Waterborn (The Emerald Series Book 1) (13 page)

“And you didn’t think to tell me then?” I had asked point blank who that man was, and still he had lied.

“Seeing him…” His hands ran down the sides of his face. “It was a place I wasn’t ready go. This is hard for me too, Caris.”

“No. You don’t get to do that. I won’t feel sorry for you.” I pointed my finger at him, shaking with accusation, or just shaking. I hated the gentleness in his eyes. “And quit looking at me like I’m a cancer patient. You’ve been doing that for years. My God, so many times you could have told me. The day I got off the bus, crying when Roscoe was making fun of me because of my hair. He called me a boy.” My lip quivered, remembering. I had spent the next year brushing my hair every night, hundreds of strokes, until my hand cramped and tears stung my eyes. I had never understood why my hair wouldn’t grow. My mom had long flowing hair, the picture held proof of that. I couldn’t be like her if people thought I was a boy.

I ignored the anguish in my dad’s face. This was his fault. “And the time I fell in the pool at the country club? The scene I caused?” It had been a waking nightmare. I had been wild with fear, everyone staring and whispering because I wouldn’t quit screaming, insisting a monster lurked in the bottom of the deep end.

“All the stupid excuses to prevent me from coming to the beach on spring break with my friends. You lied over and over.” And now he was telling me that my mother had believed me to be dangerous.

Cursed like her.

“And what about the other day when Noah brought me home? If you know all this, you have to know what he is. Even then…” God, my head was going to explode. My hands gripped over my ears, trying to make some sense of all my jumbled thoughts whirling around like chunks of debris caught in a funnel cloud. A tornado raged in my head. “How could you do this?”

“We were scared for you, Caris. Your father was a monster.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. That he tried to defend himself when clearly he had no defense. He took a step forward, tried to get close to me, do some stupid daddy thing like hug me.

“No.” I shoved him in the chest so hard he stumbled backward and nearly fell. No, these weren’t my hands. I would never shove my dad. But he wasn’t my dad; he’d been lying to me. He seemed surprised by my strength. I was glad for it.

“No,
Dad
.” I put as much venom in the word as I could. “You’re the monster.”

I wanted to cry. I wanted to go back home and pretend I had never come here. But home was here, a place that didn’t yet recognize me as belonging. I had to get out of this house and away from this man who had been keeping terrible secrets. I spun on my heels.

“Where are you going?” He followed me through the kitchen, hand grasping my arm at the same time I reached for the door.

“Let go of me.” I jerked my arm free, leaving him grasping at nothing but air. “I hate you.”

His face fell as though I had just punched him. Good. I wanted to hurt him. My fists bunched at my sides.

“Caris, wait.”

I slammed the door behind me, heart pounding, every breath a concerted effort as I realized I had nowhere to go.

Noah
.

Something I wasn’t quite ready to acknowledge forced me to banish his name from my thoughts. I had my bike. A bike my dad had given me. I saw it now for what it was: a diversion. Another lie. I grabbed the handlebars and took to it without a thought to where I was going. Did it really matter?

Did anything really matter anymore?

“
D
id
you know I was one of these waterbreathers or whatever?” I stood on Erin’s front porch under the soft gaslight coming off the fixture hanging overhead. I had ridden through the darkened streets, legs pedaling until I had felt nothing but empty.

Even empty hurt.

“Oh my God, Caris, are you all right?” Erin flung her arms around me, pulling me into an embrace that threatened to break the dam of tears, threatened to undo all my hard work of keeping control. How funny was that? I had never been in control of anything.

“Did you?” I pleaded.

“Not until today. Not until Sol showed up.” She wrapped her arm around my shoulder and ushered me inside the two-story foyer.

Music drifted through a set of double doors as I let her lead me up the stairs to her room. The pink walls offered a kind of familiar relief, as did the lavender incense wafting through the air. I went straight to the bed, fell face first on the mattress, and the dam of tears broke, gushing with enough force to rack my body.

I knew I’d been right to come here when she let me cry it out, offering no words of comfort, asking no prodding questions, and making no promises of rightness when everything was clearly not right and maybe never would be again. At one point she disappeared into the bathroom, bringing back a roll of toilet paper. I put it to good use, blowing my nose until the bed was littered with wadded up tissue. When it seemed my tears were dried up, I sat up, eyes puffy, nose still running.

“Your dad called and told me you were home safe. I’m sorry about the boat, Caris. I had no idea. But Sol was right. Noah found you?”

“Yes.” I wasn’t going to tell her the rest. That I had nearly drowned in the process. The whole ordeal felt surreal, like maybe it hadn’t really happened.

“Noah’s been texting me for the last hour. He never does that. He’s worried about you.” She held up her phone and a line of messages filled her screen.

Not worried enough. He hadn’t told me the truth when he could have so many times. I had been half out of it on the beach, but I remembered the look on his face when he’d told me to go talk to my dad. He’d looked scared. And he’d left me.

“Are you going to be all right?” She sat down next to me on the bed.

“I don’t know.” I flipped over on my back, searching the ceiling as though I could find answers in the stars scattered there. “I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

“So tell me what you do know and maybe I can help you figure it out.”

I recounted as much as I could, as though I were telling a story about people I didn’t know, people who didn’t matter. This couldn’t be about me, about the people I cared about. Hearing it again, coming off my lips, didn’t dull the impact. Instead of a heart, it felt like I had a big stone lodged in my chest.

“Wow,” she said. “Here I was thinking I had the most tragic story.”

It was only a crack of one, my smile. This was why I had come here, because if Erin could still make jokes after losing so much, maybe eventually I could too.

“Thank you,” I said. “You’re a good friend for letting me blubber all over your bed.”

And really that’s all I had come here for, a place to blubber where my dad couldn’t hear me, a neutral place away from the man who had been lying to me. Away from the water that called me. My body begged me to respond, but I wasn’t ready. I wondered if I ever would be. I had thought about it while riding my bike—leaving, going back to Kentucky, and pretending none of this had happened.

“It’s a good bed for blubbering.” She cleared a path through discarded tissue and lay beside me, resting her head on her elbow. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of the vulnerability that never quite left her eyes. Remnants of well-hidden hurt, the ghosts of what she’d lost.

I rolled over and we stared at the ceiling and the expanse of pretend stars. They were beautiful and peaceful, almost like being outside. And for the first time since Sol had walked onto that boat, I was able to relax enough that it didn’t hurt to breathe. It didn’t hurt to think.

“Jamie made that for me. We used to spend hours watching the stars on the beach. He did this so I would think of him every night. As if he wasn’t on my mind all the time anyway.”

“Did you always know what he was?” It still seemed too unbelievable, the existence of another species of humans that had somehow managed to keep themselves so well hidden.

“You can't live here all your life and not hear stories. And I knew the first time I saw him there was something different about him. I used to watch him swim when he thought there was no one around. He was so beautiful, graceful and powerful all at the same time. Overwhelming, really. I never would have had the courage to say anything to him, and I thought I was content with my long-distance crush.”

“So what happened? How did you meet?” I lapped up the distraction she offered.

“One day he just stalked right out of the water straight to my hiding place and, without saying a word, he kissed me. Turns out he’d known all along I’d been watching him.” Her words created a dream that I felt like I’d lived before. And maybe I did every time I saw Noah.

“You win.” I tucked my hands under my cheek. “Your story is beautiful and romantic as hell, but definitely more tragic. I’m really sorry.”

“Well, yours is just beginning, and I have a feeling it has a happy ending.”

“How can you say that? I just found out I don’t even have a family. Not a real one. And I’m not who Noah thinks I am. I don’t know how to be what he is.”

We lay quiet for a few minutes, watching pretend stars while I contemplated my pretend life. The promise of a happy ending seemed so far out of reach.

“Was the baby… you know, like Jamie?”

“No, she wasn’t.” I could hear the sadness and longing in her voice. “We never would have been able to have a baby like Jamie. Both parents have to be breathers. Kind of caused a stink actually, me taking another one of them out of the breeding pool.”

“I think I knew. Ever since I can remember, I’ve felt, I don’t know… off. The first time I stepped out on the beach and the breeze hit me it was like my skin started peeling away. I’m scared.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of. I used to wish I were one of them, to be a part of Jamie’s whole world, the most important part.” Erin turned her head to look at me with her deep chocolate eyes and smooth flawless skin. A strand of dark hair fell over her cheek.

“I can’t even swim.” Apparently I could sing though. A Song that had the power to hurt someone without me even trying.

“Yeah, I have to admit I had my suspicions about you. But when you told us this morning you couldn’t swim, I decided I must be wrong. I wouldn’t worry about it though. You have Noah to help you. He’d swim bleeding through shark-infested waters to help you.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that.” I pushed myself up from the bed. I had been trying not to think about Noah, but his parting words came back to me, bringing with them a tide of anguish.

Call me and I will come.

That’s how he’d found me. The night after being in Erin’s pool, he’d grabbed me and looked me in the eye and asked me to stop. He’d been trying to tell me. I just hadn’t been listening. I shivered, though it had nothing to do with being cold.

She sang and he heard and in the end it drove him mad
.

I didn’t remember leaving Erin’s house. I remembered riding home with only one thought on my mind.

Noah and I were cursed.

A
ll my life
I wanted to be like my mother, hoped I was like her. And now that I knew I was, the knowledge felt like a burden instead of a blessing. A dream turned nightmare.

As I stood on the beach, a few yards away from where the foamy waves rushed over the sand, I wished it weren’t true. Maybe my dad was wrong. Maybe my mother had been wrong.

My hope was dashed as soon as the Song came, easy and instinctive. Echoes building and swirling in my head like the breaking of so many waves. I felt the purpose of this Song in a way I hadn’t felt before. I recognized it for what it was now. What before had come as the result of wayward thoughts, produced by uncontrolled feelings, now came with a violent edge.

A command.

A part of me prayed he wouldn’t answer, that he wouldn’t succumb to the power even as it seemed to fill me with a sense of vitality.

Minutes later, Noah emerged from the surf, surrounded by the foamy break. Power radiated off him in a fine mist. Somewhere in the fog of my mind, I remembered his strong arms wrapped around me as he wrestled me from the force that had been holding me to the bottom of the ocean. Was it because I knew what he was that I could see him so clearly, or was it that he no longer had to hide that part of himself from me? Did we all wear a charm of some sort? All I knew for sure was that no mere human had eyes like that. No mere human moved with such graceful strength, as though he commanded the water itself.

Our eyes locked and held. We circled each other with wary steps. This wasn’t the same boy I’d rescued from a pack of bullies. This boy was wild, defiant and snarling silently, caught in the invisible trap of my Song.

Where did we stand?

Yesterday I would have said we were friends. Now I didn’t know. He stopped an arms length away. Was he afraid to come closer? No wonder he had looked at me with such animosity before. He didn’t like having to come when I called. But despite that, despite what my dad had told me about my real father hurting my mother, I couldn’t believe that Noah would hurt me. I told him that day he’d rescued me from a pool of horseshoe crabs that he wouldn’t hurt me and I still believed that. Maybe even more now.

“Are you afraid of me?” I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel a sense of empowerment, a tiny thrill that he was here only because I’d asked him to come with just a thought.

“No.” As if to prove it, he closed the space between us with one long stride, eyes intent, bold as they raked over me.

I had discarded my dad’s t-shirt, eager to feel the wind on my skin and the spray from the surf. I wore my bikini top and bottoms, but I might as well have been naked the way Noah was looking at me. Noah’s bare chest glistened with moisture and I had the absurd thought to rub up against him and let that moisture soak into my skin. Something must have shown on my face, some yearning I couldn’t name, because he shook his head and tiny drops of water rained down on me. I massaged them into my arms and let them drip down my face, craving more. They sang through my blood and every nerve ending in my body responded. Even my scalp tingled.

His eyes scoured my face, questions swimming in their green depths. But he also looked as if he too had no idea what happened next.