Part 15 (1/2)

Her arms are like hummingbird wings flitting through the water. She's almost a foot away from him. They reach the rocks. He flips right around, a smile visible when he breaks the surface just for show. My own gills burn.

”Will you stop pacing?” Marty pulls on my cargo shorts. ”It isn't going to help.”

Maybe not looking might somehow make this nauseous feeling go away. I pick the spot directly across from me where the herald tents are. Alone, while her future husband is racing my best friend, the Snow White mermaid lies on heaps of blankets. The servants who surrounded her moments ago are gathered at the edge of the lake. She leans her cheek on her fist, bored. That's when I see it. I mean, see her. In a second, her gray eyes glaze over with a black shadow and her lips mouth a single word, a word I can't even begin to guess the meaning of.

The crowd gasps and squeals as Layla speeds up. One, two, three, four strokes, and she's reached the other side of the sh.o.r.e.

Elias is only a second behind her, but it's clear to everyone watching that he's lost.

The court is a mess-girls, kids, fathers-laughing. My grandfather is still and pulls at the tip of his chin hair. He makes a motion to reach for something at his right, his trident, and then realizes it isn't there anymore.

Elias has lost. He's lost to a human girl, an intruder, and the court is laughing at him. I look for his fiancee, but she isn't there anymore, and I can't find her in the crowds of the court.

In the lake, Layla cries out and cringes. She has a cramp and grabs on to the rocky ledge. Kurt and Marty are weaving their way through to help pull her out of the water as Elias turns his bloodshot eyes on my friend. My Layla.

Brow tight, lips curled in a growl, hands outstretched for her neck, he is literally a creature rising from the lake to attack her. I can't say I do this without thinking. I think he's going to hurt her. I don't think about what this might do to my standing as a champion. I run and dive into the lake, close enough to him that my splash distracts him. Elias turns to me full on.

The s.h.i.+ft comes naturally. It starts as a tingle in my spine, right where my tattoo is, and it travels all the way down. In two strokes I adjust to one tail movement instead of two kicking legs. One, two, and I have my arms around him. One under the right arm and one over his left shoulder. I squeeze him and he pushes hard against me, so we sink into the water.

He's physically stronger, and we go down, down, down. We hit against a wall, and I let go of him. He charges at me with arms outstretched, full speed, Superman underwater. We're locked in a wrestler's grip, forearm to forearm.

Something in me is awakening. I don't know what to call it. Instinct is too simple. It's older, more primal. It's more than defending a girl I'm possibly in love with; it's knowing that I can beat him. I push as hard as I can through the water. I can feel every fiber in my body, every bone in my tail, and he cannot overpower me. Something in me knows nothing can harm me. I am untouchable.

And then there is the darkness. We're so far from the surface that the light doesn't reach us anymore. He breaks my hold and hits me right on the jaw, sending me slamming against a boulder. His hands close around my neck so my gills can't take in water. I hold my breath, but it isn't enough. I wrap my tail around his, and even though I can't see his face, I can still see the whites of his eyes. His grip loosens, and his eyes roll back into his head. He lets go completely, falling down into the pitch-black. Did I do that? I couldn't have. I wouldn't know how.

My stomach contracts and there's that nauseous feeling again. My head feels like it's splitting open. I reach for Elias's hand and try to pull him up to the surface, but he's as heavy as he looks, and my muscles feel like elastic that's given out and snapped.

I shut my eyes against the throbbing pain in my head, and I know this is all happening because of her. I can see her face again. Smiling, waiting in the black coldness of my dreams, the silver mermaid. Waiting for a moment like this.

It's daylight.

I'm drooling all over my arm in Ancient History. The teacher, Mr. Van Oppen, leans his Hugh-Grant-looking self against the chalkboard. He has a funny accent I can't ever guess right and the kind of hair that flops everywhere when he runs his fingers through it.

The girls are crazy about him. I'm talking Indiana-Jones-writing-on-their-eyelids-and-hanging-around-after-cla.s.s-was.h.i.+ng-the-eraser-board-for-him kind of crazy.

”And what year did Alexander the Great conquer all? Come on, now, it's not like it's in front of you on the reading a.s.signment from last night, hmm?”

Silence.

A sliver of light peers through the blinds and hits me right in the eyes. Mr. Van Oppen pulls on the string to make the shutters stay shut, and my eyes are unblinded. The lights in the cla.s.sroom are so bright that I can't imagine how I fell asleep in the first place.

He taps my desk with his long, skinny index finger.

”Mr. Hart?” He never calls anyone by their first name.

”'At the age of nineteen / He became the Macedon King / And he swore to free all of Asia Minor / By the Aegean Sea / In 334 B.C. / He utterly beat the armies of Persia'?”

”Very good, Mr. Hart. I see you've been listening to your Iron Maiden, hmm?”

The cla.s.s snickers.

”What made him a good king? Ms. Shea?”

Maddy sits with her legs up on the chair. She's wearing a tiara from her Sweet Sixteen party, which was really just me, her, Layla, and some of her drama club nerds at Ruby's on the boardwalk, because her mom wouldn't let her have a party. The tiara was my will-you-be-my-girlfriend gift, along with a few other things I fished out of my mom's junk trunk.

Maddy pops a big, green bubble-gum ball and rolls her eyes. ”Down with kings! Alexander the Great was such a poser. Did he even fight? No. He just got people killed, and killed a whole bunch of other people who didn't even want to be ruled. He killed them right there and then-dead. Dead, dead.”

My head pounds at the temples.

There's a knock on the door. Everyone looks at me, then at the door. Then me again.

I stand and b.u.mp into the desk next to mine. It's Layla's. She sits with her hands tied and propped on the desk. She has her head down like she doesn't want anyone to look at her face. ”This is all your fault, Tristan. All your fault,” she says.

”What the-” I grab her hands and start trying to undo the ropes, but every time I get one knot undone, another one pops up in its place.

Maddy gets up and out of her desk, and everyone goes, ”Oooooooh.”

She stands over me and says, ”You always picked Layla over me. Now you got her dead. All you do is hurt people, Tristan Hart.”

”The door, Mr. Hart. The door.” Mr. Van Oppen walks around and sits on his desk. ”Everyone else turn to page 1001, the future-the destruction of New York City by a little merman.”

”Wh-”

”The door, Mr. Hart. Answer the door.”

I can't shake the numbness spreading through my body. I turn the k.n.o.b, and when I open my eyes, the silver mermaid is there. She bares her shark teeth at me. The hallway is full of water. She moves her hands to try and grab me, but she can't breach the gla.s.s wall between us. I shut the door in her face and press my back against it.

Mr. Van Oppen stares at me with a furrowed brow and a crooked smile. ”My, my. And here I was wondering what all the fuss was about. Hmm?”

When I breathe, I breathe hard.

Breathe like I haven't had any air in years. Layla's face is right over me. Her eyes are wet, and she wipes her hand across them. She brings her closed fist right down on my chest. Deja vu.

”Easy, girl,” I hear Marty say.

”Where am I?”

”You're alive is what you are,” Thalia says. She's in between s.h.i.+fts. Her deep green scales cover her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and she's still wearing her puffy pink skirt. She's rubbing a black paste onto my chest where I've got more long red scratches.

”You're in the king's quarters,” Kurt says from somewhere. I recognize the bed, the throne across the room, the empty stand where the trident used to be.

I stretch my arms out and feel the sheer blanket, too fine to be silk but the softest thing I've ever felt. Then I glance at Layla's face again and think of the kiss I stole from her. No way, her lips are definitely the softest.

But other memories push past that one-the silver mermaid, over and over again. She's here. She's somewhere on the island.

”Elias. That shark mermaid was down there. Where's my grandfather?”

”The king is calming the crowds,” Thalia says. Her cuteness is replaced with that all-knowing, kick-a.s.s att.i.tude she doesn't always let peek through. s.h.i.+t must be serious then.

”Elias's followers want your fins stripped on a platter.”