by Erin Hayes
Our circumstances might have been different—I was human, Kai was a dolphin—and I couldn’t pretend to know how awful it must be for Kai to be captured. Instead, I could at least offer him some comfort.
I knelt and reached out across the pool to stroke the melon of his head. His slippery skin felt cool against my hand, and at my touch, it seemed like he sighed into it. I petted him, feeling protective of the fragile baby.
“You’re going to be okay, Kai,” I whispered.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man pulling himself up and over the fence by me. At least, I thought it was a man—he was hidden by the shadows, and I couldn’t be sure. Curiosity overtook fear, and I straightened from my kneeling position to get a closer look. Maybe it was a cleaner. Or a trespasser, in which case, I should be running.
I walked towards the figure as it began crawling across the ground, recovered from its climb.
It was dark, so I could barely see the outline of a man’s body stop and look at me. Then I saw the impossible, long, single fin on his lower half instead of two feet, and the scales cascading down from the man’s waist.
A mer tail. Not like the silicon kind I used for my performances. Even in the dark, I could see that it writhed and moved with a mind of its own, fully an extension of his body.
Reflexes and survival instinct took over before my mind could react. I backpedaled, trying to get away from the mysterious figure, only I misjudged how far I was from the edge of the water. And how wet the ground was.
My foot slipped, and I fell head-over-heels backwards, plunging over the side of the fence and onto the rocky crags below. I screamed for help, but when my head struck solid rock and the rest of my body impacted with the ground, I fell into an unyielding darkness, one that was haunted by merman-shaped shadows emerging from the ocean.
I should have gone to dinner with Christine and the others.
Chapter Three
My ears were awake before the rest of me. Even before I opened my eyes, some man’s voice was yelling at me.
“What is this?” a rough, intense voice demanded. “What were you doing at the prison?”
I swam out of unconsciousness, an uncomfortable experience that revealed my entire body aching, my head most of all. It was so dark, and a strange feeling had overtaken my body. Like I was floating. I tried touching a hand to my head, only to find that I couldn’t.
What the-?
My hands were tied behind my back with what felt like...kelp?
The realization hit me, and I thrashed about trying to free myself, and I finally opened my eyes.
I paused for a moment, unable to grasp exactly where I was.
I was...underwater?
Air bubbles popped out of my mouth in a flurry when a scream escaped my throat. A thousand thoughts filled my head, none of them making sense except for the overwhelming dread that I was somehow underwater with my hands tied behind my back. From what I could tell, there was no way I could get air to breathe. I’d lost a lot of air when I screamed.
Oh my god, I was going to drown.
My mermaid necklace was thrust in front of my vision, momentarily disorienting me.
“I demand you to tell me now!”
“What?” I asked out loud. A sharp pain zigzagged across my head from where I’d hit it on the rock. I was trapped underwater, and this man wanted to know...what exactly? What my necklace was?
The necklace came even closer to my face, so much that I’d have to go cross-eyed in order to focus on it.
“Where did you get this? What is it?” the man demanded.
“It’s my...” I was unsure and still terrified of my situation. “It’s my necklace.” I gasped for breath, and somehow I was getting air into my lungs. “How...how am I underwater?”
That was the best question that could come to mind to sum up my predicament. I should have asked, “Who are you?” or “Why do you have me tied up?” but my first instinct was survival. I was doing the impossible by being underwater this long.
The intense movements of shoving the necklace into my line of vision paused, as if considering my words. I took this moment to look up at the face belonging to the hands and voice.
It was a boy, one who appeared to be only a few years older than me. He had dark hair that was slightly longer than what was in style, flowing in wisps around his face. His eyes were sea green, framed by a tanned face with a strong jaw. He was muscular, not from pumping weights at the gym, but from necessity. Like he had the body of someone who swam twenty-four hours a day.
He was gorgeous. Supermodel gorgeous.
When he came closer to me, I saw a pattern of angry scars crisscrossing his shoulders and his arms, spider-webbing all the way to his back. I couldn’t tell if they continued from there. It took me a second to realize where I’d seen marks like that before. I’d seen them on some porpoises we’d rehabilitated.
They looked like damage from fishing nets, although why someone like him would have them, I had no idea. It gave him a rugged look, one that didn’t detract from his good looks. If my experience with movie stars told me anything, it was that scars on a good-looking guy made them even more attractive.
I was transfixed for a split second. It actually gave me a bit of respite from freaking out about my predicament.
My aching skull tried to piece together everything. He’d been the one who was yelling at me about my necklace. He wasn’t tied up either, which must have meant that he’d been the one who tied me up. And he was underwater and talking to me.
What the hell?
Then my eyes dipped down, and I saw the tail. Where his legs should have been was a long, salmon-colored fishtail. It looked as complex as the silicon tails that we wore for our performances. Only... I squinted my eyes, inspecting it, and I screamed.
It was real. He had a real fishtail.
He was a merman, and he was holding me captive underwater.
I looked at him, locking eyes with him, and the terror overtook me again as my vision tunneled. My ears rang, and my vision blackened. I was about to pass out again.
“Finn!” someone yelled as darkness edged my vision. “Give her some space. She just woke up!”
There were more of them? It was too much for my injured head to handle. Instead of screaming for help, I watched as the ocean faded to black.
When I woke up again, I felt like I was coming out of a bad dream. Tied up, underwater, a good-looking merman yelling at me about my necklace, a dolphin talking to me and asking for my help…
Someone’s hand gently pressed a compress to my forehead, like my mother soothing me when I was sick. That touch grounded me, made me feel like I was in control again, even though I felt weird, sticky, and waterlogged. I kept my eyes closed, because I wanted to relish this feeling of being safe.
It had been a bad dream. That’s all it was.
“Mom...” My voice sounded far away and muffled. “Mom, I had the strangest...dream. It was a nightmare.”
The hand caressing my face paused, followed by a resigned sigh. Then I heard a voice. It was a woman, maybe elderly, although my ears were still ringing.
“It was no dream,” she said, words coming out muffled.
Like she was underwater.
Like the merman from before.
I snapped my eyes open, meeting violet eyes in a wrinkled face framed by floating white hair. Floating because she was underwater. And she wasn’t my mother.
I screamed, and this time, my hands weren’t bound by kelp. I pushed myself up and tried backing up as far away from her as possible, although whatever bed I’d been laying on was right up against the bare rock of a cave. When I moved, it was like my buoyancy had kicked in and my entire body started floating. I scrabbled against the rock of the cave, terrified.
The woman—mermaid, as I noticed that she had a distinctly purple tail that she used to steady herself in the water—studied me with apprehension. “It’s been so long since we had a...human...visitor,” she said in her
gravelly voice.
“Are you real?”
To my surprise, she chuckled, bursts of bubbles erupting from her mouth and around her. “I could be asking the same of you.”
With my hands free, I brought them up to my face. “How am I able to breathe?” I rasped.
She shrugged. “A small trick, don’t worry.”
Don’t worry? How long was I going to be here? How long have I been here? I hyperventilated and gasped and sputtered.
We were in an underwater cave, like the stereotypical version of Ursula’s home in The Little Mermaid. It was dark, and some strange aquatic plants glowed with bioluminescent light, shrouding the entire place in an eerie twilight. The place seemed cluttered, with shelves laden with trinkets and shells and things that I had no idea what they were. There was only a single entrance to the cave from what I could tell, a semicircle that opened to the outside.
The mermaid reached out and steadied me. “Calm down,” she said.
Calm down? I couldn’t calm down. I was stuck underwater with a mermaid and no way to get back to the surface. I really should have taken Christine up on her offer to go to dinner. I should have listened to Mom and gone to college. I should have stayed far away from the ocean. Then I could have avoided this.
“Is she awake?”
I froze, recognizing the voice as the merman from last night. He appeared in the entrance of the cave. My heart sped up, and I tried shrinking even further into the corner, kicking my feet out to propel me into the side. I didn’t want him to capture me again. Not that I was any better off stuck underwater, but I considered the ability to move a step up from where I’d been.
“Stay away from me!” I cried.
He hesitated, those sea green eyes meeting mine.
“He kidnapped me!” I pointed an accusing finger his way.
He gave me an unimpressed look.
“What else did you expect, Finn?” the mermaid asked, her voice amused. “You frightened the poor creature.”
Finn groaned, rolling his head like he was cracking some stress out of it. “She surprised me. First, I saw her near Kai’s tank, and then she had this...” He held up my mermaid necklace. “I didn’t know what to think.”
“You kidnapped me,” I accused again, really because there was nothing else that came to mind. “You tied me up! And give me back my necklace!”
He frowned. “I saved you,” he corrected. He tapped his temple, in the same area where mine throbbed painfully. “When you fell, you hit your head pretty hard. You would have drowned if I didn’t come after you.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Why did you tie me up?”
He crossed his arms and gave me a square look. “Because I thought you were one of the humans who kidnapped Kai. You were near his prison when I came to rescue him.”
My mind was slowly piecing together everything. “Wait...you think I kidnapped Kai? The little dolphin?”
“Surely you don’t think she really did that, Finn,” the mermaid chided, clicking her tongue. “Look at her puny arms. She wouldn’t have been able to lift a dolphin, even a small one like Kai.”
“She could have had a potion,” Finn retorted.
The mermaid rolled her eyes. “What’s your name, child?” she asked, deftly changing the subject.
“T-Tara,” I managed.
“Well, Tuhtara,” the mermaid said, “I’m Nereia and this is my nephew Finn.”
“Tara.”
Finn crossed his arms. “What?”
I shivered, clutching my legs to my chest in a semi-fetal position. “It’s just Tara. Not...Tuhtara.”
Nereia chuckled. “Apologies. As I said, it’s been a while since we’ve had a human visitor.”
I was still trying to process everything. Finally, it felt like something was trying to make sense, and I clutched at it like my life depended on it. “Kai was taken?” Suddenly, I knew why the dolphin was so sad. “Is that why he asked me to help him?” I ventured. It was crazy, thinking that a dolphin was speaking directly to me; then again, here I was deep in the ocean, talking to a pair of mermaids.
Crazy was par for the course.
I didn’t get the reaction I thought I would. Finn looked at me in shock while the mermaid raised a quizzical eyebrow, impressed.
“You heard him speak to you?” she asked. “As a human, you could understand him?”
“Yeah?” I said.
“Impossible,” Finn interjected. “Dolphins aren’t supposed to be able to speak to humans.”
This merman had no right to tell me what I did and didn’t hear. I know what I heard—unless I was crazy.
Nereia thoughtfully touched a finger to her chin. “Unless...” she started, her voice trailing off.
“I heard him,” I promised. “Why was he crying for help?”
“He was stolen.” Finn spat the words as if they tasted bad. “By humans.”
“I had nothing to do with that,” I said. “Nothing.”
“She’s telling the truth,” the mermaid said.
“Then why were you by his cage when I was trying to rescue him?”
“I wanted to see if he was all right,” I said. “He felt... I could feel his sadness, and I wanted to see if I could help him. I was performing a mermaid show and—”
“How could you perform a ‘mermaid’ show when you’re human?” Nereia asked, speaking each word slowly.
“I have a tail that I put on, and then I go in the water and go out and do a dance for everyone.”
Their expressions turned into disgust. Finn’s frown was so deep, he looked like a big mouth bass, while Nereia’s face wrinkled into a mask of distaste. It hit me then that me being a mermaid was quite possibly the equivalent of me mocking their culture with inappropriate clothing and customs. Now that I knew that mermaids were real, it struck me how wrong the entire idea of it was.
Who in heck knew mermaids were real?
“Sorry,” I muttered, unsure if even that was appropriate. If I ever got out of here alive, I’d make sure to tell Christine how mermaids really acted. Like concerned old women or haughty, handsome, annoying men. And they didn’t wear sparkly makeup.
“I need to go,” Finn said. He rubbed his hands in front of him, the awkwardness growing between all three of us. “I’ve got to figure out how to tell Nadia and Levi that I haven’t been able to free Kai yet.”
Nereia nodded. “Good luck. You’ll have to figure out how to tell them you dropped Kai’s potion.”
Finn’s face twisted into a frown, and he shook his head. “It wasn’t my fault. I was...distracted.” He pointedly glanced at me. “I’ll need a new potion.”
“You know how long those take me to make, Finn,” Nereia warned. “And it gets more and more dangerous every time you go on land.” Her eyes widened slightly. “What if a human saw you?”
Finn gave me a wry glance. “One did see me, and it’ll be okay. I’ll be more careful next time.”
Nereia’s lips pressed into a thin line. “I’m only worried about you and the deadline we have looming. I just want to help.”
Finn smiled. “The last time you helped me find a way, we froze a fleet of human ships in the Arctic.”
I saw a mad sparkle in Nereia’s eyes as she sighed. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“Yeah. It did.” Finn sobered. “Can you keep an eye on Tara?”
“Go do your business.” The old mermaid waved him off. Finn opened his mouth, as if to say something else, then turned and swam out of the cave.
I caught sight of the scars on his body again, and they did indeed cover his back with angry welts. Definitely a fishing net. I found myself wondering how he got caught in one. The faded marks looked like they must have hurt when they were fresh.
His body moved, the long, salmon-colored tail pivoting from his hips, swimming with the grace of a fish that had been in the water all his life. Were the movies true? If merfolk dry off on land, would they have legs to walk around? Would they infiltrate the human race? My min
d wandered to all sorts of places, and I realized that despite the fact that I acted like a mermaid for a job, I really had no idea what they were truly like.
The older mermaid eyed me, not unkindly. In fact, she had a small smile on her face. “Don’t blame him for his behavior,” she said. “You’re the first human he’s ever met.”
“He’s being rude.”
“He saved your life.”
“Remind me to thank him when he’s not being a jerk.”
Instead of rolling her eyes at my childish comment, she chuckled good-naturedly.
“Are you a real mermaid?” I asked dumbly. I couldn’t help myself.
“I’m what you would call a sea witch.”
“Like Ursula?” The question popped out before I could stop it.
Her brow furrowed. “I don’t know what an Urr-soo-lah is,” she said, sounding out the foreign name. “But I was the one who treated you when Finn brought you to my chambers. Your head was bleeding terribly.”
“So you were really the one who saved my life.”
She didn’t get my joke. “I wouldn’t have known that you were drowning unless he brought you to me.”
“Of course.”
Despite the fact that I didn’t like him, I had to concede that if it wasn’t for him, I’d be fish food right about now. And even though I called him a jerk, I got the feeling that he really wasn’t. He acted like he had the fate of the entire ocean on his shoulders, and I didn’t quite know why. Other than failing to save Kai, which was a pretty big deal.
“How am I still alive?” I asked. “How is the pressure not killing me? How deep are we?”
Instead of answering all my questions at once, Nereia simply smiled. “I’ve taken care of that, pearl. You’ll be fine, so no worries.” She sighed. “I see that you have a lot of questions. I guess you would, this being your first time under the sea. Your world works a lot differently than ours.”
“Namely the part where we can’t breathe underwater.”
“Oh, that.” She tinkled with laughter. “Humans are missing gills.” Nereia leaned her head back, showing where, a few centimeters underneath her jawbone, she had two slits on either side. It took me a long moment to realize what they were, yet when they flared, sucking in water, I understood. Mermaids have gills. Who knew? “We have lungs as well, so we can go on dry land for periods of time. Yet it’s our gills that keep us breathing underwater, unlike you humans. And while you can swim, you can’t do it very well, seeing as you’re missing your fins.”