Page 53 of Blood of the Sirens
And I was still pissed he’d tried to trap me in a cave.
And I was a mermaid. A siren born.
The word itself caused a shiver to run up my spine in a way ‘mermaid’ certainly didn’t. I was a descendant of … sirens, I supposed. I could almost wrap my head around that.
I was having more trouble with the whole ‘my legs could turninto a tail’ thing.
As Calypso instructed Merrick to grab onto the massive whale in front of us, I tried to see if I could do it again, scrunching my eyes closed.
Tail. Gills. Webbing between my fingers.
“Jesse?”
I blinked at Merrick, who was looking at me with his head tilted to the side. He held out a hand to help me further up onto the back of the whale. My pathetically human legs remained so, and a quick slack on the side of my neck revealed nothing but smooth skin.
Whatever I had been thinking, it hadn’t worked.
“We must hurry. The others will not be stunned for long, and they will hunt for you. We must be long gone by then, leaving no scent behind,” he urged.
I nudged him with my elbow as the whale gave a mighty kick of his tail and propelled us forward along the surface. We were out in the open ocean, with nothing to see for miles around. At least the strange octopus woman seemed to know where she was going. And the whale.
The sight of all of that open water tightened my chest. How far away were we from shore? Javi was probably blowing up my phone. If he hadn’t already figured out it was still back on Mike’s boat in the employee locker.
Oh fuck—what if he’d called the police?
I must have gone white because Merrick wrapped an arm around my waist and hauled me into his chest like I was half my size. We were both on our stomachs. His long, golden-flecked tail stretched out behind him and went down the whale’s back.
“I can’t stay out here, Merrick. I have to go back home. The police are probably looking for me. If I leave the house empty for too long, they’ll call my family and then … and then—”
They’d find out I was kicked out of the program. Itwould just draw attention to me when I couldn’t really explain who Merrick was or where he came from.
No. I’d have to figure something else out.
“Jesse! You are breathing too fast! Sit down!”
But I couldn’t calm down. Terrible thoughts raced around and around in my mind, and didn’t show any signs of slowing down. Fingers dug into my hair and grabbed my face, shoving it into the hard planes of a chest. Merrick’s scent of the sun and the sea filled my nostrils: salt, driftwood, and peace.
Incredibly, my breaths slowed. My mind calmed. Just in time for Calypso to undulate toward me on those tentacles of hers, a wicked gleam in her eye. My muscles tensed and Merrick growled at her, to which she just laughed.
Then I realized the whale was diving.
“Merrick!”
“I suggest you think back to the desire you had to be with your mer earlier, because air is hard to come by where I live.”
In the stories, the sea witch was evil. This one seems helpful so far.
But something just still seemed off. Had Merrick and his clan known about her? If not, why? I had too many questions, and no answers. And fucking Calypso? Like the one from the Greek stories?
No way.
Four tentacles shot out and wrapped around my arms and legs, pinning me down to the whale. Merrick lunged forward, grabbing the dagger he had in his pack and slamming it down on a tentacle. Calypso hissed, but two more tentacles shot out and knocked him off the whale, while another replaced the injured one to hold me down.
“MERRI—”
Another tentacle wrapped around my mouth, slimy and cold.
The whale descended, leaving Merrick behind, floating unconscious on the surface. I thrashed and writhed before realizing I was wasting what air I still had. I went still and willed my body to change.
