by ReGi McClain
Harsha followed, copying his moves as closely as possible. She clutched the rungs, which were slippery with sea spray, with a white-knuckled grip and took her time placing her feet. When she reached the hatch, she eased her first leg through and twisted a little like she’d seen Kaito do. She felt around with her inside foot and found a foothold. Now for the hard part. Clinging for dear life to one rung with both hands, she shifted her weight onto her inner leg and tried to pull her outer leg in. The next moment she found herself sitting in the middle of the sub’s limited floorspace, her derrière aching.
“Are you okay, Boss?” Kaito held out a hand to her.
Accepting the help, Harsha hauled herself to standing. The muscles of her legs and rear protested the movement and her right elbow and shoulder throbbed. “Fine.” She would have more black and blue bruises for several days, but she wasn’t incapacitated. The sub jerked, and she bounced against the wall.
“The crew is lowering the sub. You better sit down.”
Harsha took one of the two seats facing the large curved window and reached for a buckle. There wasn’t one. She grabbed onto the seat as the sub suddenly dropped. They splashed down and sank for several meters before she felt safe enough to pry her fingers open. Kaito was talking to her, and she turned to look at him. “What?”
“I said: You won’t be able to handle fancy maneuvering, but I designed it to be user-friendly.” He put his hands on what looked like an old-school joystick. “This is your basic directional control. You set the speed here.” He tapped the right pedal with his foot. “One tap per five knots. Don’t hold it down or press on it, just tap. Slow down or stop with the other pedal. Tap once for every five knots you want to slow down. If you need to shut off the engines, press this button.”
Harsha practiced driving the sub until she got the hang of it. After that, she read picture books with Maura, chatted with Seraph, won three days’ refund from the captain at poker, called Josh to go over her will, and taught Zeeb the Macarena for laughs.
Chapter 33
Between the multiple adrenalin rushes of the day and her rush of activity, Harsha anticipated a night of recuperating sleep. Instead, she stared at the underside of Maura’s berth, cursing the perversity of her brain. She wanted to see merfolk and get a cure. Now, she had what she wanted, or near to it, and a thousand doubts yammered for attention. Hoping to exhaust herself, she got up and wrapped on her bathrobe.
“You’re awake?” Seraph asked around a wide yawn.
“I can’t shut my brain off. I’m going to get a snack and take a walk.”
Seraph nodded. “Don’t wear yourself out. If you do, please let one of the crewmen carry you back down.”
Harsha grimaced. She hated needing rescuing. She tried to come up with a reason to argue, but several conversations with Jason came to mind. “Yeah, okay, but only if I need it.”
“Thank you.”
Grumbling in her mind about the rottenness of being descended from a super-being, she got a bag of trail mix from the dining area and wandered toward the equipment, where she found Zeeb lounging in a deckchair and staring at the sky. He patted the chair next to him without looking at her.
“You heard me?” Was I complaining out loud?
“Smelled you. You’re easier to pick out than usual. You’re scared.”
Having friends who could gauge her emotional state by smell was inconvenient at times. Rather than try to deny it or tell him to keep his senses to himself, she decided to vent.
“There are so many reasons this won’t work. Nobody can say for sure whether the sub can take me as far down as I need to go in the first place. If it does, who’s to say the doctor and I will be able to communicate? I can’t exactly get out and swim around under all the pressure. Even if I can because of my genes, I can’t talk to them. Even assuming everything is perfect, I’m essentially an experiment.”
“I thought of all that, too.”
Harsha fidgeted in her seat. Her questions, the ones she’d voiced and dozens of others, rotated in quick succession. She wished for a tin of candy to soothe her, but she’d left them in her cabin. With a huff of frustration, she stood and hobbled up the deck, using the railing for support. Zeeb joined her, hands in his pockets and eyes to the waning moon. She paused every few steps and let go of the railing to pick at her trail mix, choosing the candied fruit over the nuts, and worried. The merman had made no guarantee of a cure, just an appointment.
Lost in anxiety, she didn’t notice the cold until the warmth of his hand on her shoulder brought all her senses into sharp focus. For the first time, she caught his scent, wild and rich like burning hickory, flowing into the salty breeze. Her lungs swelled to catch the fragrance, greedy for all of it. His knuckles pressed the soft, fleecy fabric of her robe into her skin to trace a path down and up her arm. His touch joined with the breeze tickling her spine to send a shiver across her shoulders.
“You’re cold. I’ll walk you to your room.”
Afraid to meet his eyes lest she confirm what his sense of smell surely told him, she tucked the trail mix in a pocket, drew her robe tighter, and turned her gaze to the stars burning in the onyx sky. “I can’t sleep at all. Besides, I like being out here. It’s quiet, and beautiful, and…” you’re here . “I don’t know. It sort of has a homey feeling to it.”
“Homey? You really are a mermaid.”
The statement surprised her to a halt and made her look at him. “You didn’t believe me? I thought ”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean it’s obvious when I see you out here.” His eyes followed his hand down her arm, tracking back up until they made their way to her eyes, where they shone with an unspoken confession.
Her breath eluded her, snatched away by her racing heart. She wanted to hear him say it. She feared having it in the open. She felt it, denied it, longed for it, and rejected it all at once. The moon danced in his glacier eyes, the sun shone in his golden locks, and… and she needed to get her head back on her shoulders.
His head swiveled to look up the deck, breaking the spell he held over her. “So, besides being terrified, are you excited?”
Harsha released her captive lungs with a silent sigh of relief and disappointment. “Can’t you smell anticipation, too?”
“Not the kind I’m talking about.”
Glad the night distorted colors and hid the burning of her cheeks, she chuckled. “Yes, I’m excited. I shouldn’t hope for much, but I can’t help it. Jason used to tease me for it.”
“Hope isn’t something to take lightly.”
“No, but neither are repeated brushes with death.” Besides the Rice Clinic and Phyllis, other doctors had pushed her to death’s door with their attempts to treat her, though their methods lacked the dramatic flair of paranoid scientists and mad fae. The faerie hunt had put Seraph and Zeeb at risk, too, and their current search… Not to mention rescuing Jason’s and Elaine’s bodies.
Guilt writhed in her belly. She dropped her head to stare at her feet in shame. “Especially when my choices put other people at risk. Like today.”
“You should go inside.”
His husky tone yanked her head up to meet his eyes. He stared at the moon, his chest heaving, his teeth clenched, and his hands hidden in his pockets, balled into fists.
His anger tore at her. Desperate to make things all right with him, she gripped his shoulders. “I’m so sorry. This was a bad idea. I should have listened to you.”
He sucked in his breath and closed his eyes. With slow, deliberate motions, he eased his hands out of his pockets and removed her hands. He opened his eyes and brushed hair back from her face. “I’m not mad.” His gaze dropped to her lips and lingered there.
Harsha caught his scent, closed her eyes, and breathed it in. She wanted to eliminate the space between them, to lean into his arms and find out if he tasted as good as he smelled.
His hands trailed down her arms and withdrew. “Please go back to bed.”
So clos
e, but to what? Something she truly wanted, or something borne of frazzled emotions? She opened her eyes. Zeeb leaned against the control room wall, balled fists in his pockets, staring up at the moon, and she knew he doubted himself, too. Torn between frustration and admiration for his self-control, she nodded and returned to her cabin to stare at Maura’s berth and ponder more concerns than she started with.
An hour before she expected the merfolk, she abandoned her cabin to pace in front of the workstation. One by one, her friends joined her. Just before they expected General, Zeeb popped a large stocking cap over Kaito’s head.
Kaito laughed. “Call me Ethan Hunt.” He put his hands out in front of him. “But they let him get in the car first. How do you expect me to find my way to the sub?”
Zeeb pulled the cap off and handed it to Harsha. He locked Kaito in a stare-down. “Harsha is the one they want to see. We don’t know how they’ll react to you going along, so you put this on and don’t take it off unless Harsha says so. If she misses this opportunity or gets hurt because of you, I’ll take wolf-form tonight and rip your throat out.”
Kaito grinned. “It’s not a full moon.”
“I don’t need a full moon.”
Seraph, who’d gone to fetch coffee, came up behind him. “I don’t need any moon. What are we talking about?”
Harsha explained, “Zeeb was threatening Kaito.”
“Oh, good.” She gave Kaito a stern look. “This boat won’t survive an attack.”
“All right, all right. Let’s get in the sub.”
Afraid to let herself linger over goodbyes, Harsha distributed brief hugs to Seraph, Maura, and Zeeb before climbing into the sub. Kaito waited while she boarded, then came in after her. To her surprise, he submitted to the mask without complaint. “What’s with the meekness, Kaito? I thought for sure you’d try to argue your way out of being blindfolded.”
He shook his stocking. “Nah. I’m not fanatical enough to risk being killed for the sake of discovery. Coming along to test the limits of my sub is plenty.” A clang resounded in the small space. “What was that?”
Harsha gawked at General. Unlike the merfolk in children’s stories, his body didn’t divide clearly in the middle from mammal to fish. Instead, his human upper half stretched down into a smooth, dolphin-like lower half devoid of scales. The color of his face and powerful upper torso, an attractive bronze tone that might belong to any of several human races, faded to white before blooming into a bright, glowing green on his flukes to match his shining hair. Except for a thick belt above his dorsal fin, he wore no clothes. Not that his cetacean lower half displayed his masculine apparatuses, but the realization she was staring at a naked man embarrassed her.
“Looks like our escort is here,” she answered when she found her tongue.
General smirked when he saw Kaito’s stockinged head and waved her to follow him. He descended at a rapid pace, forcing Harsha to tap the accelerator pedal several times to keep up with him. She paid careful attention to his movements and tried her best to zig when he zigged and zag when he zagged. At first it was easy. They descended through the vast blueness of the water without changing course by the slightest degree, that Harsha noticed. General didn’t even swerve when they came to a school of large fish. Instead, he swam right into their midst. She followed, grimacing any time the sub bumped a fish that didn’t get out of the way in time. She screeched a curse when a large black and white something flashed by like a drag racer with a death wish. Kaito grumbled about the blind leading the inept and reminded her he had equipped the sub with the aquatic equivalent of a braking system.
In a surprisingly short time—two or three minutes—they left behind the sunlit waters. Harsha turned on the sub lights, but General scowled at her and signaled for her to turn them off. She shook her head at him. No way she was going to follow him into eternal night without shining a lamp into it. Without warning, he darted straight at her and slammed a fist on the glass that had looked thick and sturdy when examined in the light of day, and now seemed far too fragile to protect her from this realm of darkness.
The sub reverberated with the impact of the merman’s blow. She couldn’t exactly hear whatever General said after he hit the window, but she felt it like the boom of heavy bass pumped through a subwoofer speaker, and she understood. As if in the distance, she heard Kaito swearing and giving her more instructions, but whatever he said, she ignored. It took more willpower than she’d known she possessed to swallow down her terror, steady her shaking hands, and reach for the light switch.
The darkness enveloped them, except where the green luminescence of General’s eyes, hair, and tail haloed him in a glow that she focused on with all her heart. He led on. The heavy blackness seemed to be swallowing her, drawing her deep into its belly to make her a part of itself. She concentrated on General’s light, blinking as little as possible, afraid if she closed her eyes for a split second too long, the oppressive dark would devour General, the sub, and her.
Her eyes bleared with the effort of trying not to blink, and the glow around General seemed to expand. She risked a few rapid blinks to clear the illusion, but it remained. Another few blinks, and she realized it wasn’t the same green of General’s light, and it was expanding. Her fear dissipated in direct proportion to the visible light. Then she saw the source. Chubby flashlight fish. Probably the school they’d been watching for ages. Both her fear and her hope flopped to her toes in wry disappointment, but only for a moment. The abyss had just started creeping in on her soul again when General shooed the fish away to reveal an expanse of shimmering aquamarine that looked like an underwater lake illuminated from below. Harsha gasped.
“What? What’s happening?” Kaito asked. His voice jolted her the rest of the way out of the spell she’d been under since General assaulted the sub and forced her to trust him.
“I think we’re almost there.”
“Well that was fast.”
Had it been? Harsha glanced at the clock and realized her trek through the dark had lasted five minutes at the most. She felt ridiculous. “Yeah. Like walking to the corner store.”.”
General pressed a fist into the sand at the edge of the lake. A whirlpool formed in the center, swirling downward and widening until it grew large enough to accommodate the sub. He signaled to Harsha and dove through. Careful to keep away from the edges, she maneuvered the sub into the funnel formed by the spinning water.
They dropped. Harsha squawked. Kaito white-knuckled his thighs. They splashed down a split-second later and sank a few yards. The sub’s engines, still running, propelled them forward with a jerk. Harsha kicked the brake fast and hard to make it stop.
“What did you do? What happened? Harsha?”
Harsha didn’t answer. The merfolk’s city took her breath away. Buildings shaped like seashells and coral stretched for miles in front of her. Light filtered from large windows on the sides and tops of the structures. Above it, an air pocket created a sky of sorts. Merfolk bobbed at the surface of the water, like people playing in a pool, or breached and dove like dolphins filling their lungs with air before returning to their lives beneath the waves. With their shining eyes, hair, and tails, they looked like a galaxy of living stars.
General knocked on the window and signaled her to take off Kaito’s mask. Without warning him, she pulled it off.
“Oh good, I was getting ho whoa.”
General knocked on the window, again, brows drawn and lips pressed. Kaito took the controls and followed. As they neared the city, merfolk approached the sub. Several young men and two or three young women followed them, reaching out webbed hands to touch the sub.
Kaito ogled a few of the naked mermaids with his nose crinkled. “That would be sexy, if it wasn’t so weird.”
Noting the well-honed biceps of one of the nearby mermen, Harsha nodded. “I know what you mean.”
General tried to shoo the others away, to no avail. Their procession grew, gathering dozens of young merfolk. Mothers with
tiny children watched from their windows. Elderly merfolk eyed them with caution, curiosity, or animosity.
The crowd thickened until it forced Kaito to creep at five knots to avoid injuring them. Scowling, General pulled out his phone-like device and tapped at it. A detachment of mermen carrying spears arrived. Four of them smiled and waved at Harsha in recognition of their first encounter at the surface as they pushed the curious throng away. They escorted Harsha and Kaito to a pink, coralesque building.
A group of merfolk wearing matching belts waited for them outside the largest window. They surrounded the ship. After several attempts to communicate through the window, Kaito shut off the engines and let go of the steering stick to give control of the sub to them.
They grabbed hold of the sub and swam downward through a shaft lined with round entryways into other halls until they came to a room where a merman with short, glimmering white hair lay on his belly on a chair-sized sponge, flipping through the pages of a book. When the sub sat on the floor of the room, the banded merfolk exited, leaving General, the elderly merman, and the mermaid Harsha had first seen in the viewing screen.
A growling-cranking noise rocked the sub. Harsha covered her ears, wondering what happened. The mermaid grimaced at the ceiling and held her hands over her ears, but neither she nor either of the mermen looked concerned. Harsha looked at the spot the mermaid watched. Bubbles gathered in the nooks and crannies, expanding and pushing water out of their way. They swelled until they merged into one enormous, growing pocket of air. When the air pushed the water back until a few feet of it remained on the floor, General beckoned.