Deep Betrayal

by two emotionally ravenous creatures tearing me apart, like lions fighting over prey. I’d heard Calder talk about the mermaid’s need for human energy. Absorption , he’d called it. It always sounded so much more gentle than this.
    My mind was blank—just a buzzing sound. I couldn’t think what to do or where to go or how to do any of it if I could. And then one thought came screaming into my head: Stop!
    There was great jerk and thrust and one set of arms let go. I rushed for the surface. Gasping, I crawled through the water, frantically kicking at whatever creature was still close.
    The screeching sound was now in the air, along with another voice, grim and unforgiving.
    “Maris,” Calder said, his voice stern with warning, his arms stretched wide as if he could defend the whole lakeshore, his muscles tense and flexing. He must have heard me open my mouth to speak, because he shushed me with a backward flick of his hand.
    “Why is she alive?” Maris asked, her voice like a rake scraping my ears.
    Pavati emerged from the water, perfectly formed, more beautiful than I remembered.
    “And Hancock lives, too?” Maris asked.
    “Don’t do this,” Calder said. Long red gouges ran down his arms and back where she had torn his skin. Blood dripped from the wounds.
    Behind him, I dragged oxygen from the air in ragged breaths. I tried to swim backward, to reclaim the shore. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered Calder saying they wouldn’t kill on land. But I couldn’t make any progress; my fingers could not find purchase.
    “You know Jason is one of us,” Calder continued. His words were a calming rhythm. “Now he knows it, too.”
    Maris sneered at Calder’s familiarity with the man who had once been their target. “A little too late to do us any good. I will have my justice.” Her glaring gaze pierced me to the core.
    “You have no right to retribution,” Calder said. “Lily paid her father’s price. She fulfilled the promise.”
    “How can you say that?” shrieked Maris, the whites of her eyes showing all around the irises. Pavati laid her hand on Maris’s shoulder, but Maris snarled and Pavati withdrew.
    Calder reached toward Maris, palms out. “She promised to sacrifice herself to Tallulah in her father’s place. She didn’t back out. You saw that much for yourself. The debt is satisfied.”
    A sharp slap of her tail on the water might as well have been a slap across the face. She said, “I don’t see it like that.”
    Pavati drifted closer, smoothly, as if being pulled on a line.
    Calder continued with his argument. “Lily did all she could do when she jumped. It’s not her fault she lived.”
    “Let me speak to Tallulah. I want to hear her side,” Maris demanded.
    Calder’s voice dropped an octave. “You can’t.”
    Maris froze for just a second, the waves sloshing against her shoulders. “She isn’t with you?”
    “No,” Calder said.
    “She followed you when you left. I haven’t heard from her in weeks. What did you say to her?”
    “Nothing,” he said.
    Pavati tried again to enter the conversation. Once again, she laid her hand gently on Maris’s shoulder. “You might not be able to hear his thoughts, but read our dear brother’s face. Don’t you see it?”
    Maris studied Calder, and my heart trembled as she learned the truth. His face was always so easy to read. Calder couldn’t look Maris in the eye. Grief weighted his eyes, pulled at the corners of his mouth. When he tried to speak, nothing came out.
    “No,” Maris said. “I don’t believe it.”
    “A man,” Calder said, doing his best to protect Jack from the penance they would demand. “With a gun. He must have thought he was helping.”
    Maris threw her head back and howled; the sound filled the sky, ruffled the trees. She covered her face, and then wrenched handfuls of hair from her head. I had a strange yearning to comfort her.
    “A man with a gun?” Pavati asked. “Took quite a chance, didn’t he? He could have shot the girl by mistake.”
    That had never occurred to me. I had already been so close to death, a bullet was nothing. What had Jack been thinking? Or hadn’t he cared?
    Maris wailed. The sound would have broken anyone’s heart. It was the wind in the trees, the crash of breakers on the rocks, the cry of the gulls. It was all that wound into one.
    She pointed at me, saying, “This is your fault. Why is my family shrinking while the Hancocks all