She leaned in, and her lips brushed my cheek. Rage boiled in the kiss, and it scalded my mind until the wisps of my thoughts evaporated. There was nothing. I was nothing. All that remained was Letitia. Her will. Her power. I understood now. I understood everything.

The mermaid had to die.

She pointed a finger at a woman with delicate features and pastel hair. She had slender legs, not fins, but Letitia was insistent. “Kill her. Kill the mermaid.”

I didn’t think. I didn’t question. I ran at the slumped figure. A shadow kept pace with me, its insidious whispers stoking the ravenous fire smoldering within me. Fingers curled into claws, I swiped at the woman’s face with my blunt fingernails. She brought her arm up and blocked me, our elbows tangling, and that rush of contact sent a haze of cool magic flowing up my arm.

Gentle energy crackled over my skin, and the Fury’s blinding haze cleared. Harlow. Fresh horror seized my heart as her magical signature registered.

There was none.

Harlow was…human.

“Run,” I rasped.

“I can’t.” An umbra pooled around her ankles, cementing her to the spot. “It’s all right, Cam.”

No. This was all kinds of not right. The contact magic was fading, and my memories dulled with it.

Who was this girl? Why had I attacked her? What about her made me so angry?

“What is this?” Letitia shrieked. “I told you to kill her.”

Each stomp of her foot as she approached ground my awareness under her heel. Fighting the compulsion left me trembling and weak with sweat pouring down my forehead into my eyes.

“Tell my folks I would have come home. Can you do that for me?” Harlow’s voice trembled. “Tell them I would have chosen the Mother.”

The Mother. She meant the ocean. She would have returned home to her pod at the end of her year. What kind of human claimed merfolk as kin? What sort of mortal called the sea home? If Letitia had her way, I would never learn the truth of the peculiar little un-mermaid.

I captured her hand between my damp ones. “Please.”

Unsure which of us I was begging, I squeezed her fist in a silent urge to run far and fast away from me. The harder I gripped her, the better it felt until Letitia radiated from the corner of my eye, and I clenched my hand until Harlow’s knuckles broke.

The girl—Harlow?—cried out.

“Kill her,” Letitia snarled, inches from my face.

The track of my mind skipped and white noise filled my head as Letitia’s fury seeped into my soul. That searing emotion became mine, and it was righteous. The mermaid was of no consequence. She was an obstacle to quenching my desire for vengeance.