Swans Landing #1 - Surfacing (22 page)

But Sailor stomped toward the hall. She spun around, glaring back at us. “You can love her more than you do me all you want, but there is no way I’m sharing what I have left of my mother with her, too.”

We heard the slam of Sailor’s bedroom door a moment later.

Miss Gale shook her head. “I’m sorry, sugar,” she said. “Sailor gets a little emotional sometimes.”

I smiled at her. “It’s okay.”

Miss Gale groaned as she stood. “I’d better go talk to her.”

Lake stood. “We should probably go and leave you two alone.”

Miss Gale shook her head. “No, stay. I insist. I’ll be right back.”

She disappeared down the hall, leaving Lake and me in awkward silence. The fire crackled and popped and Lake turned back to it, using the poker to move the firewood around again.

My gaze scanned the room, studying the mermaid prints on the walls and the crystal prisms hanging from the skylights overhead. The night sky was dark, but the firelight glinted in the crystals and cast dazzling rainbows around the ceiling.

“You can help me with the crabbing,” Lake said. “If you want. I could teach you what to do.”

I picked at the chipped emerald green polish on my fingernails. “Okay,” I said after a long time. Learning how to catch crabs wasn’t high on my priority list, but it would be a chance to be out on the water during this time that I was still stuck in Swans Landing.

It might be helpful anyway, to know how to catch some food once I was out there in the open water after I managed to convince Josh to leave with me.

Miss Gale returned, attempting to smile even though it didn’t reach all the way to her eyes. “She needs some time to cool off. It’ll be all right.”

“You sure?” Lake asked. “It’s getting late. We could go and leave you two to talk about things.”

“No, sir,” Miss Gale said. “I invited you over for dinner and you can’t leave without some entertainment.”

“Entertainment?” I asked, raising one eyebrow.

Miss Gale opened a closet and retrieved a gleaming fiddle and bow. “Entertainment,” she repeated. “You like folk music, sugar?”

“Um...” Honestly, I wasn’t sure that I’d ever heard folk music before in my life.

But Miss Gale didn’t look concerned as she adjusted the strings on her fiddle. “Don’t worry about it. This is finfolk music, something that the folk musicians only wish they could play.” She winked at me as she lifted the instrument to her shoulder.

The music that filled the room was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. It sounded like the ocean and the wind turned into a soothing, dancing melody. If I closed my eyes, I could believe I was swimming, diving deep underwater and breathing in the sweet salty ocean.

Lake smiled as he listened. He leaned against the wall, his ankles crossed and his gaze was unfocused. I wondered what Miss Gale’s song made him think of. Fishing out on the water? Or maybe my mom standing on the beach?

When the song ended, Miss Gale beamed at my applause.

“Do you ever play out at the Variety Store?” I asked, remembering the group of musicians seated around the fire the previous Friday night.

Miss Gale’s smiled faltered slightly. “No, sugar. I’m afraid I only play here in my own house.”

“Why?” I asked. “You’re great.”

“Thank you,” she said. “But the Friday night folk music is a human tradition. They don’t like us joining in.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it quickly. I almost said that they allowed Josh to play with them without any objections, but then, that was different. No one knew that Josh was finfolk.

“What song was that?” I asked instead.

“It’s the music of the ocean,” Miss Gale said. “The water has a song, and each ocean has its own song. That was the Atlantic’s song, the instrumental equivalent of what we sing on Song Night.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“It’s a song every finfolk knows by heart,” Lake spoke up. “It’s ingrained into our souls. It’s what calls us back to the water.”

Miss Gale lifted her fiddle again. “I know the other ocean’s songs too. Sit back and enjoy the entertainment.”

When Miss Gale finally put her fiddle away, I slipped off to use the restroom before we headed home. As I washed my hands, I thought I heard a soft murmur over the water. I turned off the tap, listening closely.

A low hum drifted toward me. I opened the door and stepped into the hall, trying to figure out where the sound came from. It sounded like the song Miss Gale had hummed at the Variety Store, only much more mournful.

I tiptoed down the hall to the last door on the right, which was open just a crack. Light flooded through the narrow slit into the hall and I peeked inside, holding my breath to keep from being noticed.

Sailor sat on her bed, the photo album open in her lap, but her face was turned upward. Her eyes were closed and tears trickled down her cheeks.

As she sang, the air around me began to shimmer and I breathed deep, inhaling the scent of lilacs and vanilla. My mom’s laughter echoed in my ears.

It’s not real,
I reminded myself, trying to hold onto reality.

But I desperately wanted it to be real. I fought against the urge to reach forward into the shimmering air, telling myself again that my mother would not be there no matter how hard I searched for her.

Sailor swayed on her bed and her song faltered, her voice cracking as a sob bubbled out of her throat. The magic shattered and the shimmers faded into nothing in my eyes.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I closed my eyes, enjoying the feel of the wind rushing through my hair and the spray of the water caressing my skin. Under me, Lake’s boat rumbled through the water while the sun began its climb into the purple morning sky and the steady flash of the lighthouse swept toward us.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Dylan called to me over the sound of the motor.

I nodded and opened my eyes to stare into the pale orange sunrise. All around us was water and my body thrilled in being surrounded by it. I had not been too happy about getting up before the sun had risen, but the invigorating feel as the salt seeped deep into my lungs made up for it.

Sailor sat on the other side of the boat, glaring at me whenever Dylan looked my way. He sat close, despite the fact that I kept edging away from him. Every now and then, he would brush his hand against mine and give me a smile, like we shared a secret between the two of us.

I knew I needed to tell him about Josh. Kissing Dylan had been a mistake. I’d been too confused and upset to even think about what I was doing that night.

But I wouldn’t do it in front of Sailor. I’d save that for the first moment we got some privacy.

When we reached the blue buoys in the water, Lake cut the motor, let the anchor drop, and then the boat glided gently to a stop nearby. His boat was as ragged and decrepit as his Jeep, with rails covered in rust and paint that had long ago faded and peeled off. It was small, and we sat crowded together on the old wooden seats. Three big plastic tubs filled the rest of the boat, empty for now. The boat was Lake’s pride and joy, judging from the affectionate way he had patted it when he first showed it to me that morning.

Apparently, I needed lessons on how to be finfolk. At least, that was the excuse Dylan had given me when he’d woken me up an hour ago. I suspected that maybe it was really his ploy to get me to spend some time with Lake. Why Sailor had come along, I didn’t know, except that maybe being tormented was part of being finfolk too. We were out here to swim and gather Lake’s crab pots before the three of us had to go to school.

“Ready to swim?” Lake asked. We had not spoken to each other since our talk the day before. I didn’t know if his sending Dylan in to wake me that morning was an act of giving me space or cowardice.

Sailor peeled off her jacket and pants, revealing a bikini underneath. She stripped down bare on her bottom half, obviously not shy at all in the presence of onlookers. Lake, thankfully, jumped into the water first before removing his pants and tossing them back onto the boat. I wasn’t exactly a prude, but I would need to be eased into this part of finfolk life gradually.

“Can you control when you change?” I asked, watching Sailor dive into the water.

“Somewhat, once you get the hang of it,” Dylan told me. “You can never fully control it, you will always change once you’re submerged in saltwater, but you can learn how to delay the change for a few minutes to allow yourself time to take off your clothes.”

I shivered when I looked over the side of the boat, remembering the excruciating pain I’d felt when my body had metamorphosed into finfolk form. The thought of going through that again wasn’t very appealing.

Dylan had taken his jacket and shirt off. His hands were on the waistband of his pants when I sat back down, gripping the railing tight in one fist. “What’s wrong?” he asked, moving to sit next to me.

My teeth chattered, though not entirely from the cold breeze. He slipped his arm around me, pulling me into his side. His embrace felt so comforting, like I could be protected from anything bad as long as he was around.

“I’m scared,” I admitted. “Yesterday, it hurt so much I thought I was going to drown.”

He smiled and ran a hand over my hair. “You can’t drown, Mara. It’s impossible for finfolk to drown.”

I smiled sheepishly. “I know, but I’m only half-finfolk.”

“It will take some time before the change stops hurting,” Dylan said. “You’re at a disadvantage, changing for the first time at such an older age.”

I wondered how bad it had hurt for Josh the first time he realized he could change. Who had been there to help him through it? I was certain that Dylan didn’t know the truth about Josh and I wasn’t about to reveal a secret that wasn’t mine to tell.

“It gets easier the more you do it,” Dylan told me. He squeezed me to him. “And I will be right there if you need me. I’ll help make it easier, I promise.”

I smiled at him. I hoped that he wouldn’t be too hurt when I told him the truth. The last thing I wanted was for him to hate me.

Changing hurt only slightly less than it had been the day before. Dylan held me tight under the water as my body shifted and remolded itself. I bit my lip so hard that I was certain it would be bloody and swollen.

Halfway through the change, I became aware of a soft melody in the water. At first I could barely hear it over the pain flooding through me, but then it grew louder and stronger. My mind grabbed onto the sound, desperate for anything to distract me from what was happening to my body. The song flowed through me, easing the tension in my legs, allowing my scales to slip through my skin with only the slightest tinge of pain instead of the shredding I’d felt yesterday.

I emerged from the water, the change complete, just as the three finfolk around me reached the end of their song. I blinked at the smiling faces of Lake and Dylan, and the scowling one of Sailor.

“What happened?” I asked.

“We gave you the song to help you,” Lake told me.

“I thought the song was meant to call lost finfolk home,” I said as I flexed my tail, marveling at the way it flickered through the water.

“It is,” Lake said. “But it didn’t start out that way. The song is about rebirth. Newly born finfolk are introduced to the water on Song Night and it helps them shift form easier. It’s something finfolk have done since the beginning of time, a way of ushering us from one life into the other.”

“Thanks,” I said, grateful for anything that would make the change easier.

Sailor rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t deny that she had sung for me. Maybe she did it only to please Dylan, but she had had a part in ushering in my change and making it more endurable.

Learning to be finfolk meant a lot of practice swimming and diving deep into the water. We retrieved Lake’s crab pots hooked to the ropes dangling from the buoys and dropped them back into the boat to give me a chance to build up my confidence in swimming with a tail.

It was amazing how different the four of us looked from each other. It seemed as if every finfolk had their own unique color. My scales were gold, as were Lake’s, but his were more of a yellow-gold while mine were dark, more of a brown-gold. Dylan’s were iridescent blue-green. Josh’s scales had been a gleaming silver.

But Sailor’s scales were breathtaking. When she leaped into the air in an expert flip and twist, the hazy morning sunlight reflected off red scales so vibrant the color looked like something only possible in a painting. The light illuminated small silver scales mixed in among the red, making her look as if she were fire and ice embodied in one being.

We worked in silence for a long time, diving down and then back up, pulling the trapped crabs along with us.

“How much time do the finfolk here usually spend in the water?” I asked Dylan after a while.

“Not much,” Dylan answered. “During the summer, we only go into the water on the first night of the new moon each month, to sing. There are too many tourists around, and so the darkest night is the only time we can swim unseen. During the off-season, sometimes we might swim a little more, but most of us stick to land.”