Epilogue
Verity
I'd always loved whales. Until the day one tried to kill me.
Or maybe it didn't. Maybe it just wanted to play and didn't consider that it was so much bigger than the RIB.
Either way, it hit us like a truck, slamming into the boat from the side. The impact tore through the inflatable’s hull with a sound like thunder. There was no time to radio for help. We were in the water before we could blink.
One moment, we were laughing about the playlist Hugo had put on – Under the Sea, of all things – and the next, the world flipped upside down.
Cold swallowed me whole. The sea punched the air from my lungs, and I barely remembered to close my mouth before the saltwater rushed in.
My life jacket yanked me upwards, forcing me to the surface just in time to see the whale’s tail fin rise like a mountain behind me, then crash down, sending a wave that rolled me over again.
When I surfaced a second time, coughing and choking, it was gone. Its work was done.
The sea around us was a chaos of foam and debris. The overturned RIB bobbed nearby, half-submerged. The engine hissed and spat before dying entirely.
“Hugo!” I gasped, throat raw from salt and panic.
He surfaced a few metres away, eyes wide, coughing up seawater. “I’m here! Jammie?”
A spluttered reply came from somewhere to my left. Relief, sharp and fleeting. All three of us. Alive. For now.
We tried to stay afloat as the sea rocked us like rag dolls.
There was nothing around us but endless blue – no shore, no boats, no sign of rescue.
The Minerva, our main vessel, had to be out there somewhere, but the swell made it impossible to spot her.
The horizon was a jagged line between sea and sky.
I tilted my head back and stared at the sky. A single gull circled high above us, its cry thin and lonely. The world was too vast, too silent, too indifferent.
I’d always loved whales. Their songs, their grace, their impossible size. It’s why I had spent my adult life studying them. But floating there, tiny and breakable in the endless ocean, I realised love could be as dangerous as it was beautiful.
Now, we could only wait to be rescued.
Or to become part of the deep.
Maelis and Cerban got their happily ever after, but will marine biologist Verity find her finman? Find out in Rainse, the third book in the Starlight Mermen.