Slipping - Book 1.5 in the Swans Landing series

SLIPPING

by

Shana Norris

Copyright 2013 by Shana Norris

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the author.

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

I drift like a wave on the ocean,
I blow as aimless as the wind.
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Chapter One

Mom would kill me for swimming while she was gone, which was why she could never find out.

Not that I expected her to find out. Mom had a doctor’s appointment on the mainland that day and a trip to the mainland meant a three hour ferry ride there, a half hour’s bus ride from the ferry dock to the closest city, another twenty-minute bus ride to the doctor’s office, at least an hour there, and then repeat the bus and ferry rides back to the tiny island of Swans Landing where we lived.

That gave me all day to myself. Plenty of time to go for a little swim and be back home, dried off, before Mom came back. It wasn’t the first time I had broken the rules.

I dove deep into the gently lapping water of the Pamlico Sound, pushing through underwater grasses and small schools of fish that darted out of my way. I flicked my tail fin, propelling myself faster. The swim back to Swans Landing was more exhausting than I expected. I really didn’t swim as much as I should, and even though being finfolk gave me an edge, it didn’t amount to much considering that I was still pretty out of shape.

If I didn’t have to keep the fact that I was finfolk secret, I could swim more often. Sometimes it would easier if everyone knew the truth. I wouldn’t have to keep making up excuses for not getting into the water each summer. I wouldn’t have to hide the fact that I needed extra salt on my lunch at school. I wouldn’t have to pretend to be something I wasn’t.

But being finfolk in Swans Landing wasn’t exactly a picnic. And there was still my biggest reason for keeping the truth about me secret: it would devastate my mom if anyone knew.

I surfaced near Pirate’s Cove and dashed into the safety of the trees. It was early afternoon, judging from the position of the sun in the late winter sky. I had learned to tell time by studying the position of the sun and stars since I couldn’t carry my cell phone with me as I swam. Something that earned me an eye roll from my half-sister Sailor Mooring whenever I talked too much about it.

“You’re the biggest geek I know, Josh,” she would say when I got too excited about something new I was learning. But I liked knowing things. I thought my dad would have approved, if he was somewhere out there watching over me.

Almost every finfolk in Swans Landing had mixed blood, with some trace of human ancestry somewhere in the line. The mixed blood made finfolk genes uncertain in each generation, though the ones with more of the finfolk blood in them most often were able to change form in the water and grow a tail fin and scales. Sometimes though, the human blood took over and the person could never change, despite the fact that other members of their family could.

My dad, Oliver Canavan, couldn’t change at all. At least, that was what I’d heard from other people. He died before I was even a year old. Most of the humans on the island blamed the finfolk for my father’s death. Mom had spent her life hiding the fact that I was one of them, that I had inherited the ability to change through the little finfolk blood in my veins.