by Amy McNulty
“Your dad said you’re staying with your mom exclusively for a while.” Her limbs shook slightly as a nervous chuckle escaped her lips. “Hey, did you know this whole debacle got my dad to come visit me? He’s still in town.”
Something inside me softened. I might have felt empathy for her before Homecoming.
“He’s… That is, he’s…” She went silent for a moment before a watery smile erupted on her face. “Ivy, I need to win this.”
I scoffed as the inaudible conversation of our family from downstairs traveled up the landing. “And doom the merfolk to extinction? I don’t think so.”
Calder nodded at me, and something in his demeanor, something like a sense of courage I so rarely saw in him, spurred me on. “The vampires have had their time, Ember. It’s not like them vanishing would be cutting lives short.”
“Their lives were already cut short,” said Ember. “This second life—it might be some kind of recompense for that.” She frowned, her right hand clenching into a fist at her side as she clutched the dirtied towel to her heart. “Ivy, I need you to trust me.”
The laughter that escaped my lips sounded hollow. “Who was the first person to attack whom back at Homecoming?” I asked.
Ember’s gaze darted to Calder.
No. I’d walked in on Calder surrounded, the vampires having a field day as they’d paced back and forth like lions about to assault their prey.
…I’d walked in to find the battle in progress.
And who had started the fire to get the sprinklers going anyway?
Calder shook his head as my fingers seemed to thaw, my own arm lowering.
“Ivy?” called Noelle up the stairs. “Oh, hello. Are you Ivy’s new friends? Will you all be staying for dinner?”
Ember turned at the sound of her mom’s voice and I let the ice flow out of my hand, but even so—I grabbed for her wrist.
She let out a startled cry, but I wasn’t intending to hurt her. Instead, I focused. What are you so afraid of?
I saw images of a man with gold-and-gray hair, a wine glass in hand, a wide grin on his face. The room was dark, my surroundings difficult to focus on. I blinked through Ember’s eyes and saw the bright blue irises first—the scores of them all around me—Dean coming into focus to the right of me.
A woman in a dark red dress drank from a goblet filled with a dark liquid, a trickle of red dripping down her pale chin.
Dad, I thought. But Dad was nowhere to be found.
I gasped, letting go of Ember’s wrist, realizing what had gone through my brain. Her dad. Her uninvolved father had come to visit her in the hospital and wound up dining with vampires?
Chapter Fourteen
My fingers were barely off of Ember’s wrist before it all came tumbling out. “The bloodsuckers have taken your dad hostage?”
“What?” she asked, rubbing her wrist with her other hand as if I’d burned her. “How did you…?”
“That’s enough,” said Calder, striding forward to snatch my elbow. “If this is a neutral zone, we need to get out of here. All of us.” He nodded to his group.
“Ember? Ivy?”
I’d almost forgotten Noelle was at the bottom of the stairs.
“We’re leaving, Mrs. Sheppard,” said Calder as he practically dragged me down the stairs.
“Ms. Goodwin-Sheppard,” said Noelle, her lips drawn tight. “Ivy, are you really going…?”
I yanked my arm away from Calder and put a flittering smile on my face. “Yes, sorry, but thanks, Noelle. I have plans.”
“Ivy.” Ember looked down from the second floor, her pallid figure behind the bannister too reminiscent of a specter. “You can stay.”
“Don’t trust her,” hissed Calder into my ear.
I shook my head up at Ember, then gazed around the staircase and into the kitchen. Autumn and Dad were laughing, Autumn continually trying to keep a box of donuts out of his reach and Dad clearly just pretending to miss snatching it.
My stomach grew knotted, my regrets piling up by the minute.
“No,” I said again, fighting back the tears in my eyes. “We have to go.”
I led the way, brushing past Noelle without even telling my dad and Autumn I’d see them later.
“Now, wait a minute, young lady.”
I stopped in the middle of the driveway, my merfolk milling about between me and my step-mother, who’d followed us out onto the porch. She approached us by cutting across the grass, her hands on her hips, the ruffled collar of her blouse slightly askew at the end of a long day. “I hope you haven’t forgotten your father’s and my wedding ceremony.” Her eyes flicked to Calder, then the rest of the group. “Your new friends are welcome to come.”
I blinked rapidly, my brain scrambling for some semblance of what my life had been before this. “Right. End of the month.” That was just about a week and a half away.
“Just because you’re spending more time with your mom doesn’t mean you can’t be there for your dad and me on this important day.” She jiggled a bracelet on her wrist and the movement reminded me of her daughter just a few minutes before. “I know we already got married at the courthouse, but this is for friends and family—this is the real celebration of a life we’re so happy to be living.” She smiled and took a few steps closer, practically willing the other teens to step away. Then she gave me a hug and it was awkward, but I tried to hug back, patting her on the shoulder. My eyes darted about and locked on Ember in a second-story window above—the master bedroom. The lace curtains billowed gently at her touch, her blonde hair falling in waves over half her face, reminding me of that one old starlet who probably couldn’t even see out of one of her eyes when she filmed thanks to the hairdo.
Noelle pulled back and squeezed me by the upper arms. “We need all our daughters there.”
“Of course,” I said, my insides quivering. “Of course…”
If this was over by then, one way or another, I couldn’t guarantee all her daughters would be there.
I spent the better part of the very short drive scrolling through the missed messages on my phone, my palm clammy and my heart thundering even as I tried not to think too hard about everything before me. If Ember had never joined this battle, I wouldn’t have, either. I ached for the normalcy of my life, for the company of my longtime friends.
My fingers dragged over a picture Paisley had sent me of her and Lyric in history, Lyric sticking her tongue out, probably because she’d been instructed the picture was about to be sent to me. She was probably more upset about Raelynn than anything—assuming they hadn’t quite made up yet—but it was clear I was also on an enemies list of some sort at the moment.
“The vampires don’t know about our ability. At least—they didn’t.” Calder let out a deep breath as he put the truck in park in the lot outside the Poole Estate garage. He flicked off the ignition. “Now Ember is going to wonder why you know something she didn’t tell you about her dad—”
“Yeah, something pretty important, wouldn’t you say?” I dropped my phone into my tote bag, the only message sent to Paisley, about my first day at Central being okay but totally failing to make the swim team—which was fine by me, I’d been sure to add.
I’d never be one for that kind of structure in sports and exercise. I’d envied the freedom of the merfolk—though I couldn’t bring myself to be quite so free and loose in the nudist sense like they were.
Cascade, Laguna, Bay, and Llyr poured out of the garage, suddenly gathering in a circle and playing rock-paper-scissors, one coupling at a time, until Cascade threw up her hands in the air, a grin on her face even as she shook her head.
The other three started stripping in front of the moat and I realized they’d been playing for clothes-pick-up duty.
“How is that important?” Calder’s voice cracked as he slammed a palm against the steering wheel.
“What…?” I’d almost forgotten what we’d been speaking about.
“Argh,” said Calder. He slanted
away from me, leaning his head against the driver’s side window. “Just don’t… Don’t tell my mom you screwed up, all right?”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean it.” Calder gripped the door handle, his brain clearly churning for a minute. “Just… don’t. Don’t let her know you may have let Ember know about our subconscious thought touch.” He opened his door.
“Oh, so it’s like a proper superpower now?” I kept up the conversation as Calder reached into the space between us to grab his backpack and then slid it over one arm. “Could have fooled me that it would come in handy.” I opened my own door and had to grind my teeth as Calder joined me and Cascade made her way toward us, her arms piled high with clothes and shoes. Laguna floated on her back like a painting of Ophelia, and only the very tips of fins were visible from Bay and Llyr.
“Can I get a hand with the backpacks?” asked Cascade, nodding toward the garage.
Calder growled and stormed over there, his legs practically bouncing to join the others in the water.
He was getting harder to root for by the minute. “You know, it actually did come in handy for once,” I pointed out as Calder opened the back door of Cascade’s car and started loading up his arms with bookbags. I shuffled the straps of my tote bag higher up my arm and grabbed one, the heat of my face at odds with the ice forming on my fingers. “We know something we’d have no reason to know before. Something that could partially explain Ember’s motivations—at least her current ones. Something we might hold over her or use to think of a plan—”
“Let me repeat myself,” snapped Calder. “The vampires didn’t know that about us and now they’ll probably figure it out. We lost an advantage.”
I flailed my arms around, knocking my tote bag down to my elbow. “Like you don’t already have an insane advantage in this fortress?”
“There’s no way my mom is going to allow you to lure the vampires here.”
“Why on Earth not? Doesn’t she want this to be over?”
“Listen. You have no idea how badly my mom wants this to be over, but there are precautions we have to take.”
“Like what?”
Cascade cleared her throat as she stood in front of the door leading inside. “Sorry to interrupt this lovers’ quarrel, but can I get a hand?” There was too much in her own to for her to get a hand free.
A sigh escaped Calder’s lips as he looked at his own arms, bulging with school supplies. “You get it,” he said sullenly.
“Me?” Right. The scanning. I put my palm against the sensor, and sure enough, it lit up green, the door to the glass water-coated hallway swinging open. Cascade and Calder made their way inside.
They hesitated at the other end, waiting for me to do my palm trick again, but I wasn’t one of the ones wearing aquatic shoes, and my poor water-logged boots had just dried out from this morning. “Just a second,” I said, cringing as my toes tingled while I moved one foot in front of the other.
I laid my palm on the second sensor and the door opened again, Cascade going straight to the laundry table with all her stuff and Calder hanging the bookbags on a coatrack nearby. They both kicked off their shoes and added them to the others’ beneath the table.
“You think I could get a pair of those?” I asked, cringing as I peeled away the foul-smelling leather of my boots.
“Sure,” said Cascade, a bright look on her face as she started peeling her shirt off in front of Calder and me. I looked away. “Someone should have thought of that. I think we have some spares in a closet somewhere.”
Calder was removing his clothes, too.
“What… are you two doing?” I asked.
“Getting ready for dinner,” said Cascade, bending to peel off her pants.
“No, that’s the complete opposite of what you two are doing,” I pointed out.
“Come on,” said Cascade, padding over to me in her bra and panties. “Get undressed.”
“No thanks?” I tried not to look at Calder’s bare rear end as he strolled over to the pool in the entryway. He put his arms together above his hand, ending in the point of his clasped palms, and dove, his toes shimmering into fins just before they vanished beneath the water.
“You’ll have to excuse him,” said Cascade, shaking me back to the moment.
I’d been thinking about how toned and sculped his leg muscles were before they’d vanished into scales. “He’s… He’s not taking this thing well,” explained Cascade.
“This… thing?”
Cascade flourished her hands around her. “The battle. It doesn’t… It doesn’t feel real.”
“What do you mean?”
The splashing from Calder’s swim was fading now, the distant trickle of water the only indicator of movement.
“Unlike the vampires, the merfolk—we live human life spans.” Cascade maneuvered her arms behind her to unclasp her bra. I took off the sweater she’d lent me and folded it numbly, then hugged the midriff-baring top I still had on after putting the sweater on the table. I wasn’t going for a swim topless, if that was where I was expected to go.
I nodded. “Calder’s really sixteen and De—the vampire prince is an old man. I get it.”
“But do you?” She held her bra aloft and chucked it into a laundry bin. “That means the bloodsuckers have done nothing but wait with bated breath for this battle to begin. Our parents grew up without it ever being a possibility. Our grandparents even—despite the…” She chewed her lip.
“The queen’s grandfather,” I said, remembering that important detail.
“Yes, and even then, it wasn’t the battle, it wasn’t the real war.” She shook out her long hair so part of it covered her chest. “Calder probably just thought… Well, he might have thought we’d have a chance to grow up without worrying about any of this. A chance where ‘the battle to declare a winning species’ is just a distant, far-off idea—like it had been for generations.”
“It shouldn’t be all on your shoulders.” I looked around, but there was no sign of life from the kitchen behind me. “You have enough people here that you could all chip in.”
“Maybe,” said Cascade. She was working on getting her panties off now and I turned away. “But either way, Prince Calder would be at the center of it. He couldn’t get out of his role to play in all of this.”
“Well, he’s not doing a great job of that,” I muttered. “If he’s supposed to be my support.”
“Your consort, even.”
I winced. “We’re trying that… But I thought, well… The one thing I’d ask for in a boyfriend—especially one for whom I’m doing so much—would be to have my back. Calder doesn’t have that.”
A splash behind me told me Cascade had jumped in. “That’s not true.” Her voice was loud as it carried across the entryway. “You just don’t realize what he’s trying to do for you.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Are we talking about the same angry, frightened merman here?”
“Trust me,” said Cascade.
Sure. I just met you yesterday, but sure.
“Come on in,” she said, waving one arm high above her head. I felt my feet moving toward the edge of the water. She laughed and winced. “Sorry. I’m so not used to speaking to humans in this form. I forget about the siren call.”
Shaking my head, I blinked myself back to the moment. Right. Another potential tool in my arsenal. “Does that work on vampires?”
“What?” asked Cascade, her arms fluttering around her.
“Siren call.”
“Oh.” She chewed her lip. “No. I don’t think so. Not that I’ve ever tried it myself, but, like, vampires have their own seduction technique, I guess you’d call it? They don’t seem to fall for mermaids.”
Drat. Biting my lip, I checked for any other sign of life in the house. “So are we having this dinner meeting?” I asked. “The war council?”
Cascade’s fins poked out of the water as she made little coquettish movements with her hands to swim backward, her torso alm
ost fully above the surface. “That’s why I told you to get undressed.”
I blanched and pointed to the water. “It’s down there?”
“Sometimes we prefer to dine merfolk-style,” she said. “Come on!”
Well, I clearly needed more practice in the water anyway, if the swim team coach’s ire was an indication of my skill. I waited for Cascade to make a loop around the little pool so her back was to me and then removed my leggings, skirt, and underwear. I hesitated at the top. Nope.
I dove, maintaining my human form almost all the way to the bottom.
Cold. Really cold.
A hazy, shapely figure appeared to my left. I blinked hard, but Cascade—I presumed—didn’t come into focus, though somehow I was filled with the tantalizing promise of a mermaid rescuing me, like sailors lured to their dooms.
My mouth opened and the cool splash of sour water filled in, the panic squeezing at my chest, at my throat—
The figure seemed to speak beside me, bubbles floating from her mouth.
I closed my eyes. Water. Calder… Calder… That brought on a mix of emotions, but it also centered me, churning that asphyxiating water into soothing air, my lungs filling with the liquid as naturally as if I were breathing air.
A sense of warmth overtook me. A cozy feeling of home, of belonging.
“Whoa, that was a close one,” said Cascade beside me, as clear as day. She giggled, and the sound was like music in the hollow echo of the pool. “Who’d have thought you’d have a hard time staying human in the water when you need to and a hard time not when you don’t?”
Flicking my tail and feeling the movement stretch up from my waist to my spine, I swirled in place. “Give me a break,” I said, grinning. “This is only my third time intentionally trying to turn mermaid.”
“Really?” Cascade’s voice rose in pitch. “Someone needs to give that prince a talking to.”
Tell me about it.
“Still,” she continued, “that’s incredible that you were able to kick bloodsucker butt with so little experience.” She took me in, head to fin, and gave me an appraising nod. “I think we might just win this thing.”