Page 9 of Stranded With the Grumpy Mermaid

Her jaw tightens. And she says, so quietly the engine nearly takes it, “The water’s wrong.”

“Wrong how?” I frown, then look up at the ominous line of fast darkening sky.

“It’s the interval.” Her hand makes a small motion and she makes a frustrated grimace. “The swell period, it’s … it’s the rhythm. It’s wrong for this forecast. It’s too long, and the sound is too deep. Maybe we should turn around…”

She stops. Shuts her mouth, then shakes her head.

“Never mind. I’m not a meteorologist.”

“No,” I say slowly, “but you’re a mermaid. Aren’t mermaids attuned to the ocean?”

It’s either the wrong words, or the right ones, because her whole body flinches shut, drawbridge up, and I could kick myself. But here’s what I can’t stop looking at: she isn’t fibbing. Every line of her face is certain. Terrified of her own certainty, fighting it like a hooked fish, but certain. I’ve spent twenty years around people having hunches, I’ve had three good ones myself, and I know what a real signal looks like coming through a person.

And this mermaid is certain that the water is wrong.

I don’t need any other hint.

“Stay here,” I say. “I’ll be right back.”

I turn away and walk to the wheel, where our captain, Fergus, has one furred hand on the wheel and one holding his pipe at the corner of his mouth. When I ask him what he makes of the sky, he doesn’t even glance at it.

“Making good time,” he says. “We’ll have you under your dome with an hour to spare.”

“And the storm? Dr. Marsh thinks it’s got more behind it.”

Captain Fergus laughs.

Not the wonderful harbor-shaking laugh from the dock. A different one, smaller and wider at the same time. He pitches it loud, loud enough to carry out the wheelhouse door, down the deck, all the way to the stern, where Nerissa stands, staring at the water. It makes me want to stuff a rag in his large, open mouth.

“The opinions of a half-mermaid!” he booms. “Forty years I’ve run this water, professor. Forty years, every weather God ever invented, and I’ll tell you what I know. Seals read the sea.” He thumps his barrel chest. “Selkies most of all. We sleep in it, we hunt in it, it talks to us the whole way down. And I’ll be seal-blind before I take storm advice from a half-mermaid who rode to my boat in a taxi. Half, mind you. The half that reads water must’ve gone to the other side of the family!”

And he laughs again, delighted with himself.

I don’t say anything for a second. I’m watching her back go stiff and her shoulders hitch higher. She doesn’t move, doesn’t turn, and somehow that’s worse than if she’d flinched.

Something in my chest goes hot and simple.

“Turn the boat around,” I say.

Fergus blinks. “Beg pardon?”

“Turn it around. Or into harbor, whatever’s nearest, Port Clyde, wherever.” My voice is low and my tone sharp. I don’t use it often, but I’m done dealing with this man. “Bill me for the whole charter and the day rate and the fuel.”

“Professor,” Fergus starts, “there’s no call for this.”

“Humor me,” I say. “You’ll be getting paid to be wrong.”

And I mean it. Every word. I’d set fire to the whole gilded afternoon based on my trust in her knowledge of the water.

But it isn’t the captain who answers.

“No.”

She’s in the wheelhouse doorway. Spray-damp, chin up, and her face has been wiped clean of everything, the certainty, the fear, all of it zipped into a flat cold calm that took visible effort to put on.

“No?” I say. “I thought you wanted to turn back.”

“It’s an evening system.” Her voice is even. Too even, perhaps. “I trust our captain. If he says the storm won’t reach us, then the storm won’t reach us.”