I Taught a Siren to Court... Then Became His Mate novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: The Shared Breath

Margie lifted her face out of her hands and looked where I was looking.

"Oh, hell," she said. "Right. The speaker."

We'd lashed the gray case under her stern that afternoon.

She dropped it over the side on its line, ran the cable up to my laptop, and set the laptop on the hauler with the bargain file open.

"Wait for my hand," I said.

"I'll wait for your hand."

I was already zipping my drysuit.

Mask, fins, my dive knife on my belt.

"Abbie," Margie said. "If she drowns you, I'm going to be so angry."

"Noted."

I went over the side.

The cold closed over me, and the song was everywhere.

I swam for the cave.

The net still hung across its mouth, chain on the bottom, floats above.

Jet was right behind it, waiting, his hand already on the mesh.

I pulled my knife.

"I'm going to cut you out," I said into the water. "Don't bite me."

"I never bit you," he said. "That was Minnow."

I laughed out a mouthful of bubbles and sawed.

One strand, then ten, then a hole big enough for a man.

He came through it in one long black stroke and took my hand, and we went up the moon road together.

We broke the surface in the middle of the cove.

They were all around us.

Thirty heads in a wide ring, hair dark on the water, eyes catching the moon.

Minnow was in the front, bobbing, both fists clenched.

The singing stopped.

The Red Mother slid off the seal rock and came across the ring toward us, slow, the water barely moving around her.

"You let him out of his box," she said. "That wasn't the bargain."

"It wasn't my bargain."

She smiled.

She looked past me, at Jet.

"Four steps," she told the pod, in a voice like cold water poured slowly. "Four, and the fifth is tonight. Ask her, Jet. Go on. Ask her in front of all of us."

Then she looked back at me.

"And she'll say no."

My palm burned.

"Say it, little fish," she said softly. "Or I'll sing."

I didn't say it.

She opened her mouth.

The song came out of her low and sure and sweet, and it didn't go toward me.

It went over my head, toward the island.

Up on the hill, the church bell clanged once, wildly.

Then the church doors banged open.

Men came out into the moonlight.

They came down the hill road in a slow line, the loud lobsterman at the front, the minister hanging off his arm and shouting.

Not one of them was looking where he was going.

All of them were looking at the water.

"Abbie!" Margie screamed from the Second Wind.

I didn't look at the Red Mother.

I looked at Jet.

Then I sang his name.

Three notes, out loud, across the whole cove.

The low one, falling like water over a ledge.

The high one, flat, the way I always sang it.

The click.

The ring of heads went dead still.

The Red Mother's song broke in the middle.

"She has his name," somebody said in the ring, in that underwater voice I could hear with my whole skull. "He gave her his name."

"He gave it to me," I said, loud. "And I'm keeping it."

I lifted my hand out of the water toward the Second Wind.

Margie hit the key.

Under us, the speaker came alive.

The Red Mother's own voice filled the cove from below, slow and sure.

Then Barrows, small and tinny, and the price she'd named for every one of them.

The recording ended.

Nobody in the ring moved.

The Red Mother's black eyes went from face to face.

"She sold us," Minnow said, into the silence. "I told you. I told you all, and you didn't believe me."

An old gray siren at the edge of the ring turned his face away from the Red Mother.

Then the one beside him did.

Then the pod began to sing.

Not for her.

Against her.

Thirty voices, low and rising, so loud it shook the water against my chest.

Her song went under it and drowned.

On the hill, the line of men stopped walking.

The loud lobsterman blinked at the moon and said, very clearly, "Why am I outside?"

The ring closed in on the Red Mother.

Not fast.

Steady.

She backed away from it toward the cove mouth.

At the line of boats, she turned once and looked back at me, and her face was the oldest thing I'd ever seen.

Margie fired the flare gun straight up over her head.

The cove went red.

When it faded, she was gone under the boats and out into open sea, and the pod went after her a long way, singing.

My palm stopped burning.

I held it up in the moonlight.

The red line was gone.

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