Page 1 of Where the Current Takes Him (Mermate #1)

Beau

B eau knew it was wrong, oh so wrong, yet he continued to dump bottle after bottle of goldfish flakes into his mouth. Salty, fishy, melt-in-your-mouth—

“Hey!” yelled the Pet World cashier. “Not you again! Get out!”

Beau hissed, wrenching open the next bottle and jamming it between his teeth. The cashier charged toward him, wielding a broom like a greatsword.

He bolted toward the door, but not before filling his pockets with as much salty goodness as his pants could hold.

Beau jolted awake in a cold sweat. What the living fuck was that.

The sound of his father’s thick knuckles rapping the door shook him from the depths of his own self-disgust.

“Beaumont,” his father’s oddly nasal voice said. “What the hell are you doing? It’s 6:45 already. Get up. We need to talk.”

Beau rolled his eyes, suddenly spying a sleeping form beside him.

Shit. Forgot I brought a guy home. “I’m up, Dad, what do you want?” he called loudly. `The man beside him jerked awake at the noise.

“What the—” Beau clapped a hand over his mouth.

“Shut up,” he hissed.

“Watch your tone, boy,” Beau’s father snapped. “Meet me in my office.”

Beau groaned as his father’s footsteps retreated down the marbled halls.

No good ever came from a discussion held in the confines of his father’s office.

It was so expensive that it bordered on hostile.

There was even a pool. Though, in his father’s defense, that was for the comfort of Mer diplomats, and was built long before his time.

It was tiled in pristine, white marble and featured a tunnel leading to the ocean.

Beau wondered if his father actually had something to tell him, or if this was just another opportunity for the man to toy with him. Probably the latter.

He rolled out of bed, already mourning the loss of those 1500 thread count sheets. Being a politician’s son was a shit lot in life, but at least he slept well.

“Sorry about that,” he said to the naked man who was lying, bewildered, in his bed. “You’re gonna have to sneak out the window. Like. Now.”

“Seriously?”

“Unless you want to come face to face with Ashford Montgomery.”

The man paled. “You’re Ashford Montgomery’s—”

“Yeah, yeah, trust me, I’m just as upset about it as you are.” Beau tossed an unfamiliar shirt at the bed. “Window’s on the ground floor. There’s a gate a few feet to the left. Go through that and just keep walking until you hit the road.”

The grumbling man dressed and tugged the window open, dropping out of sight. Beau turned around and pulled on a pair of pink chino shorts he knew his father would hate, then paired it with an equally atrocious Hawaiian shirt. It was the small acts of rebellion that made his existence tolerable.

Sure enough, Ashford Montgomery’s lips pressed into a thin line beneath his graying mustache the moment his only son walked in.

But rather than comment on his lurid attire, Beau’s father gestured to the heavy chair in front of the mahogany desk. Beau sank into it, feeling the cool, blue velvet upholstery give beneath him.

The decor was Grecian in style, with carved marble, an unnecessary set of Parthenon pillars, and completely ludicrous frescoes across the ceiling. Hand-painted angels flew in a spiral around a crystal chandelier, which cast dappled light across the tiled walls.

Despite the sheer size of the room, his father’s potent cologne always managed to pollute the air—a thick, suffocating scent of woodchips and sage.

“Beaumont,” Ashford began.

Beau cringed. He hated his full name, and his father knew it.

“I have a task for you.”

That gave Beau pause. Since when did his father ask for his help? He’d been nothing but a stain on his father’s reputation from the day he was born. The staunchly “natural” gender politician and his Omega son.

“You’re going to Miami.”

Beau’s stomach twisted. “What? Why?”

“There’s been some… tension. Between my administration and the Mer. You’re going to smooth it over.”

“And exactly how am I going to do that, Dad?” Beau’s voice was low, somewhere between fury and defeat.

“There’s a Mer who has been sympathetic to my cause. He’s donated quite a sum of money for my reelection campaign. He’s an Alpha. Unattached. Needs a…” Ashford’s cold, dark eyes lingered on his son. “… companion.”

“You have got to be joking.” Beau leapt up from the chair. “Are you seriously feeding me to the Mer?”

“This is what you were made for, is it not?” His father was already looking back down at the documents littering his desk. “You’re certainly of no use to me here.”

“But—” Beau choked. “What about Mamá ?”

The steel in his father’s eyes softened for a moment. “Miami isn’t that far. You will still be able to visit her.”

Beau’s thoughts flashed back to the last time he’d been to his mother’s room, just the day before. She’d been lying in her home hospital bed, surrounded by equipment and skittering nurses. She kept her head wrapped in silk scarves these days, but anyone could see the cancer was winning.

“Does she know?” His throat constricted.

Ashford leaned back in his patent leather chair and closed his eyes with a sigh. “I told Ileana you fell in love. That you want to go be with your Mer. It’s kinder she doesn’t know the full truth.”

Relief twined with indignation. Of course it would do no good for his dying mother to know. How could either of them burden her with the knowledge that Beau was being sold as a walking uterus, or maybe just a human lab rat?

The Mer had all the leverage—technology, medical advancements, even superior strength.

There was only one thing they needed from humanity: the ability to birth live children.

Live children whose intermingled genes could reverse the damage done to the Mer genome on their home planet. It was the only reason they’d come.

“What if I say no?” Beau asked quietly.

That hard mask that his father so often wore came crashing back down.

“You know what happens if you say no. I love your mother, but I will cut your visits with her if that’s what needs to be done.

You’ll be dropped off in some backwater swamp, penniless and ripe for the taking.

I hear the Mer have begun terraforming the Everglades, bringing them back above sea level. ”

Beau’s jaw clenched. His father always had the final word. At least, he would until the day Beau’s mother died.

“You leave tonight.”

“What?” Beau yelped. “But I haven’t signed any transfer papers, or done the blood tests, or—”

“That’s what you’ll be doing today,” his father interjected, returning his attention to the papers on his desk. “There’s a car waiting for you in the drive. Get moving.”

More tests. The permanent bruises that traced Beau’s veins throbbed, as if the needles were already lancing through.

With a deep, stabilizing breath, Beau left the ornate office, casting one final look at the gleaming pool set into the floor.

Had the Alpha been here? He didn’t even know his name. It didn’t really matter.

At twenty-four, Beau had never known life without the Mer. Without the existence of Omegas and Alphas. His father was born a year after their arrival. Beau’s grandfather, when he was alive, had treated his whole family to long, rage-induced rants whenever he recalled the day the Mer came.

“Like pieces of sky were crashing down!” The smell of cheap beer always lingered on Grandpa Marshall’s breath.

“Those damn blue orbs, they blended right in until it was too late. Splashed straight into our oceans, down to the bottom where we couldn’t get to ’em.

Took our useless president months to find a single daggum pod.

But the damage was already done. Their filthy chemicals contaminated our water supply and destroyed our men. Back in my day, men were men .”

Beau kept his mouth shut. Ashford had never admitted that his son was an Omega. Not until his father’s dying day.

Grandpa Marshall’s rampage continued. “Then they came outta the water. Put up their alien islands where they flooded our coastlines, and built their cities to look like ours.” His grandpa scoffed.

“Like that would make us trust them. Government ought to’ve sent in the Marines to take care of business, but instead, that air-headed, blonde bitch invited them to come on in. Election fraud, I’m tellin’ you.”

Beau couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Grandpa, didn’t they share their technology with us? That’s how your diabetes got cured.”

“You hush, boy. Humanity woulda figured it out sooner or later. We don’t need ‘em. And anyways, the price was too damn high. Taking away our men, turning them into women.” Grandpa Marshall spat over the porch railing.

“Of course, then we learned that they would walk on land. Some kind of shape-shifting devilry, with those tails splitting into legs. Demons, all of ‘em. You know why this happened, boy? Because people stopped puttin’ the Lord first. Took the Bible outta schools, celebrated pagan holidays, started electing women to public offices…”

That was always the time Beau started tuning his grandfather out.

Cloaked as it was in spite and hate, he enjoyed hearing the story of how the Mer came to reside on Earth.

How they abandoned their own world when the radiation grew too deadly, and came looking for a world they could terraform, and a species that was compatible.

Of course, humans being humans, initial interactions were violent.

But humanity quickly learned that bullets did little against the Mer.

It wasn’t long after that a new branch of government was created—the Department of Interspecies Relations, the Florida office headquartered in Gainesville.

Now, fifty years later, tentative integration had been achieved, and work programs for human Omegas were established on the Mer islands. Their official name was the Paeil Islands, but most humans had taken to calling them the Mermade Islands.

The largest of them appeared over what was once Miami. Perhaps in an effort to ingratiate themselves to humanity, the Mer had named the island after the lost city. It caused more outrage than camaraderie, but the name stuck.

After what felt like hours, Beau made it to the main entrance of his father’s government-owned mansion. A nondescript black car was waiting for him.

“Mr. Montgomery,” the driver said, pulling the door open.

Beau eyed the man. Something about his skin caught the light. Minute, glittering scales. He was Mer. No overwhelming pheromones wafted from the scent glands on either side of his neck. Instead, he was emitting a lightly sweet scent. An Omega, then.

Of course, Beau thought. As if an Alpha would be driving my sorry ass around town.

While roughly thirty-five percent of the human population was now made up of Omegas, it still left sixty-five percent of what was now called “standard male” and “standard female.” Mer, on the other hand, were either Alphas or Omegas.

Though there were Mer females, they too were divided into Alphas and Omegas.

From what Beau had learned, the Mer typically preferred partners of their own gender, but that didn’t mean an Alpha male couldn’t reproduce with an Omega female and vice versa.

As Beau stared out the heavily tinted window, a pang of fear bloomed in his gut. He recognized this route.

“Uh, excuse me,” he said, flushing slightly. “Where exactly are you taking me?”

The Omega smiled in the rearview mirror.

“First stop is St. Marina’s, sir.”

His stomach twisted. “Just Beau, please.”