Emily Windsnap and the Siren's Secret (19 page)

I turned to Aaron. “What do you think? Should we?”

Aaron shrugged. “Like Morvena says, what is there to lose?”

“OK,” I said, reaching out to take the shell from Morvena. “We’ll do it.”

Aaron and I swam up the well. Looking down, I could see Shona and Morvena staring up at us. “Look after her!” I called down. “Don’t let them hurt her!”

“I promise!” Morvena called back up to me. She reached out to pull Shona toward her and held a protective arm around her.

“I think we can trust her,” Aaron said to me. “After everything she’s told us today, she’s got as much to lose as any of us.”

“I guess so,” I said, tightening my grip on his hand. Holding the shell carefully in my other hand, I gave a sharp flick with my tail.

Moments later, we were through the opening at the top and swimming away from the sirens, away from the caves, away from Shona — taking two things away with us: the shell, and the question I had no idea how to answer.

How would we ever make it release its magic and get Shona out of that place?

I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t really want to set foot in Brightport at all. I’d almost forgotten about the newspaper and everything that had happened before I found the sirens’ caves. It seemed like years ago! But now that we were in town again, it came flooding back.

“I don’t want to see anyone,” I said as we crept out of the sea onto the beach and shook our clothes dry.

“Just stop by your house and let your mom know you’re safe,” Aaron said. “Then come back to my house. We’ll do it there.”

I agreed reluctantly and headed home. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see Mom. I just didn’t want to go up to the pier and along the jetty and all the places between here and home where I could run into someone trying to catch a mermaid who might recognize my face from their newspaper.

“Hurry,” Aaron called. “We haven’t got long.”

Aaron was right. I had to get home as quickly as possible — preferably avoiding any eye contact with anyone along the way — tell Mom everything was fine, put on a big false smile, and hotfoot it back to Aaron’s.

“I’ll be there in five minutes,” I called over my shoulder. And then I ran home.

Mom was sitting on the front deck with Millie and Aaron’s mom. I could see them from the end of the jetty. I was glad to see Aaron’s mom here. At least that meant their cottage would be empty.

“Hi!” I said, all smiles. Mom looked up at me and smiled back so innocently that I could almost believe that the whole morning had been a figment of my imagination.

“Emily darling!” she said, waving me over. “I thought you were going to be at Shona’s all day.”

“Did you?” I asked nervously. “Why did you think that?”

“Mandy came over and passed on your message. It’s nice that you’re friends again, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes, of course.” I’d forgotten about asking Mandy to cover for me. Had that only been this morning? It felt like a lifetime ago.

“Come and sit down, sweet pea,” she said.

Millie drained her cup. “Just pop in and put the kettle on first,” she said. “I could kill for another cup of Earl Grey.”

I went inside and turned the stove on in a daze. While I was waiting for it to boil, I grabbed some bread and made a sandwich. The morning’s swim had been exhausting and I realized I was starving! How could they be sitting here so calm and casual when people were hunting down mermaids for cash prizes? Or while Shona was trapped in an underground cave with the meanest sirens in the world? It all felt unreal.

“I just wanted to let you know I’m over at Aaron’s if you need me,” I said when I came back out.

“Oh, chicken, aren’t you going to join us for some lunch?” Mom asked, squinting up at me.

“I just had some. See you later, OK?” I tried to sound as though everything was normal. I wasn’t going to start getting into it all with Mom — not after everything else that had been going on with her parents. I turned away before I could see any disappointment in her eyes.

I sauntered casually down the jetty, my cheekbones aching from the false smile and my limbs feeling like a marionette’s, all loose and floppy as I tried to imitate the way I might walk on any other normal Sunday afternoon when I was off with my friends.

“Be careful!” Mom called to my back. In reply, I turned and gave her a quick wave. A moment later, I was on the pier and out of sight. I dropped the smile, broke into a run, and hurried over to Aaron’s.

“I don’t get it. It’s just a shell,” Aaron said. He was holding it in his hands, turning it around and around for the hundredth time. “It doesn’t
do
anything!”

He shook the shell. He lifted it to his ear. “I mean, it does that thing that all conches like this do. It sounds like waves when you listen to it.” He put the shell down on the table in front of us. “But that’s it. Nothing else. I think Morvena’s wrong. I don’t think it’s got anything magical about it at all.”

I stared at the shell. “Why would Melody talk to it, though? Why would she hold it and cry over it every morning? We must be missing something.”

“OK, maybe we are — but I’ve got no idea how we’re going to figure out what it is.”

I reached out to pick up the shell — and so did Aaron. As our hands touched, I got that tingly feeling in my fingers. I snatched my hand away, embarrassed in case he could tell how it made me feel when he touched my hand, in case it wasn’t the same for him.

“That’s it!” he said. “Of course! How could we be so stupid?”

“What is it?”

Aaron lowered his eyes and shuffled awkwardly. “Look, you know when I — when we — you know, kind of touch hands . . .” His voice trailed away.

“Uh-huh,” I said, trying to keep my voice casual.
Touch hands? Did we? Oh — maybe, yeah. I hadn’t really noticed.

“Well, d’you ever get, like, a kind of tingly feeling?”

“You get it too?” I asked.

Aaron grinned. “Course I do!”

I smiled back at him. That meant he felt the same way I did. Maybe he
was
my boyfriend!

“Just — well, you know there’s all the stuff about the power that we have,” he went on. “You know, the thing about Neptune.”

Oh. OK, so maybe it wasn’t about him being so crazy about me that his skin danced in happy leaps because I was close. It was just about overturning a curse.

“Mm, yeah, that’s what I was thinking too,” I lied.

Aaron laughed. “As
well
as anything else,” he said. He’d gone and read my mind again. And this time, his face had turned as pink as mine felt. He
did
feel the same way! I couldn’t suppress a happy smile.

“Just now, when we touched hands, and we were both touching the shell too, did you feel it then?”

I considered lying. If I said I’d felt it, what if he laughed in my face and said that he hadn’t? It could be a trick to get me to confess to my feelings for him so he could tell me he didn’t feel the same way.

Then I thought about it a bit more. This was Aaron I was talking about. He wasn’t like that. He would never do something like that.

“Yes,” I confessed. “Actually, I felt it really strongly.”

“Me too,” he said. Then he lifted the shell and held it between us. “Link my fingers,” he said. “If we hold hands and hold the shell between us, maybe something will happen. Perhaps the shell’s magic has something to do with Neptune — and if so, maybe we can undo it!”

I took his hand. As soon as we touched, I felt the tingle again. First in my fingertips, then it traveled up my arm. Soon it felt as though it was spreading through my whole body.

“Look!” Aaron said. The shell had started to vibrate in our hands. I tightened my grip on his fingers so we didn’t drop it.

“It’s working — it’s doing something!”

The shell rumbled and shook, and it was making a noise — a bit like the sound it had made when we held it to our ears, only about fifty times as loud! It was shaking more and more violently. And then, without any warning, it suddenly stopped.

We stared at the shell, at our hands, at each other.

It hadn’t worked. Nothing had changed. So much for our magical powers.

“Now what?” I asked.

Aaron disentangled his fingers from mine and held the shell to his ear. “There’s something inside it,” he said, shaking it softly.

Then he passed it to me. I turned it over and shook it. He was right! Something was jiggling around inside the shell! I shook it again. This time the thing inside dislodged itself a little so that I could see the tip of it inside the gaping spiral.

I reached in and tried to grab it. My fingertips touched the corner, but I couldn’t grasp it. “It looks like a piece of plastic!” I said, dismay hitting me like a hard slap. We’d gotten it all wrong. Morvena was mistaken; there was nothing magical about the shell. We’d done all this for a piece of plastic that had probably been swept out to sea with someone’s trash and ended up in the shell! We’d done it all for nothing.

“I can’t get a hold of it,” I said flatly.

“Hang on a sec.” Aaron got up and left the room. A minute later, he was back, with a pair of tweezers. He held them out to me. “Now try.”

Reaching carefully in with the tweezers, I gripped the corner of the plastic and pulled at it.

Soon, I’d pulled enough of it out to grip it with my fingers — but they were shaking. What if I was wrong and it
was
magical after all? What might we be about to find? I’d had enough surprises in the last few months to know that you don’t always find the answers you’re looking for without finding about fifty unwanted ones first.