Of Poseidon (28 page)

open desk up front.

While Emma sleeps through physics, Galen dutifully takes notes on thermodynamics for her. On a separate sheet of paper, he lists questions he wants to ask Romul. Still, even after he’s checked and rechecked the list, there’s a question he’s forgetting.

It gnaws at him, teasing him from the edge of his brain, not quite getting close enough to grasp.

-1—

Beside him, Emma sighs in her sleep. Galen stiff ens. Emma.

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Who will watch Emma while I’m gone? Toraf hasn’t returned from

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searching for Paca. Rachel can watch her on land, but if Emma gets in the water, she’s as good as gone. Not that she looks up to practicing any time soon, exhausted as she is. But Emma is practically made of defi ance and stubbornness and resilience, and everything else that could possibly make his life diffi cult. If

she wants to get in the water, she will.

That only leaves one person. Rayna.

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21

THE CHANNELS on the TV continue to change even after Rayna stops pressing the button on the remote. She slides down the front of the couch, planting herself on the fl oor. “Four hundred channels and nothing worth watching. Unbelievable,” she mutters.

I glance up from where I’m sitting in the recliner and fold the page of my book. “You could help me practice. They wouldn’t have to know.” I don’t even feel like practicing. It just seems I should get in the water on principal, since Galen told me not to.

And especially since he left me with a babysitter.

She throws me a sideways glare. “Fat Lips would know.

He can sense me from anywhere, remember? And he’d snitch to Galen. He would know something’s wrong if you and me got in

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without my brother.”

0—

I shrug. “Since when do you care about getting in trouble?”

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“Since never. But Galen said if I kept you out of the water, he’d teach me how to drive his car.”

Jackpot. “I happen to know how to drive. I could teach you.”

“Galen said I wasn’t allowed to ask you, or the deal’s off .”

“You didn’t ask me. I off ered.”

She nods, biting her lip. “That’s true. You did.” I set the book on the ugly glass coff ee table and squat next to her. “I’ll teach you how to drive if you let me get in the water.

You don’t even have to get in.”

The way she raises her brow reminds me of Galen. “You’re wasting your time trying to change if you ask me. You’re half human. You probably don’t even have a fi n in there.”

“What do you know about the Half Breeds?”

She shrugs. “Not much. Enough to know that if you’re one of them, there’s no point in trying to change. No one is going to accept you. At least, no Syrena will.”

I decide not to take off ense. I don’t put much stock in her opinion anyway, and she won’t care if she off ended me or not.

Rayna can be counted on to say what she’s thinking. Taking of-fense would waste everyone’s time. Besides, she’s still here. If she thought of me as an abomination, she wouldn’t have anything to do with me, would she?

“That might be true. But if it were you, wouldn’t you want to know if you could change?”

She considers, then shrugs again. “Probably.”

“So we have a deal?” I say, holding my hand out for a shake.

—-1

She eyes it and crosses her arms. I set my hand on the couch,

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feeling awkward, wondering if she even knows what a hand shake is.

“You’ll teach me to drive your car if I let you get in the water?”

“Uh, no. I’ll teach you how to drive Galen’s car if you let me get in the water. You’re not touching my car without a license.

A real one, not some shiny plastic thing Rachel made between afternoon talk shows.” Even if Galen doesn’t have insurance, he’s got enough in his wallet to buy a new one. I, on the other hand, have just enough in savings to cover my deductible.

Her eyes go round. “You’ll let me drive his little red one?

The combustible?”

Why not? I nod. “Yep. The convertible. Deal?” She grabs my hand from the couch to pull us both up.

Then she shakes it. “Deal! I’ll go get the keys from Rachel.” I pull over on the dirt shoulder of the most abandoned road in the furthest hem of the furthest outskirt of Middlepoint. The rearview shows me nothing but our dusty trail disappearing like phantoms into the trees on either side. Ahead of us, a mail truck stops with fl ashing lights at the only mailbox on the whole stretch. When it passes us, the driver tips his cap our way, eyeing us as if he thinks we’re up to no good— the kind of no good he might call the cops on. I wave to him and smile, wondering if I look as guilty as I feel. Better make this the quickest lesson in driving history. It’s not like she needs to pass the state

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exam. If she can keep the car straight for ten seconds in a row, 0—

I’ve upheld my end of the deal.

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I turn off the ignition and look at her. “So, how are you and Toraf doing?”

She cocks her head at me. “What does that have to do with driving?”

Aside from delaying it? “Nothing,” I say, shrugging. “Just wondering.”

She pulls down the visor and fl ips open the mirror. Using her index fi nger, she unsmudges the mascara Rachel put on her. “Not that it’s your business, but we’re fi ne. We were always fi ne.”

“He didn’t seem to think so.”

She shoots me a look. “He can be oversensitive sometimes.

I explained that to him.”

Oversensitive? No way. She’s not getting off that easy. “He’s a good kisser,” I tell her, bracing myself.

She turns in her seat, eyes narrowed to slits. “You might as well forget about that kiss, Emma. He’s mine, and if you put your nasty half- breed lips on him again—”

“Now who’s being oversensitive?” I say, grinning. She does love him.

“Switch places with me,” she snarls. But I’m too happy for Toraf to return the animosity.

Once she’s in the driver’s seat, her attitude changes. She bounces up and down like she’s mattress shopping, getting so much air that she’d puncture the top if I hadn’t put it down already. She reaches for the keys in the ignition. I grab her hand.

“Nope. Buckle up fi rst.”

—-1

It’s almost cliché for her to roll her eyes now, but she does.

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When she’s fi nished dramatizing the act of buckling her seat belt— complete with tugging on it to make sure it won’t unclick—

she turns to me in pouty expectation. I nod.

She wrenches the key and the engine fi res up. The distant look in her eyes makes me ner vous. Or maybe it’s the guilt swirling around in my stomach. Galen might not like this car, but it still feels like sacrilege to put the fate of a BMW in Rayna’s novice hands. As she grips the gear stick so hard her knuckles turn white, I thank God this is an automatic.

“D is for drive, right?” she says.

“Yes. The right pedal is to go. The left pedal is to stop. You have to step on the left one to change into drive.”

“I know. I saw you do it.” She mashes down on the brake, then throws us into drive. But we don’t move.

“Okay, now you’ll want to step on the right pedal, which is the gas—”

The tires start spinning— and so do we. Rayna stares at me wide- eyed and mouth ajar, which isn’t a good thing since her hands are on the wheel. It occurs to me that she’s screaming, but I can’t hear her over my own screeching. The dust wall we’ve created whirls around us, blocking our view of the trees and the road and life as we knew it.

“Take your foot off the right one!” I yell. We stop so hard my teeth feel rattled.

“Are you trying to get us killed?” she howls, holding her hand to her cheek as if I’ve slapped her. Her eyes are wild and

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glassy; she just might cry.

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“Are you freaking kidding me? You’re the one driving!”

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“You said to step on the brake to put us into drive, then to step on the right one to—”

“Not at the same time!”

“Well, you should have told me that. How was I supposed to know?”

I snort. “You acted like the freaking Dalai Lama when I tried to tell you how to shift gears. I told you, one was for go and one was for stop. You can’t stop and go at the same time! You have to make up your mind.”

From the expression on her face, she’s either about to punch me or call me something really bad. She opens her mouth, but the really bad something doesn’t come out; she shuts it again.

Then she giggles. Now I’ve seen everything.

“Galen tells me that all the time,” she chortles. “That I can never make up my mind.” Then she bursts out laughing so hard she spits all over the steering wheel. She keeps laughing until I’m convinced an unknown force is tickling her senseless.

What? As far as I can tell, her indecisiveness almost got us killed. Killed isn’t funny.

“You should have seen your face,” she says, between gulps of breaths. “You were all, like—” And she makes the face of a drunk clown. “I bet you wet yourself, didn’t you?” She cracks herself up so much she clutches her side as if she’s holding in her own guts.

I feel my lips fracture into a smile before I can stop them.

“You were more scared than me. You swallowed like ten fl ies while you were screaming.”

—-1

She spits all over the steering wheel again. And I spew

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laughter onto the dash. It takes a good fi ve minutes for us to sober up enough for another driving lesson. My throat is dry, and my eyes are wet when I say, “Okay, now. Let’s concentrate.

The sun is going down. These woods probably get pretty creepy at night.”

She clears her throat, still giggling a little. “Okay. Concentrate. Right.”

“So, this time, when you take your foot off the brake, the car will go on its own. There, see?” We slink along the road at idle- two miles per hour.

She huff s up at her bangs. “This is boring. I want to go faster.”

I start to say, “Not too fast,” but she squashes the gas under her foot, and my words are snatched away by the wind. She gives a startled shout, which I fi nd hypocritical because after all, I’m the one helpless in the passenger seat, and she’s the one screaming like a teapot, turning the wheel back and forth like the road isn’t straight as a pencil.

“Brake, brake, brake!” I shout, hoping repetition will somehow penetrate the small part of her brain that actually thinks.

Everything happens fast. We stop. There’s a crunching sound. My face slams into the dash. No wait, the dash becomes an airbag. Rayna’s scream is cut off by her airbag. I open my eyes. A tree. A freaking tree. The metal frame groans, and something under the hood lets out a mechanical hiss. Smoke billows up from the front, the universal symbol for You’re Screwed.