Chapter Text
~
It’s about the size of her fingernail. Neither opaque nor translucent. Emerald green when laid against the flat of her palm. Iridescent like nacre when held to light. It reminds her of the ocean. It is cutting. It is beautiful. It is a problem.
Villanelle turns the scale like a coin between her fingers — lets its jagged edge press into her skin when it lands against the soft of her thumb. Lets it bite down and draw blood when she jumps in her seat — startled by the scrape of a stool’s metal legs against the floor. She hides it quickly in her fist.
“You’re keeping Irina busy today,” Konstantin says. He takes a seat beside her at the bar. He is a big man with a kind face and an accent not so distant from her own. “More fish than she can clean.”
Villanelle raises her thumb to her mouth. She presses her tongue hard against the cut, and as she tastes blood, thinks of the little shard of green responsible. She wishes Konstantin gone, wishes for nothing in this moment but to behold the most prepossessing and dangerous fragment, of a no-doubt all the more prepossessing and dangerous whole, that she has ever had the pleasure of beholding. She tucks it discretely in her pocket. Resolves not to let him see it. Her treasure, her secret.
“Good,” she says. “Maybe I can clean my boat in peace today.”
Irina, Konstantin’s nuisance of a daughter, meets Villanelle’s trawler on fishing days. She pulls it to the docks by mooring ropes and stills it with nooses to cleats. She hops the gunwale to help Villanelle wash and ice her haul, and together, they carry packed coolers to Konstantin’s pickup. Irina waddles under their weight — insists it’s the bulk. She can’t see her feet, and when she trips, inevitably, over a stray hose or a misplaced net, Villanelle catches her by the scruff of her shirt. Yanks her hard, back into balance. Chides her for nearly spoiling her morning’s work, and curses out any fisher unfortunate enough to have thrown their clutter to the dock.
Konstantin, the good-for-nothing that he is, waits inside the truck as they load the coolers into the back. Once they’re stacked and secured, Irina takes the front seat. Sometimes, Villanelle climbs in with the fish, but most times, this is where they part. Konstantin and Irina, up the cobblestoned hill, to the shop where they gut Villanelle’s catches, and Villanelle, to the restaurants crowded shoulder-to-shoulder along the waterfront. She should really clean the boat first thing, but fishing has a way of leaving a hole in her gut, and Irina’s incessant yapping has a way of not letting her forget it.
Konstantin rarely joins her for lunch. Hardly ever leaves the shop on a market day. But never, in their three years living here, have they ever been faced with a problem quite like this one, either.
He scans the restaurant rather needlessly. It’s clearly and expectedly dead, the way it always is when tourists and locals and fishers flock the stands. He finds only Ms. Tattevin, a transplant from France and the very nosiest of retirees, seated several tables behind them. Too far for eavesdropping.
The waitress slides Villanelle a plate of crostini, olives, cheese, and anchovies. Konstantin exercises patience as he waits for her to leave — waits for Villanelle to finish charming her with blunt compliments and a lopsided smile — and when she retreats to the kitchen with pink on her cheeks, he elbows the bar to face Villanelle squarely. Looks at her the way a parent looks at a child who should be much too old for scolding.
“So?”
Villanelle tears into loaded bread with a crunch. She looks down at her plate, not at him, as she chews and swallows.
“You were right,” she says. “Traces around the sea stacks.”
Konstantin’s face falls. He takes a minute. Villanelle lets him, eats heartily.
“By the beach?” he asks.
“No, the headland.”
She found the scale on a monolith of a rock jutting out from the water.
“What kind of traces?”
She shrugs. “Scuffs, mostly. Nothing… glaring. But still — unmistakable.”
“Mostly?”
Villanelle gives him a look.
“Scuffs, mostly,” he parrots. “What else?”
The scale weighs heavy in her pocket.
“Nothing else,” she lies. “Nothing anyone in town would find interesting.”
Konstantin looks at her the way he used to, when they were different people, with different lives and different jobs, and a relationship Villanelle wishes she could forget, however much it informs their present closeness.
“You have to go back out today,” he tells her after a silence.
Villanelle clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “I will go when I feel like it.”
“Do you understand how serious this is?” His voice turns harsh, but drops to a whisper. His stout fingers ball into a fist against the counter. “The neighbor’s kid — last week, he saw something in the water. And you’ve heard people complaining on the docks. Fish schooling and shoaling in strange places — like they’re avoiding something worse than hooks and nets. Someone is going to put two and two together eventually. She’s too close. Too comfortable.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it,” Villanelle snaps. “But I don’t take orders anymore. Not from you. Especially not for stuff like this.”
Konstantin goes still. Behind them, Ms. Tattevin eyes them over the edge of her newspaper with all the subtlety of a beached beluga.
“Okay,” he says, lips thinning. “But remember, it’s not just your ass on the line here. I’ll do it myself if you don’t.”
Villanelle’s grip tightens around her fork. The cut on her thumb cries, and she promises, “I’ll find her.”
~
The humans call this corner of the ocean il mar Tirreno — just as they presume the right to name all things that come from water, they presume the right to name the sea itself. Eve has no name for her, knows she escapes naming. But these people, they talk about her stained-glass coloring like it is their point of pride. Like they see beauty only in clear greens and blues, and never in the somber monochrome of storm waves crashing against cliffs.
Maybe her kind is just as guilty — deciding which colors deserve love and which deserve hate, as though the ocean doesn’t prize its inventions equally. Eve is either lucky or horribly stifled to carry in her scales the hues both humans and mermaids prize most. It makes this next part easier: hugging the hulls of boats like a shadow, flitting between them, the shimmer of her scales easily confused for light playing through water.
She keeps low, but not so low that flicks of her tail will stir clouds of sand up towards the surface. She moves the way she knows not to make waves, swimming with the ocean rather than against it. And when she pokes her head out beneath the docks, she peers carefully at the humans through thin gaps between thick weathered slats. The stomp of their heavy boots echoes between wood and water; their voices bounce more softly, lost partially to the breeze.
Barnacles, witnesses to her spying, scratch her hands as she pushes herself from piling to piling. She spots among all the ships lined either side of the dock a small Greek trawler. It is old, of traditional make, but the love poured into its restoration is evident by its bright coloring, its immaculate hull, its clean ropes. It sways back and forth. Rocks unevenly against the beat of the ocean. Someone is aboard.
Eve finds purchase against the nearest pile, keeps to its shadow, and lifts herself from the water until the waves lap at her hips — at the seam where the soft skin below her belly turns smoothly into scales.
She cranes her neck, sees no one yet, but counts two voices.
“Have you seen my hands?” one complains. A child, Eve realizes, as they step close enough to the edge of the deck to reveal a fiery mass of short-cropped hair. “I deboned fifty at least.”
“Did you come just to complain?” a woman answers — voice sonorous, deep, accented.
“Dad said you needed help casting off. That you are fishing again.”
“Your dad is going to die with this hose shoved up his stinking ass if he keeps minding my business.”
“Aren’t you business partners?”
“Shut up,” she snaps. “Go grab a bucket.”
The girl tilts her head up to groan at the sky, then shuffles off, presumably, to grab a bucket. The woman — the fisher — takes her place. Eve surges as close as she is able, nose nearly pressed to the underside of the dock, just to catch a proper glimpse.
She is young. Not even thirty. Her eyes are wide and brown and tinged the slightest bit green by the sky and the sea. Her features are delicate but her bones are strong. Her hair is honey blonde, and her skin, well-kissed by the sun. She is pretty, lost in thought. Eve watches her long fingers slip past the seam of her right pocket. She plays with something there, tight motions beneath fabric.
Her grip on the hose in her other hand grows slack. Neither notices — not Eve, captivated by the fisher, not the fisher, captivated by the contents of her own pocket. They jump together when the hose nods out of her fist, breaks its neck against the side of the boat and splashes hard into water.
Eve knows her mistake. The twitch of her tail sends a shock up through the piling. She dives quickly out of sight, swims fast and far away — following the same path of hull-shaped shadows she took on her way in.
When she surfaces again, head and shoulders peeking out from behind the cover of a boat moored to a buoy more than twenty yards away, the woman has left her trawler. She stands on the dock, hose forgotten, looking through the gaps in the slats beneath her feet. Eve’s heart pounds in her throat.
She’d never been so close before. Thinks that next time, she’d like to try closer.
~
Villanelle doesn’t search the sea that day. From the town docks, she carves a long arch through water. Speeds far enough away that the buildings at her back become a mess of colorful crowded teeth planted roughly in the hillside’s gums. Then, she curves off toward the headland — toward that austere cliffside with its edges so forbidding, and passes the sea stack where she found her scale along the way.
Hidden among the crags, carved into stone, a narrow staircase winds up and out of the ocean’s reach. Villanelle’s trawler finds the floating dock laid at its feet, and then she takes the steps, two at a time, to the little house perched precariously over the steep.
Villanelle makes a point of curating her space. Buys the prettiest pieces of furniture she can find — imported woods and expensive leathers, rugs that feel like clouds beneath her feet, blankets just as soft. The result, in this cramped old cottage, is an aesthetic that falls short of rustic on account of opulence.
In much the same way, the house falls short of home — too many riches material, far too few sentimental. There are no pictures of people, not on walls or on frames stood to tables. The closest thing is an early artwork of Irina’s: crayon likenesses with lopsided smiles and flat hair — one short, one fat, one not — standing over fish-rich water. It is pinned to the side of her fridge by kitschy tourist magnets.
Villanelle settles heavily on the couch, plunges her hand into her pocket, and retrieves her pretty scale. She draws circles with her thumb against the flat of it — so soft, she can’t resist the urge to press it to her bottom lip, run it back and forth over giving flesh. Feels longing at the touch. She stops it on something like a kiss, then drops it promptly to the bottom of the decorative bowl centered on her coffee table. And with the clink of bone against resin, the balance between house and home shifts just a bit.
~
She doesn’t search the sea the next day, either. She doesn’t have to.
The steps down from her house are slick with morning dew. She follows them with a hand braced to the cliff face, then hops from rock to wood, onto the floating dock adjoining. It seesaws — her weight at one end, the weight of two long marine storage bins at the other. She clicks one free of its latches and swings the lid back. What she finds within — or rather, what she doesn’t — decides the course of her day.
She might not have noticed the missing lures. It’s the haphazard replacement of the life vests, and the glaring absence of the old harpoon beneath, that gives the thief away. A few snack bars have been pillaged from a lunchbox, too.
She kneels at the edge of the dock and leans carefully over, hand braced against the edge of the box so as not to risk falling to water. The markings are unmistakable — short lines shredded into wood, shallower at their edges then at their centers, just like the scuffs she’d noticed on the seastack.
Villanelle imagines a mermaid sitting on a rock, peeling the wrapper off an energy bar, and smiles.
~
The pilferage just feels targeted. Either she is right, or she is irremediably self-centered — or she is both. Villanelle dissuades herself from informing Konstantin of the development regardless. Her mermaid is fun — naughty, even, while he is naughty only in the vilest of ways.
Good thieves are like lightning. The chunks this one took out of her dock tell Villanelle she’s bound to strike the same place twice.
Her favorite bag, the one she takes on errands into town, is sized suitably for the task. She fills it with temptations — a pretty hand mirror, her most expensive earrings, a leather-bound notebook that smells like the earth, two scarves — one green and the other bone-white, a bar of artisanal soap that smells like the sea, and finally, remembering the harpoon, a wicked fillet knife — custom made, barbed at the spine, liquid-patterned Damascus steel, with a cobalt blue epoxy handle marbled by veins like golden sand. She considers throwing in a bottle of her nicest wine, too, but at the image of a drunken mermaid inadvertently beached in town, reconsiders.
She takes the stairs with the bag tucked under her arm, and tries not to scan the water for flares of green and blue and pearlescent nacre. Leashes her excitement — though she feels it through her fingers, twitching against the handle of her bag, and at her throat, tight when she inhales — at the thought of beholding not one scale shed, but a multitude shifting and living and breathing together.
Her mermaid is beautiful. She knows it. What kind of woman who steals a harpoon isn’t?
Villanelle leaves all her gifts, all her bait, in deliberate disarray at the bottom of her once-plundered marine box.
~
There is a cave south of town, just north of the floating dock married to the base of the cliff. Serrated sea-washed rocks guard its mouth, unwelcoming as a great white’s serried smile. It’s little wonder the children don’t play here — they’d cut their hands against those teeth. Fisher’s boats would split their hulls against them, too.
Inside, the waves calm to the point of stilling. A fissure among stalactites dripping from the ceiling offers just enough light to see by. Some sea caves hold secret beaches, pristine sand, but this one frames water with nothing but level planes of stone that stretch into the darkness of a seemingly endless throat. One edge of the pool is raised higher than the rest, like a retaining wall, and it’s here that Eve sets her treasures. The harpoon, the hooks, the food, and several fresher additions — all well out of the tide’s reach.
After three days and two nights, she decides the cave is safe enough.
She hoists herself onto the shallowest lip of the pool. Stretches out her tail where the rock is dry. Fists her hand into the pink towel at her side and — imagining Carolyn’s reproachful voice, her withering stare — lets her grip falter. Remembers hazel eyes, honeyed hair, and a voice pleasing as the rush of water, and takes the towel to her tail.
This is the part she’s done before — dried by the sun on remote beaches and desolate island shores. A gruesome transformation. Her scales shift and retract, her flesh and bone roil — the whole process is melting and angular and not-quite right. She watches with bated breath as land fits her with a pair of legs. Palpates either side of her neck to confirm the closure of her gills.
This is the part that is new:
With one hand to the ground and the other to the raised ledge at her back, she draws her knees up to her chest. Flexes her toes hard and white against dark rock. Keeps her feet firmly planted, and stands mostly by the strength of her arms. Her legs wobble. She takes one step. Then two. Loses her balance — and falls with a graceless splash back to the sea.
~
Villanelle doesn’t often feel like a fool, but she does feel like one now, looking into her decidedly un-pilfered storage box. Not a single of her offerings has been stolen — not a single one so much as touched, though the latches on the box have been tampered with. And this isn’t even the worst part.
The worst part is that she’s been robbed all the same.
The bag she used to carry down her gifts — the one she tossed blindly to the deck of her trawler after emptying — is nowhere to be found. Her towel — the ugly pink one she keeps aboard, just in case — is also missing. But the real insult is her fishing knife — the boring one stored beside her nets and rods — it has been taken, too. Meanwhile, the most beautiful blade she’s ever seen lies pointedly forlorn at the bottom of her box.
Either her mermaid has shit taste, or she’s a real asshole.
Villanelle slams the lid shut and climbs back up the steps, not knowing whether to feel insulted or impressed. When she opens her front door, the landline greets her with a ring. She answers grumpily — it’s Konstantin.
“What is it?”
“Come. I have something for you.”
~
It’s a dreary evening — grey skies and dark waters. Villanelle cuts through the town square and turns onto a narrow street curving up the hillside. Storefront windows spill warm light onto the uneven cobbling beneath her feet.
Irina’s yellow bike is parked against the fire hydrant in front of Konstantin’s shop, exactly where he’s told her countless times not to leave it. Villanelle considers ratting her out as she splays her hand against the front door’s frosted pane — right over a rather tasteless logo of a fish hung by a hook pierced through its bottom lip. She pushes. A bell chimes overhead.
“He’s upstairs,” Irina provides, fist squished to her cheek. She holds a book flat open against the counter, spares Villanelle only a glance before returning to its pages. Dead fish on display lear up at her through the glass.
Villanelle pulls the hood of Irina’s sweatshirt hard over her head as she walks past, then dashes for the door designated employees only before any retaliation can occur.
Straight ahead is the kitchen; beyond it, the storeroom; to the right, a narrow set of stairs. She climbs quietly, and opens the unlocked door at its head with all the subtlety of a thief — the kind like lightning, not the kind that leaves scales on rocks and scratches in people’s docks.
Konstantin mans the stove with one hand fisting a spatula like a knife and the other at his hip. The whole place smells like fish and garlic and tomatoes and wine. Villanelle creeps through the living room like she knows exactly which floorboards to avoid so as not to make a creak.
“Hello, Villanelle,” he says without turning.
She deflates and shuffles noisily into the kitchen. Looks over Konstantin’s shoulder and steals a piece of fennel off his cutting board. “Are you making me dinner?”
“You’re welcome to join us.”
Villanelle looks to the table, already set for three.
Konstantin had a wife, before. Left her along with his previous life. Meant to leave Irina, too, but the girl never did know what was best for her — and when he and Villanelle found her, hidden in the trunk of the car they’d made their escape in, it was too late to turn back. From the Baltic to the Mediterranean she was swept.
Secretly, Villanelle is thankful. Konstantin’s daughter offers him a sense of normalcy, of family, of purpose. Keeps him busy. Out of her hair.
As they share aqua pazza fresh off the stove — made with fish that Villanelle has caught, that Irina has gutted, that Konstantin has cooked — Villanelle wonders what these dinners would look like, or if they would be at all, if they were two, she and Konstantin, instead of three.
After eating, Irina does the dishes, and Konstantin beckons Villanelle to the study. He shuts the door behind them. The room is cramped — a desk, two armchairs, bookshelves lining one wall, storage cabinets lining the other. Villanelle winds her way to the window and looks onto the street one level below. Irina’s bike still leans against the hydrant.
“Am I going to like my surprise?”
“What counts is that our new problem won’t.”
Villanelle pretends this doesn’t make her want to turn her head. She bites her lip as Konstantin rummages for something hidden within the depths of the closet by the door. He finds it, finally, and squeezes past the armchairs to join her side. She looks — down at his hands, at the offering held between them.
“I have one already.”
“No, you don’t.”
The speargun looks as ordinary as any other, if a bit on the heavy side. But then she recognizes it — the onyx tip, barbed and glinting ruby red where it catches light. Metal engineered to pierce through scales hard as any armor with the ease of a warmed knife sliding through butter.
“Why did you keep this?” she asks, eyes narrowing.
“It’s a fine weapon,” he shrugs, like this fine weapon doesn’t hold the weight of their shared history. When Villanelle’s glare doesn’t give, he holds it out to her, practically shoves it to her chest. “Yours now. For good. You won’t even have to leave your boat to kill her.”
A quick, impersonal death. Villanelle takes the gun and tests its balance between her hands. The bands on it are so thick, she expects they’ll take twice as much effort to pull back as the ones on the gun she has back home.
She wonders if Konstantin’s charity should be read as anything more than an efficient solution to their problem — a show of trust? an apology? a mercy? a threat? Her hands squeeze hard around the gun. Her nostrils flare, her eyebrows twitch.
“These thing are cruel,” she says, touching her finger to the tip of the spear.
“They are efficient.”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night.”
Konstantin sighs. “Are you taking it or not?”
~
Of course she takes it. Whether she ends up using it as its makers intended remains to be seen. Its weight feels far from right against her shoulder, but at least it doesn’t feel so wrong as it would have, stayed in Konstantin’s closet. Men, especially men with histories like his, shouldn’t be allowed such weapons. But then, maybe a woman like her shouldn’t be allowed them, either.
Her hand tightens around the strap of the speargun’s carrying case as she crests the hill, onto the headland proper. Polyester chafes against the soft skin by the neck of her shirt. The dirt path beneath her feet turns to mud with the turning of the weather. She braces herself against the rocks with her free hand, so as not to slip.
Far below, the ocean breaks violently against the cliffs, the way it does in the advent of a storm. The wind whips back her clothes, pelts her with rain, threatens to push her down the slope.
She remembers her raincoat — deliberately left to a hook by her front door — and curses herself. Town lies fifteen minutes at her back; home, ten minutes ahead. Five more in this rain, and she’ll be soaked to the bone.
Her solution lies less that one minute up the path — a cavity she discovered two years ago, and has made occasional use of since. The opening hides like a fault against a massive hunk of rock jutting out from the earth. It’s barely wide enough for an adult to squeeze through, but Villanelle manages with no more than a scrape against her back.
Beyond the breach, the rocks widen just enough not to have her feeling crushed. She gropes blindly at dampened stone, eyes adjusting to the dark as the gouge swallows her — down down down. Until the tunnel spits her out to the back of a cave, which, in turn, spits water out to sea.
She sits, sets the speargun down beside her, and wonders how long before the storm will pass. Her hair is damp. She shakes it from where it sticks flat against her scalp and —
pauses mid-brush at a sound. A wet sound. Not like rain trickling through rocks, or like waves percussing cliffs. Like something sloshing, cutting through water.
Villanelle ventures toward the bright mouth of the cave with her speargun between both hands. Keeps to the shadows, back flush to stone, and cranes her head around the corner. What she sees swimming in the pool — who she sees, rather — nearly has the gun clattering at her feet.
Her mermaid is beautiful. She shouldn’t be surprised. But the sight of her — the whole of her — leaves Villanelle choking on her own breath.
One solitary scale does her ill-justice. Their multitude scatters light in shifting mosaics across the cavern walls. Her hair is dark and tameless as the ocean itself, and her skin looks soft where her shoulders break out from the surface. She leans over the lip of the pool, breasts occasionally brushing rock as she plays with something set there. Her tail, capable of caving a man’s chest by a single beat, waves aimless patterns through the water behind her.
For a brief moment, Villanelle is struck with the dangerous and impossible urge to join her in the pool, maybe reach out for her scales, touch her skin, stroke her chest. Appreciate her, intimately.
The thought makes her skin grow tight. Tight at her scalp and at the back of her neck. Tight at her shoulders and down her arms. Tight at her chest. Tight with a terrible and understated arousal that makes her head spin. Too stimulated to think.
A whispered curse pulls her back to her skin.
Villanelle breathes — feels her chest grow full with the swell of her lungs and the swell of her heart. Presses her nape to sobering-cold rock. Wills her head clear, to see beyond her mermaid’s beauty for a moment.
A collection lines a natural shelf beside the pool: her fishing gear, her food, her towel, her bag, her harpoon… and several items Villanelle has never seen before. A green camping lantern, restaurant silverware, a rag doll, and a reusable water bottle.
So Villanelle isn’t the only victim of mermaid robbery. Whatever. The realization doesn’t make her heart sink at all. Doesn’t make her grip tighten against the sheathed neck of her speargun, either.
(Had the others laid out gifts? Had she pointedly ignored them, too? Or is the pocket watch she turns between her hands — yanks all the delicate mechanical parts out of with curious fingers — an offering accepted?)
A desperate longing to feel closer, closest — has Villanelle forgetting her footing. The slick soles of her shoes slip against rock. Wet sweeps her legs right out from under her. She catches herself mid-fall, but it’s too late. The gun clatters violently to the ground. Skids with a sound that sends echoes bouncing throughout the deepest recesses of the cave.
When Villanelle finds her feet again, the pool is empty — her mermaid, gone.
~
Now that she has seen her, it’s too easy to imagine what the tip of the spear would look like, burnt crimson, rending ocean scales to hook its barbed head through her flesh. Blood would trickle from the puncture like water over rocks — or, if she were shot in the sea, bloom weightless like a cloud of dust. Thick at first and quickly thinning, muddling with greens and salted blues.
She tucks the gun back in its case. Does the zipper up with a quick, hard yank that draws a high whiz from its teeth.
It’s too impersonal. Unthinkable from the start, really. She should be insulted Konstantin suggested it.
The utility closet in her laundry room has become a collector of dust and knickknacks and unwanted gifts — mostly from women she’s taken to bed — and, of course, of memories buried. When she opens it with the sole intention of shoving the speargun as far up its ass as she’s able, she discovers a line of canvases, covered in paint, shelved long ago. Some no bigger than a postcard, others too large to fit width-wise through the door. Beside them, a wooden tote contains scrunched tubes with color-crusted caps, an equally color-crusted palate, and — in a twist — clean brushes.
She trades the closet, gun for art, then with arms laden, slams its door with a well-placed nudge of her foot. Out the laundry room, past the kitchen, and into the living room she carries her burden — where she drops it to the floor in a great scattered pile.
Each of her old paintings appreciates the same subject: the sea. Always in greys, blacks and whites, murky greens, and dismal blues. Like a great storm had passed over the landscape the moment brush touched canvas.
Her mermaid’s scale, brilliant as ocean waves on the clearest of days, lies cradled still by the little bowl crowning her coffee table. She scoops it from the vertex, opens her paints, and over hours, mixes colors until she births emerald iridescent. As faithful a match as she can ever hope to pull from pigments human-made.
She spreads her mermaid’s base color across her palate, and from it, mixes several shades — one for each way she imagines her scales catch light. With an old seascape lain to the floor, one bare foot flat beside it, her tongue pressed between her lips, and hair falling against her face — she touches bristles, loaded with fresh paint, to the dried greys spread across a canvas. The waves that spring beneath her brush are cutting, beautiful, hers — and Villanelle wonders what kind of problem breathes life into bled-out colors.
~~