Water (21 page)

As soon as the boys had left, all of the strength and excitement drained out of my body, making my knees shake and my head spin.

Merrick caught me, hugging me as he supporting most of my body weight and smoothing my hair from my face, pressing his face into my hair.

“Well done. A good day I think!” Talita told me with a warm smile.

I turned from where my face had been buried in Merrick’s chest, pushing myself away from him to confront her.

“How could you do that?!” I asked her, calm at first, but my voice increasing in volume to a screech at the end of the question.

The fury I’d managed to access to push the pain aside in the pool, reappeared rapidly. My palms tingled with rage as I watched her smiling smugly.

“You just needed the right motivation,” she told me.

“And what if you’d been wrong?” I shouted at her.

“They were collateral,” she told me, waving her hand. “Anyway, I knew you wouldn’t fail.”

Without really knowing what I was doing, I lifted both my arms, my palms facing each other.

To my shock and horror, a blue ball of energy appeared between them. It tasered between my fingers, arcing between my palms, until I dropped it in fright.

It fell to the ground with a whump, leaving a black hole where it had fallen, surrounded by a spider web of burnt rock.

The three of us stared at the blackened rock, triplicate astonishment echoed in each expression.

Talita recovered first. “Merrick, no more work today please, we wouldn’t want Alexandra to overextend herself.”

Merrick and I were sitting on top of a boulder that was the start of what he called the waterslide. I’d almost collapsed a few minutes after Talita had left. He’d caught me before I hit the ground, worrying over how pale I’d gone.

“It’s probably just shock,” I’d managed to whisper as the spots I’d avoided earlier blacked out bits of vision.

He’d settled me in some grass before rushing off only to return a few minutes later with some fruit.

The sugar and rest had helped, and I wanted to try breathing on my own again. The dark pool held no more fear for me. I’d faced it and won, and now, almost in triumph, I’d wanted to explore it more.

Merrick had, instead, brought me here.

I’d gasped in amazement. The flat rock ledge in front of us was covered in pock marks. Some of them were as much as a metre deep, some shallow indentations in the rock and some went straight through the rock revealing glimpses of the river below. Each hole was a different size, in varying shades of creamy beige streaked with rust red.

Without warning Merrick had jumped feet-first into one of the holes shrieking with delight as he’d disappeared. I’d immediately followed, wrapping my toes over the edge of the hole he’d disappeared into and staring in fascination as the rock formation corkscrewed downward to the river which swept upwards into the hole, lapping greedily at the rock in a swirling eddy.

His laughter had drifted up to me on the breeze invitingly as I’d jumped into the swirling ice-cold mountain water. It had clutched at me hungrily, pulling me under so rapidly, and with such dizzying force, that the air whooshed out of my lungs.

My initial instinct had been to panic, kicking desperately toward the circle of light above me bruising my knees and shins on the confining rock in the process. The current continued to tug me under as the circle of light above me spun dizzyingly, always just out of reach.

And then I’d let go. I’d stopped trying to control it and just relaxed, and with only the slightest nettle of pain, I’d been breathing underwater again.

In moments I’d shot out of the short tunnel, swirling and corkscrewing over slippery rocks until I’d been thrown out into space before falling feet first, arms flapping in panic, into the deep wide sapphire-blue pool I’d recognised as Sabine’s pool, the pool where our adventure had begun.

He’d been waiting for me in the middle of the water, laughing at my delight.

“Show me the bottom of this pool?” I’d asked, suddenly curious about what must lie beneath.

“You don’t need me to show you anything any more,” he’d told me, his voice teasing but with a sad undertone.

I’d bobbed forward in the water, putting both of my arms round his neck, the way I’d held him before I’d discovered my ability to breathe underwater.

“I’ll always need you,” I whispered.

He’d smiled, flipping us with blinding speed into the beautiful water. He’d held me very close, but didn’t breathe for me, searching eagerly for the bottom of the pool as we gazed into the darkening water.

Merrick had suddenly twisted us to the left, corkscrewing around the edge of the pool slowing as we went. After a short while he’d shifted the orientation of our bodies until we were swimming parallel to the surface of the pool and shortly thereafter he had flipped us around and pushed my feet onto the slippery bottom of the pool.

My eyes had struggled to adapt to the gloomy light. I’d pushed away from him treading water a little as my natural buoyancy lifted me off the bottom, turning around clumsily as I’d tried to see the cave we must be in and what must lie beneath it for the colour of the pool to be turquoise and jade green.

He’d popped up beside me.

“Stay here for a moment,” he’d said, his mouth tickling my neck as he spoke. The water had swirled around me, and begun to glow faintly.

I’d looked around for the source of light and watched in delight as the sides of the pool began to glow behind Merrick’s finger tips as he ran them over the rock. The light grew stronger as he made his way around the pool illuminating the water with an eerie glow and showing just how vast the space was. I’d expected the pool to narrow as we got deeper, but in fact the opposite was true. The beautiful pool we had dived into at the surface was a fifth of the size of the cave we were in now.

I’d watched, fascinated, as Merrick continued to circle the pool. He’d swum in a wavelike motion his movement infinitely more graceful in the water than he had been on land. He was so fast, so comfortable in the water, that for the first time I understood just how inhuman he actually was.

And then the realisation hit me, that
I
was just as inhuman, that water was now my home too, my refuge, my haven.

I laughed, the sound as clear as a bell.

“What’s so funny?” he’d asked on one of his laps around.

I’d twisted to follow him, imitating the wavelike motion in which he swam.

“I’m just like you.” I’d laughed again.

It was freedom and excitement and joy but most of all it was an intense feeling of “rightness”, of really belonging.

He’d curled in toward me, spiralling us into a tighter circle before pushing my feet onto the rock.

“Look at your feet”

I’d looked down in time to see him sweep his hand along the bottom of the pool, revealing what I hadn’t been able to see earlier.

The black rock was marbled with jade stone running in frozen swirls out from where I was standing. My feet had been at the epicentre of the green rock and when I’d looked up, I could see a small circle of light that must be the very centre of the pool.

“It’s so beautiful,” I’d told him, not just referring to jade.

“It’s almost as beautiful as you are, Alexandra,” he’d murmured before running his fingers through my swirling hair.

“Race you to the top,” I’d giggled, laughing as I easily outpaced him.

We had been sitting on the boulder at the top of the waterslide for a little while talking, the topics drifting from childhood memories and friends to the most beautiful places we’d ever been.

The comparison was almost funny if they hadn’t been so bizarrely different.

Merrick really listened to me as I related what I considered to be a normal school day, asking fascinated questions about the dull routine that had filled my life before this incredible adventure. He’d wanted to know about my teachers and the subjects I’d been learning.

Trying to explain the purpose of each subject had proven very difficult. I’d always just assumed the benefits of learning were obvious, but he questioned how I’d use them practically and how they’d prepared me for life.

In contrast his childhood had been a very practical one. He’d learned the habits of the creatures that they lived with, turtles, eels, rays and sharks.

I’d shuddered at the mention of the great predators, expressing what mindless eating machines they were.

He’d been shocked and saddened at my perception of them, claiming them to be incredibly intelligent and highly social, both characteristics I’d never associated with them.

He’d explained the languages he’d had to learn, first and most obvious being the language the Oceanids spoke, but then different dialects of Dolphin, Orca and Whale.

He’d explained what Oceanids ate, how they hunted, how they prepared food, and the flavour of his favourite dishes.

In return I’d tried to explain the ingredients of cottage pie and chicken salad and peanut butter.

After the twentieth question of the texture of a peanut butter sandwich, I’d promised him I’d make him one, in return for a clam and seaweed wrap, which he claimed was his favourite snack.

I had described my family for him. I’d told him about Brent, how much I missed him, how sometimes the only picture of his face I had left in my head was the dead one. How I longed to be able to undo that afternoon in the pool, because it somehow felt like my fault.

He’d held my hand and let me talk, not trying to make me feel better.

I’d described my Mom. The way she loved me, how she looked, and how I didn’t know how to leave her. He hadn’t tried to convince me, he’d just listened, allowing me to express the argument that had been raging within me as I struggled to come to terms with two equally painful losses.

“If I could just say goodbye to her, Merrick, just spend a couple of weeks with her, it would make all of this so much easier.” Tears had filled my eyes, and he’d squeezed my hand, promising me that we could talk to Talita about it.

I’d explained what Dad looked like, and how much fun he was, how I felt betrayed by his silence about my heritage, which was quite obviously a reality.

“Don’t be too hard on him,” Merrick had told me quietly, the first comment he’d made the entire time I’d been talking. “From what I understand, he has only ever wanted what’s best for you.”

“How is lying to me what’s best for me?” I’d asked hotly.

He’d smiled. “He wanted to keep you from all of this, Alexandra. He wanted to keep you safe. I can understand a little bit of what he’s been through, because any possibility that you might be harmed frightens me more than anything I’ve ever feared.”

“Tell me about your family,” I’d asked, wanting to change the subject.

He’d described his parents, what they had looked like, how they had moved, how his mother had taught him and his siblings about manners and the etiquette that ruled Oceanid life. How his father had taught him to hunt and ride ocean currents and play the games young Oceanid males played.

I hadn’t realised there were other children in his family, and tears of pity streaked down my cheeks as I listened to him describe the way his family had been. How much they’d loved each other.

We melted into silence, the pictures he’d painted for me with his words still enveloping me in their rich descriptions.

“It’s getting late,” he eventually said. I looked around me, bewildered.

“What’s the time?” I asked him.

“Almost seven.”

“That’s impossible, how long have we been sitting here for?”

He smiled and stretched. “About four hours,” he replied easily.

I had never spoken to anyone for that long, never been listened to by anyone for that long. Time with him didn’t seem to have the same properties, I’d been so absorbed in the conversation it felt like just a few moments. A whisper of guilt wound around me as I realised we hadn’t discussed a single strategy about what we were going to do to help the Oceanids in the entire time we’d been talking, but when I expressed my chargrin he’d brushed it aside, telling me we’d made good progress today already and we could talk about it later that night.

“Wait here for a few minutes,” he asked, kissing the palm of my hand.

A thrill of excitement thrummed through me as his lips touched my skin.

I blushed and nodded.

He returned twenty minutes later with a small deer over his shoulder. Its head lolled sickeningly, death clouding its pretty lash-fringed eyes.

“What is that for?” I asked, disliking that he’d obviously killed it.

He shrugged his shoulders, the deer bobbing up and down as he did so. “I assumed you’d be hungry tonight. We won’t make it back to the main cave tonight.”

“We won’t?” I asked surprised, finding that I really liked the idea of spending the night alone with Merrick.

He shook his head. “No, but there’s another colony of caves about half an hour’s walk from here. It used to be inhabited by Sabine’s tribe many years ago. We’ll sleep there for the night.”

He turned and led me along the riverbed before starting up the side of a valley.

We reached the top of the valley a few moments before the liquid gold ball of the sun shimmered below the mauve and pink horizon.

He began a brisk walk across the spine of the mountain, the dead deer bouncing macabrely on his shoulders. I followed as quickly as I could, occasionally tripping over tussocks of grass I couldn’t quite see in the fading light. After the third time I’d nearly turned my ankle I called a breathy stop to our dusk dash.

Merrick jogged back to me, concern creasing his forehead as he shifted the weight of the deer slightly and took my hand.

“You OK?” he asked worriedly.

“Yeah, I just can’t seem to see where I’m going all that well.”

He released my hand. “Try using your senses,” he suggested.

I closed my eyes and concentrated, trying to find the fury that seemed to drive my ability to access the supernatural in me.

After a few moments of dredging up angry thoughts, only to have them whisked away by a memory from the afternoon, I opened my eyes.

“It’s no use,” I told him grinning.

He cocked his head to one side. “Why?”

“I’m too happy,” I told him, grinning again.

He smiled, confusion still playing across his gorgeous features in the twilight.

“What do you mean.”

“I seem to only be able to access my senses and, well, blue fireballs too, when I’m really, really angry. And I’m not now.” I took a step towards him, looking into his face. “I’m too happy.”

He beamed at me. “That is a very interesting observation, which we will definitely have to explore,” he told me, a laugh in his voice as he took my hand.

I was surprised by the clarity of the landscape when his skin touched mine. Dusk took on a brighter glow as if the light emanated from the land rather than the sun.

Enthralled as I was by the sudden strengthening of my sight, the rich, earthy and decidedly dead smell of the deer on Merrick’s shoulders had me gagging, and quickly dropping his hand.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“How can you stomach the smell of that thing?” I asked, fighting the nausea clawing its way up my throat.

He laughed. “It smells delicious,” he replied, trying to take my hand again.

I shook my head. “I’ll walk thanks.”

He sighed and walked beside me, steadying me as I continued to stumble on the grass.

“I’m going to run ahead and drop this off and then I’ll come and get you,” he said after I’d stumbled yet again.

“You’re going to leave me?”

“I won’t be gone long, I promise.” He pulled me briefly into his side, trying not to drop the deer in the process.