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Coming in September, 2015
Submerged
Melusine and Levi’s next adventure!
Siren’s Kiss by Margo Bond Collins
Her kiss might save the world …
Unless his kiss kills her first.
It’s been almost two thousand years since the mer-shifter Skyla walked the streets of Athens—not since her heart was broken by a human man and she exchanged the land and sky for the ocean depths. Ever since, she has lived in the underwater ruins of Atlantis, studying with the priestesses of the goddess Amphitrite, refining her mermaid powers and ignoring her human half.
But her studies are interrupted when she is called upon by the god Poseidon himself to investigate rumors that the world above is being polluted by the magic of creatures from another realm—and worse, that the ocean kingdom of the mer-people might be next.
When her inquiries in modern-day Greece lead her to an American detective asking similar questions, Skyla realizes that the magical problem she’s been sent to research is bigger than she anticipated—and that one human’s kisses might be more dangerous to her, and her world, than she ever could have imagined.
Skyla
This is not a love story.
It’s been over two thousand years since I walked these shores, and even then, the man who broke my heart was centuries gone, sailed away into death—the last journey into yet another land where I will not follow.
Truth be told, though, he left me long before he died, gone away to rejoin a wife he hadn’t seen in twenty years, to reclaim a rocky, wind-swept island for a son he barely knew.
Gone home, to spin stories about his absence like his wife spun his death-shroud—picking out the stitches at night and reweaving them anew to postpone the inevitable moment when the stories wear thin and you find the monsters have been in your home all along, posing as suitors who would win your heart.
The poets lie, you know. They say our songs seduce the sailors, draw them into the ocean to drown.
But if the ocean sings to them, it is not our doing—no more than the earth’s call to us is theirs.
And Odysseus never tried to resist.
Clay
The first time I saw her, I thought she was a hallucination—a fever dream brought on by the ancient stories I had read on the plane from Dallas to Athens, by jet-lag, by the irrepressible urge to wander late at night that was inspired by the sight of the blue dome over the Church of St. Nicholas from my hotel-room window.
The whole trip had tugged at me, from the moment my captain told me he was putting me on leave after the shooting of Dennis Charalobos. We all knew it was a good shoot, but we had to follow the forms, and the investigation had to proceed. The news cameras were watching. At the time, I thought those cameras, as much as anything, prompted the investigators to allow me to leave the country.
I know better now.
But the department shrink said I should follow my urge to see Charalobos’s home country, so I followed the allure of the idea.
The cathedral drew me from Hotel Poseidonio—the name seems an irony now—and I promised myself to explore it during daylight hours before I left the port area of Piraeus for central Athens in a few days.
I still haven’t seen the interior of the church.
The smell of the ocean permeated everything, and though I wanted to stare at the water, I found myself turning my back on the giant cruise ships docked nearby, and heading into the dark, narrow streets. I walked without conscious purpose, but with a clear sense of direction, and was unsurprised when I emerged from the city lanes half an hour later to stand above the curve of a beach.
A rock wall formed the boundaries of a small highway, and cars whizzed by fairly regularly. I suspected there was probably an easier beach entrance. Still, rather than look for it, I jumped down to cross the highway, and clambered to the beach below.
Not far off shore stood a rocky formation. I vaguely recalled it from the map, a small circle labeled with a long Greek word beginning with a K. Stepping as close to the ocean as I could without getting my boots wet, I stared at the dark mound, feeling something about it tug at the very core of me. Then I stepped into the gently lapping water.
If I hadn’t been staring at the tiny island so intently, I wouldn’t have seen her. As it was, a ripple of the water in the moonlight caught my attention first, then the quiet splash of a fish jumping—the same sound I’d heard on the Texas coast probably hundreds of times in my life.
In the next moment, though, a fin flipped up, fracturing the moonlight into a thousand dark droplets before slapping down flat against the water. A few feet away, a sleek head emerged from the sea before disappearing again, and I leaned forward, blinking and peering into the darkness.
A seal, maybe? Were there seals in the Mediterranean? I listened carefully for the distinctive bark, but heard nothing other than the traffic passing above.
There it was again. Small, rounded—and I could almost make out a face.
Was a person swimming out there?
A cloud drifting across the moon obscured my vision for a moment. I went back to listening, even as I wondered why I even cared. So what if someone was swimming in the ocean after midnight? It had nothing to do with me.
I should go back to my hotel, try to get some sleep.
Stay.
I heard it as clearly as if it had been whispered into my ear—almost felt the brush of soft, feminine lips against my skin.
I froze at the instruction, just as the sky cleared again and the moon shone directly onto the tiny island across from me, highlighting the profile of a woman using her arms to pull herself up onto a rock as she shook out her long, dark hair, sending water flying in all directions.
She didn’t wear any bathing suit top, and her breasts shivered with the exertion of lifting herself, the nipples forming tiny peaks that held my attention for a long moment. Although I couldn’t see it, I could imagine the water forming clear droplets, trembling before falling off those darkened mounds.
As she rolled over to sit up straight, we made eye contact, broken only when her long fin flipped up to coil around the rock she sat on.
Mermaid.
The word wandered through my mind as if attempting to attach itself to something more real than the vision in front of me.
I waited, held still by a silent word and an impossible image.
With a convulsive motion, the mermaid across the water from me grabbed the sides of her hips, covered in silvery scales. Her groan echoed across the water, along with an ominous ripping sound.
An odd white light swirled around her, spotlighting the tear moving down her fin, like a knife slicing into her.
Dark blood ran from her center down both sides of the ruined fin, and her groans turned into sobbing whimpers. I couldn’t understand the words she said, but their meaning was clear as she shook her head and clutched her torn body.
No, no, no. Please. No more.
And a name, repeated over and over: Poseidon.
I knew that one—Greek god of the ocean.
Part of me wanted to swim to the rock, to try to save the mermaid. But I couldn’t bring myself to move, and the same part of me that had known I needed to come to this beach told me that she had to face this alone—it was not my battle.
Your fight is coming.
The whispered voice in my mind shook me, even as I accepted its words as truth.
The mermaid’s transformation took less than half an hour, and when it was done, she stood, shak
ily, on two legs, rinsing blood and flesh and scales away into the water to reveal the almost silvery-white, untouched skin of newly formed legs beneath.
She stood naked on the rock, her pale skin shining in the moonlight, her hair swirling down around her hips, a new dark triangle where her legs met her torso—and everything about her was perfect. I felt a surge of longing pulse through me.
A single swipe of her arm across her face dashed away any remaining tears.
Then, meeting my eyes for a final time, she dove from the rock into the water, slicing into the ocean and disappearing from my sight.
I was suddenly as tired as if I had undergone the shift myself, and as determined to get back to my hotel as I had originally been to find this rock.
A single, disconnected thought drifted across my mind: Something was driving me, and it wasn’t my own desire.
Stumbling back across the beach, I stopped long enough to scoop up a broken shell and drop it in my jeans pocket.
Whatever was going on here, I suspected I was going to need some kind of evidence that all this had really happened.
Skyla
Stretched out across several of the crumbled stone seats of the Theatre of Dionysus, I baked in the warm sunshine of a summer’s day, allowing the heat to soak in and warm me to my very bones, too long submerged in the deep.
On the cliff above me, the Parthenon loomed, its marble columns partially obscured in scaffolding as workers worked on repairs.
The last time I had been here, when the marble seats of the open-air amphitheater were new and held thousands, I watched the Oresteia trilogy—tragedies to the Athenians who surrounded me, but too far from the truth to be anything but comic to me.
In reality, Agamemnon was a monster, a tyrant of a man who murdered his daughter for the joy of killing, a sacrifice to the gods of power and control. When his wife Clytemnestra killed him in return, other women did not blame her. Their house fell, but it was not of her doing.
But the memories of men are short, and the stories they share shift and change, like the ocean’s surface.
And now was not the time for reflections on the past.
I had a job to do, and it could not wait for the memories crowding my mind to abate.
I stood, stretching my arms into the air, searching for the right point of balance on my newly-shifted legs. Walking remained precarious, though I found it easier with every step. And despite the High Priestess’s warning, the spells I wove around myself—for balance, for language, for truth, even, when I had first arrived, for invisibility—had not drawn undue attention.
This world was ultimately not one of magic.
And yet one man had seen through my veil of illusion.
As I made my way to the surface, I had prayed to Poseidon for assistance. When I arrived, the pale, dark-haired man had been watching the ocean, waiting for me. I could see the magic flickering around him in bright sparks, illuminating us to one another, even in the darkness.
I had forgotten how much the shift hurt.
As with all things, there is a price to pay for change. With magic, that price is unpredictable. In Atlantis, there is an old story of a mermaid who, for love of a human male, traded her fins for legs—and in so doing, lost the voice that the man had loved, gaining only the agony of two legs forevermore.
It’s a tragic story, to be sure, but it’s also a cautionary tale to those of us who travel between worlds. The world of men offers little but pain, and silences our songs.
My shift when I emerged topside tore me in half and left me keening in pain, begging Poseidon to make it stop. Washing away my own flesh and blood, dropping fleshy chunks into the water afterwards like so much chum, made my stomach turn—and seeing the fish rise to the surface to consume that portion of me that made me part of the ocean, made me mer, brought tears of anguish to my eyes.
At least I knew my sacrifice to the magic: the surrender of my own body, my flesh returned to feed the sea.
My new legs ached, and the pale skin was tender, but they were not the agony of needles the mermaid in the old story had suffered.
Perhaps our own stories were as unreliable as any on the surface.
In the days since the shift, I had set out to relearn this world, my magic allowing me to slide through the world unnoticed.
I might be a Siren, able to shift from legs to fins at will, but I had spent centuries as a mermaid, singing with my sisters, learning to control my powers and studying with the priestesses of the sea-goddess Amphitrite, consort of Poseidon.
After so much training, my magic probably should have been palpable, even to humans, even if they didn’t know exactly what was different about me. But because no one expected mermaids, no one truly saw me, even as I moved among them.
So it came as a surprise now when a deep, masculine voice spoke to me from behind. “Excuse me, miss. Could you help me?”
I turned to find the man from the beach staring at me intently. His eyes were a blue-gray, ringed by a darker shade separating the iris from the whites of his eyes. They reminded me a little of the eyes of the few mermen in Atlantis: wide and pale.
Nothing else about him was reminiscent of a merman, though. Where they were slender and graceful, everything about him radiated power—broad shoulders tapering to a trim waist, muscular legs, strong arms. I could imagine him, dense and solid, sinking to the bottom of the ocean.
His wore his dark hair cropped short, and a light sunburn peeled away the skin over the dusting of freckles over his nose. A slight cleft in his otherwise square chin made me want to trail my fingers along it to feel the density of the bone beneath.
Though his gaze didn’t waver from my own, I could not tell if he recognized me—there was no way, short of asking outright, if he had found me through active searching, or if Poseidon’s magic had brought us together again of its own volition.
“I’m sorry,” he said when I didn’t answer his first query. “Do you speak English?”
“I do,” I finally replied, my magic sparking a little as it translated for me.
He blinked at the sound of my voice—perhaps the Atlantean accent that could not be fully erased—but he nodded and continued speaking. “I was wondering if you could tell me the where the closest subway station is?”
When I didn’t immediately reply, he frowned a little, drawing my attention to the faint sheen of sweat along his brow-line. I stared at it, fascinated by the way it glistened in the sunlight.
Do not be a fool. You have known humans before.
Just not in a very long time.
“I am only newly returned to Athens myself,” I said, “but I believe it is this way.” Stepping carefully out of the seating area, I led the man toward the broad street below—Dionysiou Areopagitou. I had only barely begun to learn to navigate this new version of my old city, but I was suddenly glad to be able to share that knowledge, if only in a small way.
“Please don’t let me interrupt you,” the man said. “You don’t have to lead me there—just point me in the right direction?”
I shook my head. “I was leaving the theatre. I, too, need to travel elsewhere now.” I turned left without waiting for a response, still distracted by the way it felt to walk on feet after so long. “The Akropoli station is this way.”
The man fell into step beside me. “You said you were ‘newly returned’ to Athens. Are you from here originally?”
“No, though I spent much of my … younger life here.” One glance back at the theatre, and I dismissed that younger life from my mind.
He nodded. “I’m from the U.S. Name’s Adam Clayton. Most people call me Clay.”
“The U.S. That is the United States?” At his affirmative nod, I replied, “I am Skyla Tritones.” I did not offer further information about my origin, and we walked in silence for a moment longer, turning onto the street that led to the metro station—the loud, smelly transportation that swept its inhabitants from one part of the city to another with virtually miraculous spe
ed.
Why had this Adam Clayton not mentioned seeing me several nights before?
I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. Was I wrong? Was this not the man who had watched me as I shifted on the rocks? As we walked, he slipped his hand into his pocket, turning some item inside around and around in his fingers, his expression thoughtful.
No. I was sure. Even if I had not recognized his face, the magic sparking around him would have proven that he was the man from the beach.
I was equally certain that he was Poseidon’s answer to my prayers.
But I didn’t know how he could help—or what I should do with him in the meantime.
Clay
I walked half a step behind the young woman as she led me toward the subway stop nearest the Acropolis. Truth be told, I didn’t need the directions—I’d been in Athens for several days now, all of them spent searching for her, and I had pretty much learned my way around, even as I circled in on that feeling—the pull that seemed to draw me toward something important. Even when it led me nowhere for days on end, I remained convinced that I would find her again.
Something about the dark-haired young woman—the mermaid-turned-human—sitting in the crumbling stadium seats of the Theater of Dionysus had drawn me back to her. Even now, I found himself staring at her as her seafoam-green dress fluttered around her calves and her white sandals slipped along the sidewalk.
And really, young woman wasn’t quite the right term. When she’d turned her face up toward me, the depth of her eyes had startled me. I suspected that her smooth, flawless skin might not be an honest indicator of her age.
There was more. The way she moved … her dark hair … her abstracted air, even when she spoke directly to him…
Falling in Deep Collection Box Set Page 114
