Female Fantasy
Nix looks at me. His sandpaper laugh scrapes against my cheek.
“She has no idea, does she?” he asks Ryke.
Ryke’s answering glare sends a chill down my spine.
I clench my fist around the dorsal fin, and my band of dolphins circles the siren in a predatory dance. Nix grimaces, then quickly regains his composure.
“Of course she does not. Why would she? For she is only a human. She lacks the sight.”
“The sight?” I repeat. “What is the sight?”
“One more word,” Ryke says, “and I will not wait for these vicious creatures to rip out your throat. I shall do it myself.”
“Ah, yes. With your enhanced strength. Funny.” Nix turns around and cocks his head at me—a challenge. “And how is it, do you think, that your fair prince gained this enhanced strength without repercussions?”
I gulp, my vision blurring. I am still faint. “We…power shared.”
“And yet you remain alive,” Nix says.
A statement, not a question.
Ryke grunts in warning.
I shoot him a look. “I need to hear this,” I tell him. Then to Nix, “Go on.”
“Do you not find it odd that centuries of mer have attempted to do precisely what your prince did in order to heal and grow strong, but all of them lost the battle and paid a steep price? Did it not occur to you that sirens would not exist if all mer had the same level of restraint as your lover?”
The blood pumping through my veins pauses. In fact, the entirety of the ocean seems to still.
I ponder his query.
The truth is, these things did occur to me.
I questioned Ryke about this very matter.
But he dismissed my concern outright, told me that he was able to take enough blood without killing me and then stop because of me.
That my reaction was enough to signal him, to wake him from his power-hungry haze.
And I accepted that, took his words at face value.
What a childish, na?ve woman I am.
I must think very highly of myself. Me, a mere human, able to control the actions of the prince of Atlantia? Of course there is another explanation.
“Since drinking your blood, the prince has evolved into a strange creature, an amalgamation of sorts,” Nix muses.
Behind him, my dolphins whine and whinny. An intimidation tactic.
“What do you mean?” I ask before I can stop myself.
Nix’s lips twitch. “Well, he is clearly no longer your average mer. Although you could argue that his royal bloodline has always afforded him certain…privileges. Advantages that we sirens were not given at birth but rather had to take by force.”
“By murdering innocents?” Ryke growls.
Nix shrugs. “You say innocents. My sisters and I say collateral damage. I am surprised by you, Your Highness. I really am. You know better than anyone that the best way—the only way—to gain power is to take it.”
My insides start to churn. What is he talking about it? What could that possibly mean?
“No, the reason you two were able to power share, to gain strength without giving up your humanity and live to tell the tale—or rather, the tail—is simple. Rare, but simple. One word, really.”
Ryke charges forward, the veins in his forehead popping. “I will cut out your tongue—”
“Lochs.”
The dolphins cease their snarling as the current around us slows.
A satisfied smirk graces the false prince’s face.
Devastation suffuses the face of the true prince from chin to brow.
I, however, remain confused.
“Locks?” I repeat, tasting the word on my tongue. “What do they have to do with anything?”
Ryke’s next sentence comes in a whisper. “I did not want you to find out this way.” He starts toward me, but Nix blocks his path. “You were never meant to feel forced by anyone’s hand, even the Furnace and its Fates. It was always meant to be your choice.”
I shake my head, still not understanding. “What was meant to be my choice?”
“Why, him, of course.” Nix purses his lips.
“You see, lochs are ancient bonds predating the written word, the mer, and perhaps even this universe. They are lore and they are law. But they are so uncommon that it is highly unlikely one will come across their own in their lifetime. Most mer do not consume themselves with looking, with wondering, or with wishing. It has been centuries since I have seen one myself.”
I store the information that Nix is hundreds of years old in the folds of my brain for another day.
“Lock,” I repeat to myself. “Like the mechanism that safeguards a door or trove?”
“No, you fool.” Nix shakes his head. “A loch is the very arm of the sea. The backbone of the tide. The intersection of the water and the earth.”
The intersection of the water and the earth.
I cannot think of a more apt description of Ryke and me.
“But in the case of the mer, your loch is your fated mate, forged by the Furnace, predestined for you at birth by the North Star. Your entire life, the North Star tries to guide you toward your loch, even when you are not aware of it.”
I look over at Ryke, whose eyes brim with unshed tears.
Ryke—my stranger, my lover, my friend—is my destiny?
My loch?
Chosen for me by the North Star itself?
I need not ask the siren for confirmation. I can see it in the eyes of my prince.
Regret.
Betrayal.
And pure, unconditional longing.
“You knew?” I whisper, needing to hear the words aloud. “All this time, you knew I was your loch, and yet you said nothing? You never thought to tell me?”
He hangs his head, unable to look at me.
“How did you know?”
I think back to the first time we met at the creek cottage.
The night he saved me from the abuse of my husband.
Was he merely claiming what was rightfully his?
I had fancied him my liberator, not my captor.
“Your light,” Nix answers for him. “When two people become interloched—that is the term for when two lochs converge, their fated journey completed—they begin to glow faintly with the light of the North Star, a blaze that grows even brighter when they are together. You cannot see your own light because you are a mere human. You do not possess the sight. But the first time our sweet prince laid eyes on you, you began to glow, and he immediately knew that you were his loch. If, that is, he had not already felt the tugs of fate, the watchful North Star, leading him to you before that day.”
I look to Ryke, a mix of horror and wonder mingling in my mind.
“I suspected,” Ryke admits to the ocean floor. “But I did not know for certain until then.”
Every hair on my body stands up straight, the muscles in my abdomen, which Ryke has helped me to develop, clenching as I fight the urge to burst into tears. “So everyone—Dylan, Guinn, the others—they all know?”
Ryke grits his teeth and nods. “The people who have not seen us together know only that I am interloched. But yes, our friends know.”
Our friends.
Not his friends. Not his Upper Shoal.
Ours.
And somehow, that makes the truth sting all the sweeter.
“They never said a word,” I mutter.
Then an even more paralyzing thought strikes me.
“Of course—the night of the ball. You knew the risk of us attending together. Everyone present knew that were interloched. We must have been glowing more brightly than the moon.”
Ryke grimaces but does not contradict me.
“Oh, Furnace help me,” I mutter as the pieces begin to fit together. “That is why you caught the attention of the false queen Talassa. That is why the battle ensued and all those mer died. Because of me.”
“No,” Ryke says sharply. “Because of me. Not because of you. I let you go into that situation blind. I put you in danger because I was afraid that if you knew, you would feel obligated to be with me. And I wanted you to choose me of your own accord. To fall…”
I wait for him to finish his sentence.
But all that follows is silence.
I shut my eyes and hear the bloody cries of the siren attack. Think of the sirens whose organs I boiled, their bodies exploding.
It is horrifying, even if they deserved it.
I killed all those creatures because the North Star decided Ryke and I were destined for each other even before I took my first breath.
Everything I have been through.
The suffering of my village.
The abusive hand of my husband…
Oh, tides. My husband.
A man who made my light dim instead of glow.
I married him, not knowing that the Fates were laughing at me.
My head throbs as I fight another wave of nausea.
As if he can read my mind, Ryke cuts in. “Please, my minnow. Allow me to explain. I was so afraid of losing you, of hurting you. Of behaving like…him.”
He does not dare utter my husband’s name.
“You needed to realize your own power. Your own strength. Merriah, you are the only living descendant of Amphitrite, the sea goddess. The ocean bends to your will. The conch calls to you. You even command a dolphin fleet.” He gestures to the battalion behind me.
“You are so more than my loch. You are Atlantia’s salvation. ”
I cannot bring myself to ask Ryke why he does not believe I can be both.