As if sensing my distress, Nereia called down, “Does your head still hurt?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to sleep?”
“I don’t think I’d be able to.” I gingerly touched my head. It throbbed even at the slightest touch. Didn’t I read somewhere that you weren’t supposed to sleep when you’re concussed? Then again, I was under the ministrations of a sea witch.
She appeared, holding a globule of some amber liquid. A straw stuck out of the end of it, waiting for me to suck it down. “Drink this and you’ll be able to sleep.”
The age-old warning of never taking candy from strangers entered my mind, especially when they were sea witches, yet Nereia had done nothing to make me suspect that she would try harming me. In fact, she’d saved my life, so there was no reason for me to resist, especially with my head pounding.
I took it from her, hesitated for a moment more, and drank.
“Now that you’re a merwalker, you should come back and visit. I love hearing what’s happening in the human world. And I’m sure that Finn would love to see you again too.” Her voice sounded far away as the underwater world around me began to fade.
“What?” I muttered. “What’s a merwalker?”
It was too late. I was swallowed up by the darkness once again.
Chapter 4
“Hey, what are you doing here?”
My first thought was that the question was in English—I was sure of it—and my second thought was why someone was asking me that. I was in Nereia’s care in the cave, wasn’t I?
I opened my eyes, curious as to why it was so bright outside when I was deep in the ocean.
Wait a sec, that’s sunlight, and I am on dry land.
Right next to Kai’s isolation tank at the Houston Aquarium, from the looks of it. The aquarist who had been trying to feed him from earlier was standing over me, looking down, his mouth agape.
I sprang up with a gasp, trying to get my bearings. I immediately winced as my head pounded.
“Ow,” I whined, touching my head.
“What are you doing here?” the aquarist demanded. He looked around me, as if the answer was in plain sight. “Did you spend all night here?” He stopped and eyed me warily as a thought struck him. “You aren’t supposed to be here. Were you drinking?”
“No,” I said. “I…” I took stock of my situation. I was still in the clothes that I’d worn when I fell from Kai’s tank, and other than a few wrinkles and dirt, they looked pristine. Like I hadn’t been underwater.
I blinked in the sunlight. “What day is it?” I asked. How much time had passed? Between my faintings, I couldn’t tell how long I’d been in the ocean.
The aquarist looked taken aback. “What are you talking about?”
“What day is it?”
“It’s Wednesday.”
“Oh.” I sat back. So it was the next morning. I let out a long sigh of relief. I might not have been in as much trouble as I’d initially thought. Although, based on the aquarist’s stern expression, my being near the dolphins was probably a bad sign.
“What are you doing here?” he asked again.
“Last night,” I said, gesturing to the pool, “I wanted to check on Kai. He seemed so sad, I wanted to make sure that he was okay.”
As if in answer, the young dolphin let out a mournful cry. Thankfully, I didn’t hear him cry for help. I don’t know if I could have handled hearing him talk at that moment.
The aquarist either didn’t hear the cry or didn’t care, because he was still busy drilling me.
“By sheer dumb luck, you were out of sight of the security cameras, otherwise they would have caught you.” He gestured behind him and I caught a glimpse of the security camera that was trained on the largest of the dolphin pools. I was behind a pillar, beyond the security camera’s reach.
Thank goodness for small miracles.
“I, uh…” I didn’t want to tell him that I’d hit my head or anything and raise alarms that I’d had a concussion. After Nereia’s ministrations, I didn’t want to go to the hospital and have them see any evidence of a sea witch messing around with my cranial structure. I knew that my head was fine, even though I’m not sure what she did or even if she was real. “I laid down to talk to him, and I guess I fell asleep.”
“So you were drunk,” the aquarist said, unimpressed.
“No! I fell asleep here accidentally.” I demonstrated by tilting my head as if to pop my neck and rubbing my shoulder, as if I’d spend the entire night on a concrete surface. “Listen, I know what I did was wrong, but please don’t tell anyone. I could lose my job.”
I really could. One of Neptune’s biggest rules when we went on our tour was to not make a splash of bad publicity for his aquarium. I knew that sneaking into an animal enclosure and falling asleep constituted a “splash”. The realization of that made tears spring to my eyes.
The aquarist considered my plea for a second, before sighing with a long, drawn-out nod. “All right. It’s only because I’d feel bad for you. I know people make mistakes in their lives, especially when they’re young.”
I got to my feet and threw my arms around him. “Thank you, thank you, thank you so much, Mister…”
“It’s Tim,” he said, filling in the blank. “Call me Tim.”
“Thank you so much, Tim!”
“Don’t make me regret it,” he said with a grunt.
I pulled my arms to my side. “Of course,” I said.
Out of the need to make it up to him, I offered to help him feed and prep the dolphins for the day. Instead, Tim waved me away.
“That’s more rule breaking,” he said, “and you’ve done enough of that. Go back to your dressing room, and hurry because others are arriving for work. And don’t swim if you are hungover.” He added that last bit, giving me the impression that he didn’t believe my story about me falling asleep near Kai’s tank.
Before he could change his mind about keeping this quiet, I hurried back to the dressing room. It was early morning, so the hallways weren’t busy either. Even as it was, I rushed as fast as I could. I gratefully slammed the door shut and leaned against it, breathing heavily.
Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe I really had bonked my head on the side of the pool and only imagined everything. Hell, I was lucky that I wasn’t dead. It would have been all too easy to fall in the pool and then have someone find me, bloated and drowned. I’ve read stories like that before where someone had snuck into an aquarium and fell in, only to be discovered in the morning.
I shivered and wrapped my arms about myself. I’m too morbid sometimes.
Cautiously, I walked back to my station and looked at myself in in the mirror. No wonder the aquarist thought I’d been drinking. I looked awful. There were dark purple circles around my eyes, making me look like a zombie. My dark hair was in disarray and it would take a long time to get it looking somewhat presentable. I was also slightly sunburned on the side that had been exposed to the morning sun.
I gingerly lifted the hair from the right side of my head, and I saw a dark, angry spider web of bruising. So that’s where I had hit my head. Thankfully, I didn’t have any blood on me and my hair mostly covered it up. It certainly didn’t look like I had fallen into the Gulf of Mexico and split open my head. It looked like I had hit it pretty badly, sure, but nothing like what Nereia and Finn were talking about.
Maybe it truly was all a dream. Regardless, I probably shouldn’t swim that day.
Yet then I’d be in even more trouble because I didn’t report in last night and I’d be missing out on a performance today. Not to mention that something deep inside me wanted to go back into the water.
A shower would do me a world of good. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was 8:15, so I had about forty-five minutes to get showered and get myself looking like a normal human being. I had to get a move on before Christine showed up.
I got to my feet and headed into the shower, my muscles groaning and my head aching. As
soon as I turned on the water, I felt rejuvenated, like I was an entirely new person. I closed my eyes and put my hand up against the wall, leaning into the spray. I relished the sensation of the warm droplets hitting me and cascading down my body.
It felt good.
I groaned in pleasure, and it wasn’t the normal, “Oh that feels good”. This groan was something different, like something was aroused deep within me. My cheeks burning, I turned off the water and quickly toweled myself dry, not caring if I was too coarse with my scrubbing. I was glad there was no one there to see me.
I self-consciously put my bikini on, ready for the performance later on today, and then put my robe on over it. Jordyn was going to be handling the meet and greet with the kids, which was a relief. I probably needed all the time up until the two o’clock performance to get myself together.
I headed back out into the changing rooms, pausing when I heard voices out there.
“…think she’s okay?” a voice asked. Alaina.
“I hope so,” another voice said. Christine. She sounded so worried. “The cops won’t take a statement until she’s been missing until twenty-four hours. I’m so worried about her.”
I closed my eyes and if it wasn’t for my sore head, I would have given myself a facepalm. They called the cops? I really was in some deep shit. I also cursed myself that I hadn’t texted them as soon as I got back to the changing rooms. I’d been too absorbed in what had happened that I completely forgot. My mother was probably freaking out as well. I usually texted her a few times a day to let her know that I was all right.
“You don’t reckon that she was kidnapped?” Jordyn spoke up. “Maybe she just ran away?”
Before their conversation could get any more morbid about all the possibilities of what happened to me, I steeled myself and walked into the changing room. All three of them were there, setting their bags on their make-up stations. At my appearance, they all froze, looking at me like deer in headlights. Christine’s jaw dropped and the other two stared at me with wide eyes.
“Tara?” Alaina asked.
“Hey guys.” I self-consciously placed a strand of wet hair behind my ear. “Sorry about going AWOL on you guys last night. I, uh…” I couldn’t very well tell them that I’d spent all night by Kai’s pool. Just because I vividly remembered being saved by Finn and Nereia doesn’t mean it actually happened.
“You idiot!” Christine’s voice snapped me back to the present situation. She stood in front of me, her hands on her hips as she stared me down, an angry frown on her face. “You nearly gave me a heart attack, Tara! Where the hell were you?!”
“I, uh…” My mind reeled, and Finn’s handsome face floated across my mind, taking my breath away. I came up with something that was somewhere in between what I believed was the truth and what was more likely to have happened. “I…met someone.”
She stepped back with a bewildered look on her face that was reflected on both Alaina and Jordyn. “You met someone?”
“Like a guy?” Jordyn ventured in a scandalous stage whisper.
I closed my eyes, not believing the next words that came out of my mouth. “Yeah. We went back to his place?” The pitch of my voice raised on the last word, making it sound like a question. I hoped it didn’t sound like I was making it up.
“Did you…?” Christine asked as Jordyn exclaimed, “Oh my god, you didn’t!” She hooted like she was seeing a kiss on an old TV show.
My cheeks burned. I should have said something else.
Christine shook her head. “Where did you meet this guy?” Before I could answer, she shook her head as if she were erasing her thoughts. “Never mind. You’re eighteen years old, you’re an adult. Just please, please, please promise me that you’re being safe. And if you are…going over to a guy’s place, please let one of us know. And that’s all I’m saying about that.”
I let out a breath. So now everyone thought that I was a bit easy. I guess that’s better than thinking I was crazy, at least for now. And I wasn’t going to be kept from the performance this afternoon. Something deep in the pit of my stomach told me that I had to be there.
Christine continued, all business. “Jordyn, you need to get ready for the meet and greet, you only have half an hour to get ready.”
The pressure was off me. I still felt terrible, but at least I wasn’t going to be fired, or worse.
I exhaled.
Yet, there was still the question that remained. What really did happen last night?
***
Even Neptune noticed that I was a bit off-kilter.
“You look a lil’ different today,” he told me gruffly. We were by the dolphin pool and I had barely gotten into the water to put my mermaid tail on for the two o’clock performance. I held onto the ledge with one hand, submerged up to my shoulders as I maneuvered into my tail with my other hand. Even though getting in the water felt amazing, I was able to keep the groan of pleasure from escaping my throat this time. They didn’t need to know that it felt like the water completed me.
“Did you get some extra beauty sleep or somethin’?” Neptune asked, frowning.
I glanced at Christine, who was putting her tail on by the side of the pool. She downcast her eyes, and I got the message. While she wasn’t going to tell our boss about me going missing last night, she wasn’t going to help me either. I was on my own.
“Extra beauty sleep,” I said vaguely, hoping that he wouldn’t push the issue. By now, I’d decided that it had all been some sort of weird dream and I had passed out by the pool. That was it. No merman. No sea witch. Just a bad circumstance.
I pulled up on my mermaid tail, which thankfully slid up over my hips without any trouble. Usually it was a mission to get the tight silicon to pull up. Today, it seemed that I was getting better at putting it on.
He squinted down at me, his mouth open as if he was about to say something else, then he shook himself and handed the air hose to me.
“Don’t get too much beauty sleep,” he warned. “You might have trouble waking up from it.”
Before I could ask what he meant by that, he turned away and sauntered over to the other side to talk to Alaina, who was having trouble getting her tail on over her burgeoning belly—noticeable only to those of us who knew how tiny she was before she became pregnant. I frowned, thinking how much I was going to miss the other mermaid when she left to have her baby.
I looked back to the dolphin pool to check if I heard anything coming from there. Kai seemed like he was avoiding me and I didn’t feel any deep emotions overtaking me, so maybe I really did dream all of it up.
I squeezed the trigger for the air hose and heard the satisfying hiss of air. I put it in the water, squeezed the trigger again, and air bubbles floated to the top.
“Tara,” Christine said softly, drawing my attention over to her. “Look, I know that I said you’re an adult and that you can make your own choices, but if there’s anything you need to talk about, like birth control…”
“I’m good.” I tried smiling encouragingly at her. “I’m sorry for making you worry.”
She frowned. “Please call me if that happens again. So I know where you are.”
“Of course,” I said. “I promise I’ll do that.” Not that I plan on that ever happening again, whatever it was.
She smiled at me then, the first I’d gotten from her all day. “All right.”
As if remembering that we were about to go on to perform, she glanced up at the clock. “Let’s get this show on the road.” She signaled to Jordyn and Alaina, who gave their thumbs up that their tails were on and that they were ready. She then signaled to the volunteer. “It’s show time.”
All four of us submerged and headed for the stage area.
Underwater, I could hear my heartbeat, like some sort of bass drum that oddly pounded in time to the music. My eyes were open, and I could swear that I could see better than ever before in the water. Everything looked crystal clear.
I must’ve hit my head hard
er than I thought.
The strangeness made me hesitate briefly before reaching the front glass and pulling myself up the edge of the glass to introduce us to the audience. Christine glanced over at me in concern. Everyone else had reached the glass before me. Usually I’m the first to reach the glass, being so excited about the chance to perform. I gave her a quick nod to let her know that I was all right.
Focus, Tara, I told myself.
The music came on and all four of us waved. We were supposed to push off the wall and do a back flip. I obliged, trying to execute the movement, only I slid through the water like a hot knife through butter and misjudged my trajectory, shooting me down twenty feet, almost to the bottom of the pool. I could hear the gasp of air bubbles above me, and I realized that my fellow mermaids saw my mistake. I quickly recovered and swam back up, aligning myself with Christine.
My troubles didn’t end there. For some reason, every time we twisted, I spun an extra three times. When we did a backflip, I did mine in a quarter of the time. It wasn’t that I was trying to show off. Heck, I was the least experienced out of all of us—I usually couldn’t move as fast as the other three mermaids. Nevertheless, I was spinning and moving like I’d always lived in the water.
Like I was a fish.
Jordyn caught my eyes, and she did a double take. Yeah, I was about to feel that way too. Something was wrong. Yet at the same time, something was oh so right.
I enjoyed it. This reminded me of the first time I put on a tail two months ago. In all my dreams, I had no idea how incredible it was to be a mermaid. Again, I was feeling like I did that first day, only this was far more…empowered.
The adrenaline hit me then, filling me with elation. I gasped when it hit me, and the awkwardness fell off me like I’d removed a cloak.
I suddenly forgot how weird it all was. There was just me and the water. I was going to have fun with this, and take this performance to a whole new level. When we were supposed to spin, I executed the quadruple spin. When we backflipped, I made my circumference bigger, relishing the water supporting me.
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