Kenneth refused to be baited. He had a feeling such talk made all the sisters self- conscious and embarrassed them. From what he’d seen, they were doing their best to fit into human society, live as normally as possible. “It’s nothing I’m interested in. I like her just as well when she’s standing on two legs.”
Jake smirked knowingly. “She’s much better when she’s in the water. Some of the moves she can do with that appendage will make your co—”
Tessa silenced him with a single finger cutting through the air. “Don’t you dare go there!” Her frigid eyes glittered with offense. “Say one more word about us and I’ll kill you and hide the body, Jake. No one will find you at the bottom of the bay.”
“I’ll help her,” Addison chimed in.
“Me, too,” Gwen warned. “You’re here on a trial basis only. Blow it and you’re gone.” She snapped her fingers. “Like that.”
Chastised by three fierce expressions, Jake backed down. “Okay, okay. I was just joking,” he grumbled. “There was a time when you had a sense of humor, Tess.”
Tessa huffed out a long breath of disgust. “I’m not the blind fool I used to be.”
The atmosphere in the room was beginning to turn hostile, toxic.
Feeling his muscles knot, Kenneth stepped up. He hadn’t liked Jake on sight and the idea of punching him in the face wasn’t exactly unappealing. “One more crack out of you and the girls won’t be the ones showing you the door.” He’d always felt contempt for men who made unflattering sexual remarks about the women they’d slept with. It wasn’t only immature; it was disrespectful.
Jake held up his hands in appeal. This time his smile wasn’t so self-assured, cocky. “I’m a jerk, I get that,” he said through a cold stretch of his lips.
Tessa nodded her agreement. “That’s saying the least of it.”
Kenneth placed a hand on Tessa’s shoulder. She tensed momentarily, then relaxed and accepted his touch. “Instead of going at it tooth and nail, just stay to the business at hand.”
Gaze cooling, Tessa nodded her agreement. “The sooner you show us, the sooner you can leave.”
Jake stepped up to the crate, reaching inside to retrieve an object protected by layers of heavy bubble wrap. “You won’t kick me out once you’ve seen this.” Going down on his knees as though weighed down by an object of great and holy reverence, he unwrapped the package. “Keep in mind this has been underwater for a long time. It took months to restore, though I think my team did a pretty good job.”
A statue about three feet in length was revealed. The top half of the figure was instantly recognizable as a woman: long hair, full breasts, slender waist. Her bottom half didn’t show two legs, as would be expected. From the waist down, her figure was that of a sea creature. The mermaid appeared to be poised as though to rise from the water, her left arm extended toward the sky. What the figure might have held in her hand had gone missing centuries ago.
Jake slowly lifted the statue, showing all angles. Painstakingly cleaned and polished, it was a striking piece. “Isn’t she beautiful? The detailing is perfect.”
“Heavenly goddess,” Gwen murmured, reaching for the crystal hanging around her neck. “It’s a Mer.”
“I don’t believe it,” Addison added. “It looks just like . . .”
“Us,” Tessa finished grimly.
Awed by the craftsmanship that had gone into the piece, Kenneth whistled under his breath. “It’s a stunning piece of work.” What had been merely curious had truly become fascinating. The twists and turns of the last twenty-four hours were something he could never have dreamed up. He was definitely hooked.
Pleased to be the center of attention, Jake nodded. “What you are looking at is one of the few preserved original bronze statues of the Severe Style, notable for the exquisite rendering of motion and anatomy. It’s most assuredly the hand of a great sculptor, one probably hailing from the time of the early Grecian Classical period.”
Tessa shrugged. “So it’s a Greek statue. That doesn’t prove anything. It’s probably meant to represent one of Poseidon’s sea nymphs.”
Jake shook his head. “Many would jump to that conclusion. Except in this case there is more than one relic pointing to the origins of this particular piece.”
Tessa snorted. By the look on her face, she was doing her very best to disbelieve everything Jake presented as false and misleading. “What relics?”
Jake Massey graced everyone with a Cheshire’s grin. “Though we’ve only been able to work with underwater subs, we’ve found enough remnants to convince us that a small island once inhabited the area.”
Gwen’s brows shot clear off her forehead. “You are fucking kidding.”
“I am absolutely serious, Gwen,” Jake countered dryly. “Though I have to admit the ruins are far beyond the location I’d initially guessed.”
“What kind of remains are there?” Addison asked.
Jake reached back into his crate, drawing out more pieces. “Literally, everything you could imagine. Though we didn’t have long to explore the area because of some tricky laws about who the waters belong to, we did manage to bring up a few significant items. Our biggest challenge has been the sheer depth. There are a lot of deep crevasses we just can’t penetrate, even with a rover.” He unwrapped about half a dozen packages, including a stash of gold coins, a few oddly shaped vases made out of pottery, a marble bust that looked like the head of a woman. The last piece was most puzzling, a long and spiraling loop fashioned out of gold.
“If you look closely, the image cut into the coins also resembles the face of this woman,” Jake said, pointing to the marble bust. He handed a couple of the coins to Gwen. “Do you know that woman?”
Looking at the coins, Gwen paled. “Atargatis,” she murmured. “The mother-creator of all Mer.”
Tessa snatched one of the coins. “It can’t be.”
Addison looked at the small marble head. “I think it is.”
Kenneth glanced over Tessa’s shoulder. The coin, about the size of a silver dollar, wasn’t perfectly shaped, but it was brilliantly engraved with the face of a woman in profile. A series of strange symbols was stamped in front of her face. The edges of the coin were decorated with a sort of ornamental pattern.
Looking at the piece, he remembered the sudden cold prickle of disbelief that had crept over him when he’d seen Tessa in her mermaid form. It began to dawn on him that the Mer were an actual people with a viable history, a race that had existed alongside mankind for millennia uncounted. Yet few knew of their existence. He couldn’t imagine belonging to a race that had lost its identity, its place in the world. He suddenly understood Tessa’s earlier remark, when she’d said she felt like an outsider, always looking in.
“Turn it over,” he suggested.
Tessa hesitated, then turned over the coin. A small gasp of surprise escaped her. “It’s the Mer,” she murmured, casting a glance at the bronze statue Jake had unwrapped. The figure on the coin left no doubt as to what might have been in the statue’s upraised hand: a thunderbolt. “I don’t believe my eyes.”
Jake’s grin widened. “I didn’t believe it, either. But it’s there. It’s all there, and so much more.”
Tessa’s fingers closed around the coin. Kenneth couldn’t fail to notice her hand shook. “Where did you find it?”
Jake swept his long bangs away from his angular forehead. One could almost imagine him primping for his close-up. “I wasn’t the actual discoverer,” he admitted. “The bronze statue there was snagged by accident by Libyan fishermen. My crew and I just happened to be doing some research in Benghazi when they brought some pieces they’d salvaged in to sell.”
Addison grimaced. “Lucky break for you.”
Jake scrubbed his fashionably stubble-covered jaw. “Not so lucky, actually. It took more than two years to pinpoint the location where the artifacts came from. There’s been a lot of volcanic upheaval through the centuries, and the remains are literally scattered for miles across the bottom of the sea. It would take years to map out every square inch of the site, tag, and preserve every artifact.”
Addison studied the coins she held, comparing them with the small marble bust about the size of a fist. “It’s amazing to think I could be holding something a kins-woman of mine might have held more than a millennium ago.”
“Not ‘might have held,’ ” Jake broke in. “Did. Based on the dives I’ve made, I am convinced the ruins belong to Ishaldi.”
“But it’s not one hundred percent positive?” Tessa asked.
Jake considered a few of the coins. “Not one hundred percent,” he allowed. “But I’d stake my reputation on ninety-eight percent.”
Addison snorted a scornful laugh. “Your reputation sucks, Jake. People think you’re a nut.”
“And a gold digger,” Gwen added, no more tactful than her younger sister. “They say you’ve sold out for working with commercial treasure hunters.”
There was a long silence.
Jake Massey’s confidence wavered in the wake of their criticism. “It’s true I went about presenting my theories in a ham- fisted manner,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back and rocking on his heels. “But I’ve always felt the evidence would be found.”
Kenneth listened closely as Jake explained his find. He had to admit the subject fascinated him. As a person who had just learned of the existence of mermaids, he was still in the early stages of discovery. Sure, his initial disbelief had passed. He’d seen Tessa in her Mer form with his own eyes. And now that he knew her, he wanted to know more about her kind.
And even though he didn’t like the presenter behind the information, he couldn’t resist the niggle of curiosity. “Now that you’ve found what you believe to be the location, how exactly will you go about presenting proof of their existence?” he asked. “Short of having a mermaid show up, it’s all still pretty much speculation, right?”
Jake scowled at the interruption. His cool gaze raked over Kenneth, though not as dismissively as before. “Although there is a lot of lore surrounding the Mer, I believe I can absolutely present their existence as fact.”
Spreading his hands, Kenneth gave him his best
show me
expression. “How?” he asked.
“I’d like to know that one myself,” Gwen broke in.
Tessa and Addison nodded, too.
Jake looked at the girls. “You’ve already given me a good foundation to build on by identifying your mother-goddess. It’s true, isn’t it, that you were taught to acknowledge Atargatis as the creator of the Mer?”
Addison nodded and began to recite from memory, “As God created mankind in his image to live on land, Atargatis created Mer women in hers to occupy the seas. So that the two species could live in harmony, the Mer were granted the ability to shift on land and interact—and mate—with human males.”
Jake nodded. “The first known Mer lore dates back to Assyria, which gives us a region to begin the search for artifacts.”
Tessa wrinkled her brow. “But wasn’t Assyria a primarily desert region?”
Jake beamed, enjoying his glory as the in- resident expert. “At one time the Neo-Assyrian Empire actually extended all the way to the Mediterranean Sea,” he corrected. “And while most legends of sea gods and goddesses come out of Greece and Rome in the form of Poseidon and the like, the Assyrian empire actually predates those myths, perhaps even inspired them.”
Tessa blinked and fingered the coin she held. Half elation, half disbelief colored her features. “I’ve always wondered about where we came from, where we might have belonged.”
Jake nodded. “To this day we’re still uncovering artifacts that prove what many take for myth is based on actual fact.”
Gwen shook her head. “I’ve always thought Ishaldi was a myth, and I’m a Mer.” A short laugh escaped her.
Addison eyed her sisters with a searching look. “I think that’s why the Mer have become endangered.” She looked at her sisters. “We’ve spent most of our lives trying not to be Mer.”
Tessa nodded. “That’s true. Part of the reason Mom and Aunt Gail fought so much was because Gail wanted to raise her girls as human. Gail even sold her share in the island to our parents, because she wanted to leave everything behind. I’m afraid that’s what broke our grandmother’s heart so much. Grandma wanted us to hang on to our Mer heritage, however little of it we had to hang on to.”
“So you have relatives living on the mainland?” Kenneth asked.
Tessa frowned. “Oh, yeah. But Aunt Gail cut contact years ago, when Gwen was still in diapers and Addison was just a twinkle in Daddy’s eyes. I barely remember my cousins.”
“It would be logical the Mer moved inland and integrated with humans,” Jake added. “As I mentioned before, there were a lot of volcanic upheavals on land and at sea during those times, which might explain the destruction. One that stands out in my mind is the Crete earthquake of AD 365. The quake was followed by a tsunami that devastated several coasts on the Mediterranean.”
“Something like that could have taken a small island under,” Addison said. “I mean, look at the recent earthquakes in Haiti and China. The devastation is almost endless.”
“Based on the account I found in Hypatia’s writings and the fact she lived during the time the events took place, it would seem as close to an eyewitness account as can be found.” Jake shook his head. “More of the Mer might have been known if only the library of Alexandria had survived.”
Gwen thought a moment. “That’s underwater now, isn’t it? Alexandria, I mean.”
Jake nodded. “Very little of the ancient city has survived into the present day. Much of the royal and civic quarters sank beneath the harbor due to the earthquake I mentioned earlier. What remained has been built over in modern times.”
Kenneth listened closely, putting the pieces together for himself. Even without Massey’s explanations, the facts were beginning to stack up. “You can’t argue with what he’s shown you so far.”
Addison knelt down on the rug Jake used to showcase the artifacts. “Holding these pieces in your hands does make it all seem real.” Previously overlooked, the spiraling circle caught her attention. She pointed. “That’s gold, isn’t it?”