Not entirely human.
The thought was crazy—I knew it was—and yet I continued to turn the broken seashell from the beach around and around, the sharp edges scraping against my fingers like a talisman of truth—a physical connection to the reality of the beach with its shape-shifting mermaid, and this reality here and now, walking along the cobblestoned street across from sidewalk cafes filled with tourists.
Part of me suspected that I might be in the middle of a psychotic break. Had I finally lost it, now that I was in Charalobos’s home country? It was the only goal I’d had since I’d killed the man who drew on me that night in Dallas.
“We are here,” Skyla said, stopping outside the subway entrance. “Do you know now your destination?”
I gave myself a mental shake, trying to dispel the lump of failure that settled in my stomach every time I thought about the events of the last few months.
Glancing around, I gestured toward the many sidewalk cafes and bakeries lining the street. “Would you join me for lunch?”
Skyla blinked up at me, her dark green eyes wide and luminous. “I am indeed hungry,” she said, her intonation musical, but not quite like that of the other Greeks to whom I had spoken on this trip.
That’s because she’s a mermaid. Her accent isn’t Greek. It’s Ocean Deeps.
“Pick your poison,” I said, waving my arm in an all-encompassing arc.
Her gasp was audible. “Pardon me?”
“I meant, choose a restaurant.” I could feel a flush crawling up my neck—its obviousness the curse of my fair skin.
“My apologies,” Skyla said, a hint of a smile playing around her lips. “I’m afraid I don’t always understand such idioms.”
“I’ll try to keep the idiot comments to a minimum then,” I replied dryly.
“No, no. I said idioms.” Waving her hands in front of her face, Skyla shook her head so wildly that her fine, dark hair flew around her, catching in spiderweb tendrils along her cheek.
You are an idiot, Clayton.
“Just a joke,” I said, stepping off the sidewalk to cross the street. “Shall we?”
Skyla stared at me for a long moment before she finally nodded and followed him.
Skyla
Why had I agreed to join this odd man from across a wide ocean for a meal?
He was not part of my assignment. Not officially. I wasn’t even certain he was Poseidon’s gift.
Then again, sitting in a crumbling amphitheatre, daydreaming about long-dead lovers hadn’t been part of my assignment, either.
Something about this man drew me to him. I doubted he could tell, but the embarrassed flush when he had corrected me—who offers to allow one to pick one’s own method of poisoning, anyway?—had left me feeling oddly charmed. Atlantean mermen do not blush, at least not at home.
Nor do I.
I didn’t know if I could blush here, either—it had been so very long since my blood had run hot.
And his play on words between idiom and idiot would have been entertaining, had my translation spell caught it soon enough.
I would have to tweak the spell later that night, I decided.
Wait. No, I won’t. I don’t need it to pick up such subtleties.
I was here to do a job—to find the source of a magical taint that was seeping up through the earth and was now apparently attempting to gain a foothold on this world—not to spend time with human men.
I glanced at Adam Clayton’s broad shoulders as he ushered me across the street.
No matter how attractive.
I had given up the earth and the sky millennia ago, determined to avoid the misery of another human lover again.
As the high priestess had pointed out, such unions never ended well. The magic required to keep the shift permanently in place always demanded a greater sacrifice than anyone could imagine. It was better that Odysseus had returned to his wife, they had told me. Human kings had human duties.
And mermaids who became Sirens had duties of their own, I reminded myself. But a traitorous voice whispered in the back of my mind. Even in a world as devoid of kings as this one? What duties could a simple human male have?
I admired the curve of his bicep as he turned to escort me onto the opposite sidewalk.
With an internal groan, I began to imagine practicing the soothing songs I sang with my sisters—a song of peace, and joy, and serenity.
“What’s that tune?” Clay asked as he stopped in front of a restaurant menu. “I like it.”
I hadn’t realized that I had been humming the melody aloud. “An old family lullaby.”
As he pulled out a seat for me and I sank into it, I realized that I was still humming—but that the song had changed, turned darker, threaded now with a note of desire, of hunger for things of men, for things of the earth.
For Clay.
Clay
I watched the mermaid take a seat across from me, her movements precise and direct, as if she had not yet gotten a sense of how to move her human body.
As if legs were still new to her, or something? Inwardly, I rolled my eyes. Of course she wasn’t used to land yet.
Another part of me stared in open-mouthed amazement at how easily I was accepting this strange new twist in my life. That morning, I had gotten up, checked out of the Hotel Poseidonio, and made my way into the main part of Athens, checking into The Royal Athenian, with its blue and gold furnishing and balconies overlooking the lovely pool. I had stayed long enough to enjoy breakfast on the veranda overlooking the Temple of Zeus on one side and overlooked by the Parthenon on the other.
The view should have stunned me, but all I could feel was a thrumming in my veins, telling me go, go, go, a liquid fire inside me that burned mercury-bright, forcing me to move toward the woman I had half-convinced myself was mere vision.
And as the night before, I circled around my final stop, working around and around until whatever homing sense I carried focused in on her.
She wore a dress the same shade of green as fabric under seawater, and she sat with her face tipped back toward the sun. And yet I would have known her anywhere.
I might have known her even I had never seen her before.
When I spoke, her eyes—a brilliant turquoise that flashed from one sea-drenched shade to another—settled on me as if she was as little surprised by me as I by her.
And now that we sat across from one another, I didn’t know what to say.
At home, I’m a solid investigator, sometimes even called in to conduct other officers’ interrogations. Here, though, I sat still and dumb, waiting for her to speak.
When she didn’t say anything at all—when she seemed, in fact, perfectly willing to allow the silence to continue indefinitely—I found myself dropping into that same interrogatory mode. In those cases, sometimes surprise is best.
“So why did you decide to trade your fins for legs?” I asked. Might as well get it out in the open, anyway. If I was wrong—if this somehow wasn’t the mermaid I had witness changing—probably better to let her know right up from that she was dealing with a lunatic.
But Skyla Tritones didn’t seem at all surprised. Instead, she regarded me with those oversized, green eyes for a long moment, and then took a sip of water the waiter had set in front of her. The long pull from the bottle seemed to soothe her somehow. I didn’t know how saltwater mermaids dealt with a human’s need for fresh water, but I was distracted from the consideration by the sight of the long column of her throat when she swallowed.
As the sunlight flashed off her skin, I could almost see the slightest shimmer of light, flashing off scales. I waited for her denial, for her to say that I was crazy, to get up and leave.
She stayed where she was.
When she spoke, her voice still held undertones of the song she had been singing when we chose our seats, as if every sound from her helped weave a spell around us.
“I am here to protect the world of men.” She waved her hand around in a graceful arc, as if taking in everything
around us.
“By ‘world of men,’ you mean humans, I take it?” My voice dropped without my conscious volition, apparently to keep the secret that I already knew no one would believe.
Skyla simply nodded and took another drink. If not for the slight widening of her eyes as she looked over my shoulder, I probably wouldn’t have even seen what was happening behind me.
But Skyla was either poorly prepared or a terrible actress. Either way, she gave away our opponent’s position, if only with that enlarged glance.
I, on the other hand, was a trained cop.
Leaning forward, I took her hand in my own and pulled her across the table, toward me. A shock ran between us from fingertip to fingertip, and spreading from our palms as heat. I did my best to focus not on my reaction to her, but on whatever was behind us causing her to react.
“How far behind me is it?” I whispered seductively into her ear.
“I don’t know your measurements.” She kept her voice equally low, but she couldn’t stop her glance from wandering behind me.
“No. Don’t look at it.” I brushed my cheek against hers, and although most of my concentration remained focused behind me, I couldn’t help but feel her reaction to my touch—a shiver that ran all the way down her neck and along her long, slender arms.
“It is the length of perhaps one tall human male,” she murmured, her breath blowing warm against my own cheek. I had to tamp down a shudder of my own.
No time for that yet—I would have to sort that out later. I could feel whatever it was gaining force behind me, and I knew without asking that it was something from her world, not mine, the same way I had known where to see her shift to human, where I had known to find her in the heart of Athens.
“Can you combat it?” I asked. My hand had already scrabbled uselessly at my hip where I usually kept my gun holstered. I was miserably under-armed for any official action.
Or unofficial, for that matter.
“I believe so,” Skyla murmured. “Especially with your help.”
I couldn’t imagine what I might have to offer beyond a well-placed kick or two, but I was certainly willing.
“Then on three.” I stared into her eyes as I breathed out the numbers, and as I completed the count, we stood together, pushing our chairs behind us and out of the way. Skyla came around the table as I spun around so we faced the same direction, and then the mermaid kept going, holding my forearm in her grip and using it as a fulcrum, a pivot point for her legs.
Her sudden leap in the air surprised me, as I was still scanning the area for the threat she had so clearly sensed.
For an instant, I was convinced that I had imagined it all, that there was no danger whatsoever.
And then I saw it, shimmering between worlds, impossibly large, and unimaginably complete—taking up all the air around me even as it condensed itself into something miniscule enough to make its way from its world into mine.
The sheer contrast between the two scales the creature occupied could have been enough to send me gibbering into the streets, had it not been for Skyla’s handclasp grounding me in this world. Even as her feet lashed out kick the figure flickering between dimensions, she pulled me closer in for a kiss.
The passage between worlds dimmed for just a moment, long enough for Skyla to complete that kiss.
Too stunned to do anything else, I responded with all the pent-up emotion I’d been carrying since Charalobos’s death, pouring into that one kiss all the guilt and anxiety of the shoot, along with all the longing to see Greece, and the desire I’d felt tugging at my center since I first saw Skyla on the rock outcropping off of Piraeus. All of it swept from me in a wave that crested above us, then crashed down into Skyla. Her shoulders flew back as it hit her, and with a jerk of her chin, she broke the kiss, pulling everything she had gained deep inside her.
When she pushed away from me and turned to face the monster that I still could not see clearly, she glowed the blue-green of the Mediterranean. Strands of her dark hair floated out around her as if in water, and her feet barely brushed the ground.
Around us pulsed a bubble of silver-blue, surrounding our table and the portal between worlds. Outside it, I could see men and women strolling along the sidewalk, sunlight glinting off their skin. Inside the bubble, where sunlight didn’t penetrate, I shivered as Skyla raised her arms.
Skyla
I had been almost certain that Clay was Poseidon-sent, the earthen counterpoint to the water of my nature, the sky of my name. We were not whole, of course—would not be until we had drawn counterpoints of all elements to us, had created a council that would serve to oppose the Titans as they attempted to break free of their banishment—but we were the beginning of the resistance that would grow.
Most of the Old Gods had followed the Titans out of this world, leaving the humans in possession of the Earth. Only a few had stayed behind, like Poseidon and Amphitrite. And only a few of their acolytes had remained, as well, our own lives often cut so short as to have sent the stories of our charges into obscurity had the Titans remained gone long enough. But they had stayed on the other side of their wall and gathered their forces, choosing what was for them an almost immediate attack.
So although I had not seen this Titan before, I knew him, from the stories of Poseidon my father, Epimetheus, Titan of afterthought—the one we had always suspected would be first to test our side.
My power bubble protected the humans from even seeing Epimetheus as he attempted to move from the prison world, the dimension he had been sent to by Zeus’s power bolts many human years ago.
“What the hell is that thing?” Clay asked, still catching his breath from the power swap. I had taken almost everything he had to offer, magically speaking. It would take some time for him to recover.
And if I did it often enough, I might very well take everything he had.
The mermaids weren’t the only ones who traded love for pain.
Humans who follow their hearts to the sea all too often drown for love.
Still, now wasn’t the time for discussion. “Concentrate on the edge of the power bubble,” I directed. It was made of his power, so he should be able to maintain it. “Don’t let anyone walk through it.”
“What will you do?” Clay asked, focusing his attention on the wavering edge of the power containment.
“I’m going to send this monster back to hell.” The words didn’t exactly translate that way, but it’s what my translation spell, buzzing against my skin, gave me. I shrugged. Good enough.
Inhaling deeply, I drew my arms up beside me and began singing a spell, weaving a captivity incantation into, around, and through reality, threading it into the light that already existed and binding it with sound.
On the other side of the portal, Epimetheus howled in pain, his own corporeal self drawn into the very fabric of the song that created the boundaries of his prison.
Only a few moments in, thought, another force joined Epimetheus, taxing my powers beyond my ability to contain the Titans. A sharp, bright lance of pain sliced through my midsection, and for just a moment, I was convinced that I had failed Poseidon, that the Titans would pour through to destroy the Earth, all the humans, and then finally, all the oceans, swallowing the songs of my sisters.
This dismal image flashed across my vision for only an instant before Clay—Adam Clayton, first man, man of earth, Poseidon-chosen for me—stepped in to catch me as I crumpled to the ground. “Not yet,” he whispered, and then he pressed his lips to mine again.
This time, more than just his surface emotion poured into to me.
Everything about who he was, what he was doing here in Greece, all of it—his history, his hopes, his fears—everything poured into me, so that when I finally pulled away, he dropped to the ground, his eyes empty circles of nothingness.
But I stood with enough power to close the portal, even with more than Epimetheus behind it. A wind whipping out of nowhere crackled through my hair as I pointed the bulge in
reality where I could still see the Titan attempting to push through.
Raising both hands, I flicked my fingers through the air and sang an ancient word of closure. Lightning flashed from my nails and sizzled along the opening. From the other side, I could hear wails of anguish, and the scent of burnt ozone in the air around me seemed laced with a light touch of flesh, as well.
When I could no longer see the bulge in reality, I let the power bubble around us drop, brought us back into the awareness of those humans who had unconsciously skirted us for the last several minutes.
“Miss, is your friend okay?” the waiter asked, rushing over to hover solicitously when he realized Clay was slumped to the ground beside our table.
“He is very well,” I said. “Merely too much ouzo.”
With a touch, I guided him to his feet, keeping one hand on his arm to lead him, and whispering a healing song as I led him to the room I had let.
It was all I could think to do for this man who had given me everything he had to fight an evil he had not even understood.
Clay
I came to slowly, only gradually aware that I had been noticing things around me for quite some time—the narrow streets of Athens already in shadowy dusk, the Parthenon far above still shining in the sun. Skyla walked beside me, singing, her thin frame deceptively strong as she took most of my shambling weight against her body, right up to the point she unlocked a narrow, green, wooden door and pushed it in.
Her tune faltered a little as she flipped on the light. A bare bulb hung from a wire, illuminating a small, spare room containing little more than a tiny bed and a small table. I grunted a little as Skyla jostled me over the door sill, and barely made it to the bed before my knees gave way and I thumped down to a seated position.
“Look at me.” Sky knelt in front of me, her eyes glowing a little in the barely lit room. She peered at me critically. “The song seems to have helped some, but it’s not enough.”
Trying to shake the cotton wool out of his head, I blinked and focused on Skyla. “What happened?” I finally managed.
Falling in Deep Collection Box Set Page 115
