by Amanda Milo
I scan him, wondering if the flights back and forth were that much of an exertion on his powerful body.
His wings bend outward as he bends his neck low—bowing to me, I discover before he leaves to patrol the area, his tail winding back and forth like a giant anaconda of darkness behind him.
A happy hiss erupts from him when he discovers a coastal cavern large enough for him to enter it, and he’s delighted to find a fresh water spring complete with cavefish hidden inside of the thing.
I’m amused as I watch him explore, and I find my gaze repeatedly going back to him while he makes his rounds, protecting this territory he has claimed.
My cheeks fire with a blush when the dragon gallops through the sea spray just to bring me a seashell, and I feel my heartbeat quicken when he returns to proudly bestow me with interesting bits of ship wreckage, because… well, for a mermaid, this is quite the courting gesture.
It used to be, anyway.
Mermen are such a rarity that they rarely form any sort of mate-pair anymore. Romantic gestures are a bit of a thing of the past for our kind.
That this dragon—Kalos, I silently refer to him in my mind—seems to enjoy collecting treasure to the degree I do is interesting. I too am inclined to hunt for whatever glitters, whatever I can hoard. And I happen to love seashells.
I clutch Kalos’s gifts to me, deciding that I’ll keep them even when he takes me back. Holding them makes me hungry to dig for my own treasure as well, and eventually, I can’t resist my own hunting in what little water I can patter around in. I’m pleased when Kalos expresses interest in what I find; he’s truly as enamored with flash as I am. “I think these are old coins,” he even muses in wonder as he digs through my little pile.
Unlike when one of my sisters touches my treasures, I don’t shriek at him not to steal anything. Not because I’m afraid of him, but because I… I don’t know anything about this creature, and yet I have the strangest desire to blindly trust him.
It’s peculiar.
In the afternoon, the ebb tide pulls the already low water entirely out of the bay, leaving nothing but the sandiest excuses for puddles. The positive side to this is that the oysters have nowhere to hide. We deplete their population by half just trying to satisfy the dragon’s stomach. I knew dragons had an appetite; I didn’t know they could empty half the ocean. It’s a good thing they live in the air and not the sea. Nothing would be spared. This thought has me gazing narrow-eyed at the quiet cliffs and the silent sky.
Not one gull in sight.
Did the dragon eat the seabirds?
An itching sensation on my lower half has me glancing down to see I’m already drying out. Morosely, I inch over until I’m submerged in the soft wet sand with the most water pooled in it.
Kalos’s shadow falls over me. Instinctively, I twitch. He doesn’t notice. “Is it normal for the tide to wash out like this? The whole bay is empty,” he exclaims, sounding shocked.
“Tides leave like this in many places,” I confirm. I bite my tongue to prevent myself from adding that my family’s cove doesn’t disappear. The waters fall low, sure, but they never empty, not like this place.
“What an unlucky phenomenon,” Kalos says. “I believe I’ve been told that funnel storms off of a coast can drain a bay. Perhaps it’s temporary.”
I nod because I know this to be true.
“Never had cause to see it before. Never had cause to much care—I’ve always avoided the coast if the skies look bad,” he continues, clearly perplexed. But then his dragon’s chin firms, and for the first time, I notice little spikes on it that form a short sort of leathery beard. It gives him a wiser, slightly older appearance than I first assumed. “I can no longer afford not to care.” He turns his gaze to me. “My mate needs her safe seawater.”
I say nothing, because I do need it. And I don’t address the part where he refers to me as his mate, because unlike him, I don’t feel any such bond. If he’s experiencing any sort of bonded drives and instincts, it’s entirely one-sided.
“You’ve been very quiet,” Kalos notes.
“I don’t have anything to add.”
“You don’t sing?” he asks, and if I’m not mistaken, there’s something besides curiosity in his voice. Longing, maybe.
It’s with sadness that I tell him, “Kalos, a mermaid only sings when she’s happy.”
CHAPTER 6
KALOS
The tide still hasn’t returned by the time night falls. To my dismay, the moon that rises in the sky is as red as the scarlet streaks in Adella’s gorgeous fall of drying hair.
But it isn’t as lovely a sight as her crimson sections of wild mane. Oh, it’s beautiful, to be sure. But not welcome. Because to see the red moon rise in the sky is to begin the full effects of heat.
Heat. I understand that word now. There’s fire in my lower belly, an incessant, angry drive that cannot be quenched.
This wouldn’t be a suffering I’d endure to this degree if I hadn’t captured this mermaid. If I were free to find a female dragon, I would not suffer this moon’s cruel effects at all.
I would revel in them.
But I have a mate, I cannot and will not go seeking any other—no matter that my taken female is not of my kind. We aren’t physically compatible but she is very likable, and surprisingly, we share several commonalities, and we’ve only known each other for the briefest of time. For however long our lives last, we will surely find more.
Still, I curse myself for the thousandth time for snatching a sea maiden. It was thoughtless, it was foolish, and now we are both suffering.
And to my utter shame, my mate is suffering. And whats more, if I hadn’t taken her, she wouldn’t be so unhappy as she clearly is.
Adella huddles in the meager leaving of water remaining here, and if I were feeling well, I would have flown her to a better location long before dark fell. I would think my eyes would be better honed at scoping out an appropriate seaside home for us now that I’ve had two practice runs. If my mate had needed a cave with the perfect number of exits and a large enough chamber free from drafts and water (which is the perfect location for Crested Merlin egg incubation), I would have known exactly where to settle us, but I’m new to my mate’s needs. And I’d leave right now and get her settled tonight—I have a sense of urgency that demands my mate get better care shown to her than this—but something isn’t right with me. My sense of balance even seems to be affected; my rear legs aren’t responding like they should, my body isn’t in sync with itself like it should be... I feel strange.
I don’t tell Adella, but when I call my wings to open, just for a stretch, they don’t spread.
This discovery sparks more than mere concern in me. This is no normal heat; if my system were responding to the moon’s fires, I would be burning for a female’s company sure—but I’d be damned ready and able to fly to find one.
All I can assume is that because I have broken the natural law of things and taken an otherworldly mate, then I have disrupted the natural happenings of my system entirely. Why should my system let me fly? I won’t be seeking out any winged mates. Not now, not ever.
I can still walk well enough though, so I approach my female with purpose. “Adella? I will carry you in my hand while we search for an appropriate settling place. We’ll move further down the coast.” I don’t offer the reason as to why I will be walking, and she doesn’t ask.
Instead, she shakes her head and scoops a handful of sand off to the side of herself, and I realize she’s digging a pit, searching out what water lies trapped under the sand’s surface. “Just rest for the night.” She spares me a glance. “You said you weren’t feeling quite right, and you don’t look it. You’re making a funny face.”
I frown at her. “This is my regular face. It isn’t funny.”
Her lips tug up, more of the shadow cast by a smile than the real thing, but it’s a welcome flash of humor all the same. “Whatever you say, dragon.”
“Kalos.”
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“I should stay hydrated enough until the tide returns… Kalos,” she tells me kindly, continuing to dig.
That she’s being so solicitous in the face of such awful first-day matehood circumstances mortifies me. I don’t deserve her kindness, and it drives home the point that although she is a mermaid, something that my kind wouldn’t hesitate to consume, she is an entirely likable creature.
And I mean that beyond what she probably tastes like.
Even if matehood could be reversed—and it cannot be—I don’t believe I could ever swallow a sea maiden after this.
(I can definitely eat the mermen though. If you don’t count their surprisingly strong flailings, I didn’t so much as suffer indigestion.)
Part of me knows I should take Adella back to her cove, but a newly mated dragon does not share his mate. It isn’t safe, not even if the only threats are this mermaid’s siblings. Especially if those other females would attempt to turn my mate from me.
And why wouldn’t her sisters try to rescue her from a dragon’s clutches?
Surely they will take one look at her and attempt to swim her away. Concerningly in this scenario, mermaids can hold their breath in the deep far longer than a dragon can.
I wouldn’t be able to bring her back if she fled from me.
I can’t lose my mate now that I have her. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t enjoyed her for long; she is my mate. To lose her would destroy me.
But my greatest fear is that I would take her back to her family—satisfying my need to please her—only to feel my protective instincts flare, and in a mindless rage, I might decimate her sisters who try to take action to save her from me.
If I destroy her loved ones, Adella will hate me.
I want with everything that I am for her to be happy, but I need her to stay with me. We even curl up together to sleep, with me forming a living wall around Adella as she tries to keep herself submerged in the salt-encrusted pit I managed to shakily help her dig out.
Adella noticed my trembling limbs. I saw it in her worried gaze. But she didn’t press me to stop, and I wouldn’t have even if she’d asked. She needs the water, and something is more wrong with me than I knew. I’m glad I didn’t attempt to carry her out of here, because now I know I wouldn’t have succeeded. Not safely.
Before Adella nods off beside me, she may do it quietly, but my ears detect the hitches in her breathing.
She’s silently crying.
My heart strangles, the huge muscle torquing painfully enough that I rub at my chest scales to relieve the sensation.
On our first night of matehood, my female for life is not pleasured and satisfied as a new mate should be. This is unthinkable.
As her mate, especially during a mating fever, I should be devoting all of my attention to slaking our lusts and assuaging our driving needs. I’m not providing for her properly, and I only have myself to blame. As I lie curled around her, bringing my tail closer and closer until it touches her (and attempting not to feel a pang of sadness as she tries not to flinch at my tail’s touch), I vow to all that is dragon within me that at first light, I must be recovered enough to fly her to a new gulf or cove or bay where there’s enough damn seawater.
Without warning, I transform into a man.
It’s so sudden and so silent that I’m staring down at myself in shock, and Adella is none the wiser until she glances at me from the corner of her eye—and does a double take.
“Kalos?” she gasps—and it’s a question, as if she’s trying to reconcile how a man managed to sneak up on a full-grown dragon and soundlessly steal close to his mate.
“It’s me,” I confirm, drawing my eyes away from my scale-covered human hands with nearly blunt human claws. I cast an amazed glance around us—because everything just became gargantuan.
Either that, or I just shrank down to something vulnerably small.
I detest the very idea. I’m a dragon—I should never know the sensation of being small.
I should also never know what it feels like for any part of me to be vulnerable. And yet, between my very human legs, I have no scale-covered plating to protect a rather vulnerable spot, let alone hide my burgeoning desire for the female I’ve been snuggled beside.
Adella sees the evidence of my fever-stricken hunger and glances away, her eyes wide.
My eyes though are soon glued to the approximate place on a mermaid where a human man might couple with her. Adella has only the smallest front slit. I’ve never examined a merman’s tail-half beyond dangling him by the split end of it before dropping him down my gullet, but I’ve been told that they have a small spear-like copulatory organ called a gonopodium that folds out from the fins that grow on their fronts.
What this long-ago stored information tells me is that Adella is unlikely to welcome my advances when my own organ, even human-sized, is likely ten times as thick and large as a male of her kind, and from what I can see, too large to fit into her tiny slit.
And mating fever lasts a burning, fiery month.
I growl into my human hands, making Adella jump.
“Sorry,” I mutter, rubbing tiredly at my face. I think about testing my new limbs, likely the reason I’ve felt so uncoordinated half the day; it seems they move more independently than my dragon’s limbs do—but I decide against moving from this spot at all. If I rise, I’m afraid I’ll fall on Adella, in both senses of that phrase. I don’t want to excite myself by touching her further, and I’m not certain I can master human locomotion without some embarrassing flailing. I also don’t want to frighten her with advances she won’t want or can’t meet.
So I stay where I am, sitting half behind my mate, staring at her hungrily as she tries to keep her scales from drying out in this terrible place that does not meet her needs.
The reminder that I haven’t provided well for my female cools some of my ardor. Enough for me to grow aware of my human-form’s discomfort. Because if I thought my dragon self was less than enthusiastic about drowsing on packed wet sand while my mate keeps vigil in her pocket of necessary water, my new human form is equally thrilled at the prospect. My skin-like scales begin to itch in no time.
I want to roar. I want to rage. I settle for a tired sigh and a sorrowful apology to Adella. “If I could go back, I would not have cursed you with me. I vow that I will make you happy though, Adella. Just please… give me that chance.”
Listlessly, my mate nods.
CHAPTER 7
ADELLA
I wake up because my lower half feels so… wrong.
The red moon burns almost as brightly as the sun, illuminating everything in an unnatural glow. Blearily, I stare down, expecting to see the muddied water, but all I see are a pair of muddy legs.
Legs...
LEGS?!
I thrash sideways, panicked. Like a fish flips itself to escape a net, I instinctively employ the same maneuver…
And end up sprawling, my limbs flailing like a jellyfish’s tendrils do when they’re trapped on land. My body slaps into the sand.
“Adella?”
Startled at myself, my horrified gaze leaps to Kalos’s human face to see that I can read his expressions much better in his human form. He’s astonished.
He helps me stand—both of us clumsy as unicorn foals at first, shaky on our newly minted legs. It takes some coordination, but because he isn’t entirely new to having feet, just a human’s form, he manages well enough, and conversely, because he is new to having a human’s legs and feet, he can adequately understand where I’m failing to grasp my body’s new mechanics, and he is able to instruct me on how to commandeer myself until I’m walking right along with him.
He takes me to the cavern where he found the freshwater spring. His eyes are still a dragon’s eyes—slitted pupils and the brightness from his irises illuminates everywhere he turns his head. Even if this were not so, as a mermaid, I possess excellent night vision. It helps my kind when we’re hunting ships at night.
Kalos drinks greed
ily from the spring, and I find that I need the freshwater too. I find that it tastes good to me now, not bad.
I jump when I feel Kalos’s hand on my… thigh.
I have a thigh.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” he explains. “Does your skin feel like you must scratch at it?” He drags short claws over his arm as if he can’t help it, proving his scales are irritating him.
Mine skin is irritating me too.
I nod. “It feels stretched tight and… strange.”
Grimly, he bobs his chin, and bends to take me by my calves. He lifts each one gently, rinsing them in the spring’s water using the roughness of his human hands to get the sand and grit from my human legs.
He washes himself next.
And as I watch him running his large hands over his equally large, well-filled out, mature male body—and he catches me looking at him, my eyes heavy-lidded—his eyes widen comically… That’s when I suss out the reason I ever thought of Kalos as young: he’s wholesome.
He’s a full-grown man, and he certainly looks to be a full-grown dragon, when he’s in that form. He just happens to be an idealistic, sweet one.
A dragon. Considerate and attentive and sweet. Who would have thought?
The water has left me cold, and as I stand and wait for him to finish, gooseflesh breaks out on my skin like a human’s. As a mermaid, I’d be impervious to water of this temperature. I could swim, play, eat, and sleep in it.
The realization that I’ve changed makes me unbearably sad.
“Oh, no, shhh,” Kalos nearly squawks—even as he shushes me again, the twit—his brows nearly touching. He leans forward, trying to dash away my tears with his human thumbs. “No, please don’t cry. Adella, I’m so sorry—please don’t cry.”
But I can’t help it. I start to sob.
“Och,” Kalos says, swallowing thickly. “My poor half-of-my-heart.” He wraps his arms around me and brings me in to his warm chest.
