Chapter 22
Troy
BY THE NEXT MORNING , I had to admit I couldn’t keep Kiora in bed all day. For one, she must be sore. For two, my dick hurt.
We had been at it all day and part of the night until neither of us could stay awake. If it wasn’t for the habit of waking up at the same time every day for the past twenty-odd years, I still would’ve been asleep. Instead, here I was, watching Kiora make soft chortling sounds in her sleep. Adorable.
Unfortunately, there was a reason I always woke up early. I had work to do. My mornings were usually reserved for checking if there were any more selkies and mermaids found matching Kiora’s description. Now I had to check on her parents instead.
I left the caves to get some signal and texted both, Dylan and Eirlys. Still no reply. Then I texted Azar to see if he had spotted them. He texted back, saying he’d swing by with my clothes.
Azar didn’t have a key to my place. How had he gotten my clothes?
Whatever. I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
There was something else I had wanted to do. What the hell was it? Oh, right, I had wanted to find a location for the surprise party.
No way in hell would I offer my house or my office. First, I didn’t want people all up in my business, especially if they were partying. Second, my client wasn’t paying me to keep secrets from her, so anywhere I owned wouldn’t look good for me.
There was that magic shanty. Unlike the cursed store front, the shanty had some good vibes. Things tended to go well there, but it didn’t accept people for very long, so no one had been able to live in it.
I typed out a text to Selena, telling her where to find the shanty and the limitations it had. The place didn’t look like much, and it didn’t like being prettied up, but it also occasionally bestowed visitors with gifts they hadn’t even known they needed.
Just as I finished setting Selena up, Azar appeared on the horizon. His landing shook the mountain, but at least he was graceful enough not to shove me off a cliff.
He held my suitcase in his giant paw, and for some odd reason, the Ursula statue from my front yard was attached to it with bungee cord and carabiners. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what was inside the bag if Ursula was on the outside.
“I have so many questions,” I mumbled as I stared at his packing job. Somehow, the hard-shell suitcase looked lumpy. What had he done to it?
Azar shifted, grabbed a pair of pants stashed away near the entrance, then happily wheeled the suitcase inside. I followed.
“I didn’t find your boat,” Azar said as he put my luggage next to one of the sectionals in the living room. “And judging by how strongly you smell of Kiora, that might be a good thing because Dylan is going to murder you. Murder you! ”
“Thanks. I know, but I’d rather he murder me than get killed.”
Azar nodded before continuing his report. “The naga is still in town, but everyone else is gone. I guess he’s sticking around to see if Kiora is just hiding somewhere. He’s laying low to make everyone think he left.”
“Where is he hiding?” There were quite a few places one person could hide, but in a town like ours, there was no telling how the place would react.
“The cursed store front,” Azar said with a giant grin.
Good thing I warned Selena away from that place. With her being from Because, people here might not report her missing, thinking she’d returned home, while people from her hometown might think she was still in Whynot.
“Hey, I love your hair,” Azar said out of the blue.
I looked up at him and quickly realized he wasn’t talking to me. His eyes were to my left where Kiora emerged from the bedroom with the right side of her hair sticking up in all directions.
“Thanks. I woke up like that.” She finger-combed her hair, moving it to cover the offending mess on her right side.
“Did you pack my toiletries?” I asked Azar.
“You mean the entire drug store’s worth of hair products? Yeah, they’re in there somewhere.”
He could make fun of my hair products all he wanted, but mer hair was a pain to manage.
I unzipped my bag and found all my toiletries on the very top. Each bottle was packed in an individual ziplock bag, and the bag was signed with the product’s name, as if I couldn’t see the bottle.
“Come here. I’ll fix that for you,” I said to Kiora and patted the sectional.
“It’s not fixable.” Still, she sat down in front of me like I had told her to. “Trust me, I tried everything in the past.”
“Have you tried the siren’s song spray?” I asked while spritzing it in.
“I don’t even know what that is,” she admitted.
As I carefully brushed the tangles out of her hair, I explained. “It helps with the texture. Gives you beach waves.”
She hummed, but the sound stopped abruptly when she spotted the giant Ursula statue. “Do I even want to know?”
“I needed a workout, and that thing weighs a ton,” Azar answered.
“Riiight. So, you decided to haul a cartoon character around. Nice.”
With all the tangles gone, I started working the mermaid tail serum into Kiora’s hair. It would get that stubborn spot to behave, and hopefully, stay down for more than a day, although there was no telling with mer hair. It just did whatever it wanted.
“I’m going to guess that what Azar really wanted was to embarrass me,” I said to Kiora. “He failed to realize that I wouldn’t keep that statue on my front lawn if it embarrassed me.”
If anything, it helped me weed out stuck-ups who couldn’t see past their own upturned noses.
“Why Ursula, though?”
“Someone very smart told me that villains turn ordinary people into heroes.” I kissed her temple. “I conquered this villainous hair of yours. Never underestimate a merman with a hairbrush.”
Kiora fished out a mirror Azar had packed into yet another ziplock bag, then inspected her hair. “Wow. You actually did.” She took the two products I had used and inspected the bottles. “Figures it would take magical hair products to fix my morning hair.”
“Mermaid hair, especially if you’re a saltwater mermaid, gets everything it needs from the ocean. You haven’t been in one in how long?”
She sighed. “Since I was sixteen.”
Since Billy had tried to sell her.
“We’ll fix that.”