Chapter 15
Fifteen
Angie
The mermaid hadn’t left her mind when Angie returned home. Lulu slunk out to greet her, and after grabbing her seaflute from her nightstand, she sat on the floor, letting the cat nestle in her lap while she rolled the instrument around in her fingers.
She hoped Grayson would reconsider keeping the mermaid and release her.
Her thoughts traveled to Kaden again. She hadn’t talked to him in over a week, though when she tried to call him, he didn’t answer, and since there was no way to leave a message with the seaflute, she didn’t know if he had tried to call her, either.
As if she spoke him into existence, the seaflute vibrated and Kaden’s voice came through. “Angie? Are you there?”
“I just tried calling you.” Angie rested two fingers on the seaflute as though she could touch him, as though he was right here in front of her. Lulu awoke at the sound of Kaden’s voice and sat upright, staring at it. “Hey. Say hi to Uncle Kaden.”
Lulu didn’t blink.
“Tell her I say hi!” Kaden’s voice came through her seaflute, clear and crisp, as if he were beside her.
With dainty steps, the cat stepped out of Angie’s lap and walked back to her hiding place in the closet and fell asleep, shaped like a black-and-white loaf with ears and a tail.
Under her breath, Angie muttered, “And this is why I have cat hair all over my clothes.” The last time she tried to lock Lulu out of her closet, her cat cried and yowled all night until she could get back in, and Angie wasn’t about to begrudge her feeling safe.
“I take it she didn’t return the greeting?” Kaden asked.
“She hasn’t seen you enough. It takes her a minute to warm up to someone new.”
“I’m afraid she’ll destroy my tail the next time she sees me.”
“She might,” Angie said with a small laugh. “She thinks it’s a fish. Oh wait. It is a fishtail.”
Kaden’s chuckle was jovial. “Did you just get back from the aquarium?”
“I did.” Angie licked her lips and everything she wanted to say to him tumbled out at once.
“I—I miss you. I have so much going on between my job and school, and trying to find who’s responsible for your mother’s death.
I’ve hit a dead end. I know you’ve been going through a lot, too, and I feel bad I can’t be there to support you. ”
Kaden’s tone softened. “I keep thinking about the humans that were responsible. I feel stuck and can’t do anything.”
“I tried. I have to think of what to do next, but I’ve called dive shops all over Alaska, and I’m left with nothing.” Angie raked a hand through her hair. She didn’t know what to do next.
“Perhaps you can talk to any witnesses who were there that night? If you could even find one of the divers and get them to talk.”
“Yeah, I’ll ask Bàba who was on duty that night and maybe someone saw something that Stefan missed.” Angie pulled out her phone and sent a quick text to Bàba, asking him the same. “How’s it going with your uncle?”
“I’ve been trying to talk some sense into him, but he—I feel like he deflects me at every turn. He tells me he values my input, but he doesn’t show it. And we have reports of missing mer, mostly sentinels and sentries.”
“Missing mer?” Angie’s breath hitched. “How many?”
“About eight.”
The number rang in Angie’s head. There were six mermaids and mermen in the news, and Dr. Williams had two.
“I’ve seen reports of six merfolk shipped off to facilities around here.
My professor has a mermaid and merman, and one of those mermaids.
..” She took a shaky breath. “is in the aquarium where I work. I tried to talk my boss into releasing her. Looked like a shark attacked her?”
“I’m not surprised. We’ve had a minimal number of attacks, but from what I heard from Aunt Cassia, they’re having issues with sharks looking for merfolk, as well. Possibly from human activity and fishing and sharks having less food for themselves.”
“Damn it.” Angie went to pour herself a glass of water, stretching out her legs. She was right, and the notion saddened her.
“If my uncle gets ahold of this,” Kaden grumbled. “It might push him to increase his efforts to retaliate.” A pause. “But he appointed me his high advisor and we’re having a council meeting two tidesdays from now. I have to speak up. We can’t have another war.”
Angie’s heart swelled with pride. “You have my full support.”
Angie didn’t hear back from Bàba until the next afternoon, when he sent a text update on the missing divers around Creston. As she opened the message, her heart nearly stopped.
Bàba: Hi Beibei. We found the missing divers—dead in a shallower area of the sea surrounded by armed mer.
Search party and divers overwhelmed the mer in a surprise attack and killed some and captured others.
I want to say five total. All were sold.
I believe at least two or three were sold somewhere by you.
I will get you the names of the staff that night.
Angie shuddered, reading his text over and over until the words became fuzzy blurs. It explained where these research labs, fisheries, and SMOSA were getting mer.
She thought of the missing divers, consternation rising.
The air in her apartment stifled her, even with her windows cracked open, and she dialed Bàba’s number.
It went straight to voicemail without a ring, so she tried their house phone.
It rang and rang, and after Angie counted ten rings, she hung up. He wasn’t at the docks or at home.
Where was he? Was he okay?
Mia would still be at work.
Sighing with frustration, she grabbed her jacket, purse, phone, and keys, and left the apartment.
She needed a change of scenery and slid into her car, turning on the GPS to her destination: a state park ten miles north of Shoreline.
Angie packed her books and notebooks, should the urge to study strike her.
The beach wasn’t as quiet as she would have liked with smatterings of families and groups of teenagers and kids playing. Angie counted fifteen people in her vicinity and there was enough space between the groups so that she could find a spot in an isolated corner.
The hazy sun hung overhead, making the calm waters, blue gray horizon, and bordering rocks and bluffs appear ethereal and surreal.
The scent of salt and brine, and occasional pungent stench of decaying seaweed and sea lettuce, filled her nostrils, and she found a flat rock to sit on.
Fortunately, the fetid stenches were passing, and Angie settled atop the rock, smelling the fresh, crisp scent of passing rain showers mixed with the salt breeze. She took a deep inhale, savoring it.
Mount Rainier’s shadow loomed in the distance, providing her with a perfect, peaceful backdrop.
Not ten minutes into studying, raucous commotion filled her ears.
Tiān, why did people have to be so loud and obnoxious?
She tried blocking them out, but their laughter grew louder, followed by a loud, clear ‘hold it there! I almost got it’.
Angie’s head shot up and she dropped her pen. It wedged between two stones like a stake.
A group of two teenage boys, one tall and one shorter, and a girl were pulling a wiggling spiny dogfish out of the water, the small shark thrashing and writhing as they dragged the animal farther ashore.
She jumped to her feet and bolted for them, careful to keep her balance on the rocky ground. “Hey! What are you doing?”
They ignored her, the taller boy holding the shark down on their back while the girl took pictures with her phone.
Angie quickly scanned the dogfish’s underside. No claspers, denoting a female. “Leave her alone.” Angie wedged her way into the group and grabbed the shark from his hands. The dogfish was as long as she was tall and she struggled to maintain a grip on her smooth, wet skin.
“What’s your problem?” the boy asked, throwing out his hands and glaring at her. “We’re not hurting anything! We’re gonna throw it back after we get like, one picture, damn.”
“Mind your own business.” The girl put her hands on her hips and widened her stance.
“My problem? How would you like it if someone came to your house and dragged you out so they could take pictures?”
“Like a stupid shark is going to drag me out of my house. Ooooo.” The taller boy wiggled his fingers at her.
“Okay, how about divers coming and dragging you out to the water, where they can breathe, and you can’t?” Angie made her way to the shoreline to throw the shark back in. Her gills were opening and closing, and she wasn’t thrashing so much anymore, as if she was giving up her fight.
She whispered, “No, no, stay alive.”
A hard shove struck her between her shoulder blades, and she lost her balance, falling to her hands and knees.
Did one of them push her? What the fuck.
The dogfish slipped from her hands, so close to the water, but too far from the receding tide an inch away from her.
She winced as her palms and knees slammed into the small pebbles, and a painful, electric jolt shot up the underside of her forearms and down her shin.
The tide came in again, brushing the dogfish’s tailfin.
“We’re gonna teach you a lesson,” he said with a blinding, pearly-white snarl. “Nobody messes with us.”
“Because I wanted to throw a,” she made air quotes with her fingers, “quote unquote, stupid shark back into the water, you’re going to assault me?
Do your parents know about your anger problems?
” Angie jerked, but the boy was bigger and stronger than she was.
Come to think of it, they were all taller than her.
“My parents aren’t here right now,” the boy said from behind her. She grabbed a handful of pebbles and before he could react, flung it as hard as she could behind her, hoping to hit his face. One struck him in the open eye, the others bouncing off his forehead.
“Bitch hit me in the eye!” he hollered but let her go while his hands flew to his face.
Angie came eye-to-eye with the dogfish who watched her with unblinking eyes. A harsh scratch ran diagonally down her right eye.
So, this wasn’t the first time she had gotten into trouble.
Angie was going to get beaten up by teenagers for this dogfish. Just the way she wanted to end a perfectly good Monday evening otherwise.
From her peripheral vision, other figures approached. “What’s going on over there?” A faint yell from a deep male voice. She stood. Inches away from her feet, the tide pulled back.
Too far back, revealing sand and rocks beneath.
A large wave rose and crashed over her head, knocking her back onto her knees.
Angie whimpered as she interlaced her fingers around the back of her head and tucked her chin, digging her toes in the ground.
Screams arose from around her and she scrambled back to her feet.
Another tidal wave was coming, this one looking like a meteotsunami.
Water dotted and blurred her vision. She wiped her eyes and froze where she was.
Three mer surfaced. Two mermaids, one merman. The markings on their shoulders denoted them as royal sentinels.
More screams, and the waves crashed down on them. Before Angie’s eyes, the dogfish wiggled her way back in the receding water.
The three teenagers stared, a mixture of fear and awe clear on their expressions. In unison, the mer reared their arms back, and in the blink of an eye, had hurled spears toward the three teens.
They yelled something in Renyuhua, and they spoke too fast for Angie to understand a single word.
Tremors seized Angie’s muscles, and she broke into a cold sweat, breaths coming out in shallow gasps.
Was one of those spears meant for her?
No, the sentinels’ aim was true to their targets.
The girl was speared through her chest, and with blood dripping from her lips, she collapsed to her side, unmoving.
Another tidal wave swept onto the coast, this one carrying driftwood, logs, and twigs. In the ensuing chaos, Angie felt as if her legs were cemented into the ground. The sentinels let two more spears attached to ropes fly.
They speared the taller boy through his side and the shorter one through his shoulder.
The boys screamed as the sentinels pulled them into the water.
“Mer! Oh shit!” A horrified scream came from another young woman standing off to the side. A log hit the woman, and she collapsed, holding her head and gritting her teeth.
Some people were filming the whole ordeal. Others stayed back, faces paled with shock.
A middle-aged couple rushed to the shore but backed off before getting too close to the shoreline.
Other beachgoers ran for their lives.
In her immediate field of vision, the last of the mer disappeared beneath the surface without giving her a second glance.
Her knees were weak, as if they would give out from under her at any moment, and she looked over to the now-calm seas. Angie searched for the dogfish, but she was gone, likely safe again beneath the waves.
Her limbs and core were numb and the world blurred around her.
She couldn’t stop staring at the sea. It was eerily calm, as if the mer had never been there.