Page 47 of Surfaces
The shark shifter squeezed my hand in solidarity and for some reason, the song inside of me surged forth.
My free hand unfurled to the right instinctively as the voice inside rushed up through my chest and made my ribs start to vibrate with her song.
A low note echoed inside of my head as my fingertips shot a hundred balls of ice out into the water, where they floated in a straight line, the size of dinner plates.
I swallowed hard, in shock as the frozen spheres slowly began to rise in place.
I didn’t even mean to do that.
But Watkins capitalized on the moment, seizing the opportunity. In a loud, fierce voice he yelled and pointed at my glittering creations. “Citizens, grab your weapons! Attack!”
An enthusiastic howl went up through the crowd and I stared down in awe.
They were thrilled to be invited to participate.
To them, this was fun.
It was silly.
It was a game.
Sea men of all shapes and sizes zoomed upward through the current in a flurry of bubbles, plucking the ice from the water. They hurled their frosted globes at the inverted ship, pummeling the side boards. Cracks and holes formed in the ship. The sirens kept playing their part, some panicking and running about on deck ridiculously, grabbing at their hair and screeching.
One yelled, “We need to lose weight or we’ll sink!” And then he chucked a fellow siren off the side of the ship, where the man proceeded to flip and spin in the water as he died in a very agonizingly theatrical way.
The mermen tugging the ship got into the game, tilting it from side to side.
Meanwhile, some of the other sirens on board tried to haul the net of mer children in faster. “Get ‘em in! Then we’ll plug that hole.”
Watkins tugged at my hand, and chuckled. Then he swam up a few yards, dragging me with him as I tried to process what was happening.
“More ice, Majesty,” Watkins shouted, with all the fierceness of an army commander.
I lifted my hand, letting the song inside of me shake my bones, and another row of ice balls shot out, spinning through the water in a neat even row. The citizens of Navagio were into the game now, hurling insults as they hurled the balls of ice.
“You filthy sand-walking fools!”
“You stupid scallywags!”
“Your mom wouldn’t know a barnacle from her butthole!”
While some mermen from the crowd pummeled the ship with the ice, another group formed a “rescue” team, swimming at the ship from behind, grabbing one mer child at a time and passing them down the row of rescuers to safety.
One of the children ruined the illusion of the battle when she yelled, “Daddy!” and planted a big kiss on her father’s cheek.
But that just caused a chuckle to ripple through the crowd as her father rumpled her hair and then handed her off, continuing on with his role. He yelled, “We’ve almost got them all! Those sky breathers won’t know what hit them!”
It wasn’t long before all the children had been freed.
Then mermen swarmed the ship, all of them singing.
One of the siren men on board clasped his hands and batted his eyelashes before saying, “Oh, I surrender. With a voice like that you can do whatever you want to me!”
The audience chuckled as the rest followed suit, each siren trying to top the other’s surrender with something more outlandish until they were all on their knees.
Watkins again took up his role as a faux general and shouted, “Victory is ours! Navagio you did it!!!!!”
The roar from the crowd was deafening as a storm.
