Tula laughed again. “You’re a match for her.”
“She was supposed to tell me about Rhymer McEvers. We had a deal.”
“I know. I’m here to honor it.”
“Tell me. Is he . . . what? Sixty? A hundred? Sean Connery’s long-lost younger brother?”
Tula sighed. “He’s a lost soul.”
I settled back in my chair. So am I, I thought. “And?”
“Many years ago, he was in love with a member of the British royal family. The house of Windsor has a strain of Mer, you see. Why do you think they send the young princes off to join the navy, not the army? Mer instincts.”
“Of . . . course.”
“Anyway, Rhymer was in love with a sweet girl, some cousin of a cousin of the future Queen’s, but she was killed. Murdered. They say it was a revenge killing over some elaborate international business deal of her father’s during World War II.”
I took a deep swig of water and wished it was nerve-soothing cola. “Rhymer was a young man in the nineteen forties?”
“No, he was just a child, then. But this complex business relationship of the girl’s father stemmed from the 1940s. And had something to do with Nazis.”
“Please don’t tell me there were Nazi mer-people.”
Tula arched a brow. “Of course not. Only Landers kill each other over land, politics, and religion. Mers have no interest in any of those things—” her voice became sardonic “—as long as we control everything else.”
“I see.”
“To continue, Rhymer was in love with this girl, but her father, a Lander, owed some secret debt to Hitler’s top cabal, and the high-ranking Nazis who escaped to South America needed money to fund their exile, and the father refused to pay, so they sent assassins.” She paused, her face sad. “And they dragged Rhymer’s girlfriend from her country home along the English coast, and they killed her.”
“Oh, Tula, how sad.” Good. She’s definitely dead. I gasped inside. What a horrible thing to think.
“Rhymer tracked them down. All of them. And he, well . . . I’m only relaying gossip—”
“Tell me.”
“He killed all the assassins. Then he went to South America and killed the old Nazis who’d ordered her murder.”
I sank back in my chair, speechless.
Tula looked up at me somberly. “I don’t know Rhymer very well. No one does. He spent years as some kind of commando for the British. Now he’s a Peacekeeper for our Council. But I knew his sister, Tara.” Tula paused. “Now, I’ll tell you what happened to her.”
I continued to sit in hypnotized silence as Tula related the story of Tara McEvers and her . . . her Mer lover/monster. A sensation like cold lizards crept up my arms and spine. Tiny lights sparkled in front of my eyes. Occasionally, my migraine headaches started this way. Only without the sensation of pure horror and incredulous terror.
Tula halted, watching me. “Take it easy, breathe, breathe, don’t pass out.”
I gulped some air. “A few days ago I was just an ordinary person, living an ordinary life. All right, an ordinary person with odd little traits and unexplainable impulses. But certainly not less mainstream than, say, your average Goth computer gamer or audience members at Jerry Springer tapings. Then I was jerked out of my psychologically insulated world by Miss Barracuda, aka Juna Lee, and told that I’m descended from a mermaid, and that all my quirks are actually Mer traits, and now I’m conducting psychic cell-phone chats with various merfolk, and trying very hard not to bolt for the nearest police station and beg them to lock me up until appropriate psychiatric help can be summoned . . . and now you expect me to believe that my new family tree includes shapeshifting mutants.”
“Now, now, I never said Orion is a ‘mutant.’”
“If no one’s ever seen one of these rare and incredibly secretive Swimmers, how do you know they exist?”
“Well, obviously, Tara McEvers believed Orion was one. Tara wasn’t fanciful. She wasn’t foolish. And there have always been reports, rumors, sightings — just never any proof.”
“So . . . this Orion might look like something subhuman, or he might look like Barney Fife.”
“Personally, I think he’s somewhere in between.”
“Well, that’s comforting.” I sat there, chewing my lip, absorbing and sorting information. “He wants to kill his own daughters?”
“We don’t know what he wants to do with them. He’s never visited them. Tara would meet him at the ocean. He never even contacted his daughters psychically. Tara insisted he didn’t want to frighten them. But now, suddenly, he’s looking for them. He’s looking for them, and he’s violent. He murdered all those UniWorld scientists and took Tara’s body.” She paused. “Not that the scientists didn’t deserve being murdered, for treating a Mer like a research object.”
I gaped at her, trying to focus on this bloodthirsty facet of her personality. Jewelry designer, elegant middle-aged youngster, lover of good books, the antidote to the awful Juna Lee, and gleeful pro-murder advocate? “I take it we, hmmm, don’t like UniWorld?”
She arched a reddish brow. “To say the least. Most Mers have a slight problem with greedy Landers prowling around the coasts ruining the view with oil derricks, not to mention the occasional disastrous oil spill from a leaky tanker. Especially when UniWorld also owns dozens of other coastal industries, including marine labs doing unethical research, plus a couple of volatile nuclear power plants and private weapons labs selling the latest killing machines to the highest bidders.”
“But I thought Mers controlled the waters. Aren’t Mers powerful enough to stop this conglomerate?”
She gave me a grim look. “We don’t like to admit what I’m about to tell you. I won’t go into the details now. Really, Lilith will have to tell you the whole story sometime.” She paused, almost stricken with humiliation. “UniWorld is owned by Mers.”
This jaw-dropper set me back in my wicker chair, speechless. Before I could find my tongue again, Tula blinked and looked away as if listening. “Lilith says hello.”
Lilith. The ethereal voice that had filled my head in Memphis. I reached out tentatively. Lilith? Hello? Can we . . . talk face to face? Mind to mind, that is?
My dear Molly, of course we can talk.
Lilith, I’m floundering. I’m in information overload. I might sink.
No, you won’t. Just keep treading water, and you’ll find your way to shore.
Lilith —
Trust your heart, Molly. The human body is 98 percent water. Listen to your own tides.
Tell me what else I should know about Rhymer McEvers. Is there any way I can help him?
I can tell you this much — he needs you. And you need him.
Am I losing my mind?
No, dear. Only your unnecessary illusions. Au revoir, Molly Martha Revere. I’ll see you when I return to the island in two months.
Two months? But I don’t know if —
I’ll see you, my dear. By then you’ll be an old hand at Mer life. You’ll glory in your liquid substance. You’ll dive into the depths and breathe the elixir of joyful truth.
And then she was gone.
Dive into the depths, and breathe. I looked at Tula. “Can I breathe underwater?”
She nodded. “All it takes is practice. And faith.”
Whammo. All these years, I’d thought I was just good at holding my breath.
* * * *
“Onto the shore, girls. This is Sainte’s Point.”
“It is a magical place, Uncle Rhymer,” Stella said.
“Aye, it ‘tis.” Let them have their fancies. I was certain only that the island was far from Orion’s grasp. I hoped.
Stella, Isis, and Venus stepped off the dock and, holding hands, gazed up at the pretty ballast-stone walls and delicate turrets and general oddities of the Bonavendier mansion. The bleached shells of sea turtles decorated a wall beneath the massive beams of the veranda, like warrior shields. Anchors and ships’ cannons perched gran
dly on stone pads about the yard. Ships’ bells swayed gently from tall posts. From Spanish galleons to Yankee submarines, the Bonavendiers had collected quite a commission from the shallows off their island.
“Look, sisters, a lovely fountain,” Stella said, directing a slender finger at a statue of a sexy mermaid holding a large shell, from which water trickled into a basin. “Such a pretty Mer. A Greek Nereid.”
“Oh, Mother would have loved it here,” little Venus sighed. “It’s wrapped in a lovely shade of happiness.”
“Looks as though they like war a bit much, if you ask me,” Isis grumped. She prodded an 18th century cannon with her sandaled foot. “Perhaps, if our father shows up, we can shoot him with one of these things.”
Venus began to cry. “I don’t want to shoot him. I don’t even know him. Why does he want to kill me and eat me?”
Stella gasped. “Where did you get such an idea?”
“I felt Uncle Rhymer thinking it.”
I groaned. Shaking my head, I dropped to my heels before the threesome — stately Stella, jaunty Isis, sweetheart Venus. “You did no’ hear me thinking such a thing. Tis your imagination, Venus.”
“Mother always said he loves us dearly, in his own way, but that he wasn’t meant to be with us. But if he loves us, wouldn’t he at least talk inside our heads? But he never has.”
“That’s right,” Isis grunted. “He doesn’t call, he doesn’t write. Not so much as a holiday card.”
Stella hissed at her. “Whatever the truth, we’re here with Uncle Rhymer, so let’s make the best of it. Let’s go inside. Miss Lilith left us all manner of good things to eat. Shrimp and chowder and chocolate and deviled crab with butter sauce. She spoke to me just this morning, and she said if we walk to the far side of this island we can see the village of Bellemeade and, farther up the coast, a lovely little cottage where a Mer storyteller lives.”
“A Mer storyteller?” Venus whispered, wide-eyed.
All three girls caught my surge of thought. They pivoted toward me as neatly as a platoon on drill. “Who’s Molly, Uncle?” Stella asked.
“Someone you like immensely, we take it,” Isis echoed.
“And what’s this about her puss?” Venus chimed. “She has a lovely kitty, you say?”
I groaned inwardly and squelched my thoughts. “She’s a nice lady who’s taken up residence across the water, just as we have here.” I pointed a lecturing finger at the girls and put on my sternest face. “But we’ll have no visiting, you hear? It’s no’ safe to leave the island.”
Stella stared at me, picking up on details even I couldn’t hide. Healers are even more sensitive to intuitions than most Mers. Her eyes went wide.
“Molly is . . . she’s M.M. Revere. Molly is M.M. Revere. Uncle!”
“I don’t care if she’s the queen of Persia. There’ll be no visiting.”
“M.M. Revere?” Isis squealed. “M.M. Revere lives nearby?”
“Aye. Now you have the truth. But still, there’ll be no visiting—”
“We have all her books! We have the DVD of Hyacinth and the Mermaid’s Torch! We’ve watched that movie a thousand times!”
“Hyacinth?” little Venus shouted. “The Hyacinth lady lives near here? Oh, Uncle, I want to visit the Hyacinth lady!”
“No visiting.”
They moaned. Stella beseeched me. “But you said she’s one of us. She’s a Mer, and her books are so special—”
“She’s in seclusion, as we are. Do no’ be trying to see her. Enough. No visiting. That’s the last time I’ll say it.”
I was reduced to waving my hands and making a deadly face. In the service, I’d grunt a one-word command and armed men would jump to follow the order. But three little girls made me flap like a deranged seagull.
They looked absolutely crestfallen. I felt as if my own crest had taken a tumble, too. ’Twas no fun to be a father figure. “Into the house with you three,” I ordered. “And not another peep. Not so much as a hum.”
They dutifully trudged up the knoll to the house, their delicately webbed feet beating a soft rhythm in sandals, thin summer smocks floating around them like upside-down buttercups, their heads bowed.
I stood for a moment, looking up at the grand, empty house, then scanning the grand maritime forest behind it, before turning to look at the quiet harbor where my boat was now anchored. Sainte’s Point. A safe sanctuary, I prayed.
I thought of Moll. Another kind of sanctuary, quirky and sweet.
But I could not risk visiting her, anymore than the girls could.
* * * *
Moll, I could still hear Rhymer saying. Speaking my name in that deep, Scotch whiskey voice of his. Almost as if he’d just said it again. He made my knees weak. Not a good thing when one knee was already tricky.
Leaning on my cane, I stopped suddenly in the sandy yard outside the shingled walls of Randolph Cottage, my adopted summer home. Heathcliff snoozed heavily in his carrier, an old kitty-man who spent all but an hour a day in deep, tired rest. I set the wicker carrier down gently, then, trembling, hunched over my cane and peered at a sandy spot between two pink oleanders.
Rhymer’s footprints, from the other night. Big, strong, barefoot, manly imprints.
With the outline of webbing between the toes.
I maneuvered myself into a kneeling position on the sand, then slowly touched a fingertip to the prints. As I traced the outline just above the sand, not wanting to destroy them —to hell with the Zen of the moment, I thought grimly, I like things that last — a sexual warmth came over me, highlighting specific regions, and no respecter of dignity. I shut my eyes.
Dance, Moll, Rhymer whispered. You can do it.
Then he was gone.
I opened my eyes, sat down on the sand, and looked out over the bay at the low green mountain of Sainte’s Point. The island rode the blue-gray crest of the horizon, the rim of the world, the curving waters. I drew a shaky breath. This was all real. I was not immersed in some hallucination, some waking dream, some malfunction of fragile brain tissue. Rhymer McEvers was real. mer-people were real. I was real. A real Mer. Floater class, no webbed tootsies, but still.
You, too, I whispered back to him. Dance. And stay safe.
Trapped in the Land of Rum Cocktails
Chapter 12
Dear Diary:
I hate steel drums and blackened flounder. In my opinion, the entire Caribbean, along with every fruity rum drink, jerk chicken dinner, ‘Hallo, Mon,’ accent, and Rastafarian dreadlock should be swallowed by a massive tidal wave.
But then, maybe I’m just in a bad mood because I’m locked in the Jamaican equivalent of a Vegas high-roller’s suite.
“Juna Lee?” my guard called through the teak double doors in her coy Hispanic drawl. She was six feet tall, two feet wide, and built like a brick lighthouse. An Amazon. A freakin’ Amazon Mer was guarding my door, night and day. The Queen Latifah of Mer Mamas, guarding me. “Juna Lee, you prissy little puta, you better answer me.”
I stood and yelled, “Listen, you Araiza-employed knuckle-dragger, obviously I’m not going to throw myself off a fifth floor balcony when you’re not looking. I’m not a flying fish.”
“Jordan Brighton sent you a gift. Behave and I’ll open the doors and hand it to you. Si?”
I was off to the doors in a flash. My warden unlocked the door, opened it a few inches, then thrust a beautifully wrapped little box at me. I grabbed the box and made a poofing sound at her. “Scared of me? It’s not as if I’m going to arm-wrestle you and bolt.”
Snow white teeth gleamed in the polished chocolate stone of her face. A whiff of Chanel wafted off her pale silk suit. A plus-sized designer Amazon. Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, senorita, I wish you’d try to escape.” She pulled the doors to, and locked them again.
Muttering under my breath, I hurried to my bed — a lonely fantasy island, draped in white netting and plump with sea-peach silk finery — where I curled up and ripped the wrapping off Jordan’s apology.
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I forgive you for being a pain in the fin, his note said.
“You forgive me?” I popped open the jeweler’s box and glowered at a tennis bracelet engorged with diamonds and pearls. “You know I don’t play tennis! You know I don’t ever sweat deliberately!” I stuffed Jordan’s note into the box, ran to the balcony, scoured the palm trees, beaches, pools, and cabanas below for a likely target, then drew back my arm ferociously.
I sent the jeweler’s box so far it probably hit a pirate in his Yo-ho-ho.
Then I latched the bracelet around one wrist and went back to my computer.
Never throw diamonds away. It’s bad luck.
Molly Embraces Her Inner Shopping Mer
Chapter 13
I stood on the sidewalk before a boutique in Bellemeade, clasping a small shopping bag containing a clingy, diaphanous silk dress the clerk had talked me into buying. I wasn’t sure I’d be wild enough to wear something so un-Molly-like, even in the privacy of my own home, but I loved the idea of putting it on a hanger and looking at it.
“Ms. Revere, your Jaguar is waiting,” a voice said.
I turned. “I beg your pardon?”
“Tula Bonavendier said you needed a car to drive during your visit to the coast.”
I looked from the well-dressed young manto the gleaming silver Jag he’d parked on the bayfront street. “A Jaguar? I told Tula I was thinking of renting a nice little sedan with a pine-scented air freshener. Something fragrant and inconspicuous.”
“No need to worry about your privacy here, Ms. Revere. Bellemeade belongs to our people. Our Landers are well-trained and polite. They won’t harass a celebrity.”
Ah hah. He was a Mer. I should have known. Second, he was a Mob Mer, or talked like one. Our people. Our Landers. It was almost medieval. The beautiful little village was awash in nice people — Landers, there, I said it! I made the distinction! — who hurried to help me, welcome me, and compliment me on my books. I buzzed with guilty pleasure. I was a princess here. I had peasants.
“The car, ma’am?” The well-dressed Jag-delivery Merman was looking at me.
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