Page 10 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

She takes a deep breath, sets her shoulders square and digs the hook of her blazing blue eyes deep into my soul.

“We are not blowing up the most important week of either of our careers over a feeling. I’d like to get to the island, Dr. Vasquez. I have a talk to give.”

“Nerissa,” I say carefully. “You just told me the water was wrong.”

Something moves behind her eyes, deep under the ice, some enormous shape turning over. For one second I think it’s going to surface.

Then Fergus chuckles, warm and vindicated, and says, “There’s a sensible lass,” and the shape goes down and doesn’t come back.

“I’m going to review my slides,” she tells the space between us, and walks out, down the deck, and plants herself at the stern rail with her back to all of us, facing the water.

Fergus gives me a look that invites me to share a moment about the moods of mermaids. I hold his gaze until his whiskers do something embarrassed, and then I go back out on deck.

The door clicks shut somewhere behind me. When I glance over my shoulder at Nerissa, she has her laptop open on her lap, but she’s not looking at her slides.

She’s watching the ocean.

Chapter 5

Neri

The storm doesn’t just arrive. Ambushes have arrivals. This is a door slamming in our faces.

One minute the Belle is shouldering through pewter chop with the island still forty minutes out while I’m at the stern pretending to read slide nine. The next, the wind comes across the water in a visible line, a dark ruffled wall dragging rain behind it like a net, and it hits the boat with a sound I have never heard before.

It’s an angry sound. The sound of something ancient and wrathful.

The Belle heels. My laptop goes skating off the locker and I catch it by reflex. The rain lands on the windowpane, horizontal, cold as a slap and without mercy.

So much for the evening system.

So much for forty years of selkie wisdom.

“Inside!” Fergus’s roar comes down the deck, shredded by wind. “Both of you, in! It’s just a squall line, she’ll punch through!”

We lurch for the wheelhouse. Rafe gets there first and holds the door against the wind, one arm out, herding me through, and Carl Sagan flails against his lashings beside the doorway with his cardboard smile unchanged. I guess a man who spent his life watching the cosmos isn’t fazed by a high sea storm.

Inside is diesel-warm and pipe-smoke close, wipers slamming back and forth on full and losing. Fergus stands wide-legged at the wheel, and I’ll grant the old seal this: his hands are good. He takes the boat up each swell on the angle, easing her, forty years of sea life alive in his wrists.

It’s not going to matter.

I know that the way I know my own name. The way I knew when listening to the waves that something wasn’t adding up. It’s a knowledge I can’t explain, but it’s as much a part of me as my hair and my bones.

The water told me and I was too foolish to listen to its warning.

I wedge myself into the corner of the wraparound bench and hug my ridiculous garment bag and my closed laptop like it’s a flotation device, which it’s not. My mind races and I remember where the life vests are. I checked the moment I boarded. All six of them are under this very bench, neatly stacked.

A small part of me whispers that I should pull them out and put one on, but I’m too paralyzed with fear to do so. It’s like wearing it makes the situation more real.

Stupid, I know. But I’m terrified and fear makes me stupid.

The boat drops off a swell into a trough. The hull booms. Spray sheets the windshield with sea-water green.

“Squall line!” Fergus bellows again, to himself this time, stubborn as a mule. “Punch through in ten minutes!”

And the ocean says, clear as a voice, low in my body where I stopped listening five years ago: no.

Here’s what nobody understands about it, what I stopped trying to explain around the same time I stopped letting anyone close enough to ask. When the water speaks, I’m not really hearing. I’m not really feeling, either, not the way a headache is feeling. It’s the difference between watching a graph of a heartbeat and having one. The sea has a pulse and my body was built with its rhythm in it.