Midnight Pearls (9 page)

He began to choke and at the same time he could feel his tail split completely. He gave a mighty kick first with one half and then the other—
no, my legs!
he corrected himself—and his head broke the surface of the water.

He gasped, sucking in the air, drinking it as he had once breathed the water. He treaded the water for a moment, taking deep breaths and coughing up water. His new legs suddenly seemed heavier. He reached down to touch them with his hand. There seemed to be some covering over them. The Witch had at least given him some clothing.

At last his breathing evened out. He needed to make it to the shore, though he wasn’t sure how much longer he could swim. Without his eyes he would have to find another way to locate the land. If he set off in the wrong direction he wouldn’t discover the mistake in time to save himself.

He heard the sound of the waves crashing on the beach. On his body he still felt the play of the water. The gentle waves moved in one direction while the undertow pulled in the opposite direction. He turned and began to swim with the tide.

She walked down the aisle, staring at her groom as he stood beside Father Gregory. He smiled at her, and the gesture sent shivers up her spine. She prayed that God would have mercy and strike her dead before she reached them.

“James!” she shouted as loud as she could.

When there was no reply, Pearl turned and tried to run down the beach. Her wet skirt slowed her, and she fell to her knees several times. She kept struggling back up, though. She reached the end of the beach and turned around, running back the other way. Nothing.

She headed back up the beach more slowly, inspecting the sand for footprints as well. Maybe, just maybe, he had reached the beach first and went to get help. She clung to the slender thread of hope, though in her heart she didn’t believe it. He would not have left with her still in the water.

The only sets of footprints she found farther up the beach were hers and the ones they had left earlier when they’d arrived. She turned back and scanned the length of the beach once more.

There!
There was something dark on the sand. She picked up her skirt and ran, stumbling toward it. When she got closer she saw that it was James, lying in a crumpled heap on the sand.

She fell on her knees beside him, sobbing. Slowly, he straightened up and looked at her wide-eyed.

“You saved me.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head.

“You did, I saw you,” he insisted.

Confusion filled her. “James, I—I thought I’d lost you.”

“My foot got tangled in the rope, and I hit my head on the bow of the boat. I woke up here with you leaning over me. You saved me.”

“I didn’t. I just found you, here on the beach. Maybe the tide carried you in.”

He shook his head groggily “No, it was you. You bent down and kissed me and then … you went away.”

“James, I didn’t save you and I didn’t kiss you.”

“Well, somebody did and she had your hair and your beautiful skin. So, if it wasn’t you, who was it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, rocking back on her heels and preparing to stand.

He grabbed her hand, and his voice dropped low. It was commanding, insistent. “I shall marry the girl who saved me.”

She stared into his eyes for a long moment with her heart in her throat. He thought it was she.
And what of it?
He had been dreaming; no one else had been on the beach but her. The tide must have washed him up.

But what if it didn’t?
her mind demanded. Then James would be marrying the wrong woman.
And who has more right to marry him than me?
She flushed at her own arrogance.

Tears fell from her eyes and landed on his cheek. “Then you shall not be marrying me.”

Pearl sat on her bed with her knees tucked under her chin. For all the years they had known each other, she and James had never parted on uneasy terms. He refused to believe that she hadn’t saved him from drowning. It would have been so easy to lie to him, but she had never lied to him about anything before and she wasn’t about to start. She owed him the truth even if he wouldn’t accept it.

When she had come home her parents had taken one look at her bedraggled form and wisely refrained from asking questions. Despite her anxiety over James, she was also more than a little amazed that she had survived her swim in the ocean.

“The voice was wrong,” she whispered. And if the voice was wrong about that, it could be wrong about other things. Maybe she was somebody, somebody special.

Long after the cottage had grown dark and quiet, she finally lay down and closed her eyes. She fell asleep, and the dreams came.

The boat was behind her, and she was swimming for the shore. She was afraid she wouldn’t make it.
If you go in the water, you will die,
the voice in her head whispered. But the rush of water against her skin felt good. She glanced back but did not see James. Behind her, though just beneath the surface of the water, there was a shadow. The shadow’s eyes stared at her. They always stare.

The eyes beckoned her down into the depths, below the surface, into the darkness. She followed, swimming, laughing. She felt so alive.

The shadow disappeared, and the world grew dark as night. The water was cold. It hurt her skin, it was so cold. It wasn’t as cold as the laughter, though—that seemed to come from everywhere. The darkness threatened to overwhelm her, and she whimpered.

There was a light shining in the darkness, and she was drawn to it. In the light there were pearls, beautiful and large. She reached out and took one of them and hid it away.

Then came the voice—the hard one, not the soft one. It floated on the water. “Never return…. If you go into the ocean you will die along with everyone you love…. You are nothing, nobody…. No one will miss you….” There were other words, but she couldn’t hear them.

“I won’t die,” she yelled. “I won’t die.”

She woke up whispering, “I won’t die.”

The nightmares faded back into the darkness, and she was left alone in the cold light of morning. She had something, though, the barest shred of a memory, but it was more than she had ever had and she clung to it as a child clings to her mother’s skirt.

The night that Finneas had pulled her out of the ocean, the water had been cold.

The day passed in a blur of misery. She spent most of the afternoon cleaning and preserving fish that her father had caught that morning. At dinner everyone ate in a silence that she was grateful for. Afterward she excused herself and headed for the beach.

She both desired and dreaded to see James and wasn’t at all sure which emotion was stronger. It was not his day to be at the beach, but a part of her hoped he would be there, waiting for her.

As she crested the hill she had to shield her eyes against the rays of the sun as it approached the horizon. Someone was sitting on the beach facing the ocean.
Sitting in our spot.
With the sun in her eyes she couldn’t tell who it was, but was sure it must be James.

She was within ten feet of the man before she realized that he was a stranger. Startled, she stopped. The man was naked from the waist up and was cradling his head in his hands. His shoulders were broad and well-muscled. His large hands looked powerful, whereas the long, slender fingers added an air of grace to them. His legs, clad in simple pants, seemed impossibly long and were stretched out on the sand. He had pale hair, nearly silver like hers. His skin was also deathly white with patches of red where the sun of the day had burned him.

Suddenly the man lifted his head, and she took a step back. He cocked his head as though listening, and sniffed the air as an animal would. “Adriana?” he asked softly.

“I’m sorry, sir, you are mistaken,” she informed him.

A smile burst over his face, and she jumped back as he scrambled to his feet like a newborn colt. “Adriana! It
is
you!”

“I’m sorry, sir, I do not know this Adriana of whom you speak. I am Pearl.”

“Pearl…,” he said slowly, as though he were tasting the word in his mouth.

His presence here on her beach and in such a state of undress unnerved her and she backed up, ready to flee. It was then that he finally looked at her.

She gasped and stopped in her tracks.
His eyes!
They were the dark eyes from her dreams. The eyes of the shadow that always stood behind James. “You, who are you?” she asked, feeling dazed.

“I am Kale, and I have been searching for you for a very long time.”

“Searching for Adriana, you mean.”

“Searching for
you
, no matter what name you are called by here.”

She felt dizzy, as though she were standing on the edge of a precipice. It was then that she noticed the eerie fixation of his eyes, their unblinking stare. “Your eyes?” she asked.

He raised his hand to them. “A recent development seems to have rendered me blind.”

“Then how did you know it was me?”

“Your scent, the sound of your voice, your spirit—all these things made you known to me.”

She backed up a bit, “You are frightening me, sir.”

“I guess I must be, at that. I am sorry, I’m a bit frightened myself.”

“Are you ill?”

“Not exactly, though it would be safe to say that I am not myself today.”

His comments were so cryptic that for a moment, she believed he might be insane. His state of undress did nothing to convince her otherwise. Still, she could not turn from him, from the owner of the eyes that she saw every night in her dreams.

“Why do you believe that I am this woman you are seeking?”

He sighed heavily, “I saw you yesterday and recognized you.”

“But your eyes…”

“I told you, the blindness is a recent complication,
very
recent.”

“Why did you not make yourself known to me yesterday?” she asked suspiciously.

“Believe me, I wanted to, but circumstances prevented it. Also, it seemed that you and the young man wished to be alone.”

She felt her blood run cold. He had seen her with James! She took a step back. Was he some enemy of James’s, or someone who wanted to hurt his reputation, or hers?

“You saw us?”

He nodded. “Is he all right?”

“Yes.” He had seen the accident, then. She looked again at his eyes. They were such a deep color. She had thought that they were black, but as she looked closer she saw that they were a dark shade of blue, the most intense eyes she had ever seen.
Except for the shadow.
Something from her dream suddenly came back to her. She was swimming away from the boat and she saw the shadow in the water beneath her, the eyes fixed upon her.

“You! You were in the water with me yesterday,” she accused.

He suddenly looked very agitated. “Yes, I was,” he admitted. “Did you see me?”

“Only your eyes,” she admitted.

He seemed to relax at that. “I followed you to make sure you made it safely to the land.”

She stared at his silver hair, and a sickening feeling twisted her stomach. “Was there someone else with you?” she asked in hushed tones.

He nodded. “My sister, Faye.”

“She saved James,” Pearl said more to herself than to him.

“That is true,” he affirmed.

She felt as though her world were crashing down around her. “Where is she now?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I think she went off in search of him this morning.”

Her legs gave way, and she sank slowly to a seat on the sand.
James is going to marry her!
She felt as though she couldn’t breathe, and within moments tears were coursing down her cheeks. Awkwardly he dropped back down to the sand. At last the wave passed and she glanced at Kale.

“You really care about him, don't you” he asked.

“It’s … complicated,” she said.

“Why is it complicate? Either you love him or not.”

“It’s just not that easy:”

“Why?”

“He’s my best friend and my prince,” she answered, not sure why she wanted to suddenly pour her heart out to this stranger.
He doesn’t feel like a strangers, though. There’s something so familiar about him, like I’ve known him all my life.
Warning bells were going off in her head. She shouldn’t be speaking with him, a strange man alone on the beach. And she definitely shouldn’t be telling him anything about her relationship with James.

“But you love him” he pressed, his voice wistful sounding.

She answered despite herself. “I don’t know. I think I have feelings for him. I
do
have feelings for him, I just don’t know if I love him.’

“Then you don’t,” he said confidently. “If you have to question whether you’re in love, then you’re not.”

She shuddered. “It would just be so easy to be in love with him. It would solve so many problems.” She sighed, frustrated. “But it would create so many more. He’s a prince and I am nothing.”

“That is a lie!”

Startled, she stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“You are not nothing, and anyone who said you are is
lying.”