For the Taking (13 page)

T
he next few days passed in a jumble of new impressions and rediscovered memories.

Selkia and Nacre took their duty of looking after Lass very seriously. Both of them were strong, beautiful young mermaids with deep auburn hair that streamed behind them as they swam. They were sisters, it turned out, and Lass envied their easy, loving rapport.

She didn’t understand half the jokes and teasing remarks they signed back and forth. It was a little easier once they entered the cave system where Loucan and his supporters had their headquarters. Like the palace, it was filled with air, which meant the mer could take on land form, wear the clothing that still resembled sailors’ garb from long ago, and use spoken language instead of signing.

Selkia and Nacre spoke something like eighteenth century Cornish pirates, but Lass found their strong accents and odd vocabulary easier than the
signing. There, it would take her a while to regain her full fluency.

Although she was pleased at the way everyone received her, it was daunting for Lass to discover how much she was the focus of everyone’s hopes.

“The news of your marriage has disappointed half the unwed mermaids below the age of fifty,” Nacre told her, at the end of her fourth day in Pacifica. The two of them were swimming lazily in mer form, in a shell-tiled saltwater pool heated by undersea volcanic gases. “And a few of the wed mermaids, as well! Not me,” she added quickly. “Carrag and I will wed when next the moon is full. I am sure Loucan is the right man to bring peace, but I have never wanted his wooing.”

She sounded very earnest, as if she was afraid Lass might distrust her intentions, so Lass said quickly, “I’m sure you haven’t.”

“They say Joran is biting his tongue in fury,” Nacre continued. “He blames your alliance with Loucan for the fact that his supporters are deserting him. He does not realize that he has made so many enemies among both Swimmers and Breathers that everyone is uniting in the hope of bringing him down. And if,” she added eagerly, “you should be carrying Loucan’s child, that would be perfect.”

“I’m not,” Lass told her. She regretted it seconds later. Why hadn’t she been a little more vague? Her answer would only encourage Nacre’s questions.

“A pity,” the other mermaid said. “He will have to come to you more often at night, if ’tis to happen.”

“That’s step one, yes,” Lass drawled.

“But he has not come to you at all, has he?”

Plenty of times on the boat, Lass could have said,
but none since we got here. She contented herself with a simple, “No,” then added, “he told me it would be like this.”

Why was she defending him? Thinking back on the few times they’d been in each other’s company during the past few days, she knew he could have found opportunities to connect with her. Just a private squeeze of her hand, a special look or a whispered phrase in her ear. Instead, he had barely glanced at her, and the smiles he’d given her were a public performance and didn’t reach his deep blue eyes.

She should be furious about it, not hurting like this.

“Are men like that on land?” Nacre asked curiously.

“Some of them. The ones like Loucan who care more about politics than they do about people.”

“Loucan does not. Not usually. He does what he believes is necessary.”

“And so do I.”

“In other words, if you cannot lie with him, you wait until you can. But you miss it. Badly. I know.”

Lass didn’t correct Nacre’s interpretation of her words. The other mermaid said nothing for a minute, then spoke again.

“Selkia is part of a patrol group going out across the reefs tomorrow to contact your siblings. Loucan believes that it will be safe for them to come here now. Joran has not launched the attack we were all afraid of, once he set himself up in the palace. His garrison is not strong enough. The decision about coming here will be up to your siblings, of course. They may still choose to wait.”

She went on talking about the strategic situation for a little longer, but Lass couldn’t follow it. All she
could think of was the news that Selkia was going to see Saegar and the twins.

Why can’t I go, too, with the patrol group?

“Is there a chance that I’ll see Loucan tonight?” she asked Nacre as soon as the other mermaid had stopped speaking.

Nacre laughed. “That is just what I was thinking about Carrag. ’Tis hard to long so much for a man!”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Thalassa, I see your face when you look at him. I can send for him, if you like. I can have him told that you want him to come to you.”

“Could you?”

She didn’t care if Nacre and everyone else thought she was desperate to have Loucan in her bed. She didn’t care if Loucan himself thought the same thing…or she tried not to care, anyway. She just wanted to see him and ask if it would be safe for her to go across the reefs with the patrol group to see her siblings.

Nacre promised to ensure that the message was delivered, and she must have kept her promise. Just before Lass went to bed, on a mattress of some downy stuff, covered in sheets made of a seaweed fiber that felt soft and cool like pure linen, an answering message came from Loucan. It was delivered by Nacre’s own fiancé, Carrag.

Not tonight.

Nothing more. Just those two words.

“Loucan says to tell you, not tonight.”

Lass was simply frustrated at first. The anger came a little later, when she’d spent a frantic twenty minutes thinking,
All I want is five minutes conver
sation with him, but how do I get to him? I have no idea where he is!

Nacre didn’t know. She had relayed the message to Carrag, who’d told an older man who was also part of Loucan’s inner circle. It was late, and the cave system was quiet. If mer technology had encompassed cell phones, Lass would have appreciated one right now, as well as a little mer mother-of-pearl PalmPilot with Loucan’s phone number in it.

As matters stood, she had two choices. Let the whole thing go, and put off the longed-for meeting with her siblings yet again, or search for Loucan herself.

No. Wrong. There was a third option.

Why did she have to involve Loucan at all? If he couldn’t find even a few snatched minutes of time for her, why shouldn’t she simply bypass him? She knew where Selkia slept, right near an exit from the air-filled caves into the open sea. Lass could wait there and join Selkia’s patrol group in the morning.

Not knowing how early they planned to set out, and with no way of ensuring that she’d wake in time, she abandoned her comfortable bed and stayed in the ocean all night, floating and dozing near the exit from the caves. It left her tired, but it worked.

The patrol group appeared just as the light of dawn began to penetrate the water. Selkia looked surprised when Lass swam in among them, but she signed quickly, “I want to see my siblings. Loucan believes it’s safe.”

It
was as vague a word in mer signing as it was in spoken English, and that was convenient. She hadn’t alerted them to the fact that Loucan had no idea she was here. They seemed to accept her presence, and
as the morning light turned the water from dark jade to pale aquamarine, she crossed the coral reefs once more.

This wasn’t the way she’d come from Loucan’s boat, and she recognized only one distinctive out-cropping of rock, which she must have seen once, long ago. The lifeless state of these reefs was far worse than the ones she’d swum across the other day, and she asked one of the mermen about it.

“Joran and the Swimmers joined battle against us here a few years ago,” he explained. “We lost some good men, and so did they. Many of their side crossed to us after ’twas over. They told us Joran did not care how many lives were lost, nor what he did to the coral. Much of it, he blasted himself to make better defenses.”

They swam on, and Lass had trouble keeping up. She hadn’t realized it the other day, but Loucan must have been pacing himself to match her more limited speed.

“I wish he was here….” Something twisted uncomfortably in her stomach, and she suddenly ached to feel his touch, or just his strong presence beside her. No matter how hard she tried, her anger was always mixed with other more powerful feelings, where Loucan was concerned. It had been that way with him from the beginning.

Her muscles began to burn, and she felt a dangerous urge to breathe real air instead of filtering oxygen out of the water through her gills. Barely sleeping last night hadn’t helped her energy levels, and it seemed hours before they began to swim up toward the sun’s light.

When she broke the surface, the first thing she did
was draw in deep, panting lungfuls of air. The other mer turned away, as if she was doing something a little indecent, reminding her that there were nuances to mer etiquette and culture of which she still knew nothing. She swam away from the group in a slow circle, and when she’d rejoined them, she found that they had seen the boat they were looking for—the boat where Saegar, Phoebe and Kai were waiting.

It was a moment she would never forget.

With the boat’s engine powering the craft toward them, she could soon see several figures on deck. The morning sun shone on two blond heads, one honey-colored, the other like silky straw.

“Phoebe and Kai,” Lass whispered under her breath.

Both women wore colorful bikinis, and both stood beside tall men who looked well tanned from their days at sea. One of them was pulling up the zipper on a slick black wetsuit, while the other still had a pile of diving gear at his feet.

There were two more figures on the deck, as well—a man and a woman, already dressed in full scuba gear, with oxygen tanks on their backs and breathing masks ready to pull into position. They had to be Beth and Saegar. Her brother, who had forever lost his tail for the sake of living on land with the woman he loved…

All of them were studying the group of mer in the water. Lass and the five members of the patrol had now almost reached the hull.

“Loucan’s not with you?” Saegar called out. Like Loucan, he had a deep, powerful voice.

“No,” answered the patrol leader, who was
Nacre’s fiancé, Carrag. “He’s staying close to home, waiting for Joran’s next move.”

Lass saw the disappointment in her siblings’ faces, and felt it in her own heart, as well. She had the sudden sense that it had been wrong of her—dangerous, even—to give in to her impatience to see Saegar and the twins without consulting Loucan. He should have been beside her at this moment. For a whole lot of reasons.

She hardened her heart. Maybe he could have spared her the five minutes she’d wanted last night, and then she’d have known if this was a foolish expedition for her to undertake. Or if—less likely—he might have wanted to be here with her at this moment for a more emotional reason.

She hadn’t even seen him in almost two days.

“But we have Thalassa here,” Carrag called up to the boat.

“Omigosh,
Lass?
” Kai squealed, as Lass waved. “Yes! I see you!”

She dove into the water and came up, her face and hair streaming with water, next to Lass. They hugged, cried, looked at each other and hugged again. Lass forgot about Loucan, and her odd sense of foreboding regret that he wasn’t here.

Phoebe wasn’t far behind her sister, and she was teary and emotional as well. Considering that the twins hadn’t experienced their first mer transformation until just a few months ago, they both seemed amazingly at home in the water.

Saegar was awkward by contrast. “Don’t laugh, big sister,” he growled, after swooping at her and giving her a bearlike hug. “Legs still don’t feel right
in the water. Beth is teaching me how to move, and fortunately she’s very good at it.”

Beth had swum up beside him, and when she wrapped her arms around him, they seemed like two playful seal pups in their black suits. She looked very pretty and young, with a warm fire of new love burning in her eyes.

Kevin and Ben had finished putting on their diving gear now, and joined their wives in the water.

“I couldn’t find you,” Kevin told Lass. “But I wasn’t surprised to hear that Loucan had succeeded. Sometimes you need intuition, not facts.”

“How long is the swim, Carrag?” Saegar asked. “Should we have brought the boat closer?”

“That’s not safe,” the merman answered. His accent wasn’t as strong as Nacre’s or Selkia’s, and Lass guessed that he’d had more contact with land-dwellers, maybe as a result of Loucan’s guidance. “We never like to anchor a boat directly over Pacifica. In any case, the water’s too deep there. You need a place like this, where the reef will hold the anchor, and where there’s an atoll nearby to shelter the boat from storms.”

They talked about air tanks and flippers for a while, as well as hearing an update from Carrag on what was happening in Pacifica. Ben seemed very concerned for Kai’s safety, and Lass wondered if he was always that protective. She couldn’t imagine Loucan treating her that way. Was this part of the difference between love and mere attraction? Once again, she felt more alone than she wanted to be, without Loucan beside her.

I’ve been alone for more than thirteen years, since Cyria died. And I have Saegar and my sisters now,
she berated herself inwardly.
What’s wrong with me? I’m stronger than this, I know I am.

The journey back across the reefs was magical at first. Unlike Lass, Kai and Phoebe had no memory of the place at all, and spent the long swim pointing in delight at the frenzy of brilliant colors. Saegar and Beth never left each other’s side, and Lass knew that this experience must be hard for her brother. When you’d swum in mer form, scuba gear wasn’t the same. Beth seemed to understand this instinctively, and Lass again found herself envying their closeness.

Fatigue enveloped her, and she began to drop back almost out of sight of the others, unable to keep up. Even Beth and Saegar had swum ahead, now.

I should be feeling so happy, but all I can do is wallow in feeling left out. That’s not fair. In fact, it’s pathetic! Do I really begrudge Saegar and my sisters their happiness?