Kept (31 page)

“No.” My voice was quiet as I handed it to her.

“Are you sure? It’s really pretty.” She tossed it onto her massive pile of Christmas purchases. She’d even grabbed the broken candy I’d skipped when I first walked in.

“You find anything good?” she asked, pulling me further out of my reverie.

“Not really.”

“Those mothertruckers here need to reduce the prices some more. My son of a bucket husband doesn’t give me enough money to buy the expensive stuff.”

My head tilted to the side. Had she just referred to her husband as a
son of a bucket
?

She thrust a set of Christmas doggie shirts into my now empty hands. “Honey, you need to grab this stuff fast before someone else takes it.”

The aisle was very empty. No one came scrambling to snatch my stuff away.

“I don’t really see anything I want.”

“Oh, shake and bake!” She leaned across her cart and shook her finger at me. While she berated me, I wondered if she really had told me “bullshit” or if she actually needed to find a box of Shake and Bake.

“You can never have enough Christmas supplies. Especially at these cheap ace prices.”

Now that I had the pattern of her cursing down, all I could do was chuckle. She cursed like a sailor—a clean one anyway.

I watched her pick out selections for a while, and my heart sank as she joyfully added her choices into her cart. She had a bright smile on her face, even when she groaned while stretching for something beyond her reach. I grabbed the item for her, and she thanked me.

By the time we were at the end of the aisle, it became crystal clear: It was time for me to find Nick and go
home. I had things to do, and I was wasting my time here trying to use buying things as a crutch when I had real problems to face. But as I walked slowly down the aisle, dread filled me. I had a healing injury, and I wasn’t fully trained yet. What the hell should I do?

Night came and ate away at the remains of the day. Thankfully, Aggie was spending the night with Will. She’d called briefly to check on me.

“Are you doing okay?”

“I’m fine. Nick stopped by and plotted our next exercise. Right now I’m just hanging out.”

“You should get some sleep for tomorrow.”

I sat straighter in my seat to try to come off as normal. “I’m too nervous to sleep. You know me. I’ll watch TV and then doze off.” Or maybe I’d cry in the corner over how shitty things had become in my life.

Aggie sighed, and then the sounds of enthusiastic chewing came through the phone. Probably fried chicken from the spacing between breaths. “I wish sleeping pills worked on you. When you stay up late your credit card mysteriously pops out.”

“There was this nice china I saw on an infomercial—”

“Useless junk.”

I heard a voice whispering in the background. Aggie giggled, and I could tell she’d placed something over the phone to muffle the sound. As her friend, I was genuinely happy for her. But I was jealous too. Here I was, resting for the night all alone.

After Nick got back to NYC, he had left me a brief message on my cell phone to check on me, but no one else had called. Not even Thorn. Right now, I wanted so badly for him to comfort me. For him to hold me close and reassure me that no matter what happened tomorrow, he’d still love me.

A knock on the front door drew me back into my conversation with Aggie. “I have to go. Someone’s at the door.”

I slowly walked over to the foyer, trying to catch the scent of my visitor. My nose immediately told me it wasn’t Thorn, but another friend: Heidi. I beckoned her inside.

“What are you doing out in these parts?” I asked her.

She came in and sat down in my living room. The mermaid glanced at the fireplace, where I had a small fire going. “I came to see you one last time.”

With everything I had, I managed to walk to the opposite love seat without showing my injury. “What are you talking about?” But then I remembered what she’d said at group therapy. “Are you sure you want to go back? It doesn’t seem like you’re ready for that.”

She laughed softly, her red curls bouncing. At the top of her head, I noticed, her roots were white. I leaned forward to get a better view, and she pursed her lips at me.

“Yes, my roots are showing,” she snapped.

“All this time I thought you were a natural redhead.”

“I’m not.” She rolled her eyes. “And I bet neither are most of the redheads in NYC these days. Anyway, this is what happens to mermaids when they stay out of the water.”

My mouth formed an
O
, then I said, “So, have you actually gotten in the water yet?”

“I went with Eren to put my feet in to prepare.”

“Eren—that’s the man we saw in Maine?”

She nodded and continued to stare at the fire.

“You said at therapy that he’s your best friend. Did he come to tell you that you had to go home?”

“Yeah.”

From the length of silence that followed, it appeared
I’d have to keep prying information from her. “What happened?”

“I’m not just your average truck-driving, bartending mermaid who likes roughnecks.” Her face brightened for a moment. “I’m a member of the Royal Court of the Atlantic Coast.”

“A princess?” As in a fairy-tale princess who’s also a truck-driving, bartending mermaid?

“Oh, nothing that fancy. My dad’s a high-ranking general. He’s like the equivalent of a duke or something.”

I nodded and encouraged her to continue.

“Eren’s one of my father’s men. He was the one who left me that message at the gas station.”

“So he’s the one who killed all those imps. He didn’t leave a trace of his presence other than the note.”

“He’s the best of the best at what he does. I wish he’d fail once in a while so I wouldn’t have to go back.” She bumped her head on the back of the couch. “The note said it was time for me to go home to call everyone to arms.”

I frowned. “Don’t most armies have multiple generals? Why do they need you?”

“My father’s dead.” She said the words without any emotion. Maybe that’s what broke my heart the most for her.

I swallowed hard and stared at the floor. When I couldn’t bring myself to speak, I took in the view of my boxes. “I’m so sorry, Heidi.”

“I barely remember the last conversation I had with him before I left.” She smiled briefly through her pain. “He’d always been on a mission of some kind.”

“So you were alone a lot?” After all the time we’d been in therapy together, I didn’t know much about her past.

“Children are left to fend for themselves at a young age where I’m from. Your mother gives birth to you, and then you go live with the rest of the children born at the same time. Everyone either lives or dies by learning to be strong and choosing to make the right decisions. I was part of a pod with other highborn merpeople. We found a place to grow up protected from the darker things that lurked in the deep.”

My imagination built a picture for me of the ocean with Heidi inside it. She’d frolic with the fish and be carefree.

“Many of the highborn in my pod died from creatures you’ll never see on land. The ocean’s a cruel and vicious place compared to the safety of land.”

Okay, I take it back. No frolicking.

Heidi continued. “When I came of age, it was time for me to start thinking about looking for a mate. My father urged me to join the army so I could learn fighting skills and catch the eye of a suitable male.” She grinned devilishly. “There were plenty to choose from, and most of them were the bad boys my father liked to train. As I worked through training, I came to bond as a lifelong friend with my pod mate Eren. He wasn’t like the others. He followed orders without questioning them. He was—dependable. I came to find that honorable about him.

“While we were resting from a training mission once, Eren took me to a grotto he’d thought was interesting. None of the other soldiers liked him much since they thought he was a brownnoser, so he spent a lot of time alone.

“We traveled for hours, until we entered a cave off an underwater mountain.” She shivered and then closed her eyes.

“Everything went perfectly until we were separated. It
shouldn’t have been a problem. I was a mermaid, and I could easily search for a path outside. But I never found one.” Her breathing quickened and then broke as she said, “For hours I searched in the darkness, and then suddenly the water shook as an underwater earthquake hit. The cave I was in collapsed.”

I knew where this story was going and I didn’t want her to finish, but she appeared to need to get it out.

“Even though I’m nearly one hundred years old—just barely into adulthood—I’ve seen the deepest part of the ocean, touched the warmest of vents, next to underwater mountains taller than Mt. Everest. But I’d never been trapped all alone in a place that dark and cold in my life. I could move, I could breathe—but I was all alone, and no one came to me when I called. For the longest time I thought I was
dead
. Eren didn’t come when I needed him.”

I swallowed painfully as her tears flowed.

“Time passed. I don’t know how long. But when I woke up, I found myself floating along a current heading up the coast, toward Canada. Somehow I’d escaped the cave.”

“What happened after that?”

Heidi’s face paled even further. “I washed ashore in Boston, and I haven’t entered the ocean since.”

“But what about your home? Your father? Didn’t anyone come looking for you?”

She shrugged. “My family doesn’t work the way yours does. We don’t band together to help someone unless that person is of value to the merfolk. No one except someone’s mate cares what they do with themselves.”

Heidi said it matter-of-factly, but to me it came off as cold. The ocean was definitely more of a sink-or-swim kind of place than I’d want to live in.

“So why do they care about you now?” I asked.

“I’m the heir to my house. There are things my father was supposed to do that I must now accomplish. Or many people will die.”

“Are you ready to go home?”

Her sigh came out slightly choked. “No, I’m not.”

I stood, wobbling a bit before I managed to sit down next to her.

“I envy what you have,” was all she said. “Sometimes I wish I’d been born on land. With a family like yours, who cared for me and protected me.”

Most of them cared for me—and that was more than I’d ever need. But I was perfectly glad to share my babushka. She seemed to always have enough love for anyone.

Slowly, I reached behind my neck and undid the clasp on the seashell necklace. She gave me an evil eye when I placed it around her neck.

“What are you doing? That was a gift.”

“Right now, you need it more than I do.”

Her eyes darkened. “You offend me by giving this back—”

“And you offend me by not
taking
it back,” I said gently.

Her face immediately softened, and she sat a bit straighter. Her fingers traced a line over the shell’s most prominent ridge, like I always did. From her smile I knew the truth: Its magic would work
only
on mermaids.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Heidi said.

“You can and you will. Weren’t you the one who told me home’s the place we always have to return to someday?” I wrapped my arm around her shoulders. Her head leaned in to rest on mine. “Tomorrow’s a big day for both of us.”

“Yes, it is,” she said quietly.

“You’ll do just fine, and come back in no time.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

I snorted. “It will be, ’cause I’ll come find your sorry butt if you don’t bring me my necklace back.”

Chapter 26

A
s
I walked down the first part of the course, I wondered if a cell phone call to Mike’s Supernatural Drunk Bus would be my best move. I had to be boozed up and out of my mind to be here with my injury.

After my talk with Heidi last night, I should’ve felt fired up and ready to go. She had to take a step toward what she feared the most. Why couldn’t I do the same?

The course’s location was never revealed to the candidates. After walking it with the others, I was glad they hadn’t told us. Whoever planned this trial had smoked from a cheap crack pipe and then passed it around asking for bright suggestions on how to scare the piss out of people.

Out of the six candidates, I appeared the least anxious. But, well, after everything I’d been through to get my family’s honor back, it was either join the pack or leave so I wouldn’t have to witness Erica parading around with Thorn’s ring on her finger. Today I was here to finish the job. Whether I made it or not, at least I might get my respect back.

I took in the scene. It resembled a boot camp obstacle course. The serene scene, if you could call it that, included a wall to scale, a tire run, horizontal ladder rungs, and a frozen moat to swing across. Snow covered the ground, except for on the low crawl, where chunks
of frozen mud and branches had collected. Filthy and disgusting, by my standards.

And what the hell was up with the wall the size of a small mountain? In terms of upper-body strength, I had zip.
Don’t think about that. Think about victory. After everything you’ve endured, you’ll go home as a respected member of the South Toms River pack. A position you can hold and not have Thorn in your life
. The Stravinskys already treated me like family, other than Auntie Yelena, but underneath it all, I wanted the pack to give me the respect I truly deserved. If I could survive touching this stuff without thinking about all the germs. Hell, that was what drugs were for. And with the amount of mellow purple pills I’d popped, most normal folks would have been stripped naked in the snowdrifts making snow angels.

The trials would begin at twilight, after the divorces. In my opinion, it’s a bit much to make the candidates suffer after a couple dukes it out as if the obstacle course were a California courtroom. Werewolves should mate for life, but I guess if the couple hated each other, then why suffer for it? From what I’ve heard and witnessed, the Atkinses needed a divorce. They fought constantly, about everything—including the Atlantic Ocean—while I’d shopped at the grocery store.