by Erin Hayes
Finn’s jawline set. “Yes,” he said without looking at Ponce or me. “Just that though. Lookers. Nothing else.”
I looked at our clasped hands, and I thought about how perfectly they fit together. This was a scary position to be in, this new world, and Finn was my navigator through it all. He made me feel like I belonged, even more so than I did on land. There, I was always the weird girl with a strange fascination with mermaids. Here, while I wasn’t quite a mermaid, I was with someone who treated me like I was normal.
No. He was a merman, and I was a human. This wouldn’t ever work.
I gulped my heart back down to my chest where it beat with the rhythm of a sad song.
We approached a set of great of double doors at the end of the hall. These doors were made out of half a giant clam shell apiece, sparkling with their abalone texture. Intricate designs were etched onto the shells, flourishes of abstract shapes and lines that were tightly woven together. It was stunning.
To my utter surprise and slight terror, I saw that four tiger sharks were at the entrance to the room in an attack formation. Their black eyes watched us as we came up. The palace might have had open walls, yet this was heavily fortified. Whatever was behind this door must have been important.
Like a king.
Finn cursed under his breath. He looked like an animal that was trying to find an escape.
“Is this some kind of throne room?” I asked.
“Some kind of throne room,” he agreed cryptically. “I was hoping we’d catch him alone at this time.”
I didn’t see any clocks and the sun wasn’t reliable this deep, so I had no idea how he knew what time it was.
He looked as if he was about to pull me to another place in the palace, when one the sharks addressed him.
“Prince Finn.” He bowed his head down in a gesture of supplication. “King Oceanus has been expecting you.”
Finn let out a sigh, the color leaching from his face. “I should have known,” he muttered. “Is he alone?” I heard the note of hope in his voice.
The shark grinned, which wasn’t pretty on a predator like him. If anything, it made it look like he was baring his teeth at Finn. “He’ll make time for you.”
Finn’s jaw worked while he considered this. “Is it all right if I bring my two guests with me?”
The grin became even wider. “He’s counting on it. He’s interested in who the girl is.”
I shivered. Guards or not, I didn’t like these guys. Ponce had kept his mouth shut and stuck close to me, like I could stop a shark feeding frenzy if the guards decided that he was bait.
Finn took another glance at the shark guards before moving forward. His hand left mine, and I wanted to grab hold of it again because I felt naked without it. He went to the clam doors and pulled one of them open. Light poured out from the hole, casting rays on both Finn and the floor of the hallways. Sounds came out, of people chattering.
Finn gestured for me to come over. I wrapped an arm around Ponce’s body and brought him along with me as I swam to the door.
The sharks’ eyes never left us, never blinking once.
As I passed Finn, he nodded sympathetically to me.
I wished I could get my heart rate under control. Nerves were getting the best of me, and I couldn’t quite explain why. Maybe it was because Ponce had said that Oceanus would flip his lid if he knew that a human was in the palace. I gulped self-consciously and passed through the doors and into Oceanus’s throne room.
Chapter Seven
The collective gasp from all of the room’s occupants when I entered the room made me flinch. I squinted, trying to discern the shapes around me as the bright light momentarily disoriented me.
Why was it so bright?
“What’s wrong with her?” a female voice asked in much the same kind of voice that you would hear someone shriek over a mouse in the kitchen. “Why is her tail like that?”
What the heck was wrong with my mermaid tail that merfolk could pick up something off about it right away? The other creatures of the sea hadn’t noticed as much. Maybe it was like humans noticing that someone had bad plastic surgery, while an animal wouldn’t care.
Whatever it was, I was starting to feel like maybe my tail hadn’t been the good camouflage that I thought it was.
I glanced over to where I’d heard the voice and saw an elderly mermaid with dark blue skin gaping at me. There were a lot of merfolk in this room. It was like a royal court, and there were dolphins and whales and fish and octopods and crabs all looking at me, making me the center of attention. On a dais in the middle of it all, a merman sat on what looked like a throne made up of seashells, coral, and sand covered in algae. He had a deep blue tail which contrasted with his long ginger hair and beard. He appeared to be in his mid-fifties, although I got the impression that he was much older than that. For a man in his fifties though, he was well built and muscular. Arnold Schwarzenegger would have been jealous. A crown of tan coral sat atop his head.
Despite the difference in hair color, I could tell from the shape of his face and certain idiosyncrasies like how he combed his fingers through his hair, that he was Finn’s father, King Oceanus.
Like Nereia’s cave, the room was lit by glowing plants, only far more of them, and these cast the throne room with a white light.
Oceanus scrutinized me in the way a scientist dissects a bug, his face contorted in a grimace that said he wasn’t amused. “Finn?” he questioned, his deep baritone voice reverberating throughout the chambers. “I was told by my sources that you were traveling with a disfigured mermaid. Who is this?”
Murmurs broke out among the court, guessing at who—and what—I was. Oceanus sternly glanced around, silencing the gossip.
I had to stifle a shiver. Beside me, Ponce actually shuddered. I guess King Oceanus really did scare the caviar out of him.
Finn moved in front of me, almost in a protective gesture. “We need to talk. Alone.”
Oceanus’s eyes narrowed, and for a second, I thought he was going to push the issue. “Leave us. Everyone. Except you,” he pointed to Finn, “and you,” he said, pointing to me, although the contempt in his eyes was enough to make me squirm.
The throne room began to clear out, the court stealing furtive glances back at us. I thought back to my meet and greet from only the day before when I was the center of attention for a drastically different reason. Now, I would have given anything to be back there. Except I needed to reverse whatever was happening to me, and I needed to keep my promise to Kai.
My heart squeezed, and I hoped he was okay.
“You stay too, Ponce,” Oceanus boomed. I hadn’t noticed that the snapper was trying to slip away with the crowd. Ponce snapped right back to my side.
“Here, I thought you were coming for a visit, my son,” Oceanus said, “but it turns out that this is a business trip. You need to explain to me what you’re doing with a merwalker. She is a merwalker. I can spot it a fathom away.”
“What does that even mean?” I asked. “Everyone keeps calling me that, and I have no idea what that is.”
Oceanus raised an eyebrow. “Who is ‘everyone’?” he asked, his voice low and dangerous.
I thought he was asking me, but Finn answered, “Nereia, Ponce, and myself.” While his voice was even and quiet, there was an intensity to it as he addressed his father. I got the feeling that this wasn’t the first time he and Oceanus had had a confrontation like this.
“Let me guess,” the king said, rubbing his temples, “my dear sister was the one behind this abomination.”
Finn nodded.
Oceanus groaned. “And here she is, out trying to get the ingredients for some damned potion!” He pounded his fist on the arm of the throne and it echoed throughout the now-empty room. “Is there even a reason for that potion, or is she hiding something from me?”
“You know as well as I do that she needs it sooner rather than later,” Finn answered, bristling.
Oceanus glared at
him. “Do I?” he asked. “Do you? She could have motives get this—” he indicated me again “—permanent. It’s happened in the past.”
“I don’t want to be a permanent mermaid, either!” I blurted. “Until twenty-four hours ago, I had no idea mermaids were even real. But what is this? What is a merwalker?”
Finn shot me a look, his expression telling me to take it down a notch.
Oceanus pushed himself off his throne and floated down to me, his hair swirling in the water like some sort of watery ghost. To my credit, I held my ground as he came towards me. In fact, he came right up to me and grasped my chin. I fought him at the gesture, taken aback by his hands on me. He held on, ignoring my struggle, and lifted my chin up to see my gills.
“A merwalker,” he said slowly, “is a creature that can live in the sea with fins as a mermaid and on land with legs as a human. Merwalkers are dangerous. They aren’t to be trusted. You’re the first one in my kingdom in a long time. If my people knew that you were in their midst, there would be a panic.”
He released my chin, and I swam back a few feet, shaking my head while I rubbed where he gripped me. It hurt.
“I don’t recall ever having fins,” I said defensively.
“You were changed.”
I thought back to waking up underwater both times. Both times I’d been breathing underwater. So it had to have happened while I was unconscious. Nereia did say that she had to do a few things to put me back together. Was turning me into a merwalker one of them?
“I’m sure my sister did that,” Oceanus continued tiredly. “Although how you ended up in her care...?”
“That was my doing,” Finn said, inserting himself back into the conversation.
“Your doing?” Oceanus asked, looking at him curiously.
Finn held himself a bit straighter as he addressed his father. “Last night, I went to the human prison, the Aquarium, to release Prince Kai. Tara here was at the prince’s cell.”
“What were you doing at his majesty’s cell?” Oceanus demanded, whirling on me.
I was shocked, speechless that Finn had casually dropped the fact that Kai was a prince too. I’d had no idea until that moment that Kai was royalty.
Was everyone here some sort of prince? I gulped, realizing how bad it looked that I was by Kai’s pool when Finn found me. No wonder he thought I was a kidnapper. I would have thought I was a kidnapper too.
“She was trying to help him,” Finn interjected for me. “She was startled by my appearance and injured herself. I had to abandon the mission in order to save her.”
“Heh,” Oceanus sneered. “Save a human instead of a prince?”
I now knew where I stood in Oceanus’s eyes. Although I couldn’t blame him, knowing that Kai was a prince and important, I felt even worse that I had gotten in the way of his rescue.
“I wasn’t about to let her die,” Finn said evenly. “Kai agreed with me that it was the right thing to do. She was trying to help him, after all.”
“Then you are both fools,” King Oceanus sighed. “So that’s when you took her to Nereia. That was foolish on everyone’s part. I hope you see that, given the deadline.” The king stroked his beard in thought. “So why did you bring her here where other merfolk could see her?”
“She doesn’t want to be a merwalker,” Finn replied. “I thought you could help.”
Oceanus burst out laughing. “Son, the only mermaid who can help her is out in the trenches looking for a fire flower. It was a waste of time to bring her here. I have an impending war against the land dwellers, and the last thing I need is a panic over an intruder on my hands.”
“Impending war?” I squeaked. “What?”
Finn shot me another look. Before there could be any further discussion, however, a tiny seahorse, no bigger than the width of my finger, swam the distance up to Oceanus’s ear, speaking to him in hushed tones so I couldn’t hear. The king paused, tilting his head to hear the little guy better. He reeled back in horror, thundering, “What? They’re here?”
I heard the seahorse eep something like an apology as the clamshell doors to the throne room were thrown open. I shrank back, conscious that I was a stranger in a strange land. If more merfolk were coming in here, they would notice that I was different, and there might be trouble. My only saving grace was that Prince Finn had, so far, granted me his protection.
Two dolphins came in, one of them the size of a killer whale, while the other one was more petite, yet still possessing an air of authority. An entourage of creatures came with them into the room, clownfish, snappers, crabs, eels, and more. By sheer luck, there were no merfolk in the group, though. This was a decidedly different crowd than before.
Finn put a protective arm across me, which told me all I needed to know. We were not in friendly company. He was tense, ready to bolt or fight if it came to it. And I’d be caught in the middle because I had no idea what the hell I was doing.
“You!” the smaller dolphin shouted in my direction.
At first, I thought she was talking to me, that I’d been discovered. Yet as the smaller dolphin—a female—swam towards us, it dawned on me that she was addressing Finn.
“You said that you would bring him back!” the female dolphin cried shrilly, in hysterics. “You said that you would bring my son back!”
Finn’s cheeks colored, the only indication that he was flustered. “Queen Nadia, I am doing everything I can at the moment.”
“No!” she sobbed. “No you’re not. You wouldn’t be here otherwise! You would be trying to bring my Kai to me!”
Kai’s parents. My heart broke for them and for Kai, knowing he was still in the isolation pool at the aquarium.
The muscles in Finn’s jaw flexed and unclenched. “Rest assured, I am doing everything I can. The humans are smart. They’re keeping Kai too far from the ocean for him to jump their barriers. We will need to have the fire flower potion ready for him.”
“You’re putting the fate of our son in the Sea Witch’s hands?” the huge dolphin demanded. If I thought Oceanus’s voice boomed in the throne room, I was unprepared for this dolphin’s voice. It reverberated deep in my bones. The huge dolphin turned to Oceanus. “Need I remind you that my deadline still stands?”
Deadline? Did that have to do with the impending war that Oceanus mentioned?
“Levi,” Oceanus said, “I assure you, Kai will be back by sunset tomorrow.”
The giant dolphin, King Levi, puffed up. Beside him, Queen Nadia sniffled, which fueled his anger. “I mean it, Oceanus. I don’t make threats lightly. My people are ready to take Kai back by force if we have to. We have the power of the deep sea creatures at our beck and call and the weather and waves of the oceans if it comes to it.”
“Finn is the best protector Thalassa has ever had,” Oceanus explained. “He will bring back Prince Kai. You have my word.” He looked directly at Finn, who continued to stoically look forward.
“We just want our son back,” Nadia said, her voice still shrill. I’d never seen a dolphin cry before, and I was responsible for Finn’s failed rescue attempt. I tried imagining what it was like for a mother to lose her child. While my mother was always a bit cold to me, Dad had always treated me like I was the center of his world. He made sure that I was taken care of and never let me out of his sight. Nadia would feel the same way, I imagine.
Then, for some reason, I thought back to Christine worrying about my disappearance the night before. She was concerned, although it was one millionth of the concern that Nadia must have felt.
I debated if I should say anything to give them peace of mind. That Kai was being well-treated. That he was going to be okay until we found a way to bring him back, whether that was by tomorrow night or later. There was no need for a deadline. He was going to be okay. I could help out. I could go back to the surface and campaign for Kai’s release.
I was human. I could secure his release using human tactics.
I opened my mouth and flicked my tail forward t
o voice my thoughts, however ludicrous they may be, yet Finn grabbed my arm and shot me with a look that said, “Don’t.” I wanted to protest, but he slightly shook his head. Now wasn’t the time to speak up.
Our gazes met, slowing down time. Tears welled up in my eyes at my predicament and at Kai’s imprisonment.
“Easy, Tara,” Finn murmured. “I’ll explain everything after this.”
You haven’t explained anything! I wanted to shout at him. In answer, he squeezed my hand, instantly calming me.
“Queen Nadia and King Leviathan,” Oceanus was saying, breaking into my inner turmoil, “you’re more than welcome to stay here until Finn retrieves Kai.” I didn’t know what Oceanus would do to his son if he failed. Then again, I also knew that they didn’t have the best of relationships. Finn’s failure could ignite a powder keg. If those even worked down here.
“He’d better, Oceanus,” the big dolphin king warned. “You know the forces I command are so powerful, they can’t be stopped once they’re unleashed. It’s your son’s job to save the creatures of the sea. He’d better do it.”
The threat lingered in the water around us. The entire entourage of the dolphin king and queen dispersed, led away to various sectors of the palace to wait out the lost prince’s absence. Luckily, none of the sea creatures paid attention to me, so there weren’t any more questions about who or what I was. Finn played the part of the good prince and helped the king and queen dolphin leave the room, leaving me to chat with Ponce.
“Well, this is exciting,” Ponce said nervously. I nearly jumped out of my mermaid tail at his voice. I’d forgotten he was there.
“Wish you’d stayed behind?”
“A bit,” the snapper admitted. “I might’ve miscalculated that one. The last time I saw King Oceanus, he threatened to feed me to the guards. This was worse.”
“Well, thanks for staying,” I said.
Ponce gave me a sideways glance. “If I was an octopus, I woulda inked up the whole place.”
“That could have been a good thing,” I murmured, looking at my tail and wishing for the cover it would have provided.