“Which is exactly why we should hire someone. Before we burn out.” He gives me that look, the patient one that means he’s not going to push, but he’s also not going to let it go. “Just think about it. A year into these tours and we’re already maxing out. We need help to keep this sustainable.”
“I’ll think about it.”
I won’t. But he’ll bring it up again in a few weeks, and I’ll deflect, and he’ll sigh, and we’ll have this same conversation in August. This is our system and it works.
We sit in the quiet while the lake settles into its evening self. Softer, darker, the day-sounds of motor boats and tourist chatter giving way to frogs and the occasional splash of something in the shallows that might be a fish and might be Phineas doing his rounds. Lights are coming on across the water. Somewhere in town, someone is playing music.
“You singing at the bonfire tonight?” Rex asks. His eyes are half-closed in that deceptive way of his. He looks relaxed, but he’s always listening.
“Mmm. Told Mateo I would. Some tourists specifically asked.” I scratch at the corner of my beer label. “They always ask.”
“Because you’re very good.”
“I’m a sirena. It’s sort of built in.”
“It’s still a skill.” He glances at me sidelong. “Not every sirena actuallysingsthe way you do. Some of them just weaponize it.”
“I prefer to think of my voice as a gift I give freely to the community.”
Rex laughs, warm and real, rolling out of him easy as water, and something inside my chest loosens the way it does when I’ve been holding tension I didn’t notice was there. This. This is what I love about us.
No performance, no careful self-editing. Rex knows exactly what I am down to the species level and has never once made me feel like that’s anything other than completely ordinary.
When you’re both Otherkin, you develop a shorthand. When you’re also best friends, the shorthand becomes its own language.
I’m about to suggest we head in and change when voices carry up from the shore path.
Three of them. A cluster of familiar figures cutting along the lake trail the way locals do, the way that bypasses the public parking and goes right past the ecotour cabin.
The Bennett sisters from the crystal shop, moving in their characteristic matching-energy way, and old Mr. Calloway, who is human but has always known things he probably shouldn’t, including and especially when a storm is coming.
“—absolutelycertain,” the older one is saying. “Liana told me she saw him in the market picking up some groceries.”
“Well,” Mr. Calloway says, in the dry register of someone who has lived by a lake long enough to have opinions about everything, “he’s got nerve, I’ll give him that. Showing his face again after all this time.”
“You know how selkies are.” The younger sister lowers her voice with the theatrical care of someone who absolutely wants to be overheard. “The sea calls, and they go. Doesn’t matter much who they leave behind.”
My body goes rigid.
The beer bottle is suddenly very slick in my hand. Beside me, Rex sits up.
“Cora—” he starts.
“I should change before the bonfire,” I say, fast and tight, already rising.
But they’ve spotted us. The older Bennett sister lifts a hand and redirects up the path toward the cabin, and I have approximatelythree seconds to paste something resembling normalcy onto my face.
“Cora! Rex!” She beams, glancing between us with the sharp-eyed warmth that is their family brand. “Perfect timing. We’re heading to the Rusty Anchor, come eat with us.”
“Thanks, but we’ve got the bonfire to prep,” Rex says, smooth as river stone.
Mr. Calloway is watching my face in that way of his. He has known me for about a year, and he has the long memory of someone who has been paying attention to the lake and everyone on it for several decades. “Heard the news, have you?”
“What news?” I ask.
The sisters exchange one of their looks. A whole conversation conducted in the space between two faces.
The younger one speaks gently. “About Muir. He’s back, sweetheart.”