Blueisland (Watermagic Series, #4) (17 page)

“Hell if I know,” she sighed as she examined a heart trinket on my charm
bracelet. “I just thought you should see it.”

“Now I know why you were afraid to show me. This is creepy.”

She put her hand on my shoulder and I flinched, thinking of the last time I wore the baton twirler costume and how Jake Stevenson yanked it down to my knees in his sports car.
Stop, stop! Get the fuck off of me. Take me home.

You want it,
girl. You want it
, he moaned. There was blood all over the costume when I pulled it back up over my body. I hated him so much. He stole my virginity and he never paid for that. I was too ashamed to tell anyone.

Jake Stevenson must have stolen all these things from me. Maybe he snuck into my apartment after the incident and took my costume so that there wouldn’t be any evidence of what he did to me.
I wasn’t going to tell a soul. The bastard. My heart burned like the fires of hell. I couldn’t relay any of this to Savannah. It was too shameful.

“Do you have any guesses who would take your stuff from you?” she asked, her eyes glossy.

“No.” I said adamantly, my hands balling into fists. It just didn’t make sense that Jake Stevenson would steal all the trinkets, the perfume, and the hairbrush from me. Those weren’t missing all at once. If my memory served me right, I lost each thing at a different time it seemed. He would have had to break into my house on several occasions. Would he do that? I didn’t think so. But if he did, why the hell would he?

“Whoever took your stuff must have brought it on the yacht,” Savannah said.

“You’re right. That’s weird isn’t it?”

She nodded, her eyes wide. “I’d say it’s psycho.”

My pulse skipped a beat. “Let’s get out of here.” I motioned with my chin toward the window.

“Do you want to take your valuables?” she asked, looking at the table.

“No. I just want to leave and figure all this shit out.”

“
That’s for sure. It is better if the person who put these things here doesn’t know we saw them.”

I licked my lips. “Yup.” My mind was spinning with ideas.

We swam through the dark out the window, back over the dilapidated stairs and into the great room. “Let’s make our way out through that window,” Savannah said looking back at me.

I followed behind, but just as we were nearing
the window overhead, someone looked in. “Holy crap!” I gasped.

Savannah looked back at me, her eyes wide.

“Donny?” I said in shock. But then, he was gone. We swam out the window and couldn’t find him anywhere.

Chapter Ten

Back at the beach, Savannah and I tried to help the three freshmen girls, Connie, Cindy, and Jenny feed the bonfire. It was my suggestion to increase the flames. I hoped that the humans could make it off the island before they were killed. Maybe a rescue team would see the smoke and find us. It wasn’t fair that the Ancients were set on murdering the remaining humans.

But a part of me feared that maybe the Ancients would attack the rescue boat. That would be an even bigger terror. Logan, Andrew, and Steve told me that
they learned from the French school of mers that the Ancients hypnotized that giant kraken into sinking our ship. I was astounded at the powers we possessed as a species. It was surreal.

I stepped back from the fire feeling a bit too hot.
It was tough being so close to the heat, but even tougher was being around the girls. They smelled like food. Their soft flesh, warm and pungent by the fire, was a constant temptation. Really they needed to stay away from us and keep even farther away from the Ancients who seemed set on devouring them. “Make sure you stay out of the ocean,” I cautioned the girls, my arms crossing tightly over my chest, but Savannah bumped me on the side when I said that.

“Jeez
,” I said, scowling at her.

“Why should we?” Connie interrupted my irritation
with the slightest bit of attitude. She was a tall fleshy blonde and the leader of the three. Even though she was a bitch, her body smelled like hot shrimp and rare steak, seasoned just right. She needed to take a step back, but she just stood there like an idiot on a kabob taunting me.

“Don’t you know what happened on the yacht?”
I asked, my voice laced with tension. Was she really that clueless?

“Watch yourself,” Savannah whispered in my ear as she tossed another branch into the fire.
Maybe she was concerned I would tear Connie’s flesh to shreds right there on the beach, but I think she was more concerned that the Trident Court might find out that I was cautioning the humans on the island. She must have been afraid of what I was saying. According to Marcel, the Ancients were planning to kill every last human. I just couldn’t let that happen.

Jenny, the strawberry blonde with dimples
and a spicy apple pie scent that made me think of desert butted in. “Oh, I do! I know what happened on the yacht,” she said, her cheeks heating up. I took a step back, biting my inner cheek as she continued, “There was a huge octopus that killed everyone. It injected a poison into some of you and the poison made you guys gorgeous and strong with all sorts of weird changes. Do you think the octopus could come back?”

Though my hands were balled into tight fists underneath my crossed arms
, I chuckled, blinking so my eyes wouldn’t dry out too much in the heat. Boy was she stupid—but creative. I’ll hand her that. “Yeah, I do. It wants to eat you,” I said firmly.

She gasped and then giggled. Probably, she thought I was joking.
Stupid dingbat. The sun was really hot even though it was almost evening time. I looked across the fire at the ocean longingly, but turned back shortly thereafter to chuck a stick at the fire.

I heard Cindy sigh causing me to glance over at her. Her
eyes welled up. She was a petite brunette with ringlets. Her flesh smelled like hot butter on lobster. Dang, she was gourmet. “Jake said sharks killed Jason, Jeff, and Talia, but Emily won’t talk about anything.” I wished she wouldn’t talk about Jason. She wiped the perspiration off her forehead with a hanky she had tucked in the bodice of her tethered pink prom dress. I sucked in a hot breath of air and tore another thick branch off the limb behind us and threw it in the bonfire.

“
Emily’s traumatized by something,” Jenny added. She had a light shawl over her bare, fleshy shoulders, but I could see salty perspiration marks on her teal colored prom dress that she had pinned up on the sides. My eyes trailed down the sinews of her thighs.

Connie tossed her
buttery blonde hair off her pink shoulder and scoffed, “She’s just a spoiled baby that is scared of everything. I’m not afraid of the water. Even if there was an octopus, it would have swum off by now and sharks rarely attack people, so I’m not worried.” She stood before the bonfire looking at us with her hands on her hips. “Plus it’s too damn hot to just sit around in this soupy heat without cooling off in the ocean.”

“Just stay
at the edge of the…” I started to say the word, shore, but Savannah’s expression was on fire, so I stopped. Didn’t she care about the humans? Maybe we were all predators now, but I couldn’t put my head around intentionally murdering people I knew. My fantasies were nearly overwhelming, but with self-control, I would stop myself. I licked my lips. Yes I would. Just step back and breathe. My head was pounding. I regretted killing Jason. It was a horrible mistake that I would die to take back.

“Raz
and I are going hunting in the jungle. We’ll see you guys tomorrow,” Savannah said, tucking her hair behind her ears. Maybe she was feeling the same thing I was. At least somebody was thinking rationally.

Jenny’s eyelids flew open. “Don’t do that! Wild animals will kill you in there! I think that’s how a whole bunch of our classmates died.”

“We won’t get killed with these.” Savannah patted the two knives fastened to the waist of her wet jeans, a pair of pants she must have found in someone’s backpack that got washed up to shore. She told me to keep my clothes wet so that I didn’t get overheated on land, but I didn’t listen. “We need protein,” she said to the girls.

“You’re right,” Cindy agreed. “We can’t live on just mangos and bananas.”
I wondered how much better they would taste if they started fattening up with meat.

“You couldn’t catch a fish to save your life,” Connie teased her friend.

Cindy pursed her lips together. “Oh, and you can?”

“I’m just saying we need the animal
substance to get on,” Connie said sarcastically, her eyes wide and challenging.

“There are sea urchins and snails in the tide pools,” Jenny
added.

“Oh, and you’re going to eat that slimy mess?” Connie laughed
, fixing the hand tied satin mini-skirt she had hanging over her shapely hips and round buttocks. Apparently, she made the thing out of her prom dress. She had the same fabric tied clumsily over her fleshy breasts.

“Maybe, if it comes down to it.” She folded her arms.

Cindy giggled. “I know you, Jenny. No way in the world would you eat snotty squishy bottom dwellers that eat the poop of the fish.”

I laughed at that
, putting my hand on Cindy’s shoulder. Oh, it was warm. I pulled back suddenly.

Her eyes widened. “What?”
She looked at me.

“Nothing,” I mumbled, rushing behind one of the piles of branches we had lugged over.

Her eyes blinked several times as she stared at me. She seemed confused. I tried to ignore her and pull myself together. “There was a bee on your shoulder,” I said, trying to cover for my strange behavior.

“Is it gone?” she asked, jumpin
g around and swishing at her body.

I chuckled. “Yeah, it flew away.”

She sighed, rolling her eyes and then went back to poking at the fire. Like that did anything.

The other girls were talking about the oysters in the cove.
Sea creatures actually sounded promising to me. I started to wonder why I hadn’t thought of eating them. So cool and soft in the mouth. An aphrodisiac. Maybe they would curb my appetite and keep my mind straight. Even though I was burning up, my body shuddered at my morbid thoughts. Never again, I told myself. Never ever.

“Come on,” Savannah said, probably reading my mind.
The telepathy thing would take getting used to. I knew we weren’t going hunting. She just didn’t want them to know we were going in the ocean to the Ancient’s get-together. What would they think of that crazy shit?

I didn’t want to meet the
Trident Court. After what they had done, I hated them. But as pathetic as it was, I couldn’t wait to see Marcel. I knew he was dangerous in more ways than one. Aside from the fact that he was married to Brigitte, he was a mer killer. The guy could lose control and tear me to shreds. He probably felt reckless and out of control around me the way I felt around these girls.

But n
ow that Savannah had revealed so much about his past, I had many burning questions tugging at my mind. I hoped he would confide in me more. Surely, I wouldn’t ask him private details, but possibly he would offer them up on his own. He seemed set on keeping me safe. Surely, he wouldn’t kill me.

I also was dying to ask him about Donny. It didn’t make sense that he was swimming so deep down in the ocean. A human couldn’t do that without special gear.
I sunk my toes in the sand as I thought about Donny. The sand felt cool on the webbings that had recently grown between my toes.

My mind reeled. Was Donny
a mer? Savannah said he must be. But if he was one of us, why was he avoiding our school? And there was that creepy ensemble of my things on that table in the room of the yacht. Did Donny have anything to do with that? No way. He was too sweet. I couldn’t imagine him stealing my things. But a part of me wondered because why was he swimming up to the yacht? Maybe he was staying there and that room was his. The idea of it made me very uncomfortable.

I thought back in time.
It surprised me tremendously when he asked me to the prom. I didn’t even think he knew I was alive. But then, out of the blue, he invited me. He could have asked a number of girls who didn’t have dates, but he chose me. Why? Did he have some sort of infatuation with me that I wasn’t aware of? He did used to flirt with me in junior high.

I remembered how Jason said Marcel kissed Donny on the deck of the yacht before kicking him into the ocean. Was Jason just making that up?
Maybe not. Marcel must have kissed him to convert him into a mer. Yet, he must have hated Donny if he kicked him into the ocean right after the kiss. If he loathed him so much, why would he choose to turn him? And why was Donny hiding away from us? It just didn’t make sense.

If I had gotten a better glimpse of Donny from the window of the sunken yacht, I might have seen if his hair had grown long. That would tell me if he was a mer now. But
it was such a brief glimpse that I barely saw him at all. For all I knew, it could have been someone else.

“Hello,” Savannah said to me, waving her hand before my face. “Is anybody in there?”
She was smiling playfully at me.