She was careful to keep her singing quiet as she swam out, even though hardly any boats seemed to come through this way anymore. Probably the crews had finally gotten spooked by all the shipwrecks and decided that this part of the coast was simply unlucky. Every time Luce noticed a big commercial fishing boat or a cruise ship, it would be swinging out toward the horizon as if it wanted to avoid the area on purpose. That was fine with her. She knew, though, that Anais and the others had to be seething with frustration, watching their prey repeatedly glide out of range. Still, there was the occasional small fishing boat or kayaker, and Luce couldn’t take the risk of anyone hearing her sing. She played with the water as she swam, sculpting it with rivulets of music. Several months before, she’d discovered the secret of controlling the waves with her voice, and she’d been practicing obsessively ever since Catarina had left. Now as she skimmed along the surface she let out a series of high, bright, concentrated notes, calling up a row of perfect jets of water that splashed down again as she swirled away. Then she dipped below, still singing, opening ribbons of air inside the sea.

She could even make small blobs of water levitate now. She’d been working on sculpting water in midair with tiny variations in her song, shaping transparent fish and seabirds, stars with dangling tentacles, human faces . . .

A spangle of shining windows to her right marked the fishing village set back in its small crook of harbor. Luce reflexively edged a bit farther out to sea. Even if no one saw her, human settlements always had an air of discomfort around them, a subdued menace. Farther on was the beach where she’d left the boy, followed by a wall of low, uneven cliffs thick with half-dead spruce. Luce swam in closer again, gazing up. Trees stripped naked on the windward side tilted forlornly out of jags in the rust-colored rock, their bare tan branches like decaying lace. She caught the flash of something white and plummeting, probably a hunting owl, and heard an animal’s cry from the edge of the woods. It was loud and determined, and Luce stopped singing to hear it better. Maybe a rabbit was screaming as the owl carried it gripped in piercing talons.

No. The cry went on too long for that and, it occurred to Luce, it was oddly musical, though to a mermaid’s ears it was much too coarse and graceless to count as actual music. Not really like an animal’s voice at all. Almost human, in fact, and now that she thought about it there seemed to be something peculiar about the sequence of notes. There was one note that soared up, high and feverish, followed by a tumbling fall . . .