Fathom (Mermaids of Montana #3) - Elsa Jade Page 0,7

said as much when she met him once before, but she’d wondered if it was a mistake of the universal translator device implanted in the bone behind her ear. How could he be made when he was so obviously not a machine? She’d never seen a being so blatantly…organic in nature. Maybe it was because his battle skin was so revealing… She forced herself to focus on their conversation instead of his exposed skin. “Were fire-witches made too?”

When he angled his head again to look at her, she wondered if he had trouble seeing through his protective eye shields. “Nul’ah-wys don’t exist. They were only stories. Stories of a danger deeper than the deeps, a peril that could crack the world.”

But the sideways cant of his mouth was speculative, as if considering whether she could be the hazard that the Tritonesse had warned of. It wasn’t fair that they were calling her a monster when all her life she’d tried so hard to be sweet and gentle and helpful, the kind of girl worth keeping around.

But she had knocked him off the balcony without a touch, so maybe the threat assessment was not so wrong.

She looked away from him. “Too bad you can’t convince the Tritonesse there’s no such thing as fire-witches. Then maybe they wouldn’t have kicked me off their planet.”

Except… There really was something wrong with her. Without the Wavercrest syndrome or the fire-witch stories or something, she’d have no explanation for what was happening to her. She’d be back at ground zero, like before she’d gotten a letter from Marisol seeking others suffering from strange symptoms who carried the Wavercrest gene—a heritage they now knew was extraterrestrial.

At first, she’d loved the idea of being half mermaid. To find out she was all monster… “Just go home,” she said with a sigh. “Tell them I refused to come back with you.”

“No.”

She glared at him. “What, you don’t want to look bad? Then just tell them you never found me at all.”

“No.”

She glared at him some more. “Whatever. Don’t go. Don’t tell them anything. I don’t care. Just get out of here. Leave.” She flicked her fingers at him in a shooing gesture as if he were a stray cat lurking at her back door. Except he was much too large and scary to be a cat, even some white tiger—more like a great white land shark—and anyway she’d never shooed away any stray. She’d always lured them closer, fed them, cuddled them.

Uh yeah, no, bad idea. She was not cuddling a half-shark alien warrior, even if that insulating layer of flesh made him look particularly plush under that pebbled skin.

Perhaps predictably, he was unmoved by her feeble rejection. Maybe if there’d been more lightning?

“No,” he said again, although this time he deigned to add, “I can’t.”

Annoyed enough to feel a little warmer, she propped her fists on her hips. “Just because your commander gave you a mission—”

He shook his head. “I can’t reach them. I can’t leave.”

A niggling of alarm wiggled through her. “Just…turn around and go. However you got here. It’s not like you swam here.”

“I did,” he said. “Through the tunnels from the Atlantyri.”

She frowned. The exodus ship from Tritona, fleeing their interminable war with a precious cargo of endangered species and then lost for centuries, was hidden near Yellowstone, which was almost an hour’s drive from the estate. “Where’s your spaceship? The one that brought you here now?”

“Gone. The IDA security codes that the Cretarni hijacked to come here have expired. So my ship couldn’t stay.”

She boggled at him. “Well, you certainly can’t stay here.” The other Tritonyri had been able to masquerade as human—too tall and handsome and alluring to be actually human, but close enough. Sting was…none of those things.

Earth was a closed world to protect its inhabitants from knowledge of and interference by the wider intergalactic community. The Cretarni, longtime enemies of the Tritonans, had hacked the Intergalactic Dating Agency secret security codes allowing them access to Earth, but the extraterrestrial presence had gone undetected, and even if she was only part Earther, she needed to keep it that way. And no alien was going to access her. “Call them back to come get you.”

He shook his head. “Gone,” he said again, as if she hadn’t heard him the first time. “We’ll use the ship you stole.”

She stuck her jaw out. “You can’t. I crashed it.”

For the first time, she thought she glimpsed actual emotion in him. He jerked back, not a