Chapter 1: The Wave.
There was a good chance the woman would end up killing his son.
This wasn't representative of the reaction Sebastian usually generated. The kid had already mastered the art of charming ladies. When the reddish brown curls, the big smile and the little lisp weren't working, he played the dimples – and played them well, too.
However, the woman hadn't so much as smiled in the three hours since they'd boarded the ship. In fact, he'd caught a sigh or two here and there.
It was understandable. Sebastian had been virtually glued to her side; when she'd gone to the toilets, he'd followed her and waited in front of the door. He just talked and talked, and talked her ears off, completely undeterred by her lack of response.
This also was a new development. Seb had the attention span, the curiosity and the energy of a puppy. On their way in, he'd been fascinated by the propellers, the anchors, the safety boats, the crew, the rope, the noises, the fresh air; trailing him had been bloody exhausting.
Now, he seemed perfectly content to stay next to the stranger.
“I hope you don't mind?” Erik had asked.
It was one of these awkward phrases parents had to dish out on a regular basis, along with “he didn't mean it” and “ever so sorry.”
As Seb was giving him some sort of respite, for once, Erik had displayed all of his charms in an attempt to keep the woman cooperative. He'd taken a page out of Seb's book and made good use of his own set of dimples, but all in vain: she only shrugged, without gracing him with so much as a glance.
Courtesy dictated that, after that unenthusiastic response, he should take his troublesome kid and bugger off to another deck – god knew that beast of a ship had enough of them – but damn, he deserved to sit down and relax for five minutes; so he'd just taken a seat on the next chair and left them to it.
The woman was lounging on her chaise, eyes closed, barely moving. She wasn't even there to tan: she wore glasses, a large, dark straw hat shaded most of her face, and a loose jumpsuit covered her legs.
This probably was the very definition of being a bum. Erik wished he could switch the rest of the world off like that: she was at peace and even Seb's chatter failed to disrupt it.
At lunchtime, a server approached and Erik took it as a clue to finally release her from Seb, but his intrusion wasn't requested or required.
She asked for a sophisticated salad and completely destroyed its soul by demanding that they’d remove the seafood but then, before he'd had the chance to convince the kid to come and see what he had to say, she'd turned to Seb and curtly told him, “Order.”
Seb asked for cheesy chips and a burger, no veggies. She snorted, turning to the waiter.
“Do attempt to hide greens somewhere in there, would you? Lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes would do. Also, bring some water, please.”
Erik looked at her, stunned by a strange mixture of anger, gratitude, relief, longing and pain.
He had servants to lessen his workload; right this minute, there were two guards and an assistant in his peripheral vision. At home, there also was a flock of carers who saw to Seb's needs.
Yet, it had always been him who did the admonishing, the coaxing, the parenting, because Prince Sebastian the third, son of King Erik of Denker, just didn't take orders from anyone else.
The child said nothing about the salad and – when it arrived – drank his water.
Was it what it felt like? Having someone else who could carry some of the responsibility? If so, he started to understand why his entourage was pushing him to consider marrying.
Anger and pain gradually left, as though they'd been sucked away from his mind. It was strange. Usually, when he happened to think of anything of the sort – anything reminding him that he was alone – it didn't fade for days and after, he had to deal with worse: the emptiness.
But poof, the negative feelings were gone.
It left him with everything else and, as a consequence, he actually looked at a woman for the first time in close to six years.
She seemed pretty, but he couldn't really tell: what her wide sunglasses didn't hide, her hat concealed. She had a heart-shaped face, a nice mouth, and the loose, casual fit of her clothes didn't hide her pleasing frame.
To the generic attributes, he added something he couldn't place; something alluring, wild and exciting. It almost wasn't physical, until it became so.
The longing morphed into something very different; something he'd failed to grasp since Seb’s mother had butted in and out of his life.
Her meal arrived and made things worse. While the word salad had suggested something rather anticlimactic, her plate was decadent and full of exotic things he would never have voluntarily submitted himself to, but to her, they were obviously delicious: she didn't eat, she devoured her meal, voraciously.
Food was obviously something she enjoyed, because she moaned once.
Great. Now he was hard as a rock in front of his damn son.
He was still processing the fact that he was actually thinking about sex when the weather changed – dramatically – as it often did while in the ocean. It went from a cloudless sunny day to a dark, threatening storm in the space of an instant, but large cruisers such as the Siren were built for this: the waves were impressive, yet they barely felt them.
The woman lifted her head and seemed to listen – to what, he couldn't tell – before turning his way and addressing him for the first time.
“You should go inside now.”
What a voice. He'd previously registered that it had sounded agreeable, but somehow now, it was almost a caress, an intimacy that should be solely confined between four soundproofed walls.
He didn't get it at first.
He wouldn't get it until the end of the nightmare.
Unsurprisingly, he didn't listen.
She decided that she shouldn't care. He deserved to suffer the wrath of the oceans; most men did, even those who looked like that.
Silvia’s two brothers had competed for the title of Sexiest Man on Gaia four years in a row; she was accustomed to beauty, but all the same, he’d caught and retained her attention from the moment she’d seen his tall, golden frame.
The three day shadow sprinkling on his chiseled jaw, the lips and the depth of his amber eyes would have made a weaker woman squirm. And damn, those shoulders. She had to force her eyes away from his slim fit shirt.
Let’s face it, he had to be an asshole.
Telling and repeating that to herself was helping. She was almost resolved to let him stay on the deck, but then, Sebastian pulled at her jumpsuit and asked her why she was still wearing her glasses; it wasn't sunny.
Right. That might have been the reason why her little mantra had completely failed to hit the mark.
She was hardly the mothering kind, but damn if that kid wasn't endearing.
Silvia opened her mouth to formulate a clearer warning and closed it, because then, sooner than expected, it started.
Someone rang a bell inside and alarms resounded; a member of the crew, displaying the calm and dignity one should retain in this situation, came out, safety vests in hand, shaking from head to toes and screaming warnings at the top of his voice, while pointing at the rear of the ship.
Silvia didn't bother turning around. She'd felt the wave two minutes and seventeen seconds ago, well before their radars or their eyes could have detected one movement.
It was big. It was about five times the height of the ship. These sort of waves were either created by tectonic movements or by a very pissed off nymph.
Silvia would have put her money on the latter option.
Some continents had taken to planes, but Europa was a portal to the other realm and fays flew above it when they wished to do so; the airs weren't safe, which meant that humans generally traveled by water. While steam-powered cruisers did very little damage to the environment, they only represented a tiny percentage of the means used to charter people and merchandise around.
No, mortals preferred fuel and when it became useless, they dumped it in the ocean.
What did they expect?
Thankfully for humanity, but unfortunately for the seas, Nymphs were very limited; their powers were constricted to their territories, but entering their space did put humans at their mercy.
Silvia cursed; it hadn’t been part of the plan. When she’d heard that a new cruise company was opening a picturesque route on a ship they’d called The Siren, she’d jumped on it, expecting one week of pure bliss.
Very naive of her; water generally had a plan of its own.
The panic around her only lasted the space of an instant; then, there was silence and death.
Silvia didn't stick around to see it.
The child's hand, she'd gripped, so firmly she wondered if she could have broken a few of his fingers, but the father, they’d lost.
The coast was over two miles away; changing form, adopting the graceful tentacles her legs turned into when she wished it, she'd swam, gliding through the water at a speed she wouldn't have believed herself capable of.
There must have been more de Luz in her than she'd previously acknowledged, because there was no way anything other than the power of the four winds could have broken through the currents with so much force.
Throwing the kid on land, she'd barely taken the time to see that indeed, he was still breathing, before jumping back.
Children weren't supposed to grow up without their parents. She knew the feeling, and it wasn't a nice one.
Of course, her case was very different. Her mother hadn't drowned: she'd willfully left her. Her father was still around, he just didn't care about anything, or anyone, save for himself.
But Sebastian had a father who cared, who didn't stop looking at him with wonder, pride and unconditional love – even when the little bugger was doing his best to embarrass him in front of a stranger.
He was going to have him back if she could do anything about it.
Back at the scene, there was an absolute, irrefutable chaos. Not everyone was dead yet, but those who weren't would be, soon. The storm still raged; blocks of metal and electrified devices finished off the poor mortals who hadn't succumbed to the elements.
A hundred, a thousand merfolks might have made a difference, but she was one little siren, and there was nothing she could do.
She didn't know how she spotted him. In the crowd, his tall frame and his sculptural, tanned stature had stood out, but amongst the torrents and the sea of broken flesh, he should have been indistinguishable.
He wasn't.
Her gaze was almost instantly drawn to a form, some distance away, right at the heart of the storm; half propped on a wooden pallet, he was still alive, but there wasn’t much fight left in him. He wouldn't hold onto it for long.
That's when a smart, rational woman would have recalled that she had a certain standing in these waters. She might have attempted to impose her will against the nymph's and tried to calm this madness.
Instead, taken by an incomprehensible urgency, a sense of need bordering on panic, she dived.
Three days later.
“We find you guilty.”
Ah, ah, and ah.
They found her conveniently present, while their power had failed to reach the actual perpetrator of the crime.
Silvia shrugged.
The thing was, ridiculous as that poor excuse for a trial had been, it didn't matter in the least. The merfolks of Atlantis couldn't do much against her. She was Alenian, and the two nations had an agreement: her fate would be decided by her people – which, in her case, meant that she'd get a "very naughty, don't do it again."
Being the irrelevant child of King Leopold did have some perks, occasionally.
“Playing with powers you fail to comprehend has cost the life of over three thousand people and yet, you smile?”
No; she smiled because they were morons and there wasn't anything else to do against stupidity.
“You believe we have no power against you, Sea Witch. You're right, we don't. So long as you never again enter our borders. Silvia Undine, you are hereby banished from the Dark Ocean. Should you so much as touch our waters, we will take the one thing that will prevent you from causing anymore harm: your voice.”
Once Upon A Time, there was a little girl who just loved telling her own stories. Fastforward about two decades? Not a lot of change, there.
My mother's collection of novels extends to three rooms, the stepfather who raised me writes awesome short stories: really, I didn't have a choice, I caught a bug.
I dabble in anything, Fantasy, Contemporary, Dystopian... Really, the subject doesn't matter.
