“Don’t move,” he whispered.

The first thing I noticed was the moisture in the air. It was very humid and warm like I had just stepped into a room with a pool. Then he struck a match and lit five candles of a candelabra. In the flickering light, I could see I was standing at the top of a long staircase that wound around the outside of a spacious cavern. If he hadn’t warned me, I would have fallen down the stairs.

“Are you scared?” he asked tenderly.

“No.” My gaze lingered on his bandages. “Please tell me what happened to your arm.”

“Nothing happened to it. Sometimes it's like this. I’m not bleeding,” he reassured me. “I’m just built a little differently than other people.”

When we got to the bottom of the stairs we came around a corner and we stood in front of a huge aquarium; or rather, a window to the sea. Sunlight shone through the water and illuminated seaweed, blackfish, and fish greener than the green sea. 

“This is your room?” I asked, looking around at my surroundings. When my eyes adjusted to the light, slowly, slowly, I was able to see a barred door that led to an underwater exit like a dark tunnel going nowhere. The rest of the room was a nook that contained quite normal bedroom-like things. There was a bed. It was shaped strangely, like a giant eye cut into the floor, with at least a dozen pillows covering it. There were a few chests stacked and a couple of wardrobe-like cupboards standing side by side.

Tremor kicked off his boots and he reached for me and pulled me onto the bed. I got nervous. Why was he pulling me onto his bed if his book had parameters? What was going to happen? I couldn’t help feeling a little scared. I fell down on top of him and he laughed and moved me aside. From that position, he helped me take my shoes off, and then he placed me next to him in the crook of his arm facing the sea.

I looked at him rather expectantly. 

“What?” he asked roguishly. “You told Gretchen you wanted to see what a capricorn looks like. True, I have pictures, but why bother with any of that when you can just see the show from here. One will probably swim by any minute.”

“Really?” 

We sat there and watched the veins of light reflecting on the cavern walls and through the water. At first, I wasn’t comfortable. Even if he was supposed to be Tremor, I couldn’t stop thinking of him as a version of Evander. Sitting beside him made my belly ache. I’d never had my stomach tied up in so many knots. My blood was pounding in my ears. I couldn’t even think. 

He tried to make small talk with me to thin the air out. “Do you like to eat fish?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you ever had roe?”

“Probably not. I have no idea what that even is.” 

His tanned Adam’s apple moved as he breathed in and spoke. It was mesmerizing. “They’re fish eggs.”

Suddenly I was saying, “Do you know how much I like you?”

He stopped and turned his brown eyes toward me.

I said it so bravely, but there was a part of me that didn’t think he would hear me. I was mostly talking about Evander and whenever I mentioned anything from the real world the character in the story simply wouldn't hear what I said. 

“Why would you like me? I still don’t understand why you would want to marry me. I thought you’d opt for Murmur. Obviously, he thought so too and that’s why he’s here now. He probably planned to take you home to the capital with him today. Doubtless, he’s furious. Even still, I reasoned that if you didn’t want him, then I’d have to send you home to Lilikeen. Didn’t the dead capricorn scare you? Why do you want to live in a place where they breed like rabbits and where your husband is practically one of them?”

“How are you practically one of them?” 

“Let’s wait for one of them to appear before we have that conversation.”

I sat there and tried to feel the rhythm of his body over the sound of my heartbeat pulsing noisily up to my brain. At that moment, I wasn’t interested in the story, I wanted to talk to Evander when he would actually listen to me. “I don’t know why I like you. You cut yourself off from me more than any other person I have ever met. Your aloofness doesn’t make me stop liking you. If you would only let me in a little bit—“

“I’m trying to let you in. Look, there’s a capricorn!” He pointed and I saw one swim directly toward us.

Looking at the creature through the glass, it was no longer difficult to describe, just hard to believe. It looked like a chimera of two creatures I was already familiar with—a goat and a fish. It had the upper body of a goat, but much larger. Its fur was white and long and not as dense as a mountain goat. Instead, it waved in the current like mermaid hair. I could see its veins through the fur going in strange little blue lines down its front legs and up its muscular neck. The horns on its brow were long and curved slightly backward. Behind the horns was a longish mane that curled in waves and went all the way down the capricorn’s back. The mane even continued past its fur and into the part of its body covered in scales—around the middle. The scales were gray and white by turns. Obviously, the animal had only front legs and instead of hind legs, the remainder of its body ended in a powerful tail with a long white fin. 

It was majestic if you didn’t look carefully at the animal’s face. The capricorn had a beard of white hair that hung down and swayed. Its mouth was shockingly wide and when it was opened, I could see it wasn’t filled with flat herbivore teeth, but sharp meat-eating fangs. Two of its bottom teeth were even too long for its mouth and they stuck out like a warthog’s. Its eyes were the part that was really unsettling. The pupils were not circular but long and flat like a minus sign or a frog’s eyes. The irises were bright yellow. 

I tensed in Tremor’s arms. “Well, that is about the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.” I laughed to shake off my fear, but when I turned to Tremor his expression was vacant.

“You think it’s creepy?”

“Well, it’s huge,” I said defensively. “Look at the size of those jaws. That guy could swallow me whole. Gretchen told me they eat people.”

He scoffed angrily. “So what if they eat people? They’re just another link in the food chain. They have things that hunt them, too.”

“There’s something bigger than them in the ocean? I am never going out on a boat!”

“No, there isn’t any animal around here that would dare hunt an adult capricorn, but the babies and the elderly get pecked off easily enough by smaller meat-eaters. I’m thinking of the enemy across the sea. They hunt them and eat them as often as they can.”

I felt deflated. Of course, Man had to be the capricorn’s largest threat. I didn’t know what I was thinking. “Sorry. I’ve never seen anything like that. It seems larger than life. And that dead one I almost fell into has left me a little bit shaken.”

His arm came tightly around me. “But you feel safe with me?”

“Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?”

His eyes were deep and penetrating. “Because I’m a monster.”

The moment stretched out while I thought up a response for him. Thinking was hard when he looked at me like that. Finally, I said, “You can’t stop my feelings for you by saying things like that.”

He didn’t answer me. 

“Do you still think I’m brave, or have you decided I’m stupid?”

He chuckled. “Probably a little bit of both. Here, I’ll take you back upstairs. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to spend the night with you above floors. I still haven’t gone out to sea. Gretchen caught me before I left, but I’ll be back in the morning to make sure you’re safe from my fiendish brother. No doubt he’s already made havoc up there. Let’s go assess the damage.”

Once we were back in the front hall, Gretchen and Hilda saw us and came across the floor to us hastily.

“What happened?” Tremor asked.

Gretchen pointed an angry finger at Hilda. “She didn’t even try to stop him. He told her what he wanted and she just went ahead and did it.”

“Did what?”

“Repacked all of Princess Sarafina’s clothes and emptied the wardrobe.”

Tremor stuck his tongue in his cheek. “Why did Murmur order that?”

“He says he wants to stay in the state guest room and since you are married to her now, there’s no reason for her not to move downstairs with you right away,” Gretchen reported shrilly. 

Tremor listened patiently and scratched his collarbone. “Sarafina, he’s doing this to make you uncomfortable. What would you like me to do? If you want Murmur out of the guestroom, I’ll certainly see that he gets thrown out. I already told him to stay on the second floor.”

“Leave him where he is. I’ll stay downstairs.”

Tremor did a double-take. “Really?” He put his mouth close to my ear and whispered privately, “Are you sure you want to do that? My room is quite different at night and I won’t be there.”

“It’s fine,” I reassured him.

His eyes sparkled with excitement and my breath caught in my throat. At that moment, it was incredibly fun to be partners in crime with him. I never wanted to wake up.

“What’s fine?” a voice in my ear asked noisily.

I winced at the sound and when I opened my eyes again I was in my bedroom and my mother was making fun of me and my ‘sleep-talking.' 

I rubbed my forehead painfully. I had a headache and I couldn’t even find the voice to describe how much I didn’t want to face a day at school. When I went to the mirror, I looked like I had been up most of the night and was still wearing yesterday’s clothes. I had to read in smaller increments. I splashed my face with water and tried to cheer myself. After all, the next time I read Evander's book, I would be sleeping in his bed.