Page 11
Death was surprisingly wet.
I woke with a gasp, lungs instinctively searching for air, only to find water. It was everywhere, pressing against me and chilling me to the bone.
Lifting my hand, I fluttered my fingers in front of my face. My mind was sluggish, struggling to understand how I could breathe underwater. With no easy answers, I tried to take stock of the rest of my body and absorb my murky, cramped surroundings.
My vision blurred an array of twinkling anemones clinging to a low, craggy ceiling. As my eyesight sharpened, they resembled an imitation of starlight, their glow piercing through the water in shafts of light that reached the sandy floor.
A tremor ran through me.
I’d drowned. I was sure of it.
I think.
The last thing I remembered was Gavin’s firm grip. His eyes, fierce with determination, right before I plunged beneath the frigid waves. I could still feel it, that helpless slide of our fingers separating. The magic was stronger than both of us.
Fear had clamped down on my chest. Then came the vortex, swirling and tumbling me like sea glass.
The ruins of my family home had flashed in my mind.
My friend’s faces, Gavin’s, were the last to fade.
And in that final flash, his eyes still held mine.
Not the horror-rimmed look from the ship, but the one from the alcove.
The one that had made me hope for something more.
But those hopes were dashed, and then the whirling current stole the breath from my lungs, and I inhaled the promise of salty death. Darkness filled my mouth, my throat, spilling into my veins. A pain so intense, I begged for peace.
Except when it came, I didn’t die.
You came home.
The siren-like voice curled through my mind, making my heart race as I searched for the source.
But I was alone.
Had my friends survived? I had to believe they were still on the ship. That the storm had passed, sparing them. Anything else was too hard to accept.
I pressed my palm to the slippery cushion beneath my body. The bedding was made of seaweed.
Where was I?
Bars formed from pearlescent coral stretched from floor to ceiling at one end of the cramped chamber. The other walls were made of black, claustrophobic rock, lit by faint shafts of light. A corroded metal bowl lay partially buried in the sand near a shale slab that created a small table.
It was too quiet, as if I hadn't fallen into the sea, but into that endless void beneath the rope bridge. Into a dark pit of nothing.
Unease slithered through my body. The sparse furnishings. The thick bars. I answered my own question.
This was a cell.
I winced, my muscles spasming as I pushed myself up on my elbows and braced my palms against the padded seaweed. But the movement felt unnatural. Wrong.
My eyes shot wide. The confusion clouding my senses evaporated, and with a jolt, I scuttled backward until my back hit the rock.
No. Nope! This is not happening.
I couldn’t look away as I open-mouth stared at where my legs should have been. In their place, shimmering scales tapered into an almost translucent fin. I blinked once. Twice. My mind battled to rewrite what I was seeing.
The tail— no, my tail —swished, curling toward me like I’d bent my knees.
My stomach lurched, and I clapped a hand over my mouth.
I was going to be sick. Bile coated my throat, and my vision blurred again.
I squeezed my eyes shut, but I could still see my fin as if it had been burned behind my eyelids.
How is this possible?
My heartbeat kicked up another notch as I braved a second glance and let my trembling fingers explore the silken scales that started near my hips. The smooth surface felt foreign, but undeniably real.
A wave of dizziness passed through me. My hand glided up my bare abdomen to the edges of a green kelp wrap that covered my chest. The strands of my hair flowed eerily around my neck and shoulders, swaying with the movement of water.
A wide swath floated in front of my face, and I grabbed the saturated locks to pull them closer.
The length had turned a rich purple hue. Similar to the amethyst crystals in the hair comb. It was as if the magic inside had leached into the strands and stained them, leaving its cryptic mark. The rest of my hair was still a dark shade of brown.
I looked for the comb, but it was gone. And I was glad to be rid of it.
Look what it had done to me! I was afraid that if I saw it now, I’d rip it apart, strip the pearls, and grind the crystals against the rock.
I needed to destroy it. Even if it was the only thing that could change me back.
I wished I’d never laid eyes on it, never listened to its siren charm.
Magic was a terrifying thing. And I wanted to scream into the void because there was an irony to my fate.
Most people believed mermaids were a myth.
But I knew they were real. I’d spotted one once, below the cliffs outside my family home.
When I told my father on our daily walk, he drew pictures in the sand of a beautiful underwater kingdom.
A realm of sand and salt, with a castle carved from stone with glittering coral spires.
He said it was the land of our ancestors, and I giggled, imagining myself among them. Young girls often dream of becoming a princess, wearing lavish gowns, and finding a handsome prince.
I dreamed of becoming a mermaid.
My father had laughed softly, ruffling my hair, and told me the origins of my name.
Marin—of the sea.
But it was just a name. A tribute to the rolling waves outside our beloved manor and the fairylike story of its history. Mermaids might be real, but I wasn't one of them. I didn’t belong here.
This wasn’t my dream. It was my nightmare. And I needed to go home.
“Is anyone there?”
I tumbled off the kelp bed, my fin propelling me unsteadily toward the coral bars.
I landed in the sand with a thud, my upper body sinking into the silt.
A hysterical laugh burned in my throat. I could barely move, the only mermaid who couldn't swim.
I might as well have been a crab burrowing into the gritty floor.
Terror swelled beneath the humor. I wasn't just trapped. I was helpless.
I'd clawed my way out of the gutter, over mountaintops, and through ruins, vowing never to fall that far again. And here I was. At the bottom. In the muck. Bars in front of me, instead of freedom.
Using my arms, I dragged myself forward and wrapped my hands around the rough coral, anchoring myself in place. I pressed my face into the narrow gap.
“Let me out of here!”
No one answered.
Across from me was another empty cell. And more lined the dark passage. A silent wing of rock and coral, echoing my pain. Where were the guards? The other prisoners? What had I done to earn solitary confinement?
The only sounds were the slow, deep groan from somewhere beyond the bars, the faint clink of metal, and the subtle shifting of sand beneath my tail.
I shouted again. Over and over. Until my voice turned hoarse, and the shadows began to shift. The glowing anemones moved across the ceiling in a crude passage of time.
A wretched ache twisted in my stomach. I slumped into the sand. My friends were gone, and I’d never escape—left to rot in cold, wet silence.
But as the day stretched, the ache also sharpened into hunger.
I lifted my head when I heard the sand shift, and a lone figure slowly slithered in front of the bars .
“Your bowl.”
The voice was low and garbled. I glimpsed the guard's features between a mass of silver hair swirling around his craggy face—pale eyes, a hooked nose, and firm, grim lips.
He had inky scales and blended in with the shadows as if he lived inside them.
He could have been there the whole time, and I never would've known.
There was no softness. No mercy in his stormy gaze.
His skin was smooth but stretched tight over rigid muscle. Arms like bands of steel. A guard's belt hung low on his waist, weighed down with strange tools, coral keys, and a faintly glowing disc no bigger than Gavin's trick coin.
When I didn’t move fast enough, he removed a metal rod from a sleeve in his belt and raked it unevenly across the bars.
The muffled clang echoed through my cell and jarred my bones. I crawled backward on my hands, heart hammering, and searched for the corroded dish I’d seen covered in sand.
I held it out; the bowl shaking as a ladle slipped through the coral and dumped a heavy plant-like sludge that settled into the bottom. I swallowed thickly as a rotten stench reached my senses.
My hunger vanished.
“Why am I here?” I asked, extending my hand through the bars.
The guard branded me with his metal rod. It released a shockwave that blistered my knuckles, pain radiating to my wrist. It sizzled through my body like a fuse, blinding me in sick, searing agony.
When my vision cleared, he had already moved on; the sand shifting behind his fin.
“Wait! Come back. Answer me! ”
The guard vanished down the dark tunnel, and I sank to the ground with a trembling sob.
I pressed my injured knuckles to my mouth.
I felt woozy and weak. Dread clawed me from the inside out, while isolation wanted in, threatening to sink into my bones and become a cruel mirage of a permanent companion.
I needed a distraction, something to dull the pain and the panic and keep me from spiraling further. Picking at the sludge, I tried desperately to bottle my despair by guessing what Cass would've named the strange seaweed.
I heard her voice in my mind, nose wrinkled as she gagged. Gourmet sea slime, salted with silt and scum. A mermaid convict's favorite treat.
A descriptive enough name for whatever sloshed at the bottom of my bowl. I’d tell her about it when I saw her again; how, when I pressed my thumb into the slippery goo, bubbles surfaced, and I was pretty sure it groaned.
Though that might have been me.
My stomach rolled, and I cast aside the seaweed to explore my cell. Reid would want all the details. Dimensions. Colors—or the lack of them. The temperature—freezing. He’d try to sketch it while I relayed every inch from memory, making it the first entry in his brand-new notebook.
I got to work, awkwardly, still unable to properly use my tail.
My motions were jerky and anything but fluid, but I examined the kelp bedding and ran my hands underneath it.
Then I moved to the shale table, taking measurements in my mind.
I dug into the sand as if searching for buried treasure and found a chipped shell with a sharp edge.
I scanned the walls, my gaze stalling on marks etched into the rock.
My throat tightened. The dread was back with a force that made the water press in until I choked on the weight of it.
The scratches were thin, straight lines. One after another, in neat rows. Someone else had drawn them. Counting the days. There were so many. I closed my fist around the broken shell until the edge pricked my palm.
Had they been set free or had they died here?
I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer.
Forcing the jagged point against the rock, I carved a similar mark.
Day one.
I stared at it, numb for the first time. Then, with a shake of my head, I buried the shell back into the sand for safekeeping.
Exhaustion tempered some of my fear, and muscles I’d never used before ached. Tears heated behind my eyelids. Could mermaids even cry? I curled up on the pallet of seaweed and gazed at the ceiling, counting the organic starlight while imagining I was camped under a vast sky.
I hadn't slept alone in a year. The nights were filled with the sound of crickets, the snap of a campfire, and Gavin's bedroll next to mine. His grin in the dark. The warmth of his body. Always within reach.
But not tonight. Maybe never again. And it wasn't long before even the anemones had extinguished their light, leaving me cold and alone in my empty cell.
I didn't sleep.
I mourned.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11 (Reading here)
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
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- Page 39
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- Page 49
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- Page 63
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- Page 67