I Taught a Siren to Court... Then Became His Mate novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Thing in the Net
Fired in front of the donors for refusing to hand over her research, Abbie cuts a captured merman free, and he asks her to teach him how humans court, then hands back the watch she lost the day she drowned nine years ago.
The merman in the holding pen wanted to know how a man makes a woman love him.
Eleven hours earlier, I'd been fired for trying to keep him from getting caught.
It happened in the big lab at the Gannet Island Marine Station, in front of eleven donors in rain jackets.
Dr. Lewis Barrows stood at the screen with a clicker in his hand.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, in the soft voice he saved for money. "Listen to this."
He pressed play.
A low song filled the room.
It rose and fell.
I knew every second of it.
I had sat on the north ledges in the dark for nine months to get it, from two to four every morning, in sleet.
"Nine months of recordings," Barrows said. "My team's work. My discovery."
The postdoc next to him clapped first.
The donors clapped too.
Then a new slide came up.
PROJECT SIREN NET.
A drawing of a long net across the mouth of the north cove, and a date at the bottom. June 20.
"Whatever is singing out there," Barrows said, "we're going to bring it home. Live, on camera."
My chair scraped back before I'd decided anything.
"Those are my recordings."
Eleven heads turned.
"Abbie," Barrows said kindly. "Sit down."
"My hydrophones. My nights. My name is on every file, if you haven't scrubbed them yet."
A woman in a yellow rain jacket looked from me to him.
"And you don't net something you've never seen," I said. "You don't even know what it is. You'll kill it."
Barrows set down the clicker.
"Our colleague has had a hard year," he told the donors. "Some of you may remember. She nearly drowned in that cove at nineteen. Swam off alone. It's made her a little..." He tapped his temple.
The postdoc laughed.
Somebody in the back laughed with him.
"You're done here, Abbie," Barrows said. "Leave your keycard at the front desk."
I didn't sit.
I walked out past every one of them with my face on fire.
By the time I got to the front desk, my keycard had already stopped working.
Margie Dunham, who skippered the station boat, texted me before I reached the road.
"Heard. Want me to sink him? I know where he moors."
By dark, I'd stopped crying about it.
By midnight, I was walking down the station dock in my boots, with my dive knife on my belt.
The hydrophones were mine.
I'd bought them with my own money.
They were clipped to the holding pen, a big floating square of net off the end of the dock, where Barrows had been testing his capture net all week.
I wasn't leaving them for him.
The camera on the light pole blinked red.
Let it.
Halfway down the dock, I heard the water.
Something was thrashing inside the pen.
Something big.
The net bulged and snapped tight, and the whole float rocked under my feet.
I got my flashlight on it.
A man's arm came out of the water, tangled in the mesh to the shoulder.
Pale skin. Black scales down the back of it, shining like wet tar.
Then a tail broke the surface, black and long as a canoe, and slammed the net hard enough to soak me.
My first thought was that Barrows had been right.
My second was that he was going to kill it.
I knelt on the float and pulled my knife.
The tangled thing went still and stared at me through the mesh.
He had gray eyes.
A man's face, all angles, long black hair stuck across it.
Pointed ears.
"I'm going to cut you out," I said. "Don't bite me."
I sawed through the first strand, and the second, and the tenth.
The net gave all at once.
He went under.
I leaned over the edge to look.
A hand closed around my wrist and pulled me in.
The cold hit.
I kicked and got nowhere.
He had my arm, and then he had my waist, and he turned me in the black water as easily as a doll.
His body was hard against mine, all muscle and scale.
His fingers slid over my wrist.
Then he let go, and I shot up and grabbed the float and coughed half the harbor onto the planks.
He came up a few feet away.
He was holding my watch.
"Give that back," I said.
He turned it over in the flashlight beam.
"You have teeth," he said. "For a small fish."
His voice was low and rough.
He talked.
"You speak English."
"Boat radios," he said. "Many years. Your fishermen say very bad words."
I hauled myself up onto the float and sat there dripping.
He drifted closer and rested his arms on the edge, beside my knee.
He was so close I could see the water running off his eyelashes.
"You cut the net," he said. "They will know it was you."
"They already fired me."
"Then you have time."
"For what?"
He looked at me for a long moment.
"How does your kind court a woman?"
I laughed out loud.
He didn't.
"I mean it," he said. "There is one I want. I have until the full moon in June. I don't know your ways."
"You're asking me for dating advice."
"You're the only human I know."
I should've stood up and gone home.
Instead I looked at the black scales on his shoulders and the scrape the net had left across his chest, and I heard myself say, "Fine. I need something too."
"Name it."
"Your song. I want to record it. Up close."
Something moved in his face.
"Done," he said.
"And you need a name. I can't keep calling you the merman."
He waited.
"Jet," I said. "Black, and you steal shiny things."
He tried it in his mouth. "Jet."
Then he held out his closed hand.
"Lesson one," I said. "You give back what you take."
He opened his fingers.
A steel dive watch lay on his wet palm.
It wasn't mine.
The band was old and green with salt, and the back was scratched with initials I'd known all my life.
My father's.
The watch I'd been wearing the day I drowned in the north cove, nine years ago.
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