Claimed by the Mer-Shifter Prince I Made Cry novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Man on the Sand
Minnie finds a chained man with a silver-blue tail on the beach below her father's boathouse, hides him in the old bait tub, and two men from a boat knock at the door.
The storm left a man on the beach below my father's boathouse.
I saw him from the top of the stairs at six in the morning, a long pale shape on the wet sand.
I thought he was dead.
I was halfway down the steps before I remembered I hated that beach.
The sea took my father six years ago, and I had not touched that water since.
I went anyway.
The man lay on his side with long silver hair stuck across his face.
He wore no shirt.
Iron cuffs were locked around both of his wrists, and the chain between them was wrapped twice around a piece of driftwood.
The skin under the cuffs was blistered black.
Then I looked lower, and my brain stopped.
Where his legs should have been, there was a tail.
It was as long as a canoe, silver on the top and deep blue underneath, and every scale caught the gray light.
The end of it still moved a little in the foam.
"Okay," I said out loud. "Okay."
I knelt and put two fingers on his neck.
His pulse was slow, but it was there.
His skin was freezing, and so cold it hurt.
One of his hands was closed tight around something.
I pried his fingers open one at a time.
It was a pearl, white and round, about the size of a pea.
It was warm, which made no sense, because he wasn't.
I thought about the gulls already circling and put it in the pocket of my father's yellow rain jacket.
Then I zipped the pocket shut.
His eyes opened.
They were silver-gray, and they found my face and held it.
His lips moved, and no sound came out.
"Don't talk," I said. "I've got you."
I did not have him.
He weighed more than any man I had ever lifted, and I could not get my arms under the tail.
I looked at the boathouse above us.
My father's old fish cart was still chained to the rail at the bottom of the stairs, the one with the fat tires.
I ran up for the bolt cutters, then ran back down and cut the cart free.
It took me four tries to roll him onto it.
His head hit the side once, and he flinched.
"Sorry," I said. "Sorry, sorry."
I shoved the cart across the sand with my whole body.
The tail dragged a line behind us that the tide would erase in an hour.
The boathouse hadn't been opened in six years.
I had to put my shoulder into the door to get it open.
Inside it smelled of salt, old rope and dead bait.
My father's workbench still had his coffee mug on it.
Against the back wall stood the cast-iron tub he used to keep live bait in, big enough for a grown man to lie down in.
I hadn't known why I'd never let anyone haul it away.
I knew now.
I ran seawater from the slip in buckets, one bucket after another, until my arms shook and the tub was two thirds full.
Then I dragged the cart up to the edge and tipped him in.
The water closed over the tail.
The man let out a long, shaking breath, and the color started creeping back into his face.
He was beautiful, and I didn't want to notice that.
His ears came to a point.
His cheekbones could have cut glass.
There was a scar around each wrist, thin and old.
"Who did this to you?" I asked.
He turned his head toward me.
"You should not have touched me," he said.
His voice was low and hoarse and slow.
"Well, I did," I said. "You're welcome."
Something like a smile crossed his mouth and was gone.
He started to say more, and then his head turned toward the door.
I heard it too.
Boots on the gravel outside.
Two voices, men's voices, and the scrape of a hull on the slip.
I yanked a blue tarp off the workbench and threw it over the tub.
"Don't move," I whispered. "Don't make a sound."
Someone knocked on the boathouse door, three slow raps.
I opened it a hand's width.
Two men in black dry suits stood on my father's porch.
They were wet to the knees, and neither one blinked.
"Morning, miss," the taller one said. "We lost a swimmer in the storm. Big guy, long hair. You see anybody on the beach?"
"No," I said. "Nobody."
"Mind if we look inside?"
Under the tarp, a wet hand slid out of the tub and closed around my ankle.
It was ice cold, and it held on hard.
It held on.
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