by A Corrin
I swam for the surface, and this time, I was able to break through and fill my lungs with air. My mouth was bleeding, but not badly, and I came to the disgusting conclusion that the siren had been trying to devour me while I’d been under the impression that we were making out. My tongue was cut, and a bit of my chin and bottom lip as well.
On the beach, Kayle was shoving men into the sand to keep them out of the water. The Amazonian women were trying to help him, barricading the men with their weapons, shouting at them to stand down. Kayle spread his wings and gave an eagle scream. From this distance, he seemed to be letting off smoke for some reason. I shook my head hard to clear it, feeling terrible: dizzy, sick, and just plain dirty. I had cheated on my Nikki! It’s not like I could ever expect her to believe my excuse.
At a snail’s pace, I started swimming for the beach, wallowing in guilt and self-pity, until a hand grabbed the hood of my sweatshirt. Frenzied, I started slapping at whatever was holding on to me until I saw that it was Peter.
“Calm yourself,” he scolded, seeming amused. “You’re alright now.” With one great heft, he had me slung across his board.
As I left the water’s crushing weight, I was finally able to take great, fresh breaths and gargle some water to clear away the blood. The salt stung my wounds.
“Got bit,” Peter observed. He had a small smile.
“Enjoying this?” I asked sourly.
Peter raised one eyebrow and said more seriously, “It’s shown me that we have a lot of work to do.”
I wasn’t too sure how to take that, so I rested my chin on the board and forced myself to stare only at my reflection. I didn’t want to look up and see a condescending sneer turning up Kayle’s beak, making his maroon-brown eyes gleam. And I didn’t want to see the dazed and longing faces of the once powerful squadron brought to foolish boyishness at the sirens’ song.
Feeling a tad silly being slung over Peter’s board like a hunted deer, I played with the idea of swimming the rest of the way, but my feet suddenly dug into sand. Clambering off, I waded to shore and fell onto my back, staring at the sky. Kayle and the squadron gathered silently around me, conversing with Peter.
Mariah had dived for the object I had seen in the coral when I was under. She reappeared, swimming gracefully to the sand as a griffin, using her legs and wings to paddle with. She held something gray in her beak. I sat up, and we all watched her approach in apprehensive silence. Shaking her pale feathers and fur, Mariah dropped what she was holding and set about the task of preening. Kayle picked the Ranker clue up in his talons and carefully measured its weight, prodding it and rolling it around. It was a square package wrapped in thick, oily gray paper and bound with a thin cord of seaweed.
“Seems safe to open,” Kayle finally said. “No enchantments, nothing moving inside, no odd smells or sounds.” He tossed it over to Peter with a flick of his talon. I was sort of glad to find that I could still understand him, not being in griffin form myself. So we weren’t speaking bird, after all.
Peter caught the package in his huge hands and was about to tug on the knot holding the seaweed together when Mariah interrupted, “Hey, let’s first give thanks to those who saved our prince’s life!”
As one, we all whipped around to face the ocean. Weird-looking things with long tails were just chasing off the rest of the sirens, brandishing tridents and using them on the ones that were too slow. I heard one sailor sigh to his buddy, “The angel of the sea. I’ve never seen one. This must bode well for us.”
Peter swiftly changed into a griffin and beckoned for me to follow him down to the shore to meet the heroes. Kayle and Mariah flanked us. Mariah was still wet; her fur clung to her, making her look almost bony. Her feathers were quicker in drying, but they were fluffed out to do so and gave her a darker-orange-tinted look. Kayle had his head low, his neck straight out into a continuation of the ram-rod spine. His tail was slung into a J shape, and his face was empty of emotion. I was beginning to really wonder what his deal was. Peter was so much bigger than all of us. His head was high and arched like an Arabian stallion’s, and his gait was leisurely. I wondered about him as well. Why was he so cool with everything? Didn’t he want to go home too?
The squadron hung back, unsure of what to do. As our rescuers slowly came into view, the knights peeled up their metal visors to see better. Four heads came up out of the water, giggling at the befuddled soldiers. They belonged to mermaids. So it hadn’t been a fish I’d seen earlier, swimming away. Now I felt self-conscious about being the tallest in the near vicinity (my neck was up to Peter’s head) and the only human. I felt naked, like my feelings were scrolling across my forehead in neon letters.
The mermaids had long curly hair in vivid coral shades: bright pink, blue, green, and yellow. One had a starfish holding her hair away from her face. Their eyes were large and expressive, the pupils almost fully shrunk, making them seem nonexistent. Their lips were full and pulled back over their large canines. Their webbed hands were wrapped tightly around the poles of three-pronged tridents made from some weird kind of mineral. One mermaid had her tail lazily sticking out of the water and curved over her back.
Peter, Kayle, and Mariah bowed, leaving me to be the confused fool standing with his head in the clouds. When they stood straight again, Peter jerked his tail at me and said, “Forgive him. He’s still getting used to transforming.”
The mermaids nodded understandingly. I leaned over to Kayle and whispered, “Is that bad? That I can’t transform at will?”
Out of the corner of his beak, Kayle answered, “As a human, you can’t fully understand the magic of your surroundings. If you’re a griffin or other type of mythical, imaginative being, you can sense the magic around you and understand different tongues and cultures better. Plus, it’s respectful. Mermaids enjoy seeing such powerful creatures, like griffins, bowing to them.”
“Oooooh,” I drawled and stepped forward to bow, one hand across my torso, the other behind my back. The mermaids burst into another bout of laughter. I frowned, insulted. Was my fly open or something? Sheesh, it couldn’t be that hilarious to be a human.
The mermaid with the starfish silenced her companions with a raised hand. Her face was serious. Sticking the butt of her trident deep into the sand beside her, she crawled closer to us. Her voice hit my ears in strange tones. One second, it was pure and clear and very feminine, the next harsh and quiet and croaky. I think me being only part griffin had something to do with it. I noticed that they all kept at least halfway in the water. I had a feeling that their tails had to constantly be wet, like a fish had to continue circulating water through its gills.
The serious mermaid rasped, “Those foul creatures will not return. That package you found is evil. We could smell it from afar. It called us to you.” She looked up at me and said, “Come.”
I was frozen in place. Kayle head-butted me hard behind the knees, and I stumbled forward and fell, nearly face-to-face with the mermaid. Her skin was olive green and moist, and I couldn’t tear my eyes from hers. She reached behind her and pulled forward my surfboard. My eyes flicked quickly to it, then back to her. What was she going to do?
The mermaid extended her long arms and placed a cold, webbed hand on either side of my face. Looking deep into my eyes, she said, “Jonathan. You will do great things… Many will stand in your way, but only you have the power to move them. The legacy you leave behind shall be everlasting, and shall reach back to the very foundations of the Land of Dreams and the throne of griffins... You are the herald of our most terrible and most beautiful age: the Age of Miracles.” She let go of me and bowed deeply.
Looking surprised, her friends followed her example. Then she pulled my surfboard in front of her, closed her eyes, and rested the head of her trident on top of it. Suddenly, the board grew smaller and smaller, its sides coming out and a ring opening in the center. The color turned white and mottled yellow, and the tex
ture became smooth and pliable.
Leaning forward, the mermaid looped the surfboard-turned-necklace around my neck, her face so close that I could smell her salty breath, and explained, “This is sun coral. It grants upon you a special power. A griffin’s power will awaken on its own after a time, or it may be presented to them by a mystic being.”
I touched the necklace and whispered, “What is my power?”
The mermaid shrugged. “It is for you to discover. Good luck, Prince.” With that, she slid backward into the water, and she and her fellow mermaids vanished.
Kayle scoffed snidely. “He doesn’t deserve a gift.” My stomach sank. He was right. I hadn’t done anything helpful. But to protect my dignity, I got to my feet, dusted the sand off my jeans (since my clothes were still wet, I ended up rubbing in the wet muck and salt from the ocean instead), and looked down at him.
“Apparently the mermaids thought so. Whatever problems you have with me, whether it’s because I’m a prince, or an American”—his eyes narrowed—“shove ’em.”
Kayle’s collar of thick feathers bristled. “Maybe you should try not talking to me.”
“Maybe you should try uppers,” I shot back. One of the soldiers up the beach busted up laughing and then tried to cover it up by coughing.
Kayle looked ready to carve my heart out of my chest, but before he could, Peter stopped him.
“Fighting isn’t going to help anything. Let’s see what’s in this package.”
I led the way back toward the squadron with my hands shoved into my pockets in fists. I wanted to teach that goon a lesson, but it would be weird beating up a griffin. Plus, I needed a nap first. Like, really bad.
The soldiers had formed a circle around the clue, their weapons nonchalantly pointed at it. They cleared a path for us, most staring at me and taking in my human appearance with something close to cynicism.
Peter, of course, was the one we assumed should open the package. He once more picked it up in his talons and readied to untie the knot. Everyone took a casual step back. Peter unpeeled the wrapping and turned it upside down.
What fluttered to the ground surprised us all: a slip of paper followed by a small key. Peter stabbed the paper onto one talon and squinted, holding it up to his eyes. He read, “Ingredients for the Bowl of Bemusement: Four chopped up shiitake mushrooms, handful of leeks, extract of swamp-rat, clump of moss, pinch of mold, scoop of mulch, a quart of boiled mud water.”
“Eeeewww!” Mariah grimaced squeamishly, her crown feathers popping up like a cockatiel’s.
“How is a recipe a clue?” I asked. I’d expected something more along the lines of a map: “turn left at the talking tree,” or, “go twenty steps past the dragon and then go right.”
“The Rankers’ clues appear to intentionally lead their allies through places where they can gather power. Who’s to say what this recipe does, or whether it’s a code of some kind that only the Ranker’s could decipher. But we’re going to find out.”
Peter passed the key around, and when it got to me, warm from being in so many hands, I was surprised to find how heavy it was, like it was lead-infused iron or something. It looked old-fashioned, and the base was stained with rust and moss.
“Pocket it,” Peter said. “It’ll be safest in your possession.”
“How so?” I asked, still a bit thrown by everything the mermaid had said, making out with a siren, finding a new frenemy in Kayle, and everything else, so I had a hard time keeping my tone civil.
“Like we said, we took an oath of honor to protect you,” Peter said. “Every one of us here would die before we’d let anything happen to you.” One of the women in the squadron was gravely nodding her head, and I felt strange all of a sudden—like I wanted to cry. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know how. So I just obediently shoved the key deep into my jeans pocket and pulled my sweatshirt down over it.
Peter spoke up for all of us to hear. “Those ingredients, I’m afraid”—uh-oh, that was never a good way to start—“can only be found in the Melancholy Bog of the Reekwood Swamp.”
Yikes. I remembered reading about the bog in Peter’s Locations book. It was a mysterious place—people sometimes vanished out of thin air there. A haunting myth clung around the swamp, but none of the natives liked to speak of it. The people and beasts who lived there weren’t hospitable, and the area was permeated by noxious green mists, muddy wallows, and rotted trees.
Peter was saying, “We must be careful, the bog is one of the sheltering zones for nightmares. Even if we don’t meet any Rankers we’re very likely to see minor creatures of darkness.”
One soldier swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple jumping. “What…sort of nightmares, sir?”
Peter looked at him out of one eye. “The kind where you’re running and running and you just can’t seem to get away. The kind where a snorting beast waits for your back to be turned. The kind where you feel yourself changing into something hideous and broken, something that reflects your every perceived internal flaw, and against your will you become a tortured monster—you become the very thing in the world that you most hate and fear.” His casual tones did not keep a sense of ominousness from leaking into the air.
“We’ll camp up in the trees for the night and then set off at dawn,” Peter said.
I looked out behind me at the water, wondering about my father and Nikki. Was anyone looking for me yet? Suddenly, I fell forward and felt familiar weights tugging at my back. I was a griffin once more.
“Get used to it,” Peter said in response to my plaintive expression. “The more you shift, the more you’ll be able to do so at will.”
I moaned. Things were not turning out the way I’d wanted them to. The next time I saw that charlatan…
Chapter Ten:
Meanwhile, Back in Reality
Ethan He’klarr’s eyes popped open. He jolted up onto his feet from where he was lying on the couch in the living room, massaging a crick in his neck, and rushed throughout the house calling his son’s name. Then, clinging to a frayed thread of hope, he went to the front door, threw it wide, and ignoring the evening’s chill, he called out, “Jonathan!” But he was only answered by the distant baying of a loose dog.
Ethan walked out onto the porch and looked all around his yard, which was bathed in the blue-gray light of a full moon. It was no use wishing. His son had not returned. He must have been dreaming.
The police had arrived at Ethan’s house that morning to question him, just as he was getting ready for work. One of the officers had scowled at the stench of alcohol on his breath but the other had maintained her composure enough to professionally inform him that Jonathan had been reported missing the previous day.
“Do you know anything about that?” the first officer had asked, still with a look of disdain on his face.
“No, I...I thought he was at a friend’s!” Ethan replied. An old fear had seeped through him like cold sludge. Memories of the night he had lost Esther had flickered through his mind. After the policemen had informed him that Jonathan had apparently vanished after a helicopter crash, that they had found his phone and his blood on the floor of a nearby model home, Ethan fell onto the sofa, his head thundering with terror for his son, and with pain from the previous night’s binge. Once the officers had finished questioning him and left, Ethan had rolled onto his side on the couch, shaking with the same, visceral despair that he had felt only once before, and eventually drifted into a light sleep disturbed with nightmares of strange sounds and fleeting glimpses of Jonathan.
Now, making some coffee, Ethan trundled upstairs to his son’s empty room for the first time in years, clutching the hot mug tightly in his cold hands.
The bed-sheets were mussed and the window open. Setting the coffee on Jon’s bedside table, Ethan stared at the mural of the football player on the ceiling above, tears forming in the corners of his eyes. He had k
nown so little about Jonathan—been so absent from his own son’s life.
After endless minutes of morosely admiring the brushstrokes forming the work of art on Jonathan’s ceiling, Ethan forced himself to confront the one question hovering at the forefront of his mind: Did this happen because of me?
Ethan took up his cooling coffee and went on to search his son’s room, looking for clues as to his disappearance and little trinkets with which to soothe his sorrow.
In a corner of one of Jonathan’s wardrobe shelves was a crumpled-up ball of paper with Nikki’s phone number on it. His girlfriend. Ethan guessed that maybe his son had memorized the number and no longer had any need for the paper.
But if anyone could tell him more about what had happened, Nikki could.
Rushing out into the hall so fast that he practically dislodged the rug from where it had molded to the floorboards, Ethan jumped downstairs and ran to the phone. He dialed Nikki’s number and waited impatiently during the dial tones. After two rings, someone picked up and Ethan heard a young, feminine voice, sounding miserable, ask hopefully, “Hello?”
“Miss Nikki?” Ethan asked.
There was no answer, then, “Yes.”
Ethan knew that she wished to say more and waited.
“This is…his number. I thought…”
Ethan took a deep breath and said, “I’m his dad. I was wondering if you could tell me...what happened? The police came by today and they didn’t say much.”
“His dad?” An uncertain silence.
“Please?” Ethan added.
He listened as Nikki described the charity work they had been doing in Arrow Creek, the crash, and Nikki looking over her shoulder to check on him while she made a tourniquet for someone who’d been injured and finding him gone.
“Did you know that they found his cellphone?” Ethan asked.
“No, they did?” Nikki’s voice brightened even as Ethan’s spirits plummeted. She wouldn’t know, then, about the blood. And he didn’t want to be the one to tell her. They spoke a little longer, but quickly ran out of things to say. After a particularly long pause, Ethan waited until he thought he was in danger of being hung up on and said as consolingly as he could, “It’ll be okay. The police are still looking.”
