This is not a love story.
It’s been over two thousand years since I walked these shores, and even then, the man who broke my heart was centuries gone, sailed away into death—the last journey into yet another land where I will not follow.
Truth be told, though, he left me long before he died, gone away to rejoin a wife he hadn’t seen in twenty years, to reclaim a rocky, wind-swept island for a son he barely knew.
Gone home, to spin stories about his absence like his wife spun his death-shroud—picking out the stitches at night and reweaving them anew to postpone the inevitable moment when the stories wear thin and you find the monsters have been in your home all along, posing as suitors who would win your heart.
The poets lie, you know. They say our songs seduce the sailors, draw them into the ocean to drown.
But if the ocean sings to them, it is not our doing—no more than the earth’s call to us is theirs.
And Odysseus never tried to resist.
Her kiss might save the world . . .
Unless his kiss kills her first.
It’s been almost two thousand years since the mer-shifter Skyla walked the streets of Athens—not since her heart was broken by a human man and she exchanged the land and sky for the ocean depths. Ever since, she has lived in the underwater ruins of Atlantis, studying with the priestesses of the goddess Amphitrite, refining her mermaid powers and ignoring her human half.
But her studies are interrupted when she is called upon by Poseidon himself to investigate rumors that the world above is being polluted by the magic of creatures from another realm—and worse, that the ocean kingdom of the mer-people might be next.
When her inquiries in modern-day Greece lead her to an American detective asking similar questions, Skyla realizes that the magical problem she’s been sent to research is bigger than she anticipated—and that one human’s kisses might be more dangerous to her, and her world, than she ever could have imagined.
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Wow! The poetry! So lovely!
Thanks so much! 🙂
Interesting premise.
It’s been fun to write! 🙂
ooooh, mer people. Rock on 🙂
We’re having fun with the collection this is part of! 🙂
Wow- ghe flow of that was catching and beautiful.
Thanks so much! 🙂