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The pond hadn’t changed at all. The hedges were still perfectly trimmed, the gazebos as spotlessly white as ever. Warren meandered to the dock by the old boathouse and sat cross-legged at the end. He saw a flicker of movement under the surface, and heard the titter of the naiad language.
Warren remembered coming here as a kid, when the preserve and the magical world it had opened to him was still new and wonderful, before he’d known how much it could take away from him. He’d chased Dale along the boardwalks or dared himself closer and closer to the pond, skipping stones on the surface until the naiads got angry enough to throw them back. When he’d come back to the house one day with a lump on his head, Lena had admonished him to stop harassing her sisters.
“But they’re… evil, aren’t they?” he’d asked her, and she’d frowned, her eyes distant. “Not that you were. But, you know what I mean.”
“They protect the shrine,” she said. “It’s their job to keep humans away. Besides, they don’t see human life the way you and I do. It’s pretty difficult to fathom what death actually is when you’re an immortal being.”
Warren had taken the cloth-wrapped ice Lena handed him and pressed it to his forehead. “Do you wish you were still immortal?” He’d asked her. He’d wondered it since he'd met the former naiad.
Lena had looked at him fondly. “I don’t regret coming out of the pond. I’ve lived more life above the surface than I could have in a thousand years in the water. I don’t like getting older, but I don’t regret the life my old age is the price for.” Lena’s almond eyes took on the distance they held sometimes. “I do miss my sisters, as strange as that may sound. It’s lonely to be the only one of my kind. Especially now that Patton is gone. He understood me and my experience better than any other human ever has, maybe because he knew me as a naiad.”
“I won’t throw rocks anymore,” Warren had promised, because he hadn’t known what else to say. He hadn’t returned to the pond as often, after that.
And now, like so much else in his life since he’d woken up, Lena was long gone. Except that she wasn’t.
“Lena!” He called out, his voice sounding quiet and empty over the still water.
“Go away, pesky dirt-stomper,” said a voice from beneath the surface.
“Leave our sister alone,” said another.
“Warren?” asked Lena, her face raising up beneath the surface, her hair swirling around her. She looked younger than he’d ever seen her, and her face betrayed no recognition.
“Yeah, Lena, it’s me.”
“I remember you dying,” she mused, cocking her head slightly, the movement rippling the water over her head.
“I didn’t die,” he said, taken aback. “I was catatonic. Dale told me that you helped take care of me.”
“Oh yes. That was different, wasn’t it?” Lena blinked slowly. “Did the fairies restore you too?”
“Who cares,” heckled another naiad, too deep for Warren to see her.
“No, the fairies didn’t have anything to do with it,” Warren said.
“Oh,” said Lena without interest, her gaze wandering. Warren’s chest ached.
“You know, you once told me you didn’t regret leaving the pond.”
“Did I?” Lena looked at him again. “Did I ever tell you how much you look like Patton?” Her face drifted a little closer to the surface.
“Yeah, Lena, you did.”
“But you aren’t him.” She sighed. “And he really is dead, isn’t he?”
Warren nodded.
“This one will be too, before long,” said another naiad. “I thought you were done with the humans, sister.”
For a moment, Lena’s face betrayed a bit of expression, but not one Warren could quite read.
“I hope you’re happy, Lena,” Warren told her.
“Happy is nothing compared to content,” Lena said. “But I suppose I am happy that you aren’t dead yet.” She smiled with her mouth, but not her eyes, and then she sank back beneath the surface, leaving nothing but a circle of ripples, expanding and then disappearing like the wake of a skipped stone.
That was the Lena that Patton had first fallen in love with, Warren realized. The man he was supposedly so much like had spent his days playing music for a creature who would have happily drowned him, at least in the beginning. Was it the lure of danger that had drawn Patton here? The particular beauty of the strange and unknown? Or had he seen, even in those early days, whatever it was in Lena that had saved his life the day she left the pond?
Warren wasn’t sure he could see it in her now. The woman who’d patched up his childhood injuries, the woman who’d cared for his mother in her final days, the woman who’d sometimes looked at him with an old, weary grief when she'd thought he couldn’t see her: that woman wasn’t anything like the Lena in the pond.
But Patton had known both Lenas– the monster and the woman– and he’d loved her. And it had been that first Lena who had given up eternity to save him from the depths.
As the surface of the pond returned to stillness, for a moment Warren could almost see a different face there, dark eyes and smooth olive skin and thick black hair swirling through the water. She smiled that teasing, cocky smile of hers, peering up from that other world, the glassy surface of the pond forming an impassable barrier. He blinked, and the image was gone.
Vanessa had locked those dark eyes with his as she’d held out the potion that had saved his life, and when he’d refused it and taken the weapon instead, her hand had stayed there on the spear beside his, just for a moment, before she’d released it. And then he’d jumped.