Autumn Mermaid (Mermaid Series Book 4) Read online

  She hated mirrors. She hated that visage. It reeked of tales never meant to be told, of ghost stories coming true, and of a life lost without ever being lived. Visions of wild dogs tearing tender flesh—of pulling her still-beating heart from the open cavity in her chest and devouring it right in front of her—raged through her consciousness as she fought up to the surface of waking.

  It took Natalia a few seconds to assure herself she'd been but dreaming. Lily and Lauren lay gentle and silent by her either side breathing the heavy breath of sleep awaiting her summons but she abhorred the thought of tearing them from their slumbers over something as silly as a bad dream.

  "Never hesitate to wake me, my darling Natalia. I am always here for you."

  Lily knew how she'd been troubled by nightmares for centuries. She often shared her own night terrors with Natalia but someone else's fears were always distant at best. Though she commiserated with Lily, Natalia had no sense that her lover experienced the same depths of despair and angst while sailing through that displaced and imagined reality in which no one else could share.

  "Do you ever think that all this has been only a mirage, darling Lily? I often dream that I am still back on that terrible train in Europe searching for you yet no matter how I look, you are not there. I begin to believe I am the only one on that train. It is moving down the tracks—faster and faster—taking me to my death and there is nowhere to get off.

  "Could we leave pieces of our selves lying about in the times and places of our darkest and deepest despair? Sometimes I wake up—or at least I think I wake up—and the room is completely dark. It rocks back and forth the way I remember that train doing. I even hear the clickity-clack of metal wheels on the iron rails.

  "I want to scream but my throat is closing up. All I can manage is a whimper. I know there is something in the dark waiting for me. The air itself seems to move and ripple like dark curtains being drawn over me... like a burial shroud clouding my face. I want to shout, to tell someone that I am not dead, but I cannot move. I cannot speak.

  "I feel cold, like I used to feel as a child when the wild winter winds would seep up through the cracks in the wagon which served us as a home. I lay there paralyzed. Though I long to climb out of bed and find my mother I know it will not be she who I discover.

  "There is someone in the wagon with me. It used to be a man but now it has changed into something sinister—a dead thing kept alive by shards of glass that have pierced its heart and anchored its being to the night.

  "I keep thinking I know who this man used to be yet his name will not surface. It is as if he has willed his memory from my mind by replacing it with such dread and horror that I will not approach even the remembrance of him.

  "Do you have such surreal nightmares at times too, my precious Lily?"

  "My dreams are of the Lake, sweet Natalia, especially now, when we're so close to traveling there again. Like you, I wake to find myself cold and in a blue sort of darkness, only I know from the weight pressing down upon me that I am beneath the waters once again, living a sort of death each day, and dreading the coming of the night.

  "My ancestors were little better than the feral monkey-like creatures that prowled the naked shores of the Lake seeking to spear one of us to roast upon a spit over an open flame. They did not care if we were alive or dead... in fact, they seemed to prefer the meat of an animal cooked alive.

  "Your dream, my precious Natalia, seems to portend the future while mine are always of the past. Have you thought of further exploring the road upon which you travel during your sleep?"

  "I'm not sure what you mean, my lovely Lily."

  "Among my kind, it is possible to consciously order one's dreams. I have heard it said it takes much practice and I have never attempted the feat, but I knew of others who have. They became known as predictors of the future."

  "Are they dead now, my darling Lily?"

  "All of them have gone into the depths of the Lake, my beautiful Natalia, if that is what you mean."

  "I don’t understand, my wondrous Lily. If they could foretell the future, why didn’t they avoid their own demise?"

  "I have learned that a long life isn’t always advantageous. The troubles of time pile deeper and thicker until we often succumb to the lure of the Lake. It is what is called the diminishing. As a girl I often watched old women descend into the depths never again to surface.

  "Females are afflicted with this dread disease much more than are males. This may be a quirk in our physiology or perhaps it has more to do with the Ladies remembering every passing moment while the males pass through life as phantoms, rarely recalling even their own names.

  "I was under the spell of the diminishing not so long ago... remember how isolated I'd become? I couldn’t bring myself to leave my abode. Though I longed for your touch—for Lauren's—I detested the thought of allowing it.

  "When Micah's minions appeared to take me away on his clouds of desire, I went willingly. I was ready to die... it didn’t matter how. Something odd happened, however. His miniature monsters seemed to eat away the diseased parts of my body and then they died away, leaving me renewed and ready once again for life with my Ladies.

  "Now, I am ready to live forever once more."

  Chapter 4—Compulsion

  "I have to go, sweet Amanda. Lady Lily needs me."

  "We need you more, darling Nate. We are your family now. If you leave us I know you'll never return."

  Despite his assurances to the contrary, her prescience proved correct. He wanted to go back to Toulon but something held him at anchor in Orchardton Hall, and when he finally left there, he went north to the Isle of Skye rather than southward and home.

  Nate rationalized that it was his work that required he do so though all his tools, diagrams, and even his prototypes were at Toulon. He couldn’t face Amanda and Ginger knowing how he'd lied to them, how he'd let them down after their belief in him, and how he'd abandoned them without so much as a logical and rational excuse.

  He supposed he'd never get over what he felt for Lily. Though he didn’t understand it, the pull of her presence was too great an attraction for him to overcome. He was a moon orbiting her presence and as the years went by the draw of her magnetism brought him ever-closer until he knew either they would collide once more or else he'd be shattered to pieces by his magical desire for her.

  Making love with her one last time had been a mistake of epic proportions. When she took him by the hand he wanted to break free of her... to run back to Toulon, to his family and to his life. He trembled like a child again in the presence of a god he had no right to be with.

  Instead, he followed Lily even then he knew it was but spur of the moment impulses driving her desires. She'd always been like that. For him that was perhaps her most endearing feature. But when those impulses drove her into the arms of others, it maddened him, driving him crazy with jealous thoughts and insane ideas of revenge.

  He'd grown up with Lily, not as a peer but knowing her as a trusted voice who had always watched out for him. It was she who advised him to pick up a stout piece of driftwood to club Drummond over the head when he began his bullying ways.

  "You should have finished the job, darling Nate. Now I fear he will only seek retribution for the beating you inflicted upon him. Beware, my darling."

  Not long afterwards, the girl whom he'd been trying to save came to him telling of plans she'd made with the hated Drummond to leave Orchardton Hall and start a colony of their own. Lucy challenged him to go to the Ladies with the news yet he stayed quiet instead.

  When the small group turned up dead, no one mourned any of them too heavily. Drummond was universally despised, Lucy was a sullen thing prone to sarcasm and meanness, and the others who went with them were much the same.

  Though Lucy had enchanted Nate for a brief while it was Lily who enthralled him... even as a child he dreamed of her. Every story he read—and he read a million of them—contained a character like Lily, a temptress who bade
her lovers to come closer while all the while pushing them away.

  There were both bright flames burning in her heart and cold brittle ice coagulating around its edges. She repelled him with her frigid and calculating ways while at the same time attracting him with her beauty and grace. Though the same blood mingled in their veins, her species was something all together foreign to the human race that he was also a part and parcel of.

  Though he found solace in the arms of Ginger and Amanda, they could never grab hold of his passions and twist them into being the way Lily had done and continued to do. He thought he might stay by her side forever, just in case she ever welcomed him into her bed once more.

  But then, the stars overhead began to beckon. Pete had a crazy idea they could modify the anti-gravity craft to become an interstellar vessel capable of reaching nearby solar systems and Nate thought how the man could well be correct.

  With Ena's help, a skeleton of starship began taking form in the workshop behind her villa on the Isle of Skye. The rest of the world fell by the wayside as they toiled. Years passed by with barely a whisper, their only trail marked by myriad dead leaves that cluttered the corners ever more deeply. Friends and family arrived from other parts of the globe and when they were ignored soon left, first with regularity, and later less often until no one appeared at all.

  Nate wondered if living on another world many light years away might lessen the addiction that he suffered for Lily's love and affection. Thoughts of her tormented his sleep and gradually crept into his waking life until it was all he could do not to leave the workshop in the Isle of Skye and go back to Orchardton Hall even if it meant merely haunting the forests that slowly grew closer to the castle walls.

  He knew Lily felt nothing for him. She never had. She had used him as a pawn in a centuries-long chess game she played in her own mind. Still, he had been a willing participant and would do so again if ever given the opportunity.

  Love was overrated. Centuries ago Karen once told him that love was just chemicals mixing around deep inside the head exciting neurons in the pleasure centers in the brain and leading to expectations that would forever exceed reality.

  He didn’t believe her. He couldn't. There was no way love was as elemental as she seemed to think. Love was as indefinable as the sky that whirled overhead as they argued long into the night over many bottles of wine, neither of them able to convince the other of the veracity of their claims.

  Knowing Lily had cemented it for him. Karen was right. What he felt for his Lady was as ephemeral as a sunrise. When he tried to pin down the love he knew so well, he discovered it was nothing more than an illusion, something he had made up as a child and liked so well that he could never let it go.

  He wanted to hate her and in that fashion attempt to negate any affection he once harbored for Lily. He made long lists of all her harmful qualities careful to list each one that came to mind, and they were legion.

  Late in the autumn of one of those mislaid years that had come to afflict him like those dead leaves piling into the unswept corners of his memories he returned to Toulon more on a whim than on a plan. He flew noiselessly over the once thriving vineyards disturbed to see the neglect and ruin that met his anxious eyes. There was no one about to witness his presence.

  The old castle looked like a broken ghost, its windows gone, the roof fallen through, and the walls covered in a creeping malaise of sour mold and mildew working its way up from below rotting out the mortar and weakening the corners until gaping cracks had appeared.

  He realized for the first time what he had done by leaving Toulon yet the knowing did not engender the regret that he heretofore thought it might. That was why he had stayed away so long... the threat of a mountain of guilt falling upon his head. Yet he felt nothing.

  He and Kirk had been the cement that held up the community. They worked the vineyards, fermented the grapes, and bottled the wine. Leaving Niall behind was but a poor substitute, a way of quelling his feelings of having abandoned the women who loved him most.

  Without setting down he flew on, proud that he had kept a promise for once in his life yet left wondering what had become of his erstwhile family. Had they died? Surely word would have reached him at the Isle of Skye... but who would bring the news? They had no visitors any longer... he couldn’t recall the last folk to come by.

  It was the compulsion he felt... the need to invent. But what good did any of his achievements do when there was no one around to enjoy them? Making a wide circle Nate flew low searching out the landscape for signs of human life.

  Chapter 5—Changes

  The weather had turned.

  Being close to nature as he was, Alpin could sense the changes coming days in advance—sometimes weeks—so he had prepared the cabin for the cold front moving in by stocking its outer walls with wood for his stove as well as bringing in plenty of dried gnu meat from the underground vault where he stored it to keep his food safe from predators.

  "When are you coming home, sweet Alpin?"

  Ena visited him a few days ago. He had been surprised to see his wife after so many years apart thinking perhaps she'd forgotten him... or maybe he was just hoping. He didn’t know when or why but he had come to feel a certain aversion to being in the woman's presence.

  She knew things people shouldn’t know... like the time she warned him not to leave the villa and he did anyway only to suffer a near-fatal injury when a tree branch broke off in a windstorm striking him over the head and shoulders fracturing his skull and breaking his collar bone. He woke to find Ena tending his wounds with a gentle look of reproach in her eyes. She didn’t have to say anything.

  "I am at home, my darling Ena."

  "You know what I mean, my precious Alpin. I miss you. When are you coming home to the Isle of Skye?"

  He had never been able to and he still couldn’t seem to bring himself to tell her the truth... that he'd grown tired of life with her... that he enjoyed these mountains and his solitude far more than he ever took pleasure in living at the villa on the Isle of Skye.

  He'd always told Ena what he thought she wanted to hear, at least ever since that time long ago when he refused to go to old America with her and took up with Amanda. Though that happened centuries ago he still felt pangs of guilt clawing at his hearts when he thought of how he had hurt the love of his life.

  He knew he'd never meet anyone like Ena. Rather than shunning her, he should be clinging to her with all his might. Any man would be lucky to have a woman like her by his side. Instead, he spent half his life pushing her away, punishing her for the mere fact that she loved him.

  "I have herbs to gather before winter sets in, my sweet Ena. Look for me around the solstice."

  He was lying. What was more, she knew he was lying... he could see it in her eyes and the way she had of biting her lower lip to keep from crying. He should have been shamed into keeping his promise but after she left the Grampians he forgot all about her.

  He'd heard the man they rescued from that beach in old France had gone off into the wilderness too. No one saw him for decades. Kāne had always frightened him, the feral look in his eyes reminded Alpin of a pride of lions he stumbled across during his first trip into the north of old Scotland and how he thought sure he'd be their next meal.

  There was something cold in those eyes, hard and unforgiving, as if the man had learned secrets too terrible to share with others and yet he still dared them to listen to his sordid tales.

  Ena called him Father.

  He had once been passionately jealous of the relationship between her and Kāne though he told himself a million times over that he had no right to feel the way he did. Kāne was Ena's father even though Alpin didn’t understand the dynamics behind her heritage. He envied her for having such a powerful father figure... Kāne exuded a rare strength that surpassed even that of Grandfather Nate in its intensity.

  While living in the villa located on the Isle of Skye, Alpin noted the passing of the days with an impatience
colored by knowing he was doing what was expected of him: playing the good father and the genteel husband all the while dreaming of the Grampians and their timeless majesty.

  The pull of the high wild places had proved too powerful a lure to ignore for long. Soon after he convinced Ena to go with him the north of old Scotland, he had taken to leaving her and their growing family for increasingly longer amounts of time as he cultivated the life of a hermit, hiding away from those he loved most and ruing the days he was forced to spend in civilization.

  Catan grew up rarely seeing his father as did a long succession of children finally culminating in Niall, who had apparently inherited his father's wanderlust. Early one morning Ena had showed up at his cabin with tidings of their youngest son having run away.

  "I know he's wanted to go to the south of old France to be with Luciana and I promised I'd take him soon. I don't understand why he would just depart like he did, without a word. He didn’t even leave a note, my lovely Alpin. Come go with me to find our son before he is devoured by fell beasts."

  "Niall will be fine, precious Ena. He doesn’t need us chasing after him. Let him have his adventure... if he doesn’t turn up in a few weeks, I'll go looking for him."

  "He's just fifteen years old, Alpin! He's on your old motorcycle too. Aren't you worried about him? Remember what happened to you and how you nearly died?"

  "Niall is a smart boy. He's been riding since he could hardly walk. He'll be safe, my precious Ena."

  Without a word she got in the Jeep, drove off, and left him standing there. He knew she was angry and that he should follow her, to explain his reasoning, to make good the guilt that was arising in his conscience, but he didn’t. He let her go. Later, he heard that Niall showed up in Toulon at Grandfather Nate's castle wanting to learn how to grow grapes.