by Tracy Deebs
Page 26
“You wanted to walk,” I told him, making sure not to touch him as I stepped away from Mark. “So let’s walk. ”
Kona nodded, then led the way down to the water. As soon as my feet touched the surf, my power welled inside of me. I could feel it pushing up against the walls I used to cage it, pouring through cracks in my defenses until my entire body felt like it was burning up.
I glanced down, realized with a sinking heart that I was glowing, the phosphorescence that allowed mercreatures to see one another when deep in the ocean spinning out of my control. Usually I could tamp it down when I was on land, but tonight that seemed to be beyond my command. Like so much of the rest of my life.
I looked behind me, saw that Mark was staring at the purple luminosity that surrounded me. I told myself that it was a good thing, that visual reminders of how different I was could only help convince Mark that we weren’t right for each other. But knowing all that didn’t keep my stomach from twisting sickly.
“What’s wrong, Tempest?” Kona asked snidely. “Mark not so down with your mermaid side?”
“Mark and I are just fine, thank you. ”
“Yeah, I can see that. ” He turned away, looked out at the ocean, and I regretted the churlish words. I had no business rubbing my relationship with Mark in his face. Not when I knew how much it hurt him—and not when he had done nothing but try to make my whole transition to being mermaid easier for me.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I told him. “I didn’t mean—”
He made a dismissive sound low in his throat. “It doesn’t seem like there’s much you do mean. Right, Tempest?”
“What exactly are you implying?”
He just stared at me, his enigmatic silver eyes swirling with a mixture of rage and power and some other emotion I couldn’t begin to identify.
I sighed in response, frustrated with him and the entire situation. “Fine, if you aren’t going to answer me, can we at least talk about whatever it is you want to discuss? You came all this way to say it, so it must be important. ”
He was quiet for so long that I started to think he wasn’t going to answer me. Then he said the two words I’d been fearing since I first saw him towering above Mark and me on the beach.
“Hailana’s dead. ”
Chapter 12
My knees went weak.
The news wasn’t unexpected—I’d been preparing for this moment, in part anyway, for the last four months. And yet it was still shocking. As horror reverberated through me, I fell to my knees on the wet, hard-packed sand.
“Tempest!” I heard Mark, knew he’d be running toward me.
I held my hand up to stop him, forced my paralyzed throat to speak. “I’m fine!” I called.
But I wasn’t, not really. I was freaking out, mind racing and heart beating wildly. I wanted to feel sorrow at Hailana’s passing. She was my queen, after all, and my last real link to the mother I still didn’t understand. But it was hard to be upset about losing her, specifically, when she had been so horrible to me. Still, I had never wished her dead. She had done a lot of good things for Coral Straits in her heyday and she had served them well.
Better than I ever could, I told myself as I tried to deal with my rapidly shifting reality.
Everything I had been preparing for—everything I had been terrified of—was coming to pass. And no matter how much I wished it were otherwise, I had no idea what to do about any of it.
“So, I’m … merQueen now. ”
“Yes. ”
Again, his answer wasn’t a surprise, but it escalated my terror anyway. I felt like I was drowning, like the weight of the entire ocean was suddenly pressing down on my chest and I couldn’t get any air.
“Breathe,” Kona said, crouching next to me.
I pressed a hand against my chest, gasped. “I can’t. ”
“Yes, you can. ” He wrapped his hands around my upper arms, held me gently, securely, and I knew—though he didn’t say a word—that this was the closest he could bring himself to offering support. “You need to get up, Tempest. Mark’s keeping his distance, but if you don’t show him you’re okay soon, this will get ugly. ”
I glanced behind me again, saw Mark standing under a lamppost about fifteen feet away. Unlike a lot of the others on the beach, its lightbulb was still intact. I could see his face in its reflection and he looked frantic, angry. That’s when I knew Kona was right. I pushed myself to my feet, to placate Mark but also to prove to myself that I could handle this.
“When did she die?” I asked Kona as I brushed the sand from my legs.
“From what I understand, it was the day you left to come here. They sent a messenger out to find you at the same time they sent the announcement to me, but he couldn’t catch up with you. ”
“I was moving fast. ”
Kona’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t say anything else.
“So she’s been dead five days. ”
“Yes. ”
“When’s the funeral?”
“I believe they’re waiting for you. ”
I nodded, rubbing my hands up and down my upper arms in an effort to chase away the chill that was blanketing me. “Right. Of course. So, um, what happens now?”
If I’d still been Kona’s girlfriend after his parents had died, I’d probably know the steps that went into the coronation of a new monarch—selkie hierarchies weren’t that much different from merpeople’s, after all. But as we’d broken up within days of his parents’ deaths, I hadn’t been there to witness everything Kona had gone through to ascend the throne.
I had wanted to be there, had wanted to support him. Even though I had broken up with him, I still cared about him. But since he’d become king, he’d turned angrier, blocked me out. He hadn’t wanted me anywhere around, and I hadn’t pushed. The last thing I’d wanted was to make things harder for him.
Now I wished I had pushed. Not necessarily because of the situation I was in—after all, I’d known Hailana was dying and had spent a bunch of time researching mer customs and law recently—but because of Kona. It was obvious that the last few months hadn’t been kind to him. He’d lost weight, grown harder and more cynical until I could barely see the guy I had fallen for a year ago. If I’d been around more, if I’d pushed harder, then maybe …
I shook my head as the truth crashed in. There was no maybe. When I’d broken up with Kona, I’d ruined everything we had between us—not just our relationship, but our friendship as well. To be honest, a part of me was shocked he was here now. He could have sent someone to find me instead of swimming all this way himself. Yes, the fact that Hailana was dead was big news, but he was the king. If he didn’t have anyone he trusted to deliver the news, then we were all in even bigger trouble than I’d imagined.
“What happens now,” he said, repeating my words, “is that you get back to Coral Straits and assume the crown as quickly as possible. It’ll take two days for you to get home, which means that your people will have been without a leader for a full week. That’s an unacceptable lag between competent governments, although I am using the word competent loosely. ”
For a second, I wasn’t sure if he was insulting me or Hailana—or both. Either way, he sounded so stuffy, so monarch-like, so different from the guy I used to know that I couldn’t help myself. I lashed out at him, demanding, “Why does that one week matter so much? You’ll have been gone almost as long and that’s okay for you, but it’s not okay for me?”
