Excerpt from Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Go away"! I couldn't remember Ushag ever telling me to go away before. No mam, no pa, and now this aunt who didn't want to claim me. I was an orphan. Why had I never noticed how sour Ushag was? It was baffling how much of a spit hag she'd become in just a few months.

That morning, all I'd done was tell her about my dream, and she couldn't have looked more buffeted if I'd turned into a fish before her face. She turned grey and pressed her lips together as if she wanted to stop them forming words.

It was only a dream, I told her.

In it, the sea was getting green in the light of morning, and I was on the shore collecting limpets. Everything was as it always is, calm and unremarkable; then I saw out in the cove a pale round moon rippling just under the water and closing in on the shore. I prickled all over but couldn't look away.

When the moon thing reached the shallows, it drew itself out of the purple sea and bobbed there, half in, half out, letting me look. The torso of a greenish woman rose out of the foam, paler than any woman I ever saw. It seemed transparent, and I thought I saw the blue veins pulsing in its neck and breasts. Its flowing hair seemed to be an ocean in itself, so flapping was it with tiny silver fish. I stepped into the water up to my knees to see it better.

I saw its tail then, shining and coiling under the surface, and I knew it to be a merrow. Raising my eyes to its face, I was shocked to see tears dropping from eyes singularly wild and hollow. I suppose I'd never thought of the merrows as having mortal feelings. I suppose I'd thought of them as glamorous fish, but cold and heartless. This one seemed to be full of a heart that was breaking. Wading in up to my thighs, I lifted my hand toward the wet, weeping creature.

It called me by name.

"Neen." My blood ran cold as a winter stream.

Twice it called. "Nee-een."

A third time.

"Nee-eenie," it called me, doleful-like and lonely. Reaching with webbed fingers through the sea spray, it dropped a sizable pearl into my hand. There was something about its face I knew from somewhere. Then it turned and was gone, with no trace of bubbles to mark a trail. I was left on the shore, gripping the pearl and searching for the wake.

Then I woke up.

After my aunt's first reaction, during which I thought she was going to be sick, she'd pulled herself together and asked who'd been telling me those stories.

"What stories?" I asked.

"Merrows, water horses, charmers . . . all of that." She rolled her eyes to the sky as though petitioning someone there for patience, and I felt myself grow still and colder even than the dream merrow's touch.

"Nobody told me, I just heard," I said. "What's a water horse?"

"It's nothing, is what it is." She gave me a sharp, sudden glance. "You can't have just heard. Somebody has been filling your head."

I thought how typical it was that she would take it for granted that I had a head that needed to be filled with stuff, as if it were hollow. As if I had no head already filled with its own stuff. I felt overhot and shifty, and before I knew it, I was saying all that about opening her mind a bit and not knowing everything about everything.

Auntie Ushag did not like me saying such things.

"And you, heishan, you know nothing about any-thing." She came close and pulled herself up to her full height, but because for the last few months we've been the same height, it didn't have the effect she was looking for. In fact, we both noticed at the same time that I had to look down to meet her eyes. She took a big breath, fattening herself up like a puffer fish. "The trouble with you is that you're neither one thing nor the other," she added. "You're an in-between."I didn't know what that was. It sounded like an insult.

"You're in between your own self," she said.

Excerpted from Merrow by Ananda Braxton-Smith. Copyright © 2016 by Ananda Braxton-Smith. Excerpted by permission of Candlewick Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.