I brushed a piece of hair back as the wind off of the water whipped me across the face, nearly taking my breath away. “Holy crap, this is so beautiful.”
He carried me right to the edge. I could see four feet of rocks underneath the surface, and then it dropped off into endless black. It occurred to me, as Saxon stood there holding me, with the wind gusting against his body, that if we took one wrong step we would fall straight into the lake. And if we slid past the rocky embankment, we would be in water that was hundreds of feet deep. Worse yet, if his arms gave out,
I
would drop straight into the lake.
He must have felt my arm tighten around his neck, because he turned his face into mine. “Are you nervous?”
Laughing manically, I shifted in his arms. “I…well…yes, if you must know. Now put me down.”
“Fine.” He crouched down and rested me on a boulder facing the water’s edge. I adjusted my lower legs so they were crossed neatly and then zipped my hoodie up tightly to protect myself from the wind. He sat down on the rock next to me, and his leather-clad arm rubbed against mine, making shivers dance up and down my spine. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? Me carrying you?”
“No, not really.” I fiddled with the end of my sleeve. “Don’t tell my parents.”
“Your parents are protective.” Saxon looked out at the water with a content sigh. “They sound like good parents.”
“They are.” I wiped rain droplets off my sleeves and nudged him with my shoulder. “What about your folks? What are they like?”
He shook his head, his damp waves flopping on his forehead. “My parents are hard to describe.”
“What do you mean?”
“They live far away, and…” He blinked a few times, and his full lips pulled into a line. “They have some very intense expectations of me. Expectations I don’t think I’ll be able to live up to.”
“Wait.” I put my hands out in front of me to stop him. “They live far away? Where?”
He turned to face me, his eyes so filled with angst, it hung like a cloud in the air between us. “It’s really hard to explain.”
“Try me.”
“I want to.” Saxon took my hand in his and stroked his thumb across my knuckles. “It’s just
really
hard to explain.”
All of the walls I’d stacked up all around me started chipping away piece by piece. Turning my hand over, I laced my fingers with his and allowed the tingles to dance up my arm. “Why don’t we start with the obvious.” I lowered my voice into a whisper. Saxon’s gaze went down to our united hand and then back up to my face. “Why don’t we start with where you live? So…word on the street is that nobody lives in the house at the end of my road.”
I paused, but he didn’t say anything.
“So where do you
really
live, Sax?”
He shook his head slowly. “I can’t tell you that. I’m sorry.”
Reality settled in my stomach like a stone dropped into the lake, settling at the bottom of my gut. Boy, when my mom said she was afraid I’d fall for a bad boy someday, she was right. Only I’d taken it one step farther. I’d fallen for a homeless guy.
I tilted my head forward, so only an inch separated my forehead from his. “You don’t have a place to live, do you?”
He took his other hand and covered our interlaced ones. The heat in my belly churned. “I do have a place to live.”
“But, the gate is all chained up. How do you get in and out?”
“You’re right. I don’t live in that house.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “What? Where do you live, then?”
His cerulean eyes looked out across the water. “Would you believe me if I told you the truth?”
I tried to follow his line of sight, but only saw waves of dark water lined with acres upon acres of forest. I let his words marinate for a few beats. Would I believe him? I didn’t really believe people easily. Whenever my mother said she would back off and let me control my own life, she never actually did. When my father promised he would stop acting so vacant and actually tune in to our family once in a while, he never managed to do it. Why would I believe what Saxon had to tell me?
He turned back to me, and one side of his mouth tugged upward. At that moment he could have told me he lived in a tree with a pet monkey and a magic lamp, and I would have enthusiastically agreed.
“Yes.” I nodded. “I’ll believe you.”
“Good.” He lifted a hand to cup one side of my face. “Because I want to tell you the truth.” His smile grew wider, and he moved closer. Again, I could feel his breath, this time on my lips. “But first I want to do something crazy.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?” I clenched all of the muscles in my body—at least the ones I could still control—to avoid screaming,
Holy crap, he’s gonna freaking kiss me!
He let go of my hand and cupped my other cheek. “I want to kiss you.”
His nose brushed against mine, and then our lips touched. It was the lightest of kisses, barely more than a peck, more like two sleeves brushing against each other as people passed in a hallway. My neck weakened, and he supported my head as it tilted to the side. A painfully girlish sigh escaped my lungs just as my eyelids slid shut. My insides suddenly felt weightless, like a bundle of balloons had been released inside of me. A breeze rushed around our bodies, so closely pressed together, and the rock beneath us disappeared. We’d taken flight. Or at least in my mind we had. Sure…I’d been kissed before, but never in a way that made gravity disappear.
Just as he released his lips against mine, I opened my eyes and looked around. Was this really happening? Were his arms around me right now? It felt too amazing to be real.
Something beyond his shoulder caught my eye. Something greenish-white under the water. Squinting, I looked closer just as our mouths parted.
The blood inside of my veins ran cold, and I jerked apart from him so suddenly that he nearly fell off of the boulder. My instinct was to run, but I was stuck in once place. Suddenly the air around us felt icy, and my skin was covered in goose bumps from head to toe. No longer could I hear the sound of the waves, my lungs expanding and contracting, or my own heart beating. It was as if God had hit the mute button, and there was no sound.
“Luna?” Saxon’s voice was distant.
I used my hands to push myself backward, away from the lake. But without a bar or chair or
anything
to grab onto, I just floundered in my spot, my nails scraping on the rock. Saxon’s brought his hands to my shoulders, and he hunched down so that his face was blocking my view of the water.
His voice was frantic. “What’s wrong?”
Using a hand shaking so bad, it looked like I was vibrating, I pointed over his shoulder to where the rock incline dropped off into the deeper water of the lake.
There, just a foot or so from the surface was the blue-green face of a woman, whose long blonde hair fanned out from all around her head like seaweed. Her lips were pulled back into a silent grimace, and her eyes filled with manic rage—and fixed directly on me.
Chapter Six
The face was looking at me.
Looking
at me.
I tore my eyes away from the ones in the water, frozen in a rage-filled grimace, and used my hands to scoot myself sideways. The edge of the boulder sloped down, and I tumbled to my right, landing on smaller, moss-covered rocks and sending shooting pain up my arm.
“I want to go home
now
!”
Pushing myself back up into a sitting position, my whole body jerked with fear-induced tremors. My stomach no longer boiled because of Saxon’s close proximity. Now it roiled back and forth, threatening to empty all over my own lap. When he stood up, facing the water, I could no longer see the face, but the hair still danced in slow motion underneath the water, its white-blonde color tinged with green. Scrambling to move my body as far away from the water as I could get, I gripped the dirty rocks behind me and pulled myself backward, inch by frantic inch.
A dead body was at the mouth of Moon’s Bay, and obviously its last moments had been something of sheer terror. The snarl frozen on her face was no joke. She’d died fighting for something. Maybe her life?
I dragged my eyes away from the hair swaying in the current and looked up at Saxon’s back. He clenched his fists at his sides, and his shoulders now rose and fell in labored breaths. It reminded me of that day I’d seen him getting sick in the woods.
“Don’t look at it.” My voice was hoarse. “We need to call the police.” I stopped dragging myself backward and jammed my mud-caked hands into my pockets.
He didn’t answer me. Instead he took another threatening step toward the water’s edge, and the sound echoed against the trees. It looked as though he were challenging the corpse to a duel.
My cell phone popped out of my hoodie pocket and bounced along the rocks. I reached to grab it and spotted the side of the dead girl’s face, causing another shudder to rack through my body. “What the hell are you doing? Get away from it!”
What, did he expect it to float away if he stared it down? Great, he was homeless
and
crazy. “Saxon!” I yelled, fumbling to turn on my phone and press the numbers. Dirt from my hands covered the numbers, and it was hard to keep a good grip on the plastic when I shook so hard. “Stop it! For Pete’s sake, get away from—”
I told you to stay away from her. Away from me. Are you a fool?
Gasping, I dropped the phone onto the rocks with a clatter and scanned the woods with wide eyes. Now I could hear my heart beating. It was so loud it throbbed against my eardrums. “Who is that?”
There was nobody around. Nobody walking the beach on this side of the mouth or the other. And nobody was in the woods behind us.
If you come near us again, I’ll kill you myself. Do you understand?
His mouth wasn’t moving. I used my hips and legs to move myself backward some more. Terrified tears pricked and stung my eyes as I searched the woods for whoever was yelling. “What is going on? Take me home. I want to go home right now!”
He didn’t move. He stood like a statue, facing the body with flexed arms. I let cries laced with swear words slip out of my mouth as I grappled with the rocks underneath me.
This was what happened when I let someone carry me. Now I was stuck in the woods with a corpse and some sicko who thought it was funny to hide from us. I hated being caught without an escape plan. I felt vulnerable, and it chilled me right to my core.
“Hello?” I screamed into the woods behind me. “Who’s out there?”
This time it wasn’t a man talking, and it set every single hair on my body standing upright. Instead, a woman’s voice bounced around inside of my head and knocked against the backs of my eyes. And though it was said in a whisper, it was more threatening than any sound I’d ever heard in my life:
I dare you.
I choked on a cry and reached for my phone. With trembling fingers, I pressed out a text to my father.
I ned hellp. Come getme.
Each time my dirt-caked fingers would hit the wrong button, my tears blurred the screen and I had to start over. I was losing my mind. All those visits to the shrink my parents worked overtime to pay for, and we’d not once talked about hearing voices.
Finally turning away from the water, Saxon dove toward me. “Luna! Oh, no, I’m so sorry!” As soon as he moved, tunnel vision kicked in. Everything around me turned black, except for the spot in the water where the body had been.
Had been
. Now it was gone.
Everything went black.
When I opened my eyes, it felt as if they were being weighed down by one of the rocks I’d been clawing at. I expected the gray sky above me but found a canopy of green pine trees instead. When I moved my head, I realized Saxon had rolled up his leather jacket to put underneath me.
“Luna?” Saxon’s face came into view as he propped himself above me. Worry pulled all of his features downward, and a line stretched across his forehead as he stared down at me. “Don’t try to move yet. Just take it slow.”
I’d heard those words before. Only there had been sirens blaring and the smell of gasoline in the air at the time. Sliding my elbows underneath me, I sat bolt upright. “What happened? How did we get into the brush?”
He rocked back on his knees. “Whoa. So much for taking it slow.”
“Not really my thing.” I shook my head, trying to rid it of the fogginess. The water came into view through the trees, and I jolted, ruffling the coat. “The water…”
He took hold of my shoulders and positioned himself in front of my view. “It’s OK. Relax.”
“She was there.” I was mumbling, leaning to the side to see around Saxon. “It…she…was there, and then…” I looked up at his face and drew a shaky breath. “Gone.”
He nodded, his mouth pressed into a tense line. “She left.”
I gaped at him. “She
left
? She was dead. She couldn’t exactly
leave
.”
“Yes, she could.” He drew lines with his thumbs over the angle where my arms met my shoulders. “Do you still want me to take you home?”
“Yes. No. I…” I touched my forehead. “I guess I should. I mean, I passed out. And…heard things. Maybe I need to go to bed. Or a psychologist. Or a lobotomist, or something.” I didn’t even know if that last one was a word, but I didn’t care. I felt disoriented, and the fear was starting to snake back in. I looked down at the water, but saw nothing. “Seriously, where did she go?”
“Come on.” He put one arm around my shoulders and the other underneath my knees. “Let’s get you home.”
My eyes flooded as I brought them up to meet his. “What is going on here?” I sobbed. “I feel like I’m losing my mind. I’ve never passed out. I’ve never heard voices in my head. I don’t understand what’s happening to me—”
He wrapped his arms around me, enveloping me in warmth. He pressed his face against my hair. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I never wanted you to find out this way.”
I pressed my face into the thin cotton of his shirt. “Find w-what out? That I’m crazy?” I forced a laugh. It came out sounding jerky and unnatural. “Too late.”
He pulled back and pressed his forehead to mine. “Listen to me. You’re not crazy. You didn’t hear voices in your head. And you didn’t faint.”
I wiped my wet cheeks with my sleeve. “I hate to break it to you, Mr. Positive Thinker, but, yes, I am. And, yes, I did.”
He took a deep breath, then released me. “I need to tell you something.”
I wrapped my arms around myself. This felt ominous. “OK.”
He looked toward the waterline. His eyes were almost translucent as the light hit them. “What I’m about to tell you is going to go against everything you think you already know. It is going to make you hate me. But you deserve to know.”
My voice came out barely above a whisper. “What?”
“That wasn’t a body. That was Isolde.” He looked at me, and the wrinkle across his forehead deepened. “She came here to frighten you.”
“Well, she succeeded.” I shivered at the memory of her underwater snarl. “But why does this…
Eye-sold
chick want to scare me? And where did she go?” I looked over my shoulder, half expecting her greenish scowl to be peering at me from behind a tree. It wasn’t.
He pulled his knees up and made a steeple out of his fingers. I watched him think for a moment, and then he responded. “She went home. I told her to leave.”
“You told her to leave?” I rubbed my hands up and down my own arms, trying to ward off the goose bumps. “And where did she go?”
He faced me, his jaw twitching. “Underwater.”
Narrowing my eyes at him, I fought the urge to scoot away. He was becoming weirder by the millisecond, and I knew weird. “I think I may have misheard you. You said
underwater
?”
“Underwater.” He nodded. Just once.
The realization that this Isolde might not have been a corpse and that she might have actually swam away sank in—pun intended—and I sucked in a sharp breath.
“Was she dead?”
“No.” He shook his head.
“Then how—”
“I’m forbidden from telling you this.” He chewed the inside of his lip for a moment before dropping his voice low. “From telling anyone. Those of us who have told have always met an early death.”
“Tell me what?” I pulled the ends of my sleeves over my frozen fingers. “Just spit it out, because this slow reveal thing is freaking me out.”
His clear eyes filled with pain. “There are creatures you’ve only heard about. My people live at the bottom of the lake.”
“Like, as in a mermaid?” I looked away. “Sure. You’re a mermaid. Or,
merman.
Is that more PC? You must think I’m some sort of idiot.”
“Then tell me,” he demanded, his voice still low, “how did you hear me talking to Isolde? And how did you hear Isolde’s response?”
My breath caught in my throat. “It was you? I’m not hearing voices?”
“Actually, you are.” He sniffed. “But it’s not because you’re crazy. It’s because I was communicating with Isolde in front of you. I can’t keep you from hearing it when you’re just feet away from me.”
“You were speaking telepathically?” I yanked my beanie off of my head and raked my hands through my damp hair. “That’s why I heard you? Both of you?” He nodded. “Can you do it again? Prove it to me. Do it right now.”
He grimaced. “This isn’t a game. If someone finds out I did this, I’ll—”
I grabbed his arm and gave it a yank, forcing him to look at me. “Are you kidding me? You want me to believe that you live at the bottom of Pend Oreille Lake, but you won’t prove this to me? And you say
I’m
the one playing games?”
“Fine.” He grit his straight white teeth together and bore his gaze down on my face with such intensity that I could feel it clear to the back of my head. His voice was as clear and understandable as if he were speaking out loud right next to me.
My family has lived at the bottom of these waters for six generations. We work incredibly hard at keeping our existence a secret, but I knew when I met you that I would tell you. I knew that there would be no secrets between us, not if I wanted to earn your trust.
“Why me?” I felt foolish speaking out loud when all he had to do was think.
Because Mer know when they’ve met their mate. It’s instinctual. There is no dating where I come from. There is no courtship. There is a moment when we can sense that connection. It feels like a key sliding into a lock, and in that instant, it’s confirmed. We see our mate, and we take them.
I shuddered. “That’s the creepiest thing I’ve ever heard.”
He pulled his eyebrows downward.
I would never take you anywhere you didn’t want to go.
“I’m not interested in being anyone’s mate.” My stomach roiled. This was heavy information. “I was just enjoying the fact someone was actually interested in me again.”
I can’t imagine anyone
not
being interested in you. I know that things work differently with humans. I understand my time with you will be limited and that someday you’ll move on. But it doesn’t matter to me. I just want to spend time with you while I can.
“You mean while you’re still human?” I laughed at the absurdity of what I was saying. “Or is the evil sea witch going to take away your voice?”
He smiled.
I don’t understand what you’re talking about.
“Of course not.” Looking down at the water, my stomach clenched. “Is that why you have those tattoos on your neck? Are they, um, gills?”
His hand went to the marks on one side of his neck.
Yes. That’s how I breathe after I shift.
“Shift?” I raised an eyebrow.
Mer are like any other shape-shifter. Werewolves, kitsunes…all of those kinds of creatures have to change their forms before they can walk amongst humans.
“Wait, wait, wait.” I grabbed my head and closed my eyes. “Can we just talk about one monster at a time? Please? I’m on overload.”
His face pinked.
Right. So when I want to go home, I shift. Then I’m able to swim and breathe under the water.
“Do you have fins? Do you look like a fish?”
He gulped and looked down at his legs.
Half of my body becomes a fish, yes.
I stared down at his legs too. “Does it hurt?”
Yes. Very much.
My heart squeezed. He looked so sad, sitting there in the same clothes he always wore, with his eyes fixed on legs apparently always on loan. I reached for his arm again. “Will you talk to me now? Like a human?”
He frowned. “Yes.”
“Is that why you were sick that day Evey and I saw you? Because you were…shifting?”
“Being a human isn’t easy for us.” His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. “It requires a tremendous amount of strength to shift at will, and then even more strength to keep yourself in human form for as long as I do. It takes a young Mer years of practice to be able to control his or her shifts. The drier the weather is outside, the harder it can be to control yourself.”
“Is that why you were walking in the rain last night?” I looked up at the umbrella of green branches above our heads. “And today?”