
"No. You wasted our time," I shouted at her. "You didn't tell us."
Her mouth snapped shut and her green eyes swung toward me as her tentacles oozed my way. I moved back, motioning for Siya to do the same, but the witch's tentacles were long and fast. They curled around my tail and the suckers fixed themselves on my scales.
"Wh-what are you doing?"
"You owe me for my time."
"No, I don't." I pushed at her tentacles and shot a panicked glance at Siya who stood, motionless, her eyes wide. "Alec!"
Alec came running, his feet kicking up sand as he tried to reach me in time. The witch shot out a tentacle, catching him by the waist and throwing him backward. He roared and shifted in midair, his dragon popping into existence faster than I could blink. Flapping his wings, he rose above the witch and threw a lance of fire at her. She knocked it out of the sky with a tentacle, not seeming to feel the heat even
though the tentacle itself broke and fell off.
The rest of her tentacles, crawled the beach, aiming for the ocean. She still held Niall and me close, meaning as she moved into the water, so did we.
"Let me go," I said. Drawing a deep breath I prepared to launch a song at her like a weapon but she anticipated me and clapped a sticky tentacle across my mouth. The taste of dead fish filled my mouth making the ball the slavers had used on me seem like a delicacy.
"Ah-ah-ah. You're coming with me and there's no singing your way out of it. I am owed a price and you, mermaid, are the one who will pay it." She ducked as Alec swooped in, more fire shooting from his mouth. With one of her bigger tentacles she reached up and grabbed his tail, plucking him from the sky and slamming him into the sea. Water sprayed and a wave as high as my chest hit the shore from the impact. Alec went under for a long moment and then resurfaced, but by then it was too late. The witch herself was in the water now, weightless and able to move faster than Alec could hope to fly. She dragged Niall and me under, pushing her tentacles into the seabed to propel us forward.
Within moments we were too far and too deep for Alec to track us. I kept looking for Siya, hoping she'd followed us, but saw no sign of her. She hadn't stood frozen on the beach the whole time, had she? Not after I rescued her? To have gone so far and done so much only to have it end like this left my heart hopeless.
Chapter Fourteen
The witch pulled us through the sea for the longest time. We went south into even warmer waters and into a deep I'd never swum in before. I continued to squirm and push against her tentacles, but their suckers clung to me like clams refusing to give up their pearls. The only way I would get away would be if she let me go. I growled in frustration and then fell silent as any noise forced the tentacle across my mouth to tighten bringing with it a rotten fish flavor.
When we reached a great undersea mountain that rose so high its tip poked through the surface, the witch dove deeper yet. The water pressed against me, squeezing just as hard as the tentacle that held me prisoner. The gills at my neck fluttered faster and faster while my heart pounded in my chest. Mermaids lived in the water, but couldn't survive the Great Deep. At most we dove down and touched it with our fingers, but we never lingered. It wasn't our home. Apparently, though, the witch had moved in.
Just when I thought my heart might burst, she reached a crevice in the mountain and darted—the water made her so buoyant that her large shape now moved with some grace— inside. Green things glowed on the rock, the same green as her eyes, providing dim illumination of a jagged corridor hewn of rock. A moment later we surfaced in a cave that somehow was not filled with water. The same green glowed all over the cave, allowing me to see everything in good detail.
The witch dropped Niall on a ledge and then plopped me on another one on the opposite side of the cave. I peered over the edge, contemplating whether I should jump and make a swim for it.
The witch busied herself with a pile of random things on another ledge, muttering to herself as she examined and rejected different items. "No. Not this. A lid. I need a lid." She gave a shout of triumph and held up a blue glass bottle, crusted with coral. "This one."
One of her tentacles thrust the bottle at me. "Fill it."
"No," I said.
"You called me and did not pay a price. Pay." She pressed the bottle against my hand but I refused to take it. When she let it go, I threw it over the side.
That angered her and she shoved me against the cave wall so hard the rock broke my skin. Her other tentacles fished in the water for the bottle and recovered it a moment later.
"You will stay here until you sing, mermaid. Your juice will dry, and you will be dust if you do not."
I nodded to Niall. "Bring him back and I'll sing you as many songs as I can."
She shook the blob that served as her head. "The abyss doesn't want songs, it wants sacrifice."
I gave her a hard look. "If the sacrifice was for the abyss, what was your payment then?"
She smiled, showing off the stumps of her shark teeth. "Juicies. I keep all the juicies." She picked up Niall. "He has juice."
"What do you mean juice?"
She smacked her lips. "Juice is good."
"You are not eating him," I said, stabbing a finger at her.
She peered at Niall, poking at him with a tentacle. "No. Not yet. Too hard. Tomorrow maybe." With another tentacle she set the bottle next to me. "Sing, and you may leave."
With that, she slipped into the water and swam away. I tried to jump off the ledge then only to bump into an invisible wall. Magic. Turning around, I tried to climb away from the ledge and made it several feet before hitting another wall. She'd put me in an invisible cell.
Frustrated I sat down and then laid down when my back began to protest. I really needed to stop spending so much time out of water. Although, trapped as I was, I wondered if I would ever feel water on my scales again. Boredom overtook me and I drifted into sleep, slowly swallowed by an ocean of dreams.
***
"Mila," said a familiar Scottish brogue. The voice held a warmth I wanted to snuggle up against.
I opened my eyes and then closed them again because all I could see was darkness. "Who is it?"
"It's me, Niall."
I knew it wasn't possible, that it couldn't be true, but I felt his hand on my shoulder giving me a little shake. "Niall's dead," I said, keeping my eyes closed.
"Aye. I am. But I've been given the chance to talk to you. "
I opened my eyes again. The darkness remained, but now I could see Niall. He appeared before me, flickering like a start about to go dark. "You're see-through."
He chuckled."Well, I don't have a body any more now do I?"
"Where are you?"
"The afterlife. What that horrid witch calls the abyss."
"Are you okay?"
"Better than okay."
"How can you say that? You're dead!"
"It's not so bad. All I miss is you."
"And your brothers."
He shrugged. "Maybe. In time. We were trapped together in that castle for a verra long time. It's nice to have a break. There's quiet here, and no one is arguing. Gavin was always causing a fight with one of us."
"I could never leave my sister."
"You've never had to live with her for hundreds of years unable to leave. You might find the experience changes your mind."
I conceded his point with a nod. "So why are you here? Are you really here?"
"Yes. This is real. As real as a dream can get anyway. I'm here because I have some help."
"From the abyss?"
"No. From the fish."
"Fish?"
"The ones who live in the water in this cave. There are two of them." He pointed. "Look."
I peered over the edge of my prison to see two large fish poke their heads out of the water. They made eye contact and then dove back under, their bodies flashing a rainbow of color as they moved. "What are they? I've never seen fish like that before."
"This cave is their home, but the witch took it from them and only allows them to swim in a very small part of the water."
"Why does she keep them alive? I would have thought she'd have drank their juice by now."
"Their scales are good for love potions."
"Who asks her for those? As far as I know, I'm the only one who's called her in a long time."
"I don't know, but they're trapped here same as you and they have an idea."
"What kind of idea?"
"The witch wants you to sing so give her a song, one that will attack her when she opens the bottle to check your magic. If you can make her sleep or pin her down, the fish will do the rest."
"But aren't they caged like me?"
"They have a way out. They just need some help."
"What about you, Niall? If the witch dies, so does our only chance to bring you back to life."
He shook his head. "We'll have to find another way."
&nbs
p; I blinked at him. "There is only one witch. I don't know anyone else with that kind of magic."
"Once you're safe, you can find out if that's true. It's a big world, and there's a lot of magic left in it. The important thing right now is to get you out of here alive so you can go home to your sister."
A pang went through me. He was giving up. I could see it in his eyes. "You're going to stay dead, aren't you?"
He wiped a tear from my eye. "Donna fash, lass. It's okay."
"It's my fault."
"Och, nay. Donna say that. The wound that killed me was old and the poison deep. You dinna do anything."
"I broke the curse that was keeping you alive."
"That was no life, lass. Believe me. You set me free."
"Even though you're dead?"
He gave a solemn nod."Even though I'm dead. " He started to move away, then paused. "I want you to be happy, Mila. And you canna be happy down here. So get out when you can and donna think about me."
"I want you to be happy too, Niall. But you're dead."
He laughed at that.
"Don't laugh at me. It's not a joke."
"I think death has been maligned by gossip. Once the pain of dying is done, it's not so bad. The worst part is being without you." He held up his hand and I tried to press my palm against his, but there was nothing there.
"Niall?" He was fading. Right in front of me. "Niall!" I stood and reached for him but he was gone.
I woke with a start. My stomach plummeted as if I was falling faster than my insides could keep up. Wiping sweat off my brow, I sat for several long minutes, just taking deep breathes to calm my racing heart. It had been so real. His voice. His touch. The way he laughed. That shock of orange hair that even being see-through couldn't dull.
Had it all been a dream?
I looked at the bottle as I debated whether I'd made it all up or not. I couldn't decide, but there'd been some merit to Niall's plan. When I'd bargained with the witch for my legs, I'd sang only a few gentle lullabies, and she'd been there to hear the magic I gave her. But she wasn't here now. She would have no idea what I'd cast until she listened to it. A war song full of sharp notes that would cut into her flesh and make her bleed followed by a stumble song to tie her tentacles into knots could work. Assuming she removed the invisible walls holding me in place.