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The sun had already risen, but the air was icy enough I had to pull Kai’s overshirt around me to help cut the chill. It was weird to think that although I’d slept next to one merman, another would come for me soon. Would it be Barren this time, or had Kai’s day not counted since it was technically a half-day? Kai had said they’d be back in the morning, but I was too nervous last night to ask which of them was taking a turn next.
Would one of them take me out to the water today? My stomach coiled into a knot at the thought of going back in the ocean. I wasn’t sure if I was ready for anyone else to see how useless I was as a mermaid.
A feeling of joy bloomed in my chest. Uh,what?Considering I was sort of having a mini-crisis, joy didn’t feel quite right. It felt jarring, suddenly being overcome with such a conflicting, powerful emotion.I followed the sensation to the edge of the pier, clasping at the fabric over my heart as I looked out at the water. Yes, it was joy I was feeling. I was certain now. But why—
“I knew you were as dumb as a rock, but standing right next to the water? Seriously?”
I froze, my hand still clutching at my heart. Even if I lived for a thousand years, I’d still recognize the grating sound of Aleena’s cackle. The bitch queen of the fucking harpies was standing right behind me.
“Too easy.”
Before I could turn around, something hard shoved into my back. Up became down as my feet fell out from underneath me.
And down into the water I went.
* * *
No—notnow. Not while I was alone.
I screamed on impulse, and a flood of water rushed into my lungs, the salt burning a line down my throat before my body could acclimate to the change. The slap of skin against the water’s surface, the crack of bones rearranging—everything hit too hard, too fast. My arms thrashed, blindly searching for something to latch on to before I started—
Sinking.I was sinking!
Terror brought another shriek, the sound reverberating like a shrill clap of thunder under the waves.Oh—oh no.My body was heavy, so incredibly heavy. My arms beat through the water, stroke after stroke, but still, I sank, the intense weight of my lower half impossible to keep afloat.
My tail had finally become the nightmare I always knew it to be, the anchor that would drag me to my watery demise.
And damn, did I sink fast.
Seagrass billowed in dense tufts around me as I dropped to the bottom of the harbor, my body going momentarily weightless as my tail bounced over hard sand. The grassy canopy closed overhead like the jaws of a great leviathan, swallowing me down into the murk.
The pitch black shocked my senses. Strange lines crowded my vision, rippling in a way that made my temples throb. My eyes darted, my pulse hammering all the way up my throat as my entire being vibrated with a panic I couldn’t control.
What were the lines? I remembered seeing them last time I was in the water, but what did they mean?
I tried tracking one, but it slid away whenever I focused, rendering it impossible to pin down. The throbbing in my head intensified with each movement of my eyes until my head felt like it was on the brink of exploding.
There!I finally caught a squiggle, but my satisfaction was brief. Something in me snapped, and a firework went off behind my eyes.
My vision closed like a shutter, every line dissolving to darkness at once, and when the shutter reopened, the world was reborn in monochrome. I was seeing again—but without the need for light.
I blinked wildly, suddenly able to trail gray strands of grass to where they rooted in the dark sand. My sight fell on the wide scales forming at my hip, and by the time I reached the frills edging the bottom of my tail, fury simmered hot in my belly.
Night vision? I’d lived my entire life without a hint of mermaid magic, and when a spark of it finally awakened, the best trick I could pull off wasseeing in the dark?
And what a neat trick it was. Now I could experience my inevitable demise in dramatic shades of black and gray. What luck!
Oh, I wasangry. Angry with myself for letting Aleena best me. Angry with the ocean. And beyond furious with Poseidon for having the giant, ancient gonads to cobble someone together with such a useless set of magical “gifts.”
Even if it was my own damn fault I’d never mastered my tail, I was still furious. I’d been haunted by the question of what it was I lacked as a mermaid my entire life, and now more than ever, it felt like my existence was some sort of supreme joke Poseidon had conjured up for his divine amusement.
What was it that made me unworthy? Did I lack strength? An aptitude for magic? Or was it my faith in Poseidon that was the issue? I sure spoke his name in vain a lot, but that little habit started long after he’d turned my life into a joke.
Twenty years of grief, and it was clear I hadn’t learned a damned thing.
Stupid. Useless. Tail.
How long would fate curse me to look at it? To see its beauty and ache for the false promise of a life under the waves?
