Authors: Tracy Deebs
But then, reason and logic didn’t have much to do with how I was feeling, not when just the thought of Mark had my heart beating faster.
“So, since you’re not tired and I sincerely doubt I’m going to
get any sleep tonight …” My dad nodded his head toward the dark, endless ocean outside our kitchen window. “You want to try your hand at night surfing?”
I stared at him in shock. “You never let me do that. You’ve been telling me it was too dangerous from the first time I asked to go.”
“Yeah, well, that was before you were mermaid,” he replied with a smirk. “If something happens, I’m pretty sure you can grow gills and get yourself out of it. Besides, you spend months at a time—nights included—in the ocean. What’s one more? But we have to get in and out—a storm is supposed to hit in a few hours and conditions will get rough.”
I almost asked about Sabrina again, but I didn’t want anything to ruin this night with my dad, so I headed for the stairs at a dead run, determined to get my swimsuit on and be out the door before my dad came to his senses.
It turned out, I needn’t have worried. By the time I had shimmied into a bathing suit, my father was already out the door, his surfboard under one arm and mine under the other.
Excitement welled up inside of me as I dashed after him. Between Mark, my friends, my dad … this was turning into the best night ever.
I should have known it was just the calm before the storm.
“What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark?
It would be like sleep without dreams.”
—Werner Herzog
As I caught up to my dad, I realized the surfboards he was carrying weren’t our regular ones. I mean, my dad has six or seven boards, though he usually switches between two. I have three, but the only one I’ve used since my sixteenth birthday is the purple-and-orange Brewer my dad had specially designed for me.
These boards were different. They were clear, with strings of something—I couldn’t quite see what, even in the light cast from the streetlamps—stretching from the tip of the boards to the very ends of them.
I started to ask him what was up with the board change—if I was going to risk night surfing, I wanted to do it on a board I was familiar with. But he shook his head before I said anything and told me, “Wait until we get to the water.”
I did, and was shocked to see the boards light up the second my dad laid them on the sand. “There are only a half dozen of these in existence right now,” he told me. “The guy who created them asked me and a couple other surfers to try them out, see how they worked.”
“They’re awesome!” I crouched down to run my hand over one. I’d seen pictures of boards tricked out with LED lights before—usually stunts pulled by surf companies and their prosurfers to get attention—but this was different. The boards weren’t merely lined with LEDs; the lights were actually inside the completely glassed-over board. It was brilliant, and beautiful.
“I know, right?” He held out a remote control. “And check this out.” With a few clicks, he turned the lights inside my board from green to red to blue to purple. He stopped there and handed me the remote. “I thought it would match your tattoos.”
I laughed. “That rocks.”
He switched his lights to white, then we grabbed our boards and started paddling out to sea. The waves were going off, just as Scooter had predicted, so we stayed close to shore for a few minutes, sitting on our boards and riding out the remnants of the waves as my dad explained some of the accommodations that had to be made when trying to surf a wave you could barely see coming at you—things like looking for the light of the moon reflecting off the wave face, feeling the wave instead of counting on seeing it, and once the ride began never looking directly toward the light on shore or it would mess with my balance, plus make it all kinds of difficult for my eyes to adjust to the dark again.
Then it was time. I knew it, could feel it in that part of me that had always been able to sense the pattern of the ocean. The buildup of the waves.
My dad felt it too. “Get ready, Tempest!” he called even as he shifted so that he was lying on his board.
I did the same, then started to paddle out. The wave was
building up, swelling, and as it came into view I realized it was larger—much larger—than I had anticipated. If I didn’t paddle like hell, I was going to get worked.
So that’s what I did, adrenaline racing through my system as I searched for the perfect spot to drop in on it. Beside me, my father’s board glowed silver against the darkness of the ocean. He was close, close enough that I could reach out and touch him. It wasn’t great positioning for surfing, by any means, but then I wasn’t really out here for the waves. The father-daughter bonding time was suddenly a lot more important to me.
“Take it!” he shouted, doing what he always did—giving the first, the best, to me while he made do with the consolation prize.
Not this time. “You take it, Dad!”
He was going to argue—I could see it in his face—so I dropped back, out of contention, then watched as he took off.
It was a thing of beauty. Not just watching the great Bobby Maguire take on a wave of this proportion—which was, indeed, beautiful. But also the entire ocean around him had come alive, lit up. It was a sight to behold, one of the most gorgeous things I had ever seen.
Oh, logically I knew there was an explanation for it. I even knew what that explanation was. Lingulodinium polyedrum. Besides having a really weird name, it was a microorganism that lived in a lot of the waters off Southern California. During the day, it was best known for making the ocean around here weird and kind of cloudy, but at night it turned bright blue whenever something disturbed it.
In my time as mermaid, I had seen a lot of phosphorescent
stuff—it was kind of hard to live at the bottom of the ocean and not glow, but there was something about this algae that was extra beautiful. Maybe it was the combination of night sky and water and human and glowing surfboard … I don’t know. But I was spellbound as my father streaked across the ocean like a shooting star, leaving a trail of electric blue in his wake.
My dad ended up shooting the barrel before riding the wave really close to the shore. And then it really was my turn, a wave of epic proportions calling to me to drop in.
I knew my dad would freak out—the thing would be massive by the time it finished building—but I wanted it. Badly. So I took it and prayed I wouldn’t wipe out.
I dropped in on the wave just as it crested. As I did, I made the mistake of looking toward shore—exactly what my dad had told me not to do. I could see him there, standing under a light and looking out at me. I couldn’t see his expression, but I figured it wasn’t happy. But if I nailed this wave, all would be forgiven.
I turned to look down at the wave and realized that I couldn’t see anything—the lights on shore had disrupted my vision, just as my dad had said they would. I felt a moment of panic at the idea of surfing this wave, which was high enough that riding its crest felt like being at the top of a mountain. And then it was too late to do anything but ride as I plummeted down the sheer, flat face of the most mammoth wave I’d ever ridden.
It was amazing, exhilarating, terrifying, and awe inspiring all at the same time. More than once I thought I was going into the drink, but I managed to hold on—by my toenails
sometimes—until the wave brought me in. I didn’t get as close to shore as my dad did, didn’t get a chance to shoot the barrel as the wave turned choppier, started to break up.
I jockeyed for position, hung on as long as possible, then dropped out right before the thing crashed into the surface of the ocean. As the waves bumped me around some—the water was getting rougher—I fumbled for my board. Once I found it, I straddled it and let out a war whoop of epic proportions. My dad echoed it from his spot on the water. He was paddling out to meet me and probably do the whole crazy thing again, and I couldn’t wait. I’d ridden the hell out of that wave and couldn’t have been prouder.
Grinning, thrilled with myself and the whole world, I turned toward my dad, wanting to share my exhilaration with him. He was close enough that I could see his grin and I smiled back, waving a little. He was as stoked as I was that I had not let that swell take me down.
“That was awesome, Temp—”
He stopped talking midsentence, a strange look crossing his face before he disappeared suddenly beneath the choppy surface of the ocean.
What the hell?
“Dad!” I called, but he didn’t answer. Seconds later, I saw his board floating several feet away.
Confusion turned to alarm, and I ditched my board, diving deep between the crests of one wave and the next. As I did, I blew the air out of my lungs and let my gills take over so I wouldn’t have to worry about hitting the surface for air. Though I was prepared, that first breath of salt water hurt like a bitch as
my human lungs fought instinctively to reject it. I ignored the pain, ignored the messages that warned me I was drowning, and dived deeper. Swam faster.
As I did, visions of sharks and swordfish and even huge, carnivorous seals ripped through my head. As did images of Tiamat and her vicious pet, the Lusca. Something had my dad—of that I had no doubt. Now it was a matter of finding out if it was just an animal doing what came naturally or if it was a darker, more dangerous force.
Smart enough to know I wasn’t going to be able to find him out here in the dark, I closed my eyes and tried to focus through the terror ripping me apart. A couple deep breaths, a little shot of power, and I’d created a large, encapsulated ball of light that illuminated the ocean around me. I quickly tethered it to me with another blast of power so that it moved where I did, and then I went deep.
As I dove, I didn’t know what to wish for: a shark could very well have killed my father by now. But then, so could Tiamat—unless she wanted something from him. Like to use him as bait to make me swim directly into one of her traps.
If it was her, she was getting her wish, because while the logical portion of my brain was shouting warnings at me, I was paying it absolutely no attention. Sheer terror had seized control of me, and I was bumbling around like a total frube, desperate for some—any—sign of my father. It had been two and a half, maybe three minutes since he’d been grabbed. I had only a couple more to find him before brain damage started to kick in.
Freaking out, panicked beyond just about anything I had
ever felt before, I forced myself to surface. To look out over the black water and try to see if I could spot anything. But there was nothing except the inevitable push and pull of the waves and the glowing blue of the algae all around me. In the distance, I could see the lights of my board glowing purple against the dark water, but there was no sign of my father.
And that’s when it registered. While the ocean all around me was lit up an otherworldly blue, there was a heavy concentration of the phosphorescent light about thirty feet in front of me. Heavy enough that it meant something was there right now disturbing the algae.
I shot forward, using every ounce of power and strength I had to swim faster than I ever had before. I got there in seconds—I’d never been more thankful for the whole mermaid thing—and then dove deep, circling the lit-up area much like a shark did its prey.
And that’s when I saw him, floating along beneath the surface. His arms were above his head, his legs slightly open. His eyes were closed, his face lax, and I knew. I just knew that I was too late. That my father was dead because I hadn’t been strong enough to stop it.
I arrowed through the water toward him, so close to hysteria that I forgot how to breathe through my gills. Instead, I opened my mouth and ended up gulping in huge swallows of salt water, choking on it.
My human body wanted to cough, to expel the noxious stuff, but I held it down with sheer will alone. If I had any chance of doing CPR, of getting the water out of his lungs, every second counted.
I reached my father moments later, wrapped my arms around his waist and used the powerful muscles in my legs, muscles I’d spent the last year building, to kick us straight up to the surface.
As I broke through the water, I dragged air into my abused lungs even as I tried to figure out if my dad was breathing. He wasn’t—of course he wasn’t—so I whirled around in a desperate bid to find shore. In just the last few minutes the ocean had grown much choppier, though I didn’t know if it was from the incoming storm or my own freaked-out emotions. It didn’t matter either way, I supposed, not when the end result was the same. We’d been pushed farther out to sea by the seething, roiling waves, shore much too far away to reach in time to save my dad, even for me.
Wrapping my arms around him again—this time above his waist and below his breastbone—I drove my fist directly back and into the bottom of his lungs. Water shot from his mouth, so I did it again and again and again. It was awkward as hell with the waves building up all around us, but I forced my body to relax. To just ride out the waves. Soon, I had determined the timing of the ocean and which part of the wave I needed to be at to squeeze the most water from my father’s lungs.
I rode the waves for long seconds, not attempting to fight them or get closer to shore, but simply trying to clear my dad’s lungs enough that he could breathe. I was focusing so completely on the task that when it finally happened, when he spit out a huge mouthful of water and then started to cough, I could barely believe it. I kept pounding my fist into the spot below his sternum until he started struggling against me.
And even then, even as I heard him draw one loud, shaky breath into his lungs, I still didn’t believe it. “Daddy?” I shouted to be heard above the roaring of the waves, slipping back into the childhood endearment as if it were a comfortable old slipper that had just been waiting for me to find it again.
“What happened?” he gasped between coughing fits.