Copyright

Copyright © 2012 by Sarah Porter

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

Lyrics for “Pensacola”:
Words and Music by Michael Doughty, Sebastian Steinberg, Mark Degliantoni, Yuval Gabay, and Ava Chin.

Copyright © 1998 WB Music Corp.
Published by Our Pal Dolores, and Ava Chin.
All rights on behalf of Published by Our Pal Dolores.
Administered by WB Music Corp.
All rights reserved.
Used by permission.

Cover photographs © by Chris Crumley

Hand-lettering by Georgia Deaver

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PRINT EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Porter, Sarah, 1969–
Waking storms / by Sarah Porter.
p. cm.
Sequel to: Lost voices.

Summary: As a mermaid versus human war looms on the horizon, Luce falls in love with her sworn enemy Dorian and assumes her rightful role as queen of the mermaids.

[1. Mermaids—Fiction. 2. Supernatural—Fiction. 3. Love—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.

P8303 Wak 2012 [Fic]—dc23
2011027322

ISBN 978-0-547-48251-4 hardcover

ISBN 978-0-547-48254-5 paperback

eISBN 978-0-547-82273-0
v4.1117

Dedication

For Jennifer Lemper,
land mermaid

Epigraph

Oh pride is not a sin,
And that’s why I have gone
On down to Walmart with
My checkbook, just to get you some.
Like waves in which you drown me, shouting . . .

Soul Coughing, “Pensacola”

1

Each to Each

The last words he had absorbed were the ones about Lazarus, come back from the dead to tell everyone . . . everything. That was all wrong, bogus. If you’ve seen death from the inside, Dorian thought, you keep your mouth shut. You don’t say a word to anybody. They wouldn’t understand you anyway.

“Dorian? Can you continue?”

He looked up, blank. Images of plummeting bodies still streaked through his head.

“‘Shall I part . . .’” Mrs. Muggeridge prompted. Dorian pulled himself up from terrible daydreams and forced his eyes to focus on the page in front of him. Acting normal was a way to buy himself the privacy to think not so normally. He found the line and cleared his throat.

“‘Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?’” His voice sounded too flat. He tried to squeeze more emotion into it, though the words seemed uninteresting. “‘I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.’” Now Dorian saw what was coming in the next line and started to panic. He struggled to suppress the memory of those dark eyes looking at him from the center of a wave, the gagging taste of salt, that unspeakable music. Did Mrs. Muggeridge have any idea what she was doing to him? “‘I have heard the mer . . .’” He choked a little. “‘The mermaids singing, each to each.’” Now there was an audible tremor in his voice, and something rising in his throat that felt like a throttled scream.

“Please read to the end.”