My shoulders slumped, but I nodded. He sounded confident. It wasn’t my choice to make. “Okay. Let’s go.”
As we walked toward Pirate’s Cove, I kept waiting for Dylan to change his mind. As we stripped out of our clothes on the empty beach and waded into the water, I expected him to stay behind and say it was just a joke. As we crossed through the door to Finfolkaheem, I looked to see if there was any hesitation on his face. There was nothing except stern determination. Dylan swam confidently to the square where we found the council with many other finfolk.
The council listened to Dylan’s request, their expressions blank and their mouths set in thin lines. I swam just behind him, waiting for them to tell him it was impossible. Or else that they wouldn’t do it. There had to be some sort of ancient finfolk law about doing something like this.
But after exchanging a few looks, Mairead nodded and said, “We will grant your request, young one, if it is truly what you wish.”
“It is,” Dylan said.
Finlay looked at me. “You have already been changed, so the song will not affect you if you hear it. But you are necessary in this. Once the song is complete, his lungs will be the last part of him to change. You must get him back to the door and to the surface in your world, or else he will be capable of drowning, just as any other human.”
I gulped. “I understand.”
But I didn’t really. I didn’t understand why Dylan would do this. Taking away the finfolk part of him wouldn’t save Swans Landing or anyone else. No one was asking him to do this. I looked at his tail of shimmering blue scales, knowing this was the last time anyone would see them.
I used to envy Dylan, back before everyone knew that I was finfolk. He had always seemed so sure of himself and who he was. He didn’t apologize for being finfolk. He seemed comfortable in his own skin.
It was strange how sometimes you didn’t really know a person the way you thought you did.
“Are you sure?” I asked Dylan, raising my eyebrows. “Really sure?”
He swished his tail back and forth through the water, looking down at it. Then he nodded. “I’m sure.”
I didn’t want to watch the transformation. I didn’t want to see part of Dylan being taken away from him. I closed my eyes as the council began the song. Thousands of finfolk voices joined in around us, a haunting melody that sounded almost like a funeral song. It was a death in a way, but I hoped that it would give Dylan the life he wanted.
I opened my eyes as the song began to fade. Dylan no longer had the blue-scaled tail. His legs were two limbs again, his skin shining pale in the glowing algae around us. Pain contorted his face and he looked like he was going to be sick.
“Go,” Sorcha told me. “Hurry.”
I grabbed Dylan’s arm and pulled him with me, pumping my tail fin as fast as I could to rocket through the water. He was mostly deadweight, barely moving his legs to help propel us.
The glow of the door appeared behind the rocks just ahead. I swam harder, biting my lip as we pushed through the water. Dylan began to struggle, flailing his arms and shaking his head.
Just a little more. I pushed Dylan through the door ahead of me. The whirlpool on the other side almost ripped him from my grasp, but I tightened my hold on his arm.
I fought against the current, pushing us toward the surface and out of the swirling water. Dylan came up next to me, sputtering and coughing.
I helped him swim to shore and then I shed my finfolk form as I walked back onto the beach. Dylan collapsed on the sand, panting heavily. I pulled my jeans on, shivering in the cold breeze, and then sat down next to him. The water crashed against the shore, just barely brushing Dylan’s toes.
Toes he would have every day for the rest of his life.
“How do you feel?” I asked after a moment.
Dylan lifted his head, his cheek coated with a layer of sand. He smiled.
“I feel human,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Night fell and almost total darkness covered Swans Landing. Every finfolk on the island gathered on the beach at Pirate’s Cove, our breaths hanging in the night air for a moment before dissolving into the mists.
The constant strobe of the lighthouse at the other end of the island was barely visible through the fog. It was getting thicker. Phone lines had gone dead a week ago. We didn’t even know if the island existed in the human world at all anymore.
Tonight we’d find out if we could bring it back for good.
Mr. Moody sat on the beach with Miss Gale, her head in his lap. She was too tired to swim, so she would sit and listen to the rest of us sing. Coral sat next to them, humming to herself as she trailed her fingers through the sand. Other people—finfolk and human—all affected by the mists, sat along the beach, waiting.
“You sure you don’t want to go back home and wait?” Callum asked Mr. Moody. “We don’t know what this song might do to you or cause you to see.”
But Mr. Moody shook his head. “I’m staying here, boy.” He waved a hand toward the water. “Y’all go on and get it over with.”
Sailor knelt to kiss her grandmother’s forehead. “I’ll come right back to you, Grandma. You’ll feel better soon.”
She stood and squeezed her mother’s hand, then followed Callum to the water.
I saw Dylan’s parents and his little brother as they made their way to the water. Dylan wasn’t there. He had seemed to be happy with his decision to become human, and he and Elizabeth were talking about applying to colleges near each other in the fall.
If things had gone according to plan, if I had been just another human guy, I would be going off to college this summer. But my life had never been normal, from the moment I was born I was something else. Now I was something even more different than that, my human genes changed by the finfolk song.
“You ready?” Mara asked, giving me a smile.
We were always tied to the island, but it didn’t have to limit my life. I would go back to school, get my GED through online classes. Maybe I could find an online oceanography or marine biology course. Something related to the water. Something that would have made my dad proud.
I nodded. “I’m ready.”
Lake stood nearby, watching me with narrowed eyes. I let out a shaky breath. He definitely knew I had almost slept with his daughter. I was becoming used to his watching, silent presence, but still, I made sure not to look Mara’s way as she shimmied out of her jeans, no matter how much I wanted to.
When we were all in the water and had changed forms, we turned to look back at the shore. We fell silent, listening to the crash of the waves around us and the hum of the earth below the water.
Then our voices filled the night, rising higher and louder into the mists all around us. The vibrations of both water and earth filled me. It would have been easy to become distracted by the loud water song that my body was so used to. But I closed my eyes, focusing all of my thoughts the softer, older earth song, pulling it through me and singing the notes that matched it.
We sang until my throat felt raw and my voice became hoarse. When the song finally ended, I almost felt like I had no energy left. It had taken a lot of power to pull from the earth’s essence.
But the water around me had stilled. It no longer crashed and swirled as it had done ever since I’d arrived back in Swans Landing a month ago. When I opened my eyes, the night looked clearer. There was still no moon and very little light, but stars pinpricked the sky. In the east, the first orange tint of the sunrise was touching the horizon.
“Did we do it?” Mara asked, looking around us. Finfolk floated along the calm water, all of them looking for a sign that everything was okay.
“I think so,” I said. The earth felt different, even the water felt different. The door to Finfolkaheem was closed and Swans Landing was back where it belonged in the human world.
We made our way back to the shore. Sailor pushed past me, hurrying over to her grandparents.
“Grandma?” she asked
, kneeling in the sand. “Are you all right?”
Miss Gale’s eyes stayed closed and she let out a soft moan.
“Gale?” Mr. Moody asked, leaning over her. “Say something. Let us know you’re okay.”
Miss Gale opened one eye and looked up at his grizzled face. She licked her cracked lips, then said in a voice that sounded more like the woman I’d always known, “I want a wedding. A real one. Right here. With a ridiculous wedding cake covered in flowers. Lemon cream in the middle.” She pointed up at Mr. Moody. “And you don’t you start in about how you hate lemon. You know you always eat my lemon pie when you think nobody’s looking, so don’t give me none of that. And you’re moving to my house. There ain’t no way we can live in that shack you own. There ain’t even enough room for our girls over there.”
Mr. Moody’s mouth hung open a moment. Then he laughed and leaned forward, kissing Miss Gale on the lips.
Mara slipped her arm around me and grinned. “I guess it’s a good night for a proposal,” she said.
I laughed. “You want one too?”
She tilted her head to the side, tapping her finger on her chin. “Maybe in a few years. Once I decide whether I want to keep you or not.”
“I knew you were just using me for my singing abilities,” I said, sighing dramatically.
Mara laughed and then wrapped her arms around my neck, leaning her head back to look up at me. “I decided to keep you months ago.”
I leaned down and kissed her, sending tingling sensations throughout me. If we had been alone, my hands wouldn’t have been able to stay still.
I pulled back and caught sight of Lake watching us, his arms crossed. Oh, he knew. He definitely knew.
I was in so much trouble.
FROM THE AUTHOR
Thank you all so much for your support of the Swans Landing series! These books were a work of love inspired by a trip to North Carolina’s Outer Banks years ago. I wondered what kind of secrets the year-long residents might know about the islands that the rest of us don’t get to see, and out of that came the idea for the story of the Swans Landing finfolk.
You can find stories about finfolk mythology online, but a lot of the information in these books is my own, created specifically for this story. Hildaland, Hether Blether, and Finfolkaheem are all taken from the finfolk mythology, but the details about them and what they look like came from my own imagination. If you want to read more about finfolk, I highly recommend the website Orkneyjar – The Heritage of the Orkney Islands.
You can also read more about Swans Landing and see the playlists I created for each book at my website.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Most days, Shana Norris still feels like she’s stuck at sixteen, which is probably why she enjoys writing about teens. She always wanted to be a mermaid and fell in love with the Outer Banks during a gray late winter years ago. She lives in a small town in eastern North Carolina with her husband and small zoo of pets, which currently includes two dogs, five cats, and five chickens.
To learn more about Swans Landing and the people living there, please visit www.shananorris.com. Follow Shana on Twitter @shananorris or on Facebook. Or email her at [email protected].
Sign up for Shana’s email newsletter and receive news, upcoming release announcements, and special members-only content directly in your inbox.
http://eepurl.com/vPkYX
Other books by Shana Norris:
The Boyfriend Thief
Troy High
Surfacing (Swans Landing Book 1)
Submerging (Swans Landing Book 2)
Shifting (Swans Landing Book 2.5)
Something to Blog About
The Rules of You and Me
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
FROM THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Surrendering (Swans Landing) Page 20
