by Rebecca Watters
Cast adrift with only a pistol and a single lead ball—a small mercy for which Horatio ought to be grateful after a failed mutiny. He should have got a real job, but smuggling was more lucrative. Money and adventure—Arthur Gray’s siren song—that’s what lured him from the Mermaid Inn at Rye, where Arthur’s men drank, their tables spread with more weapons than the king’s armory and more money than God. It was good while it lasted. If it weren’t for that damned Marshall boy . . .
Horatio had done very bad things—but what Arthur did to that boy was more than even he could stomach.He should have kept his mouth shut about it, but he thought the other men were as angry as he was. They sure as hell said they were angry about it; he thought they meant it when they said they’d back him when he confronted Arthur about it. He didn’t realize they were too damned scared and too smart to stand up to Arthur. Horatio was never a brave man; what he lacked in courage he didn’t make up for in wit, either. If he had, he wouldn’t be where he was now.
Delirious and languishing on the open sea, not a drop of fresh water to sate his thirst, he thought of his mother. Named him after a character from Shakespeare, she did—he didn’t know which play. He didn’t care. He was never much one for theatre and literature. Took after his father that way; now he’d disappear like him, too.
“Sorry, Mum,” he mumbled through chapped, sun-drunk lips. “You’ll have to depend on Ophelia for grandchildren . . . I’m done for.”
If he were wise, he would have already used that single lead ball to end it. But now he was too weak to lift the damn pistol. A slow, agonizing death—Arthur’s parting gift. He was likely at the Mermaid by now, some pretty girl on his lap. Mermaids. That’s what the men called all them pretty girls that kept their laps warm and their beds cozy at the Mermaid Inn. Like the dark-haired siren Horatio wanted bad enough that he would get himself mixed up with Arthur’s gang in the first place, hoping if he was one of them, she’d be impressed. She was impressed all right; impressed enough to let Arthur press her back against a wall in the narrow corridor for a sixpence. Horatio should have known he never stood a chance with those damned mermaids when Arthur was around.
A mermaid started this whole affair. Fitting that a mermaid should end it.
That’s what she was, right? The woman he saw peering over the side of the boat. Large black eyes staring back at him from a face that was . . . human but not human. Women don’t have gray skin and black eyes. They don’t swim in the sea or tow boats back to Hastings, either.
That’s where the boat landed on the beach. It was night. He sat up, and there she was—hairless and terrifying—staring with those endless black eyes. A real, live mermaid. Not like the ones painted on the sign that hung over the door at the Mermaid, either. That’s how he knew she wasn’t a dream.
His mouth dropped open. The mermaid smiled an inhuman, sharp-toothed grin. Then she was gone—her large, fan-shaped tail splashing into the Channel’s dark waters.