Waterborn (The Emerald Series Book 1) (14 page)

“How long have you known?” I couldn’t quite keep the edge out of my voice. The accusation. I knew this wasn’t his fault. The fault lay with my dad, but still, he had been keeping this from me. He should have told me.

“Since the first day I saw you.”

“The day behind the shops, when Jax took your hair?” How had they done it, cornered and trapped him like that? It didn’t seem possible, even though there had been three of them.

“No.” He averted his eyes. I watched his throat move as he swallowed. “Before that.”

Realization dawned. My first night here, when the water grabbed at me. I remembered the swell I’d felt in my chest, the Song that had burst through my head almost without me knowing.

I’d called him that first day, and he’d come, not knowing who I was. I didn’t want that kind of power over him. Yet, here he stood.

“Why you? I mean, there are others like you…” I gulped, still barely able to grasp the idea of another species, even with the proof of it standing in front of me and the proof of it humming under my skin. I still felt human enough, but Noah was definitely more—so unquestioningly, obviously more. “Like us. Why you?”

“I don’t know,” he said as though he’d asked himself the same question over and over.

“So, we’re not really friends. It’s just this…” I waved my hand between us, not knowing what to call this connection we shared.

“I can’t speak for you, but I am your friend, Caris. I will always be that.”

My throat tightened and I looked away, not wanting him to see how his words affected me. They soothed the raw edge of my raging emotions and grounded me to center when everything felt like it was spiraling out of my control. “You must hate me.”

His mouth quirked in a half smile. “No. I don’t hate you.”

“That day at Ellie’s tank when I told you I couldn’t swim. Why didn’t you tell me then?”

“It wasn’t my place. And I didn’t want you to know the whole of it.” He grew another inch on his expanded breath, eyes shot with challenge, refusing to be cowered by me, no matter he was at my beck and call.

“That you heard my Song,” I supplied the words he wouldn’t say.

“Yes.” He had said he didn’t hate me, but he wasn’t happy about it either. His whole body radiated rebellion.

“So you know who my real father is.” I saw that man clearly in my mind, standing on his boat, taking a old line of coiled rope from me.

He nodded, jaw clenched tight, and this time when he looked at me, his eyes pooled into softness. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

He lifted his hand and I held my breath, waiting for his touch. It didn’t come. His eyes lingered on my neck.

“Do you remember what happened?”

“He cut me and I fell. And then you came. I wanted you to come.” Unexplainable tears threatened at the remembered wash of emotions.

“Yes.” Noah had been careful to keep his distance, but now he stepped close. So close I could smell the scent of the Deep on his skin. I recognized it now, because now I recognized it on myself. “Sol keeps his knife laced with dreamweed. It’s a hallucinogen. But mostly it just makes people forget stuff.”

The name sparked a vision of black eyes, piercing in the fog. The flash of a knife. My hand floated to my neck and the mark there. “He did this. Sol did this. Why would he do that to me?”

“Because he’s a tool, and honestly, I don’t think he knows who you are.” His fingers were gentle on my jaw as he turned my head, exposing the column of my throat and the cut Sol had made. He lifted a small section of his hair and held it over the mark, squeezing water from the ends. It ran down my neck, warm and tingling. When my fingers traced the spot, the skin underneath was smooth, completely healed. I sucked in a breath.

“How did you do that?” I stared at his hair, now clumped over his shoulders. “Is that why Jax took your hair?”

“No. It’s the water that heals,” he said.

“Sol knows what I am. I think that’s why he came.”

“But he doesn’t know who you are, not in relation to him.”

“What does that mean?” My eyes found his.

“Athen is his father. Sol is your half-brother.” He delivered this information as though he found it extremely distasteful. Totally understandable.

I felt my eyes widen. “Well, shit.”

“Yeah, that was my thought exactly.” He lifted his hand and I tensed as he ran his thumb over my bottom lip, a barely there touch. With all that had happened, I hadn’t even noticed it was swollen and tender.

“That was my fault. I should have been more careful. I thought I hadn’t gotten to you in time.” He applied the slightest pressure with his thumb and my lips parted. I wondered if he would work his magic and heal my lip too. He dropped his hand, a hard look in his eyes, and he stepped back, putting some space between us.

I wanted to demand he close it again. Demand he put his hand on me again. Suddenly my Song didn’t sound so innocent anymore. It crawled around in my head with the sharp claws of a crab, pinching and poking. I needed him to leave because I wanted so much for him to stay.

It was all too overwhelming: My dad’s lies. The truth of what my mother had endured at the hands of a man she had driven insane with her Song. Noah, and what he had just done to heal me. Despite the assurance he was in no danger from me, I didn’t know if I was willing to take that chance. And I had a brother, who, for all intents and purposes, had almost drowned me.

“You should go.” I wrapped my arms around myself, eyes searching for the expanse of the Gulf. I wanted to immerse myself in the water. In that moment, I thought I was the one in danger of going crazy.

“Caris.” He reached out for me and I held up my hand, backing farther away, shaking my head. It was too much to think about, and with him here it made things seem so much more complicated.

“Just, go. Please. I want to be alone.”

He looked disappointed, but he did what I asked. I watched him disappear into the surf, fighting the impossible need to follow him. I was left alone with only the waves to keep me company. I looked back at my house and the square windows of light shining in the dark. I couldn’t face my dad, not yet. My insides still felt raw with betrayal. And the water wouldn’t have me, or if it did, it was with malevolence, as though it were angry with me. As though it didn’t recognize me. I stood in the sand in this place of in between—a purgatory between what I was and who I was born to be. Neither felt right.

I didn’t belong anywhere.

I
didn’t feel
like myself. Caris’s Song had me tied up in knots. I heard it in the unguarded moments when instinct took over and the swell of her emotions overrode conscious thought. Then her Song would filter through me, sometimes in a trickle of warmth, sometimes with a searing heat. I wanted to go to her and shield her from the hurt with my own body and slay all her dragons.

That’s how I viewed Sol, as one of her dragons.

“You just couldn’t leave it alone, could you?” I found Sol a few miles offshore, the lights of his boat the only visible thing on the dark horizon.

“Your little songbird is real cute. How tight a leash is she keeping you on?” he mocked me through a cloud of smoke, the end of his blunt flaming bright when he inhaled.

Usually the details of someone’s life didn’t concern me much but now I wished I’d paid more attention. I knew Sol’s mother lived in Miami and he’d been sent to live with his father after he’d served his time. In some respects, Sol was the total opposite of his father. They were probably the wealthiest among our tribe. And while Athen lived pretty much like a hermit on his thirty-year-old fishing boat, Sol enjoyed the spoils of their businesses, both legit and not so legit. When he did come landside he spread his sleazy charm in opulent style. His boat was brand new and custom made, fitted with the latest in technology. The teak wood gleamed under the stars. The plasma flat screen glared through the cabin window.

I hated that I liked it.

“It’s really none of your business. Why do you care anyway?”

“I always care when this degree of magic is involved. And that girl is perfumed in it. It’s quite delicious. Who is she?” He raised the cup in his hand and took a lingering drink.

As if I was going to be the one to tell him. Sol made it his business to know everything, especially if it involved the tribe. This was one piece of information I was going to enjoy keeping to myself. Mr. Harper and my mom had changed him from a rival to a damn nuisance. Now I just wanted him to stay the hell away from her. I was surprised he hadn’t figured it out already. He must be losing his edge.

“Just a girl.” I crossed my arms in front of my chest and stared at him.

“I never use the word
just
when it comes to girls, especially one that looks like that. Care to share?” Sol cocked his head and smiled.

My body reacted before it could consult with my mind. That smile fled the minute my knife lodged itself to the hilt in the cushion behind him, a hair’s breath away from his cheek. But not before nicking his cheekbone right under his eye—a thread of a cut.

“Leave her alone, Sol.” I could imagine him breathing fire. I could imagine the two-inch blade of my knife was two feet of honed steel.

A good thirty seconds passed with us staring at each other.

“Careful, Noah. You might have put an eye out.” Without taking his eyes off mine, he pulled the knife out.

If I had wanted to put his eyes out I would have, and he damn well knew it.

“I assume you have some duct tape to patch that up with.”

“I don’t get you, Noah. You go apeshit when I even mention this girl, but when Jax takes your hair you don’t do a damn thing about it. The guy should have been strung up by his balls.”

“Jax is an idiot who’s into kiddie pranks. I don’t waste my time with idiots.”

“Well, don’t I feel special.” He tossed my knife back. “He takes, Noah. They all do, systematically putting us in our place. We’re better than this. Better than getting pushed aside while they build up around us, choking us out of existence.”

“We have no choice but to coexist and haven’t for a long time.” How had I let him lure me into some asinine conversation that had been recycled for decades? Caris had asked me to leave her alone and I’d done it. It hadn’t been easy though. A part of me was waiting for her to call me back to her side. The other part just wanted to hit something.

“Coexist?” Sol blew a line of smoke. “It’s called containment, Noah. They gave us a stretch of beach and put a building on it in the name of research when it’s nothing more than a prison. And I should know. My father was well acquainted with the place.”

I shuddered at the thought of being held prisoner. I could barely ride in the Bronco without feeling suffocated. To be locked away in a cube with no sunlight, no open water? I’m surprised he had survived. But I sure as hell didn’t want to start feeling sorry for Caris’s father. He got what he deserved.

My nose pricked with the scent of churned up dirt. I searched the swells around the boat. I couldn’t see them but I could hear them. I’d never been able to figure out how they managed to make so much noise swimming. It was like elephants tromping through a jungle. Even the boat rocked on the water from their approach.

“Really?” I looked at Sol. “You hanging with these guys?”

Swampers, we liked to call them. Backwater rednecks of the coast. Technically, they were a part of our tribe, but they were bottom feeders, scavengers, like worm-infested amberjack.

Like most boys, we had liked to play games, and the higher the stakes the better, especially if it involved getting to hit somebody. Competition had always been fierce between us boys of the coast and the boys that lived in the bogs of the eastern panhandle.

The rules of the game had been simple, kind of like capture the flag, only the flag for us was our hair. Coasters against swampers, the team with the most flags won. The penalty for the losing team was that you had to take a hit for each flag lost. As for our team, we had decided each man—hell, who was I kidding? We had been boys, especially me and Jeb—would take his own penalty. If you were dumb enough to lose your hair, you paid for it. Jeb and I had been the youngest by a couple of years, and they grew them big in the swamplands. Poor Jeb, his hair grew so fast he was always a target. That first round, Jamie let us each take the first five punches before he stepped in and took our penalty. Then I got faster, Jeb got stronger, and we won more than we lost.

We’d stopped the game the first time one of us had seen a braid hanging from the mirror of Jax Harrison’s car. It was one thing for us to steal from each other, a way to hone some evasive skills in the water, some hand-to-hand skills on land, but for some dumbass lander to spit on us by getting involved? No way. We’d grown out of it, but apparently Jax hadn’t.

“Once you get used to the stench they’re not so bad.” Sol shrugged. “They like to live hard, play hard. Nothing wrong with that. You’re a snob.”

Maybe that was partly true. Mostly I remembered how hard Levi could hit.

Three of them shot out of the water like barracudas. Levi, his younger brother Sammy, and their cousin Zach. The boat rocked so hard Sol nearly fell off his seat.

Levi was big and lumbering, a real teddy bear, but with a mean streak. As a species, we didn’t tend to carry much body fat, but Levi carried more than most. He was the only one of us I could ever remember seeing that had any kind of a belly. It hung over the band of his gator skin shorts like an inner tube. I was pretty sure it was the beer. Sammy and Zach looked more like twins than cousins. Same wiry build, same shock of red hair. They all had the same golden-brown eyes.

They didn’t see me at first, so I watched from my little corner as they exchanged high fives with Sol. I had never, and I mean not once—even since we’d quit the game—been within twenty yards of these guys that we hadn’t ended up in a fight. It’s just what we did. I didn’t think tonight would be any different. It was just a matter of how fast Levi could get me to take the first swing. I always did. It seemed the guy was born to push my buttons. Tonight, it wasn’t going to take much.

“You in some kind of trouble? You’ve been laying low for a while,” Levi said as he slapped Sol’s hand.

Levi was a legend in the swamps of St. Joe. He liked to wrestle gators, eat them, and then make clothes out of their hide. His knife hung on his waist, wicked sharp, and when he hit you, you heard and felt it for days.

“Nah. I’ve just been chilling.” Sol nodded to a cooler on the deck. “Grab a drink, fellas.”

Well, that just plain hurt my feelings. Sol hadn’t offered me a beer.

As they fished around in the cooler, sloshing melted ice, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“Testy are we?” Jeb sided up next to me.

“What are you doing here?” I couldn’t say I wasn’t glad to see him. Jeb was younger than me, but most people would say he looked older. Taller by an inch and thicker through the shoulders, he was also more levelheaded, and by some people’s accounts, more mature. Two things I needed when I encountered Levi.

“I followed their stench and thought I might keep you from getting killed. Just keep cool. Don’t let him goad you into the first punch.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” I muttered.

“Hey, Levi. Throw us a couple.” Jeb’s voice sliced through their chatter, silencing all of them. An eerie quiet settled over the boat like we were passing through the eye of a hurricane.

Levi turned around, his face breaking into a malicious grin. He cut his eyes to Sol. “That was hospitable of you to provide the entertainment.” He nodded at Zach, who threw us each a beer. I really didn’t want one, but I popped the top and took a drink anyway.

“I do what I can.” Sol sat back and kicked his feet up, as though he had planned this on purpose.

“Looks like you two girls have finally grown up. Learned how to take a punch yet?” Levi lifted his beer and took a swig. “Come hang with us in the swamps and we might make men out of you, after all.”

“Sorry, Levi. Your sister’s already done that. And I have to hand it to you, you taught her well,” Jeb said. He was probably telling the truth and Levi knew it.

The air shifted on a burst of heat, a visible current running around the boat. Ghostly fingers stretched out of an otherwise dark night, wrapping around themselves in the air—a display of one of the things we liked to keep to ourselves. I was pretty sure it wasn’t coming from Levi. Fog was Sol’s thing.

Levi’s eyes narrowed on me and I braced myself for what he was about to say, willing myself to stay calm no matter what. For a second his eyes looked like the gold coins Maggie used in some of her jewelry. Then his face lost its hard edge and his eyes wandered back to Jeb. He smiled, and then he really did look like a teddy bear. A big ol’ happy, cuddly bear.

“I see your friend Nemo’s back.” He jerked his chin at me. “Did you find what you were looking for Nemo? Find your daddy? Or was it your brother this time?”

“Shit,” Jeb said under his breath, but I was already airborne.

My fist landed smack in the middle of Levi’s jellied paunch. The good thing about being able to take a hit was you could take a hit. The bad thing about being able to take a hit was you could take a hit—over and over and over.

Right eye.

Adams apple—which had me bent over and wheezing.

Knee to the jaw.

Left eye.

Kidney—Sammy had snuck up behind me.

We had a rule about fists only, so the knife strapped to my thigh was off limits, as was everyone else’s. Blood poured from my nose and my knuckles screamed. I might have broken my hand. Levi was stronger but I was faster, which dragged the thing out even longer. He was moving so slow after about five minutes it was pretty easy to duck.

And then I stopped ducking. Pain exploded in my abdomen and radiated down my legs. My breath was gone. I didn’t care. This was why I’d let Jax take my hair. I’d deserved it. And I deserved to get my ass kicked. I’d lost my brother. I’d left my mom. I’d let Sol get to Caris. And since Jamie wasn’t here to do it, I let Levi do it. My arms fell lax at my sides. I swayed on my feet, the night sky spinning.

I heard Jeb yell my name. I found him in that tunnel of spinning faces and smiled at him. Then all I saw was Levi’s fist coming at me. Like a meteor in slow motion, I waited for it to hit.

It was the last thing I remembered.

“
W
hat the hell
happened to you?”

Of course my mom was there to watch Jeb drag me out the water. He dumped me in the sand at her feet. He was good and pissed at me. I was surprised he didn’t leave me for the sharks. I certainly resembled a bag of chum.

“Your boy here’s been picking fights with people not his own size. And then enjoying getting his ass kicked. Masochist.” Jeb actually kicked sand at me.

I lifted my head off the sand and glared at him through my left eye. The right one was still swollen shut. He was doing this on purpose, making me stew in my pain when another half hour in the water would have taken care of it.

“You picked that fight. His sister? Really?” It was hard to sound incredulous with a busted mouth. I sounded like a cartoon character.

“Have you seen his sister?”

“Go home, Jeb.” I let my head fall back into the sand. As soft as it was, it still jarred my brain.

“Here.” My mom took my hand and made me sit up. She handed me a bottle of water. It had to be three in the morning. What was she doing out here? “Drink this.”

I drank about half of it then poured the rest over my face.

“There’s some food up at the house. I’ll take care of him,” my mom said, relieving Jeb of his babysitting duties. Jesus, they were like a tag team.

“Thanks, Mrs. Jacobs.” Jeb’s feet scraped through the sand, and I was left alone with my mom and a skull-splitting headache.

“What are you doing out here? It’s the middle of the night.” I eyed her with my good eye. She wore one of my dad’s old t-shirts. It was big and black and hung on her like a tent.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

She was a terrible liar.

“You were waiting up for me?”

“You did run out rather abruptly. Left quite a mess.”

I had forgotten about the door. I had run right through it, shattering the glass. Had that been this afternoon? It felt like days ago, not hours.

“I’m sorry.” I was about to say I couldn’t help it but I thought it was more in that moment, I hadn’t cared. My only thought had been to get to Caris.

“Patrick helped me clean it up. I’ve already got somebody lined up to replace it tomorrow. You going to tell me what’s going on? Is this about Rena’s daughter?”