Fantasea, page 1
Cleaning the Kelpie pens was the worst job in the history of jobs at the castle. Never mind that I was unjustly cursed by a wizard who wanted my kingdom. Never mind that I shouldn’t even be in the land of Evermore. Never mind that I was the unrecognized Crown Princess of Starfall. None of it mattered. Kelpie poop was the great equalizer.
Praise for Fantasea Authors
Join this collection of bestselling, award-winning authors as they dive into the waters of adventure, science fiction, fantasy, and romance.
Fantasea
A Wild Rose Press Anthology
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.
Fantasea
COPYRIGHT © 2022 by …
Breathe the Sea – L.G. McCary
Candles in the Dark – Brittany Eden
Mer Mage – Beka Gremikova
Piper of the Seas – Kaitlyn Carter Brown
Shepherd of the Llams – Alyssa Roat
The Kelpie and the Curse – AJ Skelly
The Ningen – Lacey R Scott
The Song and the Sea – Cassandra Hamm
Whirlpool – Hope Bolinger
Trouble in the Deep – AJ Skelly
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Contact Information: info@thewildrosepress.com
The Wild Rose Press, Inc.
PO Box 708
Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708
Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com
Publishing History
First Edition, 2022
Trade Paperback ISBN 978-1-5092-4319-8
Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-4320-4
Published in the United States of America
Dedication
For all those who have ever fancied themselves a pirate, mermaid, or high seas adventurer.
Table of Contents
Breathe the Sea – L.G. McCary3
Candles in the Dark – Brittany Eden7
Mer Mage – Beka Gremikova33
Piper of the Seas – Kaitlyn Carter Brown69
Shepherd of the Llams – Alyssa Roat99
The Kelpie and the Curse – AJ Skelly133
The Ningen – Lacey R Scott159
The Song and the Sea – Cassandra Hamm175
Whirlpool – Hope Bolinger211
Trouble in the Deep – AJ Skelly227
Breathe the Sea
by
L.G. McCary
How many hours have ticked by since the infusion? A glance at the clock tells me almost a full day. I’m supposed to be feeling better by now. Instead, it feels like I’m sucking air through a coffee straw as I coax my lungs open with a breathing treatment. I should be used to this since I’ve been choking to death for all of my sixteen years.
The clean white beach catches my eye through the dingy clinic window. Gentle waves tumble across the sand. Dad said this treatment would be a vacation, and when I first stepped onto the beach of this tiny island, I understood why doctors used to prescribe sea air for invalids. For a few minutes on the sand, I breathed the sea and felt normal.
I cough and try to get the last drops of medicine into my lungs. I can still smell the essential oils my father insists on diffusing everywhere we go.
It’s all pointless. Modern medicine has failed me, and so have all the crazy quacks Dad has found over the years. I wonder if my mother was so quick to try every cure on the planet. This disease took its sweet time to kill her, like a slow leak instead of the flood I live with. But she only got half of the genetic curse. I have it from both sides.
Outside the door, I recognize my father’s panicked voice. The doctor who gave me the infusion says the word “hospice.” The old door squeals open.
“Look at her!” my father yells.
“That’s why I suggest we go outside to the beach,” Dr. Lange says.
“She needs oxygen! I’m getting her tank.” My father stalks out.
Dr. Lange eyes me from the doorway. He steps inside and leans against my wheelchair.
“Marin, can I speak frankly?”
I nod.
“You knew this was a long shot.”
I nod again.
“Those drugs won’t help you anymore. I can take you outside where you’ll be more comfortable.” He tugs my wheelchair from the corner and smiles sadly.
Comfortable. I barely know what that means. I’ve been a lab rat my whole life. I stopped counting the clinical trials my father has found and experimental medications most doctors consider illegal. It’s the guilt of being an asymptomatic carrier. He will go to any length to keep me alive a few days longer. Even a few minutes longer.
I drop the nebulizer on the floor and wave toward the wheelchair. I’d like to be comfortable for one afternoon. Dr. Lange tells a nurse to bring my father out back when he comes in from the car. The back door of the clinic opens directly onto a cracked concrete path to the beach.
“How about here?” Dr. Lange helps me out of the wheelchair until I’m sitting half in and half out of the water. I squint at the soft blue horizon and clear sky. The sun bakes my arms and face while the cool water raises gooseflesh across my legs.
Suddenly it’s more than goosebumps. The skin on my legs and backside feels like it’s being stabbed with a million frozen needles. I look up to see Dr. Lange smiling at me, but he no longer looks kind. He knew this would happen. I try to roll away from the waves, but my body seizes, and my thrashing limbs hurl me back into the ocean.
Then I’m underwater.
I try to hold my breath, but I barely have any to hold. My spine curls and jerks, and my chest burns. Bands of pain wrap around my chest, stinging and burning into my ribs.
I feel my skin rip. The water turns red, and cold liquid seeps inside my chest. The skin over my collarbone splits open like a stab wound, and water rushes into the gashes. The waves turn pink and foamy around me.
My spasming muscles slowly relax, and I drift under the waves. Dr. Lange has left me to drown. Will my father know what happened to me? My brain slowly clears, like a fog being lifted. I test my arms and legs, and they move easily. I should be drowning, but I’m not.
A swish of cold water inside my neck makes me jerk and sit upright. Another rush of water pours through me, and I feel a fluttering sensation over my ribs. I should be dead, but I feel more awake, more alive than I ever have.
Hands jerk me from the water, and I realize my father is screaming my name. He pulls me up and checks my pulse. I start to tell him I’m fine, but I can only cough up water.
“She was drowning!” he screams at Dr. Lange. He turns me around, then yelps and jerks back, pointing at my neck.
I touch the holes above each collarbone and wince, then cough up more water. The fluttering feeling returns, and I lift my shirt and stare at three slits between my ribs. They flare red, and I feel my head rush as if I’m breathless again.
“You need to stay in the water, Marin,” Dr. Lange says, rubbing his hands together.
“What have you done to her?” My father swings his fist at Dr. Lange’s head but misses and collapses onto the sand. I feel faint and drop back under the waves, sucking water through the holes in my neck and over my gills.
I think of how the nurse looked scared and didn’t want to touch my IV bag. I remember the scarred and maimed fish in the tank in the clinic lobby.
I lift my head above the water. My father is running into the clinic screaming for help. Dr. Lange kneels on the sand and watches me, like I’m a creature in a zoo.
“This is just the beginning of your transformation, Marin. You’re my masterpiece,” he says. “From now on, you breathe the sea!”
Candles in the Dark
by
Brittany Eden
Lights like stars move upon the surface of the nightshade water.
Every moonless night as clockwork.
I could judge them if I didn’t need them. The smugglers. The thieves, the crooks. Pirates really, in the grandest but least glamorous and historical sense of the word.
From afar, they appear like stuttering wraiths shifting dangerously on solid ground after gliding the glassy waters of the cove. I suspect that up close, one would not want to be. So I take my payment in the deeper dark of dreamless nights, glancing over my shoulder for a candle in the dark, any indication one of the ruffians passed out on rum or stumbled onto my secret paths.
No light.
Good.
Times like these aren’t made for the light.
I collect my due, an old used barrel marked Basy on the corner, left upended, as if empty.
It’s not heavy, but it’s also not worthless. Hidden compartments aren’t merely for stories. And it’s the reason for my mercy in not reporting the illegal shipping route to the authorities.
What I call mercy, others label blackmail.
But you can’t judge your own, even if your own made you lonely and lawbreaking and unmarriageable and friendless in an unescapable life. Dead father, surviving daughter. I’m like him. I wish I wasn’t. Thieves cut from the same cloth—
RFFFT!
I start, shifting smoothly to hug the dripping wall of the cave. Muted sounds of waves mock the silence after the
Waves.
I step toward the sound where there is no light.
Waves.
Waves of hope or despair. Waves of thoughts and dreams. Waves of age and time weaving through our hair and our hearts. Inescapable, unfair. Welcome, fleeting.
I remove my black scarf from its embrace and raise my lantern.
Waves.
They can be light, heavy. Waves of change can drown and steal or rescue and return. Peaceful waves, dangerous waves. I take another step toward the sound of frantic movement. A moan escapes.
But waves.
We are not still. The earth does not wait. Spinning, turning, moving, being. Life and living welcome or inescapable, unfair in the fleeting. Yet waves are not waves but for their dance and danger, the sound of moving water only peaceful for the motion.
No more moans. No motion.
No life.
Suddenly afraid, I bring the silent area near where the rustling sound was into the circle of my light.
A body, no longer moving and a visage obscured by seaweed. Or bruises. Light lifts, and my heart’s thumping stumbles at the stillness. Purple and muddied bruises on a jaw where the face isn’t submerged—his breath won’t be lost because of me. For now that I’ve seen him, I can’t leave him.
No face but the son of my father’s sworn enemy could be that beautiful.
****
“What did the sea bring you last night?”
Blasted, bleeding, waves. “Only one barrel, Gran.” And gun residue and red blood-stained fingers for my trouble.
“The usual?” Her knife chops woodenly on the counter.
“Not this time.”
“I meant breakfast, but your escapade sounds far more interesting.”
The stuttering of her motions makes me nervous. How is it she knows everything without leaving our lighthouse home?
“Rye?” I say instead.
“The last, I’m afraid.” She butters the piece, giving me the larger share. “Did the dark skies find your treasure?”
I roll my eyes at her inexplicable delight. “Gran, you know there’s no treasure. It’s been four years and forty days, and all the Kendricks do is—”
“Not kill us.” Her tone is dry like my throat. “Someday, they may get bored of using you.”
I hope, I hope.
Then I shrug. “Maybe they’ll forgot about me. Definitely, they’ve forgotten you. Maybe they think we’ll give up living, or die in a freak fire, or drown in the water we never venture into.” She raises a slow brow at me, but I don’t care. Last night I met my limit. Or was it hope? Either way. “Or maybe they’ll move their business elsewhere, and we can live our days in peace.”
And maybe, hopefully, they’ll forget about him.
Right, him. The pirate-prince. The smuggler-son. Hardly. He’s a strapping young man born into the wrong family. Or the right family, if he still doesn’t think hiding income from governments or stealing secrets between seas is immoral. He seems to be leaning away from the latter, and it’s making me feel guilty. Convicted. He and I are so much the same I want to cry into my empty teacup. As if I’m the one who chose to be born to a father of such—
“Why can’t we have breakfast like normal people?” My gaze avoids the high-noonday sun and the glint it makes off the waves through the window of our lighthouse.
“Because we made an agreement, and they’ve stuck to it. Say your prayers and be grateful that today presents another chance at living. For you and the boy you dragged up those creaky stairs last night.” I gape at the elderly woman’s words. “Living in our abandoned lighthouse leaves no room for dark secrets; there’s too much light, even when you try sneaking through the back door.” She chuckles that old lady laugh. “But don’t tell me your plans. I don’t want to spill them if those pirates find me when you finally decide to escape.”
I ignore her and mumble my prayers while getting tea. How badly I need tea. Only a spoonful of leaves left.
“Said.” Prayers said, and they were full of genuine pleas. “See? Grateful.” Probably not grateful. I swallow a bread bite and wave the piece in the air. “Need to refill the tea-tin. I’ll go up.” I rush out before she can ask me anything else about the story surely screaming on my face.
Young Kendrick had better be worth his weight in gold. Or tea leaves. Whichever comes through for me first, though tea would satisfy me quicker.
Shoving the door closed with my foot, I hurry up creaking stairs. Walls the color of forgotten seashells, wide floorboards remembering the texture of sand tracked from the rocks below.
Moaning greets my knock. Settled uncomfortably on a pile of empty burlap is my enemy. I regret not tying him up.
“Nice shiner,” I greet him.
He tries to sit upright but falls back, exhausted. My regret is gone.
“Nice office,” he says.
“I know who you are.”
He smiles straight at me, all nice teeth and mysterious eyes. “And yet, you brought me breakfast.”
I hand him the leftover piece of my bread. He doesn’t notice I’ve taken a bit of it before shoving it in his mouth. I swallow sympathy.
“It’s not breakfast without tea.” I shake the empty tin upside down. “Oh, look. No tea.”
“You got your barrel?”
“I found my tea,” I non-answer, leaving him for the brightest corner of the service room and the two crates I’d filled and carried up last night. After half-dragging the surprisingly heavy and handsome—infuriating, beat-up, cheeky, roguish—young man up to hide him in the top of the lighthouse.
I can’t resist a dig, in an attempt to discover the reason I found him. “Hungover? Bar fight?”
Ice settles in his seafoam eyes. “Never.”
“So, a bet gone wrong? Fighting over a girl?”
If possible, his gaze cools further. “Would you believe any better of me?”
I pause in my rustling, the first box of tea propped open. The sweet earthy aroma soothes me. “Probably not.”
He shrugs, pain rushing through his eyes at the motion. The slash sliding from his jaw to below his collarbone, blood having leaked and dried on the torn fabric of his shirt.
I open the next box, cringing at the porcelain figurines wrapped in newspaper.
“Do you even have any idea what’s in there?” He asks from across the room. It sounds like an accusation, but that could be my conscience.
“My life, that’s what.” I huff.
“Death. For someone else, at least. Loss of livelihood, at best.”
I suspected, but I never asked. This smuggling arrangement—blackmail, survival, whatever we want to call it—only works if Gran and I don’t ask questions. We take a barrel and sell the trinkets to a local pawn shop. No questions. No words, no letters, no commas, or other annoying grammar of any kind.
Coins speak a universal language. So do guns.
I still want to know his story, much more than my own. “What did you do to deserve this?”
He exhales and it’s worringly ragged. His movements are stilted because of what I’m sure is a nasty gash from an almost-gunshot wound on his calf—the better of his two legs unfortunately. Then, a certain stillness catches my attention.
“I got out,” he breathes.
I gasp. “Do you have a death wish? No one gets out.”
“You do if you’re dead.”
I raise a brow. “So…you’re dead?”
“In the flesh.”
I can’t help but laugh. His eyes brighten until the clouds cover the sun and the watch room windows lose their natural spotlight.
An awkward pause as those sea-wish eyes dim, and he looks down at his bruised hands, knuckles roughed from a recent fistfight. Then he lifts his eyes with a surety I’ve never possessed. “My father’s best mate slashed me quickly and gave me a sleeping drought. That was the plan.”
My fingers stop their busyness on the tea-tin, and I wonder at the betrayal and how deep the bitterness against the senior Kendrick might go.
“He left me beside the water as if dead. Which I would be, because he must’ve given me enough to kill a horse.” He grimaces. “But you tipped me over before the sea could claim me. Not with a storm or even a wave. Just a puddle of water at the dark end of a cave.”
I feel that almost-tragedy deep as his words. It’s why I couldn’t leave him last night.
