The Merman Boxset (Books 1-5): A Gay Merman Romance Read online

  “Ah, enough, enough!” she pleaded.

  “That’s what you get for telling me about a monster, Mom,” he said.

  “I suppose so,” she said. Her expression went thoughtful. “People really do claim to have seen the Mers. I thought I saw one too, once. Staring at me right back.”

  “Really? Where, Mom? Around here? What did you do?” Gabriel asked.

  She opened her mouth to answer, but then her gaze fixed on something over his shoulder. That was when he heard the crack of lightning. He whipped around. The formerly cloudless horizon had filled with a welling line of black clouds. The slow, silky waves changed to choppy swells. His mother scrambled to her feet and helped him up.

  “John!” she cried. Her face had gone chalk white.

  “I see it!” he yelled back. His father was already white-knuckling the wheel. “We’ve got to turn around. Get back to shore now.”

  “Where did the storm come from?” Gabriel crouch-walked back to the stern, holding on to the railing as tightly as he could. The boat had begun to buck up and down. “It was sunny!”

  “The ocean can turn on a dime, Gabriel,” his mother said. Her expression was grim. She quickly joined his father behind the wheel.

  That was when Gabriel felt it. They were at the spot. He wavered where he stood. Something was beneath them. Something far below.

  This is where we were meant to come.

  His mother’s voice, high and tight, broke him out of his reverie. “John, let’s get the motor on and the sails down. I’ll take over here.” She gestured towards the wheel.

  His father nodded tightly. He stopped to cup Gabriel’s cheek, probably thinking the strange expression on his face was fear. “It’s going to be all right, Gabe. Don’t worry. We’re going to be fine. We’ll keep ahead of the storm. I’ll get the sails. Why don’t you turn the engine on?”

  But the storm was already upon them. A line of darkness crossed over the boat. Gabriel watched as the sun was snuffed out. The wind nearly blew him over as he stumbled towards where the controls for the motor were. The line holding the dinghy snapped and the little boat floated several yards away before being swamped by a wave and disappearing below the surface. Lightning crackled above them. Thunder suddenly boomed, and Gabriel felt the vibration in his chest.

  His father had untied the line and was winching the jib closed. The muscles in his arms and legs stood out as he used all of his strength against the power of the wind. Gabriel tried turning the key to get the engine to start, but nothing happened.

  “Mom, Dad, it’s not turning over!”

  His father turned to come help him, but his mother waved him off.

  “John, get the mainsail down first! Then we can deal with the engine!” Kathleen cried.

  The wind was making the mainsail snap violently, and there was now an ominous tilt to the boat. Gabriel had to hang on to one of the cleats to stop from tumbling into the sea.

  “Damn!” John jumped up and headed towards the mast.

  Gabriel was watching his father with anxious eyes when he glimpsed something huge and black rising up from the ocean in front of them. He heard his mother scream for his father. His father turned and saw the rogue wave. There was nothing they could do. They couldn’t get out of the way. His father didn’t even have time to get back to them. The massive wave blotted out Gabriel’s ability to think. And then his father, his mother, and the boat were all gone.

  He was in the water.

  It was amazingly quiet underneath the waves. The thunder was muted. The lightning that ripped across the sky wasn’t as bright. Everything was peaceful. Calm. Gabriel could see the boat floating above him, only it wasn’t quite right. The mast was snapped in the middle, hanging on by a few thin strands of fiberglass. It should have been pointing at the sky, but was now straining towards the bottom of the ocean. The boat had capsized. For one moment, he thought of just staying where he was. It felt so much safer under the water. But then his lungs began to ache. He had to surface. He had to face the storm.

  He swam towards the lightning-streaked sky. Gasping as he broke the surface, Gabriel frantically looked around for his parents. His eyes stung from the salt water. He blinked them clear. Where were his mother and father? He grabbed hold of the boat’s barnacle-encrusted bottom. The sharp barnacles sliced through his palms, but his blood was quickly washed away by the sea. Lightning crackled across the sky. Another round of thunder reverberated in his chest.

  “MOM! DAD!”

  His head was again pushed beneath the ocean’s surface by another wave, not as big as the one that had capsized the boat, but powerful all the same. His eyes popped open underwater. He looked around him trying to see his parents’ bodies in the dimness. He thought he saw a flash of white, maybe an arm or a leg, about twenty feet away. And there was something else, something deep below him.

  Lights? A submarine? No, it’s too big. Many colors, not just white. So deep below …

  The lights were red and blue and green and yellow and purple. They were distant, yet for some reason he felt the insane urge to try and swim down to them. But his lungs were already burning again. Strangely, so were his sides. They burned and itched. Gabriel raced to the surface for air. He gulped down oxygen greedily. The burning sensation in his lungs eased, but his sides still felt odd.

  He turned to face where he had seen the flash of a limb. However, the slate gray sea showed nothing but foaming, storm-churned water.

  “MOM! DAD! Where are you?” Gabriel’s voice was whipped back to him by the wind.

  That was when he caught sight of his mother. She was on the opposite side of the boat. Her hair was plastered to her face like seaweed and her green eyes were so wide they swallowed everything else.

  “Gabe! Oh, my God! Hold on to the boat! Don’t let go!” she cried.

  Air trapped in the cabin must have been keeping the boat afloat. Pelting rain suddenly started coming down on them in torrents. The drops stung like acid on the backs of his hands as he stretched them over the bottom of the boat. Barnacles cut into the soft inner skin of his arms.

  “Where’s Dad?” he shouted at her. He couldn’t see his strong, handsome father anywhere.

  His mother’s head swiveled around. A look of panic flooded her features.

  “John?” she cried out. “JOHN?”

  But no one responded.

  The waves lashed them from all sides. Gabriel’s grip on the boat was slipping, but he doggedly held on. A large wave lifted the boat, letting them see more clearly all around them. That was when he caught sight of his father.

  “There! There he is, Mom!” Gabriel pointed towards his father. His father’s body was bobbing up and down on the waves. He didn’t appear to be moving on his own. “I’ll go get him!”

  “No, Gabriel! Stay here!” she ordered. “I’m going to get your father. And then we’ll swim back to you. We’ll come back to you.”

  “But—”

  “NO!” She looked wild then. “Gabriel, stay with the boat. No matter what, you stay with the boat!”

  She stared at him until he nodded his agreement. Every part of him was fighting against it.

  “I love you, Gabriel.” She said the words as if she were trying to imprint them on him.

  “I love you, too, Mom.” His voice sounded hollow.

  She cast one last look at him and then she let go of the boat and swam out after his father. He watched as she swam with sure and steady strokes towards him even against the wildness of the sea. She would get to his father. She would swim them both back to the boat. Then they would all figure out a way to get back to shore. It would be all right. Everything would be all right.

  Sea spray lifted off of the ocean’s surface and splashed into his eyes. He lost sight of his mother and father, but when his vision cleared he saw something else. It was another rogue wave. A wall of black water, ten times his height, was bearing down towards him. The wave was already breaking at the top. White foam frothed at the tip as the wave began to collapse.

  His hands slid away from the boat’s slowly sinking bottom. The wave smashed down on top of him, sending him spiraling into the depths, far too deep to make it back to the surface before his lungs gave out. He barely was able to escape being snagged by the boat on its way down to the ocean’s distant floor.

  He looked around for his parents, but there was nothing left but water and the lights. His parents were gone and he knew that they were dead. He felt it inside of him, and the grief was too huge to grasp. He looked up and couldn’t see the surface. He tried to take a few strokes upwards, but his lungs were already screaming for air and his arms and legs felt leaden. His sides were burning like a knife was being punched through his skin again and again.

  I’m drowning, he thought, and was surprised at how numb he was to that fact.

  Black spots began to dance before his eyes. In a moment his mouth was going to open, and he was going to try and draw in air that wasn’t there whether he wanted it to happen or not. Water was going to rush past his lips and flood his lungs. He would spasm and there would be pain and panic. It had already happened to his parents. It would happen to him.

  The lights below him dimmed slightly, as if something impossibly large had passed in front of them. In what he thought would be his last conscious moment, he looked down once more. He thought he saw something reaching up towards him. It was long and sinuous. He knew he must be hallucinating, because what caught ahold of him, what began to draw him to the surface and from there towards shore, appeared to be a gigantic tentacle. The tentacle was attached to something miles high swimming below him in the ocean’s murky depths.

  Much later, when he awoke alone on the beach next to the old Morse place, a mile and a half from his grandmother’s cottage a
nd somehow still alive, he would tell himself that monsters didn’t exist. Like Mers and their Guardian, such things were not real. But part of him would know the truth even as he clung to the lie.

  2

  THRUM

  The present …

  Twenty-one year old Gabriel Braven looked around his empty college dorm room to make sure that he and Corey had packed everything. After tonight’s end of the school year party, they wouldn’t be in any state in the morning to finish up. Hopefully his grandmother wouldn’t mind if they were just a little hung over when they made it to her place. They were going to spend the entire summer with her, so one day of being a little worse for wear shouldn’t be that bad.

  The room was stripped bare. It was hard to believe it had been a clothes-strewn, empty pizza box pit just a few days ago when he and Corey had been cramming for their junior year finals. But now finals were done. School was over for the year and summer stretched before him like a golden road. Only he wasn’t feeling as happy about it as he should.

  His grandmother had moved back to Ocean Side. He wasn’t upset or angry with her for going back to the sea. He understood why. He was only home a few months a year now, and soon even that would end as he and Corey took off on their own. Why should she have to keep living in an inland apartment instead of the cottage by the ocean where Bravens had lived for centuries? As she neared retirement she needed to conserve money. The cottage was already paid for. The apartment was rented. He couldn’t expect her to accommodate him more than she already had.

  He and Corey were planning on spending the entire summer with her at the cottage helping to sort out hundreds of years of Braven family history that was stored in the cottage’s basement and attic. It would be the first time he had been back there since his parents’ deaths. But he could handle it. He was a grown man. He could face down his fear of the ocean. He had to.

  “Feeling nostalgic?” Corey asked as he threw one pudgy arm around Gabriel’s broad shoulders. “We’ll be in an apartment next year. Far better than our little rat hole here, though this rat hole has been good to us for three years.”

  “Our rat hole. Our dear, sweet rat hole,” Gabriel deadpanned.

  “Now I’m feeling nostalgic.” Corey sniffed dramatically.

  Gabriel playfully jabbed his elbow into Corey’s ample side. He and Corey had grown up to be as different in character as they were in body type. Gabriel was tall and lean, with deep blue eyes and black hair. He had a swimmer’s build even though he now loathed the water, and a perpetual golden tan despite the fact that he spent little time outdoors anymore. Corey’s nickname was Young Santa Claus. He was built like the jolly man, stout with a large belly that shook when he laughed. Instead of snow white hair, though, he had a bright red curly mane and a matching beard.

  “There are some things I won’t miss, though,” Gabriel said. “For example, I was checking to see if your toothpaste patch job was holding up.”

  “It’s a thing of beauty, isn’t it?”

  Corey gestured towards the section of wall where a poster had once hung. When they had tried to take down the hook that held the poster up a large section of wall plaster had come down with it. Corey had used a whole tube of white toothpaste as filler to patch it up. He had then “aged” it with a tea wash so the patch looked the same as the rest of the yellowing wall.

  “Yeah, until someone wonders where that minty fresh smell is coming from when they hammer in a nail,” Gabriel laughed.

  Corey let out a rueful sigh. “Nothing’s perfect, is it?”

  “No, I guess not.” Gabriel glanced at his watch. “We should head over to the party, yeah?”

  “Are you sure you’re feeling up to it?”

  “I’m good. Seriously.”

  Gabriel shook his head at his friend’s mother-henning. He had been sick on and off all year. Nothing specific, just tired, flu-ish, and achy. He was always dehydrated, spending hours in the shower when his skin felt too tight. The campus doctors had found nothing wrong with him, though his blood work had seemed off somehow. They thought it was a problem with the lab and not him. He was going to see a new doctor when he went to Ocean Side.

  “Hmmm, well if that changes, you let me know,” Corey said.

  “Yes, Dr. Corey.”

  “I don’t think you salute doctors. But I’ll take it. Okay, come on, let’s go.”

  Corey led the way out of the dorm room, which seemed smaller and emptier than Gabriel remembered it ever being. Their van was parked near the dorm’s back door. It was loaded with all of their things, and sat lower to the ground than usual.

  “Better watch out for speed bumps, Corey, otherwise you’ll take out the whole exhaust system.”

  “The old girl is sort of dragging her belly on the ground, isn’t she? But it’ll be okay. She’s a trooper. Hasn’t let us down yet.”

  Corey leaped up into the driver’s seat and the van sank another inch. Gabriel did the same on the passenger side, but more gingerly. The last thing they needed was for the van to break down now.

  Though that would mean a delay in going to Ocean Side. But we have to go sooner or later. Need to just do this. Gabriel wiped his suddenly damp palms on the front of his jeans.

  “So … I hear that Mark is going to be at the party tonight,” Corey said too casually after they had been driving for a few minutes. His bright brown eyes skittered from the road to Gabriel then back again. Mark was one of the many potential boyfriends that Corey had picked out for him.

  Gabriel groaned softly. “I thought I would be safe from your matchmaking tonight.”

  “You are never safe from the hand of love.”

  Gabriel swung around to face Corey full-on, sputtering, “Hand of love? You’re joking.”

  “You are fated to find a great love, Gabe. You’ll see,” Corey said with a smile.

  “Well, it’s not fated to happen tonight. It’s the end of the year and I won’t be seeing Mark or anyone else from school except you for three months. Sort of pointless to start a relationship now when it won’t even last twenty-four hours.”

  “It’ll give you a head start on next year.” Corey wagged his finger in Gabriel’s face. “It’s never too early to start developing a relationship.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “I’m a confirmed bachelor, Corey.”

  “At twenty-one?”

  “Yes, at twenty-one. When you’re married with ten red-haired children as nuts as you, I’ll be the eccentric single uncle who brings them too many presents and tells them stories about your crazy days.”

  “Speaking of stories, Swimmers in the Deep has half the guys and gals on campus swooning over you, and here you are swearing off the entire human race for love!”

  Corey was talking about a story Gabriel had written that had gotten published in the school’s fiction journal. He had written it after finding out about his grandmother’s move back to the cottage. He couldn’t fight off the feelings that had risen up within him with twelve-mile runs and endless studying. He had started writing as an outlet, thinking he would tell a story about his parents and purge himself of some of his grief and fear, but that wasn’t what came when he wrote. Instead, he had written about the myth of the Mers that his mother had told him about.

  In his story, a man glimpsed one of the Mers in the sea and could not forget him. The love that ignited within the human man was unquenchable. One single glimpse of that beautiful swimmer and he had been lost forever. Gabriel had ended the story with the man walking into the sea, thinking he would either drown or the Mer would reappear and save him. Either way the agony of loving the Mer and not knowing whether such love was real would be over. Gabriel had left it for the readers to decide what happened.

  After he finished it, he had sent it in on a whim to the journal, sure that it wouldn’t be published. On the off chance that it was accepted, he was still safe because nobody read the fiction journal anyways. But it had been published, and somehow, inexplicably, it had gone viral. It seemed like everyone had read it. His gay love story had become an impossible, improbable hit. People actually sought him out to talk about it, which still flummoxed him to no end. But after being accosted for the hundredth time, he had figured out why the story had resonated with so many people.