by ReGi McClain
Harsha giggled and dangled her arm over the edge of the bed. Her knuckles brushed the fur on his back. The soft, silky, smooth… She ran her fingers through it. “You have nice fur.”
He sighed but submitted to the treatment. Harsha’s mind quieted. Before she drifted off, she speculated whether her insomnia stemmed from loss, fear, or the lack of a puppy.
The next day started with the smell of bacon and the bouncing sensation of someone hopping onto the bed. Harsha sat up, blinked until Maura came into focus, and wrinkled her nose at the pervasive odor of pig flesh. Maura likewise made a face.
They emerged from the room wearing careful, neutral expressions. The carnivores sat around a pile of bacon several inches deep and a plate of pan-fried trout. The stink of the processed meat clashed with the fish, making Harsha’s stomach turn. She took the seat next to Ylva to give Maura the place next to Seraph. The two pescatarians looked at each other. Without speaking, they communicated plenty.
“Ylva, is it all right if Maura and I go up and look at the greenhouse on our own?”
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“Not really.”
“Sure. It’s at the top of the stairs.”
Maura bolted toward the stairs. Harsha followed at a dignified pace. She hoped it looked dignified, anyway. As soon as she judged her feet out of sight, she ran. She reached the top huffing and puffing, a cruel reminder of her waning life force. A hammock occupied one corner of the upper story. She fell into it and closed her eyes while her heart worked overtime.
Gradually, the smell in the greenhouse refreshed her. The fragrances of soil and greenery filled her nostrils and drove away the stench of processed meat.
“This is better.”
“Yes,” Maura agreed. “That…”
“Bacon.”
“It smells bad.”
“I think so, too.”
“What is this?”
Harsha opened her eyes and lifted her head enough to see the plant Maura asked about. “Potato? I’m not actually good at identifying plants. I just wanted to get away from the bacon.”
Maura nodded, her expression vague as if she understood the gist of Harsha’s words but caught few individual words. Harsha made a mental note to slow her speech and use simple words. They took refuge in the greenhouse, content with their limited communication, until Ylva came to get Harsha for testing and Maura sought out Seraph for English practice.
Sitting in the lab easy chair, Harsha watched Ralph draw sixteen vials of blood. “Sorry to take so much. We want to get it over with for you.”
“Don’t worry.” Her voice sounded slurred. “I’m used to it.” The room spun. “But I need something to drink.”
Ylva pressed a cup of tea into her hand and guided it to her lips. “Here. Sorry it’s so sweet, but I noticed you skipped breakfast altogether this morning.”
The honeyed tea slid down Harsha’s throat like life-giving nectar. She breathed in the steam, hummed appreciation, and took another sip. “So, what else do you need to know?”
Ralph withdrew the needle and pressed a cotton ball to her arm and taped it on. “The blood is all for now. I’ll pester you with questions when you’ve recovered.” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry about him and your sister-in-law.”
Harsha swirled her tea, watching it slosh the sides of her mug and contemplating the inadequacy of the expression. He’s sorry. Because more would be embarrassing and less would be heartless . She suddenly wanted another of his enormous, paternal hugs. Instead of asking for one, she muttered, “Thank you.”
He gave her another gentle squeeze before taking the full vials over to a workstation near a window.
Ylva rolled a stool over to sit next to Harsha. “Stay here while you finish your tea and then I’ll have Zeeb carry you to your room.”
Harsha took small sips, lingering. She found the quiet, pleasant atmosphere of the lab relaxing. Ylva stayed beside her, not writing notes, but sketching Ralph while he worked.
Harsha watched the man come to life on the paper. “You’re a good artist.”
Ylva shrugged. “Drawing relaxes me. Putting lines in order on the paper helps me put my thoughts in order, too.” She drew in a puppy standing with its forepaws against Ralph’s knee. “I hear you like math puzzles.”
“Numbers are stable. They’re easy. Not like what you’re doing.”
“Drawing and math are more similar than you’d think.” Ylva filled in shading on Ralph’s face, capturing his smiling eyes perfectly.
“I could never do that.”
“Perhaps, perhaps not. Light and shadow, curve and angle, it’s all math.”
Harsha watched until Ylva finished her sketch. The drawing looked like a black and white photograph. “It’s perfect.”
“He’s one of my favorite subjects.” Ylva flipped a page. “And here’s my other favorite subject.”
Zeeb’s face, startling in its realism, gazed at Harsha from the sketchbook. She tilted her head and the eyes followed her. “You know how to draw the ubiquitous eye?”
“Mmm. It helps that his are so clear.” She flipped another page. “Here’s Seraph, and here,” another page turned, “are my two newest favorites.”
Harsha gasped. Her own eyes looked at her from the page. Beneath them, at her image’s shoulder, Maura’s eyes pleaded with her in perfect imitation of the girl’s wide-eyed sorrow.
Ylva leaned closer and laid her drawing hand on Harsha’s forearm, her pencil tilted between her fingers to be out of the way. “My family is your family, Harsha. Let us take care of you.”
Harsha swallowed the painful lump in her throat and brushed away tears. She missed Jason so much. She missed sitting on the couch mutually ignoring one another and she missed giggling over popping bubble wrap together. She missed Elaine’s quiet presence and Kel’s boisterous laughter. Homesickness for the past crowded out the gratitude she knew she should be feeling over Ylva’s offer. She dreaded going home to face the empty rooms, but leaving the house in Kauai felt like giving up her memories and abandoning Kel. On top of that, it meant profound humiliation and vulnerability if the mermaid search failed.
“You hardly know me.”
“True. What Ralph and I know is hearsay, but Zeeb and Seraph consider you their closest friend beside each other. Their word is good enough for me.”
“My nephew is still in Waimea.”
“Seraph will be happy to fly you for visits every week.”
“I’m not used to living with people.”
“You adjusted to Kel and Elaine quickly.”
“I have a lot of stuff.”
“We have six bedrooms.”
“I made most of my money by counting cards. I’m technically a thief.”
“Technically, we harbor murderers.”
“I don’t want to be a burden.”
“You wouldn’t be.”
“I would.” Harsha pinned Ylva’s eyes with her own. The older woman’s answers to her other objections might be valid, but not the last. “I’ve been on the other side of this. I helped my mother take care of my sister, and I took care of my mother and Jason. I know what’s coming.”
Ylva opened her mouth to speak.
“And there’s Zeeb,” she blurted in a desperate attempt to end the argument. A barrage of embarrassment accompanied the confession. Committed, she finished. “I don’t want him to see me like that.”
Ylva bit her lip and nodded. She swallowed hard and took a deep breath, like she needed to hold back her own tears. “I understand.” She lifted the cup of tea, a silent reminder. “But I hope you change your mind.”
Ralph joined the conversation. Harsha suspected he’d given the women space until Ylva delivered her message and then jumped in when he perceived a need for lighter subject matter. He and Ylva joked about their dating days and filled the time with lighthearted, comical stories of romance and misunderstandings. Harsha laughed so hard at Ralph’s description of the first meal Ylva
tried to cook for him, her stomach hurt.
When he finished, Ylva rolled her eyes. “That chicken gets bigger every time he talks about it. It’s like the fish that got away.”
Harsha strained to read her assigned book in the lamplight. The hours of research were wearing her out. Blinking, she lowered her face to the page, hoping to stop the words from moving around.
Ralph’s fingers hovered over the yellowing page of a tattered, leather-bound book. Biting his lip, he turned the page in slow motion and scanned the next. “According to this, the first merfolk sighting probably occurred in present-day Israel.”
“Hmm.” Leaning over his shoulder, Ylva scrutinized the page with her husband. “The oldest stories mention a lake, not the ocean.”
Zeeb tapped the keyboard of his laptop while his bloodshot eyes flitted over the screen. “I don’t think it matters. Most of the other recorded sightings are limited to the Mediterranean Sea until the first millennium A.D. I think that’s the most logical place to start. Unless,” he looked at Maura, “you have a better idea?”
Maura’s eyelids drooped. She shifted to sit up straight. Zeeb repeated his words for her while she moved her lips in imitation of him. Seraph added a few halting words in Irish and the girl’s expression brightened with understanding. “No. Merfolk are…” Her brow crinkled. “They like to see new things, but then go home.”
Ralph’s eyebrows shot up his forehead. “Fascinating! That explains this paragraph here. Not to mention the lake.” Careful not to touch the page, he pointed at a passage in the book.
Ylva nodded agreement. “They’re explorers. As inquisitive as humans.”
“And as dangerous to other species.” Zeeb grabbed handfuls of his dreadlocks and slumped over his laptop. “I’m seriously concerned about this, Harsha. All the recent information indicates they live in extremely deep water and only surface a few at a time, and not often. Getting their attention will be difficult. Getting attention we live to tell about is even less likely.” He released his dreadlocks. “Maybe we can get help from a water dragon. Acquainted with any, Seraph?”
“Only freshwater ones. Sea dragons live in the deepest trenches and sleep most of the time. It’s never good when they wake up.” She shook her head, expression grim.
Harsha pushed her book away, glad of the switch to conversation. “What’s the bigger problem? Merfolk are dangerous? Or they live too deep?”
“For you and Seraph, the depth. For me…” he scratched under his beard. “Werewolves are strictly land creatures. We visit lakes and rivers, but not seas. According to some of these sources, merfolk like to experiment on species they’re not familiar with.”
Harsha shuddered at the image of jars labeled werewolf that popped into her head.
“I don’t think this is wise,” he added. “It’s tantamount to provoking a cockatrice.”
“I appreciate your concern.” She stood and stretched to give her numb backside a break. “But, like you said, my chances of finding merfolk at all are slim. I may as well give it a try.”
“Finding a crew to take you may be a problem,” Ralph pointed out. “I don’t think our personal connections can help you on this one, but one of them might know of someone. We’ll send a few emails and see what comes up.”
“That’s fine. I need time to get what’s left of my life in order before we go, anyway.”
Ylva started gathering up the books. “That’s a good idea. We’ll do what we can about the merfolk tomorrow. Let’s relax. Margarita’s case was complicated and I vote for taking the rest of the day off.”
Harsha looked around. “I forgot about her. Where is she?”
“Hiding. Her sense of smell returned to normal after today’s treatment. The poor girl is a devout Catholic and vegetarian. She’s mortified by her lycanthropic behavior.”
“So, it worked?” Zeeb stood and pulled back into a stretch with his hands on the table. “That makes the most advanced case yet, doesn’t it?”
“Eighty-two days, seventeen hours.” Ralph beamed. “We’re making progress.”
Ylva shook her head. “We need to do better. It will be another eight months before her body returns to normal. In the meantime, her digestive system is disproportionally suited to meats over plants and her aversion to cats is problematic.”
“But she’ll never again wake up with the awful feeling she’s murdered someone.” Ralph scooted his chair back, scraping the legs on the hardwood floor, to pull his wife onto his lap and give her a peck on the cheek. “She can go back to her family. That’s what matters. Just in time, too. Her paid time off ran out yesterday and her flight is tomorrow.”
Maura kissed Harsha on the cheek and said something that sounded like “Eehyu mwie, mwoihey.”
The action startled Harsha. Before she could return the affectionate gesture, Maura kissed Zeeb on the cheek and repeated the first two words, exchanging the third for, “owhiye.”
“Um… I love you, too?” He gave her a hug.
Her lip quirked in the merest hint of a smile before she went to her room.
Seraph smiled. “Actually, she said, ‘Good night, Father.’”
“Interesting,” said Ralph. “So she called Harsha ‘mother?’”
“That’s right.”
Ylva raised her brows at Harsha, a silent question. Harsha gave her head a miniscule shake to answer without attracting attention from the others. No. She intended to stay on Kauai. Ylva sighed.
“Something wrong, Mom?”
Ylva smiled at Zeeb. “Nothing you need to worry about for me.”
Harsha felt Seraph’s eyes on her. She tapped a little beat on the table, stood, and stretched. “I’m going to bed. Can Maura and I catch a ride to the airport when you take Margarita?”
“You said you had a few days,” Zeeb protested.
“Tomorrow is a few days. I need to clean up the mess I left at Ho’ola, finish training Jamala, get hold of my property manager in Vegas, find another property manager for my Waimea house, make arrangements for a nursing home, sell what I don’t need, change my will…” She rubbed her temples. “Ugh. There’s a ton of work to do.”
Zeeb looked about to speak, but he closed his mouth when Ylva spoke. “I think it’s a good idea. For now. You get your ducks in order while Zeeb and Seraph set up the expedition.”
In meeting Ylva’s eyes to question the for now , Harsha felt caught in a stand-off, as though her earlier refusal amounted to challenging the alpha-female. She doubted Ylva saw it that way, but the comparison stuck in her head until she fell asleep.
Chapter 27
“I don’t understand. Don’t you have at least a couple more days?” Zeeb flicked his eyes to meet Harsha’s in the rearview mirror for a split-second.
In the front passenger seat, Margarita snoozed, lulled to sleep by the long drive. She’d dominated the conversation from Glennallen to… somewhere, Harsha supposed, though in Alaska, nowhere was just as likely. For about an hour and a half, the recently cured werewolf prattled about how excited she was to be going home, how much she loved her job, how glad she was to have had the chance to visit Alaska, albeit under unhappy circumstances. Except for brief pauses during which her face contorted in what Harsha guessed to be remorse, mortification, or both, she kept up a running monologue. Harsha assumed she did it to keep herself from breaking down under the weight of whatever had happened while she was under the influence of the lycans virus. Seraph, from her seat behind Margarita, and Zeeb, in the driver’s seat, made encouraging noises or patted her shoulder as appropriate, apparently used to the phenomenon.
Now, with Margarita quiet, Harsha found herself the center of attention. “I told you: There’s a lot to do. The sooner I get started, the better.”
“But you can do some of it from here,” Seraph argued. “You could at least stay through Sunday.”
“I need the weekend to figure out what to do about school for Maura. Unless…” Her stomach knotted with the idea of going back to the void o
f her home without Maura to fill some of the space left by Jason, Elaine, and Kel, but now that she was discussing it in the open, she realized it wasn’t the best course of action. Not for Maura. “Maura should probably stay with you, since she’d need to move here soon, anyway.”
“No.”
Zeeb used his mirror to glance at Maura, and Seraph and Harsha turned to her.
Maura shook her head and repeated. “No.”
“You understood?” Harsha raised her brows and hoped she looked challenging rather than elated.
Maura lifted one shoulder and let it drop. “I go with the moor… the merfolk. With Harsha.”
“It would probably be easier for you if you stayed with Zeeb.”
“When you be with Zeeb, I come.”
Harsha pressed her lips together and looked away. She knew Maura’s limited English forced the girl to find creative ways to express her thoughts, but the way that one came out hit a nerve. Judging by the awkwardness that filled the car, she wasn’t the only one who felt that way. After a minute or two of silence, Zeeb turned on the radio and picked up a station playing Alaskan folk music. No one talked again until Margarita woke up and requested a potty break.
At the airport, Margarita dominated the goodbyes, which Harsha appreciated. She let Maura say her goodbyes and cut her own short with an excuse about needing to hurry to get on the next flight.
They made the flight. It went well. A taxi saw them to her home, and Maura went straight to bed, the long exposure to unfamiliar people wearying to her.
Tired, but not sleepy, thanks to the list of to-dos lining up in her head, Harsha decided to make a necessary phone call, one she hoped would ease her mind in some regards. She picked up her phone and hoped she had chosen one of Josh’s nights off.
“Your timing is lousy, you know that?” The ambient noise on Josh’s end implied he not only did not have the night off, he was working as a bouncer in the one room where Jefe hadn’t replaced the noisy old-fashioned slot machines with quiet computerized ones.
“I’ll call back tomorrow.”
“No. It’s okay.” A grunt of pain sounded in the background. “This guy is about to leave, right? Tell the nice lady you’ve decided to go home and sober up.”