Her Contract Enatails Ch. 04

She was naked save for a functional top of tight-fitting lycra, the kind of garment that would have looked more in place on an athlete than a mermaid that could have been summoned from an adolescent boy's fantasies. In addition she carried nothing with her save for a small knife, secured in a sheath that hung from a belt around her waist.

The subject of kitting her out for this attempt at escape had been a matter of much debate between the two of them. Henry had fretted over her chances of survival and wanted her to make her way into the sea burdened with a myriad of supplies that she was sure would only have been a hindrance in the long term. She was touched by his fussing, but sure that his insistence on such a large amount of things that would more than likely be useless was an attempt to assuage his own guilt rather than equip her to cope with surviving with the sea as her new home.

Carla on the other hand favoured keeping what she took and wore to the bare minimum based not on her own whims, but instead on the cold hard facts with which she had educated herself. For longer than the two weeks that Henry had been a party to her plans, she had been labouring on the scheme alone.

What she had claimed were simply trips to the numerous pools on the estate for exercise had in fact been a concerted effort to at first assess and then improve her fitness and ability to swim for extended periods of time. She had also schemed her way into accessing books and even a limited amount of time on the internet so that she could read up on the environment in which she would be forced to exist.

Even after all the work she had invested in preparing herself, she was far from confident of her chances as far as survival was concerned. Carla knew that she would be leaping from the life of what amounted to a pampered pet and into that of a wild animal, in competition with cold-minded predators and in the clutches of an uncaring sea. The most potent weapons that she could make use of were her mind and body, and they had done nothing for a number of years now save being subservient to the will and whims of Aubrey Lister.

She raised her arms and allowed Henry to lift her off the seat, feeling for what she was sure would be the final the sheer strength that was contained in his limbs. There really was no way she could have turned him down on the offer, the distance between the road and the point where the waves reached the sand was simply too far for her to have managed on her belly. In addition he would most likely have ignored her protests and carried her there anyway had she refused.

They remained silent for the entirety of the slow walk from the limousine to the first few feet of wet sand. Carla had no way of knowing what thoughts might have been chasing through Henry's immense head, but she suspected that it was a typical parade of guilt for her condition and fear of what awaited him when their scheme was inevitably discovered.

He had assured her on numerous occasions that whatever fate had in store for him, it would be no more than a part of the punishment that he willingly accepted for what he had been a party to. Carla had tried and failed to keep herself from speculating as to what Lister would do when the whole thing was laid bare to him. She had even tried to urge Henry to make his own escape when she did, but he had refused to be drawn on just what he would do once she was gone.

Carla felt nothing but contempt for most of the human race at that moment in time. Her anger would fade until she was reconciled with the fact that her fate had been perverted by a single individual and realise finally that she did not truly hate humanity as a whole. But there and then she felt sympathy and obligation to no other human being apart from the man that held her as the waves began to surge around his ankles.

She realised with a degree of shock, that she would miss the company of this quiet giant of a man. Though they had only been speaking with one another in snatched conversations in the two weeks since she opened herself to him and asked for his aid, he had become the only person who approached a friend in her life. While he might have made love to her more out of obligation to his guilt and her nature as a mermaid, she could not deny that he had been an essential counterweight to the continued attentions of her supposed master.

Where Lister was domineering and actually revelled in the act of dominating her, Henry by way of contrast was in need of her constant guidance and urging. Sex between them was an act that she lead and he attended to her every instruction so that she was truly satisfied by the time her climax came. In the altered nature of her being, this affirmed her self confidence and gave her the strength to continue despite the challenges and uncertainty that lay ahead.

Carla weighed the possibility of taking him one more time, right there in the surf as an almost territorial act before she was gone. She was not addicted to sex in the way that a person could become dependent upon narcotics, instead the need for physical fulfilment with another was an essential part of her being. She could leave without another encounter with Henry if she chose, but in this case she simply found that she was contemplating the more pleasant aspects of doing so.

She dismissed the notion, sure that he would submit to her will, but determined to make this as clean a break with her former life as she could make it. Instead she placed a gentle kiss on his cheek and cocked her head to one side, indicating that he should let her down.

Henry knelt and lowered her into the lapping water, careful to ensure that she was safely deposited upon the sand beneath before he released her from his arms.

Almost the moment that he did so, a particularly strong wave surged up the beach and swept over Carla, drenching her from head to fin. Caught unawares by the freezing cold of the water after the warm air of the evening, she shrieked in a manner that instantly filled her with embarrassment and made her hug herself in a vain attempt to fend off the chill.

It was hardly an auspicious start for a mermaid intent upon making a life for herself beneath the surface of the ocean, and she steeled her will to ignore the temperature of the water in favour of the hard fight that lay ahead.

"This is it," she deliberately did not look back at Henry as she inched further into the water, determined to spare his emotions and her own dignity as she went. "Wish me luck and pray for some of your own while you're at it."

Henry said nothing as she made her way into the deeper waves, the water reaching ever higher until she was forced to begin to actually work against the water. Soon she was more than a ten feet out into the water, arms ploughing as she moved and her tail finally beginning to tell as she swam. Then she was twenty feet out and reaching thirty faster than ever as the advantages of a mermaid in her native element came into play and she truly made her way through the churning waves in the way that she was intended to.

He made no effort to move from the spot even as the water reached further up his legs.

Instead he watched until the very last glimpse of silver scales against the fading sun was lost to his eyes.

Only then did he turn and begin to make his way back up the beach.

His thoughts moved with immense effort from the creature he had helped escape and to the heavy pistol that lay in the glove compartment of the limousine.

There were only two men in the world that he would have turned the weapon on, and now he had to discover if he knew one of them well enough to be sure that man was capable of killing the other.

Jared Largo slipped off his shoes and walked onto the sand as he did at the end of every day. The solitary walk along the beach had become one of the rituals defined his waking hours, something that if asked he would have claimed was a time when he could collect his thoughts and meditate on the events of the past day.

In reality he walked the beach and performed a string of other activities between dawn and dusk each day for the sake of having any routine at all.

He was also unsure as to whether he could truly have called his strolls along the beach solitary in that as he lived alone, everything he did was technically solitary in nature anyway.

Jared hated the fact that he found himself alone with a head that seemed to be filled with nothing any more than other pointless and random thoughts. He could recall hoping that he would find himself again amongst these new surroundings, but so far he had done nothing apart from begin to sink into what he feared was a rambling and confused decline without the structure of obligations to a work life or loved ones nearby.

The location in which he had chosen to settle had gone from a serene retreat from the madness of the wider world to a mundane backwater as time passed. It seemed nothing but a cruel irony that he had once planned to retire here with his wife, before she had been taken away from him all those years ago. But in a way he was oddly pleased that she had been spared the depressing realisation that they could have been so wrong about the nature of the place.

But of course it was only in his more positive moments that he was able to think in such as way, ascribing the disappointment of the locale solely to her absence when he was in one of his more common dark moods.

There had been a brief burst of excitement in the region within the past year though, a supposed item of news that had brought legitimate media attention and the eyes of the world before it inevitably died down and the place was forgotten once more.

The story, as far as Jared was aware, went that a local fisherman had been out at sea alone and seen a brief glimpse of something that sent him scurrying back to the mainland filled with wild claims about what he had seen. As outlandish and fanciful as man's story was, he repeated to anyone who would listen the tale of how he had seen a mermaid as plain as the nose on his face.

Had the thing stopped there, it would have been nothing more than the deranged rantings of a man who had spent too much time alone at sea. But soon the details of his story were repeated by others who also claimed to have seen the creature, both after the original sighting and some who said they had seen the same thing before him and feared to share their own accounts due to the fantastical nature of the whole thing. Soon the place had come alive with a media circus, attempts to capture the non-existent mermaid and ever more sightings that became stranger and even more far-fetched as the affair ground on.

Of course nothing had been found, how could it? And after a few months the whole thing had petered out as the place sank back into quiet obscurity. Now it was almost as if the entire affair had never happened and Jared for one was pleased to see the back of it all. While there might have been nothing in his life that provided him with much excitement, he was nevertheless happier to live outside of such craziness on a daily basis.

He reached the end of the beach proper and began to make his way across the beginnings of the rocky outcroppings that lay beyond. From that point the open expanse of the beach gave way to a series of isolated inlets that were flooded at high tide, but when the waters receded revealed a network of picturesque coves.

Jared knew the timing of the tides well and estimated that he could make one of the more pleasant of the coves and be back on the safer sands of the beach before the incoming tide would cut him off.

Rounding the final arm of rock to arrive at his destination, he caught a hint of movement in the corner of his eye. It was rare, but not unknown to come upon another person already intent upon reaching the same cove while coming this way and Jared was about to shout an apology and turn back towards the beach when he was stopped in his tracks by what he saw before him.

Any man in his position would have been surprised beyond reason by the sight of a creature that seemed to be half woman and half fish, reclining in a tidal pool and regarding him with an all too human expression of shock. The realisation that such a thing could be a reality and the questions that it threw up would probably have come long after the initial surprise had run its natural course.

But to add to all of that baffling surprise and revelation the fact that Jared was instantly sure he recognised the face of the mermaid upon which he had stumbled elevated the experience beyond the realms of those who claimed to have seen the same thing before him.

He stood, rooted to the spot and unable to make the smallest move either towards the mermaid or away from her. But for her own part, the creature seemed to be afflicted by the same problem, frozen in the act of making what looked like a dive for the deeper waters beyond the pool in which she lay.

Neither seemed to be fixated upon the body of the other, which may have been harder to fathom in the instance of the man rather than the mermaid. But instead they each scrutinized the face of the other as if trying to discern something in the features that was either hidden or obscured in some way.

In the end, it was Jared who broke the silence.

"Carla," he had no idea if such a creature could understand him or even speak at all, "am I going crazy, or is that you?"

Suddenly the mermaid broke away from his gaze, as if she could not stand to be seen by him for a moment longer. She tensed her body and propelled herself with a strength and agility that amazed him, out of the pool and into the water that lapped against the rocks.

"No!" Jared reacted without a second of conscious thought, casting his shoes aside and throwing himself in the same direction in a desperate effort to follow her. But he was not possessed of the same grace as the mermaid and instead tumbled over the rocks she had leapt over. He landed heavily, pain spreading through his body as the jagged edges of the rock lacerated his skin and the force of the impact jarred him to the bone.

Trying to ignore the pain, he pulled himself over the rocks, desperate to locate the fleeing mermaid. Every inch he was able to crawl caused him to make a strangled cry of agony, but he would not relent in his efforts. Soon he reached the edge of the water and cast his gaze around, the realisation that she was nowhere to be seen visible in his eyes as he shook his head in frustration and disbelief.

Jared laid his head upon the rocks, still and silent.

He knew full well that the tide was edging ever closer, but he decided that he did not much care about what happened to him when it did. There was simply no way that he could make sense of what he had seen and then go back to what passed for his life. Either he was insane and did not realise the fact, or even worse the wife that he had thought dead for almost a decade was still alive and breathing.

On some level his mind was trying to process the fact that her legs seemed to have been replaced by a tail, but as far as he was concerned that ranked lower in the grand scheme of things.

Jared was emotionally hollow, unhappy with the prospect of the life he had ahead of him and most of all he was so tired that he had no reserves of strength with which to simply go on with the struggle of living as things were. He could not place on top of all that such a revelation and he knew that he could not dive into the sea and search for the mermaid he had just glimpsed.

So he made up his mind that he would lay there and be swallowed by the tide.

He closed his eyes as the water washed over him and unconsciousness took him.

Jared had no idea what, if anything he had expected to be the first thing a person might experience in the afterlife, but he was certain somehow that it would not have been the sensation of being pounded mercilessly upon the chest. His eyes sprang open just at the moment that his lungs gave forth the salt-water that had been pooling in them, heaving the liquid out onto the sand before he began to draw in a series of ragged breaths.

He rolled onto his side as the feeling of having been kicked in the gut doubled him over and only then did it occur to him to ask the question as to why he was alive at all.

A hand appeared in the corner of his vision and then was lost as it yanked his eyelid open in an effort that he could only suppose was intended to check he was reacting to the light and conscious.

Jared supposed that he should have been more surprised to see that the hand was webbed with silver and sported nails that could have been mistaken in the wrong light for a set of talons. But somehow he had already made the leap of the mind in which he was sure there could have been only one individual able to rescue him from drowning.

"I knew it was you," he was compelled to speak despite the fact he still could not make out the face of the person leaning over him. "Part of me could never believe that you were really gone." His voice was weak from the effects of choking up lungfuls of seawater and the emotion of what he was saying caused it to break further, but he was certain that he had been heard.

The sensation of the hand stroking his cheek seemed to confirm his assertion.

"Don't be so sure," the voice was at once familiar and yet tinged with something that added a tone that was totally novel to his ears. "I don't think that I'm the same woman you think I am," perhaps it was the flinty strength that he did not remember in the sound, or the resigned ease with which she addressed the reunion between man and wife regardless of the fact that one half of the former partnership seemed to have both returned from the dead and become a different kind of creature entirely.

"I don't care," he tried to focus on her face. "So long as even a sliver of the woman that I used to know is still alive then I won't take a step away from you again."

Her only response was a choked laugh that ended in what could only have been a cry.

Jared's vision was starting to clear as he reached out and gripped her hand. She made no attempt to pull away from his touch and he tried to make sense of the strange feeling of her webbed fingers against his own.

"Looks like being a mermaid agrees with you," he marvelled at the sight of her face as she finally met his gaze fully. "You look younger than you did the day we met."

"Flatterer," the hint of a smile was beginning to creep onto her face, and most promising of all was the fact that he was sure he recognised the expression as one his wife had often worn back when they had been together. "They gave me some serious surgery, but they changed more than you might think."

"I did notice the tail," he glanced down and stroked the surface of her scales, glad again that she did not flinch from his touch. He had not known what to expect when he touched that part of her body, but he found that the feeling of the scales was smooth and warm in a way that made him want to explore the length of her tail. "I was always a fan of your legs, but this is really something else. I think it's very beautiful, if you don't mind me saying so."

"No," she blushed, and again he noted it as a positive reaction on her part. "I mean that they changed me on the inside as well. They played with my mind and made me forget the woman that you called your wife. For years I thought I was someone else, and then her memories started to return and I came to the realisation that I was not the person I thought I was, but I wasn't the woman that I had been either. The person that I am now is made up of pieces from both of them and I don't think that I can ever truly be one or the other again."

"I can accept that," Jared nodded. "But why are you saying all these things as though you were telling me that you killed someone?"