Waking Storms (12 page)

Luce closed her eyes, water all around her like cool, rippling space, and felt the deep hum of the darkness. The sea had its own voice, even far in the depths where the crash of waves became no more than a web of echoes. She had to listen to that voice and not the clamor of that poor little larva’s suffering. Luce felt something pulling into her body, a fathomless tide of whispers, a smooth upwelling harmony. And then she felt it begin to rise, right through the center of her chest.

It didn’t even feel like she was singing. Instead the sea sang
through
her. Why had she wanted to fight the water before? It was a new music, different, older and deeper than any song that had poured from her before, and as Luce surrendered to it the sound began to spin like a hurricane. Notes rose and whipped through space, gliding up and down the scale.

Dimly Luce heard the scream rolling on through the water. It didn’t sound the same as before, though. Luce looked up, still caught in the trance of that astonishing music, and saw the red-haired larva’s tiny silhouette as it threw itself across a glowing stretch of water. If the larva was free, though, where was the scream coming from?

A bright cone shape stabbed down through the green-shining waves just ahead of Luce. She couldn’t make sense of it at first, but then she realized what it was: a whirlpool made of merged voice and water propelled by the song endlessly tearing from her throat.

Anais was caught in it, flung around in desperate circles, her hands grappling empty space as she struggled to escape. The scream was hers. A few silver fishes spun with her, too stunned even to fight.

Luce gasped in astonishment, letting out a final burst of music. Then everything went utterly quiet. Luce couldn’t tell where the music that had filled her had gone, but the sudden silence left a hollow ache in her chest. The whirlpool fell apart, its force scattered in random swirls. Anais splashed a few feet in confusion and then flopped into Samantha’s arms.

Singing that way had wrenched all the air from Luce’s chest. She needed to breathe. As she surfaced, the first thing she saw was Samantha crying wildly, clutching Anais and stroking her golden hair.

“Is she okay?” Luce felt disturbed by the thought that her singing might have injured another mermaid, even if that mermaid was Anais. She should at least help Samantha pull Anais back to their cave.

“Just get away!” Samantha gagged the words through her sobs. “Luce, just get away from us! No one here wants you! Go back to whatever hole...” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Samantha! You know I had to do that. She was torturing that larva; I
had
to make her stop.” Somehow Luce hoped the other mermaid would see reason. Even Samantha knew that the timahk protected larvae, after all. She knew how wrong it was to hurt them.

“Anais is our
queen,
Luce!” Samantha yelled it in hysterics. Anais looked like she’d fainted, but Luce wouldn’t have been surprised to find she was faking it. “She can do whatever she wants! What do you even know about
anything
we do? We got rid of you and Catarina, and now—”

“Now you just torture larvae for fun?” Luce snarled the words, but even so she expected Samantha to get defensive, to say that Anais had just been freaking out, and nothing like that had ever happened before.

“No one
cares
about larvae! Luce, no one cares!”

Luce opened her mouth to protest, but then Samantha yelled something that shocked her into silence. “Anais has killed like
four
of them!”

***

Luce watched in numb silence as Samantha swam off, towing Anais in one arm. The queen’s golden head rested on Samantha’s shoulder. It reminded Luce of another time, when she’d pulled Catarina along the surface, away from the frenzied tribe.

Anais had started
hilling
larvae? It was so sick that Luce had trouble believing it, even after what she’d just witnessed. She drifted under the waves with a strange, hopeless pain in her heart. What had her old friends become if they allowed something like that to happen? Did they know what was going on?

If things were really so bad, it seemed obvious that she had a responsibility to challenge Anais. She should take over as queen and put a stop to the horror. But then, it wasn’t clear that Dana would support her anymore, not now that she’d learned Luce’s secret. Maybe no one would. Luce knew that Anais would never give up power without a battle. Luce would need the help of as many mermaids as possible, and who would even want her to be queen? Especially, who would want her enough to
fight
for her?

And even if Dana kept quiet, even if no one ever discovered that Luce had broken the timahk, Luce would never be able to erase the shame of what she’d done from her own heart. She’d know she had disgraced herself and that she was unworthy to rule. Knowing the truth, how could she possibly find the strength to confront Anais and her followers?

Luce found herself at a complete loss. The problem seemed insoluble. She swam back and forth through water banded with pale autumn sunlight; she stopped at random beaches, drifted on again. She kept swimming, sad and distracted, even as the day began to fail and the water dimmed. Strokes of reddish sunset filtered through the waves and curved around her arms. Sometimes she sang quietly to herself, caressing the sea’s profound voice with her own.

Caressing another voice: a voice that was coarse and desperate-sounding, coming from somewhere above the surface. Luce stopped where she was even as a huge school of small sinuous fish sleeked around her so thickly that all she could see was the weaving silver of their bodies.
Dorian.
How dare he think he could trick her again? He wasn’t singing Luce’s song this time, but something else: a human pop song, probably.

She wasn’t going to have anything to do with him, Luce told herself. Then she swam a bit closer to the shore. He sounded so upset, she thought, so
unhappy.
She barely felt the water sliding open around her head.

“Luce! I was afraid you were going to be too mad to come back! Wait, I’ll meet you at the beach, okay?” She caught just one quick glimpse of him, one flash of gold between the trees, before he was running. It was typical, Luce thought, that he was too full of himself to even give her a chance to say she didn’t want to see him again. Still, she dipped under and swirled toward the spot he’d mentioned before, the one tucked behind a boulder protruding steeply from the waves. Maybe, just maybe, he had something important to say to her? Even swimming slowly she’d been much faster than he was, and she waited with a nervous irritation, her tail curled against the pebble seafloor and her arms wrapped tight around her chest. The sky was a glassy violet sparked by the burning pallor of the stars.

Dorian broke through the branches, sliding so quickly that he fell onto his rear, and yanked off his shoes. Then, to Luce’s confusion, he splashed out to her and threw himself onto his knees, not caring how cold the water was or that his pants were getting soaked. But he didn’t kiss her. Instead he wrapped her head in both hands and pulled her cheek against his. She was saturated with the warmth of his skin, the sweetness of his touch, and all he did was hold her. His breath came rough in her ear as if he were struggling not to cry.

“Oh my God, Luce! I didn’t do it! I almost did, he almost talked me into it, and then I knew I couldn’t!”

She felt a single tear glide down where their faces pressed together and impulsively slipped her arms around him. All her fury at him was abruptly gone, but nothing he was saying made any sense.

“Dorian?” His fingers slid through her wet hair. “I don’t actually know what you’re talking about.” He tipped his head back a little and looked into her eyes.

“They took me to Anchorage. That’s why I wasn’t here last night. I didn’t have any choice, but at least...” He saw the confusion on her face. “Anchorage—that’s this human city, farther south—”

“I know what Anchorage is!” Now it was Dorian’s turn to look confused. “What I don’t understand is the part about someone
taking
you there. Why?”

“How
can
you? I mean, how can you know about—all this human stuff?” He gave a short laugh, and Luce didn’t answer. His wide ochre eyes stared at her; he still seemed half frantic, though he was starting to calm down. “Do you know about the FBI, too? They took me. I had to sit through getting questioned for two days, and I just got back.”

“What would the FBI want with you?” Luce asked. But even as the question was leaving her mouth, she already understood. “They were asking you about”—she could barely make herself say it, but then avoiding the words wouldn’t cancel out the truth of what her tribe had done, what
she
had done—“about the ship you were on?”

Just as she’d feared, his eyes hardened. He let her go and shuffled the few feet back out of the water, then sat facing her with his chin on his knees. Luce hid her breasts with her arms again. It felt awkward, and for once she wished she had some human clothing.

“About the
Dear Melissa,
yeah. Are you ever going to explain why the hell you
did
that? And they showed me a map with all the ships you guys have been sinking, too. You’re all totally out of control. And I still didn’t tell them anything! Luce,
why?”

Luce wasn’t sure what the “why” applied to. Was he asking her to tell him why he hadn’t talked or why the mermaids destroyed ships? Both questions seemed like more than she could answer.

“I’m never going to hurt another human, Dorian. I really promise. At least, not unless they attack one of us first.”

“Maybe
you
won’t! Maybe. But your friends will, Luce! Like, can you promise me that the other mermaids won’t go around killing people? Because if you
can’t
—”

“I’m not even in the tribe anymore!” Luce felt desperate. “Dorian, I mean—Anais will even kill other
mermaids.
I just learned today, she’s been doing horrible things, and there’s no way I can stop her. So how am I supposed to promise that she won’t kill humans?”

“You said that name before.” Dorian thought for a second. He was breathing too hard from agitation. “So why shouldn’t I tell the FBI about this Anais if she’s the problem? Why shouldn’t I do whatever I can to stop them—your old tribe? I just didn’t want anything bad to happen to
you.
That was the only reason I kept my mouth shut, Luce! And even that might be because”—he looked at her with an awful, searching ache in his eyes—“because you did something to my mind. I don’t even know.”

Luce stared. “What do you think I did?”

“I don’t
know.”
Dorian suddenly seemed embarrassed. “They said something about—they said I’d been subjected to mind control. That was how the FBI guy put it. That guy Ben Ellison.” Luce looked down at the water swishing gently around her fins. It was a miserable thought, but maybe it made sense. After all, her song had forced dozens of humans to love her more than they’d ever loved anything in their lives. Even if Dorian was able to fight off her magic to some degree, still, maybe he only liked her because her singing had messed up his head. What other reason could he have?

After all, he seemed like someone who never would have noticed her when she was still human.

“I hope not! I mean, I really hope I didn’t do anything like that.” Her voice sounded pathetic even to her; she could hear the note of pain breaking through it. Luce began to wonder if she should just leave. Dorian was staring, his forehead creased with the effort to understand. “Dorian—I’ll go away, you don’t ever have to talk to me again—but if I did do something permanent to your mind it wasn’t on purpose!”

“How can you not
know?”

“I mean, you sing
back!
You’re the only person who knows how to fight off getting enchanted by us. But people who’ve heard us sing aren’t ever supposed to live, and I don’t know, maybe that did something bad to you.”

“But you
hope
it didn’t? You hope you didn’t, like, do something to make me have—” Dorian broke off abruptly, raking his fingers through the stones. Even as he stared down Luce could see the struggle on his face. She watched him brace himself and gaze up at her again. “Something to make me have feelings for you?”

Luce felt like crying. “If I did, then that’s seriously depressing.”

“Why?”

“Because I only want you to like me if it’s real.” Luce was surprised she’d found the courage to say that. Being so honest with him soothed her heartache, and she didn’t feel on the edge of tears anymore.

“Because you like me?”

“Yes.” Luce considered for a second and then suddenly grinned at him. “Does that mean you used some kind of mind control on me?”

Dorian smiled back, and slid a little closer to her. “Totally. With my incredible singing. I fried all your neurons.”

Luce snorted. “Your singing sounds like somebody beating up a frog. Humans really shouldn’t even try.”

“Just because you’re magic doesn’t mean you have to be such a
snob.”
His voice was playful now, and he reached out to stroke her hair, then gently tugged her until her upper body tipped back onto the beach. “I used to sing in a band and everything.”

Even as he kissed her with melting softness, Luce was uncomfortably aware that they hadn’t actually resolved anything. He was still threatening to talk to the FBI, and she still had no idea what to do about Anais. She hadn’t yet tried to explain why the mermaids had destroyed the
Dear Melissa,
and Luce couldn’t help but realize how empty her reasons would sound to him. She hadn’t answered his questions about her knowledge of things on land, either. Somehow she felt an intense reluctance to let him know she’d once been human herself, but how could she avoid that forever? And it wasn’t even clear if his tenderness toward her was only a lingering effect of enchantment.

Dorian had the indication around him, the same dark shimmer as the mermaids, and she’d assumed that it helped protect him from their power. Luce hoped that his shimmering didn’t mean he could also see the sparkling around her. If he could, he’d be able to see that she’d been just as human as he was. Worse, if he just looked at her from the corners of his eyes, he might be able to see the events that had
changed
her.