Calum shivers. “I believe you.”

  “Don’t matter if you do. True is true, whether anyone believes or not.” He gestures at the waves. “If your woman is out there, the sea has her. The mer-folk have her. Won’t be nothin’ to find but sorrow, lad. You’ll see.”

  “Then why are you taking me out?”

  “When a man’s lost his woman, he’s lost his way. You want her to be out there, alive. She ain’t, and you know it, but you’re just mad enough to believe your own lies. I’ll show you the trail of the dead, and maybe you’ll find your senses. Or, you’ll bury yourself in the waves with your poor wife.”

  Calum doesn’t know what to make of this. “Bury myself in the waves?”

  “You’re grief-mad. It’s a better end to drown quickly out here, than slowly back ashore.” The old man thumps his chest. “Lost my wife in similar circumstances, years ago. Been drowning ever since, but I can’t bring myself to let the sea take me. Too stubborn, I guess. I’m doing you a favor. If you want to live, you’ll live. If you don’t, well . . . like I said, maybe it’s better to end it quickly.”

  Calum’s stomach drops out. End it quickly? The thought hadn’t occurred to him. He just wants to find Mary, just wants to know she’s alive.

  But if she isn’t?

  The thought of seeing her corpse in the waves . . . eaten by fish, bloated . . . Calum loses what little is left in his stomach. If Mary is . . .

  He can’t even think the word. He’s been clinging to the hope that she’s still alive.

  If she’s not . . . Calum tries to imagine carrying on with his life back ashore. Building ships, going to the tavern, drinking whisky with Da . . . it all seems futile and empty and pointless without Mary. How could he continue living? What’s the point? Until now, Calum has been clutching desperately at the notion that Mary is out here, alive still, somehow.

  If she isn’t?

  If she’s . . . dead?

  The idea of sinking peacefully beneath the waves doesn’t sound so bad. Better than going through life back ashore without Mary.

  “She could still be alive,” he insists.

  “The sea is full of mischief and trickery and surprises, lad.” The fisherman adjusts a line, knots it again. “Never know what’s possible, I suppose.”

  A long silence, and then the fisherman leans far over the side of the sloop and scoops something out of the water—a woman’s bonnet. From the bottom of the boat, the fisherman lifts a long pole with a hook on the end and uses it to reach out into the water and pull something toward the boat; the hook is snagged onto the sleeve of a man’s coat. The corpse is facedown, but has clearly been in the water a day or two. Now that he’s looking, Calum becomes aware of what it is they’re sailing through: the wreckage and detritus swept off the deck of the Victoria. Another body, also male. Crates and barrels, chunks of broken wood, a bit of spar, clothing. Food. Another body.

  Calum cries out, then—this body, the one twisting and bobbing in the waves, is a woman’s body. Her dress is splayed out in the water, bits of white petticoat showing. Dark hair floating like a spray of ink.

  “Mary!” He leans over the side, reaching for her.

  “Stay in the boat, lad,” the fisherman warns. “This ain’t the spot to be throwing yourself over. You won’t find the death you’re looking for. Not here.”

  Calum ignores the fisherman. The woman’s body is just within reach, but he can’t stretch far enough, can’t quite reach . . .

  His balance shifts, a wave sends the boat lurching, and Calum is weightless for a moment. Only for a moment, though. He smashes into the icy water, brine salting his lips and stinging his eyes and filling his mouth and lungs. Currents pull at him, and he kicks, thrashes. The sea is dark, so dark, here under the waves.

  The woman’s body is just beside him, above him.

  Her face isn’t Mary’s.

  It’s not Mary.

  Calum tries to swim, but his coat drags him down, and his peg leg is heavy, and his limbs are tired, and his lungs scream and the current is too strong, pulling him down, down, down.

  Something tugs at his foot.

  Brushes his shoulder.

  He kicks at the current, but the sea has him.

  He wants to scream, and the only word jangling through his brain is Mary, Mary, Mary, but he can’t scream, because his breath is running out.

  Something tugs at his knee.

  Bumps his back.

  Tangles in his hair.

  He twists in the current, catches a glimpse of movement in the shadows of the deep. The surface is far overhead. Too far.

  Mary.

  Mary.

  He’s dizzy, and his lungs are on fire, and even his desperation is running out. He could take a breath, and it would be over. Why fight any more? The old fisherman was right—the sea has Mary, and now the sea has him.

  He kicks for the surface once more, but the current is stronger, pulling him down.

  Something colder than the water traces across his cheek, and something tickles his hand. Scrapes his chest. He blinks, salt stinging his eyes, shadows skirling and eddying, darkness deeper than midnight shadows are all around him, pressure crushing him.

  Is . . .

  Is that a face, there in the shadows? A pale slip of white flesh, just out of reach? A corpse, probably.

  But no, it moves. Shifts, too quickly to be caught in the current.

  So dizzy.

  Fire in his chest.

  Darkness in his mind, in his eyes, behind his eyes. Breath is gone, and he has to expel it. His lungs cannot remain contracted any longer.

  He’s twisted, suddenly. Pulled, pushed.

  A face, in front of him.

  A woman.

  Alive.

  Eyes wide and oval, dark, blinking weirdly, inhuman pupils, irises too dark to be human. Too sharp cheekbones. Too high a forehead. Hair too long, too tangled, a wrong shade of brown, almost green, the shade of seaweed that sometimes washes ashore after a storm. She regards him steadily. Her expression, if a face like hers can be understood to express emotions he would comprehend, is that of someone watching a bug struggling to right itself.

  Calum sees her and is sure he must be hallucinating as his lungs give out.

  But then she reaches for him, and her palm touches his cheek, and her touch is colder than ice, and far too real. He catches at her wrists, and feels her bones in his hand, her cold flesh.

  Calum coughs, then, and knows the end has come. Seawater fills his mouth.

  He is sinking.

  Drowning.

  The woman watches, impassive.

  Mary.

  Mary?

  Does she see the sorrow in him then, this woman of the sea? Does she see something she understands? She moves, a sinuous flicker, and she’s catching at him, strong fists clutching at his clothing. Tangling with him, her solid body against his, movement fluttering against his legs.

  Her mouth is strange, pressed against his. Alien. Cold, so cold. But her lips feel like lips, and the breath she expels into his mouth tastes of brine and the deepest depths of the sea and other darker flavors, but it is a breath nonetheless, and it fills his lungs and gives him a reprieve from the darkness consuming him from within.

  Upward.

  She’s pulling him upward, swimming for the surface faster than belief. His head breaks the surface, and he gasps for air, coughing, vomiting seawater. The surface of the sea is empty, only waves in every direction. The sloop is gone, the fisherman is gone. There are no corpses, no crates, no barrels.

  Calum coughs, kicking to stay afloat, but he’s too heavy, too weak, and he sinks beneath the surface, blinking brine, gasping for another lungful of air.

  And there she is.

  Her bare flesh isn’t quite white; is there a greenish tinge? A hint of the jade of the sea, coloring her flesh? She flashes past him, swimming around him.

  Calum was a sailor once, before he lost his leg, before he met Mary. He knows the creatures of the sea, the shark, the dolphin, the swordfish, the whale . . .

  Her tail is a shark’s tail, the fin running vertical, and when she swims, her tail flashes side to side.

  Her breasts are bare, and heavy, and round, and now he notices this. Her spine is knobbed, almost ridged. Her shoulder blades are too prominent. There are slits in her skin, at the sides of her throat, which pulse open and closed—gills.

  She twists, arching her spine and rolling over, and then a wicked flash of her tail sends her slicing through the sea toward him, and she’s there, up against him, catching at his waist. Her eyes cut over him and see his legs, one whole and complete, and the other ending at the knee, with a gnarled, twisted, polished length of wood where his calf should be.

  She tangles a fist in his hair and presses her mouth to his, and once again her breath fills him, tasting stale somehow and briny and of old fish and new meat. He sucks at this breath greedily, out of instinct. His soul is heavy, his heart a vacant hole in his chest, his mind reeling and baffled and overwhelmed, but his body is betraying him, sucking at each lungful of breath he can get, clinging to each next moment of life.

  A thousand questions sear through him, tangled and confused.

  She wraps an arm around him, and she is so strong, too strong. She pulls him to the surface. She’s holding him with one arm, her tail wiggling under the surface, keeping them both afloat. She clings to him, his back pressed to her front, her breasts flattened against his shoulder blades, her hands clutching at his middle. Her tail doesn’t merely flick, but beats with staggering power, and they slice through the water together with unbelievable speed.

  He can feel the movement of her tail, feel it writhing against his legs, back and forth, back and forth. Her hair streams behind her, like a skein of seaweed. His lungful of air is soon depleted, and he holds it in still, fighting the urge to breathe, to let go.

  She angles upward, and rolls to her back with his weight resting on her, and he feels the air on his face and sucks in a breath, and no sooner he has done this than she is twisting once more, powering them beneath the waves.

  Again and again, she brings him to the surface, lets him take a breath, and then continues onward. Minutes, hours? He doesn’t know, can’t track the passage of time except in terms of breaths, lungfuls sucked in and burned through.

  The next time she surfaces, there is the sound of waves crashing against shore. Spray flings skyward as the surf smashes against a rock. It is into this violent, white-churned froth of currents and smashing waves that she takes him, to a slick bump of rock. She deposits him onto the rock, and then catches at it with her hands and pulls herself onto it beside him.

  “Can you breathe, out of the water?” he asks.

  “For a small time.” The slits in her throat, the gills, he supposes they are, are opening-closing faster than ever, pulsing rapidly, and he realizes she is winded, exhausted.

  “Why does the sea not want me?”

  A shrug of her shoulder. “The sea keeps her secrets. I only know she does not want you.”

  “Mary.” Calum points back the way they came. “She was on that boat. With those dead people, where you found me.”

  A shrug. “The sea keeps her secrets.”

  “Were you there, when they went overboard?”

  Her eyes meet his, and her gaze is alien, utterly foreign. “What is a Mary?”

  Calum touches his fist to his heart. “My wife. My mate.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did . . . can you find her? My Mary?”

  “I know not of your Mary.”

  The surf is violent, crashing, smashing, deafening, white frothing spray dappling the air: an angry sea.

  “I have to know. I have to find her.”

  “The sea keeps her secrets.”

  “Then ask the sea! Or show me how to ask!” It’s craziness, madness, what he’s saying, but Mary was his saving grace, his all, his everything.

  She does not answer, which is as much an answer as he’ll get.

  A few moments of silence between them, leavened only by the crashing surf.

  “Are there others like you?” he asks, eventually.

  “Are there others like you?” she parrots, but it’s not a repetition, rather the question returned, the question answered.

  She scoops a handful of the surf and splashes herself with it, wetting her face, her throat, her gills, and her lungs expand briefly, her gills pulsing.

  “How do you speak my language?” he asks, rather than answering her question out loud.

  “Men have known we swim beneath the waves. A man was in the little boat, the little boat that comes out of the larger boat. He was far from any after-sea, lost in the sea. She wanted him and was waiting until it was his time. I tried to help him, but the sea kept him, her currents kept him. So I stayed with him, and learned his words. You men interest me. I like to speak to you. To see you. Your legs are strange.”

  “How do I find Mary?”

  “If the sea has taken her, you cannot.”

  “I have to find her. I have to find Mary.” He meets her eyes, pleading. “The sea can have me, if I can find Mary. She’s . . . I have to find Mary.”

  A shake of her head. “I can help you forget Mary. The sea has her, and the sea does not give up her secrets.” She slides across the rock, shimmying closer to Calum. “I can take you down into the waves, and I can help you forget.”

  “I can’t forget.”

  She touches his wooden leg then the flesh of his thigh above it. “I watch the after-sea, sometimes. From the waves. I watch men and women like me. You mate, like we do.”

  Calum just stares at her. Seeing her differently. Seeing her as a female. Where her legs would be, where human becomes sea creature, there is a dappling, shadows, rippling, folds, secret flesh, feminine flesh. Breasts. Hands. Lips. Curves and softness where a woman is curved and soft.

  She shifts closer to him. Are they closer to the waves, now? Is the surf churning higher around him? Are the waves closer to reclaiming him? He smells her, feels her. She touches him, his legs, his stomach . . . his mind is spinning, dizzy, and a sense of strangeness is flowering in his mind, an otherness, a part of his deepest instincts responding to something in her voice, in the gleam of her eye, in the searing coldness of her touch.

  “I watch your men mating with your women. And I think to myself, what would it be like, to mate with a man? To join as we join, but on the after-sea, rather than—”

  “But . . . Mary . . .” It’s Calum’s only coherent thought.

  He feels her, this mer-woman, her hands on him, the cold sea air on his bare flesh, her touch so cold it burns, her breath, her too sharp teeth nipping sharply here and there, teasing rather than tearing, her body is familiar and alien at once, her lips firm and her tongue slithery, her breasts heavy and pliable and weighted perfectly in his hands, her flesh like ice, colder than ice, a cold so fierce it becomes fire.

  “So warm. Your warmth is strange.”

  “Cold.”

  He’s not Calum any longer, just a man. Response, reaction. Her touch leeches his warmth, but her touch also incites heat and need.

  “Mary.”

  He hears a hiss, her sound of frustration. “The sea has your Mary.”

  “The sea . . .” He’s trying to wade through the fog, the haze, the dizziness, the darkness, the strangely urgent desire, trying to remember what was so important. “Then give me the sea.”

  “I can give you the sea,” she says, in a shuddering vibrato that sings in the darkest nooks of his mind. “I can give you the deeps, where there are a thousand Marys to find. The sea can give you the breath of the deeps.”

  “Only one Mary. My Mary.” He has her face in his mind, her delicate black strands of hair, the vivid blue of her eyes, the gentle curve of her hips, the slightness of her tender breasts, the quiet murmur of her voice, the strength of her peace, the peace she always gave him so freely, so easily, his Mary was his peace, all she had to do was simply be, simply sit beside him and hold his hand and read to him, and he could find his peace in her.

  My Mary.

  That vibrato sings inside him again. Her touch is so cold, at his temples now, over his heart. The cold filters through him, crackles like ice in his veins. She is all around him, the cold of the depths in her touch, on her lips grazing his skin.

  She is inside him, in his dreams, in his memories. The breath from her lungs pulses through him, he’s breathing her breath and the sea is around him, but he isn’t cold and doesn’t need to breathe the sky, he’s breathing her, breathing the sea, she’s around him and her touch is warmth.

  But still, Mary is all there is. The beat of his heart—Mary . . . Mary . . . Mary . . . Mary. He aches, his bones ache, his groin aches. His cock throbs and his balls ache. His heart is fit to burst, pounding in his chest.

  Mary.

  A day of white: white flowers and white silk, his Navy uniform pressed and creased and pinned at the knee, no veil for Mary, just white flowers in her black hair and the sea behind them, rippling silver and green and blue in the sun. A day of promises, her promise to always be his peace, and his promise to always be her strength, her protector, to shield her from the ugliness of the world, so she can be his innocence, his peace, his whiteness in a blood-red world.

  MaryMaryMaryaryMaryMaryMaryMary

  * * *

  The sea whispers around him:

  . . . Calum?. . .

  * * *

  Dreams, darkness, memory, death, life—it’s all a weirding, twisting tangle. The white of her dress, her lips on his as they kiss for the first time, the white of her skin in the gentle yellow-orange of the firelight, in their cabin by the sea, near the shipyards where he builds ships he’ll never set foot on again—it’s not seasickness that makes him ill on a ship, but the blood-sickness of memory. The white of her teeth as she laughs at him, teasing, loving. The white of her breasts as she moves above him in the candlelight, such slight, small breasts, so lovely, so pale and delicate and perfect. The white of her thighs around his waist.