by Brandon Witt
Lelas’s gaze had grown unfocused and dreamy as I spoke, trying to visualize the picture I so poorly painted with so many words she wouldn’t have a reference for. The smile that played over her lips made me think she got the gist, though.
“It sounds wonderful. Is that what you would have one day if you were to stay on land? Would you wear the… what did you call it? Dress? Or would the man you love?” For a second I thought she was teasing, then realized she wasn’t, of course. She would have no idea what a dress was, much less how silly I’d look in one.
Finn’s chocolate eyes floated before me as I remembered how we had spoken of “forever,” even after only a week. How I’d actually let myself fall in love with and envision building a life with him. A sweet dream, though one that caused me to panic and run away. The thought still heightened my heart rate.
“No, two men aren’t allowed to get married, to have that type of ceremony. They are where I am from, but not in most places.”
Her brows knitted. “For what reason?”
I let out a laugh. “For the same reasons Syleen didn’t want me to be a part of the tribe.”
“I thought humans would not be driven by such old ways and archaic thinking.”
“You’d be surprised. Mers aren’t the only ones who cling to fear.”
She withdrew one of her hands from mine and patted my cheek. “Things will change. I can’t say they will with humans, but I believe they will with us. Even in the short time you’ve been here, Syleen has grown to accept you as a full member of the Chromis tribe.”
“Yeah, right!”
“She has. You are on her mission with us now, are you not?”
“It’s not like she had a choice. She needed me because of my legs. That’s all.”
Lelas leaned into me, as if sharing a secret. “You know as well as I do that Syleen always has a choice and does nothing she does not want to.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Glancing out toward the tunnel told me darkness had fallen, and nothing but pitch-black lay outside of the door hole. Even this room was much dimmer, though I’d grown accustomed to it as it happened gradually. “So, do I get to help you plan a ceremony?”
She smiled wistfully. “No. We have no such tradition, although it does sound lovely.”
“So, it’s already done? You’re already married—already fully mated.”
She nodded. “Yes, we are mated. We are one from now on.”
“Well, maybe when this is all over and we’re back with the tribe, we can start a new tradition. You’ll be the very first mermaid to ever be married!”
She grinned brightly. “I think I would like that very much.”
“Then it’s settled! We’re gonna get you married, girl!”
She leaned over and rested her head on my shoulder, some of her hair floating in front of my face. “I love you, Brett.”
“I love you too, Lelas.”
We sat like that for a time. Both lost in our own thoughts, giving in to the moment of respite.
“Lelas?”
“Hmmm?”
I hesitated, afraid to ruin the calm that had fallen between us, but I had to make sure. One final time. “Are you sure? Are you really happy?”
She nodded against my shoulder. “Yes. Happier than I have ever been before.”
Silence fell before her voice broke into my mind once more.
“Brett?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for making sure I am happy. For caring about me.”
Twelve
BRETT WRIGHT
The journey back wasn’t as dark as I’d feared. The tunnel’s surface was covered in blue-green phosphorescent specks, similar to the lightning-bug creatures I’d noticed earlier. When we entered Nalu’s room, it was almost like stepping into a planetarium, the entire circumference sparkled. Maybe it had been like that in the room Lelas and I had been in, but I hadn’t noticed it as it gradually began to glow.
I ended up having the best night’s sleep since entering the ocean. The sensation of having a starry sky over my head, and the absence of anything more than the lightest current made it almost feel like I was a kid again and sleeping in the backyard.
Upon waking, I allowed myself a few instants to give in to the sensation. I was snug in my bed, just another day getting ready to begin. Sonia already in the kitchen, clattering the dishes as she started breakfast and making a huge mess. We’d gossip about whatever boy caught our eye the night before at Rascals as we ate breakfast, and I’d head off to my lifeguard job. She’d kill time until her evening shift at the restaurant, and then we’d start it all over again. It was so clear I could almost smell the bacon and hear her heartfelt laughter.
The feeling was bittersweet as I opened my eyes to the sight of Lelas and Nalu still curled together in sleep next to the wall of the room. I let the sensation linger as long as I could, holding on to how simple life had been. I’d not known it at the time, thinking all the relational drama with my grandparents was the most tortuous thing in the world. How naïve I’d been.
Turning my head, I saw Therin and Wrell sleeping on the opposite side of the chamber. I flinched as Wrell nodded a greeting in my direction, his dark eyes upon me. While I was living in a fantasy, I might as well pretend that I really would wake up to those eyes staring at me one day, sans the crowd in the room.
An image of Nalu came into my mind, first as we’d seen him amidst the columns, then morphing to him curled up with Lelas. A feeling of curiosity washed over me.
I glanced back to make sure Lelas and Nalu were still asleep before I answered him. “I can’t say I love the guy or the idea that Lelas is mated to him now. She says she’s happy. Happier than she’s ever been, and that’s all that really matters. Just seems a little fast to me.”
He nodded his agreement.
“Do you think it’s too fast too? You think maybe they’re not actually supposed to be mated?”
He shook his head and gave me the memory of the two of them holding hands in front of Queen Akamaii. I could also hear her repeating she’d only heard of matings like this. I hadn’t ever had the impression of sound in one of Wrell’s visions before. Maybe if he heard someone else’s words, he could pass them on.
“So, you do think it’s real?”
He nodded.
I sighed inwardly and turned onto my side, stretching out on the hard floor of the saucer room. Wrell’s eyes followed the movement of my body, even pausing to observe the movement of my cock as I shifted. I looked carefully for some spark of desire. Something more than his ever-reserved curiosity. “Well, that’s good, I guess. If she’s going to be mated to him or is already mated to him, it’s good that everyone is certain this mate-at-first-sight thing is real.”
He didn’t reply, just leaned against the wall, his massive arms folded over his thick chest. My eyes lingered on the mottled purple tattoo-scar mass over his left shoulder and upper chest. He’d been through so much in his life. I’d thought my life was confusing. True, he’d always known he was a merman and didn’t have to discover that he was a mix of two different mythical creatures he hadn’t believed existed. And even if my mom was half demon, at least I hadn’t seen her ripped apart in front of my eyes as a child. I’d been raised by my family, even if only one of them was actual blood kin. Wrell had been raised by an enemy tribe, then found out that his birth tribe was the one responsible for his mother’s exile and death.
“Wrell, I’m curious about something. Do you mind if I ask you about when you went searching for your family, the Volitan tribe, back when you met Queen Akamaii?”
He shook his head and sent me a wave of assurance.
I repositioned again, this time rising to a seated position to be on eye level with him. His eyes followed me once more. “You seemed unsure if she was the same mermaid you’d met all those years ago. Did you not know that the Scarus mers aged?”
He shook his head again, this time accompanied by a sense of confusion and a hint of w
orry.
“That’s what I don’t understand. If you met them all those years ago, how did you not know they aged?”
He sent me a picture of him in front of Akamaii, once again young and beautiful. The only similarity was the crown with ropes of pearls and jewels streaming down over her long, dark hair. Behind her were six other Scarus mers. Four men, two women—all young and healthy.
“Yeah, I know. You’ve shown me that before, but still—” I thought back to the image he’d just shared and then realized what I’d missed the other times he’d shown me, and what he must not have realized before either. They were outside in the open water, out in the sunlight. They were deep in the coral reef, but not inside the island like we were now. “You never actually came into their dwelling, did you? Are those the only members of the Scarus you met?”
He nodded.
That made sense. If he hadn’t been inside, and the only mers he’d met had been young, then he would have assumed they were the same as the Chromis and Volitan tribes. “You didn’t even know there were so many of them, did you? That they were able to have children so much more easily than the Chromis?”
He shook his head. His eyes didn’t follow the school of bluefish that swam between us. I watched them as they swooped through Nalu’s room, then darted up through the hole in the ceiling toward the light. They might have been the same school that had been with Lelas and me the night before, but they were a brilliant blue in the daylight.
“Why do you think they are able to have offspring so easily? Why aren’t they immortal?”
The feeling of confusion washed over me yet again, this time the accompanying sense of worry stronger than before.
“Did you know there were mers that weren’t immortal?”
He shook his head. An image of a mer I’d never seen before entered my mind. He was fair-skinned with long blond hair, and his tail was the most beautiful I’d ever seen. It seemed more of a skin texture, as I couldn’t make out any scales covering its surface. The entire tail was a mass of brilliant blue, orange, green, and yellow swirls and spots. The fins were rounded. The dorsal fin that started between the merman’s shoulders was also rounded, except for a long orange spike at its apex.
The vision threw me. It seemed completely random. I gave Wrell a quizzical look, but he just waited.
What did the merman have to do with Queen Akamaii and the Scarus tribe? It hit me out of the blue, and I knew I’d made the right connection. “That’s one of the Synchi tribe, isn’t it? The other tribe that keeps its own territory?”
Wrell smiled, giving me a small nod of approval.
“Is that the only Synchi you met on your journey?”
He nodded yet again.
I took it one step further. “Are you thinking they might be mortal like the Scarus?”
It wasn’t long before the five of us were heading back to the Queen’s chamber. In the bright light of morning, I was even more in awe of the Scarus’s dwelling. When I ducked into the chambers and passageways we passed, I could see endless offshoots leading to other rooms and hallways. It truly seemed never-ending.
I came to a dead halt outside the sixth or seventh room I peered into. I paused, thinking I was seeing things. Then it moved, and I was certain. I craned my neck to look back at the others continuing on without me. “Lelas!”
The others stopped and turned to look at me.
“Lelas. Everybody, come back. You’ve got to see this.” Without waiting, I turned and swam into the room.
The space was a massive cylinder-shaped room, going up probably hundreds of feet. At the very top, a pinprick of light flooded the entire space, reflecting over the mirrored surfaces of the walls. It was so high up that I wondered if it opened to the air, above the surface of the ocean.
In the center of the room, stood a huge glass ball, roughly five feet in diameter. A long golden chain connected the bottom of the sphere to the stone floor of the room.
Lelas swam past me and reached the ball before I did. True to form, she stretched out a finger and ran it along the smooth curved surface. Before turning around, she glanced back only long enough to look past me to Nalu. “Is it real?”
“Yes. It is alive.” Nalu swam past me but stopped before reaching Lelas. His brilliant-blue tail glistened in the refracted light of the room, as did his skin. His coloring reminded me of Finn’s beautiful golden hue. I wasn’t sure if that made me like him more or less.
This time Lelas didn’t look back, but swam above the ball, then over to the other side, as if inspecting to see if some trick was involved. “Will it be all right?”
“Most probably.”
At this Lelas jerked her head to Nalu, her eyes flashing. “Probably?”
“Typically, we release them, but at times, Queen Akamaii wants to have them for celebratory feasts.” Nalu’s tone was apologetic, lest he be blamed for the queen’s desires.
“But she eats it, not just kills it?”
“Yes. We don’t kill for the sake of death alone.”
Lelas nodded, satisfied, and returned to her inspection. “It’s beautiful.”
I closed the distance between us, Wrell and Therin joining as well. Like Lelas, I couldn’t refrain from stretching out to touch the glass.
Perched on a pile of sticks and coral on the bottom of the glass was a tiny scarlet bird, probably about six inches tall. It cocked its head from side to side, its curved hummingbird-like beak slashing back and forth as it inspected us. The bill was a warm salmon color, the only other hue besides its bright-red feathers and black wings and tail. It hopped into midair and hovered in the middle of the ball, wings beating so furiously they blurred in its speed. It darted toward us, its beak crashing into the glass. It dropped to the twigs, dazed. After a moment, it hopped back up to the tallest point of its perch and inspected us once more.
Hating to tear my eyes from the beautiful bird, I gaped at Nalu. “You have a bird.”
“Yes.”
“Under the ocean.”
He nodded, looking at me like I was daft. “Yes.”
“How?”
He made a dismissive gesture. “I know not. Such things do not intrigue me. There are others that capture birds to show off in this room. There are better things to see in the ocean than are on land or in the air.”
Lelas continued to stare at the bird, completely captivated. “I have only seen birds from time to time, and then only the white and black ones that are on the surface of the water. I did not know birds could be as brilliantly colored as the fish in the sea.”
Nalu looked somewhat embarrassed he’d criticized the bird when Lelas was so enamored. I wanted to tell him to get used to it. She’d never met an animal she didn’t fall instantly in love with. “I can ask Palila if she can show you how she… acquires the birds. I know she would enjoy someone else being interested. She always wants to talk about things that fly through the clouds.”
Lelas turned to me, but went back to gazing at the bird before she even finished her thought. “If there are creatures such as these flying over the earth, it is no wonder humans have tales of mermaids desiring to live on land. I doubt they are legends.”
I lost track of how long we stayed, the four of us captivated by the tiny creature—so small and beautiful, so foreign, so many miles under the ocean inside an island. Even Nalu seemed to begin to be genuinely interested in the bird, probably feeding off Lelas’s enthusiasm, before he reminded us that Queen Akamaii was waiting.
Thirteen
BRETT WRIGHT
The wizened queen smiled as we entered the room we’d been in the day before. Her gaze passed over us individually and came to rest on Lelas and Nalu, once again holding hands. Any sense of distrust or uncertainty that Akamaii had the day before seemed to have been alleviated. Whether it was memories of Wrell, that we proved trustworthy through the night, putting her faith in the fairy-tale love come to life before her eyes, or a mixture of it all, who could say? Whatever it was, I couldn’t suppre
ss a thrill of excitement.
Like the queen, something had shifted in me during our time with the Scarus. Since embarking, I’d been quick to assume the four of us could be on a fool’s errand. An errand we had to do, a quest we had to see through to whatever conclusion we would find, but a fool’s task nonetheless. Maybe it was seeing the Scarus tribe, mortal, but so plentiful in number, made up of families of young and old. Maybe, like Akamaii, seeing Lelas and Nalu’s love was inspiring. Maybe it was just a bird flying around miles below the surface of the ocean. Whatever caused the queen’s loss of skepticism and my own sudden surety, I was filled with the conviction that not only were we going to discover what was happening to the missing mers, but that we would find the key among the Scarus. A home run after our very first swing.
The queen was seated somewhat more comfortably in her canopy-bed throne. She sat, her back only slightly curved forward, at the pinnacle of the artful pile of coral and jewels. This time, Laban sat somewhat behind her—lower than her but close enough to reach out and touch her, should he need to. What surprised me even more than the queen sharing her throne was the tiny merboy on Laban’s lap. By human years, I would have guessed him to be four years old, past toddler age but full cheeks still retaining the last bits of baby cuteness. The boy’s tail gleamed bright, contrasting against the dull and sickly looking hues of Akamaii’s and Laban’s scales. At our approach, he lifted his head from where it had been resting on Laban’s chest, his eyes growing wide as he stared first at my legs and then Wrell’s abundance of quills. I tried to imagine Syleen holding a child in the same manner, and I couldn’t quite picture it. Though the Chromis might not have a queen, and she definitely wouldn’t wear a jeweled crown, she seemed more the typical elite picture of royalty than Akamaii and Laban. At the moment, they seemed more like ancient grandparents than anything else.