Waterborn (The Emerald Series Book 1) (12 page)

It had to be an illusion the way the moonlight hit her skin, highlighting the energy that visibly flowed through her, like the exposure to the water had been the key to unlocking her true self. She practically glowed as her body finally accepted what she was. She was beautiful. And for the space of a few thudding heartbeats, I couldn’t look away. I swallowed, forcing my gaze over her shoulder. I didn’t know how to make this easier.

“You really need to go ask your dad.” I stepped back, feet sinking into the sand as a wave washed over them.

“Noah, I’m asking you.” Somehow that silent Song combined with her voice and I nearly doubled over at the impact it had on me. It hurt to hear her and not do what she asked. A part of me wanted to recoil in fear. How could I not after what her dad had told me?

“Caris, are you out here?” Mr. Harper’s voice tunneled through the dunes. Caris whirled around. I saw her shiver from where I stood. I started my retreat. As much as I hated it, I had to get away.

“Talk to him,” I said, prodding her forward. “If you call me, I’ll come.”

She turned back around, eyes full of questions that I didn’t have the right to answer.

“It will be all right.” I couldn’t wait any longer. I hit the water on a surge of pure need. The need to escape the haunted look in her eyes, the need to escape to the solace the Deep provided.

She might not want to lure me to my death with her Song, but she still had the ability to rip my heart out.

I
dreamed crazy dreams
, bordering on nightmares. At least I thought they were dreams. Writhing eels, the pitch and roll of a boat, thick fog that clouded my brain. The prick of pain on my neck.

Do you even know what you are?

A voice that came from far away, demanding an answer.

My eyes were slow to open, gritty with salt and sand. Heart racing, I tried to sit up, but my arms didn’t want to move. My head pounded, a drumbeat echoing between my ears. It took me a few seconds to realize it wasn’t drums, but the sound of the waves rolling over, rolling through me.

Noah.

He had come. He had saved me and brought me to the beach. Or did I dream that too? I wasn’t at the beach now. Soft cushions, warm blanket, and cool air blowing from the air conditioning.

No, not the beach.

I blinked away the fuzziness, forcing my eyes to focus. My dad sat in one of the blue chairs across from me, hair ruffled, eyes set in worried lines. He held a glass on one knee, the amber liquid catching the light of the single lamp. I had never seen my dad drink anything other than red wine or beer. He looked disheveled and scared. What had Noah told him? What was I going to tell him?

Something wasn’t right. Something Noah had been too afraid to tell me. He’d left me staring after him in confusion as he’d lost himself in the surf. I had followed my dad back to the house and collapsed on the couch. For all the world, I hadn't been able to stay awake.

“How do you feel?” My dad’s tone along with the lines on his face prompted me to sit up, forcing my body through its tired protest of moving at all. The couch rocked under me as though I were still out there being tossed by the waves, my legs shackled to the bottom of the Gulf.

“Thirsty.” Cotton filled my mouth, making my tongue feel thick. It was hard to swallow. Water. I needed water.

“Here, drink this.” He slid a glass of water across the coffee table.

My fingers curled around the glass. I ignored the water dripping over my chin. As I drank, my mind worked in circles trying to remember exactly what had happened. I remembered floating. No, I remembered sinking. I remembered calling Noah’s name, knowing it was too late. How had he found me?

“What were you doing out there?”

It wasn’t so much a question as rumination, as though he already had the answer and was waiting for me to verify it.

“I don’t know. It was an accident.” My voice cracked with uncertainty. What else could it have been? One minute I was king of the world and the next… Hell, it was as if someone had slipped me a roofie.

I lifted my hand, tracing a two-inch scab down the side of my throat. My dad’s eyes followed the path of my fingers. Anger hardened his eyes and the glass shook in his hand, ice clinking together.

“I’m sorry, Caris. I haven’t handled this very well.” His glass hit the table with a decided thud. He ran his hand over the top of his head, making his hair stick up on end.

“What are you talking about?” I pulled the blanket up under my chin. I wore a long sleeved cotton t-shirt he must have put on me. The smell of my dad’s cologne wrapped me in a cloud of familiar comfort.

“You. Your mother. Who you are.” His blue eyes met mine, so cold and stark. “What you are.”

Do you even know what you are?

I saw them again—black eyes, lips curled in a cruel smile. He had cut me, that guy on the boat. Why would he have done that? Where was Erin? I remembered Jax holding on to me, then letting go. Had they just left me in the middle of the Gulf on the orders of some modern-day pirate?

“I don’t understand.”

“First, I need you to know that I love you, Caris. I need you to believe that.” He clasped his fists together in supplication.

I nodded my head. “I know, Daddy. I love you, too. Now tell me what’s going on.”

“I’ve practiced this over and over but there’s no easy way to tell you this. Though I suspect you feel it already. So, I’ll just speak as plain as I can.”

“You’re scaring me.” I sank into the cushions.

He leaned toward me, pinning me with the intensity in his eyes as if he could force whatever it was he needed to say into my brain without having to speak the words. I couldn’t imagine what could be so bad to warrant the look on his face.

“Your mother, she was not quite human.” He let out a shaky breath, jaw set in determination. “That’s not quite right. She was human, only more. She was one of the waterborn, a species of humans with genetic traits that make them adaptable to life in the water.” His gaze never faltered, and his mouth was carved in a serious line. I waited for it to crack into a smile as a nervous laugh escaped my lips. Was he joking?

“What are you talking about?” I tried hard to concentrate on his words, but something hummed under my skin, almost like an electric current that made it hard to sit still.

“I’m talking about people like your mother. You. You’re not merely human, Caris. You are a waterbreather. Quite literally, you were born with the ability to breathe water.”

“You do realize I almost drowned today. If it hadn’t been for Noah…” My voice faltered. I wasn’t so fuzzy headed anymore that I didn’t remember what Noah had done. Despite the absurdity of what my dad said, Noah had somehow found me at the bottom of the Gulf then he’d swum with me for miles on his back. And I had seen him that day with Ellie, staying under the water for an impossibly long period of time. I had thought then that there was something different about him—something otherworldly. Still, this was complete nonsense. What he was describing didn’t exist except in comic books and movies. “What you are saying is crazy.”

“What I’m saying is the truth. A truth I should have shared with you a long time ago.”

“What truth? Do you know how ridiculous this sounds? I can’t even swim. And I’m pretty sure I can’t breathe water.”

“You can. At least you will be able to soon. You can’t tell me you haven’t felt different since I brought you here. I see it in your face every day.”

“You’re not making any sense.” But he was. Something had wrapped around me that very first day I had walked out onto the beach, something left behind by the wind. I had been trying to peel it off ever since.

“You’ve been wearing a charm, a spell of sorts, to keep your breather traits dormant. It’s been weakening, and soon you’ll realize I’m telling you the truth.”

“Charm?” My hands bunched around the blanket and my ears filled with the hysteria in my laughter. I pushed off the couch, letting the blanket fall to the floor. This was growing more absurd by the minute. I really didn’t want to hear any more. I really wanted to escape to the Gulf, but despite being told I was born to be in the water, I couldn’t go there. My dad was crazy. He had to be to believe this stuff, and he did believe it. I was certain of that. But worse was that a part of me believed it too. And that part of me sighed in abandoned relief. The bigger part still thought my dad was having some kind of a breakdown.

“Even assuming what you are saying is true, why? Why keep this a secret? Why keep this from me?” I couldn’t believe we were even having this conversation, that I was contemplating being something that didn’t exist.

“Your mother wanted to protect you.”

“Protect me from what? Jaws? Ursula?”

“Not from what, but from whom.” With no acknowledgement of my attempt at sarcasm, he lifted the glass to his mouth and drained the rest of its contents.

I knew with certainty whatever else he had to say was going to change everything for us. For me. I walked very deliberately to the back door and stared through the glass, seeing nothing but a reflection of myself framed in the darkness beyond.

“Don’t say it,” I begged. He was about to rip the one constant in my life right out from under me; himself. Because if I were this thing he claimed me to be, I knew for certain he wasn’t.

“I have to.” His image joined mine in the glass as he stepped up behind me, a ghostly reflection. I sent a silent plea with my eyes.
Don’t do this
. My eyes shut tight as he uttered the words. “She wanted to protect you from your father.”

I never wanted to open my eyes again. But I had to. I had to look at him when he told me the whole of it. “You’re not my dad.”

“I am your dad in every way that counts, Caris. And nothing will change that. But the man who fathered you is a man named Athen Kelley. He is like you. Like your mother.”

We stared at one another in the glass. I waited for the hurt but it never came. I waited for the earth to crack open and swallow me up, but here I stood, staring at a man I didn’t know anymore. His words couldn’t penetrate my numbness. I wouldn’t let them. I blinked away the tears that insisted on burning the backs of my eyes. Time enough for those later when I was away from my fake dad. I took a few seconds to compose myself, swallowing the bile of emotion.

“All my life you’ve been lying to me,” I spoke to this ghost dad because somehow it was easier talking to a ghost than to turn around and face the real thing.

Real? What was real? My life wasn’t real.

“I won’t say I’m sorry.” His eyes were laced with sadness and the regret of his own making. “Caris, I did what was necessary to protect you. You have to believe that.”

“You’re insane.” I turned around, emboldened by anger. He was a stranger to me. I had never seen this man before. The dad I knew would never do something like this to me. The dad I knew loved me, or at least I thought he did.

“I’ll explain everything, Caris. I just need you to remain calm.” He held his hands out as though he were going to touch me. I would shatter if he did. Calm was so far away I might never find it again. The muscles under my skin writhed like a bag of snakes.

“It’s what your mother wanted.” His voice was strained, as though the mere mention of her brought him pain.

“My mother?” I didn’t even know who that was. Blood boiled under my skin—skin that tingled with unseen energy. My fingers longed to scratch. This must be what a snake felt like when it was ready to shed its skin. My skin didn’t fit anymore. I really wanted to scream.

“She was afraid for you, afraid for herself. She knew there was a good chance you would be like her.” My dad had always been so composed, so sure of himself. Right now he looked torn, frayed at the edges, worn down by so many years of concealing the truth. It spilled out of him in a rush of nonsensical words. “She was a siren. She sang and he heard and in the end it drove him mad.” He was angry now too, at the past and this present he had created. Maybe I was crazy too, because I believed him. The raw emotion he exhibited was too real to ignore. Too convincing.

“You’re not making any sense, D—" I couldn’t call him that anymore. I wanted to cover my ears with my hands and refuse to listen to one more word.

“There are a few of your kind that are sirens. Females who possess the ability to call a male, sometimes by voice, most telepathically. For your mother, it was a curse. Athen heard her. He answered, and he became obsessed with her. Stalked her. Terrorized her. I was powerless to do anything about it. And one day he took her. He hurt her.” His eyes were clouded with dark memories, but he continued to hold my gaze. He looked gutted. Purged. I wondered if he had even told anyone about this in the last seventeen years. “He raped her.”

My heart sank to some deep dark place devoid of feeling. My mother wasn’t a princess. She was cursed and my father was a rapist. And I was lost and alone and something I didn’t understand. I just wished he’d shut up, this stranger who had lied to me and wasn’t my dad.

“She came back to me broken and pregnant.” His eyes were wide and unblinking.

An image flashed through my mind, forgotten until now, of a man with storm-cloud eyes and silver hair clutching a length of frayed rope. Oh my God.

“She was afraid of what Athen might do. He had already taken her. He was crazy enough to be a threat to you as well. We pretended the child was mine and after you were born, we went to see a priestess. She placed a charm on you. One that would make all your breather traits lie dormant. But the only way it would work is if we took you away from here, away from the elements that weaken it.”

Instinctively, I knew what those things were: wind, water, the sound of the surf. Even the sun that fell on my skin felt different, as if it were drawing something out. All the things I'd craved.

My dad’s eyes wandered over me as though he were seeing me for the first time. In a way I supposed he was. I had been forced to wear a mask, a costume, playing a part that I now realized I had been ill suited for. And that’s what made bile rise in my throat—time wasted. But how could I think that? A few hours ago I would have said my life was good, better than most. Did finding out it had been a lie change that?

“And my mother? What happened to her?” I was thankful for the invisible wall that was erected between us.

“She caught an infection soon after you were born. Breathers have different immune systems. Antibiotics don’t always work.”

“Why did you bring me back? Why not just stay away?”

“I’ve watched you for years. Witnessed your confusion as you struggled to make sense of what didn’t, what couldn’t make sense. I realized how unfair to you we had been. We were so young. Not much older than you. And Rena was scared. At that time I would have done anything for her.” His words sounded like a shameful confession.

“Where is this man now?” I couldn’t use the word father. I didn’t have one of those anymore.

“He’s here. After your mother died, the link that bound them severed. I heard he had come forward, guilt-ridden. Served his time in a prison of sorts, one equipped to hold your kind. But by then, you and I were gone.” A deep shudder wracked him. “You’ve seen him. And he’s seen you.”

“The man on the docks.” My hands covered my mouth. I had been enthralled with that man, had thought him beguiling. He had recognized something in me, I had seen in it his eyes, but I just hadn’t understood.

“Yes.” Like that night, my dad’s voice fell in defeat. He also sounded relieved, as though he’d unloaded a heavy burden, which I supposed he had—a burden of lies. Lies told at my expense.