Water and Fire (12 page)

Oh,
Aidan…what I'd give to be back in your arms tomorrow.
Destiny be damned.

The timer trilled and Mother
graciously left me alone. My time was up.

I picked up the plastic test,
pressing my lips together as I peered down to see what it said.

"Is it time to go to the whales
yet?" Zerafina asked, almost bouncing in her eagerness.

I roused myself from my
memories. I didn't often think of Aidan, for five years had passed
since I had last seen him, but I tried to keep the memory
fresh.

"Almost, sweetheart," I
replied. "Give me a moment."

I closed my
eyes and wished the young doctor a healthy and happy life, the
least he deserved for kindling a fire that would never go out. When
fire and water mix, they create something extraordinary and new,
but they cannot survive together.
I'm
sorry. Sirens do not stay with humans, especially not
when…

"Come on, Mummy! I see one!"
Zerafina squealed, as a thick, curly lock of red hair blew into her
mouth in the strong winds. She spat it out again before darting off
in front of me, toward the approaching whales. Her fiery tail
glinted in the morning sun as she flicked it furiously to increase
her speed.

I sighed and dove through the
water after her, my golden tail rippling in a more leisurely
fashion, with far more power than my daughter's. I resolved to
venture on land in the near future, to drink a glass of whiskey and
toast the health of her father, whose fire could never survive
beneath the ocean's surface as my people did.

After all, Aidan couldn't swim.

This novella
is a prequel to
Ocean's Gift
and
Ocean's
Infiltrator
, both books in the
Ocean's Gift
series.
Belinda is one of the main characters in
Ocean's Gift.

My books tend to be set in
Western Australia in the present day, which means my characters are
likely to appear in stories which are not their own.

For example,
Aidan is a minor character in
Nightmares
of Caitlin Lockyer.

Where else Aidan may appear in
future books…I can't say, for I have a strict no-spoiler policy.
Yet I can promise he will.

What follows
is a bonus sample section from
Ocean's
Gift
, available in ebook and
paperback.

The ocean gave him to me.

I was angry, as any girl of
sixteen would be. I'd been ordered by my elders to go and find a
strong man, one I could join with to produce a healthy child. My
hopes, my dreams and my plans were of no consequence. My destiny
was to entice a man to choose me as his plaything – to be a piece
of flesh to bait a shark. Or to be a baby seal, tempting a killer
whale? The example did not matter. The end would be the same – the
end of my control over what had been my life.

I swam in the storm, revelling
in the power of the waves, which pushed a little wooden sailing
boat through the maelstrom on the surface over my head. Two men
struggled to control the small craft with two wooden oars, the
vessel's only means of propulsion once the sail was torn away in
the wind. One man dived from the boat, slicing into the water like
a knife surrounded by bubbles. There was a line of twisted fibre in
his hand as he swam with difficulty for shore.

The little boat rocked in
reaction to the diver's spring. The wind caught the remnants of the
sail, a big wave washed over the side and the vessel tipped under
the surface, sinking slowly. I dodged through the debris as it
drifted in the current away from the little boat.

The surface above me churned
where the second man had been thrown into the water. He thrashed
around and it was clear he could not swim. The waves pushed us
together and he clung to me, his arms warm as he wrapped them
around me. I gave him my breath and took him to the surface. As we
drifted between the waves, still he would not let me go.

He called me his Lady of the
Sea, his angel. I gave him my breath again, before I dove under the
waves with him.

We surfaced near a small island
of sand, washed by the waves. Here he would be safe.

He shivered, in wet clothes on
wet sand. He called me Santa Maria, his Lady of the Sea who had
answered his prayer.

If I was to save him, I had to
keep him warm. Yet I had no human accoutrements, nothing warm or
dry with which to assist him. Only me.

I concentrated on my form,
letting my tail part, my skin pale and my gills fade. To save this
man, I needed to be human.

Or as close as I could be.

He kissed and clung to the
naked human girl by his side, who could think of only one way to
warm him. He kissed my lips and my blood responded with a wave of
heat, akin in power to the waves of the storm on my body.

We warmed one another, as the
storm and the waves raged around us. He clung to me even when
exhaustion claimed us.

When I awoke, the storm had
dissipated. I could return this man to his people and he would
live.

Whilst he still slept, I
carried him through the water to the island where his kind lived.
Yet in the deep water there were sharks, attracted by the man's
blood.

Mine.

Leaving him floating on the
surface, I charged the sharks, shouting my claim to drive them off.
It came to blows to drive the last one away, before I could return
for my human.

Yet he was not on the surface
when I returned. The water in his clothing had dragged him down,
into the deep where he could not breathe. I gave him my breath,
over and over, in a poor, cold imitation of his ardent kisses, yet
I could breathe no life into his body.

The ocean gave me this man, his
life to save, then stole his breath even as I tried to save him.
The man who called me an angel, Maria, as he loved me for a
storm.

I cursed the islands, for they
were cursed already. I would not go ashore on these wretched rocks,
to conceive a child to take back to my sisters in the deep. No
child conceived in such bitterness would survive inside me to be
birthed at the Nursery Grounds. So I resolved to tell my elders,
when I returned to them.

I cannot carry a child for you.
Even the ocean is against it.

In a sea of rebelliousness, the
girl he called Maria was lost, as I turned tail and dove deep.

I like setting up remote mining
camps. Inland Western Australia is one of the few places in the
world where you can drive out of civilisation in the morning and
know you're in the middle of nowhere when you stop at the end of
the day.

I'd arrive at a cleared site,
where the carpenters were just putting together the construction
camp buildings we called dongas, and when I left it was almost
ready for the mining crew to live in. We were creating civilisation
where there had been nothing, just plants, animals and red dust.
And when the mining crew left, we'd pull the camps apart like Lego
and pack them up to be shifted somewhere else on the back of a
truck. The plants and animals would move back in around and under
the buildings while we were there and they'd reclaim it completely
when we left. The red dust was ever-present. You never got rid of
it, because it got everywhere and into everything.

The bad part was that the camps
weren't inhabitable until we finished. So, while we worked, we
lived rough. We were the last people who actually camped there. We
slept in swags and cooked outside, in the beam of the spotlights on
the top of the car, which was a ute. There was one ute to two men,
and I shared mine with Dean the plumber. Dean was full of shit, so
it seemed natural that he was a plumber. Still, he was a better
cook than me and a good mate, too.

Our supplies were packed into
the tray on the back of the ute and the trailer behind it. We had
enough for the job and a bit over, but never enough water for much
more than drinking and cooking. After a week, we were all dreaming
about hot showers.

Like all the other mine
construction crews, we had to go back to town eventually and we got
to stay in a hotel for the night, before they flew us all home. It
was a ritual by now. I checked into the hotel with all the other
blokes who were covered in red dust. I got my room and I got to
shut the door to everyone else. Then I took a shower.

After endless weeks of basic
camps, where sometimes the best wash you got was a swim in the
river, the hotel shower was heaven. I used up all the hot water and
all the liquid soap, just to get the gritty feeling of red dust off
every bit of my skin. Shit, it felt good. Almost better than
sex.

Which I
haven't had for longer than I've been without a hot shower.
I tried not to think about it. Now I was going to
have some holidays in civilisation, who knew what would
happen?

I slept in silence and
darkness. When I opened my eyes, the sun was up.

I got dressed quickly, my legs
feeling bare in shorts after so long in site pants that kept out
the sun and the snakes. Even a short-sleeved t-shirt felt weird. My
feet felt like they'd been freed from prison in my rubber thongs,
after weeks of thick socks and work boots.

I crossed the car park from my
room to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. I wasn't the only one
dressed this casual. Most of the guys were the same, toes wiggling
in relief under every table. Anywhere else, this might be strange.
In a mining town, it was normal.

"Hey, morning, Joe!" Dean the
plumber called from a table by the window. After working on the
same crew so long, I should have been sick of him, but I was in
such a good mood I'd put up with him one more morning over
breakfast.

"Morning," I responded. I went
up to the breakfast buffet and grabbed a plate, loading it up with
as much as I could. I dumped it on the table, in front of the seat
across from Dean, and sat down.

"Coffee, sir?" A waitress came
up behind me with an electronic order pad.

My mouth
watered. I'm not sure if it was her or the thought of real coffee
that did it. Probably the coffee, I decided. The waitress looked
like she was sixteen and fresh off the farm, dark roots showing
through her bleach-blonde hair.
Too young
for me – I'm more than ten years older than she is. Besides, she
looks like my sister.

"I want a proper expresso, so
thick the spoon almost stands up by itself, and after that, I want
a latte," I told her.

"Two coffees, sir?" The little
waitress looked confused, which made her slightly cross-eyed.

"Ohhh, yes,"
I replied
. Definitely the coffee. Her
boobs are too small. I like bigger boobs than that.

I started shovelling breakfast
into my mouth, barely tasting it. What I did taste was good,
though.

I'd finished my first plate and
filled up a second by the time my expresso arrived, in a tiny cup.
I savoured every sip until it was gone.

Dean was just as focused on his
own breakfast, so it's not like I was being rude. Besides, what
else did we have to say, after months of having no one else to talk
to?

He laughed at my expression as
I enjoyed the expresso. "So, now you've had your coffee, what do
you plan to do with your two months off?"

"I'm not sure," I said slowly.
I shoved the last half a croissant in my mouth.

"I'm going to go home, get
drunk every night in a different pub and see how many hot chicks I
can pull, before we're back in the middle of nowhere again." He
looked dreamy. "How about you?"

He'll be
lucky if he manages to talk even one of them into sleeping with
him
, I thought.
And I'll be hearing about how hot she was for the whole of
the next shift, and how she did everything in every porn movie he's
ever watched, which she won't. When he gets sick of that, he'll
tell me the plot of every porn film he's ever watched, in his own
words. There's nothing worse than a badly told story with no plot
and nothing but descriptions of imaginary sex no one could ever
have.

I swallowed the last of my
croissant. "Nah, I want to go on a fishing charter, one of those
boats that just go out and fish for a week. Then I guess I'll see
if I can pick up a bit more work, rewiring people's houses and
stuff to get some more money, until we head out to the next hole in
the ground to set up camp."

"You work too hard. You have no
fun at all, mate. Still living at home, what are you saving your
money for?"

"When I've
got enough, I'm going to buy a house outright. Then I'll look at
settling down, maybe finding someone to spend the rest of my life
with. Maybe even have a family."
Two years
and I'll have enough money to buy a house. Then I can finally move
out of my parents' place and start living. I'll never have to spend
another night listening to other men snoring, or share breakfast
with fuckwits like Dean.

"You need to enjoy life,
brother. Have a good time." Dean winked.

"You're not
my brother."
Thank God for that.
"And I am going to enjoy my time off. I'm going
to spend at least a week fishing, once I work out how to arrange a
charter," I reminded him.

"I got a cousin who does some
charter fishing out at the Abrolhos. Best fishing of your life, off
the coast of Geraldton. I'll give him a call, see if I can set you
up," he promised.

Yeah, and pigs will fly.