by Anna Banks
After a few minutes, Rachel makes good on Galen’s promise. When I answer the phone, she says, “Hey there, cutie pie. You’re not feeling bad again, are you?”
“No, I’m fine. Just a little sore from yesterday, I guess. But Mom had to take my car to work, so I don’t have a way to get over there.”
Contemplation hovers in the silence that follows. I’m surprised when she doesn’t offer to come get me. Maybe she doesn’t like me as much as she lets on. “Give me a call tomorrow, okay? Galen wants me to check in with you.”
“That’s so sweet of him,” I drawl.
She chuckles. “Give the guy a break. His intentions are good. He hasn’t figured out how to handle you yet.”
“I don’t need to be handled.”
“Apparently, he thinks you do. And until he doesn’t, I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with me.”
I try not to sound curt when I say, “Do you always do what he says?”
“Not always.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Emma, if I always did what I’m told, you’d be locked in a hotel room somewhere while I secured us a private jet to a place of Galen’s choosing. Now get some rest. I’ll be expecting your call tomorrow.”
* * *
Tossing my towel in the sand, I get a running start and make a clean dive into the waves. I expect the first plunge to be refreshing, an exhilarating rush of breath-stealing cold, the kind of frigid any self-respecting New Jersey autumn would produce. But when I surface, I feel gross. The water is lukewarm. Just like my shower. Just like my love life.
I wade against the swells, and then force myself below the influence of the surf. I hold my breath and drift, pressing the start button on Dad’s old stopwatch. And I find one more reason to hate the passage of time: It’s boring. To keep from staring at the minutes dragging by, I recite the alphabet. Then I recite the statistics of the Titanic, just as any obsessed person would do. A few crabs side-wind beneath me, listening to me compare the number of lifeboats to passengers while the waves wash me to shore.
After fifteen minutes, my lungs start to tighten. At seventeen minutes, they feel like a rubberband stretched to max capacity. At twenty minutes, it’s an all-out emergency. I surface and stop the watch.
Twenty minutes, fourteen seconds. Not bad for a human—the world record is set at thirteen minutes, thirty-two seconds. But as far as fish go, it pretty much sucks. Not that fish hold their breath or anything, but I don’t exactly have gills to work with. According to Galen, he doesn’t hold his breath either. Syrena fill their lungs with water and apparently absorb the oxygen they need from it. My faith isn’t strong enough to try. In fact, growing a tail of my own is the only way to make me a believer. Even breaking a human world record on my first trial run isn’t enough to convince me to inhale seawater. Not gonna happen.
I traipse back to neck-deep and clear the time on the watch. Drawing in a lung-packing breath, I press the start button. And then I feel it. It saturates the water around me, thrumming without rhythm. The pulse. Someone is close. Someone I don’t recognize. Slowly, I tiptoe backward, careful not to splash or slosh. After a few seconds, tiptoeing doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If I can sense them, they can sense me. The pulse is getting stronger. They’re heading straight toward me. Fast.
Leaving caution, etiquette, and Dad’s stopwatch behind, I scramble like a lunatic to shallower water. Suddenly, Galen’s order to stay on dry land doesn’t seem so unreasonable. What was I thinking? The little I know about Syrena is what we crammed into the last twenty-four hours at his house. They have a social structure like humans. Government, laws, family, friendship. Do they have outcasts, too? The same way humans have rapists and serial killers? If so, I’ve just done the human equivalent of wandering into a dark parking lot alone. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Gasping into a wave lets me know my lungs aren’t prepped for water just yet. Sputtering and coughing slows me down a little, but the shore is close, and I’ve got my eye on a stick thicker than my arm just beyond the wet sand. That it will break like a twig over the head of any Syrena is not important.
I’m knee-deep when the hand grabs my ankle. I look down, but my attacker is obviously in Blended form, barely making an outline through the waves. The water doesn’t interrupt my scream, but it does shut it off from the human world. The hand is strong and big, pulling me from safety like a rip current. I’m wasting precious air by kicking and screaming at the Blended blob, but going without a fight just won’t do.
The ocean bottom is a steep hill. Only a few fingers of sunlight splay through to the deep. Those fingers disappear as my eyes adjust, casting an afternoon-like glow on everything. The more I struggle, the faster we torpedo through the water—and the tighter my abductor strengthens his hold.
“You’re hurting me!” I wail. We stop fast enough to give me whiplash.
“Oops, sorry,” the blob says, materializing as Toraf. He releases my ankle.
“You!”
“Of course it’s me. Who else would it be?”
* * *
We surface against the night sky. Stars fill my vision, but I’m not sure if they’re real or the result of running out of oxygen. Toraf shows off by shooting his body out of the water, slicing through the waves on the tip of his tale like a dolphin at Seaworld. “Stop messing around,” I tell him. “How did I do that time? Give me the watch.’”
“Twenty-seven minutes, nineteen seconds,” he says, placing it in my outstretched hand. He gasps. “Whoa. What’s wrong with your hands?”
“What do you mean?” I turn them over and over, straining to see in the moonlight. No blood, cuts, scrapes. Wiggling all ten fingers, I tell him, “There’s nothing wrong with them, see?”
His widened eyes make me check again. Still nothing. “Toraf, if this is another joke—”
“Emma, it’s not a joke. Look at your hands! They’re … they’re … wrinkled!”
“Yes. That’s because—”
“No way. I’m not going down for this. This isn’t my fault.”
“Toraf—”
“Galen will find some way to blame me though. He always does. ‘You wouldn’t have gotten caught if you didn’t swim so close to that boat, tadpole.’ No, it couldn’t be the human’s fault for fishing in the first place—”
“Toraf.”
“Or how about, ‘Maybe if you’d stop trying to kiss my sister, she’d stop bashing your head with a rock.’ How does my kissing her have anything to do with her bashing my head with a rock? If you ask me, it’s just a result of poor parenting—”
“Toraf.”
“Oh, and my favorite: ‘If you play with a lionfish, you’re going to get pricked.’ I wasn’t playing with it! I was just helping it swim faster by grabbing its fins—”
“TOR-AF.”
He stops pacing along the water, even seems to remember that I exist. “Yes, Emma? What were you saying?”
I inhale as if I’m about to submerge for the next half hour. Letting it out slowly, I say, “This isn’t anybody’s fault. My skin gets all wrinkled like that when I stay in the water too long. Always has.”
“There’s no such thing as staying in the water too long. Not for Syrena. Besides, if your skin wrinkles like that, you’ll never be able to blend.” He holds his hand out to me, shows me his palm, smooth as a statue. Then he submerges his hand and it disappears. Blended. He crosses his arms, triumphant. The accusation is clear.
“Oh, you’re right. I’m just a human with thick skin, purple eyes, and hard bones. Which means you can go home. Tell Galen I said hi.”
Toraf opens and shuts his mouth twice. Both times it seems like he wants to say something, but his expression tells me his brain isn’t cooperating. When his mouth snaps shut a third time, I splash water in his face. “Are you going to say something, or are you trying to catch wind and sail?”
A grin the size of the horizon spreads across his face. “He likes that, you know. Your temper.”
&nbs
p; Yeahfreakingright. Galen’s a classic type A personality—and type A’s hate smartass-ism. Just ask my mom. “No offense, but you’re not exactly an expert at judging people’s emotions.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by that.”
“Sure you do.”
“If you’re talking about Rayna, then you’re wrong. She loves me. She just won’t admit it.”
I roll my eyes. “Right. She’s playing hard to get, is that it? Bashing your head with a rock, splitting your lip, calling you squid breath all the time.”
“What does that mean? Hard to get?”
“It means she’s trying to make you think she doesn’t like you, so that you end up liking her more. So you work harder to get her attention.”
He nods. “Exactly. That’s exactly what she’s doing.”
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I say, “I don’t think so. As we speak, she’s getting your mating seal dissolved. That’s not playing hard to get. That’s playing impossible to get.”
“Even if she does get it dissolved, it’s not because she doesn’t care about me. She just likes to play games.”
The pain in Toraf’s voice guts me like the catch of the day. She might like playing games, but his feelings are real. And can’t I relate to that? “There’s only one way to find out,” I say softly.
“Find out?”
“If all she wants is games.”
“How?”
“You play hard to get. You know how they say, ‘If you love someone, set them free. If they return to you, it was meant to be?’”
“I’ve never heard that.”
“Right. No, you wouldn’t have.” I sigh. “Basically, what I’m trying to say is, you need to stop giving Rayna attention. Push her away. Treat her like she treats you.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t think I can do that.”
“You’ll get your answer that way,” I say, shrugging. “But it sounds like you don’t really want to know.”
“I do want to know. But what if the answer isn’t good?” His face scrunches as if the words taste like lemon juice.
“You’ve got to be ready to deal with it, no matter what.”
Toraf nods, his jaw tight. The choices he has to consider will make this night long enough for him. I decide not to intrude on his time anymore. “I’m pretty tired, so I’m heading back. I’ll meet you at Galen’s in the morning. Maybe I can break thirty minutes tomorrow, huh?” I nudge his shoulder with my fist, but a weak smile is all I get in return.
I’m surprised when he grabs my hand and starts pulling me through the water. At least it’s better than dragging me by the ankle. I can’t help but think how Galen could have done the same thing. Why does he wrap his arms around me instead?
* * *
By Saturday night, I can stay under for thirty-five minutes. By Sunday afternoon, I’m up to forty-seven. There’s something to be said about practice—even if I’m not actually practicing anything. Just hanging out in the water, holding my breath, withering my skin to grandma-like wrinkles.
I pull off the flippers Toraf brought me and chuck them onto shore. I keep my back turned while he maneuvers his shorts into place. “Are you decent?” I call after a few seconds. No matter how many times I tell him I can’t see into the water yet, he insists I’m just trying to look at his “eel.” For crying out loud.
“Oh, I’m more than decent. I’m actually quite a catch.”
I couldn’t agree more. Toraf is good-looking, funny, and considerate—which makes me question Rayna’s attitude. I’m beginning to understand why Grom sealed her to him. Who could be better for her than Toraf ?
But mentioning that to Toraf would break our silent pact not to talk about Rayna or Galen. Since Friday night, we’ve talked about everything but them. About Grom and Nalia. About the peace treaty General Triton and General Poseidon made after the Great War. About how seafood tastes—well, we argued about that one.
But mostly we just practice, me holding my breath, Toraf timing me. He can’t explain any better than Galen how to change into a fish. He agrees it feels like an almost overwhelming need to stretch.
Toraf wades to where I stand in the tide. “I can’t believe it’s already sunset,” I tell him.
“I can. I’m starving.”
“I am, too.” Must be all the extra calories I’m burning in the water.
He shrugs. “All I know is—” His head jerks toward the water and back at me. He grabs my shoulders, pulls me close. And then he breaks our silent agreement. “Remember what you said about Rayna? About playing hard to get?” He darts a glance toward the open sea, whips his head back to me again. His eyebrows melt together as he scowls.
I nod, startled by his about-face.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it. A lot. And I’m going to do it. But … but I need your help.”
“Of course I’ll help you. Whatever you need,” I say. But something feels off when he pulls me closer.
“Good,” he says, peeking again at the sunset. “Galen and Rayna are close.”
I gasp. “How do you know that? I can’t feel them.” My heart turns traitor, beating like I just ran five miles uphill. It has nothing to do with sensing and everything to do with the mention of Galen’s name.
“I’m a Tracker, Emma. I can sense them from almost across the world. Especially Rayna. And from the feel of things, Galen is flittering that cute little fin of his like crazy to get back to you. Rayna must be riding on his back.”
“You can tell what she’s doing?”
“I can tell how fast she’s moving. No one can swim as fast as Galen, Rayna included. He must be pretty impatient to see you.”
“Yeah. Impatient for me to change so he can have another royal subject to order around.”
Toraf’s laughter startles me, not because it’s loud, but because his mood seems to swing around on an axis. “Is that what you think?” he says.
Suddenly, Galen’s pulse hits my legs like a physical blow. Toraf drags me out of the water and hauls us toward the house. “He’s had plenty of chances to show me something different,” I say, my words bouncing with each hurried step chunking into the sand. Behind us, I hear Galen and Rayna laughing about something. The way they slosh makes me think they’re splashing each other.
Toraf stops us at the little picket fence, an apathetic boundary separating Galen’s beach sand from the county’s beach sand. “Well, I’m about to teach those spoiled Royals a lesson. Do you trust me, Emma?”
I nod, but something tells me I shouldn’t have. My instinct is confirmed when Toraf pulls me against his chest and lowers his mouth to mine. When I try to pull away, he grabs a handful of my hair and uses it to hold my face in place. The sudden silence behind us is louder than the laughter ever could have been.
I can tell Toraf is a good kisser. He moves his mouth just the right way, gentle and firm at the same time. And for all the seafood he eats, he doesn’t taste like it one bit.
But everything about this kiss is wrong, wrong, wrong. If I had a brother, this is what kissing him would feel like. And then I feel something else. Hair-raising prickles all over. Like I’m about to be struck by lightning.
Then Galen—not a lightning bolt—slams into Toraf, wrenching our lips apart. To his good credit, Toraf releases me immediately instead of taking me down with him. They crash into the sand, Galen launching punches like bullets from a machine gun. But I’m too stunned to move.
16
BETWEEN PUNCHES, Galen bellows his rage. “I trusted you! I said to keep an eye on her, not your filthy lips!”
Toraf’s laugh makes him hit harder. Galen is aware of Emma screaming for him to stop. Now that she’s snapped out of the trance Toraf kissed her into.
Fire sears into his biceps where Emma struggles to restrain the next blow with both hands. “Stop it, Galen! Right now!”
His head whips toward her, her concern for Toraf almost driving him beyond sense. “Why? Why should I stop?”
“Be
cause he’s your friend. Because he’s your sister’s mate,” she shouts.
“But those are the same reasons I should kill him, Emma. You’re not making any sense.”
“Rayna, help me!” Emma throws herself at Galen, ramming her shoulder into his chest.
With his arms full of Emma, it’s difficult to keep hammering Toraf. Emma is soft and sweet-smelling, which would distract him even if she wasn’t wrapping herself around him like an octopus. He can’t tell whose limbs are whose when they tumble off of Toraf and spill into the sand beside him.
Landing on top, Galen uses his hand to cushion the back of Emma’s head from hitting a piece of driftwood. Worrying about her last head injury already shortened his life span. “Triton’s trident, Emma, you can’t just throw yourself in the middle of a fight. You could get hurt,” he says, out of breath.
She pushes against him, fists balled. “A fight is two-sided, Highness. You didn’t notice Toraf wouldn’t hit back?”
Actually, no. And he didn’t care. He eases off her. She refuses the hand he offers to help her up. He shrugs, irritated at her small rejection. “His loss. Now go to the house. Toraf and I aren’t finished.”
By now Toraf is standing up, slapping the sand off his body. It takes a few moments for Galen to realize that Rayna didn’t help disentangle him from her mate. In fact, she hasn’t said a word.
She’s still standing on the beach where he left her, her face contorted into a jumble of shock, anger, and pain. The anger dissipates when Toraf straightens his swimming trunks and walks right past her. In fact, the shock goes away, too. Only pain stays behind, crumbling her expression.
