Clay’s grip on my hand tightens as he opens his eyes.
“Lia, I had this dream you were … ”
His gaze shifts from side to side, taking in his unfamiliar surroundings. He sits up and doesn’t seem to be in any pain. Through the cream on his chest, I can see the wound is closed. He looks out at the shimmering water on all sides of the boat.
“Was … was it real?”
I nod, and manage a quiet, “Yes.”
He stares at my legs then back at my face. “And you had me under a spell all this time?”
He keeps his tone steady, but betrayal lurks just under the surface.
“I didn’t know how else to protect you,” I say, my voice even quieter.
He drops my hand and scoots away from me. He makes the gesture casual, like he wants to rest his back against the side of the boat, but his message comes across loud and clear. I bite my lip to keep myself from crying.
“How am I still alive?” Clay asks, rubbing some of the cream on his chest between his fingertips and staring at it.
I’m afraid that if I talk anymore, Clay will hear the tears in my voice. When I don’t answer, Caspian chimes in from behind the wheel, “You have me to thank for that. I brought some … medicines with me. I’m Caspian.” Caspian turns and nods in greeting.
“Have we met before?” Clay asks, tilting his head.
“I tend to turn up when you’re unconscious.”
“So, Caspian, are you a … mermaid, too?”
I can’t help it; I burst out laughing. All the panic, the fear, the rejection of the day escapes in wild laughter that shudders through my body. Soon, Caspian and Clay are laughing, too. A much needed release.
We dock at my house. We need to tell my parents where Melusine and her father are. Clay’s mom is still out of town, so he agrees to come give a witness statement for official Foundation records.
“Better now than later,” Clay says. “I want to put all this behind me. Move on.”
My face falls. “All this” includes me. Clay wants to move on from me, and I can’t blame him. He keeps a sizable distance between us as we walk up the dock.
The private beach behind my house—meant only for the families (some human and some Mer) who own houses on our street—is almost always empty except for the occasional neighbor. Now, it’s crowded with people. Everyone speaks animatedly to one another. I don’t recognize all of them, but the fact that so many cover their legs with long skirts or pants despite the heat tells me they’re Mer. That’s odd. I thought I knew everyone in the Community. Did we get more refugees? What’s going on? Caspian must wonder the same thing because he raises an eyebrow at me. I shrug.
They’re all so wrapped up in conversation that no one stops us as we go up the stairs to my house. When we walk through the back door, silence greets us. Everyone must be in the grottos.
We stop at the concealed entrance. It feels monumental to bring a human into the hidden depths of my home after a lifetime of secrecy. Caspian understands my hesitancy. He stops walking and gives me time.
All I can think to say to Clay is, “Careful, it’s slippery.”
As we head down the winding stairs to the antechamber, he’s wide-eyed with wonder at the shimmering walls and the velvet water lapping along the slanted floor.
I can hear my sisters’ voices now. And Leomaris’s. And Staskia’s. And my parents’. And … Caspian’s parents’?
Even though Clay’s stomach looks healed, I don’t want to chance getting it wet. Besides, the grottos get deep, and he doesn’t have a tail. So, instead of moving farther in, I call out, “Hello! I’m home, and I really need to talk to you.”
I expect my family to be shocked beyond belief at the sight of a human in the grottos. Instead, I’m the one who’s shocked.
When my parents enter the antechamber, I gasp. They’ve changed. These are not the parents I left this morning.
The wrinkles around my mother’s eyes and mouth have vanished; the skin on her whole body is tight and glowing. Her hair, always beautiful, is now as lush, shining, and free of gray as any of my sisters’ hair.
My father has hair! My father, who’s been balding for over a decade, now has a head of thick, dark hair. Even more striking, the soft, cushy potbelly that usually sticks out above his tail has been replaced by a perfect six pack. My dad has abs … so weird.
Caspian stares at his parents with equal fascination. They look like they did when we were toddlers.
And no one—not his parents, my parents, my sisters, Stas, or Leo—seems surprised to see Clay. They shift to make room as a woman I don’t recognize enters the antechamber from the inner grottos. She’s breathtaking, with flowing auburn hair, almond eyes, and nearly translucent white skin. She swims to the edge of the water, where Clay and I stand with Caspian.
“So, Aurelia,” she says the words to me, but her gaze fixes on Clay, “this must be the human you broke the curse with.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Broke the curse? There’s no way to break the curse. Melusine and her father wanted to twist the curse, manipulate it to gain power. I want to tell my parents this—to tell them everything—but that’ll have to wait. Instead, Clay gives his formal statement that the Havelocks kidnapped and attempted to kill him, and Caspian and I describe their location. My parents know where the palace is, and my father heads upstairs to call in a Foundation team.
“We need to retrieve them,” my mother says. “Before they can take credit Below for what’s happened.”
“What has happened?” Caspian asks.
“As far as we can tell, all adult Mer in the Community, and possibly Below as well, have reverted back to their stasis ages,” Caspian’s father answers in a baritone so much like his son’s.
Before the curse, Merfolk stopped aging at around thirty—what we call reaching stasis. That’s why there was such a commotion outside … and why I didn’t recognize some of the Mer! They must’ve looked decades younger than they did the last time I saw them. My eyes flit to the beautiful Mermaid with the auburn hair. Her almond-shaped eyes are the same blue as Caspian’s and her radiant garnet tail shimmers beneath her in the water.
“MerMatron Zayle?” I ask.
“Olee?” Caspian whispers.
Caspian’s grandmother smiles. “Didn’t I tell you I was a looker in my day?” Then she turns to Clay and switches to English. “How are you feeling, young man? It seems my potions worked wonders, if I do say so myself.”
“Fine, thank you,” Clay answers. He tries to maintain eye contact with her, but his focus keeps shifting to her tail. To all their tails. “Kind of like I jumped … er, dived into one of my mom’s fairytale books but, yeah, fine.”
“Glad to hear it,” she says just as my father comes back downstairs, transforms, and returns to my mother’s side in the water. “Now, I have a theory about all this,” Caspian’s grandmother continues, “but I need to know exactly what’s happened to see if I’m correct.”
Since Caspian was never Below with us, and Clay was unconscious for most of it, the explanation falls on me.
I try to recount every detail, every word Melusine and her father said about the curse, every step they performed in the ritual. Once I reach the end, Caspian’s grandmother has me start all over again, and when I get to the part where Clay got stabbed, she interrupts me.
“So you chose a human’s life over Melusine’s promise of immortality for all of us?” she asks, her voice serious.
I nod, feeling kinda guilty.
“Thanks so much, Lia,” Lapis says sarcastically. Amy shushes her from where she swims next to Staskia.
“You must really love him.” A mix of awe and incredulity colors Emeraldine’s voice.
Both of them fall silent when Caspian’s grandmother poses her next question. “Then you attacked Melusine, risking your own life to save this human’s?”
I remember grabbing Melusine’s arm, hitting her
with my tail. Then Mr. Havelock holding me back as Melusine came at me with the dagger. I nod again.
“You were willing to die for him?” she asks.
“It’s not like I was looking forward to it. I was scared,” I confess. “But I thought maybe while they were killing me, Clay might escape.”
My parents stare at me in silence. They look … proud?
“But you didn’t make your escape,” MerMatron Zayle says to Clay. “You swam in front of the dagger to save Aurelia’s life. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” Clay says. Our eyes lock. Then he looks away.
“And when your blood poured out into the ocean, that’s when there was an explosion of light and a seaquake?”
This time, we both nod.
“Right before sunrise, when we all regained our youth,” she murmurs to herself. Then, to the room at large, she says, “It’s as I suspected.” She points to Clay and me. “Their sacrifice broke the curse.”
“But the curse can’t be broken,” I say. “Clay isn’t dead.”
“He was willing to die for you and you for him. That’s what matters. Ancient spells are about balance. The Havelocks wanted to control the curse by killing Clay in place of the prince who they thought should have died, and by taking another human life every century to balance the immortal life of the Little Mermaid, who let herself die. They saw the curse as a spell about death.”
“Isn’t it?” Caspian’s mother asks, her kind face a picture of bemusement.
“If it were, Clay here would need to be dead for a ninety-four-year-old like me to have my cleavage back.”
“Niiice,” Lazuli says, appreciating the humor. My father stifles a laugh behind his hand. Clay just mouths the words “ninety-four?”
“The Havelocks would have succeeded in taming the spell with all that death,” MerMatron Zayle says, her tone serious again, “but they could never have broken it.”
“Why not?” Leomaris asks, his attention focused on her words even as his hand strokes Emeraldine’s hair. Em’s gleaming green tail twines with his topaz one under the water.
“Because the curse isn’t about death. It’s about love.” Now she looks at me. And at Clay. “The Little Mermaid accepted death so the one she loved might live. Both of you did the same. Your true love balanced the curse and broke it.”
“True love?” I whisper.
“Yes. Only true love—free of uncertainty or hesitation,” she pins Clay and me with a knowing gaze, “free of any type of magic—could have broken that spell and given us our immortality back.”
But that means … I look at Clay. That means he loves me.
Clay loves me.
Even after finding out what I did to him—that I lied, that I’m a Mermaid, that I sirened him—he still must love me like I love him, or we wouldn’t have broken the curse.
I stand there, stunned into silence, as my fellow Mer rejoice.
“So we really have our immortality back?” my father asks. “This isn’t temporary?”
I’m barely listening as MerMatron Zayle gives her confirmation, and everyone cheers and hugs. I need to talk to Clay, but he won’t look at me. He’s giving everyone else his rapt attention.
“Oh, Edmar,” my mother says to my father, “once things settle down, we can travel home. Back to the ocean.” She buries herself in his embrace. They must be thinking of the family they haven’t seen in decades.
“I can see my parents!” Amy shouts, pulling me into a fierce hug. No sooner has she pulled back than Staskia pulls me into another—and squeezes tight. I’ve never hugged Staskia before, and I wonder if she’s just caught up in the excitement, until she whispers in my ear, “Thank you … now we can … just thank you,” and squeezes again. When she lets me go, Amy grabs her hand. The two of them share a look that puts a shy smile on Amy’s face and makes her blush. Oh! Now that immortality’s back and procreation isn’t the only way to ensure our population survives, same-love will be viewed like it was before the curse—it’ll be accepted instead of shunned. That means Amy and Stas will be accepted … whenever they’re ready to be. They’re both practically bouncing in the water, their shining faces trained on mine, expecting a reaction. I give them a giant smile, but it doesn’t quite reach my eyes. I’m happy for them. So truly happy. I’m happy for all of us. But right now, I need to know how Clay’s feeling.
He’s talking to Caspian’s family, thanking Caspian’s grandmother for the potions that saved him.
“Thank you,” Caspian’s father says to him. “Because of what you did, my wife and I, Caspian, even our little daughter Coralline—all of our kind—are immortal, as we were always meant to be.”
My parents swim up to him next. My mom gives him a lecture about how vital it is he doesn’t tell anyone about us. After he’s sworn up and down he’ll keep our secret, they thank him, too. Thank him for saving me.
“I’m glad I could help. I’m glad we survived,” Clay says. “Now that you have my statement against Mel and Mr. Havelock, I think it’s time for me to go home. Return to the human world.” He says it like a joke, and my parents laugh, but I hear what he’s really saying. This isn’t his world. Even if he loved me, really loved me in that moment when he saved my life, he doesn’t want to be with me now. He’s human, not Mer. He doesn’t belong here, and he can’t wait to leave.
Without saying a word to me, Clay turns and walks out of my life.
“There’s still one thing I don’t understand,” my mother says to me after Clay has gone, after I’ve let him go. “How did you track that human boy all the way out to the palace?”
I gulp. It’s time to tell them. So far, I haven’t mentioned anything about sireny or the bond. I said I broke Clay’s heart by confessing I’d lied to him. Everyone assumed I meant about being a Mermaid. Well, everyone except Caspian and his grandmother. I told myself I was waiting until I was alone with my parents to tell them; really, I was just putting it off so I wouldn’t have to see their anger, their disappointment. But I’m ready to face them and accept my punishment. I guess now’s as good a time as any.
“I found Clay because—”
“Because I’d taught Lia what the symbols meant,” Caspian interrupts. “When I first deciphered them. She found Clay the same way I found her. By following the symbols in his room.” His voice stays steady through the lie.
I open my mouth to argue, but Clay’s grandmother drapes an arm around my shoulders and whisks me away.
“I need to tell them,” I say.
“They’d be obligated to report you to the board, Aurelia. Even if by some miracle you weren’t imprisoned, your whole family would be mired in scandal, the way mine has been for generations. They don’t deserve that. They’ve been through enough. And so have you.” She speaks slowly, as if urging me to see reason. “The Community needs to look up to them right now. All Mer need to. Do you realize now that the curse is broken, your family is next in line for the throne?”
I hadn’t realized. My mother is such a distant cousin of the old ruling family that I’ve never thought of us as real royalty. “You think the Mer Below would want my parents to rule?”
“I don’t know,” she answers, “but it is your parents’ right, and we’ll all need strong leaders after what we’ve endured. We need leaders who can piece our civilization back together. Seeing how your parents have led the Community, I have faith they could do it.”
I do, too. I know they could.
“But they’ll never get the chance if sireny stains the Nautilus name the way it’s stained the Zayles’,” she tells me, her voice quiet but intense.
I look over at my parents, at my sisters. At their happy smiles. “So, they’d just never know?”
“You know. That’s enough. It’s over. Let it go.” With that, Caspian’s grandmother turns to swim back to the group.
“MerMatron Zayle?” I say, stopping her. “How did I track Clay to the palace? Shouldn’t the bond have
dissolved with the siren spell?”
“A siren spell uses powerful magic to join a Mermaid and a human. I’ve never heard of any other case where a victim outlived a siren spell, so I can’t be certain, but my guess is that even though the spell is over—even though your hold over Clay is gone—the two of you will always be able to sense each other. You’ll always be connected.”
The weight of her words pains me. “Even if that’s true,” I say, “Clay wants nothing to do with me.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Everything’s changing. My parents (who I still can’t stop staring at) have sent emissaries Below to explain what’s happened. They made an announcement themselves to the Community, and I’ve received more bouquets of flowers and baskets of seashells than I know what to do with.
As soon as it’s safe, my mom and dad will take us on a trip Below. We’ll see where they grew up and visit family we’ve never met. They haven’t mentioned the whole reclaiming the throne thing, but they’re thinking about it. They’ve appointed Emeraldine as an executive on the Community board, and I think it’s so she can run things up here in case they need to spend time Below.
In the meantime, the entire Community has exploded in celebration. Parties, bonfires, parades. My parents have had to tell the human neighbors it’s a Danish holiday and hoped they wouldn’t Google it. I guess there’s no better reason to celebrate than finding out you’re going to live forever.
Forever. I keep trying to wrap my brain around that, but it’s so unreal. I don’t even know what I want to do when I graduate. What am I going to do with forever? Talk about possibilities. Do I work at the Foundation someday, like my parents have always expected? Will there even need to be a Foundation? Will everyone eventually move back Below? That scares me; the human world is the only one I’ve ever known. Should I go to college and pursue a career here on land? Should I go Below and spend all my days letting the call of the ocean guide me through the waves? The thought both exhilarates and terrifies me.
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