Diary of a Radical Mermaid (12 page)

Don’t even try it, he growled inside my head, as I latched one hand around the rope at my ankle. He curled around me, rolling me inside the rope and three feet of my own auburn hair. Fly, meet Spider. I tried to pop his eardrums with my sonic shriek, but it didn’t do a damn bit of good. He wrapped me like a seafood burrito, arms pinned to sides, thigh clamped to thigh. Only my boobs were free — or, at least, bulging out between two rounds of rope.

Maybe they’d signal for help.

Jordan, I’ll never forgive you, you scum of the ocean, you amoeba-balled sneak, you—

I warned you I’d have you shanghaied if you didn’t leave the island.

I popped to the surface alongside him, bobbing like a cork. “Lilith told me I could stay—”

“I didn’t get that message.” He stuck a finger in one ear. “La la la la la,” he deadpanned. “I can’t hear a thing.”

“Liar! Cheater!”

“So sue me.”

He levered himself up the ladder of a small sailboat, grabbed me by my rope corset, and lugged me aboard. I might as well have been a netted tuna. I lay there on the deck, fuming. This mermaid was steamed.

Jordan knelt beside me. My heart caught. Damned heart. His eyes were hard but also dark and sweet. Sure, he had regrets. Sort of. “If only you were always this easy to control,” he grunted. He pushed my streaming hair away from my face, gently plucked a wet wad of it from my mouth, then gallantly arranged thick strands over my breasts. His knuckles brushed my skin, rousing a nipple or two.

Damn nipples, as well as hearts.

“I’ll drop you off near Cuba,” he said. “The Araizas will meet us there. They’ll take you to one of their hotels. Maybe in Cozumel, maybe Cancun, maybe the Caribbean. At any rate, they’ll make sure you stay put.”

The Araizas. A Mer clan who owned resorts, cruise ships, and casinos. They ran their empire with an old-world mafia attitude. Picture the Godfather with webbed feet. “You’re letting the Corleones of the Caribbean hold me hostage?”

“Hmmm. Holding you hostage? How melodramatic. What goes around comes around, right? Now you know how Molly Revere feels.”

“Jordan, please. Don’t make me leave. I know I look like a fluffy angel fish, but I’m a piranha when it comes to you.”

“You’ve chewed my ass off a few times, that’s for sure.”

“Please.”

His face softened. He leaned down, feathering my lips with his. “I love how you love me.”

I never said I love —

He planted a long, slow, wet kiss on me, and I let him.

Damn heart, nipples, and lips.

Traitors.

* * * *

My name, I typed, is Moll Revere. No longer Molly. Not Molly Martha. Moll. Moll the Mer.

Maniac.

I deleted all of that then dutifully typed on my laptop, Water Hyacinth, Book 5, Hyacinth and the Cave of the Argonauts. Chapter Seven.

I sat at a wicker table at the end of the dock at Randolph Cottage, beneath a pastel beach umbrella. Enya sang her ethereal Celtic love songs on a CD player. My laptop was neatly arranged on the table, along with a notepad, a crystal pitcher of water, and a cell phone. Heathcliff lay beneath the table on a sun-shaded pillow of silk and lamb’s wool. He calmly watched the ocean through cataract-clouded green eyes. I was dressed in an ivory cotton jumper over an ivory cotton tank top, with ivory cotton mules on my feet and a whitewashed straw sunhat on my head. Yes, I looked prim, like a vanilla ice cream cone, as the loathsome Juna Lee would have noted, but I felt very wild and provocative in that tank top. If you pulled the bib of my jumper out and stared straight down at the tank, you’d have seen that I’d impulsively cast off my bra. Gasp. You’d see the bumps of my nipples.

Secretly rebellious bumps. If that isn’t wicked, I don’t know what is.

I stared at the blank computer screen, and I sighed. Moll, the Mer, muses. And mopes. Mostly over a man.

“Molly?”

A polite female voice made me jump. I looked around wildly. A wet, gorgeous woman poked her head over the edge of the dock. She held onto the wooden ladder and gazed up at me as if she were selling Mary Kay and just happened to swim by with my order.

Tula Bonavendier. I liked Tula. She was an oasis of friendship in the delusion that had swallowed me.

“Tula, hello!”

She climbed out, naked except for a thong. I looked away, peeked, looked away, drank some water, peeked. She calmly pulled a silk shirt from a waterproof fanny pack, languidly covered herself, then sat down cross-legged on the dock. “Juna Lee has left for the Caribbean on a . . . business trip. She asked me to check on you.”

I stared at the transparent silk shirt over her breasts. I sighed. Just when I thought I’d liberated my own repressed bumps, she showed me how carefree bumps could be. Note to self, I thought. Get one of those see-through shirts.

“Are you writing another Water Hyacinth book?” Tula asked, watching me pleasantly. “I’m such a fan.”

“Oh. Yes.” I nodded. “I always carry my laptop in the bus. I write every day, even when I’m on a booksigning tour. Stories have to be told.”

“This is the perfect setting. You’ll be inspired. Your best book, yet. I bet.”

“You’re such a gracious person. Why do you put up with Juna Lee? Does she blackmail you with secrets? Were you and she separated surgically, at birth?”

Tula laughed. “No, but we’re like sisters. I’ve known her for. oh, forty years. Since we were teenagers in Charleston. The South Carolina Mers are very tight. A society thing. Very Charleston. I grew up near Juna Lee in a pre-Civil War mansion with a view of the water and Fort Sumter. We were debutantes in, oh, the 1950s.”

I stared at this youthful creature. “You’re—”

“Older than you think.”

“Oh. Tell me, how do Mer people get away with looking so young? Don’t people notice you’ve been around for a long time? Don’t they check your Social Security card?”

She laughed. “Not if we tell them not to notice. People believe what they want to believe, Molly. That’s why Mers with webbed feet can go barefoot among Landers. The Landers don’t see what we don’t want them to see.” She slid a bare foot forward. “What do you see?”

I leaned forward and peered at the sinewy, beautiful sculpted foot. “Not webbing, but, something glimmery between your toes, something—”

“Now look. Because I let you.” She pushed her foot a little closer. Suddenly, as if my vision had cleared, I saw a human foot that was not quite human, extra wide across the toes, and the toes were longer than normal, and between those toes — between them, was the most beautiful, iridescent webbing.

I put a hand to my heart. “Butterfly toes.”

She laughed.

I kicked off a white mule and looked down at my ordinary right foot, on the damaged leg, somberly. “I wish—”

“You’re a Mer, regardless. Having webbed toes is just the icing on the fish cake.”

I sighed. Change the subject. I always changed the subject when the scarred leg was involved. Under my concealing jumper, the leg was an ugly landscape of surgical scars, divets, and puckered skin. When I undressed at night I never looked at it. I pretended I couldn’t see it. Maybe, like a true Mer, I would teach myself to see an illusion instead, some day. Maybe some day Rhymer McEvers would look at me, naked, and only see what I wanted him to see. My heart sank. Daydreams. “So. Juna Lee has gone to the Caribbean. Perfect. The jerk chicken of the sea.”

Tula laughed again. “You’re a match for her.”

“She was supposed to tell me about Rhymer McEvers. We had a deal.”

“I know. I’m here to honor it.”

“Tell me. Is he . . . what? Sixty? A hundred? Sean Connery’s long-lost younger brother?”

Tula sighed. “He’s a lost soul.”

I settled back in my chair. So am I, I thought. “And?”

“Many years ago, he was in love with a member of the British royal family. The house of Windsor has a strain of Mer, you see. Why do you think they send the young princes off to join the navy, not the army? Mer instincts.”

“Of . . . course.”

“Anyway, Rhymer was in love with a sweet girl, some cousin of a cousin of the future Queen’s, but she was killed. Murdered. They say it was a revenge killing over some elaborate international business deal of her father’s during World War II.”

I took a deep swig of water and wished it was nerve-soothing cola. “Rhymer was a young man in the nineteen forties?”

“No, he was just a child, then. But this complex business relationship of the girl’s father stemmed from the 1940s. And had something to do with Nazis.”

“Please don’t tell me there were Nazi mer-people.”

Tula arched a brow. “Of course not. Only Landers kill each other over land, politics, and religion. Mers have no interest in any of those things—” her voice became sardonic “—as long as we control everything else.”

“I see.”

“To continue, Rhymer was in love with this girl, but her father, a Lander, owed some secret debt to Hitler’s top cabal, and the high-ranking Nazis who escaped to South America needed money to fund their exile, and the father refused to pay, so they sent assassins.” She paused, her face sad. “And they dragged Rhymer’s girlfriend from her country home along the English coast, and they killed her.”

“Oh, Tula, how sad.” Good. She’s definitely dead. I gasped inside. What a horrible thing to think.

“Rhymer tracked them down. All of them. And he, well . . . I’m only relaying gossip—”

“Tell me.”

“He killed all the assassins. Then he went to South America and killed the old Nazis who’d ordered her murder.”

I sank back in my chair, speechless.

Tula looked up at me somberly. “I don’t know Rhymer very well. No one does. He spent years as some kind of commando for the British. Now he’s a Peacekeeper for our Council. But I knew his sister, Tara.” Tula paused. “Now, I’ll tell you what happened to her.”

I continued to sit in hypnotized silence as Tula related the story of Tara McEvers and her . . . her Mer lover/monster. A sensation like cold lizards crept up my arms and spine. Tiny lights sparkled in front of my eyes. Occasionally, my migraine headaches started this way. Only without the sensation of pure horror and incredulous terror.

Tula halted, watching me. “Take it easy, breathe, breathe, don’t pass out.”

I gulped some air. “A few days ago I was just an ordinary person, living an ordinary life. All right, an ordinary person with odd little traits and unexplainable impulses. But certainly not less mainstream than, say, your average Goth computer gamer or audience members at Jerry Springer tapings. Then I was jerked out of my psychologically insulated world by Miss Barracuda, aka Juna Lee, and told that I’m descended from a mermaid, and that all my quirks are actually Mer traits, and now I’m conducting psychic cell-phone chats with various merfolk, and trying very hard not to bolt for the nearest police station and beg them to lock me up until appropriate psychiatric help can be summoned . . . and now you expect me to believe that my new family tree includes shapeshifting mutants.”

“Now, now, I never said Orion is a ‘mutant.’”

“If no one’s ever seen one of these rare and incredibly secretive Swimmers, how do you know they exist?”

“Well, obviously, Tara McEvers believed Orion was one. Tara wasn’t fanciful. She wasn’t foolish. And there have always been reports, rumors, sightings — just never any proof.”

“So . . . this Orion might look like something subhuman, or he might look like Barney Fife.”

“Personally, I think he’s somewhere in between.”

“Well, that’s comforting.” I sat there, chewing my lip, absorbing and sorting information. “He wants to kill his own daughters?”

“We don’t know what he wants to do with them. He’s never visited them. Tara would meet him at the ocean. He never even contacted his daughters psychically. Tara insisted he didn’t want to frighten them. But now, suddenly, he’s looking for them. He’s looking for them, and he’s violent. He murdered all those UniWorld scientists and took Tara’s body.” She paused. “Not that the scientists didn’t deserve being murdered, for treating a Mer like a research object.”

I gaped at her, trying to focus on this bloodthirsty facet of her personality. Jewelry designer, elegant middle-aged youngster, lover of good books, the antidote to the awful Juna Lee, and gleeful pro-murder advocate? “I take it we, hmmm, don’t like UniWorld?”

She arched a reddish brow. “To say the least. Most Mers have a slight problem with greedy Landers prowling around the coasts ruining the view with oil derricks, not to mention the occasional disastrous oil spill from a leaky tanker. Especially when UniWorld also owns dozens of other coastal industries, including marine labs doing unethical research, plus a couple of volatile nuclear power plants and private weapons labs selling the latest killing machines to the highest bidders.”

“But I thought Mers controlled the waters. Aren’t Mers powerful enough to stop this conglomerate?”

She gave me a grim look. “We don’t like to admit what I’m about to tell you. I won’t go into the details now. Really, Lilith will have to tell you the whole story sometime.” She paused, almost stricken with humiliation. “UniWorld is owned by Mers.”

This jaw-dropper set me back in my wicker chair, speechless. Before I could find my tongue again, Tula blinked and looked away as if listening. “Lilith says hello.”

Lilith. The ethereal voice that had filled my head in Memphis. I reached out tentatively. Lilith? Hello? Can we . . . talk face to face? Mind to mind, that is?

My dear Molly, of course we can talk.

Lilith, I’m floundering. I’m in information overload. I might sink.

No, you won’t. Just keep treading water, and you’ll find your way to shore.

Lilith —

Trust your heart, Molly. The human body is 98 percent water. Listen to your own tides.

Tell me what else I should know about Rhymer McEvers. Is there any way I can help him?

I can tell you this much — he needs you. And you need him.

Am I losing my mind?

No, dear. Only your unnecessary illusions. Au revoir, Molly Martha Revere. I’ll see you when I return to the island in two months.

Two months? But I don’t know if —

I’ll see you, my dear. By then you’ll be an old hand at Mer life. You’ll glory in your liquid substance. You’ll dive into the depths and breathe the elixir of joyful truth.