Ready for a sneak peek? I'm excited to share the first chapter of Ink: A Mermaid Romance with you. The novella is available on Amazon for pre-order. It releases June 2nd! I will raise the price to $2.99 in a bit, so be sure to grab it for 99 cents!
Chapter
1
The first
bomb exploded with a
flash of white oxygen bubbles. A sharp, piercing sound followed. I felt like my
skull would burst. Even though the pain threatened to deafen me, I suppressed
my scream. Biting my lip, I tasted blood, and my shimmering blue tail curled. I
squinted hard, covering my ears with my hands. My whole body shook, and I knew
it wasn’t over yet. Five more bombs dropped into the water. The dolphins near
the fishing vessel whistled in agony, and then became silent.
I rocked in the water, the ripple
of shockwaves rolling past me. Every muscle in my body tensed. When the pain
softened, I opened my eyes to see the bottom of the commercial fishing vessel gliding
through the water, the prop on slow. Bobbing on the waves, the dolphins floated
immobilized. Below the dolphins, tuna huddled, ripe for the picking.
Of course, they weren’t all
dolphins. Several of the dolphins were, in fact, merdolphins. I scanned the
water for my cousin Indigo. King Creon had ordered me to bring her back at once.
Something was happening at the grotto. There had been a flurry of preparation,
but I didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if the king shared his plans with me. Why
would he? I was an annoyance to him, a constant reminder of his deceased
brother who’d ruled before—and better than—him, a brother whose death had
bought Creon the throne.
“Ink?” Seaton called. “Are you
all right?”
I glanced over at him. The gruff
old merman stiffened his back, his dark purple tail uncurling. Small clouds of
blood trailed from his ears.
I nodded. “You?”
“They are using seal bombs,” he
said angrily. “Illegally.”
“When did humans ever pay
attention to their own laws?” I turned to the others, the small band of scouts
who’d come with me. It was times like this that I missed Roald who’d left the
ocean for his exile year. He would have had something smart to say to cut the
mood. But Roald was not there, and the rest of us were far too serious to make
jokes. “Everyone else okay?”
“We’ll be fine,” Achates, a
hulking merman with dark hair and a ruby-red tail, assured me. He squeezed his blades
and glared angrily at the boat overhead. There was no one we hated more than
the fishermen…well, except the oilmen. It was no wonder the mermaids of old hypnotized
and drowned humans for fun. Of course, that was before my great-great-grandfather
King Tricus outlawed siren song. His daughter, Princess Tigonea, had tried to
use siren song against her father in an attempt to usurp power. We mermaids
still suffered for her failed regicide.
I scanned the water. The bubbles
caused by the blasts faded into halos at the surface. Some of the dolphins and the
merdolphins, started to recover. We needed to get to them.
The tuna clustered under the
dolphins. Atlantic tuna were easy to find if you knew where to look. If you
hunted dolphins, you found tuna. The fishermen began dropping their purse-shaped
net. It drifted downward like a dark haze.
“Let’s go,” I called, gripping my
blades.
We swam quickly toward the pod,
careful to stay far enough below the surface to remain unseen. By sonar, we’d
just look like another pod of dolphins. Humans knew nothing about the deep. As
long as we were cautious, they’d never see us.
As we drew closer, I noticed that
some of the older dolphins had been killed. They floated like plastic bottles
on the surface, their white bellies facing the sun. Others kicked and tried to
recover from the deafening blast, swimming away in confusion. The dolphins’
blood clouded the water, filling my nostrils. This was nothing short of murder.
“Indigo,” I called, careful not
to sound too loudly. Hearing me, several of the merdolphins turned and swam our
direction. I could see from their awkward movements that many of them were
injured. Indigo, whom I finally spotted among the dolphin pod, had shapeshifted
into dolphin form. Preoccupied with one of the mother dolphins, she had not heard
me.
“Can you get them home?” I asked Achates,
referring to the injured mers, several of whom had started to shift back to
their natural mermaid or merman form.
“Yes, My Lady,” he said as he and
two of the other scouts led the wounded mers away.
Overhead, the boat motored in a
wide circle: halfway done. Soon they would close the net, and we’d be trapped
inside. We needed to work fast.
I motioned to Seaton, and then we
shot through the water. “Indigo,” I called.
She turned and whistled to me in
panic. Once we got close, I could see the problem. The mother dolphin had
started to calf and wouldn’t be moved.
“Ill-omened,” Seaton grumbled. “Nothing
can be done here, Lady Indigo. You have to go. They are dropping the net.”
Indigo shook her head, and then
stared at me, making direct eye contact. Against my better judgment, I knew
what had to be done.
“We have to cut the net,” I told
Seaton.
“Dangerous work,” the merman said
and grinned. “Best get to it.”
“In the meantime, try to convince
her,” I told Indigo, and then Seaton and I set off. I grabbed the net, feeling
the rough, human-made object in my hands. It didn’t matter how many times
drywalkers—mers who could shift into human form, mers like me—told me that
humans were kind. All I saw was the death and filth and destruction they wrought.
They were little more than barbarian apes. Land brought death. Just ask my
mother. Who knew where her corpse lay rotting in the dirt? But that death had
not been caused by humans. The Gulf tribe had killed my mother. She’d been a casualty
of our war. I barely remembered her anymore, just the shadowy memories of her
red hair, her dainty drywalker tribal mark, and the way she sang with a low
cadence. How unlike her I was with my massive swirling drywalker tribal
covering my back. While our marks were different, we were the same lot in life.
Now it was my turn to walk on terra firma. My exile year had arrived. That
night I would begin my drywalk. I shuddered at the thought, and then turned
back to my task. It didn’t do me any good to think about it now. Moonrise would
be here soon enough.
I stabbed my blade into the net
and jerked it. The net resisted. I yanked hard and soon the metal began to cut.
Below me, the massive tuna huddled together. I could taste their fear in the
water. Poor beasts. We fed on them too but not in such a barbarous way. With a
little luck, I’d have them out of there as well.
As I jerked my knife, I stared at
the boat motoring overhead. Seaton was right. Everything about this fishing practice
was illegal. The purse-seine fishing method they were using had been outlawed
years ago. Disgusting. At least merpeople honored their laws, even when we
didn’t like it.
The torn net wagged with the
motion of the waves. As I worked, anger welling up in me. If it hadn’t meant
having their refuse in my waters, I could just sink their boat and drown them
all. It was, after all, instinctual for me to want their death. While our law
forbad using siren song, which was nothing more than tuning of sound resonance,
I still felt the ancestral tug in me. I would have loved to purr a sweet song
and pull them down into a murky death. I could almost hear the tune in the back
of my head, humming from an ancient source. The song of the siren was nearly lost
now, its banishment causing it to fade from common use or knowledge. I closed
my eyes. With just a few notes, it would all be done.
“Ink?” Seaton called.
I opened my eyes. Careful, Ink. “Good. Almost there.” I glanced
back at Indigo. She’d moved the mother dolphin deeper into the water, away from
the surface, and had shifted back into mermaid form. Her blueish hair,
befitting her name, made a halo around her. She was using merdolphin magic to
dazzle the creature, talking in low melodious tones that echoed softly through
the water.
Seaton stopped just above me.
“Got it,” I said, then slid my
blade upward. The net broke in half, wagging like seaweed in the waves.
Seaton and I swam to Indigo who
was guiding the mother dolphin, holding her gently by the flipper. From above,
there was a terrible groan, then a screech as the gears on the winch sprang to
life. The net wall moved like it was alive, the tentacles of a great sea
monster closing in on us.
“We must hurry,” Seaton said.
Moving quickly, we swam through
the tear and out of the net, back into the safety of the open ocean.
The gears on the winch lurched. Water
pressure pulled the tear, causing the net to rip wide open. The tuna rushed
free. I tread for a moment, stopping to watch the sight as Indigo guided the
mother dolphin into the dark water below us.
“The pup is coming,” Indigo
called from the blackness below.
Above, the bottom of the
boat rocked, unsteadied by the broken net. The winch slowly reeled the mesh out
of the water. It looked like a dead thing, a man-made monster fished out of the
living ocean. As the fishermen moved along the rail of the ship, their images were
weirdly distorted against the surface of the water. With all my willpower, I
sucked in the death-dealing note that wanted to escape from my lips. The
massive swirling tribal mark on my back started to feel prickly and warm.
Harnessing myself in, I reminded myself that it was forbidden. I turned and
swam into the shadowy deep.
Ready for more?
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