“Tell me.” Rocking up and down on the waves, she rested her chin on her upturned hands, her elbows in the sand, as before. “What are you apart from a seeker of mermaids?”
“Ha! A seeker of mermaids? I suppose you could call me that. My job?” The moon was up earlier too, and his frown lines were obvious.
“Yes. Your job.” The words were rolling off her tongue ever more smoothly, the centuries of disuse falling away. “What do you do to make money?”
“I’m a marine biologist. I study everything that lives in the sea. Such as you.” His mouth widened in another of his inscrutable smiles.
“Me? Hmmm. I knew that. You learn from books?”
“Do I learn from books? Yes. Sometimes. And from examining specimens in the laboratory, and live ones when at sea in boats. And from the internet.”
An odd word. Internet. In his gaze, she recognized that curiosity as to what she knew and what she did not.
“I don’t know what that is. A type of net?”
“Of course you don’t. The internet helps us humans to send things around the world, without actually going there.”
“Such as? Furniture? People?”
He barked a laugh. “No. Sorry. I shouldn’t laugh.” Wolfgang rubbed at his chin and leaned back into his chair. His slate was already on his lap. “We send words. Books, in a way. Pictures, drawings. Paintings. Moving paintings. And they get to their destination very quickly. In seconds, unless the net is crapping out.”
She made an O with her mouth, not quite understanding. “That sounds like magic?”
“In a way, it is. But then… you are magic to me. You don’t exist according to science. There are stories, myths, and legends like the Argonauts that mention sirens and mermaids, but it’s considered fantasy.”
Raffaela blinked at him, listening to the shush of the waves against the shore – the rolling shift of water, sand, small stones, and seashells.
What could she say to that? She whispered, “I wish…”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
She wished she were a fantasy, that none of this had happened to her, that she’d reached Ireland and found a husband, a good man, like this Wolfgang seemed to be. She’d had a life ahead of her, back then. It was all merely wishes, and maybe she would have died of the pox in a back alley, but she’d had hope.
Sadness swelled through her, making her want to weep. She held it in.
“So. Anyway. That is how I make money. I study. I had enough of it – the money – from my work and an inheritance, to buy a house on the shore only a few kilometers away. It’s further down the peninsula.” He pointed to his left.
She followed where he pointed, wondering if she could find his house. Wondering if he ever strolled the shore at night, unshackled.
The Ravening was speaking to her, hinting, insinuating.
She stared at Wolfgang. He’d been kind to her. He would never be hers. Even if, then she shut her eyes for desire was rising. Where her legs might be when she transformed, there, in the middle of her, she felt the stir of lust.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.” She smiled at him. “I can’t talk for as long this time.”
“A pity.”
“The Ravening is starting to speak to me. I will get dangerous to you soon, in a few more days. In a week, definitely.”
There, she’d been honest. Raffaela grimaced. Now he would leave and never talk to her again.
“But now you’re okay? I’m shackled. I am safe.” He nodded firmly. “We can talk some more.”
They did talk. They chatted, to her immense delight. They laughed at each other’s stories – though hers she kept to ones about the ocean, or people she’d listened to from under a jetty. Things that sailors had done that she’d heard them speak of. She was cautious and did not tell him of her human past.
Something about Wolfgang nudged at her, sometimes. As if she missed some nuance, which was likely. She’d been poor as dirt and had never been a poncey sort for balls and carriages and la-de-dah. Never had enough food, most days. Learning about the changes in the way people spoke from overheard jetty conversations hadn’t teached her much else. Taught her much else. Even thinking about her past made her speak funny.
Before the moon traversed much of the night sky, she decided to leave.
She had listened to him talk about his adventures in life and had reciprocated with her shipwreck and storm stories, and hints of what she’d found at the very bottom of the ocean. Treasures, he thought. Corpses were also a part of life down there.
“Time to leave,” she said, huskily. She had worn out her throat.
“Oh.” He reached behind his chair and pulled up a palm-sized, drawstring bag. “If you’re leaving, I have a gift for you. A present.” He raised his eyebrows. “Will you accept it?”
A gift seemed stranger than strange. Men were her prey. They did not give her things, apart from their lives.
“Perhaps?” She was curious. “Ummm.” She craned forward, as if to get a better view. “What might it be?”
“Here.” He tossed the bag and it landed near enough to her that she could reach it without leaving the water. Luckily. He could not have come to her, and she would never have wriggled from the sea to get it.
Cautiously, she undid the cinched neck.
“It’s safe. It’s a necklace. A special one.”
“Safe? How would it not be safe?” Raffaela drew it forth, and found it was a string of pearls that glowed luminously under the moon. The clasp was simple, a screw-in thing. She thought she could manage it, but… wariness made her question him. “Special? How?”
“If ever you are in trouble, if you press on the large black pearl, which is actually not a real pearl. It will signal me. Then I can find you, help you.”
She frowned at the weird piece of jewelry made from things she could find herself on the ocean floor, inside oysters. “How?”
“It’s… like the internet. A signal goes out. Like that.”
Do not look a gift horse in the mouth – a saying from her childhood.
“Thank you.” She slipped it around her neck, hesitated then found the clasp, made the pieces meet.
“You just sort of screw them together.” He made a circling motion with his hand. “It won’t fall off once fastened.”
“I have it. It is done.” The pearls felt odd and heavy sitting there, above her bare breasts, where nothing usually sat.
A gift though. And one that had consideration to it. He thought he could find her in time if a whale swallowed her? Amusing man.
“Will you return again? In three days, at dusk?”
Three more days and the Ravening would be three days closer. She heaved out a sigh. “Yes. I will not stay long. I may not come if it’s too dangerous.”
If I want to eat you.
“Sure.”
At the last second, before she swam away, she had an urge to give something to him. A piece of knowledge would be the best she could gift.
“Once a year, my body changes back into being human, and I get to walk upon the land again. For one day only. That day comes soon.” She cocked her head at him, half hoping, perhaps, that he would offer something…