“I guess I do owe you an explanation.” She swallows hard. “I jumped because I … needed to feel alive.”
That throws me. “You are alive.”
“On the outside,” she says after a while, her voice a whisper nearly lost to the wind. “Not so much on the inside. Do you know what I mean?”
“No.” I regret the short word as soon as it leaves my mouth as I can see Anya begin to shut down and close off. It’s something I’ve seen Nerissa do when she feels cornered or belittled. “Please,” I say quickly with an apologetic smile. “What I mean is that I don’t understand, and I’d like you to explain.”
She eyes me, squinting again like she’s weighing whether or not to trust me. Then again, I did save her life. Obviously, she comes to the same resolution because she does another of those little birdlike nods. “Sometimes, I don’t feel anything. I feel numb like my insides are slowly freezing to death. I wanted to wake up. Dead Man’s Cliff seemed like a good idea at the time. I saw some people doing it the day before, and I guess I wanted to jump, too.”
“So you didn’t want to …” I trail off, clearing my throat uncomfortably. “Hurt yourself?”
“Maybe,” she says honestly. Her voice grows fainter and I have to struggle to hear the words before they are taken away by the sea breeze. “Some days, I wonder what it would be like to just give in and leave it all behind. But I can never bring myself to do it. I’m a coward, I guess.”
“Hardly. It takes a lot of strength to live.”
Anya’s gaze flicks to me again. Her eyes are blue, I realize—an intense, clear shade of blue, like the sky on a cloudless summer morning. She looks me up and down, frowning. “You look a little different from yesterday. I could have sworn … never mind, it’ll sound stupid.”
My stomach clenches, all thoughts of beautiful eyes forgotten. “No, go on. What do you mean, different?”
“You’re going to think I’m delusional,” she says. “More delusional,” she adds under her breath.
“I won’t. Promise.”
“Yesterday, you were sort of … sparkling.”
I stifle a snort and roll my eyes instead. “Sparkling?”
She bristles a little at the derision in my voice, and makes a flippant comment of her own. “Seriously. You went all Edward Cullen on me.”
“Edward Cullen?”
“Twilight?” she asks. “Shiny vampires? Didn’t you see the movie or read the books?”
I shake my head, at a complete loss. Human pop culture holds very little interest to me, much less glittery vampires. This time I can’t hold back my snort. If she thinks I’m a vampire, a shimmering underwater sea dragon is probably way out of the realm of possibility. My humor disappears as I recall her drawing. Mermen and sea monsters are practically distant cousins.
She stares at me with mock consternation as if I’ve missed out on a crucial life milestone. “Honestly, where have you been living? Everyone knows Edward Cullen.”
“I’m obviously not in the know,” I joke, responding to the slight teasing note in her voice and the barest hint of a smile. “So go on,” I tell her. “You thought I was a shiny vampire?”
“Never mind, I think I must have hit the water pretty hard,” she says, laughing at herself and the turn of the conversation. The sudden grin transforms her entire face. A dimple appears in her left cheek as her lips part, exposing a gap between her front teeth. It surprises me, and not because Anya isn’t someone you’d call drop-dead gorgeous. She’s more of the quiet, pretty type. With the exception of those startling eyes, her features are too fine for her to stand out. But when she smiles, her entire face lights up from the inside, making her eyes pop like aquamarines. My guess is that she doesn’t do it very often because the smile is gone as fast as it appears. “I must have passed out … or something.”
“You were unconscious for a few seconds,” I interject helpfully. “Before we got to Sunny Jim’s.”
“Where I imagined that I got saved by a water sprite or some fantastic water creature.”
“Nope,” I say, despite the tug in my belly. “Just me.”
“Just you,” she agrees, her eyes burning into mine. Our gazes part, hers returning to the sand at her feet and mine falling to the notebook beneath her palms.
“Thank you, by the way,” she says after a few moments. “I didn’t get a chance to say it yesterday.”
“You’re welcome.”
We stare at the people walking by without talking, watching the wind swirl eddies in the sand at our feet. It’s odd, the silence. I haven’t felt this comfortable since being land bound, and certainly never with a human girl. Normally, I can’t wait to get away from them. Their very presence is irritating, making the waters in my body anxious and uneasy. But my waters are calm now, unruffled. If anything, they’re pressing on the inside of my skin, curiously pushing toward her.
I clear my throat, surprised at the odd sensation. “So, you’re not from around here, are you?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ve never seen you here … on this beach. And I’m here a lot,” I say. “Sorry, I don’t mean to sound like a beach bum stalker. I work at the Marine Center and I live a couple miles down that way. So I’m local, I mean. That’s what I was trying to say,” I finish lamely.
Anya smiles and then bites her lip. “And you would have noticed me of all the people who live here in La Jolla.”
“No. I mean, yes,” I say, wondering what the hell is wrong with my tongue and my sudden inability to string two words together. “That’s not what I meant.” I take a breath. “It’s just that not a lot of locals jump from The Clam because the fines are insane. The jumpers are mostly tourists who do it for the t-shirt rights. And you … seem different, I guess.”
“T-shirt rights?”
“Bragging rights,” I say.
“How do you know I didn’t do it for the brag rights since you seem to notice so many little details about people?”
I flush, sensing her sarcasm. “I don’t know. Did you?”
“No.” She sees my look and her lips curl in a half smile. “I’m only teasing about you noticing me. You know, I worked out that if you try just hard enough to be invisible, it’s something you can actually do. Like, I could sit here for hours and not talk to a single person. It’s like being part of something, and yet not part of it at the same time.”
I stare at her. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“And you’re right,” Anya continues. “I’m not from around here. I live in Los Angeles.” Her eyes cloud over as if an unendurable spasm of pain is wracking her body right at that moment. “I used to live there,” she murmurs. “My fiancé … was killed.”
“I’m sorry,” I say and then frown. She’s old enough to have a fiancé?
Anya carefully masks the flare of emotion, her face resuming a blank, serene expression—a feat that she makes look easy despite the earlier sharp crack in her composure. “Thanks, and it’s okay. Everyone dies eventually.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she says in a weird, strangled sort of voice. “He was not a very good person.”
“Oh.”
The girl has so many layers, it’d be impossible to peel back all of them. She seems like someone who has been through a lot, who has seen a lot, despite her fairly short amount of years. Maybe that’s why I’m so intrigued by her. I study Anya again. She can’t be more than seventeen, but she has a deceptively ageless face. She’s one of those people who could be fourteen or twenty-five. Her nails are short and polished, and her skin unblemished. The diamond studs glinting in her ears and quality of her clothing tell their own story—she’s not suffering from any lack of funds.
“How old are you?” I blurt out.
“Almost eighteen.”
“And you’re living here on your own?”
“You know, you have a lot of questions for someone I just met,” she says, shaking her head,
a teasing glint in her eye.
“Hey, I saved your life and I sparkled,” I say, poking her in the arm. “That has to count for a couple years or something.”
She flinches away from my touch, but covers it up with a brittle laugh. “You’re right, so maybe not just a complete stranger. Still, you never told me your name, so we should probably seal the deal.”
“Speio Marin.”
“Sp—” she falters.
“Spay-oh,” I say slowly and spell out the letters.
“It’s a unique name,” Anya says after repeating the two syllables. “I like it.”
“Thanks.”
I lean back on my elbows and hook one ankle over the other. I can feel Anya studying me out of the corner of her eye, as if wondering why I’m still here and settled in like I expect to stay. Truth is, I’m wondering the same thing. But this girl is a puzzle to me. I want to know what lies behind that terrifyingly precise mask of hers. I want to know why sadness seeps from her every pore even when her face tries to pretend otherwise. I want to know what—or who—she’s running from. I want to know why her fiancé is a bad man and why she left L.A. I want to know more about her.
And so I stay. I remain still even when she opens her notebook, her eyes shifting between the paper and me, the pencil flying in her fingers. I don’t mind that she’s drawing me. In fact, I kind of like it.
“I’m not the best art subject,” I say, fidgeting. “Sitting still when I’m supposed to sit still is the worst. My eye is probably going to start twitching any minute.”
“You’re fine,” she says without looking up. Her bottom lip catches between her teeth, an expression of concentration furrowing her brow. “You have interesting lines.”
I grin, wanting to make her smile again. “Whoa. Are you hitting on me? Isn’t that against artists’ rules or something?” I ask. Anya blushes, her eyes snapping to me, her pencil coming to a fast halt. Before she can shut the book closed, I stall her fingers. “At least let me see what I stayed so perfectly still for.”
She hesitates, but pushes the book toward me. The drawing is arresting. Unlike the first one I’d seen of myself, which was more of a realistic portrait, this one is an anime-style image of a boy lounging in the sand and staring out at the ocean with a pensive look on his face. The boy’s lip is curled mid-smile as if he’s thinking about something fascinating. She’d drawn my human form perfectly, down to the messy, spiky hair and the bare, sand-crusted feet.
“I look kind of cool.”
“You reminded me just then of Tidus from Final Fantasy, so I wanted to draw it.” She sees my vacant look and sighs. “It’s a video game, never mind.”
“Not a sparkle to be seen,” I say to cover up my severe lack of gaming knowledge. I’m going to have to do some serious Googling later to up my street cred. “You’re pretty good. What else do you have in here?”
Anya tries to snatch the book away, but I block her with my body and flick through the pages. My eyes register the handsome but hard-looking man in the first few sheets. Her fiancé, I presume. He has a long scar through one eyebrow, and even the drawing emanates a cold sense of ruthlessness. I dislike him immediately, and then feel guilty because the guy’s dead.
Sensing Anya’s growing discomfort, I flick to the drawing of me—the first one I’d seen. “You gave me a tail? A tail?”
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” she says, reaching around my torso for the notebook. The shock of the contact of her warm arm across my ribs makes us both freeze. Wide cornflower-blue eyes collide with mine, and the rush of feeling in my chest takes me wholly by surprise. “I told you I was disoriented,” she says as her fingers close around the notebook.
I laugh gruffly and release the notebook, trying to dissipate the sudden tension as Anya falls backward, book in hand. I can still feel the brand of her arm across my chest. “Shiny vampire man fish,” I joke. “Anime gaming hero. I am made of awesome.”
Her lip twitches, but she slides the book into a bag lying on the sand at her side. I can see from the expressions playing across her face that she’s getting ready to bolt. I’m not sure if it’s me, or the fact that I saw some of her private drawings. Sure enough, she stands.
“I have to go,” Anya says, brushing the sand off her shorts. “It was nice talking to you.”
“Will you be here tomorrow?” I ask, pushing myself to my feet and dusting my hands together. She’s tall, I realize, almost as tall as me. Then again, she’d been horizontal when we first met.
Anya brushes her hair out of her face, darting a quick look to one of the houses looming behind us. So she is staying on the beach. Good to know. “Maybe,” she says.
“Okay, I’ll be here. Same time, same place?”
She stares at me, clutching her bag to her chest as if it’s a shield between us. “You don’t have to try to save me, you know. I’m fine. Yesterday was a … moment of idiocy, nothing more.”
“I know.”
“And you don’t have to feel sorry for me.”
“I know.”
“I’m not some charity case,” she adds. “And don’t say ‘I know.’”
I surprise her—and myself—with my answer. “I like talking with you,” I say honestly. “And I don’t think you’re a charity case. Plus, I need to prove that I’m not a complete idiot, once I find out who this Final Fantasy person is.” She doesn’t smile back so I meet her gaze and opt for a more honest approach. “Look, the thing is, we’re all fighting some kind of battle. Some days, the battle wins. Other days, we do. The point is to keep going. One day it’ll be over, and it will be one more thing that you survived.” I glance at the ocean, where the tide is coming in and the sun is starting to set. The gold-tipped waves are crashing in toward the shore. My voice lowers. “Sometimes, you have bad waves, ones that will work you and try to drown you. Other times, you have ones that are perfect … ones that are worth all the rough ones. They’re so perfect that once you get on them, you can coast all the way in to the shore. Those are the ones that are worth waiting for, and fighting through all the bad ones.” I shrug, and turn back to Anya. “One wave at a time, that’s my motto.”
“What’s your battle?” she asks me quietly.
I don’t respond for a long minute. I’ve never opened up to anyone, and a part of me still wants to keep my secrets secret. But another part wants to let them out … or at least one of them. “I don’t want to be here. We’re not from around here, either. This isn’t where I belong and I want to go home.”
“Where are you from?”
“The other side of the world,” I say.
“I don’t understand. Why can’t you go home?”
“It’s … safer for us here.”
Anya doesn’t say anything, but then she smiles. “I’ll try to be here tomorrow. Thanks for everything, Speio. It was nice talking to you, too.”
After Anya leaves, I don’t watch to see which house on El Paseo Grande she’s walking toward—at least, not overtly. I walk down toward the water’s edge and form a glimmer, pushing myself outward, and follow her up the beach. The house she enters is modern and cream-colored with a pool on the front deck. She looks back a couple times to where I’m standing, but I don’t turn around. She doesn’t go inside, sitting on the pool deck instead, and opens her notebook on the lounger. She writes my name beneath the drawing of me on the beach, and fills in some areas with shadow before closing the pages and leaning back on the chair. I wish my glimmer could tell me what she’s thinking, but only Nerissa has that kind of power.
I dissipate the glimmer with a thought and walk down the beach until I’m out of Anya’s sight. I swim out to sea, through all the breaking waves until I’m well past the surf zone. I don’t shift fully and let myself morph just enough so that I can breathe underwater. By the time I reach my house, my human arms are sore, but it’s a good kind of ache. I feel invigorated, and it’s a feeling I’d almost forgotten. That feeling of restlessness prickling under my skin like a co
nstant reminder that I don’t belong here in this world has faded. I wonder if it’s because of Anya.
Nerissa is lounging in our saltwater pool. Her eyes are curious, but she doesn’t ask where I’ve been. Instead, she throws me a long measured look and closes her eyes. I know she can feel whatever I’m feeling, and while a part of me resents the inherent intrusion, I welcome the fact that it’s a shared burden. That’s the power of the heir to the Aquarathi throne. I sense her silent invitation and join her in the pool.
“You seem happy,” she says quietly. “Not as … upset.”
“I guess.”
One eye flicks open. “Is it because of the girl? The one from yesterday?”
“Maybe.” I’m not sure I want to put what I’ve experienced with Anya into words. It feels too fragile, as if it’s somehow going to disappear when I talk about it.
“Did you—”
I preempt the question. “She doesn’t know anything.”
“And the drawing?”
“She has a vivid imagination. It’s fine.”
Nerissa closes her eye and relaxes into the water beside me, bright gold lights flickering along her skin. The silvery gold lights beneath mine flicker in automatic response to the royal call of hers. “That’s good,” she says. “It’s nice for you to make connections with people. This is our home now, for better or worse.”
For once, I don’t feel an angry retort rise to my lips. “She’s human, Riss.”
“So?”
“We can’t bond with them. There’s no point in making connections.”
Nerissa is quiet for a moment, and I know she’s thinking about dvija. “That doesn’t mean you can’t get to know her. Look at Jenna. She’s a human and she’s my best friend.”
“That’s different.”
“Spey,” she says, a trace of irritation creeping into her voice. “Just accept it for what it is, okay? If she seems like a nice girl, then be nice back. It’s not all that hard. Everything isn’t about bonding or not bonding. Human relationships are inherently complex. It doesn’t have to be sexual to mean something.” Nerissa takes a breath and immerses her entire body beneath the water, shifting into partial Aquarathi form. Deep golden scales glisten along her arms as iridescent, multicolored fins frame sharp-edged alien features.
SEAMONSTER: An Aquarathi Novella (The Aquarathi) Page 3
