Page 17 of Chasing Tail
Chapter 10
Taron didn’t totally trust them, and I knew I probably shouldn’t, but they were making it hard to be objective. I was a reasonably attractive mermaid. I felt hideous with legs, but that was the only thing about my appearance that had changed.
I hadn’t seen many people who looked like Taron or me here, but the people had I met were attractive. The male gaze was the same on land or sea. I could tell the three brothers liked what they saw but weren’t acting on it because they thought Taron and I were mates. But, of course, Taron wasn’t helping that notion at all, and I wasn’t trying to clear it up. I didn’t need any attachments to land after I took care of my business.
Forrest picked up on a lot. Some of it, I didn’t want him to, a lot of it, I was grateful for. For example, he quickly learned that Taron was possessive and didn’t like people touching me, but he also picked up on the fact that even though neither of us spoke, I did all the communicating for both of us.
Taron didn’t need to nod or shake his head when he was a shark. They didn’t do that. We read their body language and communicated with sonic pulses. Taron had picked up a lot of this land stuff reasonably quickly, but I knew exactly why he wasn’t bothering with this.
It was partly to do with his newfound jealousy and a lot to do with the fact that Taron never did anything he didn’t want to. He’d probably caught on to that just as quickly as he learned to use a fork. He wasn’t being stubborn and trying to ruin this, though.
While Forrest was watching us and picking up things I didn’t want him to, Taron watched the brothers and tried to figure out if he could trust them. Yeah, sometimes he got distracted because he was thinking about mating again, but I knew Taron was invested in this and could focus when it mattered.
Still, I kind of wanted to strangle him. Forrest didn’t want to get stabbed by random objects, and he’d picked up on the fact that Taron grunted and growled a lot, but if they asked us a question, I was the only one who answered them. Forrest was trying to teach us to speak, but he was focused on Taron. Taron was acting worse than a grumpy stonefish when you disturbed their reef.
He had his arms crossed, sulking like a teenage mermaid who had just been grounded. Forrest was trying to teach him to say his name, and you’d think a sea witch wanted one of his teeth for a spell. Forrest hadn’t even gotten to me because Taron was acting like this was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. I knew for a fact that wasn’t true.
“It’ll be easy once you start trying,” Forrest said. “Just let it roll off your tongue. Taron.”
Taron just grunted and settled himself into the couch. He was managing sitting much better, but he definitely didn’t want to talk.
“Taron!”
“This is stupid. It’s not my fault they aren’t advanced enough to communicate like us.”
“Mermaids, sirens, and sea witches can do this too. Are you telling me you aren’t capable of doing something every siren can do?”
I knew that would get him motivated. Taron wasn’t fond of sirens at all. He’d eat a land dweller if they came into his territory, but he didn’t seek them out for food the way sirens did. He honestly thought they tasted pretty nasty and liked to rant endlessly about sirens wanting to eat them instead of fish.
Taron stopped sulking and finally looked ready to try, but Forrest jumped to his feet and shouted like he was excited by something. Then, before he could even tell us, Callum came into the room.
“Beck is keeping Father busy, so I was able to slip away. He’s trying to find out more about that ship that left. Father is agitated and has soldiers patrolling the beach. He hasn’t mentioned these two, though.”
“I think I figured something out about these two. I just need Kishi to confirm it.”
Ugh. Taron wasn’t the only person watching and figuring things out. But, of course, they were. We had just barged into their lives pretending not to be able to speak, and they didn’t even know what we were. I just hoped whatever came out of Forrest’s mouth wasn’t about to complicate what we came here to do.
“They can clearly understand us, and Kishi can write. Taron has been fighting me on speaking his name, and I think I just figured out why. Druids have all this magic to force people to talk. Vampires can use coercion with eye contact and get the truth about anything. We don’t know what they are or where they came from. They seem very unfamiliar with anything we have here. What if they’ve been spelled not to speak?”
A whale would have given Forrest multiple points in mermaid school for everything he’d managed to figure out so far, with us giving him absolutely nothing to go on. He had more patience than my dolphin nanny when it came to Taron. A dolphin would have beat anyone around the ocean for sulking like that, much less threatening to stab them.
He was totally wrong about that, though. I would imagine taking someone’s voice was the type of payment a sea witch would want for coming on land. Most of the time, the magic they gifted you gave you precisely what you thought you wanted, but their price always made it impossible. So we really lucked out that the only thing Talora wanted was revenge.
I was conflicted on how to play this. I could let them try to find the magical answer and pretend I could speak, but Taron really needed to learn. On the other hand, he didn’t want to, and I could make something up about why he didn’t.
“How do you want to play this one, Taron? I can pretend to let them use magic to bring my voice back and teach you to speak in private. It’ll give you less time to figure out if you can trust them.”
“This is perfect, Kishi. Even if we can trust them and have their help, the druid king isn’t just going to let us stick him with that knife. I have useless teeth here, and you don’t have your tail. We know druids have magic, but not much about it. We know it involves the parts of other creatures. We need to know more about it.”
I had the same thought process Taron did, but he was my partner in crime, and I’d always run my plans by him first. Still, I hadn’t thought about that part, and all that blood in the water was still fresh in my mind.
“I don’t want them killing anyone because I’m faking not being able to speak.”
“So, stop them. Maybe not all druids do that. They don’t seem to like their father for doing it.”
“It’s a gigantic risk, Taron. We can’t leave the house to stop them.”
“Maybe I’ll want to kill them less when they look at you or touch you if I know I can trust them. Maybe if I see what they are capable of, that’ll happen.”
