by Shelby Bach
Nope. That was definitely Fael’s pouting face. He knew he’d probably be grounded for joyriding in Daddy’s boat.
“Awesome. Well, tell him hey for me.” The knight gave the Turn-leaf a look, like no one had ever told the Unseelie king hey. With a grin, Chase dove off.
“I won’t forget this, Rory Landon,” the Unseelie prince said, like this was supposed to scare me.
“Good.” Maybe then he wouldn’t mess with Chase again.
Then I jumped out of the boat. Luckily, it was only a twelve-foot drop.
The water was searingly cold, and the salt stung the slice on my left hand under the bandage. With the flotation spell in the pack, it was easy to stay above water. All I had to do was propel myself toward the beach, but I’d never swum so far in my life.
Chase waved both arms at me from the sand. Yeah, I see you, I thought, not sure why he was shouting. He couldn’t expect me to hear him with all these waves crashing around me.
But the sea tugged at my jeans and sucked me backward. I glanced back at the Fey ship—Fael would figure out some sort of spell to stop me. But the Fey vessel was already gliding away.
So this was just an ordinary current—the Pacific Ocean kind? The kind that drowned people?
I swam even faster—too fast. I splashed so much I choked on the sea.
A hand closed over my wrist. Chatty, treading water. She widened her dark eyes pointedly, with a very small smile, as if to say, Chill out, Rory. I’ve got you. I copied her and treaded water, trying not to panic even when the current dragged us out farther and farther.
Then she wrapped one arm across my shoulders and towed me back—parallel to the beach. When I tried to help paddle us to shore, she slapped my arm and shook her head. It would have been humiliating if I hadn’t been so tired. She wouldn’t let me move until we could touch the sandy bottom. We stood up together, and Chatty stumbled forward, her breath hissing through gritted teeth.
I grabbed her shoulder, steadying her before she could fall over. “You okay? Did you cut your foot?”
She shook her head, eyes squeezed shut, clearly still in pain.
“Lean some weight on me, if it helps,” I said, helping her toward the beach.
It was nearly dark. I heard Chase before I saw him. “A rip current.”
Chatty and I splashed the rest of the way out of the water. I spotted the others.
Mia had apparently swallowed half of the ocean. Kneeling in the sand, she delicately spat it all back up.
Ben wrung out his T-shirt. “Right. Nobody had almost died in a while. We were starting to forget what that felt like.”
“That was my bad,” said Chase, as Chatty and I trudged up the beach toward them. “I knew we got off too easy. Fael must have stopped the ship right in front of the rip current.”
Chatty shook her head so violently that drops of water flicked off her dark hair and all over one side of my face. When she was sure everyone was looking at her, she pointed her thumb at her own chest.
“You think it was your fault? Because you jumped off the boat first?” I guessed.
“You guys, everybody survived—thanks to Chatty’s excellent lifeguarding skills,” Ben said tiredly. “We’re a team. Stop worrying about what was whose fault, and let’s eat something.”
Ben decided not to pass through the X-marks-the-stop gate until morning. Chase and Kenneth told him that was stupid, but Ben held firm. He wasn’t going to jeopardize the mission when we were so close. We were all tired. It was dark. The path up to the spring was rocky. We could all break legs, and—as Ben pointed out—he couldn’t afford any more injured Companions.
“I’m injured.” I didn’t really want to admit this, but if I didn’t, Kenneth would point out the giant no-longer-white bandage on my hand. “I cut myself in the mirror vault. You can send me back—”
“Can you still walk and fight?” Ben interrupted. I nodded. “Then you’re staying. You’re the reason we got here with two days to spare. You’ll see it through to the end.”
I grinned, almost smug with happiness, and to hide it I slung off my pack and started searching for my sleeping bag. We set up camp as close to the giant crossed pines as possible. My eyes drooped as Mia and I searched the beach for firewood.
Chase broke out the Lunch Box of Plenty, and everybody teased Ben when he ordered what looked like weird purple mush in the dim light beside our pizza, chicken fingers, and hamburgers. “What can I say? I have a highly cultivated palate,” he said, snagging a fork from the lunch box. Then Ben put his arm around Mia’s shoulders, and she kind of leaned in to him, smiling. Clearly, being held hostage by a fairy prince had helped their romance.
Chatty blew her whistle and motioned that she would take the first watch. Then she stomped up the beach, her feet hitting the ground so hard she threw up little fountains of sand with each step.
I inhaled my grilled cheese in three and a half seconds and called the last watch. I got dibs because I’d been wandering a mirror vault while everyone else had been sleeping last night. Then, as Ben assigned watches to everyone else, I crawled into bed and fell asleep to Chase and Kenneth arguing about who got to order dessert from the Lunch Box of Plenty first.
I thought I would be too tired to dream, but I was wrong.
Mia’s head looked perfect and delicate on the marble pedestal, her lashes casting long, spiky shadows over her cheeks. Her black hair shone in a smooth river, cascading down her neck and over the table. Her arm lay beside the pedestal—the side that should have been attached to her shoulder was covered with white silk. Dread knotted in my chest.
I glanced back. His face white, his eyes huge, Chase was clutching a glass door with a single snowflake etched near the doorknob. He pointed at the table.
I turned. Mia’s eyes cracked open, her lips curling.
Gasping, I sat up. There were the stars, piercing through the black sky in unfamiliar constellations, and there were the huge pines twisted around each other. There was Chase sleeping on my right.
Heart hammering, I wrestled myself free of my sleeping bag and walked down to the water. I sucked in big drafts of fresh ocean breeze and tried to wake up enough to think.
Beheading hadn’t killed Mia. I shuddered all over again. Who would have guessed that a severed head staring at you could be way creepier than having it cut off in the first place?
In some Tales, you could get chopped up into little bits and brought back to life with magic. I must have read them, but I couldn’t remember what they were.
Maybe that’s why Mia hadn’t freaked out when I told her. Maybe she already knew she would get that kind of Tale.
Smiling about it seemed excessive, though. That snowflake symbol etched into the door could only come from one place—the Glass Mountain. I didn’t know how Chase, Mia, and I had gotten there, but considering how close we were to the spring, I sincerely hoped we would manage to get the Water of Life back to EAS first.
Just a few steps from the water, Chatty was throwing pebbles into the sea. Letting off steam, I guessed, but then I spotted elegant, short-haired heads bobbing in the waves, their tails curling up out of the water behind them, scales catching the moonlight.
Mermaids.
They didn’t seem too disturbed by the fact that some girl was chucking pebbles at them. They just sang a few notes, and Chatty paused. Then she threw pebbles again: two stones, which skipped once. One stone, skipping four times. Four stones that skipped twice.
A mermaid sang a warbling note back.
“Oh. Are you talking with them?” I asked. Wherever Chatty was from, their chapter had to be right next to the water if they taught their Characters to speak Mermaid.
Seeing me, the mermaids dove under, their tails making great splashes.
“Whoops, sorry about that. I didn’t think they would mind another Character—” But then I saw her face. The tears on her cheeks glinted as brightly as the mermaids’ scales. “Whoa. What’s wrong?”
But either she d
idn’t want to tell me, or she couldn’t figure out how to explain it, charades-style. She covered her face with her hands, one of them fisted around a dagger. I hadn’t even known she carried one. I guessed she took guard duty very seriously.
I didn’t know what was wrong, but the tears were kind of freaking me out. Maybe I had been hanging out with Chase too long. “It’s okay. I’ll help you.”
She hugged me swiftly then, pressing her wet face into my neck. I was missing something. It nagged at me as I hugged her back, but unfortunately, my mind had decided to shut down for the night.
“How about this?” I said. “I’ll take the rest of your watch, and you can get some more sleep. That’ll help, right? Everything feels better in the morning.”
Chatty wiped her eyes and smiled ruefully.
“Who had the next watch after you? Mia? Kenneth?” Chatty nodded. “Okay, I’ll wake up Kenneth next. You go to bed.”
And she went.
I never even suspected that I should worry about that dagger.
What Chatty really was never even crossed my mind while I kept watch, pinching myself again to stay awake, or when I gave in to the sleepiness and woke Kenneth, or when I fell back into my sleeping bag, snoring practically as soon as I touched it.
Then I woke to Kenneth shouting, “No!” Chatty was crouching over Ben, the dagger’s small blade pressed to the new kid’s throat.
he sky behind them slowly brightened from indigo to a silvery sort of yellow.
When Ben gulped, staring up at Chatty, the knife’s edge parted the skin on his neck. Blood sank into it a breath later—a short red line right below his Adam’s apple. Chatty just moved the blade back a fraction and smiled, one eyebrow quirking up at him as if to say, Ben, you big, clueless dummy.
She wasn’t going to really hurt him. She was just getting his attention.
But the prankster in Chatty definitely enjoyed watching him squirm, especially since he kept ignoring her for Mia—
Suddenly, I knew exactly what was happening—exactly what I hadn’t been able to figure out a few hours before.
I reached into the front pocket of my pack. Chatty didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t even take her eyes off Ben.
“Wake up, Chase. Now,” I said.
Chase didn’t bother to open his eyes. “What? Did Chatty draw on Kenneth’s face with a permanent marker last night? Because I say we let her.”
“Idiot. She has a knife,” Kenneth said, shaken. Chase bolted upright.
My hand found the M3. “Lena! I need your help!”
She had to answer this time. I couldn’t remember the exact wording of Chatty’s Tale without her.
“Chatty, whatever it is,” Ben said nervously, “we can talk about it.” She scowled at him, reminding him she couldn’t speak. “I mean, we’ll help you. We’ll get you what you need.”
Mia was the closest to them, but she just lay in her sleeping bag, watching.
Lena appeared in the mirror, rubbing her eyes. She sounded just like one of those talking dolls when their batteries start to wear out—unnaturally slow and crackly. “What is it?”
“Quick, Lena. What do the Little Mermaid’s sisters tell her about the knife?” I said.
“Um . . .” Lena dropped her hands, and I saw her face. Ice splashed down my spine. Her lips were turning black, just like Rumpelstiltskin’s.
“Wait, pass me to Melodie.” If Lena got any sicker, she would fall into a coma and never wake up.
Lena gave me a dirty look. “I’m fine. ‘We have given our hair to the witch, to obtain help for you, that you may not die tonight.’ ”
“Wait. You’re a mermaid?” Chase asked Chatty.
Chatty nodded vigorously. Her smile was so delighted you would have never guessed she was holding a knife to someone’s throat.
“ ‘She has given us a knife: Here it is; see, it is very sharp. Before the sun rises, you must plunge it into the heart of the prince.’ ” Then a cough overtook Lena, a wet hacking deep in her lungs.
My throat ached with sympathy. I shouldn’t have asked. It was killing her. “Please, Lena. Let Melodie.”
“I have the book, Mistress,” said the golden harp anxiously.
“The prince?” Ben glanced at Chase and Kenneth. “The guy who married the wrong girl?”
“Guess who.” Chase pointed down at Ben’s and Mia’s interlaced fingers. I hadn’t even noticed. Blushing, Ben dropped Mia’s hand. “Chatty, Ben’s chest is a little lower down.”
“Whose side are you on?” Ben asked.
“Don’t you see?” I said. “She’s not actually going to do the spell. She just wanted us to figure it out.”
Chatty removed the knife from Ben’s throat and pointed to me, nodding again.
Ben covered his neck and scrambled out of the way.
Melodie must have found the right passage: “ ‘When the warm blood falls upon your feet they will grow together again and form into a fish’s tail, and you will be once more a mermaid and return to us to live out your three hundred years before you die and change into the salt sea foam.’ ”
Sea foam. I knew she was going to turn into something. I shoved the magic mirror toward Chase and hurried across the campsite, to the Lunch Box of Plenty.
“Bowl,” I told it fiercely. “Big widemouthed bowl.”
“ ‘Haste, then; he or you must die before sunrise,’ ” continued Melodie. Lena coughed.
Chatty sighed, glancing up at the sky for the first time. I fumbled with the latches on the lunch box. The Little Mermaid straightened and took a few steps back toward the water.
“ ‘Our old grandmother moans so for you that her white hair is falling off from sorrow, as ours fell under the witch’s scissors.’ ” Melodie said.
The lip of a metal bowl appeared inside the lunch box, and I pulled it out with both hands. Apparently, the lunch box couldn’t supply any dishware without putting food in it. Oatmeal bounced in the bottom as I ran.
“ ‘Kill the prince and come back. Hasten—do you not see the first red streaks in the sky?’ ” Gold glimmered on the horizon, but, smiling, Chatty looked straight at Ben and tossed the dagger into the sea. The water turned red where the blade plopped in, like the ocean was bleeding.
“ ‘In a few minutes the sun will rise, and you must die.’ ”
“You die?” Ben took a step closer.
The sun climbed above the cliffs beyond us, red blazing around it. One eyebrow quirked up, Chatty blew Ben a kiss. Then in her place was a Chatty-shaped statue, made out of a substance like soap bubbles, almost the same color as dirty snow, but slightly greener.
Before it started to fall back into the ocean, I shoved the bowl under it—the fastest scoop of my entire life.
For a few seconds the only sounds were Lena’s coughing and a crackling noise like tiny bubbles popping, as the sea foam formerly known as Chatty collapsed slowly over the oatmeal.
“So what happened exactly?” Lena said hoarsely from the M3, and Chase started to explain.
“How did you know, Rory?” Ben asked.
I hugged the bowl to my chest. I’d thought catching her would make me feel better. I explained about the mermaids the night before, and about Chatty skipping rocks, and the dagger. “I promised to help her.”
“And you didn’t wake us up and tell us about it?” asked Mia.
“I don’t want to hear any accusations out of you, Mia,” I snapped. “I’m onto you. You’re the fake.”
“There’s no need to call Mia names, Rory,” Ben said, a little bit mad.
“Don’t you get it, Ben? Mia never saved your life during the griffin fight,” I said. “Chatty did. She saved you when she was still a mermaid, and Mia took the credit. That’s how the Tale goes. Mia lied to you, to all of us. She’s evil.”
Mia blinked at me. Infuriatingly calm again.
“Not necessarily,” said Melodie from the M3. “In most Little Mermaid Tales, the fake isn’t actually bad. She was
just in the right place at the right time. Taking the credit is usually an accident.”
“How do you accidentally take credit?” I said.
“Rory,” Ben said, like a warning. “Is that true, Mia?”
Mia looked down at the sand, her beautiful hair falling over her face. She had perfected the look of being innocent. Ben wouldn’t even be mad.
“Or did you just not have the heart to tell us?” Ben’s voice softened. “I mean, I just assumed it was you. You were the only girl around with long, straight, dark hair, and it happened pretty fast.”
“I wanted you to like me so much. I’m sorry.” Mia hadn’t even come up with her own excuse. She’d just let Ben create one for her.
“It’s okay,” Ben said, so eagerly that I hated him as much as Mia for a second.
“It’s not okay.” I shoved the bowl of sea foam under their noses.
Ben looked ashamed, but he sounded firm. “Rory, I understand you’re upset. I’m upset too.” Not upset enough, I thought savagely. “But we can’t afford to start fighting now. We have to work as a team. This is bigger than us.”
I refused to let it end this way. Chatty deserved so much better.
“Chase, I need one of the water bottles from my carryall.” I must have seemed pretty intense, because he didn’t argue. He just stuck his head in my pack to look.
“Why?” asked Lena from the M3. “Rory, what are you doing?”
I didn’t know exactly what I would do, but it involved keeping Chatty safe until I could figure out a way to save her. “Magic turned her human. Magic turned her into sea foam. Magic can bring her back.”
My hands shook, and I put the bowl down carefully in the sand so I wouldn’t drop it.
“Rory, this is how ‘The Little Mermaid’ is supposed to end—” Coughing interrupted Lena again. When she covered her mouth, I glimpsed her hands—the black vines had almost reached her fingertips.
I couldn’t stand to lose her, too. “Lena, please go back to sleep. We’re almost there. We’ll be back with the Water of Life soon.”
Lena stopped coughing and nodded. She was feeling too weak to protest, to even say good-bye. The M3 went blank.