Page 7 of Midnightsong
“Oh, you knew I had no reason to decline.” Angie tossed him with a mock-exasperated eyebrow raise.
A hearty laugh rumbled from Kaden’s throat. “Because you told me.” He pulled her in for a long kiss, running his fingers through strands of her hair flowing with the currents. “And about my having the urge to take you entirely?”
Angie raised an eyebrow, her beautiful face aglow. “Yes?”
He traced a finger around the soft outline of one of her breasts. “I think it might be striking me now.” Did she want the same? Kaden studied her expression.
“You and me both.” She kissed him again and he opened the door, tugging her hand so she floated in beside him.
After the tides shifted, he escorted Angie back to the surface and then returned to his quarters.
His guest room was sparsely decorated. A simple beige seagrass-fiber hammock in the center, thick enough so he’d get a decent night’s rest each moontide, but too thin to be truly comfortable. Angie had never mentioned how she felt in it when they slept in this hammock together. If she had any complaints, she kept them to herself.
When they first met she might have given him some snarky remark about it, but in the past tidesyear, she seemed to have mellowed, her expression speaking of joy instead of horror and anger.
At times, he missed her remarks. Her fiery attitude was a part of her that he fell in love with.
At the time, the war may have had much to do with those emotions.
And that assfish-brained brother-in-law of hers. If Kaden had ever seen Nick again after he tried to murder him in front of Angie and Zixin, and with the way he treated Angie, he wasn’t sure he would hold back from strangling the man with his bare hands. Or his tail.
The seaflute tied to his table hummed causing vibrations to ripple through the water. His mother’s voice filled the space.
“Kaden? Are you there?”
He scrambled to the seaflute, untying it and holding it close to his lips. “Mother?”
“Oh, good. Listen, I relayed this message to Cassia and Varin, but I also wanted to let you know. I spoke with some of my sentries about your and Angie’s concerns of the landwalkers returning.”
Kaden balked at the word ‘landwalkers’, but she would not call the humans by any other name. He stayed quiet, letting her continue.
She didn’t miss a beat, even with his silence. “There are landwalker divers skulking around the palace area. They never stayed to interact with us and left before our sentinels had a chance to confront them. I do not trust their intentions and have more sentinels patrolling in a wider swath.”
“Glad you’re okay.”
“Yes, I appreciate the warning. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must attend to some pressing matters with my sentinels.”
Kaden shook his head and pursed his lips. Just like the Mer-Queen. Even when he was here, his conversations with her were always short and to the point. He placed his seaflute back in between his belongings on his desk, made of smoothed and polished coarse-grained, igneous rock. When he first arrived in this palace, he’d realized all the stones and corals they used for furnishings were smooth—much smoother than the roughshod, natural rock his queendom utilized. He wasn’t used to his belongings slipping and needed to gather stones from the ocean floor to keep them still.
Though Serapha assured him she was okay, the increased diver presence unnerved him. He needed to go home and check on his mother.
A pod of chefs held out bags for him when he swam into the kitchen before making his way home. There was one final thing he wanted to do. “You asked for these, Your Highness?” a young merman asked with a bow.
“I did. Thank you.”
With a shy smile, the merman returned to his duties.
Kaden dashed away from the palace, holding the too-full bag to his chest as if it held the rarest of seaglass inside. A nip came at the tip of his tail, and jerking it away, he looked to see what bit him.
A silver wolf manyu retreated into a crack in the rocks next to him, beady eyes fixed on him, as if daring him to come too close again. His partner, a smaller sepia-shaded manyu, poked her head out to see what the commotion was about.
Of course, they were a mated pair. When they saw nothing of note, they disappeared back into their hiding hole.
He moved away from the rocks and stayed safely afloat of the jagged corals and thick beds of seagrass filled with deadly, venomous sunflower sea stars camouflaged within.
His destination came into view, and he pumped his tail faster. The bag weighed on his arms, making his muscles ache. A small village lay below, the tops of tiny homes and gardens blurry and hidden in the abyss—a community affected by a temporary drought from pollution and tainting of their food source, likely because they lived so close along the land city’s shores.
Kaden dove.
