CHAPTER 1
CORA
The lake sings to me,like always.
Its voice is low and secret, meant for a sirena alone. A murmur threaded through the water at my fingertips, familiar as my own pulse. I trail my hand along the surface as our last paddleboard tour glides toward shore, and the lake curls around my wrist the way it always does, cool and knowing.Kumusta ka na, it seems to say.How have you been?
Better than expected, I tell it without words. Business is good. The dock is mostly in one piece. And it is officially, gloriously summer in Harmony Glen.
Behind me, Rex paddles with those smooth, powerful strokes of his. Utterly relentless, utterly efficient, his were-shark nature making a straightforward task look like a personal military campaign against the water. I don’t turn around. I smile.
He hates when I call him out on it.
“And that, folks, wraps up our sunset eco-tour of Harmony Glen!” I call, pitching my voice across the water. The soundcarries the way it was made to. Sirena gift, one of the few I’ve learned to lean into rather than suppress. “Remember: what the lake gives, we protect. Leave nothing but ripples.”
Five tourists follow us toward the shore, flushed and blissed out, the way people always look at the end of a good tour. They’d spent the afternoon learning about the watershed ecosystem, and only some of that was fiction. The part about the aquatic plants, for instance, was completely accurate. The part about what was living in them was, let’s say, creatively edited.
My board grazes the sandy bottom and I hop off in one smooth motion, feet sinking into the cool, silty shore. A woman behind me wobbles on her rental board, arms pinwheeling, and I reach back automatically to catch her hand.
“Oh!” She grabs me like I’m a life ring. “Thank you. I always do that at the very end.”
“It’s the anticipation,” I tell her. “Your brain thinks you’re already on land, so your body goes ahead and agrees.”
“That wassimply magical,” she says, still gripping my hand, her eyes round with genuine feeling. “The way you told the history of the lake. I swear I could almosthearthose old songs. In the water.”
She probably could. My voice sometimes carries more than words. I’ve learned to keep the sirena on a leash during tours. Enough to make the stories land, not enough to cause the kind of trouble that results in noise complaints or municipal investigations.
“That’s Harmony Glen for you,” I say, tapping my throat and smiling. “Stories come alive here.”
Rex appears at my shoulder, all six-foot-three of him, broad-shouldered and completely dry despite having just paddled across a lake. Absolute show-off. His dark hair doesn’t even have the decency to look damp.
“Don’t forget to leave us a review,” he says with an easy grin, just a suggestion of fang in it. “San Pedro Eco-Tours runs on word of mouth and Cora’s cooking.”
I elbow him. “Ignore him. We run on genuine respect for the natural world and my extensive knowledge of local lake folklore.”
“And lumpia,” Rex adds, entirely straight-faced, which earns him a second jab to the ribs.
The tourists laugh, looping bags over their shoulders and drifting toward the parking lot with waves and thank yous and the kind of loosened, easy quality that people get when they’ve spent a few hours outside. I watch them go. The smile on my face loosens into something more real, and I exhale.
Good tour. Good day. That’s most of them, this summer. I’m not going to jinx it by saying so out loud.
Rex and I drag the boards to the storage shed in easy companionable silence, the kind that only develops between people who have spent enough time around each other that words are optional.
We’ve been doing this for about a year now. Running tours, bickering, taking turns closing up the shed while the other one grabs something cold from the Snack Hut that we also own and operate.
It started as just me and my water taxi, a way to spend time on the lake that I love, until Dr. Margaid Davis mentioned her concerns about the declining chain pickerel population, and suddenly my hobby became something more—a way to protect and educate.
It settled into a rhythm so naturally that it’s hard to remember what the lake tours alone felt like.
Probably quieter, I think. Also significantly less fun.
“Another successful tour,” I say, bumping his hip as we haul the boards onto their racks. “And the water sprites were on their best behavior today. Ish.” I add with a little wave of my hand.
He snorts. “Salli is a little menace that has serious boundary issues.”
“All water sprites do.” I grab the life vests and start hanging them on their hooks. “It’s a cultural thing.”
Rex racks the paddles with a single efficient sweep of his arm. The casual, unconscious show of strength that has given approximately half the Harmony Glen population a complicated feelings situation about their local dive guide. “Says the woman who sang to a pickerel for five minutes until it swam into her hand.”