I Taught a Siren to Court... Then Became His Mate novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Minnow

Abbie cuts a young siren out of Barrows's net and saves a deckhand from her song, and Jet admits the song Abbie has recorded for nine months is his.

I took the stairs three at a time and met Margie coming out her kitchen door in her bibs.

"You heard," she said.

"I heard."

"Then get in the damn boat."

The Second Wind was a forty-foot lobster boat with a cracked windshield and an engine Margie talked to.

She had us off the dock in two minutes.

We came around the ledges into the north cove.

The station boat sat in the middle of it, a white aluminum hull with a crane on the stern.

Two deckhands in orange bibs were hauling on a net line.

The postdoc stood at the rail with a camera.

Barrows stood beside him in his fleece, holding a long gray microphone on a pole out over the water.

Something was fighting in the net alongside them.

A small pale arm.

A flash of silver tail.

Sea-green hair, short and wild, plastered across a freckled face.

She was screaming, and it didn't sound like a girl.

It sounded like a whistle underwater.

"Jesus Christ on a cracker," Margie said. "That's not a seal."

"Put me alongside the net."

"He's got his float line right there."

"Then run over it."

Margie looked at me once.

Then she threw the wheel over and laid the Second Wind's hull right across Barrows's float line.

The station boat lurched.

"Dunham!" Barrows shouted. "Get off my gear!"

I was already over the rail to my waist with my knife out.

The net was tight against our hull.

The girl was right under me, tangled to the chest, her silver tail thrashing.

Her eyes were green and huge.

"I'm cutting you out," I told her. "Hold still."

She bit my wrist.

I swore and kept cutting.

One strand, then five, then the mesh across her shoulders gave.

That was when she sang.

It was one low note that went into my chest.

On the station boat, the deckhand at the stern let go of the line.

He was a big kid with a buzz cut, nineteen at most.

He stepped up onto the transom.

The kid walked off the stern like it was a step down onto a sidewalk.

He went in boots first and didn't kick.

He sank toward the girl with his eyes open.

The other deckhand took a step toward the rail too.

Margie grabbed him by the collar across the gap between the boats and shook him.

I saw it then.

Margie and I were the only ones on either boat who weren't leaning toward the water.

I dropped the knife on the deck.

I reached down into the cold up to my shoulder and caught the drowning kid by the straps of his bibs.

I braced my knees on the rail and hauled.

"Margie!"

She let go of the other deckhand and grabbed my belt.

Together we dragged the kid up the side of the Second Wind and dumped him on the deck.

He coughed seawater and blinked at the sky.

"Where am I?" he said.

"Lobster boat," Margie told him. "Don't touch anything."

I went back over the rail.

The girl had stopped singing.

She was staring up at me with the cut net hanging off her shoulders.

I cut the last strand at her hips.

She slid free into the dark water, and then her face came up again, just her eyes and her wet freckled nose.

"Go," I said. "Go home."

She didn't go.

She looked at the bite on my wrist, and then at my face.

"Sorry," she said, in a small rough voice.

"You speak English too?"

"Radio," she said. "Weather. Very bad words."

I laughed, and she giggled, and the sound went across the water.

"You need a name," I said. "You're about the size of a minnow."

"Minnow," she repeated, delighted.

Then she was gone under the hull.

On the station boat, Barrows had his headphones clamped to his ears with both hands.

"Did you get that?" he said to the postdoc. "Tell me you got that."

"I got the audio. The video's all her back."

"The audio is enough."

He looked across at me over the gap.

He was smiling.

"Thank you, Abbie," he said. "You just recorded it for me."

Margie picked up her radio handset.

The station's voice came out of it before she could key it.

"Dunham, this is Barrows. You're finished chartering for this station. Don't bother sending the invoice."

Margie keyed the mike.

What she told him lasted most of a minute and used the word "spineless" three times in three different grammatical roles.

Then she put the kid in a dry sweatshirt.

He kept saying he'd heard his mother calling him.

By noon I was on the north ledges with my laptop, trying to understand what I'd recorded and what I hadn't.

The water at the bottom of the ledges was green and clear to the sand.

A dark shape slid through it and stopped at my feet.

Jet rose to his chest in the shallows, black scales gleaming in the sun, his tail a long shadow behind him.

"You saved my sister," he said.

"Your sister?"

"Minnow. She likes the name. She says to tell you she's sorry about the biting."

I stared at him.

"So there's more of you," I said. "Mermen. Whatever."

He looked offended.

"We are not mermen," he said. "Mermen are a story for children."

"Then what are you?"

He looked at the laptop on my knees, where my nine months of the Gannet Song sat in a folder with my name on it.

"The song you've recorded every night for nine months," he said, "is mine."

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