Page 154 of Lifebound

Hands that had gills on the knuckles, and she had these nets between her fingers, too. Her skin had a blueish tint to it, but I couldn’t be sure if that was from the light or the water.

Then one of the other mermaids came to stand beside her, too, and they were both looking at me.

“I’ve never seen a mortal before,” said one, and I swear I’d never heard a more beautiful voice. Soft and melodic and as sweet as a lullaby.

“Wildcat,” Rune whispered, but I was already standing up.

The thing was that this was already a done deal. There was no way I was leaving Rune here and running on my own. It wasn’t going to happen. And we either died here together right now or we survived—both of us. If I could still move and he couldn’t, that meant it was up to me to figure out how we were going to get out.

And, by God, if there was any kind of way out, I was going to find it.

“Hello,” I said to the mermaids and waved my hand.

“She looks so ordinary,” said the other one, and then the third came to join her friends, too.

There they were, mermaids with big eyes and long blonde hair, naked, and with silver fish scales merging into the skin around their ribs. I was dying to see their fishtails, not going to lie, but I was dying to get the hell out of there more.

“M-my name is Nilah,” I said. “It’s actually the name of some kind of water sprites. Like…like mermaids. We, um—we’re just passing through. We didn’t mean to bother you.”

The mermaids looked at one another. Then the one in the middle said, “How did you find our cavern?”

“By accident, I assure you. If you let my friend go?—”

“No,” said the one on the right. “Fae have no right to be in the Mercove without permission. He has violated the law. He must be punished.”

They all had some kind of an accent I couldn’t really put my finger on. Like their tongues weren’t quite used to pronouncing English words all the time.

“I understand that, but I promise we won’t be back if you let us go,” I tried again, though there was a voice in the back of my head that insisted I was wasting breath here.

Then the mermaid on the right said to the others, “I wonder if Ghila will eat her.”

“I wonder if she’ll let us taste her,” said the other.

“I heard mortal flesh tastes better than fenfish.”

Goose bumps erupted all over my body. I had no idea who Ghila was or what the hellfenfishwere, but I was not going to sit around and wait for them to eat me.

Slowly, I squatted down near Rune again, and I tried to figure out how I could pull him out of that pool. This whole place was a trap, the cavern big, but we were surrounded by stone walls, and just that small opening on the ceiling to the far left. The hole through which we’d fallen was too far up and too far away from the walls, impossible to reach without rope or something to climb. And there was no rope or any kind of ladder here, just those boxes close to the other side of the big pool, and they were filled with fish and plants and crystals.

“What are they doing here?” I whispered.

“Collecting merchandise to sell. Those plants are highly poisonous, and those feed mermaids. They use the tempest crystals to create steam traps and cook their fish in the water,” Rune said.

“They sell these toothermermaids?” I had no idea why that sounded so strange.

“Mostly,” Rune said. “I can’t break the magic. There’s three of them. They’ll catch me before I can run.”

That was true. If they really had that kind of power over water, and this place was full of water everywhere we looked…

My heart beat loudly in my ears. The mermaids laughed at whatever they were whispering in each other’s ears, and then one of them jumped over the other two. She jumped right over them and revealed to me her tail in all its glory.

It was long. It was silver and purple and blue. It looked very little like in movies back home, and a lot like an actual fish’s, with fins all over, big and small, and spikes that began on her human back and went all the way down to the tip of her fishtail.

My heart continued to beat when she slipped under the water again.

Suddenly I had the conviction that I wasnotgoing to be food for mermaids. I was not going to be served to these creatures together with dead fucking fish, cooked or boiled or however they liked their mortal meat.

No.

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