Authors: Tracy Deebs
“There’s no way we can let them get in the water!” I said.
My dad had obviously reached that conclusion already. He was up before I was finished speaking and dashing for the lifeguard hut at the edge of the beach. It wasn’t manned much anymore—budget cuts from a broke California government had taken care of that—but there was still a phone there that direct-dialed 911. There was also a bunch of BEACH CLOSED, UNSAFE signs locked behind a fence.
By the time I got to the hut, my dad was scaling the fence. I waited on the other side, catching the signs as he tossed them over. As soon as the last one had cleared the fence, my dad yelled, “Go, go, go!”
I took off. “Shouldn’t we call 911 so they can patrol the beach, make sure it stays closed?” I demanded.
“After we get the signs up.” He was already over the fence and gathering signs in his arms.
And then we ran, me heading up the beach while he headed down it. Wanting to make them last, I put a sign every three hundred yards or so. When I’d finally run out, I jogged the mile or so back down the beach to find my dad deep in conversation with my friends and some other guys I’d never seen before. He was telling them about the giant great white shark we’d just seen and how we’d narrowly escaped. While they might have argued with me or some other guy who tried to keep them out of the water, there was never any doubt that they would listen to my dad. Bobby Maguire, surf god and local hero.
By the time I called 911 to alert them to the situation and returned to my dad and the others, the group of them was swapping stories of near misses with sharks and other creatures, each a little more fantastical than the one that came before it. Which was more than fine with me.
They could spin all the tales they wanted as long as they stayed the hell out of the water.
Instead of surfing, my friends and I spent the morning cooking at my house. The guys joined Moku and me in creating a feast of chocolate-chip pancakes, eggs, fruit smoothies, and strawberry parfaits for the whole crowd—and then wolfing it all down. Even Rio joined in toward the end, though I think that had more to do with the fact that he’d always had a little bit of hero worship toward Logan. Well, that and by the time we got the food on the table, he was probably starving.
Either way, we all had a great time—laughing and joking and talking over one another. At least until Sabrina came down dressed in a completely inappropriate short nightshirt and tried to join in all the teasing. Scooter seemed oblivious to her state of undress as he sat talking to her while also shoveling pancakes in as fast as I could make them—but then, he was also the guy Mickey and Bri had caught whispering love words to his surfboard, so it could just be that Sabrina wasn’t his type. The other guys, however, looked really uncomfortable and it wasn’t long before they left. Which totally pissed me off. It wasn’t like I was
around all the time—she couldn’t even give me one morning with my friends without ruining it?
Even Rio and my dad, both of whom were normally taken in by her sweet, helpful facade, seemed annoyed with her little stunt, which I took as a major score—at least until I caught her and my dad snuggled up on the couch only an hour later. Part of me wanted to ask him what he was thinking, but then, it was fairly obvious he wasn’t thinking. If I was lucky, maybe it would turn out that she was just part of an early midlife crisis. And if I wasn’t … well, I would deal with that when it happened.
Maybe I should have felt bad that I disliked her this much. After all, I was the one who had spent the last few years encouraging my dad to date again. But I hadn’t meant date someone like her. There was something seriously off about Sabrina, and it killed me that I was the only one to see it.
After we got the breakfast dishes cleaned up, Mark wanted to hang most of the day, maybe go see a movie, but I put him off. I hadn’t told him about what had happened with the sea monster and my dad, but I was in a crappy mood and I knew I wouldn’t be able to hide it if I was around him all day. Besides, the dance was tonight, and I didn’t want to ruin his senior homecoming with my fears and worries.
I still had them, though. In fact, I had so many misgivings and concerns that I spent the day practically crippled by them. Instead of doing something with Moku or my dad, I retreated to my room, where I stretched across my bed and stared at the ceiling. Brooding. All day.
I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what to feel. Part of me wanted to wave a magic wand and make everything turn
out all right. Or, barring that, at least get a good look at the future so I’d know what was going to happen.
Would I win, or would Tiamat?
Would I die or would one—or more—of the people close to me?
If it happened, if someone had to die, I prayed that it
would
be me. After all, it wasn’t like I had gone into this with my eyes closed. I might have been a little dazed and confused when Kona first showed up here, but I’d learned the score pretty quickly. Defeating Tiamat wasn’t the same thing as actually triumphing. Or surviving. Not even close.
I was prepared for it. I knew the risks, was willing to accept them if it meant that I was the one who would suffer the consequences of her anger. But Tiamat didn’t play fair—which wasn’t a big surprise, but it did mean that it made me, and the people around me, much more vulnerable than I would like.
Oh, I could handle her going after me, would welcome it, even, after all the dirty tricks she’d played. But my family, my father and brothers and Mark and the guys … They should be off-limits. They had nothing to do with Tiamat or the ocean. They were all completely human—even my brothers for now—and as such posed no risk to her quest for domination of the world’s waterways. In fact, messing with them violated about eight laws of the Pacific Council, and those were just the ones I knew about.
Then again, Tiamat obviously considered herself the be all, end all of law in the Pacific, so it was no surprise that she wasn’t fond of listening to anyone else’s rules. Still, every time I allowed myself to think about what could have happened to
my father that morning, I broke out in a cold sweat. He’d been lucky that he carried that knife, luckier still that the monster had been more interested in me than him. But it could have turned bad so easily, could have ended with me spending the night explaining to my brothers how the Pacific had taken a second parent from us instead of spending it wrapped up in Mark’s arms.
Which left me with only one choice, though everything inside of me rebelled at making it. I couldn’t let her hurt them, couldn’t let her use my friends and family to get to me. Couldn’t let one more person I cared about suffer because of this war between Tiamat and me. I loved my father and my brothers and Mark and my friends, was thrilled that they loved and accepted me even with all the weirdness. But if this last year had taught me anything, it was that love didn’t make the world go round. Not really. Not when there was so much fear and hate and horror all around us.
Frustrated and afraid, I shoved off my bed and went to peer out my bedroom window at the ocean I both loved and despised. The predicted storm had hit about half an hour ago, and the water was seething with the energy release brought on by a hundred different lightning strikes.
Part of me—the dark part that I didn’t like to acknowledge in front of anyone—longed to be out there, soaking in the power. Throwing out some of my own. When I was human, I was wary of the power I wielded. Scared of it, even. People weren’t meant to have that kind of control over the elements, over the ocean, over what happened to other people.
But when I was mermaid, or even just embracing my
mermaid side, it was a lot harder to remember that. A lot harder to not just give myself over to it, like my mother had. After all, when I was mermaid, it was a totally symbiotic relationship. I would feed off the electricity of a storm, socking away power and energy for another time when I needed it more. In return, I threw everything I had behind the squall, making it stronger, more powerful. More dangerous.
But for the first time in a long time, I didn’t run out and join the storm. Didn’t try to absorb it through my very pores. Instead, I stayed where I was and tried to determine where I’d gone wrong … and how I was going to fix it.
There had to be a solution—I refused to acknowledge any other outcome. But the fear of losing, not just the battle with Tiamat but the people I cared for most, haunted me. I tried to shove it back, bury it down deep inside of me where I didn’t have to think about it. Now that I had acknowledged the fear, however, it was hard to forget it. Hard to focus on anything but the terror spilling through me like acid.
For the first time in my life, I could almost understand the choices my mother had made. I’d spent most of my life blaming her for leaving us when we needed her most and had sworn I’d never be like her. Yet I’d become mermaid anyway and had spent the last year trying to be someone, something, that I’d never imagined I would want to be.
For the first time I was figuring out why my mother had left and never come back. Not because she hadn’t loved us, but because she had. When I was ten, Tiamat had come calling on me. Had lured me out of the house, down the beach, and into the water while my parents were out. Though I hadn’t realized
it then, I had nearly died. The worst part was knowing it didn’t have to be me. It could easily have been my father or Rio or even Moku, who was just a baby then. Tiamat wouldn’t have cared who she took, who she killed, as long as she’d been able to hurt my mother.
She’d come awfully close to succeeding.
With that realization came forgiveness—or at least the beginnings of forgiveness, which was as close as I could get for my mother, the woman who had forsaken her humanity and in doing so had bound me inescapably to the path I was now on. But how could I blame her for leaving when every instinct I had told me she’d done it to ensure the safety of her family? Of those she loved?
Oh, yes, she’d planned, all along, on my turning mermaid. But in leaving, she’d given me the chance to make a choice without her interference. And even more importantly, she’d given me the room to grow, to make my own decisions unhampered by what she wanted or what the Pacific needed. At least until she sent Kona to me right before my seventeenth birthday.
As I thought about what she’d done, about what she’d sacrificed to keep us safe, I realized that the answer to my own questions—my own problems—was right there for the taking. If I wanted to keep my family safe—and I did. Oh, God, I did—then I needed to walk away, swim away,
now
. As long as Tiamat imagined that they were important to me, that I cared about them, she would see them as a weakness to be exploited. Something she could use as a bargaining chip. Or worse, something she could spare or destroy at her own deadly whim.
As long as I kept a foot in both worlds, as long as I kept my
ties to Moku and Mark, Rio and my dad, they would be fair game for her and her minions. More, destroying them would be an added treat, because so much of who I was was wrapped up in the people I cared about most.
So if I wanted Tiamat to leave them alone, I would have to do what my mother did. I would have to convince her that I didn’t care about them anymore. I would have to leave them, at least until I’d defeated the sea witch and her band of evil followers.
And I had to defeat them. The idea of Rio turning seventeen in a few years and facing the same peril, the same horrors, that I had faced was unthinkable. And sweet little Moku? I couldn’t go there. I might die at Tiamat’s hands, but not before I took her with me. I wanted, so much, to be with my brothers when they turned seventeen—to explain to them the things I hadn’t known—but if it came to a choice between that and making sure Tiamat was dead, I would choose the latter every time. No matter what it cost me.
Still, just the thought of leaving was crippling.
Never see Moku again? Never ruffle his hair or read him a book or bask in the sweet innocence of his smile?
Never surf with my father again? Never squeeze him back when he gave me the world’s largest bear hug?
Never make up with Rio? Never find a way to reach him through the anger?
My hands went to the belly chain around my waist, the one I hadn’t taken off since Mark had given it to me the night before. And Mark—was I just supposed to say good-bye to him? To walk away like we didn’t have
years
of shared history? Like
I wasn’t totally, completely, head over heels in love with him? It wasn’t possible. It just wasn’t possible.
Except that it was. If I had any hope of keeping them safe from Tiamat, I needed to do exactly that. She had spies everywhere—if I faltered, if I returned even once, she would know about it. And she would know that they mattered.
Of course, even if I did walk away, it might not work. I was here now, wasn’t I? And it wasn’t like this was the first time I’d been home in the last year. I’d come running when she’d injured Moku, had just fought Octopus Man like a woman possessed to keep my father safe. Not to mention what I’d done to save Mark last summer. None of those things exactly screamed cool and unaffected.
But what other choice did I have? I wondered, my fingers stroking over each of the beads on the belly chain in turn. My favorite was the center one, made from the La Jolla sand, and I stood there for long seconds rubbing my fingers over it. As I held it, Mark’s face rose up behind my closed eyes and I wanted nothing more than to run to him. To dive into him, wrap my arms around him, and swear that I would never leave.
I couldn’t do that, though, any more than I could go into Moku’s room and challenge him to the world’s longest Super Mario Wii marathon. I had to cut them off, and I had to do it so convincingly that Tiamat believed I cared nothing for them. Otherwise, they were as good as dead. I wouldn’t be here to guard them forever, and no matter how strong or smart my father and Mark were, they were human. What could they really do against Tiamat if she came gunning for them with everything in her arsenal?