Page 31 of Beneath the Surface

“Um, hey.” His last memory was… Jesus, had Nisha fucked him unconscious? He hadn’t thought that was possible.

“How do you feel?”

“Well…” Now that he was a little more with it, he noticed his head ached, and his stomach was sending messages it wasn’t exactly happy either.

He was slightly queasy, and a warm sensation spread from the bite on his shoulder, but it wasn’t too bad. Just annoying. And it tingled. And well… now that he was paying attention, he noticed his body tingled. His legs, arms, back, neck—everything tingled, and that made him restless.

“Kannon?”

“I, ah… I’m not feeling too hot. What’s going on with me?”

“I… I bit you fifteen years ago and started the process of changing you. From what we know, a merfolk bite must contain something—maybe bacteria—that’s toxic to humans. Whatever it is, it changes the human enough to adapt to our world. In other words, a human will develop gills.”

“Gills. As in… gills.”

“Yes. The transformation comes from a bite, not from sex. So, when a merman or maid bites a human, the saliva enters the human’s blood stream and… changes take place.”

“I… I… seriously?”

“Yes, seriously. But one bite isn’t enough. It takes two. After the second bite, the process takes a few hours to integrate fully into human cells.”

“I hate biology, just so you know. Really sucked at it.”

“I’ll review as many times as you need. So while this was happening, you passed out. Once awake, you may have a headache and even be nauseated.”

“Lovely.”

“I know. It isn’t fun. Now, you won’t show any external signs of any changes, and you won’t until you make a conscious effort to… change. I can get into the water and not change into my merman form, just as you can get into water and not open your gills.”

“You bit me again, didn’t you? Right there at the end.”

“Of course. I also feel I should apologize for what happened earlier with Cree. He was the one who attacked you in the water and at the bungalow.”

“Wait, wait… what? Cree? You… you just jumped from basically describing how you abused my DNA to what happened with that other merman? Are you for real? Well, please, go ahead, then. Seems you got a program to follow.”

“Um, I sense you mean something by that, but I’m unsure as towhatyou mean.”

Kannon growled, and Nisha paused, a bemused look on his face. “Anyway, Cree has carried a grudge against me for a long time, but that gave him no right to not only attack Brett, but you too.”

“Well, we can agree on that.”

Nisha took a deep breath and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry you were subjected to that. I can promise you Cree will never bother you again. Not if he knows what’s good for him.”

Is he kidding me? Kannon struggled until Nisha let him go. Amazed, he quickly made his way to the shallows where he could stand on his own two feet. He couldn’t believe what he heard.

“You… you… Let me get this straight.That’swhat you apologize for? Cree attacking me? Of all the things—and there’s a laundry list of them, let me tell you—that’swhat you focus on first? Seriously?”

He’d been pretty calm up until now, all things considered. But calm was quickly taking a backseat to anger.

“I… I’m confused.” Nisha scratched his head.

“I’ve spent the last fifteen years in that state, so please, join the crowd.”

“Should I not apologize for Cree attacking you because of something I did a long time ago? Or rather, I didn’t do. I refused to him the right to mate Brooke. Of course it didn’t much matter what I said. Brett was her mate, and she would’ve refused anyone else. Cree never understood that.”

Kannon threw his hands up in the air. “Seriously? No apology about when I was eighteen? When you popped up out of nowhere, dragged me under the water, and fucking bit me? Got nothing to say about the fact that you’re a merman? A creature who does not exist? Just going to ignore the fact that Brooke’s a mermaid and mated to Brett, who’s my best friend?”

“Well—”

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