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Words seemed to reach him and he cursed his frantic brain for conjuring up a siren’s song, the same one Alex had sung in the café as she baked that day when they’d both been so happy.
He sang back, weeping too, knowing he was losing his mind as well as the woman he loved, and knowing the police officer’s boots were thumping over the wet beach behind him and they’d soon have their hands on him.
‘Soft, hear the merfolk, sing I,’ Magnús sang, his voice barely audible and broken with tears. ‘I call to thee, boy of the shore. My pretty one, my pretty one, hear me sing my water song.’
He staggered the last few paces to the waterfall, his breath catching at the sight of the pale white hand and arm limp across a rock behind the curtain of falling water, and hair, white and wet, spread over the stones, and over the sound of the waterfall, a voice echoed his own, singing weakly, barely audible, only a whisper, ‘I call to thee, boy of the shore. How I love you, my boy of the shore.’
‘Alex!’
Magnús forced his way under the wall of water, getting instantly drenched. There, in the darkness of the shallow black cave behind the waterfall, lay the woman he loved.
He didn’t dare move her. Her hair clung to her face and her clothes were filthy with mud. She didn’t look as though she’d fallen, thankfully, more like she had slept on the rocks all morning.
Her lips moved as she mouthed her song and her flesh shivered.
‘Alex, you’re alive. I knew you were alive. I heard you singing to me!’ He turned and called for help, just as the out-of-breath police officer reached them and put in a call on her radio.
Magnús knelt by Alex’s side, cradling her head and kissing her cheek. ‘You’re safe,’ he told her. ‘It’s over.’
Her eyelids lifted and he saw recognition there.
‘I love you,’ he told her, and finding the words so good to say out loud, he said them again. ‘I amseriouslyin love with you.’
She smiled weakly and sang on, audible only to Magnús with his face pressed to her cold cheek.
‘How I love you, my boy of the shore,’ she breathed.
