As I think back to how all of this began, how I went from being your average teenage nobody to the world’s most powerful sorcerer, it all really started back in the eighth grade.

It was a little more than a year after the fire, and as you might predict, I wasn’t exactly the sort of kid who found joy in candy and Happy Meal toys. Video games distracted me, but I can’t say I really enjoyed them anymore. I didn’t enjoy a whole lot of anything back then, to tell the truth. It was like living life through a viewfinder. I saw people enjoying themselves, playing games, laughing at each other’s jokes. But I felt removed from it all, isolated, on my own little island without so much as a castaway’s volleyball to assuage my insanity.

So, I started living recklessly. It’s not like I wanted to die. But I wasn’t sure how I could go on living, either.

Most of the time I was numb. But when I put myself in danger… it was like I could feel again. The only time I ever felt like I really wanted to live was at that very moment when I thought I might die. I know it’s kind of screwed up… but losing everything you care about at such a young age will do that to you. I’d heard that St. Louis was one of the most dangerous cities in the country, so I’d sneak out in the middle of the night and go walking through the park. I’d ride my bike into traffic and laugh as the cars tried to swerve out of my way. Thinking back on it, I was probably putting Gene and Lois Harley—my friend’s parents who adopted me after my parents died—through hell.

By far the craziest thing I did, though, was something I oddly didn’t even mean to do.

It was Halloween. I hate Halloween; it’s the day when my family died exactly two years before. So I was probably even more out of sorts than usual. It was also the day our class took a field trip to the St. Louis Zoo.

As I stood there overlooking the exhibit, I felt something of a kinship with the young but full-grown grizzly who paced back and forth with no discernible purpose. They called his home a “habitat,” but nothing of the thrill of the wild remained for the bear in his man-made pit. A few of my fellow eighth-grade field-trippers snickered as they watched him obsessively perform his ritual.

He would walk to one end of his cage and bob his head back and forth. Moments later, he would walk another predetermined path, sniffing at the water along the way, until he returned to where he had started. Then he’d do it all over again. He must have repeated his choreographed stroll a dozen times while I watched. I couldn’t join in my classmates’ mockery. I felt his pain. His loneliness. He had lost everything, and I knew what that was like.

Surely as a young cub, he’d had dreams—the thrill of snagging a salmon from a cold stream, savoring the fruit of his kill as he chomped into its juicy flesh. Now all he had to look forward to was the creak of an iron gate signaling that his keeper might throw him a lifeless, tasteless meal. He could survive here… but he couldn’t live.

I had more in common with this bear than any of my fellow classmates.

As I stood at the edge of the exhibit, pondering the similarities between the bear’s tragic life and my own, someone touched my arm. It was a gentle touch. A static tingle flowed from the unexpected caress and consumed my body. I turned to see who it was, but a bright light, swirling with streams of red and gold, consumed my vision. Within the light, all I could see was a dark figure with a delicate frame, nearly my own height. A feminine voice echoed in my mind, loud and piercing, but calm and deliberate.

You are meant for more than this, Elijah. Awaken!

A force stirred deep within my gut. The blinding lights surrounding the figure beside me intensified, forcing my eyes shut.

I heard hysterical screams from a distance. When my vision readjusted to my surroundings, I was in the pit, standing only a few feet from the grizzly bear. The shrieks from above continued as my classmates and other zoo-goers observed what surely seemed to them a horror come true.

The bear broke his ritual when he saw me. He paused, and as much as a bear can, he seemed to smile at me. I was not scared. Time slowed down. He sniffed my hand. Rearing upon his hind legs, he stared directly into my eyes. It was like we knew each other. I felt his pain. He understood mine. For a moment, it felt like he was my friend… or something more than that. If we could have spoken, we would have. Still, words weren’t necessary. I knew his thoughts. He cried for help. He hoped I could offer him salvation. I had no answer for him. Still, he seemed to sense my empathy. That’s all he wanted. Someone, anyone, who understood. Tears welled up in my eyes.

I felt my feet leave the ground. I heard a loud bang as my body was yanked from the exhibit by the hands of a man whom I had never met. The grizzly’s countenance turned furious. He released a piercing roar but collapsed as he attempted to pursue me, a single dart stuck in his back. With another loud bang, a second dart struck him just beneath the first. I screamed. I begged them to let me go, not to harm him.

The world spun around me as the man who held me returned my feet to the ground. He gripped my wrist tightly. Panic was upon his face as he looked directly into my eyes. “Are you okay?”

“I… Yeah… I’m fine…” I mumbled, taken aback by the sequence of events that led me to this confrontation.

“What’s your name?”

I paused for a moment, trying to make sense of what had happened. The man was large, and he spoke with a deep and intimidating voice. His khaki shirt and pants, affixed with an official St. Louis Zoo logo above his left breast, signaled that he must have been one of the zookeepers. “Elijah Wadsworth,” I told him. “I’m sorry…”

“What were you thinking?” the zookeeper interrupted. “How did you get down there?”

“I don’t know,” I told him honestly. “One minute I was standing there, watching the bear. The next thing I knew, I was right there in front of him.”

It was clear from his expression that he didn’t believe me. “A bear is not a cuddly pet. He could have killed you. You’re lucky we got there in time.”

Before I could respond, two arms enveloped me from behind and freed me from the zookeeper’s grip. I met my adopted mother’s tear-filled gaze. “Thank the Lord you’re okay! Don’t you ever do that to me again, young man. Never again…”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but we need to question the boy further. It shouldn’t take long,” the zookeeper said as he assumed a less imposing posture.

“You will do no such thing,” she said. “He has been through enough…”

“Lois, it’s okay,” I said. To their chagrin, I’d always called my adopted parents by their first names.

“My apologies, ma’am, but we need to make sure that the boy understands the gravity of the situation. We can’t have children wandering into exhibits like this…”

“Do you mean to suggest,” Lois interrupted, “that he did this on purpose? I know my boy, he must have slipped and fell. He did not just wander in there.”

The man looked at me for confirmation.

“Yes, sir. I’m very sorry. I must have been leaning too far over the rail and fell in and bumped my head. Honestly, I blacked out. I don’t remember what happened.” While it was a half-truth, it was no lie. I couldn’t explain what had happened, not completely.

The zookeeper reluctantly accepted the explanation, but insisted on escorting us out of the zoo.

Lois took a knee on the sidewalk and gripped me by each shoulder as the zookeeper left our company. “Please tell me, Elijah, that this was just an accident. I know you’ve been through a lot, but suicide…”

“Lois,” I insisted, “it’s the truth. I didn’t go in there on purpose.”

“Well,” she continued, wiping the last of her tears from her eyes, “I’m glad I volunteered as a chaperone. I’ll need to have words with your teachers. We never should have left you unattended by the exhibit.”

I wanted to protest. This was not her fault. It wasn’t the teacher’s fault, either. It wasn’t even my fault. Still, I couldn’t help but feel pangs of guilt twist away at my stomach. The Harleys were good to me, and I knew that this sort of behavior was driving them both—Lois, especially—absolutely nutty.

No one had seen how I ended up in the cage, and I couldn’t tell Lois, either. What had happened, she wouldn’t believe. Telling her about the strange figure, the swirling lights… she wouldn’t believe any of it. It would only become a pretense for mandatory psychotherapy—and I’d had enough of that already. So, I stuck by my story: I must have slipped and fallen in. I probably hit my head; that’s why I blacked out and couldn’t remember the fall.

The incident made national news. For weeks, I was something of a celebrity at school. My classmates either revered me for the incident, honoring my daredevil bravery, or mocked me as an attention-starved moron. Some of my friends started calling me “bear boy,” which eventually got shortened to “Bear.” I wasn’t sure if they meant to honor me or make fun of me. Probably some of both. I didn’t care.

I returned to the zoo a dozen times after that, but never saw the bear. Apparently he was relocated to another facility. I hoped I’d find the strange girl who had touched my arm. Something did awaken in me that day. After that, animals of all kinds were drawn to me. I could sense their thoughts, and they seemed to sense mine. Aside from a couple close friends, only my sister’s cat, Indie—who had miraculously survived the fire—really understood my pain. A part of me began to believe that the whole episode at the zoo had been an accident. I tried to convince myself that the figure who had touched my arm must have been a figment of my imagination. For years, it worked. I made my way through high school, doing my best to fit in. I was a better-than-average student, and that seemed to assuage most of my adoptive parents’ worries. Still, I couldn’t completely get the image of that darkened figure, and the sound of her oddly familiar voice, out of my mind.

I NEARLY THREW my hip out of its socket as I flipped my tail to my left, barely escaping the massive creature’s jaws. Not a bad maneuver considering I’d only had a mer-tail a total of fewer than three days...

I’d never seen anything like it. Whatever it was. It had the face of a dragon and a body like a serpent—sort of. I mean, what snake have you ever seen with the girth of a double-decker bus and the length of a half-football field?

And on top of that, it was pissed.

As if an angry regular-sized snake wasn’t frightening enough.

Add to that a dragon’s powerful jaws ...

At least I didn’t have to worry about fire-breath... as dragon-like as this creature was, it was a sea creature after all. Fire-breathing wouldn’t be an evolutionarily advantageous trait.

Still, whatever it might be, I suspected that it had other methods of devastation at its disposal...

I remained on my guard. There was no telling what this thing might try to do next.

“Come and get me, beautiful!” I screamed. I was being ironic. You know, like when the lineman on the football team gets the nickname “tiny.”

Not that there wasn’t a beauty to the creature. But when something is trying to eat you, your aesthetic judgments skew toward the unsightly.

The dragon-serpent twisted its body into something like a figure-eight before diving after me a second time, chomping its way through the water.

My home-ec teacher during my senior year told me that a career in the culinary arts might be right up my alley.

I don’t think becoming the meal was quite what she had in mind.

No time to reminisce. I gripped my trident tightly. Never go out into the ocean depths without one. That’s what Admiral Agwe told me before I left Fomoria.

It tingled slightly in my grip as I pointed its three-pronged end toward the sea monster. My trident was an ethereal weapon—I could summon it at whim, its magical signature mystically embedded into the sigil on the back of my hand.

Storing mystical items in sigils was convenient. It meant I didn’t have to lug my trident around. It also meant I never had to worry about being caught in a precarious position without it.

Did this monster sense that it was a magical item? It seemed to move a bit more cautiously once it realized I was armed.

The trident itself was fashioned from my wand. My wand was a powerful item on its own right, hewn from the Tree of Life. It allowed me to channel any magic I siphoned more precisely than otherwise.

Agwe added the enchantment to my wand, insisting it was mine by birthright. Apparently, several generations ago, the last of my Fomorian ancestors who lived there had devised it. As the next of my great, great, super-great grandfather’s kin who set fin in Fomoria, the enchantment fell to me according to his will. And the wand was the only enchantable item I had.

But to use the trident, I had to be in mermaid form. Summon it as a human, it would become a wand again.

My momma always said it’s rude to refuse a gift. Little did I know I’d need the damned thing so soon.

So far, I’d been lucky.

Supposing the sea serpent did sense I had a weapon, it wasn’t enough to tame the thing. Hell, chances were my aggressive posture only ticked the beast off more.

The monster came at me again.

A forceful wag of the tail and I did something of an underwater back-flip, evading the beast’s bite before jamming the end of my trident into its snout.

That’ll teach it, I thought.

It lashed its body side to side, the sheer force of the water it displaced tossing me head-over-tail through the water.

I dispelled my trident and focused a small amount of magic from my medallion into the sigil on my right hand. My trident reformed itself in my grip.

Where had this sea serpent come from?

I sensed its magic the moment my trident struck the monster in the nose. As a magical creature, no wonder it had detected the magic I’d used to summon my trident. This creature’s magic, though. It was a different sort of magic. But it was familiar magic... too familiar.

I didn’t dare draw on it. Not after what happened the last time... when I tried to siphon magic from a dragon.

I was still living with the consequences of that debacle.

The dragon’s essence, still haunting my soul, was a burden. It gave me instinctive urges that were nearly impossible to ignore.

But right now, it gave me an opportunity...

I could listen to the creature. I could try.

C’mon Joni. You can do this... clear your mind...

I took a deep breath.

Would I ever get used to breathing underwater? Such an odd sensation.

I exhaled.

Focus, Joni, Focus...

I drew in what remained of the magic contained in the small medallion around my neck. A gift from the Fomorian merking. A token of goodwill. But it was uniquely prepared for me. They meant it to be helpful. They knew what I could do, that I needed a source of magic, something I could siphon, to wield any magic at all. But I didn’t need a lot of power. Just enough to connect my mind to the creature’s…

A blue glow filled the waters around me—the light was emanating from my eyes as the magic tingled its way through my body.

A cacophony of emotions blasted through my mind. They were the beast’s feelings... reptilian, in a sense, but still familiar.

Fear. Anger. Confusion.

And, of course, hunger.

When I was cursed to a dragon’s form, I’d connected to a similar dialect.

A primal language, not words but urges.

The creature was disoriented. She was a mother... separated from her baby...

All she wanted was to find her child... with, perhaps, a side of filet-o-mermaid.

I could relate to that. Not eating mermaids. But missing my child...

The pangs of leaving my own baby behind still ached in my chest.

Not like I had any choice... it was for his own good.

I wasn’t myself anymore.

I was a danger to him. Hell, I was a danger to everyone I knew from my life before.

In Fomoria, with the merfolk. It was the only place where the rage inside me, the dragon instincts that had taken a seat in my soul, were calmed.

It’s why I was trying to go back... but this hybrid dragon-snake seemed to have other ideas.

Still, I understood her pain.

For a mother to leave her baby behind, even though I knew my son was better off with his father...

It left a void in my soul. A darkness...

This creature’s heart was aching. We were the same... more alike than different, despite the disparity in appearance and size.

I had to wonder—could she feel me, too? Did she sense our connection?

I suspected she did. The moment my mind touched hers, her body stopped thrashing.

She swam around me, encircling my body with her own.

All it would take would be a half-second if she wanted to wrap me up, to squeeze the life out of me as if she were a boa constrictor.

But I knew she wouldn’t...

The creature wasn’t evil. She was hurting. And she was terrified.

Probably just as scared as I was...

I’d say she was more afraid of me than I was of it. But that’s a cliché that didn’t hold water (no pun intended) in this situation. I mean, compared to the creature, I was basically an insect. A nuisance, maybe. No more a threat than a spider might be dangling from a light fixture in a human house.

Yes, I know, a lot of people are scared of spiders.

But there’s a difference between that kind of phobia and the fear you’d feel if you ever encountered a creature who could eat you in a single bite. That was the difference between the kind of fear that I might represent to this sea serpent and the terror she evoked in me...

But when we sensed each other’s pain all the fear turned to something else. A combination of empathy and awe. I pitied her situation, knowing what she was going through all too well… even while I remained enthralled by the majesty of what she was.

I reached out and touched her as she swam around me. She even felt like a dragon, a thick, scaly body, cool to the touch. The touch amplified all the emotions I’d sensed before.

Yes, she was reptilian. Possibly, amphibian. Though I suspected that whatever she was defied such categories. She was something else. ..

I already knew what drove her—finding her baby—and now I could put that pain to words.

You’re a mom, I said, utilizing our psychic connection. I know what you’re feeling… I feel it, too…

Lost... they took all of us... help us... help my baby.

Who took you? Took you from where? I asked.

The one who pulled us through the magic... he has my baby...

Us? I asked. How many of your kind are here?

All of us...

I cocked my head. Whatever these creatures were, they might not understand numbers. There wasn’t anything in its dialect, the messages I was receiving, that could account for their population’s size. All of them could be two or three. It could also be thousands. Or hundreds of thousands.

Either way, someone had brought them here... through magic... was it a portal? Did they come from another place? Maybe, even, another time? I’d had enough experience with trans-dimensional magic to know that either was possible.

At least it made some sense why I never knew such creatures existed until now. Not that it wasn’t theoretically possible that undiscovered creatures lurked in the ocean depths. Hell, the Fomorian merfolk themselves were such creatures, technically speaking. But most unknown species, so far as I knew, were much smaller and lived in deep waters. The merfolk were something of an exception. Their status as “unknown” was by design—they used their intellect to generally avoid being discovered.

Sure, they might have been seen by a few sailors or pirates through the years. Frequently enough to inspire tales and legends. But not by any credible researchers...

Of course, in the age of smartphones, everyone has cameras. I hadn’t spent a lot of time with the Fomorians, but I was there long enough to know that the secret of their existence was essential to their way of life. There was no crime in Fomoria taken more seriously than transgressing the laws meant to guard their secrecy. To so much as appear to a human was a capital offense.

The only reason they allowed me to leave was that, while there’s no law against it, I was a half-breed. Half Fomorian, half-human—and raised as a human, I was more “other” than kin. And while some of them accepted me—if they hadn’t, I never could have convinced them to help heal my baby— a significant contingent of their population had no tolerance for what I was. Some might say I was both mer and human. To this particular crowd of merfolk, I was an abomination—neither mer nor human.

As much as they hated humans, a sentiment they shared with all the Fomorians, they hated whatever I was even more.

Can you go back home? I asked the creature as she continued swimming around me.

I will not leave without my baby...and I don’t know if he will allow it…

I nodded. Who is he? The one who took you?

I am uncertain... And there’s something else...

“Did you see him? What did he look like?”

He...

Before the creature could finish her thought her words changed into a shriek, exploding through my mind.

Her body thrashed around me. I kicked my tail out of the way... barely escaping what would have been a painful blow.

Then I saw it—there was a trident sticking out of its body.

I turned.

“Agwe!” I shouted. The Fomorian admiral floated there, flanked by Titus—one of his right-hand men—and another merman I hadn’t met.

“Joni,” Agwe yelled. “Come with us! We’ll get you out of here!”

I looked at the creature again. I tried to speak to her, but I couldn’t get through. The magic I’d used before was fading. What I had left couldn’t get through the terror that consumed the sea serpent’s mind.

I kicked my tail, swimming my way toward Agwe. Titus, whom I’d only met briefly once before, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me behind him.

“I don’t think we can fight this thing,” Agwe said. “We need to regroup in Fomoria.”

“Aye, sir,” Titus replied in concert with the other mer warrior whose name I didn’t yet know.

Agwe called it a thing. Clearly, they were as confused about this creature’s presence as I was.