Waking Storms (3 page)

“Dana, I...”

“Luce, that’s the
problem!”
Dana looked up, the golden light in her brown eyes broken by urgency and awful regret. “I mean with having Anais be queen. Having her
get
to people. Like, Jenna and some of the others, they’re just completely different now than they used to be, and I have to look at them every day, my twin sister and my best friends, and think how they’d probably strangle me in my sleep if Anais told them to!”

“Dana, I’m
sorry!
I mean, I’m sorry I blamed you...”

“I want you to be more than sorry!” The words lashed out. “I want you to care! I mean, you’re sitting here alone in this cave for months, when you’re the only one who could help us. And all you can think about is Catarina and how pissed off and, like,
superior
you are, but you don’t care about the rest of us at all. Everyone keeps acting crazier all the time, Luce. Like, as long as there were ships we could sink, it kind of took the pressure off, but now that the ships have completely stopped coming this way ... I keep thinking we might wind up fighting each other, or maybe some of the girls will go like Miriam!”

Luce winced at the mention of that name. Miriam’s suicide had left a crater of pain in her heart; it wasn’t right for Dana to use that pain to make Luce do what she wanted. Not that Luce was clear on exactly what Dana was after.

“What do you want from me, Dana?” Luce snapped. Dana looked surprised, then assessing.

“You’ve changed a lot, too. God. You used to be such a marshmallow.” Luce tensed with annoyance, but she didn’t say anything. “But maybe that’s a good thing. I mean, you’ll have to be pretty tough to go up against her!”

So that was it. “You think I’m going to get rid of Anais for you?” Luce asked.

A quick, contorted smile bent Dana’s mouth. “You’re right that she wants to kill you, you know. I’m not going to tell anyone where you are—at least, not anyone but Violet, she’s dying to see you—but if somebody on Anais’s side finds out they’ll come after you for
sure.
”

Luce halfway smiled. Did Dana think, if she couldn’t manipulate Luce with heartache, then she could control her with fear instead?

“Tell Anais not to bother. It’s a waste of her time.”

“Luce, you don’t get it! Anais knows you’re the rightful queen. And she knows we all know it, too! No one really talks about it, not straight out, but we all saw what you
did
... using your voice to move the sea...”

“I knew what you meant, Dana. You can tell Anais not to worry. Tell her I don’t even want to
look
at anyone in our tribe who hurt Catarina, and I definitely don’t want to be their queen. Tell Anais I think she’s the queen they all deserve!”

Dana reeled back so hard her shoulder banged the stone wall. Her tail slashed back and forth, kicking up small recoiling waves. “Just because they all broke the timahk, and you
didn’t
...” Luce flinched at that, but luckily Dana was glaring past her and didn’t notice. “What, you think that means you’re so much
better
than they are? You’re too good to even give them
orders
?”

Luce sighed. She still felt angry, but she understood that Dana was in an awful position, stuck with a psychotic queen. And it sounded like Luce’s old tribe might be on the verge of some kind of internal war. Dana was trying to do the right thing.

“It’s not
about
the timahk, Dana.” Luce’s voice was much gentler now. “I don’t know if I even believe in the timahk anymore, or not in all of it ... But I really loved Catarina, and she’s gone now, and there’s no way I can even find out if she’s alive or not. I can’t be around a bunch of mermaids who tried to kill Cat and just somehow pretend to feel
okay
about them!”

Dana stared hard at Luce, as if she couldn’t make up her mind whether or not to be mollified.

“Why didn’t you go with her, then? If you
loved
her so much?” Dana’s tone was still sharp, but Luce could tell that her heart wasn’t in it anymore. She was forcing herself to act angrier than she really felt. Still, the question made tears start up in Luce’s eyes, and she turned her face away. “Luce? Actually, that was what we all thought at first. That you and Cat had just gone off together. Even if it seemed weird after how bad you two had been fighting...”

“I wanted to go with her. She wouldn’t let me.” She looked back at Dana, whose face had gone blank with disbelief.

“She wouldn’t
what?
No way, Luce! There’s no way any of us would just swim off alone like that. Not if there was any choice! I mean, with how dangerous it is ... and not having
anyone
to help you...”

“Catarina did, though.” Luce could hear how bitter her voice sounded. Dana was right; she
had
changed a lot in the months since Miriam’s suicide and Catarina’s near-murder. “She even tricked me. She waited until I went out to look for food and then sneaked off. To stop me from following her. Because she knew I would.”

“Crazy! You didn’t think of chasing after her?” Dana wasn’t asking it to be cruel, Luce knew, but the question still grabbed her stomach in a knot of shame. The fact was she couldn’t completely explain to herself why she hadn’t done exactly what Dana suggested. Catarina had been battered and terribly weak when she’d disappeared. If Luce had rushed south after her, searching all the caves she’d passed, there was a good chance she could have caught up with the wounded ex-queen.

Something heavy and sad and secret had urged her to let Cat slip away, to linger where she was. In her darker moments Luce accused herself of disgusting cowardice. But, if she was completely honest with herself, the truth was something even worse than that. Luce suddenly realized that her own silvery green tail had started swishing nervously without her being aware of it.

“Luce? I guess I should admit I was kind of lying before. Saying that Anais would come after you. I was mostly trying to scare you.” Luce looked up, smiling in sheer relief that Dana wasn’t pursuing the question of why Catarina had left alone. “I mean, Anais would practically cut off her own fins to see you dead, like killing you would be the most amazing thing that ever happened to her, but the thing is ... there are probably only a handful of girls who’d go along with it now. And she knows that.” Luce noticed that Dana refrained from mentioning that one of those girls was almost certainly Jenna. “The tribe is barely holding together, and if Anais pushed everyone to kill you for no reason ... I don’t know, a lot of us might just leave her, or fight on your side. She’s not going to risk it unless she can come up with some really good excuse.”

Luce watched Dana’s wide brown eyes staring off into a corner of the cave. Delicate curls of blue light flickered across Dana’s irises, and Luce had a sudden flash of insight: more than anything else, Dana was afraid that she’d wind up fighting her own twin sister, maybe even killing her. Dana must know that if Luce challenged Anais there would almost certainly be a battle, mermaid blood unraveling through the water. And Dana was prepared for that, ready to face her own worst fears for the sake of the tribe. It was stunningly brave of her to come here and to say these things. Luce almost felt ashamed of herself, but she still wasn’t ready to give in.

“It’s wonderful to see you, Dana. I really missed you.” Luce was startled to hear herself say it, and just as surprised to see Dana suddenly grinning back at her with the same open-hearted warmth she’d had before everything in their tribe had gone so hideously wrong.

“You know I’m not going to stop bugging you, Luce. About the whole queen thing. Now, you just
know
you want to take that screwy blond bitch down! Admit it!”

Luce burst out laughing. Then she realized with a hard jolt of sorrow that it was the first time she’d laughed in three months.

***

It was already twilight by the time Dana left, and Luce drifted over to the nearby beach where she usually foraged for dinner. Tall rock formations protruded from the water there, sheltering her from view in case any boats came by. They were at that juncture in the early Alaskan autumn when the night began to swing as if it were on hinges, closing steadily in on the daylight. By December the days would be no more than a dim grayish haze seeping through as the door of night was briefly knocked ajar. It was the first time Luce had really wondered what it would be like to spend a deep northern winter out in the sea. She’d only been a mermaid since April, after all, but she had a vague recollection of Kayley saying that in years when the ice got bad the tribe would be forced to migrate south for a while, out past the Alaskan Peninsula, slipping through the Aleutian Islands. She could just make out the Aleutians from here, a dark uneven band wrapping the southern horizon. Maybe she should just leave now and look for Catarina.

She knew she wouldn’t, though. As she leaned between two boulders and cracked oysters for dinner, Luce admitted to herself that there was still something holding her here. Not that she had any reason to believe that the boy with the bronzeblond hair would have stayed in the area. It was highly unlikely, in fact. Assuming his parents had been with him on the cruise ship Luce’s tribe had sunk in their furious grief over Miriam, then the boy would now be one of the lost kids, just as Luce herself had been, dumped on whatever grudging relatives could be persuaded to take him in or else passed around from one foster home to the next. He could be anywhere in the country. What were the odds, after all, that he’d have family on this desolate stretch of the Alaskan coast? She should picture him living in Montana or New York or Georgia: anywhere but here. That was simply logical.

But she couldn’t shake the sense that he was still somewhere nearby. “Wishful thinking, Luce knew. The kind of lonely delusion that would send her out of her mind if she let it. She wasn’t sure which was stupider: imagining that someday she’d see the boy she’d saved again, or
wanting
to see him. He must hate her utterly, and it would be a violation of the timahk, the mermaids’ code of honor, for Luce to speak to a human at all.

It had also been against the timahk for her to save his life, of course, no matter how she tried to rationalize what she’d done. Luce knew there were good reasons for the law she’d broken—the one which demanded that any human who heard the mermaids singing had to die—but she couldn’t think about those reasons now without feeling a surge of rebellious stubbornness. Her resentment of the timahk’s insistence on murder had been in the back of her mind when she’d spoken those reckless words to Dana:
I don’t know if I even believe in the timahk anymore.
In retrospect, Luce knew it was a terrible idea to say that out loud. She’d been living in dreamy isolation for so long that she’d forgotten the importance of keeping her most dangerous thoughts to herself.

There was a nudge at her hand. Luce looked down, glad to be distracted. It was one of the two larval mermaids who lived beside this beach: little girls, maybe eighteen months old, who’d changed into mermaids before they’d even learned how to talk right. Now they were stuck being that age for as long as they lived—and for most larvae that wasn’t very long. Larvae were slow, awkward swimmers, easy prey for orcas; Luce was glad that these two were too babyish to understand that. They squealed and tumbled together in the water, nuzzling Luce so that she wouldn’t forget to crack extra oysters for them. Sometimes she’d sing them to sleep, even tell them half-remembered fairy tales. Not that they understood anything, but they loved the attention.

“Here you go. Wait. Want a few more?” The larvae crooned wordlessly, snuffling at her and gobbling up the shellfish. One of them was pale, but the other was probably Inuit, and gazed at Luce with eyes like black pools. Sometimes Luce thought of giving them names but then thought better of it. That would only make her feel worse when they died.

Late twilight brushed the cresting waves with strokes of indigo, moody purple, slate gray. A few scattered islands cut black patches from the blue-glowing distance. The spruce-fringed slopes of the coast began to call to Luce, and she felt the tidal pull of desire to give herself to the sea. To spiral out through the night blue water, caress each wave with soft curls of her own song, and then maybe—just for a little while—float farther north, out past the fishing village where she’d thrown the bronzehaired boy onto a pebble beach. Not that she expected anything to come of this expedition besides some painful memories...

She was careful to keep her singing quiet as she swam out, even though hardly any boats seemed to come through this way anymore. Probably the crews had finally gotten spooked by all the shipwrecks and decided that this part of the coast was simply unlucky. Every time Luce noticed a big commercial fishing boat or a cruise ship, it would be swinging out toward the horizon as if it wanted to avoid the area on purpose. That was fine with her. She knew, though, that Anais and the others had to be seething with frustration, watching their prey repeatedly glide out of range. Still, there was the occasional small fishing boat or kayaker, and Luce couldn’t take the risk of anyone hearing her sing. She played with the water as she swam, sculpting it with rivulets of music. Several months before, she’d discovered the secret of controlling the waves with her voice, and she’d been practicing obsessively ever since Catarina had left. Now as she skimmed along the surface she let out a series of high, bright, concentrated notes, calling up a row of perfect jets of water that splashed down again as she swirled away. Then she dipped below, still singing, opening ribbons of air inside the sea.

She could even make small blobs of water levitate now. She’d been working on sculpting water in midair with tiny variations in her song, shaping transparent fish and seabirds, stars with dangling tentacles, human faces...

A spangle of shining windows to her right marked the fishing village set back in its small crook of harbor. Luce reflexively edged a bit farther out to sea. Even if no one saw her, human settlements always had an air of discomfort around them, a subdued menace. Farther on was the beach where she’d left the boy, followed by a wall of low, uneven cliffs thick with half-dead spruce. Luce swam in closer again, gazing up. Trees stripped naked on the windward side tilted forlornly out of jags in the rust-colored rock, their bare tan branches like decaying lace. She caught the flash of something white and plummeting, probably a hunting owl, and heard an animal’s cry from the edge of the woods. It was loud and determined, and Luce stopped singing to hear it better. Maybe a rabbit was screaming as the owl carried it gripped in piercing talons.