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She doesn’t. Nill was smaller and a smooth bronze-gray color with long rounded fins, the tips bright white like they’d been dipped in paint.

“Do you wish that you could do as I do?” she asks idly and in a moment she transforms back into herself, though her teeth still look like they belong to a shark. Her eyes go to my necklace. “You kept it throughout the years. Every time you touched it I hope it reminded you of what you lost.”

“What I lost doesn’t exist anymore,” I tell her stiffly. “My sisters are gone, my mother, my father. I don’t know who is left in Limonos.”

“Oh, well I could fill you in on all the gossip,” she says gleefully, placing her hands together. “Asherah went across the Pacific while I believe Larimar might have gone south to the poles. Your sisters left after your father died of a broken heart, all because of you. With them gone, there was no one left to rule the kingdom and they all,” she gestures with her hands, making the eels in her hair twitch, “scattered. All the Syrens left Limonos. Now it’s a barren sea surrounded by barren land. Amazing isn’t it, what one girl’s selfishness can do?”

I glare at her. “I’m tired of feeling badly for my choices.”

She gives me a mock sympathetic look, pouting. “Oh, I bet you are. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“You had your Kraken pull me down here!”

She wags her finger at me. “Only because I know that’s why you came all this way. Everything led you right to me, just as you wanted. It’s destiny, dear. And now, I will be so gracious as to grant you your wish and reverse the spell. Don’t say I never do you any favors.”

She gestures to the sand with a wriggle of her fingers and the grains starts to rise and swirl like a maelstrom, around and around, until a book surfaces out of it, a worn leatherbound manual, the pages flipping as it comes through the water.

“That’s Ramsay’s book,” I say.

“Yes. The one hiswifewrote for him,” she says, an edge to her voice. “I knew Venla was a traitor to her kind when she married that bloodsucker, yet I didn’t think she’d go so far as to write a book of magic for him so that he could learn the spells and use them for himself.” Her eyes narrow into crimson slits. “Our magic is for witches only. We don’t share with humans, and we especially don’t share with the Brethren. They’re our one true enemy, gracious, we don’t give them the only weapons we have! That’s punishable by death.”

I stare at her, aghast. “You didn’t kill Venla, did you?”

“I didn’t,” she says with a raise of her pointed chin. “I wanted to, but she was still my sister. Half of her was, anyway.”

“You killed his daughter though,” I glower.

She smiles coldly. “I did. I wanted the book. That book didn’t belong in his hands, it belonged in mine. Killing Ramsay’s little girl was a distraction. Besides, she would have grown up to be half-witch and half-bloodsucker and the world doesn’t need the likes of that. There are too many Brethren now as it is. The world is becoming uneven.”

She sighs, giving her head a shake, and the eels sigh with her. Then she tilts her head to face me and fixes me with a satisfied eye. “But now the book is in the right hands, my hands, and with it I will transform you back into what you desire.”

I find myself shaking my head, my pulse quickening. “No,” I say, swallowing hard. “No, I don’t want that anymore.”

She stares at me, eyes rounding. “You don’t want what anymore?”

“I don’t want to return to my full Syren state,” I tell her, feeling conviction for the first time. “I want to stay as I am.”

“A monster who dwells on land,” she says with contempt.

“Who is in love with another land-dwelling monster,” I say boldly. “Ramsay and I are the same. He is my blood and I am his. I won’t return to this world if I can’t be with him in it.”

Her expression turns even more venomous, enough that I get chills. “Even though he’s the reason your whole world crumbled to begin with?”

I frown. Her words put me on edge. “What do you mean?”

“Life is made up of sequences, darling. Your mother was taken from you, which meant your father ignored you because of his grief. So you left him behind for good, which killed him in the end. With no queen and no king and no princesses left to rule Limonos, the kingdom crumbled. And you’re turning your back on it again because you say you’ve fallen in love with the very man who captured your mother.”

It sounds like the world goes deathly quiet for a moment. I don’t even hear my own heart.

“What?” I whisper harshly, my chest filling with ice.

“You heard me,” she says. “Ramsay captured your mother and killed her. That’s what they do. Those pirates, those Brethren. They love their mermaid blood. You might think that they’ll view you as crew, perhaps even a new family for you to call your own, but in the end they just want to use you and discard you. They did the same to your mother and they’ll do the same to you. You’re just fish to them.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I refuse to believe that.”

“Fine,” she says, staring at her nails. “But tell me why you’ve never found who took her. Ramsay is no idiot. Not entirely. He knows that the truth would ruin what trust he’s built up between you.”

I keep shaking my head, not wanting to let the words sink in. It can’t be true.