A Crack in Everything

by Ruth Frances Long

  ‘Who?’ The sudden squall pulled her voice away the moment it left her lips, but somehow he heard her anyway.

  ‘Whoever controls the gate. They’re stirring up the elements against us to drive us off.’

  ‘Not Brí?’

  Under her feet, the rocks pitched sideways and she fell with a cry, landing hard on her knees. Jinx’s hand closed on her upper arm, hauling her back up.

  ‘Best not mention her here. She’s not exactly a good neighbour.’ He pulled her against him and the mark on her neck gave one of those shudders. Not a warning, or at least not a warning of danger. And not just the mark either. Her whole body. ‘Not her. There are other factions in control here – sea fae who have no love for the rest of us, nor any reason to love us. Just stay close.’

  Secure against him, his arms wrapped around her, Izzy closed her eyes and let the feeling wash over her. Safe, content, triumphant. Even if it couldn’t last. For this moment, for just now …

  ‘Isabel, beware your feelings. He can’t be trusted.’ Pity stained the angel’s voice. The sound turned whatever Izzy had just been feeling to ashes in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘We’d better go on,’ she whispered and Jinx released her, his withdrawal as reluctant as her own. Or maybe that was wishful thinking on her part.

  He didn’t let go of her hand though. More for balance and safety, certainly, but that didn’t matter. She was ridiculously, and profoundly, grateful.

  They stood before the shimmering gate and Jinx raised his free hand, tracing some sort of sigil in the air. Sparks of light followed his fingertips like scratches in reality.

  Izzy swallowed hard until her ears popped as the air around was sucked away. ‘What’s on the other side?’

  ‘Somewhere like this,’ he replied. ‘And not.’ Without further explanation, he pulled her through behind him.

  And not. That was the freaking understatement of the year. Though the basic landscape remained the same – the rocks, the sea, the hill rising in the distance, the shoreline to the rocky point of the Forty Foot and the wide sweep of Scotsman’s Bay beyond it – the world around her had transformed.

  The houses were gone, but that was the least of it. So were the roads, the walls and all the familiar landmarks of mankind. Flowers rioted along the edge of the dirt track leading inland. The sea turned calm, like a mirror, reflecting all around it in perfect symmetry. Too calm. Too quiet. Unnatural. Izzy turned around in a circle, staring with eyes too wide. She knew this place, knew every nuance of this land. And it was changed, swept away and replaced with something other. Like her life. Like what she had thought was her life. Replaced with madness.

  The tide was further in too, surrounding the boulder on which they stood, cutting off the gate from the mainland. The sea whirled around them, deep and green, too dark to see the bottom. They were marooned.

  After a couple of seconds studying the shore Izzy realised there were houses, but not as she knew them. Shacks hugged the shoreline, made of flotsam and jetsam – old spars and barrels, tin drums and buoys, ragged nets and something that might once have been a shopping trolley. They occupied a position half in, half out of the water, all but submerged.

  She turned at the sound of a splash behind her, but the water was just as still as before. Dark shapes moved beneath the surface, shadows within the mirror of the sea. A head popped out, glossy mahogany, almost black. A seal. Izzy pushed back the sliver of alarm worming its way through her. Just a seal. It regarded her with eyes like obsidian marbles.

  Another splash sounded, and another, and suddenly they were surrounded by dozens of seals, all of them watching the rock, studying Izzy and Jinx with calm, impenetrable eyes.

  ‘Jinx?’

  ‘Selkies,’ he told her in a voice too calm for comfort. Purposeful, dangerously quiet. That I-don’t-want-to-worry-you-but … calm. ‘Just be quiet and don’t make any sudden movements. Don’t scare them off or make them angry. Just hold on to me. They can help us. I’m told their elder is the Oracle of the Sea. Maybe he can guide us.’

  ‘How did the sea come in so fast?’

  ‘Because they told it to. Don’t insult them. What does quiet mean, Izzy?’

  ‘But they’re just—’

  He swept her into his arms too fast for her to dodge him. His hand clamped over her mouth while the other pinned her against his chest again.

  Seals, she wanted to scream at him. Just seals. You saw them all the time along this stretch of coast, especially near the harbours or fishing points. Anywhere they could pick up a free meal of fish. Just seals.

  And then, from somewhere far off and unseen, a voice began to sing.

  Jinx shuddered, a great quivering of his still, hard body that ran from his feet right up his legs and torso and along the arms holding her. Even his fingertips trembled. Izzy had never heard music like it, sweet and high, almost hypnotic in its beauty.

  The selkies splashed in the water, which now rippled and moved like mercury. With no more than an agitated flip and turn, they vanished beneath the growing waves. Gone, as if they had never been there. The voice, however, sang on. Slowly, inch by inch, Jinx released her. She watched him, bemused, as he slid to his knees on the rock, using his arms to support his body so he could search the surface of the water.

  ‘Jinx? You okay?’

  He didn’t hear her, or didn’t react if he did. The urge to kick him rose inside her and she almost did it. Right square on that too-finely sculpted ass to send him face first into the water that captivated him so. But out of the corner of her eye, she saw something approaching and it drove all thoughts of petty vengeance and mischief from her mind.

  Like seaweed, drifting towards their position. Green and gold tangles in the water. But seaweed didn’t move, as far as she knew. It certainly didn’t change direction, or speed up. The voice, weaving its charms and wiles, stole all sense of urgency from her. She stared at the something that moved through the water, its music twined around it.

  Another voice joined the first, and another. She saw the splash of a tail, a flicker of iridescent scales touched by sunlight, and then – impossibly – a hand, a shoulder, the curve of an ear, an open mouth.

  They sang in intricate harmonies worthy of a madrigal, voices that bewitched and pleasured and made her mind wonder and her heart ache. Izzy found herself kneeling at Jinx’s side. She glanced at him, to see if this music enchanted him as it did her.

  The music stripped all the hard edges from his expressions, honed those sharp angles to untold beauty. He gazed in rapt wonder into the water. Izzy frowned as something inside her ate away at the periphery of the music’s spell. He’d never looked at her like that. No one had. She’d never seen such adoration focused her way, and she wanted it. She wanted it more than anything else she could imagine.

  From him.

  Bile stung the back of her throat. The sweet scent on the air dissolved to the stench of seaweed rotting in a hot sun, and the sludge of decay, the scum of pollution that ringed the shoreline, the carcasses of dead things. She looked down into the water. Pale figures swept through the water, like bleached corpses, rising higher and higher, their mouths open in song. And in hunger.

  The first one broke the surface just in front of Jinx. Golden hair spilled down her back, spreading out in the water like tendrils of sunlight. She smiled at his adoration, such a beautiful expression, until her lips parted and Izzy saw her teeth. There was nothing human about them. The only place she could recall seeing anything comparable was in the grinning maw of a shark. The creature’s eyes were dull, opaque, dead eyes. Beautiful she might be, this mermaid, on the outside at least, but it didn’t take a second glance at the seaweed tangled in her hair, at her dead eyes and the ragged and razorlike teeth to know that there was nothing Disney about her.

  Lifting her long hands from the water, the mermaid reached for Jinx, tilting her face as if ready to receive a kiss. Between her splayed fingers, thin webs of white skin – corpse skin, dead skin, Izzy’
s brain screamed at her sluggish body – spread out as well, so tight that it might tear at any moment.

  A second movement in the water beneath her revealed another face, hauntingly similar, beautiful and terrible. Dead and rotting, seeking sustenance, the hungry mouths of the sea.

  ‘Jinx.’ Fear made her voice thin and desperate, a harsh and reluctant thing. ‘Jinx, they’re—’

  ‘Merrow,’ he whispered and even the word sounded like a spell on his lips. He smiled, such a wistful smile, not marked by his usual cynicism and bitter doubt. This was an expression of wonder, of innocence she’d never seen in him before. He bent lower and the merrow’s hand touched his skin at last. A sigh shuddered out of him as she stroked his cheek and jaw, leaving a trail of shining wetness behind. Jinx leaned in closer again, his lips parting, and his hand lifted from the rock, reaching out, over-stretching his balance.

  Izzy whimpered in alarm as the merrow nearest her was joined by another. Dead things in the water, corpses, white and waxy of flesh, their beauty only a mask for the monster beneath.

  ‘What do I do?’ A whisper was all she could manage. Just like Jinx, her treacherous body was leaning towards them, drawn by the song, lured towards the water. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Don’t let them touch you.’ Sorath’s voice tore up from the back of her mind.

  A deep-throated groan of pleasure sent all thoughts of mermaids and danger from Izzy’s mind. She stared at Jinx in abject horror.

  The merrow was half out of the water, her catwalk-perfect upper torso pressed to the rock and her arms entwined around Jinx’s neck. His hand tangled in her golden hair. Their lips met in a strangely savage kiss and slowly, so very slowly, she began to draw him forwards, over the edge of the rock and down.

  ‘Jinx!’ Izzy yelled. She grabbed his shoulders, tried to pull him back, but he felt like the rock that was their only hope of safety. ‘Jinx, stop! Please!’

  Bloody man! Stupid bloody man. Sure, he wouldn’t kiss her, but give him some waterlogged dead thing, half-supermodel and half-Jaws, and it was tonsil-tasting time. She thundered her fists on his back, pulled at his clothes and hair.

  The other merrows laughed. She could hear it in their song. They bared their teeth and the long, razor-sharp nails on their fingers, ready for blood, ready to kill, to tear him apart as soon as he was theirs.

  ‘Are you going to listen to me?’ Sorath said petulantly. ‘Trust me, Isabel. I haven’t failed you before, have I? Listen if you want to break the spell.’

  ‘Tell me!’ Izzy screamed as Jinx edged nearer the water, as the merrow pulled more insistently, as others joined it, their hands snaking up from the water to claim him. ‘Tell me what to do!’

  ‘Silver.’

  ‘She isn’t here!’

  ‘The metal. You’re wearing silver. Different fae creatures have different desires. Different addictions. Merrow love silver. Throw it into the water. As far as you can from here.’

  Her necklace. The one Dad had surprised her with on her birthday, a little Celtic knotwork fish. The Salmon of Knowledge. She loved it and it was all she had of him right now. Wincing, she ripped it from her throat and dangled it out over the water. It glinted in the sunlight.

  As if someone had flicked a switch, the merrow released Jinx. Izzy pulled him too hard, eager to get him out of their clutches, and he fell back against her. She went down on the rock beneath him, her hand flung out over the water clinging to the silver necklace. A merrow jumped, made a grab at it, but Izzy snatched it back just in time.

  Their song stopped now and they hissed at her, milling about under the necklace like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

  ‘Throw it, Isabel. As hard and as far as you can.’

  She hurled the necklace away from her. It arced out over the mirror-like sea and fell. The merrow took off after it, pushing past each other, tearing skin and scale in the effort to get there first until blood stained the water. They plunged under the waves after the necklace, still fighting each other, ripping each other apart.

  And everything went still again.

  Jinx lay on his back, pinning Izzy’s legs beneath him, dazed. He stared at the sky and gasped for breath like a drowning man. His face and hair were drenched. So were his arms and shirt, everywhere the merrow had touched him. He was half-drowned already before he’d even reached the water.

  ‘Are you okay now?’ Izzy asked, wishing she didn’t sound so scared. She’d just saved him. She shouldn’t sound terrified. ‘Jinx, can you hear me?’ She twisted around, pulling her legs out so she could bend over him.

  His gaze moved to her, shell-shocked and unknowing. She tried to study his eyes, tried to see if his senses were finally returning or if the merrow had robbed him of far more than kisses.

  Jinx surged up before she realised what was coming. His hand cupped her face, his thumb sliding along her jaw line until it settled at the back of her neck where the mark turned molten beneath his touch.

  It didn’t matter. Not when his lips brushed hers in as tender and tentative a kiss as she could ever have imagined. No boy’s kiss this, fumbling and uncertain. No rude clash of lips and teeth. Even in this state Jinx knew how to kiss. It left her stunned.

  The first kiss was a question. Too surprised to react, she let it happen to her. The second was an exploration, an elaboration on that first question, and when his lips parted, hers were compelled to mirror them. What else could she do?

  Jinx kissed her, and all conscious thought fell away in shock as she found herself, impossibly, kissing him back.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Tears for a Selkie

  Jinx tasted sweet and yet spicy too. A strange cocktail of maleness and the forbidden, which made Izzy’s heart lodge at the base of her throat and beat a furious rhythm there. Blindly, her hands ranged over his shirt, across his skin, exploring in the same way as her mouth did, wanting, needing so much more from him, terrified that she might get it. But wanting everything nonetheless. She needed to remember this, to memorise every sensation, every millimetre of him because it couldn’t last, it wouldn’t. Eventually, inevitably—

  He broke the kiss and she opened her eyes. Her face heated beneath his bewildered stare. When their eyes met, she saw the flood of shame wash the silver in them away to dull and horrified stone.

  ‘Ancestors,’ he breathed. ‘Oh no, Izzy …’

  If he had other words to say, he didn’t use them. He extricated himself from her, shaking himself free, and stood up.

  ‘Merrow.’ The word sounded like a curse. ‘Damn it, I should have been more careful. It seems I owe you my life once again.’ It wasn’t thanks. Not exactly. It sounded more like an accusation.

  His meaning dawned on her and Izzy closed her eyes, wishing the rock would just swallow her up. Bad enough that she’d saved him once and broken his geis, now she’d done it again. Just to rub in her ownership of him, she’d made him doubly indebted to her.

  And that sparked off her anger. Well, hard luck. Would he rather be dead? Would he rather be merrow food?

  ‘We need to get out of here, before they come back.’ Her voice sounded far more self-assured than she felt.

  ‘The selkies might help.’ He couldn’t quite hide the tremble at the heart of his voice. ‘For a price. I was going to ask them before …’

  ‘What price?’

  ‘Well, they like silver.’

  Oh, he couldn’t have told her that before? Or at least before she’d used the only bit of silver they had to save his miserable hide. And what right did he have to be like this now? He’d kissed her, not the other way around. Not at first anyway.

  ‘I’m all out of silver.’ She couldn’t keep the coldness out of her voice.

  He looked down as if to ask a question, but then seemed to think better of it.

  ‘Tears then.’

  She stared back at him, at the guilt that crossed his brow, wondering if the merrows had stolen his mind as well. He loomed over her, his shoulders pushed back, his
arms folded across his chest.

  ‘Tears?’

  ‘It’s what you do, isn’t it? At the first sign of conflict, dissolve into tears. Any kind of danger, have a good cry until someone comes to the rescue. Don’t get your way—’

  Her traitor eyes stung as if he’d thrown acid at her. ‘Wh—what?’

  Jinx’s mouth twisted into a sneer. That same mouth that just before now had been kissing her like all her fantasies had finally arrived. It was bad when she kissed him on the hill and he didn’t kiss her back. This was a whole new version of hell.

  She tried again, tried to make her voice strong. ‘Jinx, what are you saying?’

  ‘Only the truth.’ Raw truth, just like Marianne had always said, hurt so much.

  But Marianne was dead. And it was her fault.

  The bridge of her nose tightened, stinging like needles thrusting into her brain. Tears made her vision blur. They gathered on her lashes and spilled down her face. She dashed them away, furious with herself, furious with him. How dare he be right!

  He pulled her to her feet, holding her upper arms too tightly and shook her. ‘Come on, Izzy,’ he went on, relentless. ‘This is how you deal with conflict, isn’t it? Cry or hide. God forbid you’d ever fight back. It’s not the done thing, not civilised. And that’s all-important, isn’t it? To be civilised. To be human. To be normal. Well, you’re not. You’re not normal at all. You’re Aes Sídhe and Grigori, you’re angel and shades, a half-blood, mixed-up freak.’ He leaned in, face to face. ‘Come on,’ he snarled. ‘Show me those tears.’

  ‘Why?’ She lashed out at him, struggling in his grip. ‘Because you can’t shed them yourself? Is it a purely human thing? Or maybe it requires having something like a heart and a soul to begin with.’

  He froze, just for an instant, and she knew one barb at least had sunk in. Pain flashed like forked lightning over his face and then, just as quickly, he put it away and that hard mask returned.