Chapter 2
At first, I thought the faint cry in the distance was a seagull. Like anyone who lived on the coast, I ignored it.
When the shout came again, closer and far more strident than any seagull, I twisted at the waist to glance over my shoulder at the dunes. Jerry came into view, unmistakeable in his bright yellow wellies. I lifted an arm.
He yelled when he spotted me, and sprinted towards us, his short legs pumping. Whatever he said, I didn’t hear it. The wind that was whisking his ginger-grey hair around snatched his words away and blew them inland.
I returned my attention to Dave. I didn’t want to take my eyes off him for longer than necessary.
His head was still in my lap, his body sprawled out long and limp. I had two fingers tucked into his cool throat, feeling his pulse. It was rocketing along. One hundred and eighty beats per minute, by my last count.
As far as I knew, one hundred and eighty was entirely normal for a merman.
Maybe it was even slow. How would I know? I had a heart condition, and on doctor’s orders I regularly checked my blood pressure, blood oxygen level, and pulse. I hadn’t ever thought to check Dave’s.
So his pulse was banging away at my trembling fingertips. Didn’t necessarily mean it was a bad thing. Right? For Dave?
It could be normal.
He could be fine.
Jerry shouted again. He was close enough now for me to hear distinct words. “For god’s sake, Joe! Is he stuck in a net? Dead? Give me something here!”
The sand vibrated beneath me as Jerry pounded up and crashed to his knees on the other side of Dave. “Shit, my knees.”
That wasn’t addressed to me. I doubted he was aware he’d said it. He said things like that all the time these days. Shit, my knees. Crap, my spine. Fuck, my hip.
He was in his sixties now, and he was not enjoying it. His wife, Marcy, had taken to shoving glucosamine and cod liver oil tablets down his throat every morning. It didn’t seem to be working yet.
He reached out and slapped a hand to Dave’s throat on the other side from mine, fingers going unerringly to his pulse. He let out an agonised gasp of relief and sagged onto the sand. “You could have told me he wasn’t dead, you knob.”
I tried to reply but nothing came out. Nothing other than a garbled little bleat of distress.
Jerry’s angry expression smoothed away. “All right, lad,” he said to me. “It’s all fine. We’ve got him now. We’ll sort him out, don’t you worry.” He glanced down at where Dave was sluggishly oozing from the horrific wound that arced around his side.
The big one, that is. He had a few.
Jerry grimaced. “Aw, poor Dave. He’s right banged up, isn’t he? Bright side: whatever got him spat him out. Eventually. Oh. Don’t throw up.”
“Not going to throw up.” I sleeved my nose and blinked rapidly. The thought of Dave being…of him fighting, and not… “Ow. Jerry. What the hell!”
He’d leaned over Dave’s prone body and poked me in the sternum.
Hard.
“Pull yourself together, Joe. No time for swooning.”
“I am together! This is me together! I am fine!”
“Yeah. Okay. You seem it. Hey, he’s coming around.”
I stopped glaring at Jerry to find that Dave’s eyes were slitted open. The gleam of dark indigo looked almost black in the stark white of his face. He was always pale, even after a summer of sunning himself on my lawn, but not this pale.
Dave sighed, a pained vibration of sound. He cut his gaze to Jerry. His lips hitched at one side and he grunted with satisfaction.
Then he blacked out.
And shifted.
“Well, that’s going to complicate matters,” Jerry said. “Thanks, Dave.”
The good news was that, because we were on my sheltered beach, no one was around to see the giant merman, and feel the overwhelming urge to tell TikTok about it.
Also, I’d been right about the weather, and while I’d been waiting for Jerry, the day had gone from bright and cheery to grey and blustery with scattered rain.
The kind of tourists who thought themselves special enough that the PRIVATE: NO TRESPASSING signs didn’t apply to them were also the kind to huddle in the coffee shop or tearooms whenever the sun went in.
So much for the good news.
The bad news was that Dave in his human form had been impossible for me to drag up to the house. Even with Jerry’s help, it would have been a struggle.
Dave in his merman form was well over eight feet long and probably weighed about the same as a Holstein bull.
We didn’t have a chance of moving him.
“Right.” I sat back on my heels, shoving my damp hair out of my eyes. I rested one hand on Dave’s side above his gills. I couldn’t stop touching him. It had been over six months since I last did.
We’d parted in the autumn a few times now. I accepted it. Didn’t like it, but I accepted it. It was part of loving Dave.
Now that I knew he’d come back to me, it wasn’t so hard.
Just…he had to keep coming back. He had to.
Jerry leaned over and poked me again.
“Ow.” I smacked his hand away. “Stop doing that.”
“Stop drifting off, then. I mean it. We’ve got to stay focused. For Dave.”
“Yes.” I blinked my misty eyes clear and blew out a sharp breath. “First things first. We need to get him up to the house and out of sight.”
Jerry looked over my shoulder and down the length of the beach to the short flight of rough steps that became a track winding up to my small house on the headland. He winced. “How are we going to do that, you reckon?”
We both stared at the magnificent, unconscious, enormous merman between us.
“We’re not getting him off the ground between the two of us, I know that much,” I said.
“I could get Vinny and Patrick over here. They’d help.”
“No.” I didn’t hesitate. I liked Jerry’s brothers—well, I liked Patrick. Vinny was a dick—but no.
“You can trust them. I swear.”
“I only trust you, Jerry.”
He tried not to puff up at that. He failed miserably.
“We’ve got to handle this between us.” I gauged the distance from where we were at the water’s edge to the steps and the headland, and then from here to the dunes.
I sagged. “We can’t carry him, we already know that.
And I’m a good driver, but I don’t think I can get the Hilux down here without moving a few dunes first.”
Jerry scoffed.
I glanced over at him, and back at the dunes. “You think I can?”
“No, that was because you think you’re a good driver.”
I glared at him. “Do you think you can?”
He sucked his teeth, then shook his head reluctantly. “Been a long time since I went off-roading. Doesn’t matter, anyway. There isn’t a wide enough path through the dunes, even if I tipped it.”
“Okay. Cars are out. There’s got to be something else we can get through the dunes.”
We looked at each other.
“Quad bike!” we both said at the same time.
Jerry whooped. “Quad bike and a trailer.”
I shook my head. “Quad bike, yes. Trailer, no. Even if we could heave him up onto it in the first place, which we’ve already established we can’t, a trailer will be too wide, like the cars. And too long. It definitely won’t be able to take the narrow turns.”
After a thoughtful minute, Jerry shrugged. “We tie a rope around his tail and we drag him.”
“Jerry. You complain enough about what the road does to your piece of shit Land Rover. Think about what it will do to Dave. It’ll shred him. He’s already…look at him.” My voice broke.
“My car isn’t shit, it’s vintage, the road won’t shred him because it’s asphalt, not rocks, and obviously I meant drag him on a tarp or something. All right?”
“Okay. Quad bike and tarp. Um. You have either of those hanging around? Because I don’t.”
“I know a guy.”
Of course he did. Jerry knew everyone.
“Who’s the guy?”
“Johnson. Sheep and a few head of dairy, up over Millburn way. ‘Bout twenty minutes, give or take.”
I wanted Dave home. “Do you know anyone closer?”
“No one who owes me a favour, I don’t.” Jerry whipped out his giant iPhone in its bright yellow case that matched his wellies. “I’ll give him a call.”
I hated the idea of dragging Dave behind a quad bike like a dead deer or something, but if I wanted to get him home and safe, it was our best bet.
His breathing was short, the broad span of his ribs rising and falling much quicker than usual.
While I’d never taken his pulse before today, I’d logged many hours lying on him, being lifted and lowered with each inhalation and exhalation and I knew that, at least on land, he breathed once a minute. Twice if he’d been working hard.
Now, he was breathing at a rate that would be normal for a human, and his pulse was going at a rate that would be normal for a hamster.
I couldn’t hold back the worried whine that slipped out of me. I felt so helpless.
I’d spent years worrying about him coming back to me. I’d focused mostly on whether or not he had the will to do it, not whether or not he could.
It seemed laughably short-sighted of me.
Jerry was talking loudly in the background but I didn’t pay enough attention to make sense of the words. He’d get us a quad bike and a tarp, I knew it. And if for some reason he couldn’t, I’d drive to the nearest dealer and buy one.
No, I’d give Jerry my credit card and make him go.
I wasn’t going to leave Dave. Not for a single second.
Jerry finished his call and turned to me. “Right. I’m gonna go pick it up. Got Johnson’s ATV for the afternoon. He doesn’t have a tarp I can borrow and it’s a fair bit out of the way but I can swing by the harbour.”
I blinked at him.
“Got plenty of nets on the Mary Jane,” he explained.
“No. Absolutely not.”
“Come on, it’s perfect.”
“No! He hates nets! You know he does! He destroyed three of my hammocks before—” I broke off and snapped my fingers. “Hammock.”
“Hammock,” Jerry said at the same time, pointing at me.
Back in the courting phase of our relationship, by which I mean back when Dave was stalking me, he’d come upon me lounging in my hammock in the back garden on a glorious summer afternoon.