Waking Storms (31 page)

Rachel was still wavering and gazing nervously around when Luce took hold of her wrist. She couldn’t allow Rachel’s neuroses to ruin her chance of getting a warning to her old tribe. Luce’s nightmare of the ice blocks still had a terrible grip on her mind, and she knew it wouldn’t let go until she’d made sure the other girls were safe.

Luce kept a firm hold on Rachel’s wrist as she led her back to the tribe’s dining beach. There was Catarina’s sofa-shaped rock half-submerged as always in the lapping waves; there was the place where the black boat had bobbed with silent engines; there was the dense, rubbery seaweed matting the cliff wall, though now the leaves above the waterline were sleeved in brilliant ice. As long as the camera was still here and she could find it again...

Rachel kept twitching fearfully in Luce’s grip, but Luce ignored her as she dove to search among the brown leaves below the tide line. Kelp swirled into their faces as they squeezed close to the wall, Luce ransacking the leaves and fronds. After a few minutes Rachel stopped struggling. “Luce? What are you looking for?”

“A camera,” Luce told her absently. “I smashed it.”

“A
camera
?” Luce couldn’t have said if Rachel sounded more confused or more terrified. “Why would ... what would ... Luce, a camera here?”

After another minute Luce found it, its shattered lens still peeking blindly between two thick leaves, its black body wedged securely into a chink in the wall. Luce began wrenching leaves away until she’d cleared a pale circle of stone around it. “We need to make it easy to find again. So you can show everyone,” Luce explained. “But you have to tell them you’re the one who smashed it, Rachel, okay? You can’t let them know I was here.” If Anais thought the warning was coming from Luce she’d be sure to ignore it.

The two of them rose to the surface again. Cold wind licked their faces, and ice floes bucked on the lead-colored water.

“But Luce...” Rachel squealed. “Why would somebody put a camera here? What does it
mean?”

Maybe it would have been better to find a different mermaid, Luce thought. Rachel was already close to panic. Luce hesitated for an instant and then decided that she couldn’t afford to beat around the bush. She had to make sure Rachel understood exactly how serious the situation was.

“It means the humans know about us, Rachel,” Luce said levelly. “It means they’re watching us. It’s lucky that I found this camera, but I’m sure it’s not the only one.”

Rachel opened her mouth wide as if she couldn’t decide whether to argue or scream. In the dull blue-gray light she looked sickly, almost decaying. “But then...” Rachel gasped and stopped abruptly.

“The humans are going to come after us. I don’t know when, but it could start anytime. They’re going to hunt down the tribe,” Luce announced, then waited a second for this to sink in. “You have to show
everyone,
Rachel. It’s your job to make sure they understand. Do you hear me?” At first Rachel only gaped, but after a moment she pulled herself together just enough to nod. “You all have to get away from here. Find someplace where the humans aren’t looking and stay hidden...” Luce heard how her voice was rising now, getting harder and more urgent. “No matter
what
Anais tells you, you all have to run away!”

When Luce came close to Dorian’s village she saw that almost all the boats, including his rowboat, had been hauled out of the water and lined up on a bank dense with brown grass. The boats were all set upside down on trestles, probably to keep them from getting damaged by the ice. She and Dorian wouldn’t be able to go to their secret cave anymore, Luce realized. Not until the spring. She doubled back and found him sitting on the snow-covered beach, almost exactly in the spot where she’d thrown him ashore six months earlier. He was doing homework and didn’t notice her at first, and Luce watched him in silence.
Only six months ago,
Luce thought. How could so much have happened in such a short time? Dorian looked up and straight into her eyes.

“Hey, baby,” he said sadly, and leaned out to kiss her. “Looks like we’ve lost the boat for a while.”

She hadn’t thought Dorian was beautiful when she’d first seen him, but she did now. He seemed gorgeous to her sitting there in the dusk with his dark blond-bronze hair and full pale lips, his amber-tinted skin, his air of tattered nobility. And, she realized, the dark sparkling of the indication was almost completely gone from around him. Luce felt oddly shy. She didn’t want to tell him how she’d gone to warn the tribe, in case he was angry with her for risking another fight. After a second she decided not to mention the slick of ice covering the water in her cave either. But keeping quiet about all the important things left her with nothing to say. They were too close to his village here for her to sing to him.

Instead she kissed him. She kissed him fervently for hours, clinging to his shoulders as if something was trying to tear her away.

On her way home that evening Luce noticed a series of dots in the water ahead of her. They appeared to be moving south, and her heart skipped hopefully. As quickly and quietly as she could Luce sped along below the surface, passing her own cave, until she was just close enough to confirm that what she’d hoped was true. Through the dim green water she could see the rapid, graceful flash of mermaid tails all swimming away together. Rachel had done her job well, Luce thought. The tribe was as safe as it could be now. If the humans found their old cave it would be nothing more than a vacant, garbage-strewn hole.

She stopped to gather a supply of oysters, then turned to go home. Once she was back in her own cave Luce realized that she was now truly the only mermaid living on this stretch of the Alaskan coast. She felt more alone than she ever had before, but she told herself it didn’t make sense to feel that way. Not when she had Dorian.

***

A few days later Luce woke to find a fresh skin of ice covering the water of her cave. It was thicker than the time before, stretchy and as dark as the water below it. She tore through it easily enough, but she couldn’t help imagining that soon it might be harder to break free. When she went to meet Dorian later that day she found that the water near the shore was covered by an elastic veil of nilas some three inches thick. It bellied and fell with the waves, tearing in places, so that sheets of soft ice overlapped one another in ridges. Luce rounded the boulder that sheltered their meetings from view and looked at Dorian standing on the far side of the bending ice. He was about twenty feet away from her.

“I could try to walk out on it,” Dorian called doubtfully.

Luce felt sure it wouldn’t support his weight. “Stay there, okay? I’ll break through from the bottom.” Luce swam along the seafloor until the ice ceiling pressed claustrophobically against her head, then drove herself upward. The ice sheet swelled above her while she drove up with her fists, finally bursting through at Dorian’s feet. He knelt down, and his hands slid tenderly around her shoulders.

“Luce,” Dorian said immediately, “I’m really getting worried.” He was gazing out anxiously at the shuffling white blots of pack ice on the distant waves. “What if you got trapped under the ice somewhere and it was too thick for you to break and you couldn’t breathe in time—”

“It wasn’t like this last winter,” Luce told him, as if that could change anything. “The tribe stayed here, and they said the ice wasn’t bad at all...”

“Everyone says last winter was pretty unusual, though, like it was some kind of global-warming thing. But this year is already so cold, and the pack ice is coming like a whole month early...” Dorian’s face was against hers as he spoke. His cheeks felt burning hot after the bitter chill of the Bering Sea.

“My cave’s been freezing over,” Luce admitted, and Dorian flinched as if she’d smacked him. She hadn’t meant to tell him that, at least not yet, but somehow the words slipped from her.

“You’re going to have to leave, Luce! You should really go
now,
today, before it gets any worse. And it might be months before you can get back here, and we can’t even
e-mail
...” Dorian sounded despairing now. “Lindy says sometimes the ice doesn’t start melting until March. Even April. Luce!”

He was right, of course. Luce didn’t answer at first, just held him in her arms and tried to think of something she could do, some way she could keep reality at bay for a little longer. Nothing occurred to her. “I love you so much, Dorian,” she whispered at last. She fought to hold back her rising tears and failed.

“I love you so much, too. You’re really all I want, Luce. In the whole world...”

“What if...” Luce hesitated. “Dorian, what if I can never turn human again? Would it be better...”
Would it be better for you if I just stayed gone?
Luce thought. But she couldn’t say the words out loud.

“I love you anyway. I
want
you to be human, Luce. I want to make a real life with you and grow up with you. But I’m in love with you no matter what you are.” He pulled back just far enough to look at her. “You
promise
me you’re going to come back? As soon as the ice breaks up?”

“I promise,” Luce told him. His lips were brushing across hers, and his ochre eyes swayed across her vision like satellites.

“No matter what?” Dorian whispered. “You won’t abandon me again?”

“No matter what. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“And you promise you’ll be careful, Luce? You won’t try any more of your crazy heroic stuff?”

“I’ll be careful. But Dorian...” She squirmed in his hands, trying to pull back enough to look at him straight. She wasn’t sure if she could say this.

“Baby?” He was trying to tug her close again, and Luce knew that once he did she wouldn’t talk for a long time.

“Do you want me anyway? Even though I can’t be with you the way a human girl could?” She’d almost choked on the words, but now they were out. Dorian’s face was buried in her hair; she couldn’t tell how he was reacting.

“Hearing you sing is better than that,” Dorian murmured. His hands brushed every inch of her exposed skin from her fingertips up to her ears, and then his mouth found hers and kept it.

18

The Lost Island

Luce swam blindly away that night, barely conscious of the need to stay near the shore. Her sense of the geography was a bit hazy, but she knew she’d have to swim through Bristol Bay and then around the Alaskan Peninsula and through the Aleutian Islands. That might take a few days. On the far side she’d soon be beyond the reach of the worst sea ice, but she’d also be in areas that would probably have too many humans for comfort. But Luce had a vague memory of someone telling her that there were vast forests and wild cliffs along the coast south of Anchorage. There’d probably be caves along the waterline, and she’d find one and pass the winter in solitude. It would be lonely and maybe kind of boring, but she’d have plenty of time to practice her singing, and in a few months she’d swim home again.

Dorian would wait for her. He loved her no matter what. The fact that they could love each other in spite of everything that stood between them proved that anything was possible. The important thing was to remember that so that she could face the long, dark months ahead bravely and not crack up somehow.

She skimmed along below the surface with the dark shore to her left. Her thoughts were so full of Dorian that she barely saw the clouds of silvery fish or the dipping seals, and hours passed in darkness. She felt nothing but the sinuous movements of her own swimming. It must have been morning when she finally stopped to rest somewhere along the peninsula. The coast was low and grassy and she couldn’t find a cave, but the beach where she finally stretched out seemed isolated enough that humans probably wouldn’t discover her there. Her tail fanned through the water, and her head rested on a patch of grayish sand.

Luce slept and woke with her whole body aching, convinced in the first few moments that Dorian was sleeping beside her and that he was somehow perfectly comfortable halfsubmerged in the Bering Sea. Then she realized how alone she was, and she shivered. She didn’t even have his jacket to nestle in.

And, she suddenly remembered, there were still half a dozen of his library books stacked on a rock in her cave.

***

The constant bluish dimness made it hard to guess the time. Luce looked out on an inky sky and thrashing waves as she ate mussels and braced herself for the onward journey. The pack ice was thinner down here at least, and there was no nilas clinging to the shoreline. Her muscles were so sore that she was reluctant to face another long night of swimming, but this beach obviously wasn’t a good place to stay for long. It was too open. If she hadn’t been so exhausted she never would have stopped here at all.

The wind yowled and battered the stunted trees behind her. Luce pulled herself together and swam on, forcing herself to keep a steady pace for hours through the growing twist and push of the water. At first she tried to hug the shore, but as she went on the increasingly powerful currents threatened to overwhelm her. One towering wave caught her off-guard, swinging her high up through a blur of gray mist and then hurling her against the stone beach. For a few seconds she rolled, battered and confused, with her tail exposed and blasted by the stinging wind. She was only bruised, and she slipped back to sea on the next breaker that rolled in, but she couldn’t escape the realization that she could easily be stranded beyond the reach of the water next time.

Luce drove herself through the heavy currents, heading into deeper waters. She didn’t want to accept the possibility that a severe storm was gathering, but by the time the Alaskan Peninsula began to break into distinct, sharply peaked islands with huge slablike breakers rolling between them, it was becoming unmistakable. The only islands she could see had low, flat shores buffeted by the violent waves; there were no crags or caves where she could wait out the storm in safety.

She looked around hopelessly. At the bottom of each swell she could see nothing but sculpted walls of black water and whorls of bright foam. It was only as each wave lifted her that she could even glimpse those unwelcoming islands and the dark vacancy between them that might offer a way through to the other side. A few ice floes darted and pitched around her, and she had to dive abruptly to keep from being brained.