The sea witch snapped her fingers. “You managed to grow your gills. How did you feel just before that happened?”
With effort, I forced myself to focus. I remembered. Donovan was calling me incompetent. The heat in my belly overwhelmed me. I opened my mouth to shout at him, and I realized I could breathe. “The heat,” I whispered. “Of course. My hot flashes. The menopause.” I shook my head, finally understanding. “I’m subconsciously trying to reframe my early menopause symptoms into something not bad.” I chuckled softly. “This all makes sense now.”
“Whatever, weirdo. Listen, can we hurry this up? My lunch is probably trying to escape.” She held out the glittering stone.
“Right.” I took the enormous crystal in both hands and jolted with shock as it tingled on my skin. “It feels… alive.”
“It is alive, stupid,” she snorted. “It contains the magic of the merpeople. It literallyislife. Come on. Get on with it.” She nudged me gently once. Wait, no, that was her boob, drifting in the current, bumping into me. “Focus. Draw on your power.”
I nodded and stared down into the brilliant sparkling aqua depths of the siren stone. Now that I was holding it, Ifelt… different. The tingling sensation almost pulled at me, tugging on the heat in the core of my belly, like its power recognized me and wanted to reconnect. It felt like a best friend, soulmate, a kindred spirit, like, like…
Sadness suddenly overwhelmed me; a cry of anguish escaped my lips before I could stop it. The stone felt like my old dog, Rusty, happily trotting to meet me when I came home, licking my bare leg, doing a little happy dance with his front paws.
God, I missed him. Rusty was my best friend, a little white yorkie who never left my side. Vincent had given him to me for my thirty-fifth birthday. When I was arrested, I begged my lawyer to take care of Rusty. When I saw her again a month later, she told me Vincent was looking after him.
She lied. Probably deliberately. Vincent informed my lawyer that Rusty ran away almost immediately, probably trying to find me. She didn’t tell me until I was let out of the hospital.
I rang every single rescue in the city. Finally, a very sympathetic vet nurse told me that Rusty had been brought in, but he’d been put to sleep well over a year ago.
The heartbreak nearly killed me. I didn’t think I’d ever recover.
But I did. I recovered. Because Ialwaysdid. I was a lot of things, but at my core, I was a survivor. And I would survive this.
Carefully, I let the emotions swirl through me, my love for Rusty tempering the pain of loss. Instead of violently erupting, the heat blossomed slowly, and the tingles spread, growing in intensity.
A vibration—that was it. The stone was vibrating, and I was matching its resonance. This is how I could speak to it.
“Good,” the sea witch said. “Now ask it to close. Tell it to protect itself.”
I imagined myself stroking Rusty, telling him to be brave, to prepare himself for loss, to harden himself, to protect himself.I don’t want anyone to hurt you, I told the stone.Close yourself. Hide away.
The stone tingled underneath my fingertips sharply; a buzz shot right through my whole body, strangely warming the lump in my throat. Then, it relaxed, and I felt it obey me.
Good grief, I could definitely feel it; I could sense the stone rearranging itself, the vibrations moving inward as the magic retreated to the core of the stone beneath its new hard shell. The brilliant, transparent sparkling aqua stone became opaque, then solid, but it remained as beautiful and shining as ever. Finally, the vibrations under my fingertips dulled, then retreated completely.
It felt like it was asleep. It was done. The stone was closed. I turned to Donovan, and grinned. “I did it!”
He didn’t relax, his eyes never straying from the sea witch, floating next to me.
“Good job,” the sea witch nodded, plucking it out of my hands. “Did it gift you any magic?”
I cocked my head. “Er… no?”
“Well, then.” Her lips curved up in a grin. “Now that the stone is closed and safe from the Devourer, I suppose you can stay for lunch, too.”
Donovan let out a low growl.
“Jen.” I shook my head in disappointment. “Let’s not resort to stereotypes?—”
She lunged at me, teeth bared, tentacles spread out, boobs disappearing into her armpits as she surged through the water to grab me.
Panicking, the heat in my belly erupted out of me.“Stop.”
The witch froze, mid-lunge, mouth wide open, fingers curved into claws. Frantically, I kicked away from her, but a wave of exhaustion hobbled me. “Donovan!”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me beside him. “Go!” We swam as fast as we could, up the grisly bone-covered narrow walls of the trench, pure adrenaline pushing through my overwhelming fatigue to drive me forward.
I looked up; a sliver of pure blue lay above us like the hint of sky—the open ocean. I kicked desperately. I felt as weak as a kitten. Donovan pulled me upwards, powerful legs propelling him.
