by Starla Night
Blood ringed the metal again.
Pelan paled.
Balim filled the wound, washing the blood and elixir into Pelan’s body, sealing and healing as they worked. Doctor Kowalski rocked the slug, testing whether it was loose enough to remove.
Pelan’s littlest toe twitched.
Balim stopped the doctor and addressed the bride. “Kiss him.”
She dropped her mouth to Pelan’s. Their lips meshed. This was not their first kiss, but it was the most heartfelt. Her soul flared bright as a sun, and Pelan’s soul brightened, strengthened by her strength.
“Go,” Balim ordered the doctor.
Doctor Kowalski removed the slug. Blood filled the wound and spilled across Pelan’s pectoral, marring his black and red tattoos.
“Suction,” Balim ordered.
The assistant jammed the slender wand into Pelan’s wound. Blood spurted out, regular as a heartbeat.
Pelan tensed.
Curse it.
Balim pushed the tube away and smeared his salve into the spurting hole, then packed seaweed into the cavity. “Pour elixir.”
Doctor Kowalski grabbed the jar and spilled it on Pelan’s chest.
Balim sighed. “Do you have replacement elixir?”
“No.”
“Me neither. Steady yourself, Doctor.”
The doctor let out a long, tense breath and poured more smoothly. The spurting stopped.
Balim’s shoulders ached. Tension strained his muscles, frustration gnawed on his patience, and he itched. Pelan stabilized, the doctor had collected the metal slug evidence for the police to arrest their suspect, and he would return to training scientists to see a trait they could not sense.
But something was wrong.
Was he due elsewhere? Who needed him more than Pelan?
He smeared more salve and packed the wound with seaweed. “Now, you may apply a human bandage on Pelan until we reach the tank.”
“Tank?” the doctor repeated. Blood smeared his face mask, his glasses, and his paper armor.
“Aquarium tank.” Balim removed his paper armor. Mitch packed his tools and called Hazel. “He will heal quickly shifted into a mer.”
Doctor Kowalski glanced at the couple still kissing. “Should they stop?”
“Do not interrupt their resonance. It keeps Pelan alive.”
“Mind over matter.” Doctor Kowalski swirled the elixir and lifted it to the light. “This is a miracle. A true, chemical miracle.”
His cheerful assistants agreed. The mood lightened from how easily they had rescued this warrior.
Balim found it irritating.
“No miracle,” Balim refuted. “The elixir of concentrated Sea Opals is activated by resonance. Resonance is a wave, like sound or electricity, produced by souls.”
“Electricity and sound are pretty miraculous.”
“Not according to your ‘electricians’ or ‘sound operators.’” He and Mitch sealed the cooler. “Resonance is a tool for healing. Anyone can understand and control it.”
“That’s great. I wish all our patients controlled their bleeding with a thought.”
“Yes, the mer possess superior control. We are not distracted by any—”
A powerful wave of knowing crashed over him. Resonance. He gritted his teeth, trying to assert control, but the force was so strong, it was like holding on to a twig in a tsunami. His very soul shivered.
She was here.
Balim turned on his heel.
“Healer Balim?” Doctor Kowalski held the jar. “Would you mind if I kept this?”
“No.”
Someone passed the operating theater. A flash of red hair captivated his eye. His chest throbbed with heat. Recognition. Knowing.
The doctor continued as if he hadn’t answered. “I wanted to test it on myself. See if it even works.”
“It will work.” He pushed through the doors. “You have a bright soul.”
“Healer Balim? Hey—” The doors shut.
Where was she?
There. At the busy corridor. Her chest glowed like the final blast from a dying star.
She turned.
He jogged down the smooth linoleum, his skin jumping, and made the same turn.
A thick crowd of people separated them. She stepped into an elevator. Her gaze focused on her cell phone.
This was his first time seeing her so close. He drank in every detail.
Lush curves. Silky red hair he wanted to grip in his fist. A plump red mouth capable of great pleasure. And a plentiful smattering of dark marks humans called freckles patterning her skin in a delicate tattoo.
She is my mate.
Her soul burned in her chest. Sharp, bright, and yet tragic.
She was powerful.
His soul mate spoke to the person pressing buttons. The doors began to close.
He must force his way to her attention.
She turned, and her gaze flitted across the crowd. Touched on the person behind him. The person beside him. And then onto—
The elevator closed.
He shoved through the last step and pressed his fingers against the warm metal.
Without her brilliant light, cold seeped into his chest.
He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the metal.
His heart beat faster and faster. Hunger straightened his spine, stabbing him with needles of frustration. His muscles tightened.
Control. He was a warlord of Atlantis. A healer. A male who stormed battlefields seeking the injured without flinching.
The points of his human body fought. Mer fins. Stretchy skin between his fingers. Shudder of gills in his lower back.
Resonance was a wavelength. It could be controlled.
He held his breath.
She refused these feelings. She did not resonate with him. Her soul did not resonate at all.
Because he did not deserve her.
Everyone thought he was so honorable because he was a healer. He had fooled King Kadir. The warriors of Atlantis. All these humans.
No one could see the black fracture lines of his past. He was no more honorable than the terrorists who’d shot Pelan through the heart. He was, in fact, worse.
He did not deserve a bride.
“Balim!” Hazel’s voice grew louder. “Balim. For the last time. Where are you going? The director’s throwing us out. We have to move ASAP.”
He lifted his head. “Yes, Hazel.”
“Yes, Hazel? Did you just agree with me?” She tilted her head. “Are you feeling okay?”
He let out a long sigh between clenched teeth. “Is my health not obvious?”
“Mmm. Now that you mention it, you’re looking a little paler than usual. Around the tattoos, I mean.”
He’d been within touching distance. His mate was somewhere in the hospital. His soul recognized their connection and reached out with all its power. Offering his emotionless self to her.
I can control this.
Ordinary warriors met their soul mates. Ordinary warriors bonded for life. Ordinary warriors were swept away by emotion.
Balim was not ordinary.
Nor, some would allege, was he a warrior.
He tightened on that pain and faced Hazel with calm. “The human lights reflect my tattoo color. Not illness.”
“If you’re sure.” She operated her phone using both thumbs, stabbing at the screen with single-minded efficiency. “Because it looked like you were chasing Bella.”
“Bella?”
“The redhead. The one you followed around the corner. I wonder who she’s visiting?”
His heart thunked.
Bella. She had a name.
“You know Bella?”
“Not personally. She designed our website. You know, for MerMatch.”
“Designed our website…” he repeated.
“And she prepared all the warriors for interviews and media appearances. Don’t you remember? She must have met with you.”
He shook his h
ead firmly.
“No? Huh. Sometimes she justs drops by. She’s actually been around a lot, I think.”
“I have never seen her.”
“Dannika’s always meeting her. Or, they were always meeting. I manage the office calendar, Balim, so I know.”
Dannika. The manager of MerMatch, the dating agency that united mer warriors with their soul-mate brides.
Balim continued to shake his head. He had never seen his soul mate’s face or body. Not her skin nor her hair. Nothing physical until today. And Hazel insisted this Bella journeyed to MerMatch—and therefore could have met Balim—frequently? Impossible.
Hazel pursed her lips. “Mm, now that you mention it, Bella came around the office almost daily a few months ago, but then her visits stopped. Her work on the website must have finished before you surfaced. Oh, and she did spend the majority of her time prepping Faier for interviews because she said he had the most presence.”
Faier. The quiet, heroic, scarred warrior who had gone missing just after Balim had surfaced. Faier had met Bella and Balim had not?
Hazel spoke to her screen. “Oops. We’ve got to go. Pelan’s at the front getting loaded into the ambulance. The director’s threatening to call the cops. And Dannika wants to see us as soon as we’re done.”
Dannika knew Balim’s female, Bella. Dannika knew everyone.
The intensity of his compulsion to chase Bella lessened. Balim stepped back from the elevators. He would master this craving. “Then why are we waiting here?”
Hazel rolled her eyes. “Let’s go.”
Balim forced himself to walk away.
Dannika would find her. They should have met many times already yet they had not. Clearly the female felt no stirring in his presence, but still, Balim would offer himself.
No matter the consequences.
Chapter Two
A week later, shortly before midnight outside the nonemergency entrance at the same hospital, Bella Taylor poisoned her body with cheesy chips, faux apple pie, and canned coffee.
No strange compulsion forced her to descend the steps, circumnavigate the hospital, and sneak into the emergency entrance.
Not like last weekend.
She gulped the sugary coffee and tossed the can.
Why that uncontrollable urge? The need had driven her like a tornado siren or the impending doom of an earthquake.
If you go to the emergency entrance, you will find your salvation.
She’d made a hundred bargains with God in the last year, and so far, He hadn’t taken any offers. This inexplicable urge had been her only possibility. And yet it had faded as soon as she’d gotten into the elevators last weekend. Now it was gone.
She lingered for a few more minutes in the chill of the early fall evening, but the only insistent urge was the blinking of her phone messages.
Work. Chaz. Debt.
God didn’t leave phone messages, so she wasn’t too excited.
Bella crumpled her junk food bags into the trash, climbed the dark hospital steps, and rode the elevators to the children’s wing. The metallic aftertaste of the fake food grimed her tongue and hunger remained unsated, but she didn’t have time to buy real meals. And the chips were so addictive. That cheese substance ought to come with a Surgeon General’s warning.
“Bella!”
Tonight’s floor nurse was a grandmotherly angel who clasped Bella’s cold hands with familiarity. “He’s been waiting for you all day. How are you doing, hon?”
“Better now. You’ve been such a support in this difficult time.”
The sweet nurse pshawed her. “I do what I can.”
“I appreciate it.” Bella watched the nurse’s smile widen. She needed to be the favorite visitor so everyone would love her patient. “How’s Jonah?”
“No big changes.” She patted Bella’s hands and then passed over the visitor sheet. “He still hasn’t opened his present.”
“I’ll hurry in. Thanks so much.”
“You bet, hon.”
Bella signed in and entered the familiar women’s locker room, stowed her crumpled work suit in her locker, showered, and ripped off the tags of today’s “hospital outfit”: a new, unworn blouse and slacks torn straight from the plastic.
Jonah’s room was the last plastic bubble on the floor. Her heart grew heavy and her palms sweated as she made the nightly walk.
Her purification routine was more extreme than other visitors’, but she didn’t trust the air of the New York subway system; the germs, like the rats, were vicious survivors.
At Jonah’s plastic-covered doorway, she dumped an entire container of alcohol sanitizer into her hands and smeared it over every exposed bit of skin. She doused her cell phone and crammed it, still damp, into a Ziploc bag. Then, she unzipped the door.
A fan blew the air of the room outward, cleansing her in a cool wind.
Inside the aperture, the yellow visitor gown hid her body in a hospital burqa with headscarf and veil. She selected an envelope off the shelf and tore open the paper, unearthing her specially fitted face mask and plastic gloves. Bella tugged them on and checked for stray hairs in the mirror.
She looked like a scuba diver. Plastic covered almost every inch of her body. A bit of speckled skin showed around her eyes.
Now she was sterile. She hoped.
Bella zipped up the external door, opened the second, interior plastic door, and entered her son’s room.
It was dark. The TV displayed monotonous, flickering cartoons; the volume was too low to hear over the fans.
Jonah’s lumpy shape shadowed the flat, hard bed.
She moved his stuffed bear out of the hard plastic seat next to his bed and let herself sink.
His eyelids twitched. He didn’t awaken.
Fans muffled the sounds of the room like ocean waves crashing against implacable cliffs.
On the table, nurses had left his birthday card, a drawing of a cake with ten candles, and the Nintendo Switch she’d bought weeks ago to sterilize it.
The present was still neatly wrapped. He’d waited for her.
A hard lump formed in Bella’s throat.
She’d always made Jonah wait. Just one more client, just one more project, just one more marketing campaign.
Just one more email. Then they’d go to the park. Just one more phone call. Then they’d go out to dinner. Just one more workday scrambling to pay bills and keep the medical insurance while they waited for a miraculous cure. Then he could open his birthday present.
The sun had gone down, the restaurant had closed, and Jonah’s birthday present was unopened. He had always waited.
Bella tilted back in the chair and rested her head against the hard wall. But there was no rest for the wicked. She pressed her phone to her ear.
First message. Work? Debt? Chaz?
“Bella, your latest brand redesign proposal has notes.”
Work.
“The company likes how you glossed over the wars they started, pollution charges, extortion scandal, and child slavery allegations. ‘Progress: It’s A Process’ is a good campaign slogan for them.” Her boss’s voice dipped into the tone where she knew she was asking for something unreasonable and she still expected Bella to comply. “They complained that you didn’t play up a ‘clean energy’ angle. They once bought a wind farm.”
And dismantled it.
“And dismantled it,” her boss conceded, reading her mind on the voice message, “but they still want ‘clean energy’ in the television spot. Can you stay late tonight?…Looks like I missed you. Come in early tomorrow. If we pull all-nighters all week, we should finish by the deadline.”
Bella pulled the phone away from her ear to check the time. Tomorrow was a Saturday.
“Don’t make me give away another client. Your portfolio’s slim. The sick kid isn’t forever, okay? Your career is your future. Call me when you get this.”
Bella did not call her boss and listened to the next message.
“This is the
Collections Agency calling again about your outstanding medical bills at—”
Skip.
“Bella, you won’t believe this. The company just got nailed for bribing congressmen. It’s on the late night news. We have to switch out half the images. On the plus side, there’s more room for ‘clean energy.’ Call me.”
She reviewed the client proposal on her tiny phone screen while the next message played. Softly, so it couldn’t project over the fans.
“Hi, Bella, this is Dannika from MerMatch, trying to schedule a meeting with our handsome, eligible marine warrior, Balim.”
The strange compulsion returned. This is your salvation. Certainty filled her veins. Hairs on the back of her neck lifted and goose bumps tingled down her arms. Her heart thudded, hard, and awareness tugged her nipples into hard peaks against her braless new blouse.
“I think Balim is the only one you haven’t met! Ironic, isn’t it? After the hours you’ve spent with us, it’s so funny how life works out. Balim is eager to meet you, and I just know you’ll be great together.”
Bella paused the messages.
The tattooed warriors were hot. She’d never met Balim, but cozying up to Faier, Ciran, and Pelan between coaching sessions hadn’t pained her.
Sadly, their elixir hadn’t cured Jonah. But while she’d been trading skills and wooing it away from the mermen, she’d learned the ripped, honest, powerful males’ future brides would be well-satiated ladies.
She could be one of them…
Balim. What kind of a warrior was Balim? Bossy like serious Ciran, awkwardly hopeful like Pelan, steady and powerful like scarred Faier? Or any of the other warriors she’d worked with all those weeks ago?
He could hold her in his bulging biceps, lay her across a rose-petal-strewn bench, press one muscular thigh between her legs. Give her nights of pleasure while he wooed her to drink that same elixir, gain the powers to shift into a mermaid, and travel to the sunken mer city of Atlantis.
And as a mermaid, she’d keep her figure. The half-fish thing was a fable. Only her toes would extend into fins. The warriors were human-shaped from the tops of their dominant heads to the heels of their feet—and indisputably male.
She could be his queen.
The fantasy deepened as she imagined tracing this mysterious Balim’s tattoos with her tongue. He would sweep her away from this life, and they would escape together into the deep blue—
