by Starla Night
Maybe this time.
Her cell phone camera light turned off. The recording had timed out and stopped.
The blackness sank into her. She sat by herself, more alone than she had been since signing her divorce papers.
Lucy turned to start the recording again. The expedition recordings were for posterity. For science. Not for a weepy record of yet another failure.
Her hand hit the edge of the precariously balanced case. It clattered off the ledge and disappeared into shadow.
“Darn.” She quested for it with her hands in the darkness. “I forgot my flashlight by the pool.”
Water sloshed, and Torun’s form pulled her upright. He was a lighter shadow against pitch blackness.
“I will get this flashlight. Do not fill your head with any more fears or doubts. You are capable of great things. Focus.”
Right. The reason she was here, in this cave, breathing air was because she had trusted in him and quested after the—
His lips brushed hers. Cool and firm. Wet from the ocean. Filled with promises.
Desire sizzled through her veins and awakened an answering need in her center. She clung to his hard biceps. This was right. He was right.
Torun showed her a new world. All she had to do was open her eyes and accept it.
He pulled away. Hunger gleamed in his eyes.
She was no longer cold, and it was no longer quite so dark. His features almost glowed with his confidence in her.
“Have faith,” he said, again, and turned away.
She sat again. Hey, there was her cell phone! She switched it to battery super-saver mode and affixed it to her BCU. The next time she surfaced, the phone would awaken and search for an internet connection to post the videos on Facebook. Hopefully, it would occur after she discovered amazing mermaid superpowers, and not after she gave up on another stupid, gullible dream.
Well, that’s probably what the comments would call her anyway. You honestly believed he was a merman? And drinking brackish water would make you into a mermaid? Ha ha! You got punked!
Wait. Was that the only reason she held back? Because she worried about internet trolls calling her dumb?
That was like worrying whether the sun would rise tomorrow.
Trolls were going to troll. Haters were going to hate. Did Neil Armstrong hesitate to stand on the moon just because it had never been done before? Moon landings must have sounded science-fiction-crazy in the early 1960s.
Lucy stripped off her tight dive suit and tankini, folded them beside the BCU, and knelt at the edge of the water. Her naked butt rested on her bare feet. The rock was wet and cold.
Have faith.
Torun needed a woman to continue his race. Eventually, he would understand the woman he needed wasn’t Lucy. Should he promise to stay with her after that? No.
All Lucy could do was enjoy every minute with him until their last.
Once he tossed her aside, she would be left alone … with mermaid superpowers. Wow. Not a bad outcome for a professional diver. There were worst ways to come out of a relationship, that was for darn sure.
Plus she already had one Sea Opal. No matter what happened after today, she would use the Sea Opal Gracie was safeguarding to pay off the expedition debt, refill Elyssa’s savings, and un-double-mortgage Mel’s house. She would start a dating site for Torun’s tribe. If the tribe was a fraction as hot as he was, their profiles would get hits from loving, romantic, adventurous women by the boatload.
Concentrate on your Sea Opal…
Right.
Focus.
She eased into the water naked. Chilly ocean seeped into her cracks and bits. She wriggled. Her body felt funny and exposed and crazy and free. She closed her eyes, held her breath, and slipped beneath the surface.
She would acclimate to the water caressing her nakedness. If mermaid superpowers hadn’t taken over by then, she was going to get out and face the truth. Magic didn’t work, or it didn’t work on her, and Torun was crazy, and she was stupid-gullible for having trusted him after—
Something brushed against her nose.
She opened her eyes.
A white fish about the length of her index finger stared at her with first one eye, then the other. It glowed with an inner light, like an angel, and illuminated the water around it.
More fish joined in.
The undersea world lit as bright as midday in downtown Cancun. Algae sparkled and fish gleamed.
Even Lucy herself glowed.
Was this bioluminescence? She’d missed it because of her flashlight. Or was the elixir working? Either way, she could see!
Strange singing filled her ears.
A low hum-hum emerged from the small, white fishes. Higher pitched whee-whee came from the gently swaying anemones. Barnacles clacked and drummed like the bass line from The Lion King song, “The Circle of Life.”
She swam to a rock formation. Undersea slugs, called nudibranchs, inched across the rocks. They sang a baba-dum noise and wiggled their Technicolor feelers in her direction. They must sense her like she sensed them.
One off-kilter noise, a combination of gargling and strangling, disrupted the undersea harmony. Kind of like the tone-deaf seagull from Disney’s The Little Mermaid, which she watched growing up about ten thousand times.
The awful song came from the mouth of the cave.
What could be out there? She swam to the neck.
A body crashed into the water, and movement whispered a gentle breeze across her body. She turned.
Torun dove deep. A powerful, dark energy emanated from his chest, hot like chocolate and spicy as cinnamon. His head whipped to her. He jack-knifed and flicked his fins. He was coming and he didn’t stop! Crashing into her, he embraced and rolled her end over end.
Relief filled his deep, resonant voice. “You are here.”
She laughed in surprise. Bubbles escaped her mouth, and she tasted sea salt.
Where else would she be?
“I did not find you. I became alarmed.”
Well, he shouldn’t worry. She wasn’t going anywhere without him.
He held her close, stroking her. His limbs twined with hers. Need for him filled her veins with fire.
His mouth found hers. Heat streaked to her center, twisting with a pounding ache. His tongue teased her seam. She opened to him, inviting in his powerful filling force.
Lucy splayed her hands across his broad back. His muscles rippled. On his shoulder blades, he flexed hard ridges.
“You have fins,” she tried to say.
It came out, “Yaghlagh.” The words bubbled away from her. Water poured down her throat. She choked.
His voice penetrated her panic. “Do not try to speak. Not as you do in the air.”
She was drowning. Drowning! She scrambled for the surface.
He caught her ankle and yanked her to him again, enclosing her struggles in his arms. “Shhh.”
She jerked. The instinct to run couldn’t be controlled.
“Sure it can.”
She needed to breathe.
He tightened his grip, his thighs tightening in a powerful clench. “You are already breathing. I will hold you until you recognize it.”
Was she?
Oh.
Yes, she had been under water far too long to hold her breath. She opened her mouth, releasing the last of the bubbles. Water had already penetrated her lungs and she hadn’t noticed. The current cooled her belly, like drinking an ice water on a hot day and noticing a swallow all the way down.
No need to panic or suck the too-thick water into her lungs. She contorted to touch the small of her back. Thick ridges, like the vents on an air conditioner, opened and closed on her command.
Magic.
The water felt natural, and she’d forgotten that she should have bobbed to the surface. Instead, she hung, weightless, perfectly balanced even without her BCU. It was like a dream of flying.
“Yes, and you will not crash to the ground,” he agreed.
How could he understand the words she was not speaking aloud?
“You are saying them.” He thrummed deep in his chest. “You communicate your meaning with gestures and vibrations.”
No. That didn’t make any sense.
“My words, how am I speaking them? My mouth is not open, and you do not hear them with your ears.”
The truth smacked her head like an unsecured cabinet.
His eyes gleamed, gorgeous aquamarine, and his words hummed in his chest. They rumbled across her skin, echoing in her own chest.
“Like…telepathy,” she said, trying to use the same cavity in her body to speak the words as she heard them.
“Like that.” His lips stretched wider. He kissed her deeply, and while his mouth covered hers, he continued speaking. “You have understood so much so fast. Truly you are meant to be one of us.”
Yes. She rubbed against his hard, slippery body. Her nipples pressed like pearls on his bare chest. “I want to be with you.”
They twirled together upside down.
“Will you join with me?” He nuzzled her gently. “Forsake the world of the air, and become a mer forever?”
If he would keep her….
“Of course.” He responded to her silent caveat. “I will worship you as my queen.”
A queen who would have his children.
Chapter Seventeen
Lucy’s tentative promise nestled deep in his heart.
Even more important than when she had accepted his Sea Opal, her promise to join him forever etched the stone of their fate. She knew what his ocean world truly entailed. She promised to leave the air world behind.
“Come. We will go to my city.”
She wiggled. “Let me grab my cell phone. How deep is your city?”
“It is on the bottom of the ocean.”
“The bottom close to an atoll like this, or the bottom of a trench?”
“We are not near a trench. However, swimming directly up to the surface would take a long, long time.”
“Probably deeper than the waterproof case is rated for.” She relaxed into him. “I’ll come back. We’ll organize deep sea cameras later to take pictures of a real mer city.”
“You will have many chances.”
He heard her unspoken doubt. I hope so.
“You will.”
She smiled.
He twirled with her through the water. His body pulsed to take her now, and fulfill their ancient destiny in this submerged church. She shone within his arms, nearly blinding.
But her doubts remained. She feared she could not give him young fry. She needed to feel the healing song of the Life Tree to chase her last fears away.
He led her to the cave entrance.
She kicked furiously to keep up. “I can’t make my feet into fins like yours.”
“You must flex.” He demonstrated, flicking back and forth between fin and foot.
She tried to mimic him. Her adorable features screwed up in concentration. “Do it slower.”
Slower made the movement more difficult. Like focusing on breathing could cause choking in the lungs.
“You can’t blame me for choking like that,” she said, responding to a thought he hadn’t meant to transmit to her. “It was my first time! Normally breathing underwater is death, if not from actually drowning, then from the bacterial infection and pneumonia you get afterward. Oh!”
She flexed her foot in the right way. Her two smallest toes flattened and the foot half expanded. She kicked, wheeling in a lopsided circle. “This is awesome!”
Her light shone so brightly it made his heart ache.
But she couldn’t get her second foot to relax into the correct shape, and her first one flexed back to a human foot when she wasn’t paying attention. After working herself into sweaty frustration, he put his hands on hers to stop her from being too violent with herself.
“It just won’t go,” she cried.
“You have mastered breathing and communicating underwater,” he told her. “Forgive yourself if you must practice longer to achieve flight.”
She blew a stream of water out of her mouth. Her bangs danced. “I’ll get it.”
“You will.”
She brightened. His faith in her made hers stronger.
Again, his chest ached.
This precious woman captured him. The ache was the feeling of his heart stretching to hold their love. No other would ever take its place. He would protect her with his life.
He drew her arms around his neck. “Hold onto me. This first flight will be mine.”
She nestled against his chest. “Don’t drop me.”
“Never.”
He kicked powerfully. They rocketed from the cave, shooting past the occupied cave guardian, and wove through the atoll formations to open sea.
“Whoohoo!” she cried, clinging tight.
He held her safe, suctioning her softness to his body.
This was how all mates were meant to travel. Once she grew her fins properly and adjusted to the permanent change, they would forever travel the seas together in their mated pair.
Such a wonderful future dazzled him.
“Hey, I meant to ask. What’s that strange noise?” she asked. “It’s behind us now. It’s like singing, only really off-key.”
“Probably Mr. Huggles,” Torun said, adopting her name for the cave guardian. She would name many more things in their ocean, and he wanted her to feel proud of doing so. “Their songs are loud and terrible, especially after they have collected a new object.”
“She did steal my grease pencil.”
“It is now her new favorite possession, and she is announcing it to every other guardian also.”
She swallowed. “I’m kind of touched.”
He squeezed her. Her empathy, like her kindness, resonated in her soul.
“I’m also sorry I made her sound worse.”
“Do not be. Their awful song gives warning for miles. You can navigate half the ocean by taking cave guardians as markers. It is as reliable as your GPS.”
“Do we sound as awful to them?”
Did they? All living creatures sang. Even inanimate rocks possessed a song under the water. The mer must also have a soul sound.
“Don’t assume it’s beautiful,” she said. “Or, at least, not to everybody. What if we sound like sandpaper or a diesel engine backfiring? Or squealing brakes, or nails on a chalkboard.”
“We sound like no such thing,” he said. “We sound like solemn tones.”
“Perhaps we toot.”
She made him laugh. The absurdity of it all. Human women would turn mer warriors into philosophers.
“Or scientists,” she said. “If we can measure animal and rock sounds, we can measure our own.”
Again, she had picked up thoughts he was certain he had not projected into words. No, words had not vibrated in his chest. How odd.
“It’s so bright,” she said, changing topics and staring out across the wide undersea sky of the ocean. “I can see so far.”
“More than before?”
“So much. I can see tiny plankton on the surface miles away. I can see Mr. Huggles hanging out behind us in her cave. Ocean currents move like clouds. It even feels like I can see through rocks to the other side.”
Not only her eyes informed her new vistas. Her senses changed to become sensitive to sound, taste, and the deeper waves of life energy.
All objects and creatures gave off a resonance. Some part of the resonance Lucy now experienced as their song. Other parts of the resonance she experienced as light. Some as taste.
He had struggled, at first, to handle the opposite problem on land. He could only see so far, and he experienced air as a cold, empty, silent vacuum.
“Are you ready to go faster?” he asked.
“Faster? But we’re already out-pacing schools of fish.”
“We are approaching a finger of the super-accelerated Sol Sud current. We have a long way to reach our
city.”
Her eyes opened wide. “Yes!”
“Hold tight.” He arced into the current and flew.
She laughed with joy.
Torun flew fast within the current at first to show off; then, he flew for the joy of doing so. How long since he pushed himself to achieve his peak efforts? Chasing mini-accelerated currents within the main one, he flew ever onward, ever down.
When he had been a young fry, his wise elders took him to safe fields near the city to learn his abilities and to fly. When he had grown older, he tested himself against dangerous creatures, pitting his life against his speed to overcome certain death and survive.
Now he flew in his mating dance, pushing himself to ever greater bursts, astonishing and delighting his bride. Joy suffused her, and she opened her eyes to gaze all around.
Soon they would reach his village and he would enjoy her in the privacy of his castle. Thick walls would keep out danger and muffle their passion. He kicked harder.
They traveled far. When exhaustion finally took him, he drifted in the current, resting while she also dozed. He did this several times until reaching the place to exit the current. He swam through slower, overland currents to his city.
Lucy asked a number of questions, which he answered as best he could.
Yes, the mer were good at avoiding detection. No, he did not know if the mer were descended from humans or sharks or whether they were extraterrestrial aliens.
Once they had moved easily between earth and ocean. After the war, about a thousand years ago, the mer had withdrawn from the air. Only brides of the sacred islands honored the ancient covenant to provide young fry.
“And now, you,” he said.
“Now, me.” She stroked the back of his neck. “God, I hope so.”
He squeezed her.
They approached the border of Sireno’s land. Coral spires rose from the ocean floor, marking the beginning of the towering outer reefs. In the distance, glowing bulbs formed the floating city. The Sireno cave guardian warbled from his cave to the east.
“You really can hear those cave guardians,” she said with a laugh. “This one sounds like a cat being strangled by a frog.”
“Yes, he is a lonely male.”
Torun slowed. Passing between the spires placed them in dangerous territory. They could be heard by warriors lying silent.
