“You’re the only one I’ve ever told of my fear of blood, but Rhodomela guessed it.”
“For the life of me, I still can’t understand your fear of blood,” Pavonis drawled. “There’s not a smell in the world to which I am more attuned than that of blood. That’s how we met, in fact—through your blood.”
When she’d been two years old, Coralline’s mother had plopped her down on the window seat in the living room and had swum away to bustle about the kitchen. The currents had risen and, unseen by her mother, Coralline had drifted out among the dahlias and jewel anemones of the reef garden. Unable to swing her tailfin at that age, she’d been blown about the waters like a young snail, the currents lifting her higher and higher as they swelled. A golden mesh from an Ocean Dominion ship had descended like a delicate blanket from the surface, and her dimpled fingers had curled around it. But something sharp in the net, a flint of a hook, had scratched her arm, and a drop of blood had sprouted. A force larger than life itself had tossed her away from the net just in time, for the net had been tightening around her, about to haul her up to the waves. Upon Pavonis’s push, she’d rolled and tumbled through the froth, giggling, her stomach tickled by her own speed. When she’d come to a stop, she’d marveled at his yellow-spotted back, and her tiny hands had clasped trustingly around his dorsal fin.
Pavonis had dived down vertically, and Coralline’s stomach had churned at his descent, and she’d squeezed her eyes shut. When she’d opened them, she’d found that the two of them were at the center of a scene of confused commotion. Dozens of merpeople were gathered outside the Costaria home, for Abalone had been knocking on doors and shouting that her daughter had been abducted.
As soon as she’d seen Coralline with Pavonis, Abalone had pried her off his fin and fled with her indoors.
Undeterred, Pavonis had arrived at the living room window every afternoon to visit Coralline. Months later, when Coralline had grown a little and learned to flick her tailfin and swim on her own, she’d ambled out the window one afternoon while her mother was in the kitchen. She’d grabbed Pavonis’s dorsal fin and he’d taken her for a turbulent, rumbling ride through Urchin Grove.
He’d returned her home in time for supper that evening, and every evening after over the next fourteen years, even when she enrolled at Urchin Apothecary Academy at sixteen years of age. When she’d bite her lip in trepidation before a test, he’d pull faces outside the classroom window, opening his mouth five feet wide, as only a whale shark could. His tunnel of a mouth, columned with three hundred teeth, would make her giggle.
Now, Coralline laid her cheek flat against Pavonis’s side, her hands patting his ridges. “You also detected Father’s blood the day of his haccident,” she reminded him.
“Ah yes,” Pavonis said. “We had another dream that day, remember? We were going to traverse the Atlantic from top to bottom. Our North-to-South Expedition was to be the greatest adventure of our lives. We were to leave immediately after your graduation from Urchin Apothecary Academy and to travel to places with deeper waters and wilder waves, before returning to Urchin Grove, forever changed by our adventure. . . .”
Coralline nodded guiltily. On this day, Rhodomela had crushed her dream of healing; on that day, seven months ago, Coralline had crushed Pavonis’s dream of travel.
The day after her graduation, Coralline had waited at the window seat in the living room for her father to return home from work, so that she could tell him and her mother that she and Pavonis wished to embark on a North-to-South Expedition. Pavonis had lingered outside the window next to Coralline to ensure she didn’t lose courage before the conversation—they both knew her parents would require considerable convincing to agree to the Expedition.
Together, Coralline and Pavonis had scanned the darkening evening waters for a hint of her father’s copper tail. But Coralline’s gaze had shifted to her family’s reef garden, as new inhabitants had emerged one after another. A seven-foot-long conger eel had glided across the sediment, then a tiny cardinalfish had erupted from a crevice underneath an overhang, then a horseshoe crab had clambered onto a rock. The three heralds of the night had made her wring her hands and forget all about the North-to-South Expedition: Her father was a beacon of punctuality. Why was he late returning home from work? Had he been injured—or worse—by humans?
Suddenly, Pavonis’s snout had twitched, and he’d departed with a sharp swing of his tail. He’d sniffed blood, Coralline had known from his reaction. She’d paced the living room, swimming back and forth, her glance flitting repeatedly to the sand-clock on the mantel, watching the trickle of sand from the upper to the lower ampoule. Most of the sand was collected now in the lower ampoule, for most of the day was gone. She only hoped the same could not be said for her father’s life.
When Pavonis had returned, it had been with her father. He had been on the verge of unconsciousness, his left hand clutching Pavonis’s dorsal fin just barely, his right hand creating a shroud of blood that surrounded him like an expanding cape, his tail as lusterless as the sand gathered underneath the doorjamb.
Had Pavonis not smelled his blood, her father would likely have died of blood loss at the site of the coral reef dynamite blast. As such, both Pavonis and Rhodomela had saved Coralline’s father, Pavonis by finding him, Rhodomela by treating him. And yet Coralline had just spoken rudely to Rhodomela.
“You know I couldn’t leave, Pavonis,” Coralline said softly, brushing aside the large, bright-green fronds of kelp to look into his eye. “My family needed me.”
“I understand,” he rumbled.
“But I do still owe you an apology. I haven’t been there for you when you’ve most needed me, in the last nine months since Mako’s death. First, it was my graduation, then it was Father’s hand, then I started at The Irregular Remedy, then I met Ecklon. None of this is any excuse, of course.”
Pavonis was Coralline’s only best friend, but, just nine months ago, Pavonis had counted two best friends: Coralline and Mako. Mako had been a whale shark like Pavonis himself, but his birth name hadn’t been Mako; in adulthood, he’d renamed himself after the shortfin mako, among the fastest sharks in the world. Pavonis and Mako had been similar in personality—irreverent and adventurous—and they’d even looked similar, to an uncanny extent. Individual whale sharks could be distinguished by the yellow spots on their skin, but Pavonis’s and Mako’s patterns had borne such a strong resemblance that they were often mistaken for each other.
One day, a merman had arrived at the Costaria home. Coralline had been perusing The Ultimate Apothecary Appendix at the window seat in the living room, but the stranger had looked at her with such alarm that she’d thrown the book aside and followed him outside immediately. He had taken her to the scene of a mob. At the center of the mob had been Pavonis, slamming his great white belly down onto rocks until they fragmented into pebbles. The mob had kept a safe distance from Pavonis, but Coralline had dashed over to Pavonis’s side.
“Mako’s dead,” he’d wailed.
With that admission, the anger had drained from him, and he’d lain in the rubble, as still as though he himself had died. She’d asked him how Mako had died; he’d refused to say. That day, by the time he’d arisen, he’d changed permanently. He’d started snapping and snarling at children, smacking them with his tailfin. Worse, from Coralline’s perspective, he’d developed a habit of falling into long, brooding silences, sometimes for days at a time.