Swans Landing #1 - Surfacing (20 page)

“I know this hard for you to understand, Mara,” he started.

“You
don’t
know,” I snapped. “I feel like everything I’ve ever known to be true is a total lie. How did I grow a fin and breathe underwater yesterday? How is that even possible? I have lungs, not gills. I’m
not
a fish!”

Lake flinched at my outburst. “No, you are not a fish. I told you before, there is a difference between fish and mammals. You’re a person, being finfolk doesn’t change that. Your lungs breathe like any normal human’s would, but the finfolk genes allow you to also pull oxygen from the water as well. You are amphibious, but you are still a person. Even a doctor wouldn’t know the difference unless he studied your DNA.”

I bent over, pressing the palms of my hands into my eyes until I could see colorful spots. “I’ve been in the water before now. Mom and I used to vacation at the lake sometimes. Why haven’t I changed?”

“You can only change in saltwater. Your body craves salt, doesn’t it? Other people might complain about a dish being too salty, but for you, it’s never had enough. Right?”

My breathing quickened as Lake’s words settled over me. I wanted to deny all of this, even though I had seen my legs change with my own eyes, even though I had felt the excruciating pain rip through me as my body transformed itself. This wasn’t normal.

But then, had anything in my life ever really been normal?

I lifted my head to look at him. “Why didn’t Mom ever tell me?” My voice sounded like a child’s, quiet and small and trembling slightly.

Lake’s expression softened and his eyes turned glassy with tears. “Your mom thought she was protecting you. Relations between humans and finfolk have settled into mostly a tense existence next to each other here, but back when your mom left it was very different. She didn’t want you to have to live as an outcast your entire life. And she was afraid that one day you would choose to live in the water instead of on land, like she saw so many others do back then. She didn’t want to lose you.”

I kept silent, thinking about my decision to leave the island. What Mom had hoped for me didn’t matter now that she was gone. She wasn’t here to make everything okay again. There was nothing left to keep me tied to the land. I had lost her before she’d ever had the chance to lose me.

Lake ran a hand through his hair and let out a long sigh. “The life of a finfolk is one of choice, Mara. You will
always
have to choose between the land and the sea. You can move between both if you want, but every day you’ll be faced with choosing whether to live in one world or the other and you will never fully be a part of either. The water will always call to you and the hardest thing you’ll do in your life is making that decision whether or not to come back to land. In the water, the land will want you back and sometimes it’s too strong to keep fighting.
That’s
why your mother took you away, so that you wouldn’t have to make that choice. We wanted to protect you.”

“Then why didn’t
you
choose?” I asked. “Why didn’t you come with us?”

Lake’s shoulders slumped and he let his stringy hair fall into a curtain over his face. “I can’t.”

“You don’t want to. Mom and I were never enough for you, were we?”

“That’s not true—”

I held up one hand to stop him from making anymore excuses. “If you had ever cared, you would have come after us, no matter what.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

My instincts led me to the sign in the little parking lot without my realizing where I was going. The trees at Pirate’s Cove shivered in the cold wind and somewhere deep within I heard the call of a few birds. The forest didn’t look quite as creepy as it had Sunday night, when I had nearly gotten lost inside. When Josh had kissed me.

Leaving my bike behind, I sucked in a deep breath and plunged into the forest. I stuck to the trail, trying not to search the shadows for any sign of my mom. What exactly had happened that night? It couldn’t have been my actual mother. She was dead and buried back in Tennessee. Besides, it wasn’t the mom that I’d known in recent months, but the mom that I used to know, before the cancer took over. Tears blurred my vision as I remembered the sight of her darting through the trees, looking healthy and happy.

I stopped for a second to scrub at my eyes, then continued on. It was a nice place to be forgotten, here in the forest on a mostly isolated island. Maybe that was what Josh was doing in the forest that night, trying to be forgotten.

Just as I started to feel suffocated by the trees, I broke through to the small sliver of beach on the other side. The bright blue sky stretched on for miles into the distance, meeting with a green and shimmering ocean. I searched the horizon for a long time, but there were no signs of finfolk leaping out of the waves, only seagulls drifting on the wind.

I found a place halfway between the trees and the water and sat down.

Dylan and Lake had both mentioned finfolk leaving the island and disappearing into the sea. Where had they gone? Maybe they had returned home, to the place in Scotland where finfolk once lived. Or maybe they spent their lives searching for a place to belong, but never really finding the right fit.

Lake was right about one thing. I would never fully belong on land or sea.

I never heard footsteps or any sound that gave away his approach. Yet suddenly, I felt him there, only a few feet behind me. Something like a whisper stirred inside me, picking up on his presence.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” I asked, not turning around.

He walked the last few feet between us and sat down next to me, propping his arms up on his knees as he looked out at the water. “Probably,” he said.

I studied him, memorizing the shape of his profile so that I could remember it during my long swim. “So?”

“So I didn’t feel like going,” Josh answered.

“Couldn’t stand a day in school knowing I wasn’t there?” I asked, the laugh getting stuck in my throat on the way out.

Josh was silent for a few seconds before he said, “You do have a way of livening up an otherwise mind-numbing place.”

“If you’re so interested in my presence, maybe you should have done something other than stand there yesterday while your girlfriend ran her mouth. Maybe then I wouldn’t have punched her.”

Josh shrugged, but I detected the faint hint of a smile at the corner of his lips. “Maybe she’s not my girlfriend. And maybe I thought she could use a fat lip too.”

I couldn’t help laughing. Warmth spread through me, despite the cold wind that blew over the water at us. We watched a few birds flying low over the ocean, swooping to scoop up fish along the surface.

“So what was that the other night?” I finally asked.

“What?”

I looked at him, raising my eyebrows. “That humming we heard. And the fact that I saw...” I swallowed hard. “I saw my dead mom.”

“You saw a memory,” he told me. “It wasn’t really her.”

“How?” I asked.

Josh raked his fingers through the sand, drawing clouds and birds in the golden grains around himself. I reached over and added the waves of the ocean below, leading back to me. His brow creased in deep concentration, as if he were thinking of how to answer my questions.

“I read that book you told me about,” I said. “I know about finfolk.”

He raised one eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.

“I know they exist,” I added.

Josh’s dark eyes stared deep into mine, searching for something, like he had the day we first met. “And how do you know that?” he asked.

I took a deep breath, steadying myself to say the words. “Because I am one.”

It was a test, to see if Josh knew as much about finfolk as I suspected he did. And as expected, he didn’t look confused or surprised at my statement.

“There aren’t many finfolk left here,” Josh said.

“Why does everyone hate them so much?” I asked.

But now, Josh seemed more eager to answer my earlier question than this one. “It was a finfolk song,” he said.

“What?”

“The other night, during the new moon,” he said, nodding back toward the trees. “You heard a finfolk song.”

“Where were they?”

“They were here.” Josh gestured toward the water in front of us. “Every new moon, the finfolk still remaining here gather together in the water and sing. It’s a time of reawakening, new beginnings, so they sing to call lost finfolk. Trying to call them back home. Finfolk are able to come and go between the water and land as they wish. Some spend more time on land than they do in the ocean, trying to live human lives. But every new moon, every finfolk in the area has to go back to the water. Like they’re driven to it by instinct.”

It was no coincidence that I had come to Pirate’s Cove that night then. The ocean had called me.

Josh
lifted up handfuls of sand, letting the golden grains slip through his fingers back to the beach. “How do you know so much about them?” I asked.

“My dad was obsessed with them. He had tons of books and journals and had conducted all kinds of interviews with the finfolk still on the island. Sometimes he watched them during their new moon rituals.”

“Do you still have his research?”

Josh looked out at the water as he said, “No. My mom discovered me reading my dad’s papers a few years ago and she burned them all.”

“I’m sorry,” I said simply.

“It’s fine,” Josh said.

A few seagulls flying overhead turned their attention on us, circling around to check to see if we had any food to hand out. My fingers trailed back and forth through the sand as I watched them.

“So the song,” I said, “was it the reason I saw my mom in the trees?”

Josh nodded. “Yeah. For other finfolk, the song beckons them home and makes them follow it to the source. But in humans, it causes you to see what you want most, what feels like home to you. Because you’re half-human, the song can affect you both ways. And in your case, what you want most would be your mom.”

“If I saw my mom, does that mean you saw your dad?”

He laid back in the sand, putting one hand behind his head, and blinked up at the sky. “No,” he said. “In the past, I have seen him. But this time I saw something else.”

I waited, but of course Josh didn’t continue. Getting him to have a normal conversation in which each person actually revealed their thoughts was almost like a trip to the dentist—slow and numbing.

“What did you see then?” I prompted.

Josh turned his head toward me and his fingers inched across the sand until they barely touched mine, sending chills throughout my body. “You ask a lot of questions,” he said.

Josh and I only briefly made contact, but I felt that same dizzying, hazy sensation I’d felt the night he kissed me. But our being together was impossible. I was leaving today, diving into the ocean and swimming as far as I could just as soon as I gathered up enough courage. Even if I wasn’t leaving, we could never really be together. Being finfolk had torn my parents apart. I didn’t want to do the same to Josh.

But in spite of this knowledge, I lowered myself down so that I was lying next to him on the cold sand, our noses only inches apart. He looked frightened. I felt frightened. My hands trembled, so I held onto the only thing I could for support—Josh’s hand.

“Have you ever felt as if you’ve never really belonged to the rest of the world?” he asked in a whisper, so low I could barely hear him over the sound of the ocean roaring around us.

From the moment I’d met Josh on this beach, he’d taken me on one roller coaster of emotion after another. One minute I wanted him to kiss me, the next I felt for sure that I hated him and wanted nothing to do with him.

He rolled over on his side, tracing a finger along my cheek. I closed my eyes, shivering at the delicious tingles of his touch. The world outside of us had stopped existing. I didn’t even notice or care how much sand had stuck to my back and hair. There was Josh and there was me and that was it.

When our lips met, an explosion erupted inside of me. My arms went around him on their own, pulling him closer to me. His lips trailed down my cheek, over my jaw, and along my neck. His hot breath on my skin sent a warm tingle down all the way to my toes.

Just as quickly as we’d started, Josh pulled back. I felt his absence on my skin immediately and I had an almost irresistible urge to pull him back toward me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I have to tell you something,” he said, propping himself up on one arm.

“What?” I asked, my lips still electric and bruised from his kiss.

Instead of answering, he stood and reached down to pull me to my feet. We walked toward the edge of the foaming ocean, close enough that the bottom of our shoes touched the water whenever the tide rolled in.

I sucked the salty air deep into my lungs as I looked out over the water. Something inside me stirred and sang when I looked at it. It called me, urging me to dive back in. It would be hard to resist its call for much longer, but I wanted these last moments with Josh before I left him behind forever.