No more mermaids.
No more swimming through the open ocean. No more hunting, no more Assana. No more feeling like she actually belonged somewhere, like she had a purpose beyond “sit and wait.” Sit and wait for her sister, sit and wait for Astanrog’s army to march through Black Glacier Pass for her, sit and wait for something—anything—to happen to her. Doing that had brought James to her, had brought her here, to this island, to this moment. Had all that happened to her just for her to go back to waiting some more? Or was she supposed to learn from it, take from it and start making things happen instead?
A part of her wanted to turn everything over to Wren. Let her take charge, let her tell Jae what to do, like she’d always done. Making decisions and being in charge of her life was a lot harder than she’d bargained for. But another part of her enjoyed the challenge and the power that came with being the one in control. The question was, which of those parts was bigger, and when it came down to it, which one would win?
Chapter 10
Jae made her way out of the Flooded Lands and back to the beach. There, she waited for James, knowing that he would come as long as the Never bird didn’t eat him for dinner and then feed the rest of him to her babies. She wasn’t even really sure why she was waiting for him, except to make sure he was OK. And also to get answers, if he was willing to give them. She’d opened her heart up to him the night before, and she wasn’t ready to close it just yet.
It wasn’t long before he came swooping in, crash-landing on the beach, stopping just short of running into a cliff wall. The fairy jingled in behind him and hovered over him. She seemed to be telling him off, maybe for his terrible flying.
“Glad to see you aren’t bird food,” she said as he stood and brushed himself off.
He grimaced. “Are you? I kind of deserved to be bird food.”
The fairy—Clove, Jae now saw—gave a small jingle of what Jae assumed was agreement.
She couldn’t argue with that, either. “I got the potion.” She held it up for him to see. “I just wanted to say thank you.”
“Jae.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” she said, though of course she hoped he would.
“I was selfish,” he said. “Kissing you like that. It was selfish.”
“What do you mean?” It hadn’t felt selfish to Jae.
“You have to make a decision—a hard decision, one that’s going to affect the rest of your life. And I don’t want to influence it. I don’t want you to make a choice because of me. I want you to do what will make you happy.” As he spoke, he didn’t come any nearer to the water, keeping a safe distance from her.
“What if being with you makes me happy?”
“I told you before—I’m a pirate. Commitment is not in the cards for me.”
“So you’ve chosen, then?” she asked, trying not to let the hurt show on her face. “To remain a pirate?”
“It’s all I’ve ever known. I wouldn’t know what to do otherwise.”
Living with her, making a life with her, apparently didn’t occur to him. Clove’s earlier words came back into Jae’s mind. I was going to change my whole life for a man who wouldn’t do the same for me. There it was then. The ugly, naked truth. It had been right in front of her face the whole time.
“OK, then.” She nodded.
He looked like he might say something else but he pressed his lips together instead, keeping it inside. Clove darted back and forth between them, jingling, and for once, Jae was glad she couldn’t understand her.
Without another word between them, Jae turned and dove into the waves, letting the current carry her away, pretending that the tears that leaked from her eyes were just ocean water and nothing more.
Jae returned to the mermaid colony to wait for Wren. Back to more of the same: sitting and waiting, but at least she would be with friends. Assana greeted her with an enthusiasm as if she’d been gone for years, the prodigal friend returned.
“I’m so glad you’re back, and just in time.” She swam circles around her, creating a cyclone of bubbles.
Jae stashed the potion bottle in the stone dresser that was beside her cot. It was meant to hold odds and ends, trinkets recovered from the seafloor or gifted to one another. Assana’s dresser was full of jewelry that she collected from shipwrecks and suitors, but Jae’s drawers were empty except for her grandmother’s hair comb and now the potion. Her entire side of the cave was bare, in fact, except for the seagrass cot and the spear propped in the corner.
“Just in time for what?” Jae asked.
Tal appeared then, as if out of nowhere. The girl had a way of doing that. “The Creator’s Day celebration, of course.”
“Creator’s Day?” Jae asked. She was so grateful to Tal and Assana, even if they didn’t know it. The sadness that she’d felt when leaving James was still there on the edge of her consciousness, but she couldn’t give it any attention, not with the two of them bustling non-stop around her.
“It’s the one day every year when the residents of the island put aside their bickering and their differences and come together to celebrate Wendy and thank her for creating this place.” Tal sounded like she was reading it off of a pamphlet.
A day to celebrate her grandmother. She wondered if Granny had any idea what this place would become, or what it would do to her granddaughters. If she did, maybe she wouldn’t have made it in the first place. But if she hadn’t, then what? Jae never would have learned how to swim, for one. Nikov Panilovich would probably be her brother-in-law. And she never would have met James, or if she did, he would have been an old man, wrinkled and gray-haired. Nothing would be the same, but whether that was good or bad, she still couldn’t say for sure.
“How do we celebrate?” Jae asked when she realized her friends were looking at her.
“It’s not so different from human celebrations,” Assana said. “Food. Music. Flirting.” She waggled her eyebrows. “Maybe we can each find ourselves a pirate.”
“Maybe not,” Jae muttered.
Assana frowned. “Trouble in paradise?” She’d known about Jae’s mission to find Captain Hook, and even a little about how Jae felt toward him, though nothing about what had happened between them since then.
“Just trouble in general, but I don’t really want to talk about it.”
Assana wrapped an arm around Jae’s shoulder. “Understood.”
“I just came to see what you had that I could wear to the celebration,” Tal said, effectively doing away with any tension that might have come up because of Jae’s mood.
Mermaids didn’t wear clothes, that much Jae had learned right away. But what they did love was jewelry. Jae, who didn’t even wear jewelry as a human, couldn’t imagine swimming around with pounds of gold and gems around her neck and wrists, but she was the only one. Assana, who had come from the Golden Lands and was used to this type of adornment, wore dozens of pieces at a time. She was an expert at layering, with an eye for color. Jae worried that tiny Tal would look strange weighed down by jewels, but instead, Assana made her look tasteful, accenting the pink in her hair and tail with just the right colors.
Assana then turned to Jae. “Let me at least pin back your hair. Then a necklace just here.” She touched Jae at the base of her neck. “It would draw attention to your beautiful bone structure. And other parts.”
Tal turned away from admiring herself in the looking glass and snickered.
Jae swatted Assana’s hand away. “I’m not trying to draw attention to any parts.”
But Assana was already combing back Jae’s hair with a gilded brush that she must have found in some ship’s wreckage. It reminded Jae of the way James had run his fingers through her hair, and she had to resist the very strong urge to swim away without another word of explanation. She forced herself to stay, to feel it and create new memories in place of the old, painful ones.
Assana artfully twisted Jae’s fine, brown hair back away from her face and secured it not with her grandmother�
�s hair comb, but with a different one that she pulled from her drawers. It had a sea star in the middle, surrounded by blue jewels and pearls that matched Jae’s tail and eyes. The necklace she draped around her neck was more of the same, the perfect colors, small and dainty and just enough.
“Oh, Jae, it’s lovely,” Assana said, no teasing this time.
“Is it?” She swam over to the looking glass beside Tal. “What do you think?”
Tal squeezed Jae’s shoulders. “Perfect.”
No one said the one thing that she was thinking, and she was glad it wasn’t visible on her face. That she hoped James was there to see her looking like this.
Except that James wasn’t there. The girls had gone first to the marina outside the pirate village, where pirates were racing back and forth from the tavern with drinks in hand, delivering them to mermaids who were already delightfully tipsy. Jae watched, laughing with everyone else, as one of Naunet’s guards pulled Mr. Smee into the water. The bosun emerged sputtering and red-cheeked, but happy, nonetheless.
After Assana tried the ale and found it not worth sticking around for, the girls moved to the lagoon, which was crowded with Lost Boys and mermaids and mermen all playing a rousing game of volleyball with a rainbow-colored bubble, hitting it back and forth between land and water. It was strange to see the boys getting along with the merpeople instead of torturing them or threatening each other. In fact, Jae quite liked it. It gave her hope for the future of the island. Maybe it wouldn’t always be this chaotic and disjoined. Maybe eventually, they could get along like this every day instead of just once a year.
For that to happen, though, they were missing two very important players. Just like there was no sign of James, Pan was also missing in action. They had been here for the creation of the island, and were partly the reason why the different groups fought so much. For them not to be here on this important day—Jae couldn’t understand it.
“Where is Pan?” she asked Assana, who might know more about it than she did.
Assana frowned and looked around, as if just noticing the boy’s absence. “I don’t know.”
“Does he usually come to these celebrations?”
“Oh, yes. Everyone does. Come on.” Assana dragged Tal and Jae into the game as soon as there were three openings on their side.
“Hey, Assana.” It was Leven, the merman who always seemed to find his way to Assana whenever they were in the same place. He looked handsome with a leather cord around his neck, and his shoulders inked with some kind of swirling line design.
Assana seemed to think so, too, because she couldn’t quite look away from him. “Hi,” she said finally, just as the bubble sailed their way.
Jae leaped, throwing herself in front of Assana and batting it away. The mermaid didn’t even seem to notice. She was migrating toward Leven as if drawn by some invisible force. Jae watched, her chest aching. At first, she thought it was her old sickness returned, but then she decided that it was a new kind of disease. She’d felt that with James, that invisible tether, and now she didn’t know if she would ever find it again. Did a person get more than one of those chances in a lifetime?
She did her best not to dwell on it, though, and focused instead on the game. The mermaids were determined to beat the Lost Boys—there were no rules against a little friendly competition. She was good at volleyball, and found herself congratulating random mermaids and mermen as the score crept up.
As night fell, someone—her guess was on the pirates—started setting off fireworks. The game paused as everyone turned to watch, the sky exploding with fountains of crackling colors. Jae hovered beside the shore to watch, a Lost Boy to her right and Tal to her left.
A few minutes into the show, her attention was drawn to a small light darting between mermaids, stopping at each face as if searching for someone.
“Bell?” Jae asked, not very loud but loud enough to draw the fairy’s attention.
Bell, the tiny pixie that kept company with her sister, darted over to her, jingling wildly. She was gesturing frantically with her hands, desperate to make Jae understand.
“I don’t—I can’t—” Jae stuttered. She turned to Tal. “Tal, do you speak fairy?”
Tal barely tore her eyes from the show. “No. Hardly anyone does these days.”
Bell gestured for Jae to follow her and flew toward the inlet that led from the lagoon to the pirate’s marina.
“No,” Jae said definitively. She would not be going there, not without her friends’ support and maybe a stomach full of ale.
Bell wasn’t having it. She flew back and tugged violently on Jae’s necklace.
Jae was afraid it would snap and gave a little, letting Bell lead her away from the game and the gathered crowd. “No,” she still objected. “You don’t understand. I don’t want to—”
The fairy wasn’t listening. She was still jingling, and she kept doing it all the way around the small outcropping of land and into the marina. Here, the pirates and some mermaids were still celebrating outside, and the familiar sounds of the boisterous tavern floated out to greet her.
Bell took Jae up to a dock and stopped in front of the mermaid’s face. Two short jingles and a wag of her finger told Jae she was to wait right there and not move.
“OK,” Jae said. “Fine.” Only because she had never seen level-headed Bell this frantic.
The party continued on around her, but Jae was the calm in the storm, her eyes on the tavern door. But he didn’t come from the tavern. He came from his room upstairs, down the very stairs that he had carried her up just a few nights before. He wasn’t getting drunk, then, not drowning his sorrows in a mug of ale with his remaining crew members. He probably wasn’t thinking about her at all. How embarrassing this whole situation was.
She watched him descend, wearing his pirate gear again—black pants and a black overcoat hanging open over a blood red shirt. As always, his sword was sheathed at his side, and he held the hilt as he walked quickly, one ear tilted toward Bell who was darting around his head.
The short pause in his step when he spotted her in the water was barely noticeable, but she saw it, mainly because she couldn’t take her eyes off of him. He cleared his face of any emotions though when he came down onto the dock and knelt beside her.
“Did she tell you?”
She shook her head. “You know I don’t understand fairy.”
“Pan has Wren.”
“What do you mean?”
“She was coming to see you. She thought that today would be safe with the celebration. She and Pan had a run-in, though, and he captured her.”
It was . . . impossible. She’d known it was a possibility, sure, but Wren was always so invincible. And today of all days, when there was supposed to be a truce.
“What about Archer?” she asked, looking at Bell. Archer would never have let this happen.
James listened, and then said, “Injured. He’s with her but he’s injured. The rest of the crew is on the Jolly Roger. They stayed behind; she wanted to come alone.”
Of course she did. “Where is she?”
“He has her tied up at Skull Rock. When the tide comes in . . .”
He didn’t have to finish. She knew what it meant. It meant that her sister’s life was in danger, and this time, it was up to Jae to save her, instead of the other way around.
Chapter 11
“I’m going to get her,” Jae announced, pushing away from the dock. The tide was coming in; she could tell by where it hit the pilings on the dock. She didn’t have long to get there.
James’ hand came down around her wrist. “I’m going with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
But of course, he didn’t listen to her. He was already stepping into the nearest skiff, but Bell stopped him with a tug on his lapels. She jingled something, and then sprinkled golden dust over his shoulders. Great, even the fairy was against her.
James was no amateur flyer anymore. He flew as fast as she swam, and kept i
t low enough to the water that he squinted against the spray. Everyone was still in the marina or the lagoon, so they didn’t run into anyone else as they circumvented the island.
There was so much that she wanted to say to him, but now wasn’t the time. She was hurt, betrayed, confused. He kissed her and then he ignored her. He abandoned her and then he went with her on a mission to save her sister, a girl that he didn’t even particularly care for. And after this was over—what? They’d go back to being strangers who had kissed once? OK, more than once. She didn’t want him coming at all, and she would lose him if she could, but he was too fast and too stubborn.
Skull Rock was on the dark side of the island. The sun stayed on the other side of the mountain, so this back corner of the island was in shadow for almost half of every day. It was allegedly home to the infamous giant crocodile that no one had seen in years. It was a creature that Granny had told her about in bedtime stories and that had haunted her dreams as a child, until she’d decided that it wasn’t real. Only now she knew it was. Both of them slowed as if they had some unspoken agreement as they approached the dark, still waters.
Jae surfaced and looked up at James, who had a strange expression on his face. “Is she real? The crocodile?”
“As real as I am,” he answered, which somehow did not really feel like an answer at all.
“Are you scared of her?” Jae asked, trying to gage how real the threat was.
“Maybe more than others. She’s had a taste of me, after all.” He brandished his hook at her as proof.
Jae grimaced. “Oh, no.”
He nodded. “Pan fed it to her after he cut it off in a duel. All this after Wendy left, of course, and he turned into the monster that he is today.”
Kingdom of Villains and Vengeance: Fairytale retellings from the villain's perspective (Kingdom of Darkness and Light Book 2) Page 43