MERMADMEN (The Mermen Trilogy #2) by Mimi Jean Pamfiloff Page A

tolerate none of it. Do you hear me, merman?”
    Naylor nodded and wrung his tired hands. “Understood, my queen.” In the meantime, he would gather the other elders and begin discussing how to keep their people from being wiped from existence.
     

CHAPTER SEVEN
    “Wait. Where are you taking me?” Liv stopped cold on the narrow dark path that cut through the pitch-black forest filled with thorny bushes. “This isn’t the way to the great hall.”
    The great hall, where they’d taken her last time, was a giant cavern smack in the middle of the island, inside a mountain resembling a dormant volcano. Right now, it felt like they were heading in another direction.
    Jason, who’d been taking the lead, stopped and turned. “That’s because we’re not going to the great hall. We’re going to the lagoon.”
    “Why?” Frankly, Liv wasn’t aware they even had a lagoon. Then again, this entire place was full of surprises. The bathroom in that cottage, for example, had a sauna and a double-headed shower with the most incredible water pressure ever, and she’d enjoyed every minute of it. Forget last meals and last rites—a last shower is how this woman wants to go down. She might not make it out of this Claiming Ceremony alive if things went south with Shane. Yes, it scared the hell out of her. So what? That wouldn’t change a damned thing.
    Jason chuckled, and Liv wished she could see his face. Had that been an evil villain chuckle?
    “I get,” she said, “that you guys have excellent night vision, but would it kill you to use a flashlight when ‘guests’ are around?” Her body already felt like a solid ball of nerves, and traipsing around in a dark chilly forest, getting stuck with thorns wasn’t helping.
    Jason chuckled once more.
    “Why the hell are you laughing?” she grumbled.
    “I find your spunk amusing, that’s all. Sort of reminds me of a little piranha with sharp teeth—kinda cute.”
    Naturally, a merman would find a piranha cute.
    “Come on,” he said. “We’re almost there, and you don’t want to be late.”
    Oh no. Late. How tragic. She quickly imagined some horrible scene where women, with bite marks all over their bodies, writhed on the ground, screaming for mercy while they transformed into mermaids.
    The dirt path sloped downward, and the front of Liv’s sandal caught on a small rock. She stumbled and caught herself on the trunk of a sticky pine tree.
    “Great.” She pulled her sap-covered hands from the bark and wiped them down the sides of her white dress, which was really only a long strip of cloth wrapped around the body and tied behind the neck. It was what they’d made her wear the last time she’d been claimed when twenty men stepped up to fight to the death for her. Roen, of course, had decided to skip all that and challenge Lyle, his brother, for control of the island. Liv never got the story of how Lyle ended up in this place, though she knew it had to be complicated because up until that day, Roen believed his brother to be dead.
    “Can you possibly walk any slower?” Jason chided.
    “Yes. I can. And I don’t want to hear a…” She looked up to address Jason, losing her train of thought. Through the stand of trees up ahead, she caught a glimpse of giant floodlights shining down on an enormous swimming hole.
    She marched forward, passing Jason, for a better look. “Sonofabitch,” she muttered under her breath, emerging from the forest onto a rocky ledge overlooking the pool of sparkling, deep green water. Four floodlights anchored to tall pine trees shined down on the water’s surface. A fifth light illuminated a narrow, ten-foot-high waterfall. “You have a lake.”
    Jason stood beside her and shrugged. “Sure. Why wouldn’t we? Doesn’t everyone need drinking water?”
    That wasn’t the point. When she’d been shipwrecked on this island, before Roen took over, she’d been dying of thirst. Yes, dying-dying—not a figure of speech. Poor Roen, who’d