by Ros Baxter
Me. Rania. Of Dirtwater, Nowhere. Half mermaid, half cop. Half freakin’ insane.
I sat up quickly, tearing sheets from my body and wondering if death was like that. Ugly nothingness. Being empty of self. It was the shit-scariest thing that had ever happened to me.
I stretched like a cat, feeling sore patches and an aching bruise where my brain used to be. I glanced at the clock. Ten am. Brownie o’clock.
Wonder why Mom let me sleep so long.
Then I remembered. I was out of bed and hunting for Mom in one swift movement, although the larger muscles of my torso and quads were echoing the screaming of my brain. I felt like some giant hand had picked me up and squeezed until I was red-raw inside and out.
But I didn’t care.
I limped through the red shield of agony. The whole thing seemed surreal. Mermaids in Dirtwater. Sound weapons.
And, weirder still, happy ever after dreams.
“How are you this morning darling?” I fuzzily registered that Mom was speaking with her lips rather than into my head, and that she sounded forced, so I figured we had company.
“Peachy, Mama,” I lied briskly.
And then the voice of my boss was at my ear, picking at my wounds as though he was scratching them with a scalpel. “Big night, huh Rania?”
Aldus. Give me scary sound weapon guy any day. I should have known. Brownie Sunday is like a mating call to the Dirtwater male.
“Hi Aldus,” I smiled at him, sniffing the air. “Started early this morning, Ma?”
“I remember you promised some brownies to little Billy,” she confirmed, doing her best Little House on the Prairie.
Oh by the Goddess, that’s right. I needed to get rid of the Sheriff. But how? I shot an SOS like a laser beam into Mom’s head. Don’t you need something for the frosting?
Mom quickly bundled up two care parcels of freshly iced brownies for Aldus. “Here you go, dear,” she offered with honey persuasion. “Best get those over to your Ma right away, so they’re nice and warm for her.”
“Now?” Aldus had never been sent on his way so quickly. “What about Red Riding Hood?” He motioned at me in my crimson dressing gown. “She usually takes ’em to Ma.” “Oh, she would darling, but she has to go visit her father first. Didn’t you remember it’s Arty’s birthday? And you know your Ma’ll be waiting for them.”
Aldus had the good grace to look embarrassed. Dad’s still his best friend, despite having been locked up in the county jail for the last twelve years. “Oh, of course,” he lied. “Course I remembered. Gonna pop over to see him myself. Later.”
Aldus and Dad play a regular poker game at the jail, every Tuesday afternoon. It says something about Dirtwater that no-one bats an eyelid about the Sheriff and our most famous con being best buddies. Or about the con being the Mayor’s ex. Or the deputy being the daughter of said con and said mayor. I thought for a moment that maybe Dirtwater wasn’t such a parochial little shithole. Maybe Mom knew what she was doing when she chose it after all.
Aldus pried himself off the stool, moseying over to give Mom a quick peck on the cheek.
“Here you go.” She handed him the two parcels in a way that made him feel like the whole thing was his idea.
But even with the boss-man out of the way, there wasn’t much to tell from Mom’s end. Doug had taken off with Blondie but hadn’t said much. He’d dropped Ma’s ride back a couple of hours later and Mom had tried to pump him, but it seemed to me that maybe he hadn’t been sure how much he was allowed to tell, so he’d made himself scarce. He’d left a message on my cell at 8:17am: The delivery’s been made.
“How are you today, Ransha?” Her big blue eyes were slick with worry. I felt awful for putting her through this.
“Fine,” I lied, but opened my mind just a crack so she could peek at the pain.
“Oh darling,” she cried, hand to her mouth. “Is it unbearable?”
“What’s unbearable,” I offered lightly, “is that I’ve run out of cigarettes.”
“Sometimes a time of trial is the best time to add another test,” Mom responded.
Oh no, no way. I didn’t have the strength to argue right now so I made for the shower.
“How long ’til brownies?” I checked as I went. I’ve found there’s very little in life that can’t be cured by a good dose of sugar, butter and chocolate. Since she’s been Mayor, Mom’s been disqualified from the county fair bakeoff, but before that, she won it 16 years straight.
The water was good on skin that felt like scar tissue. I stood under the steaming jets and let them worm their wicked way under my nerve endings until I felt slow and floppy like a day old baby. Then I sat down on the floor for a while, a habit I’d had since I was a kid. I let the water pool around me and thought about that old mermaid movie. The one where the gorgeous blonde comes to live with the kooky Tom Hanks character and is always sprouting a tail. I looked down at my long, strong brown legs, and laughed to myself imagining a tail somehow appearing from my ass. My mind drifted to Aegira, that crazy beautiful underwater world. I pictured all the merfolk swimming, floating, standing around. Not a fishtail in sight. We started out human, after all. So we’re mostly human. More human than fish at least. Or something.
I grabbed a loofah and attacked my feet, scrubbing like I could scrub off the stain of terror and pain the night before had left on me. Then I moved to the rest of my body, washing thoroughly and reaching behind me with a long brush to scrub my back. It itched and ached from the night’s exertions and the brushing felt incredibly good, like pulling the last scabby crust off a healing wound. I wanted the shower never to end.
By the time I finished I felt totally human again.
Which, of course, was kind of ridiculous given my lineage.
As I was standing on the mat, water dripping off my nose, something happened to remind me. One moment I was rubbing myself all over with one of Mom’s soft, thick bath towels. The next I couldn’t see anything but blackness. I instantly thought I’d blacked out, which let’s face it would hardly be surpising given what I’d been through the night before, but I dismissed the thought almost as quickly. I was too aware, too conscious. More than aware. Hyper-aware. Tuned like a hunting dog, senses stretched to their most elastic ends.
The blackness made me a little dizzy and I dropped to my knees on Mom’s fluffy bathmat as it began. Flashing before me somehow, not before my eyes, but across the screen of my mind, and charging all my senses. A… story. A vision. The things I saw, heard and felt were fractured but ghoulish. A dark shape, indistinct but very definitely there. A place with no walls, or time. Or sound. The cries of young girls.
My body reacted like the whole thing was real. Like I was really there, wherever “there” was. My muscles tensed and bunched, ready to fly or fight. Sweat poured from me and my legs started to shake, tucked under me on the bath mat.
I was in danger. Terrible, terrible danger. But so were others. The crying of the girls seemed to intensify and I couldn’t work out what they were screaming but it was as though they were calling to me, right into me, asking for my help. Then the screen on my mind went red, swirling with what I knew in my heart was blood. So much blood. Blood of people, lots of people. People I hadn’t been able to help. And maybe my blood too. Last time I saw that much blood I was lying on a couch at the Red Cross with my sleeve rolled up and an old lady giving me a “Thanks for Your Donation” sticker.
“Nice shower?” Mom enquired sweetly over her shoulder, as I appeared again in the kitchen behind her.
I took a shaky breath, wondering if my legs would hold me. Here we go.
“Mom. I think I’ve developed some… powers.”
Mom laughed, a beautiful tinkling sound, not turning around, preoccupied by something she was fiddling with on the kitchen bench. “Oh darling, you know the drill. Aegir and Ran were magical, but apart from the instant magic of water-breathing, none of it passed. Even telepathy we just developed out of necessity, so we could communicate u
nder all that water. Essentially we’re just very clever fish.” She stopped, turning around and taking me in, wet and shaken, standing in front of her in my dressing gown. She was at my side in a heartbeat, holding me up with arms so strong I remembered all over again how different we really were from humans. A random thought skittered into my brain as she steered me over to the couch and lowered me down firmly. Wonder if she could beat me in an arm wrestle? It had never occurred to me to challenge her to one.
Mom was patting and fussing on me when I clicked back into the moment.
“Mom,” I squawked. “I’m serious. About the powers thing. Something just happened to me. A… a vision, I think. I’ve never had anything like it before.” I narrowed my eyes at her. “Do you know anything about this? Has it ever happened to you?”
Mom rubbed her hands over her eyes, shaking her head. Then she sighed, rolled her shoulders and nodded slightly. “Okay darling. Listen. No, no I’ve never had a… vision. But-” Again, that thoughtful pause, like she was weighing up what and how much to tell me. “But maybe it’s not so crazy.” She pulled me closer to her on the couch, and pressed my head down on her shoulder, but whether it was to get closer to me or because she didn’t want to look me in the eyes, I couldn’t tell. “I had a friend once, who was very… learned. He believed that we… Aegirans, that is... were experiencing an evolutionary quantum leap.”
I lifted my head off Mom’s shoulder and raised an eyebrow, trying not to feel like I was in physics class.
Mom sped it up in deference to my low boredom threshold. “He believed that certain abilities, including, perhaps, a certain psychic capacity, were starting to appear among our race. We were starting to evolve, I guess.”
The skeptic in me was thinking about all the times I’d gone off to Aldus about Dirtwater Spiritual Adventures, the little shopfront down on Main where two-bit psychics and ghost-spotters milked the locals for all they were worth. But some other bits of me were saying I should be a little more open-minded. Given, you know, my own baggage.
My tension must have played out on my face because Mom leaned forward and took my hand as she went on. “My friend, he’d followed several cases where our people had experienced... visions as you call them. Or second sight. He believed… well, he used to say… the most exceptional and gifted would change first. The rest would follow. Evolution. Another Awakening, to begin with the most remarkable. But he’d never been able to prove it.”
I sighed with relief. Maybe I wasn’t going mad after all. But I was still kinda skeptical about whether I fit the theory. Remarkable?
Mom encouraged me with her eyes. “So. Tell me about it darling.”
I hesitated. “As… as I got out of the shower, I saw things. They didn’t all make sense, but it was definitely some kind of vision. And I’m sure it was about Aegira.”
She nodded and waited, taking my hands.
I could feel them shaking, and my heart was still hammering in my ribs from what I’d just experienced. This kind of shit just did not happen to me. I mean, there were certain wild bits about who we were, but I was used to them. I was used to being strong, and the telepathy, all that stuff. All that aside, I’d always felt very… normal. Very workaday. Maybe if I’d had that tail it might have been different. I would have had a daily reminder of my otherness.
As it was, most of the time, when I wasn’t thinking about the fact that a seer from an underwater kingdom had predicted my early demise, I just felt like another harassed cop, trying to stumble along, doing the best I could. I didn’t believe in ghosts or any of that stuff. I knew seers existed (knew more than I wanted to know about them, in fact) but I’d always thought second sight was the province of other creatures and I’d never thought of myself in that category.
I tried to sort what Mom had told me. Others, other Aegirans had visions too.
But why me? Why was I being affected? And why now?
Of course, there was something special about now, and it wasn’t just the fact that I had a pretty significant birthday coming up in three weeks. The words were burned in the brains of Aegiran children before their first lullaby. When Ran’s line ends…
“Mom,” I started again. “What do you really know about all this… prophecy stuff?”
Mom got up and skittered into the kitchen, coming back with a bowl with the frosting dregs and passing it to me. I began to scrape it with my fingers.
“Well,” she said. “You know the basics, darling. Aegira came about ten millennia ago when Aegir, God of the Boundless Seas, sank his island home to the deepest part of the ocean.”
I nodded. “Check.”
She settled in for the tale. “And an evil magician, Manos of course, desired Aegira’s riches and quite fancied a billow maiden wife. He killed Aegir, and his entire family.” She blinked back tears. “They say the sea ran red with blood. All dead, bar the eldest daughter.”
I sucked in my breath as I thought about all that blood in the vision. Was it mine?
Three weeks, and I’m toast. Was the vision about me?
My head spun as I wondered how it would be for me, in three weeks.
Would I be brave? Would I cry like a baby? I’d seen enough to know no-one could ever know til the end how they were gonna be. I’d seen tough guys with tattoos of the devil calling out for their Mamas, and I’d seen little kids dying from violent attacks, cooler than Joan of Arc.
My gut churned. Blood.
“Yeah, yeah,” I confirmed impatiently. “But what about the prophecy?”
“Patience, darling,” Mom clucked in exasperation. “It’s all connected. It’s mystical, for heaven’s sake. Not some…” she looked at me sharply. “…talk show.”
I smiled contritely, swallowed memories of blood and chaos, licked my fingers clean of frosting, and nodded for her to go on. Maybe not, but Dr Phil would have got there quicker.
“Okay, so on her thousandth birthday, Angeyja, the eldest billow maiden, the one he spared? She fell mysteriously pregnant and gave birth to the next sister, who then got her turn to live again. And it’s worked that way ever since. Sister giving birth to sister after living for a thousand years, then living for only a few years until her daughter/sister comes of age.”
Mom sighed, and covered her mouth with her hand, blinking quickly. “Apparently the whole system was a really creative way for Manos to avenge the sisters for blowing him off. Typical man really. It meant the billow maidens could never be together. Because apparently, they adored each other. And… and together they were unstoppable.”
We both sighed then. Men. They’ll never get the sisterhood.
“Problem is Queen Imd was youngest, so she’s now lived a thousand years and there are no sisters left. The prophecy’s supposed to come into effect when Ran’s line ends. That’s now.”
“Yeah, okay, Mom, but what does the prophecy actually mean?” I’ve wondered about prophecies my whole adult life and I wanted her best guess, at least, about this one. The Big Kahuna. Especially now. Especially after the freakin’ things I’d seen in the freakin’ bathroom.
Were they connected somehow? The prophecy of earth and sea? And the Seer’s prediction about me? Last night, the three mermaids in town, it was all too much of a coincidence. And there was too much cop running through these veins of mine, along with that life fish, to believe in any kind of coincidence. Let alone that many coincidences.
Mom was far away, but frowning thoughtfully.
“Well, Aegiran scholars have argued about just that for millennia. I guess there are some parts of the prophecy they generally agree about. The part that says “only one world can be”, for example. They believe it means that only land-dwellers or sea-dwellers will survive the final showdown. Not both. But they’ve come up short trying to work out who or what the prophecy’s “three” are. You remember those mysterious “three”, who’ll stop the bloodtide?”
I nodded.
“Well, no-one knows who they are. Some think it’s all about the return o
f Manos.”
“Wouldn’t he be kind of old by now?”
“Quite,” Mom agreed. “And my thinking is that if we haven’t heard from him in ten thousand years, we’re probably pretty safe. The veil of secrecy obviously worked.” As she finished up, she took the bowl from me and wiped a trail of chocolate from my chin with her finger. “So, what did this vision tell you? About Aegira. How does it look??”
Suddenly I was back in the swirling red chaos, my breath sucked from my lungs, my heart pounding, watching it all unfold.
I grasped her hand.
“Bloody.”
Half an hour later I was on my way to the morgue again, to meet Billy. It felt good to be behind the wheel of Ariel, my beautiful red Chevy Corvette Stingray. Hey, we’re all allowed some irony. I had the Targa T-tops off and I was blowing out some angst. And I was working on nonchalant, ’cause I wasn’t quite sure how Billy was gonna take it when he realized Blondie was missing. I never had a poker face, so I was practicing my lines out loud.
“Heavens above, where could she be?” Nah, too Gone With The Wind.
The psychological wounds of the night before were opening a little at the thought of going back, just as I’d manage to mentally butterfly-clip them together and face another day. I’d thought I was cool with dying. But now, every time I thought about it, my fists clenched and red spots swam before my eyes. My pulse started to race and my focus started to narrow, just like it did when I geared up for a fight. Which was a problem ’cause meditation was tough, but it was a piece of cake compared to changing destiny and saving the world.
Where the hell do you start with that?
When I found Billy, he was draining the dregs from a very large coffee.
“Big night, toots?” I dropped the baking on the slab.