Where the Tides Pull Him (Mermate #3)

Chapter 1

Grayson

Frog legs? Again? Grayson’s last meal in his hometown was the epitome of redneck delicacy. How fitting.

“What’s that sour look for?” his mother snapped. “Too good for frog legs, Mr. College Degree?” Decades of misplaced rage hung in thick lines from his mother’s face. Her hair, wispy and graying, was scraped back into an old, tortoiseshell claw clip.

“No!” he said hastily. “I was… worrying about the chemicals in the water. I heard they make the frogs gay.”

“Not in Mineral Bluff, they don’t. That’s some city bullshit.” His mother gave the plate a dark look. “Go wash up, boy. And call your brothers in.”

Boy. As if he wasn’t a twenty-five-year-old, adult man.

Admittedly, he’d been forced to return home after completing his nursing degree and training, but only after six glorious years of relative freedom from his family.

And, assuming all went as planned, he’d be free again in just a few, short hours.

Grayson stepped out onto the decaying back porch and yelled, “Jameson! Dawson! Food!” That third part was what sent his younger brothers scurrying from the copse of trees behind the old house. Two perfectly normal, all-American boys—the antithesis of Grayson himself.

His parents knew their precious firstborn son was an Omega from day one. Yet, years of practice in the art of denial created the perfect environment for his parents to simply say, “No.” And that was that.

Grayson himself didn’t even know he was an Omega growing up.

Not until the heat cycles came. In the most humiliating night of his life, Grayson had been forced to stumble from his dorm and drive himself to the emergency room.

It was a form of torture he’d never had to endure until that night.

Some overworked ER nurse was forced to gently explain to him that he was an Omega and had entered his first heat.

“Did Ma cook them frogs we caught?” Dawson demanded. He was the youngest, at only fourteen. His long, lanky build was just like Grayson’s. They even shared the same pale blond hair and skin that was eighty-six percent obscured by freckles.

“ ‘Course she did,” twenty-year-old Jameson said with a shove. “We didn’t do all that work for nothin’! Pa home yet?” he asked Grayson.

“Nah. Probably at the bar right about now.”

Jameson rolled his eyes and started pushing Dawson toward the spigot at the side of their ramshackle family home.

Grayson opted to wash up at the bathroom sink, like a normal person.

Part of him was grateful for the years he spent acting in front of his family.

His whole town, actually. It made it easier to conceal the frantic thudding of his heart behind his thin chest.

In just a few hours, he would be sneaking out of this musty old hellhole for the last time. With that thought spinning on repeat in his head, Grayson smiled his way through dinner, doing his best to still the trembling in his fingers.

He barely registered when his brothers started deriding the Mer, scoffing at the “alien overlords” and proclaiming distrust of their technology. Their mother was quick to join in, though she, too, had never known life before the Mer.

It had been fifty-one years since the Mer fell from the heavens and plunged into Earth’s oceans. The changes were slow—a steady rise in sea levels, a strange increase in babies born intersex. Then, the Mer emerged from the depths.

The invaders deflected bullets with terrifying ease, and eventually, humanity gave up the fight. As time passed, human Omegas became fully established as a secondary gender—though only a fraction of the population had been affected.

The Mer, on the other hand, consisted exclusively of Alphas and Omegas.

In Grayson’s miniscule town, and at his little community college, he’d never had the chance to encounter a Mer, whether Alpha or Omega.

Anti-Mer factions claimed Alphas were violent, aggressive creatures, while the Omegas were weak and sickly.

A shred of these rumors were true. It was the whole reason the Mer had abandoned Usoi, their home planet.

Radiation ravaged the planet’s waters, and destroyed fragments of the Mer genome.

It had left their Omegas nearly incapable of producing healthy eggs, and brought the species to the brink of extinction.

That was, until they found Earth, and its population of intelligent beings capable of live birth.

“Right, Gray?” Jameson was staring over at him, mouth twisted into a furious frown.

“Oh, yeah, you’re absolutely right.” Grayson shoveled the last of his dinner into his mouth. “I gotta get to bed if I’m waking up at 4:30 to head out deer hunting.”

His mother gave him a curt nod. “You better bag somethin’ this time, boy. Don’t go wastin’ our bullets. Pleased to see you tryin’ to do somethin’ useful for once.”

Grayson mumbled a vague agreement and fled the dining room. His duffel bag was mostly packed already. He’d already gathered up his secret items, like facial cleanser and sunscreen. All he needed now were the few outfits that didn’t involve camouflage.

No one could accuse him of not playing his part well.

Sure, the neighbors whispered about his disinterest in dating, and his parents repeatedly nagged him to bulk up, but no one hurled gay slurs at him, and his status as an Omega was collecting dust in the attic.

The thought of existing somewhere he could simply be was both intoxicating and petrifying.

Out in the hallway, Grayson could hear the sounds of his brothers and mother shuffling off to their respective rooms. Jameson and Dawson would probably be up past midnight playing Call of Duty, but that also meant they wouldn’t hear him leave.

Grayson’s wiry frame was wound tight with apprehension.

The car would arrive at the end of the road at 1 a.m., and he’d be free.

Grayson had considered leaving a note, but figured his family wouldn’t care either way.

The old analog alarm clock ticked under orange lamp light, edging its way to the final hour.

About ten minutes before one, Grayson couldn’t take it any longer.

He seized the worn handles of his duffel bag and slipped from his bedroom.

The house was dark, lit only by a sliver of crescent moon.

The aging wood floor creaked like gunfire with each tentative step he took.

He cringed at a low squeak from the screen door as he left his childhood home for the last time.

In the distance, a set of tail lights glowed from the end of the road.

Grayson’s heart was thundering in his throat. He was really doing it, he was really going to be—

“Where th’hell’re you goin’, boy?”

Grayson yelped, staggering back across the porch. His father, swaying and reeking of beer.

“I said,” the old man slurred, “where’re you goin’?”

“I—” Too high. Grayson cleared his throat and reached for the lower register he needed to survive.

“I couldn’t sleep, sir. So I thought I’d put a few things in the truck for tomorrow morning.

” His lungs felt like they couldn’t expand any further, yet his head swam with lack of oxygen. Lloyd Miller was not a happy drunk.

His father’s too-pale, bloodshot eyes pierced into his for a few tense moments.

“If anythin’ gets stole from tha’ truck, you’re payin’ for it.” Without waiting for a response, his father staggered into the house, banging the screen door behind him.

Grayson let out a shaky breath. The last thing he needed was to show up at orientation with a black eye.

Slowly, he rounded the house, toward the truck.

The moment he knew he was out of sight, Grayson bolted.

His boots pounded the pitted dirt drive and kicked up sprays of dust in his wake.

The red lights were a siren song, calling him toward the sea.

There was a man leaning against the car door, staring up at the night sky. At the sound of a madman running in his direction, the man straightened. Grayson slid to a stop in front of him, panting.

“Are you… my driver?” he wheezed.

“I’ll assume you’re Grayson Miller,” the other man said with a laugh. “Hop in. Just the one bag?” He was older, with a slight paunch and thinning hair.

“Yeah.” Grayson threw his worldly possessions into the back seat and scrambled through the front passenger door.

“Settle in,” the driver said as he situated himself behind the wheel. “It’s gonna be a long night.”

∞∞∞

Grayson awoke with a jolt when the engine cut. Morning light streamed through the windshield, and in the distance, the ocean glittered. It was hard to believe that just fifty years back, this city was nowhere near the ocean.

“We’re here,” the older man said, yawning as he stepped out of the car to stretch. “Orientation facility is just over there. Go through the big glass doors, and reception will take care of you.”

“Thank you,” Grayson said, dazed. I’m here. I’m in Gainesville. I’m going to leave the mainland. No matter how many times he repeated these facts, none of them felt real.

“Good luck.” The man slid back into his now-bug-splattered sedan and pulled out of the empty parking lot. Grayson clutched his bag to his body and tottered on numb legs toward the facility entrance.

The sliding doors were larger than normal, like the ones he’d seen at his old hospital. They whirred open to reveal an artfully curved, oak reception desk. The woman behind it smiled at him.

“Can I get your name please?” Her hair was intricately braided and fell over her shoulders. A name tag peeked out between the strands, with “Destiny” stamped across it. Some kind of sign from the universe, Grayson decided.

“Grayson Miller,” he said hoarsely. When was the last time he had a sip of water?

“Miller… Ah, here you are. Labor and delivery RN slated for the Omega midwife program?”

“That’s me.” He could hardly hear her over the pounding in his ears.

“Well, let me show you to your room first, then I’ll have about a million documents for you to sign.” Destiny stood, a neat pencil skirt just skating over the tops of her knees. “Follow me, Mr. Miller.”

His body was on autopilot as he trailed after the receptionist, watching her braids sway across her back.

She was wearing some kind of sweet perfume, like vanilla and caramel.

It left a faint trail in her wake. She paused at a simple, navy door and unlocked it with a key card.

The Paeil Islands government seal—an albatross with an olive branch in its beak—was stamped across it.

“Here’s your room key,” Destiny said. “You’ll just be in this room for one night, and you’ll be out of here tomorrow morning.

” She flashed him a reassuring smile. Her pearly teeth made for a beautiful contrast against her deep brown skin.

“When you’re all settled, come back out to reception, and I’ll get you started on that paperwork. ”

Grayson staggered into the room and collapsed on the narrow mattress inside. The room was tiny—just big enough for a bed, wardrobe, desk, and bathroom. The linens were all crisp white and the floor polished tile.

He stared up at the ceiling for a moment, processing. He was actually here. He’d pulled it off. Everything felt surreal, like he might wake up in his childhood bedroom at any moment.

Grayson pulled his phone from his jeans. It was still in airplane mode—he was too much of a coward to see the furious calls and messages roll in once his family realized he was gone. His thumb hovered over the screen.

Nope.

He tossed it onto the pillow and got to his feet.