Page 79 of Bewitched By the Sea Monster
“Oh wow.”Jackson laughed.
The woman chuckled and blew a kiss at the audience, wagging her finger at the men who whooped a little too loud.
“I wonder if that hurts her?” I asked. “Changing forms like that?”
“I’m sure it doesn’t.” Jackson drummed his feet against the bottom of the bleachers.
The woman bowed and waved her arms, summoning four more kelpies from the pond. They flanked her, two on either side, as she stretched her hand over the water, bidding it to move and shape itself into a long bullwhip.
For several moments she played the part of horse trainer, putting the four kelpies through piaffes and prances, and wielding her magic over the water to make aquatic jumps for them to bound over. She’d feign surprise whenever one of the kelpiesaccidentallycrashed into a jump and transformed into a woman behind its splashing wreckage. And then she contortedherself back into her horse form and leapt over watery fences that had to be as tall as Jackson.
At the end, all five kelpies turned to their horse forms and summoned a towering wall of water in the middle of the pond.
They sailed over it in unison.
People roared.
The kelpies sank into the pond upon landing, disappearing beneath its surface in one big plop.
As the riotous cheers ricocheted through the dome, another kelpie rose from the water—a taller, ganglier horse with rippling blue flesh and ribbons of seaweed plastered to her forehead. As the crowd cheered, the kelpie whinnied and pranced up to the left-side section of the bleachers, where she stuck her head over the divider, and blew bubbles out of her nose, inciting a bunch of excited squawks from the kids sitting nearby. Then she returned to the pond, where she pranced in place for a moment before she snapped into a squared halt. A shudder ripped through her.
The ribbons of moss and seaweed dribbled down her body. Her skin melted, trickling down her bones as they cracked and crunched and reforged themselves.
I cringed. “Goodness, that looks awful.”
The kelpie laughed as she shook the last of her horse limbs away and straightened into a tall, silvery-haired woman. She spun herself into a delicate dance, skimming the edges of her mossy skirt through the water to create cascading fountains around her.
It was entrancing. Hypnotizing.
There was freedom in her dance, in the way she poured herself into each fluid movement. But there was pain in it too—the agony as she tried to convey a message, knowing most of the meaning would be lost in translation.
Tears welled in my eyes.
“It makes you feel like you’re in a tragic fairy tale. Doesn’t it?” I whispered to Jackson.
Whispered, because the audience had gone silent, watching the kelpie’s pirouetting dance.
“I guess.” Jackson shrugged. “She definitely knows how to work a crowd.”
The kelpie, basking in the audience’s rapture, leapt and pivoted through the twinkling fountains of water that had formed around her. Then she stopped.Abruptly.As though someone had fitted a hook to her midsection and hauled back, bringing her dance to a clumsy, sudden end.
I frowned.
People hooted with enough force to shake the ground beneath us.
Jackson sprang to his feet, mashing his hands together and whistling.
The kelpie stared at us, her chest heaving.
“Why’d she stop like that?” I asked Jackson as I got to my feet.
“Because the dance ended,” Jackson said.
“It didn’t look like it ended, though. It was like…” When Alistair had gotten too close to the dock and the magic had burned him.
Why burnher, though? Had she gone on too long with her dance? Were these creatures so rigidly controlled, they got punished for toeing a time schedule?
“Encore!” people shouted.
