Page 28 of Anchored to the Storm

Possibly needing time to collect his thoughts, he slowly pushed hair from his forehead. “Is anything what it seems?”

According to everything I had already experienced in my short life? Fuck no.

“Even the moon,” he explained. “We say full moon, new moon, crescent… all the same fucking moon. Just different phases.” He gazed at me as if waiting for something.

I rested my weight on my hands that were now gripping the wall. “Silly Rabbit is ready.”

He didn’t have to offer me a beer this time to prepare me. Nor trick me into a rage. This seemed to please him. He side-hugged me and kissed my head. “So fucking smart. Love ya, kid.”

My heart skipped a beat when I was told that, but I pretended to be unfazed. I needed answers. And my new Librarian had opened up for business.

After releasing me, Styx continued, “When your dad was a little boy, I took him out on my john boat to go fishing. Ya know, like dads are supposed to. How the hell was I to know a creature—what some might call a merman—would appear?”

Holy shit! “What did he say? Could he speak English? What happened? What am I?”

Styx delivered a look that said Ya done yet?

I blew out air, puffing the bangs from my forehead. “Fine.”

“With no other boats around, hence no one to help me, and us being a good distance from shore, this dude’s upper body just floated above the water. He was noooo beauty like the mermaid I had been with. He was… His energy… Well, I reached for my gun at my back. I wasn’t a biker back then, but I’d been raised by a one-percenter, so always prepared… After I did, though, that creature simply pointed at Lennox, and I froze in place. Was that gesture a threat? A promise? I didn’t know, but every instinct in me told me I would lose. The fighter in me had met his match. I wouldn’t be able to protect my boy.”

He lifted his chin as if admitting a weakness now against his biker code. I couldn’t help but reach out and hold his shoulder, giving a gentle shake of compassion.

Styx smirked at me. “That obvious?”

I shrugged. “Your grandson has got your back.”

His mouth parted slightly, but he quickly covered his shock. He coughed. “Anyway, I gave the dude a nod and released my gun. No choice. My boy was my life. So, I waited. I watched the dude observe Lennox with a pair of green eyes that glowed. I swear it.”

Now my jaw was hanging. “Saleeni. Wicked green eyes.”

As if debating his reply, his tongue pushing against the inside of his lips. He finally nodded. “I do believe he was related to her.”

I didn’t miss the ‘was,’ but I was trying to learn patience and kept my question of what his reply meant to myself.

Styx added, “How exactly? I’m not sure because he started talking to me in Greek. As I blinked at him, not understanding a word, he finally spoke in broken English, asking if that was my language ‘of choice’.” Styx laughed. “Not only was English my ‘choice’, but I also ‘chose’ not to tell him how bad he spoke it.” His head wobbled. “Not good timing and all.” Then, the humor faded, and my grandfather ran a nervous hand down his face. “Fuck, sometimes I can’t believe this ever happened.”

Understood. Completely. “That’s been me for the last two days.”

He nodded, adamantly, as if finding strength to keep talking. “So, this dude starts telling me he didn’t agree with my son being alive.” Styx choked on words and a fear I don’t think he ever got to confess until now. Staring at the water, his chest began to heave. He cried out, “He reached out for my boy, Maddox. I didn’t know what he was going to do!” He ran his strong hand over his face again, this time smearing tears. “I couldn’t help it.” He gasped, lost in his own story. “I suddenly had a knife in my hand and stabbed his arm.” He covered his mouth as if that one perfectly understandable reaction altered the earth. His body seemed to cave, and he heaved breaths. “I’m so sorry.”

I sat there in disbelief. He was distraught. “Styx, Jesus, what happened?”

He sobbed… “I don’t know how to explain it, but I instantly knew I had made a huge mistake. It flowed through me like a wave of unknown knowledge. Something I should’ve known all along but didn’t—a hindrance of being human. An out-of-body experience.” He wiped snot from under his nose. “Yet a gift at the same time.”

My foster parent, Dale, had said I was a conduit—Brass. That is how it felt in that moment. I understood the gift Styx was claiming. I was given it when dying. Noma said the same thing happened to my mother when she gave birth to me. I witnessed the same happen to Noma herself, while on her dying bed.

Tears fell from my eyes as I nodded, trying to tell Styx I understood, one hundred percent.

Crying, he leaned to the side and teased, “Ya don’t say?”

Through earth-shattering emotions, we both laughed and cried. It was one of the best moments I would ever spend with such a great man. Both of us were snotty messes, realizing we were small figures in a much bigger picture.

Catching his breath, tears continued to fall. “Glittery blue blood dripped into the boat. I swear every star in his blood was… alive. Knowledge. Lessons. The divine.” He struggled to breathe again, his voice cracking like an earthquake rattling the ground we live upon. “I dropped the knife because it felt as if I had just stabbed… a-a-a god of some sort.” He looked at me with red, humbled eyes. “The stories, the myths about these mermaid creatures got it all wrong. They are not big fish that can talk or walk. Maddox, they are something… so much more.”

Styx went quiet and just kept staring at me.

Again with the waiting… Oh.