20. Chapter 20
Iplunged into water, and my mermaid immediately awoke. But I kept her at bay long enough to slip my shorts off before allowing my tail free.
I rolled upright in the water and looked around, my keen eyes searching for anyone else around me. We had all accidentally plunged through the portal together. I couldn’t have landed here alone. But as I twisted around three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, only one figure caught my eye. Where was everyone else?
Pushing the questions to one side, I swam toward the person in the water who fought the weight of their clothes as they scrambled toward the surface. I grabbed them around the waist and rocketed us to the surface. When we broke through, they coughed and hacked, their entire body shuddering under the force of each breath.
“Adrian?” I asked, as he flipped his hair out of his face.
“What happened?” he choked.
“I don’t know. Here.” I swam us to a rocky outcrop and pushed him onto it. “Wait here. I’ll look for the others.”
Without waiting for a response, I dove back under the water and propelled myself around at a high speed in search of anyone else. But the waters were empty. I circled around a few times and cried out once or twice to see if my echolocation could pick anyone up. There was nothing but fish and the odd boat out there.
I popped up beside the rocks to find Adrian searching the waters for me.
“Did you find anyone?” he asked.
“There’s nobody,” I said. “Maybe the portal separated us.”
We had barged through it in a pretty aggressive fashion.
“Ugh.” Adrian spat some seawater onto the rocks. “Can we get onto shore then, please? I’m freezing my butt off.”
I beckoned him off the rocks, and he slipped into the ocean. With as little contact as I could manage, I pulled Adrian to the beach and let him wade out while I turned back to my human form and pulled on my shorts and sandals. The sound of a plane overhead had me craning my head to search for it. Well, at least we had landed in a fairly modern time.
“Now what do we do?” Adrian asked, as I waded onto the beach.
“The only thing we can do. Look for everyone else,” I said.
In all the commotion, I couldn’t say who had come through the portal with us. But if Adrian had, so had Kira, Ben, and Bronwyn. And maybe even one or two-.
“Freedom!” A joyous cry echoed around the cliffs and from under a nearby stone arch, a man sprinted across the beach with his arms in the air.
He had torn his bandana off and waved it around, the puffy white sleeves of his pirate shirt slipping down his skinny arms.
Yup. Dusk had pirates. And if they acted anything like they did on the ship, Dusk would see its history changed dramatically.
“Help me stop him!” I cried to Adrian as I bolted toward the pirate.
Nobody on Dusk could see him if we hoped to keep our timeline intact. But Adrian only followed at a half-hearted jog. Ugh, did that boy have enthusiasm for anything?
The pirate spotted me a second too late, and I tackled him, spraying sand into the air. He shouted and wriggled, but I threw my entire weight onto him, pinning him to the floor with his cheek pressed to the sand.
“You cannot contain me again! I am free!” he bellowed, coughing as he inhaled a mouthful of sand.
“You’re delusional if you think I’m letting you wander around my island and wreak whatever pent up havoc you’ve accumulated over centuries.” I dug an elbow into his back to keep him down, glaring at Adrian when he finally caught up. “A little help here?”
“What do you need my help for? Why don’t you just put him to sleep or something?” Adrian asked, wringing some water out of his shirt sleeve.
“Put him to sleep? What?” Did he think I went about my day laden with sleeping potions?
“Uh, hello? I thought mermaids could sing people into different states?” Adrian said. “You know, with your siren song thing?”
I scrunched up my face as I attempted to scrounge up an idea of what he meant. Once or twice, aside from using my voice for echolocation, I had lulled people into a daze. But could I put someone to sleep with my mermaid abilities? Couldn’t hurt to try.
I tapped into the part of my voice that the echolocation used and hummed a lullaby my dad used to sing to me when I was little. In a split second, the pirate fell still and rampant snores interrupted the sound of the waves and seagulls.
“Wow.” I clambered off the pirate and stood over him with my hands on my hips. “How did you know I could do that?”
“How come you didn’t know?” Adrian asked as he took his hands away from his ears, thankfully prepared.
“Nobody taught me how to be a mermaid, okay? Now, how did you know?”
Adrian shrugged. “I read up on mermaids when Ben told me you were one. Wanted to make sure there was nothing... fishy going on.” He snorted at his own joke.
Without even thinking, I slapped him on the arm. “That was so bad.”
“Ow.” Adrian pulled a face at me, rubbing the spot I had hit. “What do you want to do with him now?”
“Well...” I ran a hand through my wet hair and peered over my shoulder at the ocean. “... we can’t leave him here or he’ll drown.”
By the position of the sun, the time was late morning and although the tide wouldn’t return until the evening, we couldn’t risk leaving him on the beach. Although I didn’t know how long my song would last on him, we had to put the pirate somewhere warm and dry. Like a cactus.
“Here. Help me with him,” I said and grabbed the pirate’s wrists.
Between the two of us, Adrian and I hauled the limp pirate up the beach and onto the grassy interval that separated the beach and the car park. The pirate’s mouth fell open as his head lolled to one side.
Well, at least he wouldn’t wake up for a while.
“Celestia Beach,” Adrian said, pointing to the car park signage across the tarmac. “We’re not far from Dawn. Do you think the others will be there?”
I hesitated and took a moment to read the sign myself. This was the beach where Dad had pulled Mum out of the ocean years ago. I looked up and down the beach, as if expecting to see them there.
“If they’re not, that’s probably where they’ll go.” I hitched the waterproof bag into a more comfortable position on my shoulders. “I guess we’re walking.”
After a few minutes of walking up the road together in total silence, I realised Adrian and I had spent no time alone together... ever. To my knowledge, we only had one thing in common, and that was Ben. Well, two if you counted the curse. But after years of either avoiding or fighting with each other on sight, we hadn’t exactly built much of a relationship. Given he was Ben’s brother, maybe I should have attempted to do that recently.
But before I could even think of a question to ask him, Adrian asked one of his own: “Are you going to hurt Ben?”
“What? No.” I almost tripped on a pothole I didn’t see thanks to his stupid question. “Why would you think I would?”
“Because you’re an Arrowood,” Adrian said, kicking a stone down the road.
“Are you still not over that? We are.”
“For all I know, you could have some elaborate plan to drown him so nobody would ever know it was you.”
Suddenly, his interest in merfolk made way more sense... as did his insistence on coming with us when we went swimming together. The realisation made me want to hug him and punch him at the same time. But my empathy won over. He wasn’t trying to offend me. He just wanted to know that his brother was safe.
“Adrian,” I said in my gentlest tone. “Ben and I really care about each other. I would never hurt him.”
Not counting the time I had almost drowned him when my mermaid forgot he couldn’t breathe underwater.
After a chat with Janeira about my concerns about it happening again, I had taken steps to ensure it never would. To my delight, it had only required swimming regularly, so I could more easily balance my mermaid and witch side. But Adrian didn’t need to know about that.
“Yeah, well, excuse me for being sceptical. You two are the first Everharts and Arrowoods to get along, like, ever,” Adrian said.
“First time for everything.”
Adrian’s question made me hesitant to strike up a conversation with him. He didn’t trust me enough to leave his brother alone with me, so small talk would have to wait until he did. If that day ever came.
We walked the short distance to the outskirts of Dawn in silence, and it wasn’t until the first car passed us on its way out of the city that I gave any thought to which time we had landed in. It rushed by us too quickly for me to identify the make and model, but at first glance it had a similar look to the car that Margaret had taken baby Ben out of in our last portal. Were we back in the 90s?
Adrian and I made our way to the centre of Dawn, and I kept a keen eye out for Ben, Kira, Bronwyn, or anyone who looked like they belonged in a renaissance fair. The sun beat down so intensely that my clothes had dried on the way and the streets bustled with tourists, so we blended right in. That was one less thing to worry about.
I stopped us in the shade of a storefront. “We’ve got to come up with a plan or something. We can’t wander around aimlessly or we’ll never find them.”
“Well, what do you suggest?” Adrian asked, sitting down at a free cafe table.
I eyed an apothecary across the street. “We need to get the captain a ‘love’ potion, and it wouldn’t hurt us to stock up on potions so we can get the pirates under control.”
“And we can’t use your siren song because...?”
“Because we’re in the middle of Dawn and mermaids aren’t supposed to use their siren songs in public places,” I said.
I knew little about being a mermaid, but I knew that. People got antsy with the idea that a passing stranger could sing them into a stupor. Which was probably why an island-wide ordinance forbade any mermaids using their voices to coerce while on land. Not to mention, it might draw a lot of attention to us we didn’t need.
“Do you even have money?” Adrian asked as he followed me across the road to the apothecary.
Out of habit, I had brought my wallet, which had my last wad of wages before the scuba centre shut down for good. With no businesses to buy from, I hadn’t spent much lately. In fact, given we were at least twenty years in the past, my money might actually go further here.
I pulled my wallet out of my bag as we entered the shop and I picked out a ‘love’ potion, along with a few sleep-aid potions. In an ideal world, we could put every pirate to sleep to minimise their mischief, but I didn’t like the idea of hauling all that dead weight to the portal. The apothecary owner behind the counter looked at me curiously as I paid for the items and made a hasty exit. In fairness, the combination of potions I had bought made me look like some sort of stalker weirdo.
“I think we should go to the park,” Adrian said, once I was out on the pavement.
“Why?”
“It’s just... where Ben and I would always meet up if we couldn’t find each other when we were kids.” Adrian shrugged. “We had a bench we’d always meet at. I don’t know. Maybe he’s there?”
“Well, it’s a better idea than anything I’ve got.”
I shoved the potions into Adrian’s pockets as we walked along, much to his annoyance. But my uniform pockets didn’t even leave enough room to fit a credit card. He would have to deal with it; we might just need them in a pinch.
We walked to the park in the centre of Dawn. My feet ached in my sandals after all the walking, and I eyed several benches as we passed them, but they were all taken by tourists eating ice cream or couples eating face.
“Where’s this bench?” I asked.
But Adrian had only opened his mouth before a familiar shout cut through the cries of playing children in the play area nearby. It was a shout we both recognised: Ben’s.
A shiver wracked my body as another of Ben’s cries rang out, and I tore across the grass toward it. Adrian followed me, and we burst through the foliage off the path into the trees. A little way off, Ben wrestled with two pirates as a heavily pregnant woman clung to a tree behind him. I barrelled toward them, adrenaline kicking me to life. But I almost tripped over my feet when the woman turned to look at me, and I stopped dead in my tracks.
Our eyes met, and my heart plummeted into my stomach. Those green eyes… the blue tinted hair…
“Mum?” I whispered.