Chapter 3
Phoebe
From the Jersey Shore to Castletide—Nightfall
At the far edge of the shadows, where the service walkway meets the dark glass, a man stands.
Tall. Broad-shouldered.
At first, I think I’m seeing a costume—one of those immersive-park actors—but his presence has a thatched quality to it.
Not theatrical, but ancient. Like the weather.
His eyes are storm-colored, and they’re fixed on me in a way that strips me bare.
He isn’t entirely a man.
Oh my God—he’s beautiful.
He’s the kind of beautiful that hurts.
My stomach is clenched, and I am hyperaware of the fact that I look like a sausage in my wetsuit.
It’s just not flattering. Like at all.
I’m wearing zero makeup, and my hair is sticking to my face from a mixture of sweat and Aggie’s splashes.
I close my eyes, certain my mind is playing tricks on me. When I open them, I look again, and my lips part.
Yeah, he’s still there and still super hot, but it’s not human beauty.
Horns curve back from his temples like black coral, slick and elegant.
Lines crawl across his skin—runes maybe—glowing faintly, like tidepools lit from beneath.
He wears black slacks that look absurdly expensive for someone in an aquarium and a white shirt so thin it clings and reveals those glowing markings.
The fabric moves with him like seafoam.
I notice his muscles—knotted, roped, the sort of anatomy that makes a body look constructed by work and wind—but there’s no time to catalog that.
My brain tries to file it away like a curious note while the rest of me roars that this is wrong, wrong, wrong.
“You—you can’t be back here!” I blurt.
My voice trembles, ridiculous and small in the cavern of my ribcage.
He steps forward.
The water curls away from him. Obedient.
He dips his chin, and it rises higher around my calves as if answering him.
As if obeying him.
I force a laugh that flakes away like dried salt.
That can’t be real. That can’t be happening.
“No,” he says, his voice low and resonant like distant thunder. “I shouldn’t be. But you called out to me, Telya.”
“Telya?” My mouth tastes like copper. The name stumbles out wrong. “That’s not my—I mean, what? I don’t know you. I didn’t call—”
“It’s the word my people use for a strong current. And yes, you did call out to me. I heard you, felt you over oceans of time and space, Telya. Now, I am here to answer that call.”
He lifts his hand, and the water answers.
“I didn’t call,” I whisper.
“You did,” he insists, “and now I’m calling you back.”
A whirlpool blooms beneath where I stand, pulling at me with a patient, insistent suck.
I stumble.
My knee hits the lip of the pool.
Cold water sprays my face.
For a stupid second I think of Aggie barking in the background, of the teacher waving at the kids, of that one mom filming everything with a smug little grin—none of them notice.
It’s like the world has closed a door and swallowed the sound.
“Wait—stop! Please,” I say, noting the water rushing around us both. “What are you doing?”
I grab the edge of the tank, fingers slipping on algae.
Panic scrapes up my throat.
No one is coming.
No one is seeing him or witnessing this kidnapping—though that word feels ridiculous at my age.
The stranger is arresting. Unearthly.
I mean clearly. He has horns and a tail, for Pete’s sake.
Power rolls off him like waves, thick and inevitable, and I’m helpless to look away.
His eyes are a storm.
They burn right through the panic and lay against some raw part of me I don’t have words for.
“I’m taking what’s mine, Telya.”
“I’ll drown!” I spit, because that’s the honest thing my chest can make, the small, animal protest of a body that knows water is both cradle and coffin.
“You won’t.”
Salt stings my nose and mouth. This isn’t the smothering, chemical tang of filtered tanks—this water is clean and cold and full of a depth that presses against my teeth.
It tastes like old maps and ship hulls and the under-singing of a tide you hear before a storm.
The whirlpool pulls.
It wants me.
My lungs burn as the current tugs at my legs. Gravity feels as if someone is rewiring it.
I plant my feet, and it rips them out, anyway.
The water is a hand with teeth, and it drags.
The edge of the tank feels slick beneath my palms. Algae fuzzes the rim, and my nails scrape for purchase.
I have to ask. I have to know why my life just fell apart into someone else’s hands.
“Why?” I force out.
He tilts his head. In that small motion he looks more alien than any documentary creature, like a predator shaped in old myths rather than in any human anatomy.
When he speaks, the words wrap around me in a way that pins my ribs.
“Because my homeland is drowning, Telya, and we need you.”
“Why me?” I ask again, the question ripping from me as the water climbs, licking at my collarbone, then my hairline.
I hang on to him the way a person clutches a rope in a storm—because the world is tilting and there is nothing else to hold.
He considers, and when he answers it isn’t what my small, terrified brain expects.
“The sea has chosen.”
Something in that phrase—ancient and absolute—catches under my sternum.
It rings through me like a bell. For one thin, electric moment my mind splinters into a hundred half-thoughts.
Quiet dinners I never had, a hand to hold that didn’t leave.
Cousins who might remember my name at Christmas.
Degrees and debt and the boyfriend who left like a season that never turned.
Aggie’s eyes, the circle of concrete she swims in day after day.
All the small, worn disappointments that have stacked into the life I keep pretending to love.
Is any of it worth begging for?
The question evaporates just as suddenly as it appeared because the world peels away, becoming just a memory.
Spectators flatten into shapes of light.
Jersey—salt-streaked boardwalk, chipper vendors, the scrim of rain—folds back like a curtain.
The roar of applause and the smell of popcorn dissolve as if someone blows them out with a hand.
His fingers close over mine—solid, warm, frighteningly human—and every small animal fear I own spikes and then steadies against that touch.
His breath ghosts my ear, dry and marine and suddenly intimate.
I am drowning, and then a voice, clear as day whispers in my mind, “Breathe me.”
He says it like an order and like a promise.
The world narrows to his mouth finding mine beneath the cold water.
When his lips seal over mine, oxygen rushes in as if he has cupped the very air and pushed it down my throat.
It’s absurd and holy.
And I can feel the logic of it in my bones.
The panic loosens its grip.
My ribs unclench. I inhale, and the sting in my lungs eases.
The water swirls around us—fast, feral, hungry—but I’m fine, still holding on to this hulking creature.
I press my mouth firmly to his because it’s the only tether left that makes sense.
I do as he says.
I breathe him.
Salt and storm and something older than language.
While everything I know washes away, while the tank shrinks into a memory, I keep breathing until the terror and the wonder fold into each other and there’s no room left for smaller things like fear.
The water spins.
I close my eyes.
And I know when I open them again, everything will be different.
I won’t be in Jersey anymore.