by Judi Fennell
Crystal blue waters—temperate waters, thanks to those ocean ridge vents—warmed her from her toes to the top of her head. It had nothing to do with Reel’s legs brushing hers. Nothing whatsoever.
The sunlight started to fade as they passed a jagged outcropping of the ages-old limestone that covered Bermuda’s volcanic rock. Their marlin guides rounded the shelf and brought the chariot to a halt. Reel unharnessed them while Chum and Puffer disengaged themselves, each still trying to one-up the other.
“Um… we’re in the middle of nowhere?” Erica said, watching the marlins swim toward the surface. Wait. She was actually sad to see them go?
Reel took her hand and grinned—way too happy for a guy on his way to face the firing squad. “Oh, ye of little faith.” He tugged her toward the wall InOverHerHead.indd 69
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of limestone. “This is why your people haven’t discovered us.”
With Chum strangely quiet beside them, Erica let Reel pull her to the rock.
Still smiling at her, he knocked and opened his mouth. No sound came out.
But suddenly, the rock separated and an opening appeared.
“Oh, thank Zeus!” Puffer exclaimed. With his body now looking like a deflated balloon, he darted past them.
“Home, sweet home.”
“Hardly,” Chum grumbled, in no hurry to enter.
“But… how…?” Erica looked at Reel, who was beckoning her before him.
“Sonar. They heard me. With our guards above and the communication system in the caves throughout the islands, they knew the moment we arrived in these waters. My greeting was confirmation. Don’t want to let any undesirables in, you see.”
Undesirables. Humans.
Her.
Erica swam through the hole expecting a sawfish to greet her. Or barracuda. Or, perhaps, an entire infantry of great whites and angry hammerheads…
Instead, she gasped. Mineral-ringed stalactites descended from a domed ceiling. Every possible hue of anemone covered the floor beneath. Pyrite and obsidian twinkled in the glow from the far end of the enormous chamber. Hundreds of tiny tropical fish added their own iridescence while larger parrotfish swam in and out of multicolored coral for their evening meal… or so she thought until she looked closely and saw that InOverHerHead.indd 70
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the fish were actually clipping the coral into topiaries. Sea-creature topiaries.
“What is this place, the aquatic version of Longwood Gardens?” Erica whispered to Reel as they swam over the… garden, for lack of a better word. They rounded a bend and daylight erupted. Gold walls gleamed all around them, so tall she couldn’t see where they ended. The shimmer of mother-of-pearl from the abalones along the way winked in the light, casting pearlescent colors on marble buildings that ran the length of a shellpaved street. Mers, honest-to-God Mers with tails and everything, floated on marble balconies, and off marble balconies onto the street beneath. A Mer child bounced along the rooftop of the building on the right, his mother’s melodic laughter sounding like wind chimes as she called to him.
“You’ve heard of Atlantis?” Reel asked as they glided down the street.
She nodded.
Reel waved a hand in front of them. “Welcome to it.”
Which pretty much clammed her up. Not only did Mers exist, but Atlantis as well. What was next? The Loch Ness monster?
“Where’s the light coming from?” she asked. “It’s not sunlight.” They were inside a cavity with the underside of Bermuda so far above them that she couldn’t see it. Reel swam to a rounded well formation by the side of the road. “Take a look.”
The sea floor was barely discernible thousands of feet below them, but the red glow was clear as day.
“Magma,” he explained.
“But Bermuda’s an extinct volcano.”
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“That’s because we’ve redirected the pressure in the earth’s crust. Vent it enough, and that diffuses the buildup.”
“But that’s not possible.”
Chum bumped into her. “Yeah? And five days ago you would’ve said there’re no such things as Mers.”
“You do have a point. But why isn’t the light red?”
Reel pointed to the marble buildings and golden walls of the cavern. “The interaction of light, water, gold, and stone. Like a prism bending light into colors, but it works the opposite way under water.”
“Can we move it along, please?” Puffer darted around one of the buildings, motioning with a fin toward a jagged-topped, circular building at the end of the well-lined street. With the arched doorways ringing the structure, it reminded her of Rome’s Coliseum. Well, it would have, if not for the fact that they were greeted by thousands of sea creatures as they swam through the arches. Octopi, lobsters, crabs, rays, and more of the hundreds of types of fish that had lined their route now hung out in the stands of the large arena.
“I can’t go in there.” That sick feeling came back as she braced herself against a marble column. Just like every time she’d attempted to immerse herself in the ocean to overcome the effects of The Incident, her legs refused to cooperate. Her reaction defied logic, though God knew she’d tried to talk herself through it hundreds of times. Puffer snorted. Reel sent a wall of water toward him and the supercilious little snot went undulating away.
“You can do this, sweetheart.”
“No. I can’t. You don’t understand.” No one did. No one ever had. Herself included.
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“Sweetheart, it doesn’t matter whether I understand or not. We have to go in there. We don’t want to make them any madder. Besides, I’ve got an ace up my sleeve.”
“You don’t even have sleeves, and I’m not going in there. They’ll eat me alive.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you. Promise.” He ran his hand from her shoulder and pried her fingers—
gently—off the column. “You can do this.”
“Reel, you don’t get it. They aren’t going to let me off. Look at them. Your father looks like he could tear a giant squid apart with his bare hands.”
“So? You’re not a giant squid.”
“Very funny. Seriously, I can’t go in there. What do I have to offer them in exchange for my life? You’re right—no one can know about your world, and they’ve got no reason to trust me.”
“But you’ve got reason to trust me. I have a way to save our lives.”
“You do?”
The dimple winked at her. “I told you I did. Now, do you trust me?”
And there was the question. She’d trusted Joey, and he’d betrayed her. Twice that she knew about. But Reel wasn’t Joey. He could have fed her to any one of the sharks they’d passed, yet he hadn’t. The marlins would have found her a real treat, but he’d defended her from Galahad. He’d protected her from the moment Joey had shot her. Perhaps she could face this if he was with her. But he was just one inhabitant of this world, and her being here was against their law.
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ttt
The floor was a circular platform of marble as big as a football field. Sea anemones and other plants sprang from every crack. Beams of magma soared from tall well formations, ringing it like light fixtures at a stadium, and bouncing off the gleaming gold like the noon sun. Outcroppings of coral ringed the far edge, behind the biggest of which sat (floated?) a merman who could only be Reel’s father. The resemblance was remarkable, like looking at a white-haired older version with a tail. How much older, she didn’
t want to guess, given the whole god-as-an-ancestor thing. She had enough to deal with at the moment.
Other mermen floated beside him. Reel guided her into the arena. The twittering in the stands stopped as all eyes turned their way, which was pretty creepy considering the octopi and squids’ overly large orbs. Reel glanced at her, the laughter gone from his eyes.
“Don’t say a word, Erica. Not one. Got it?” He guided her to the edge of Atlantis’s coliseum and released her hand. The marble had broken off and the sea floor dipped about four feet. She—and her legs—would be out of the direct line of sight of The Council. “Stand down there, okay?”
Erica nodded, glad to be out of the line of fire. “Good luck,” she whispered.
“I told you not to say—”
“That was two, and you needed them.” The quick peck on his cheek before she stepped down was also for luck. “Now go save our butts, will you?”
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Chapter 10
Reel took his time approaching his fa—the Council. He was going to get reamed, nothing new there. Well, the public forum was new, but the words would be the same. They always were. He was in no hurry to hear them again.
Fisher’s face was every bit as crabby as he’d expected. If his father frowned any more, the lines in his forehead would squeeze his eyes shut.
“Reel Tritone.”
“Fisher Tritone.”
His dad’s shoulders stiffened. “This is a formal proceeding. As such, you will address me as—”
“Yeah, yeah, High Councilman. I hear ya.” Reel kicked his heels sideways. It didn’t matter to him which way he floated, but his father expected the rigid posture of upright. So, just to make things interesting, he’d choose lateral.
He had to bite his lip to keep the smile off his face as his dad’s scowl got deeper. It wouldn’t do to antagonize the High Councilman. Well, any more than he already had. Old habits died hard.
Henri, who had to have flounder somewhere in his family reef, blinked his bulbous eyes and cleared his throat. He shuffled some shell markers on the coral. “High Councilman, perhaps we should read the charges…”
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“I know what the damn charges are, Henri,” Reel interrupted. “Anyone with an eye spot can see what the charges are.” He nodded in Erica’s direction. “I’m here to explain.”
“Explain, Reel?” His father’s voice boomed across the plaza. “Explain what? Why you thought it your responsibility to end years of Council decisions regarding interaction with Humans? Why you felt the need to expose our people to the possibility of destruction by hordes of them? Do you have any idea of their technology? The instruments they now have? What can you possibly hope to say to sway The Council’s decision to remove the punishment for turning a Human?”
His father rubbed his eyes, a sign of weakness Reel hadn’t seen before. Fisher sighed. His father was getting old.
“I can’t help you now.”
“Maybe that’s the problem, Fisher. You’ve always helped the boy,” slimy Nigel chimed in, adjusting the ridiculous spectacles he’d paid a Scavenger to scuttle out of a plane wreck’s luggage. The frames were perpetually cockeyed, and they didn’t even have glass in them. “The boy has taken every privilege, every honor given him as his due, with no appreciation for his station, his responsibility.
“Using himself as live bait in the annual orca migration? Senseless. Challenging belugas to a game of beaching? Insensitive. Bringing a sea lion to the annual Mer Ball? Arrogant. The Council has given this son of yours too much leeway in his escapades—as he’s proven with this latest indiscretion.”
“Indiscretion?” Anger forced Reel upright. “Erica isn’t an indiscretion. She was dying—”
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“He cannot be held to a different standard than the rest of our people,” Nigel continued in the same godlierthan-thou manner, as if Reel hadn’t spoken. “Not in this. Can anyone forget the terror of two-hundred selinos ago when Humans set out to sea in their boats, those deadly harpoons firing into our peaceful lives day after day?
The blood when our people turned to dolphins as they died? The frenzy of sharks coming in for the kill? How many did we lose? Entire schools, reefs cleaned out, our economy destroyed. We cannot risk it again.”
“But you told Jacques Cousteau about us,” Reel said, scathingly. “Showed him where and how we lived. Gave him the damn tour—”
“An unfortunate decision—” Nigel raised his voice.
“That was proven successful,” Charley piped in, climbing on top of his section of coral. The guy was smaller than the rest of them and frequently had to resort to such tactics to be heard. But at least his spectacles were still intact. And no cheesy, slide-down-the-nose moves with them. “Monsieur Cousteau fully embraced our community, as I said he would, and helped protect this colony. He kept our secret.”
Nigel removed his damaged spectacles, folded the anchor pieces back on themselves and pointed the sorry mess at Charley. “The man has sons. Probably grandsons. Don’t make the mistake of thinking he hasn’t told them. Why do you think one of them keeps hanging around?
Our people depend on our vigilance. Which is why the law must be upheld.” He turned his beady little eyes back to Reel. “She dies. If he tries to stop us, he dies too.”
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in that? How will he learn to respect the laws we’ve set forth?” The dark-haired giant of a Mer shook his head, beard swinging. “Perhaps it’s time he finally proves himself worthy of the esteem our people have given him.”
“Esteem?” Reel mumbled under his breath. “I’m damn insurance. Nothing estimable in that, let me tell you.”
“Or, perhaps, we should throw him to the barracudas once and for all.” Nigel replaced those stupid glasses on the bridge of his nose.
Nigel had always had it in for him, ever since he’d rebuffed his daughters’ broad hints of uniting two ruling families. Hades, he’d rather “unite” with Medusa.
“Oh, you’d love that, wouldn’t you, Nigel?” Chum appeared, his pectoral fin doing a damn good imitation of a pointing finger. “That’d leave only one other contender for the throne before your own son. What’s next? An ‘accidental’ harpooning of Rod?”
“Why, it’s Chumley Suckerless. Have any run-ins with a boat lately?” Nigel sniffed. “I’d think you, of all fish, would be glad to rid this world of one more Human.”
Reel didn’t need Chum to fight his battles. Not when The Council had already decided the outcome anyway. Their best bet was to get Erica’s life pardoned with him as her permanent jailer. That was the best they could hope for, and what he’d figured would happen when he’d turned her.
And, honestly, that had been part of the incentive.
“Chum—”
“No, Reel. It has to be said.” Chum swam up to the coral table. “She was dying. Another of her kind shot her. Then Vincent decided he’d like some lunch. You InOverHerHead.indd 78
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know Reel. He couldn’t let that happen right in front of him. None of this is her fault. Just let her go.”
Great. He mentioned Vincent and Reel’s no-Humankilling policy. Whose side was Chum on, anyway?
Nigel caught it right away and snickered. “Ah, yes. Reel with the soft spot for Humans. We understand your need to find something that looks like you. It’s natural, really.” His eyes narrowed to the size of a deep-sea snail.
“But what you’re doing to her is what her kind will do to us if they
ever find us, Reel. That’s why she must be hooked. No more Humans.”
Santos, Henri, and Thorsson all nodded their agreement, sliding their shells to the edge of the table. As if he needed the official vote count. Things were not looking up for Erica at all. He could only imagine what they’d drum up for him.
Time to play the trident up his sleeve.
“How about a trade, gentleMers?” He swam over to their table, eye to eye.
“A trade?” Nigel snorted. “What could you possibly have that we would want, Reel? Besides the Human, that is.”
“Information. About The Vault.”
The stands behind The Council erupted in a wall of twitters, squeaks, snorts, and water plumes. He had their attention now.
His father leaned forward. “What about The Vault, son?”
Son. Funny time to use that designation.
“I have information The Council will want to know.”
“And you want us to spare her life for this information?” Nigel rubbed his nonexistent chin. “Tell us and we’ll decide if it’s worth it.”
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“Oh, it’s worth it, all right,” Chum said. “When he tells you—”
Reel slapped his hands over Chum’s gill slits. “It’s worth it, gentleMers. Trust me.”
Fisher stared at him, those dark blue eyes assessing. Reel could practically read his father’s mind. Was this like Reel’s old pranks? Was this some con he was trying to pull to get out of his punishment—another thing he’d been known to do? Or, did Reel—for the first time in his life—actually have something The Council could use? Something that would benefit the colony instead of being a practical joke?
His father had good reason to think those things, but, just once, Reel would like to have the benefit of the doubt.
“Fine.” His father answered at last. “Her life and yours are spared. As to the imprisonment issue, we will make no ruling until we hear your information.”
Reel shook his head. “Not good enough, Sir. I want immunity for both of us.”
The Council rallied around the table, blocking out the spectators’ access to their discussion. Angry tail flips, pointing fingers, and enough jets of water to froth an inlet meant The Council didn’t have a quorum. Then there was hope.
