Luce heard her own small cry of astonishment. She stopped where she was, her tail flopping straight down in the water. She wanted to clutch at something, but there was nothing to hold on to, only the lift and fall of waves.

It couldn’t be, Luce thought. It just couldn’t! The voice from the cliffs faded away, leaving only the sigh of wind behind. Maybe it had been her imagination after all. Much as Luce had wanted something like this to happen, she found her heart pounding with relief at the rushing silence. She waited another minute for the voice to come back—the voice that had seemed, for a moment, to be singing Luce’s own very distinctive song of enchantment—and the cold wind throbbed alone in her ears. It must have been an animal; didn’t certain animals sound almost human sometimes? It was better this way, Luce told herself. She circled away, ready to head back to her cave.

In the evening dimness at her back a single high note emerged. It hovered over the sea. Then the voice released it, letting it roll through descending tones then drift and spread. The melody wasn’t made to be carried by a human voice, but even denuded of all magic, its notes knocked askew, its velvety harmonics missing, it was unmistakably Luce’s own song.

Her fellow mermaids knew Luce’s song, of course, but there was only one human who had ever heard it and survived. She’d heard the exact same voice singing once before, in fact, as she’d watched the boy lean against a white railing, ignoring the flailing shapes of the people who hurled themselves overboard right beside him. Luce swirled in confusion. The boy with tousled bronze hair must be standing between the trunks of dying trees, dusk light reflecting in his wide-set golden eyes. There was no other explanation for what she was hearing. He’d gone to a lonely spot on the cliffs to pour out this song, gone to the kind of place that humans generally preferred to stay away from, especially after dark. He’d deliberately sought out a refuge where no one would hear him.

No one, that is, unless someone just happened to be drifting along the sea swells nearby. Was he actually calling to her?