Page 54 of Blood of the Sirens
Come on. You’ll die if you don’t. Come ON!
Nothing happened. My legs stayed legs, wrapped in Calypso’s tentacles. My neck didn’t sprout gills, and I fought the urge to open my mouth and breathe in water.
Down, down, down we went, until the darkness swallowed us and I was half-convinced I was already dead. Only the persistent burning in my lungs told me otherwise. It was hopeless. Even if Calypso let me go this instant, I’d never make it back up to the surface.
Killed by a mythical sea creature … who’d have thunk it?I dimly wondered. I just hoped my family didn’t end up selling the house because of me…
WHAM.
Something slammed into Calypso and me, and the tentacles holding me let go abruptly. I didn’t swim; I couldn’t even use my arms and legs. It took all of my focus and concentration not to inhale water, to keep my lungs dry—
Merrick’s arms grabbed me, and his lips descended harshly down onto mine.
Now doesn’t seem like the time, unless he’s saying goodbye,I vaguely thought.
A blast of pure oxygen went down my throat, and I jerked in surprise. Merrick grabbed me and sealed his lips to mine again, holding me tightly.
He was breathing for me!
I held him to me as my literal lifeline, internally promising to reward him thoroughly for this later. His tail kicked beneath us, and we shot toward the surface. His chest heaved with effort as he tried to suck oxygen through his gillsas fast as possible to give to me, and also keep himself moving.
Then he was ripped away from me, disappearing down into the inky darkness.
No. NO!
The darkness was absolute. I didn’t know which way was up or down. I had to help Merrick! I needed to find him! I’d look for him even if it meant using my last morsels of air.
Like a switch being flipped, I felt rather than saw the changes. Instead of two legs jerking out into the black depths, I suddenly only had one long, powerful muscle. I could suddenly breatheas my neck itched, gills opening down my neck and sucking in water. Merrick’s scent suddenly trailed out in front of me, as obvious and easy to follow as a blood trail through clear water.
I shot out toward his scent blindly, pushing myself as hard as I could.
Merrick’s scent led down into the darkness, then into the mouth of a cave. There was another scent around him—a scent similar to his, but with a cloying, sick sweetness that made me nauseated. The sea witch’s scent was there as well, smelling like heavy perfume dumped on a bed of kelp.
Bleh.
I dove into the cave, and then it rose sharply up, up, up. Light filtered back into the water, and in surprise, I broke through the surface. I blinked in the dim bioluminescence light, keeping my neck below the water so I didn’t automatically switch to lung breathing just yet.
Merrick rammed into my side, wrapping his arms around me and tugging us away from the sea witch and the male mer by her side. She sat like a queen propped up on a throne of carved rock and coral that jutted harshly out of the water. Thedark mer threaded water underneath her, glaring at us with black, glittering eyes.
I hadn’t seen a mer with eyes like that until now.
He looked like he could have been from Merrick’s clan … but not. The edges of his scales and fins weren’t gilded like Merrick’s, but tinged with black that almost made it look like the scales were rotting off. He had large bald patches here and there on his tail, showing scaly, pink flesh underneath. Dark, black hair fell to his waist in dreads like Merrick’s. His face was pale and gaunt.
And the tentacles.
They shot out awkwardly from the waist of his tail, small but muscled. There were four, and they hovered around his back and waist, like little snakes waiting to strike.
“There you are, dear!” Calypso trilled as if she hadn’t just tried to murder me. “My apologies for all of that. Caspian doesn’t get out much, let alone scent a siren in the water for the first time in a millennium. No harm done.”
Merrick let out a ragged breath at hearing that, and I didn’t blame him. No harm done … Was that twice now I’d almost died in twenty-four hours? Not to mention, the sea witch insinuated that this odd mer in front of us was a thousand years old?
I blinked.That’s what he looked likea zombie mer with tentacles. Did Merrick even know what a zombie was? Probably not.
Great, now I was trying to stop giggling at the thought of zombie mers.
“You tried to kill Jesse,” Merrick snarled at her, baring his fangs. Ever since I’d changed, he’d gone totally over-the-top feral on me.
I liked it.
