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When Ronan Lynch stepped out of his isolated island house and found a mer dying on the beach, he should have been surprised. Childhood stories and delicious fairy tales aside, mers were not supposed to exist. People did not live in places they could not breathe. But the sea had felt more watchful than empty his entire life, so the truth wasn't difficult to accept.
The boy was splayed across the sand like a forgotten god, his arms outstretched toward the craggy teeth of Lindenmere’s edges. His elongated fingers had scrabbled deep into the ground, desperation tearing through the thinly webbed membranes between each digit. His spine was curved in an unnatural way that spoke more of exhaustion than defeat. The skin stretched over his shoulderblades was a duochrome canvas: on the surface, browned in a manner indicative of reflective sunlight exposure over the ocean’s surface; underneath, the slick and eerie pallor of a creature adapted to live in the cold.
That he was not human would have been obvious even without the tail. But tail there was. His hips shifted smoothly from a mammal’s skin to the scaled texture of a fish. Not quite like any fish Ronan had ever seen before, though. The scales were rough, irregularly patterned and shaped, and the distinctive brownish-red color of old blood. Aside from the silky fin draped uselessly where feet would have been helpful, Ronan was reminded more of tree bark than the sea.
Ronan bypassed disbelief and moved straight to action. This was not a human intruder in clever makeup and a costume. This was a neighboring soul who’d gotten trapped on the wrong side of the atmosphere. It would be absurd to grow up on these islands and believe the ocean was empty. Here was the real truth: Some people needed the sky to breathe, and some needed the waves.
He grabbed a metal rain pail nestled in the corner of the patio, ignored the rational trail down to the beach, and vaulted the seawall instead. This sloping structure was built to keep the ocean from breaking the house, but the incline was sharp, not meant for human travel. Ronan dug his heels in, skittered downward with gravity’s accelerating force, leapt at the last second, managed to hit feet-first and roll to his knees instead of doing a face plant. Then he scrambled upward and hurled himself across the sand.
He didn’t go to the boy first. Instead, he closed the shortest distance between himself and the foamy receding tide, dragging the pail through the salt water until it was full. The churned-up sand and the boy’s injured hands spoke of intention. The mer had, Ronan was pretty sure, been trying to burrow into the moisture so the sun wouldn’t bake away his life force. Like a human sucking in desperate gasps of oxygen as the waves closed over their head. A slow, agonizing, inside-out drowning.
Ronan didn’t think his paper-dry human touch would do an already-dehydrated mer any good, so he tromped over and dumped the water over the boy’s body with the air of a farmer tending a spread-out garden.
The boy seized. His entire body jerked, tail lifting partially off the ground and then smacking back down against it as though furious to rediscover the air, a pained gasp marking his return to consciousness. He rolled over, threw up a hand to block the cloud-smeared sun, and bared razor teeth in a snarl.
He was, unfortunately, beautiful.
Ronan was arrested by this fact despite there being better things to focus on. The boy was not beautiful in a human sort of way; that type of beauty would have been easy to ignore. His face was all alien planes and angles, cheekbones and jaw and nose evolved to withstand inexorable currents and sinking pressure. His eyes glittered blue, bluer than anything else in this world, bluer than the gray sky or the gray rocks or the colorless sand or Ronan’s own glacier gaze. An electric, deep-saturated color that hinted at bioluminescence. His mouth was a hungry predator’s. His teeth could have sliced through bone.
He was senselessly gorgeous. Ronan shook his head to clear it, mentally smacked himself. Priorities. Current priority: the fact that the mer viewed him as a threat.
Ronan crouched down to get closer to a normal speaking distance without quite putting his hands or head in teeth-snapping range. “I don’t know if you can understand me,” he said, and pointed toward the surf-washed rocks in the hopes that body language would help. “I’m gonna get you back to the ocean, and I’ll be real fucking pissed if you take a chunk out of me. I’m fucking benevolent here.”
The mer regarded him for a long moment. His expression was canny, sharply intelligent, calculating. The defensive snarl fell away, and he stretched his sun-blocking hand higher, an offering.
“Good choice,” Ronan said, taking it.
-
That would have been the entire encounter, a slice of supernatural nonsense slotted perfectly into the mundanity of Ronan’s day-to-day life. It wasn’t hard to get the mer back to the sea. Lindenmere’s rocks were hungry, devouring things, ready to erase anything that slipped. But Ronan knew the shape of this island’s killer coastline like his own heartbeat. He knew where to find merciful paths and open doors that less-seasoned seekers would miss. Pulling a tide-beached mer past the rocks and to safety was no challenge. As soon as the foam wrapped around his body, the mer flipped over and vanished into the outgoing tide like he’d dissolved.
But then he came back.
Not beached, not this time. Ronan had seen the intelligence and fierceness on the boy’s face; he didn’t think this was a creature that would allow itself to become helpless twice. Instead, when Ronan stepped out in the early morning to greet the wind, he found the mer sitting atop the tangled rocks that had previously caged him in. His head was tilted in Ronan’s direction, the lines of his silhouette poised with an intention that said he wanted to be seen. His eyes were so uncannily blue that Ronan could see the color from here.
The tide was in, which meant that Ronan’s jeans were soaked to the thighs by the time he climbed up onto a flat stone surface beside the boy. The ocean spray rumbled and hissed and seethed, an in-and-out rush through the spaces between the rocks like breath through lungs. Blood through capillaries. The wind bit at Ronan’s ears, his dampened legs. He was so close to the mer that he could have reached out and brushed his fingers over the place skin melted to scales against his hip. Memorized the textures. The pull was gravitational.
He curled his fingers into fists and set his hands firmly in his lap.
The other boy had braced his palms flat on either side of him and leaned back, head tipped upward, body drinking the misty sun. His eyes were closed. Ronan was surprised to hear him speak; he'd sort of assumed they'd have a language barrier. “You saved my life.”
His voice had a slow, lovely accent that pooled in Ronan’s stomach. It bubbled and frothed. It sang of magic. It was a sound minted so far below the waves that it was more vibration than noise. It was a cadence never intended to ripple through the empty air.
The mer’s voice sounded like home.
“Yup,” Ronan conceded.
“Tell me why.”
Ronan didn’t believe such an asinine question necessitated an answer. “Tell me why you beached yourself in my goddamn backyard.”
He didn’t expect a response. Certainly the mer was silent for long enough. But then he said, considering, “I needed a place to hide. I… fell asleep. Otherwise it would have been very easy to leave before low tide.”
“You passed out,” Ronan surmised.
The mer hummed like this distinction was inconsequential.
“You’re hurt.”
“I’ll heal.”
“Let me see your hands.” Those injuries had been a consequence of the beaching, not the cause, but they were the only external hurts Ronan could quantify.
The mer heaved an exasperated sigh, but he appeared to accept that Ronan would be obnoxious until he acquiesced, because he sat up straight and turned his torso and allowed Ronan to examine his hands. Longer fingers than a human, a curious and marvelous architecture to the joints, a spiderweb of veins below the skin. And the webbing between the fingers, ripped to ragged shreds like it had been sawed through with a serrated knife.
Ronan felt an echo of nonsensical phantom pain between his own fingers, despite their definite lack of webbing. “I have some medicine that might help, back in the house. A balm. I mean, fuck if I know if it’ll do shit for you, but my mom used to…”
The thought slid away from him. He trailed off, shook his head slightly to clear it.
The mer drew his hands back, but not like he was angry. The frown on his face was more confused, like he was examining an algebraic equation that wasn’t balancing right. “I’m all right,” he said. “But thank you.”
This felt like a point that should be argued, but Ronan didn’t know a goddamn thing about mer biology, or injuries, or healing, or magic fucking powers. And besides, the tone ended this particular conversation. Mild but firm, unyielding.
Ronan moved on. “Do you guys have names?”
“Yes,” the mer said, dryly amused.
“Okay, smartass,” Ronan replied. “What’s yours?”
There was a weighted pause. Probably Ronan was breaching all kinds of magical supernatural etiquette by probing for identity or whatever. Certainly committing a social faux pas. But the moment passed, and the mer said, “Adam.”
Adam. A strangely human name. Ronan considered it, shaped the syllables in his mouth. “Adam,” he repeated, like truth.
Adam had turned his face from the sky to study Ronan instead. There was something about his expression - the furrow between his brows, the narrowed eyes, the tiny quirk of his mouth - that made Ronan feel like his insides were a book, and Adam was memorizing the text. “Ronan,” Adam said.
Ronan had definitely not told him his name.
More troubling than that was the way Adam’s voice turned the syllables ethereal. Ronan was a name that had imprinted itself across shores and moors and forests for centuries, but the way Adam said it made it an identity that belonged to the depths. A song in itself. Ronan couldn’t explain why he was so unsettled, and then he realized.
Adam’s accent was his mother’s.
The best way to approach all of this was to get it out in the open, so Ronan eloquently asked, “What the hell?”
Adam’s smile was a private thing, but it made the corners of his eyes crinkle. “Leggy asshole builds a leggy house in a place like this, people talk. I know who you are.”
Ronan was, admittedly, intrigued by the idea that he’d been the subject of underwater community gossip. He was also slightly irritated that none of the underwater community had done him the courtesy of coming to ogle him up close.
“That’s funny,” he said, “because I’m starting to think I don’t know who the fuck I am.”
“Yeah, I know.” Adam flicked the end of his tail like he was stretching, or shifting to get comfortable. “This island doesn’t like humans.”
He was urging Ronan to make a connection, here, but Ronan had already made it. Ronan had probably known it since he was old enough to pace a dock. This island didn’t like humans; this island loved Ronan. Logical conclusion, “Ronan” and “human” were opposing Venn diagram circles with no actual overlap.
Ronan pretended at stupidity. “Also funny,” he said. “The mainland doesn’t like Lynches.”
“Yeah," Adam said, unsurprised. "I bet it dries you out.”
Ronan would not previously have described it like that, but as soon as they hit his brain, the words were the truest ones he had. Being in a place where he couldn’t smell the sea had, historically, not been great for Ronan. He’d kept mainland visitations as short and efficient as possible. If he got too far from the ocean, a slow itch started under his skin. It began as a mental restlessness that wouldn’t stop, then became a relentless march of stinging insects, then turned into an airless burn that longed to smoke his paper skin to ash.
The truth was, Ronan knew that an isolated existence with only Lindenmere for companionship would drive anything mad. Islands might have the energy of something divine, but they weren't enough. The emptiness had the same inexorable pull of desolation as an eighteenth century poet despairing over a storm. Human or not, sentient creatures needed connection. Here, Ronan was connected to the sea and the sand and the rocks and the sky and the wind, but he’d started to forget what actual normal conversation felt like.
Adam shifted, pressed his damp arm against Ronan’s dry one. “You saved my life.” He had apparently not let go of this.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Ronan snapped. “Any decent fucking person saves another person given the opportunity. I didn’t even throw my goddamn back out.”
Ronan wouldn’t have known that Adam laughed if not for the little ripple of vibration through their pressed-together bodies. As it was, his shoulders shook. His gaze, when he looked at Ronan, had lost the calculating edge, shifted into something softer.
“Who kept you out of the ocean?” Adam asked.
Truthfully? Everyone. His mother, his father. Declan. Matthew. Aurora’s brand of distraction had been all sleight of hand, misdirected attention, a mind that couldn’t submerge itself if it was consumed by shiny things. Niall’s had been darkened, violent stories, a shivering thrill at the sucking power of rip tides and the yawning chasm of a miles-deep abyss, a malevolence that patiently waited for you to drown. Declan’s had been furious, insistent, bruising, and rigid with terror. Matthew’s had been anxious, loving, distracting, a more fearful version of their mother’s parlor tricks.
All four of them operated with the assumption that if the sea took Ronan, it wouldn’t give him back.
Ronan didn’t reply. He leaned forward, stretching his arms out along his legs, letting his spine curve and his vertebrae pop.
“I saw it as soon as you talked to me. It’s in your eyes. Your voice.” Adam flicked his tail again, lifting it to splay over Ronan’s legs, as though illustrating a point. “I don’t get it. There’s no one else here. What’s stopping you from coming home?”
Ronan didn’t know.
He also didn't know how to explain that he didn't know, so he took refuge in shittiness. “That sounds exactly,” Ronan said, “like the kind of shit a siren would say to lure a hapless guy into the ocean. I save your life and you murder me? Rude.”
“Well,” Adam countered, “you sound exactly like a siren’s son who’s beached his own goddamn self, so I guess we’re even.”
Ronan couldn’t argue with that.
His gaze was long and unhappy and complicated, fixed on the churning push-pull of the waves around the rocks. He wasn’t expecting Adam to speak again, and certainly wasn’t expecting him to cut so efficiently to Ronan's core.
“The island will still love you when you come back,” Adam said, a little softer, a little more hesitant. More like a fumbling kid uncertain of his own place than a supernatural creature shaking Ronan’s worldview. “You know that, right?”
Yeah. That, Ronan did know. He knew it like truth, like breath, like the smell of the sea.
This wasn’t something he could put words to. It wasn’t an agreement he could write on paper, contract terms outlined, personal identity achieved. It wasn’t even a decision he could define to himself.
It was just this:
As the wind roared and the waves pulsed and the rocks beckoned and the heartbeat of the sea played in slow time with Ronan’s own, he twined their arms tighter together, and he took Adam’s hand.