Page 5 of Dry as a Fish
"Caught yourself a mundane Delphon?" the one holding the sarong said. "What happened to your gills? Did she do that?"
"Want us to put her with the others for you?" another one said.
I gritted my teeth. Of course, he'd done this before. My dad always said you couldn't trust men, especially groups of them. These fools must have kidnapped other women from the school already. I had heard that mundanes went missing at the school sometimes, but I thought it was because of things like I had seen at Orientation.
"No," my kidnapper, Delphon, replied, his voice sending strange shivers through my timbers. "She's my heartsong."
The new group took in a collective gasp, one of them even went so far as to step back away from me and put a hand on his heart, like Delphon had just revealed that I was actually a monster in disguise.
"A mundane?" the sarong holder said. "Mundanes can be our heartsongs?"
Delphon nodded, the expression on his face unreadable.
Then I realized the group wasn't fully blocking the exit anymore. They were all staring at me, sure, but they weren't physically in my way. Confidence was half the battle when it came to dealing with large animals. I couldn't act afraid.
So I squared my shoulders and walked past them through the archway.
No one reached out to physically stop me, but I heard the group erupt into chatter as I strode into the teal-lit hallway.
"Wait, please wait," I heard Delphon call from behind me, but I kept walking.
Then a warm hand landed on my shoulder and I spun to face whomever touched me, my hands clenched into fists. I blinked as I realized it was Delphon, only he had legs now, and a sarong around his waist, his buddies all behind him all wide eyed and at a slight distance like they were watching him tip toe up to a sleeping cow at night to try to tip it over, not realizing that he was about to get stomped to the ground.
I glared at him, and Delphon removed his hand from my shoulder like I was a hot potato.
"Your tail can shift into legs," I stated the obvious.
"Please, can we talk?" Delphon asked.
I pursed my lips and looked at him. "You want to talk. You just molested me and kidnapped me, and now you want to ask me if we can talk."
The fact that he was asking now put a different spin on the situation.
"I had to kiss you to give you air," Delphon ran a hand through his sea green hair. "I wasn't going to let you drown."
"You were the only one keeping me underwater," I said, crossing my arms, feeling rather surprised that my kidnapping had turned into a discussion. "If you wanted to let me breathe, you could have let me go so I could stay on the surface."
He hesitated, then dropped his hand to his side. "I apologize for grabbing you and frightening you."
"You did more than that," I said.
"I..." he looked as if he were struggling. "If I left you at thatschool, you would have died eventually. You're a mundane. I couldn't leave you there once I realized you were my..."
"What happened to Chad?" I said, narrowing my eyes as I interrupted his justifications.
"Who?" Delphon asked.
"The guy who you dragged in the water first," I said, realizing that who was an accurate question as Chad wasn't actually that guy's name.
Delphon hesitated for a moment before speaking. “He was on the list.”
"We drown the males who are on the list," one of the group behind him said.
Delphon shot a glance back at him.
I sucked in a breath and took a step back. I didn't like Chad, or whatever his name was, but that didn't mean he deserved to die. I mean, I felt like he definitely deserved to die a little for how insane he was being following me around and ignoring my repeated attempts to get away from him and the fact that he threw his drink on me as an excuse to feel me up, but that didn't mean I really wanted him dead dead. I just wanted him to leave me alone and not be a creep.
That being said, I was definitely in danger if these guys so casually spoke about drowning people like they were culling baby roosters on an assembly line. I should feel afraid. Yet, as I stared at Delphon, at the blood still trickling down his neck, the part of me that should be terrified hummed with a song I couldn't quite hear.
