Chapter Nineteen
After I leave Cole’s house, I drive to the lake, and the anticipation is more like dread. Erik can’t be there in the tree line. He just can’t.
I shake my head and tighten my grip on the wheel. I was probably imagining it last time. My mind played tricks on me, imagining him there. It had been so dark.
It makes perfect sense.
Sort of.
I shut my car off and park it in its usual spot in the shadows of the big fir tree. But then I stall. I sit and stare out at the raindrops sliding down the windshield, and I wonder if I could possibly skip swimming tonight.
But I have to know if what I saw was real.
I slide out of the car and head toward my lake, walking slowly, letting my sneakers sink in the mud. The closer I get to my destination, the edgier I feel. When I step out into the clearing, the hairs on my arms stand on end, and I stop abruptly.
He’s standing next to my tree, darkly silent in the shadows. Right under the limb where I normally hang my clothes.
“I’m sorry,” he says, so much louder than the sounds of the surrounding forest. His tone is smooth as honey, a deep, beautiful baritone.
I stop several yards away from him, hoping the darkness is enough to conceal the fear shivering through me. “For what?”
He looks out at the lake for a long silent moment. Part of me wants to pick up and run. I can’t escape the feeling that he knows something, something I don’t want to know. That whatever he says next is going to change everything.
Then, finally, he answers me. “For scaring you last night ... and then running. Until last night, I wasn’t totally sure you were what I thought you were, and so I had to follow you. Then when I saw you . . . I panicked.”
I take another step backward. He knew what I was ... before he saw me swimming?
He furrows his brow. “Are you actually afraid of me?” His head tips to the side, his blond hair sliding off his forehead.
I don’t answer. I just stare at him, willing my posture to relax, but I can’t seem to shake off my fears.
The concern melts into awe. “You really don’t know, do you?”
I fake anger, the one thing that’s gotten me through these last two years. “You have five seconds to tell me what you’re doing here or I leave.”
He twists away from the tree to face me fully. He leans his head to the side, a crease appearing between his brows. “I’m your match.”
I raise an eyebrow and try not to snort. “No, you’re just some guy who transferred to my school this year who likes to stalk people in the woods.”
He sighs and breaks eye contact. His voice lowers, cracks a little. A tremor of sadness wrenches through him. “All this time, I just sort of assumed you were looking for me, too. No wonder it was so hard to find you.”
It’s hard to fight the urge to step closer to him when he looks so vulnerable. He reminds me of me. But I didn’t manage thus far by being weak. “I don’t understand.” I cross my arms and hope it’s enough to muffle the thunderous sounds of my heart.
He takes one more step and when I look at him up close like this, I have to fight to stay where I am.
Erik’s eyes really do look like mine. Is this what he meant by match?
“I’m like you. I’m . . . drawn to the water,” he says.
All I can do is stare, until the silence and the questions spinning in my head are too much. How does he know what I am? I’ve never told anyone.
“You’re a siren?” I ask.
Erik laughs, a throaty masculine sound. “No, of course not. Sirens are women. I’m a nix.”
He waits for my reaction, but I just stare.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says. “You don’t know what a nix is?”
I shake my head, try to ignore the fluttery feeling in my stomach.
Erik sighs and runs a hand through his blond hair. “Why don’t you know any of this? No one told you?” He pauses long enough to take in the confused expression on my face. “Wow . . . I . . .” He blows out a long slow breath. “You’re cursed to swim, right? A literal curse. Hundreds of years ago, there weren’t many of you. A few dozen, at best, cursed by the angry, the jealous, the spiteful. For some, a gypsy curse, others, voodoo or spells.”
He turns to look at me, takes in my wide eyes, and then nods. Erik knows he’s right. But how does he know this stuff?
“Nixes, we’ve been around centuries longer,” he says, motioning to the lake. “Our curse dates back to medieval times. It’s a little different than yours. We’re drawn to rivers, rather than just swimming. We get ... a sense of peace from being around them.” He pauses and stares at me. “Why don’t you sit down?”
I shake my head. It wouldn’t be a bad idea, but I can’t seem to move. Finally, he pulls his jacket off, lays it on the ground beside the tree, and forcibly maneuvers me so that I’m sitting on it. Then he kneels in front of me.
“Don’t freak out, okay? I’ll explain it all. Just bear with me here.” He pauses, checking to make sure that I’m not about to run off. Then he continues. “The original cursed nixes were vain, proud kind of guys. Normal men, not creatures of the water. They lived hundreds of years ago, and many were noblemen.
“Then there were these witches, sorcerers, voodoo women—whatever term you want to use—who would disguise themselves as beautiful women. They’d go to the balls, the parties, whatever it took to get men to notice them. They’d court these guys, wait until they men were nearly in love with them, and then they revealed themselves as the disfigured, outwardly ugly women they were.”
He blinks a few times, staring off in the distance as if he can see it playing out on a reel in his head. “If they were turned away—scorned by the men who had fallen for them—they would curse the men to the same fate. To be unloved, hideous, a lonely creature who would live a life of misery.”
“But there’s something no one ever thought of. If you get us together, a nix and a siren . . . it can be different. The idea of our curses is that no one could ever love us—that we could never be accepted for what we are. They didn’t account for the fact that if you put two . . . cursed creatures together . . . we no longer see the curse, but the people we are.”
My face is numb, and all I can feel is the bark digging into my back. Erik can’t be right. It sounds so simple, so straightforward when he says it. But the curse is too complicated, too impossible to fix. “That’s not possible,” I say, my voice more like a whisper.
“But it is. I’m your match. We can cure each other.”
“How? When? Why?”
A dozen questions spin around in my head. “And if you knew this, why did you spend the last few weeks just sitting there in class?”
“I’m sorry. I just didn’t know for sure if you were a siren. It’s not like you advertise it. It was a little nerve- racking to realize I was right.”
I swallow, my breath shallow.
“Your curse will break when you, a siren, love someone like me, a nix, and if I in turn love you. So . . . we spend some time together. See if it can become what it needs to. See if it leads us to . . . fall in love.”
I shake my head. “But I don’t know you.” A second thought occurs to me. “Have you killed?” A chill races down my spine, and I jerk back so fast my head smacks into the tree behind me.
Erik’s bright blue eyes flare wider as understanding dawns. “No, I haven’t killed. Not yet. It’s what’s driven me to find you. I needed to find you before that happened. Before the curse sets in on my eighteenth birthday.”
Me? I can stop
“Your sixteenth. I know. Nixes are different. We don’t sing either.”
“Then how do you . . .?”
