Prequel to Scales and Salt.

Verona is a bottom feeder. She is the one mer in her clan who is considered the ugliest and least intelligent. Growing up with the constant bullying and abuse wasn’t the worst of what her kind had in store for her. At seventeen years old, she must now endure “The Reckoning.” The scales will measure her worth to her clan. Will she endure thirty days as a land-walker to gather information and knowledge to appease her clan and return a valued member? Will she wait three years, until she is twenty, and find a mer of her kind to accept her and marry her? Or will she suffer exile for the rest of her life?

Her kind treats her as less-than-human, but she’s always been so much more. Mermaid life has never been easy for Verona. Her scars give evidence of her abuse. When her day of reckoning arrives, she is determined to endure exile. According to her father’s experience, exile is better than becoming a land-walker and risking her life among the humans. However, when she saves the life of a drowning human boy, she inadvertently sets off a chain of events which force her to choose a path: stay with the humans she has become attached to or return home to a life of scorn. A savage hunter draws closer, threatening even the humans. Her only hope is to keep everyone safe until the next full moon, but those around her devise their own plans. If you love mermaid tales or paranormal romance, pre-order this coming-of-age story of shifters, first love, and learning what it means to be human.

Mermaids can be cruel creatures. I couldn’t stop them from hurting her, but I couldn’t let them destroy her, no matter what they did to me. The moment I heard the bottom feeder had been chosen for the reckoning, my heart sank. Had I been discovered for what I truly was? Years of pretending I was just like everyone else could all have been for naught. But then I heard it was Verona, and my blood ran cold. Why was I surprised? I shouldn’t have been. I’d stood by and watched her ridiculed since we were younglings. I was never as brave or as unselfish as she was. But today, I would be.

Stay for love or return to the sea? When Verona choses to stay on land to be with the one she loves, she has no idea how much her life is about to change. It’s the full moon and another of the Mer is coming ashore. She never imagined Bailey would come after her… Logan’s suffering big changes of his own. His grandmother is hospitalized with a terminal illness. The woman he loves is something he never would have thought possible… a mermaid. But he has new competition for her feelings in the form of a merman. And there’s another, bigger problem surfacing. His body is undergoing changes he can barely comprehend. Now, he can’t get the witch’s voice out of his head. Another full moon approaches… And the witch wants to take lives, break hearts, and enslave Logan. Verona finds a way that might be able to stop the witch, but it will mean giving up everything she loves and returning to the sea.