Creature Discomforts (Descendants)

by Peterson, Jenny

  Kendra tucked the med kit away with a shrug, closed her marine biology textbook and dropped a handful of colored pencils from her medical sketches into a cup. She stood with a cat-like stretch that made the gills slashed along either side of her neck flutter open then she plucked a notebook from the clutter and crossed to Rachel. She plopped the spiral-bound notebook onto the vanity next to the sink and leaned against the wall, her forehead furrowed in concern and her light eyes searching. “You look like death,” Kendra offered.

  Rachel paused for a second and cut a look at her best friend. “Thank you?”

  Kendra tried to tuck strands of her hair behind her ears, but the curls just sprang back to hover like a cloud around her head. Rachel looked away to her own reflection in the mirror over the sink. Kendra wasn’t far off. Her brown eyes were traced with spidery red lines, and her hair was a lank, disheveled mess. Even her skin looked the worse for wear. Under the streaks of dirt, her complexion had gone all sallow and splotchy. Rachel splashed water onto her face and neck, though it didn’t do much good.

  “I’ve copied my notes for you,” Kendra said, tapping the notebook.

  “Thank you,” Rachel said again, sincere this time. She turned back to her weapons, concentrating on the way the water swirled black with demon blood. She methodically washed each silver blade until they gleamed.

  Kendra pushed away from the wall and padded across the room to her own twin bed next to Rachel’s. “You see the flyer about Sara Hernandez? Her friends handed them out in class when they spoke about her going missing.”

  Rachel shook water from her hands and pulled at the edges of paper sticking out from the notebook. A black and white photo of the missing girl stared back at her, hair dark and curly and cheeks dimpled. Sid had been right about her smile.

  Kendra laughed, but it was thin and died quickly. “Not gonna lie, it kind of freaks me out.”

  Rachel watched her friend in the mirror. “Did anything seem, you know,” and Rachel held her hands up in claws.

  Kendra prodded at her gills absently. “Not that I noticed. I checked the Corpus, but nothing popped out at me.” She poked at her gills again then pursed her lips together. Rachel made a mental note to check the Corpus for herself later, but forgot about it as she watched her friend try—for what felt like the millionth time—to breathe through her gills. Kendra’s gills opened wide, sucking for oxygen. It was a losing game; they really only worked under water. Kendra’s cheeks went red one minute in. She clamped her eyes shut at the end of minute two.

  Really, Rachel couldn’t blame her friend for these experiments. It had been a shock for Rachel to suddenly be able to see demons and half-demons the moment she turned eighteen, but to learn your long-absent dad actually had a fish tail? That was a lot to process, though it had explained why Kendra had such an affinity for free-diving.

  In the months since she’d inherited, Rachel had almost gotten used to seeing half-demons living amongst humans. Most of them didn’t even know what they were, and their little extra abilities went largely unseen, invisible to all but full demons and hunters like Rachel. There was a girl in her English class with yellow were-eyes, and a guy she’d bumped into in the caf with a scaly tail. How the kid had gotten through twenty years of life without realizing he was sporting a tail was beyond Rachel, but he’d obviously been oblivious. Good for him. Rachel often awoke in the middle of the night, sweating and wanting more than anything to still be oblivious.

  It was half way through minute three when Kendra gave up with a giant, sucking breath—through her mouth, not her gills—and a wail of frustration that made Sid jump in his sleep.

  Kendra took a couple giant breaths with her eyes closed, then fell back onto her elbows and eyed Rachel. “I need a distraction from the whole ‘you could up and disappear at any moment’ thing. You still in for going to Shipley tomorrow after class? Dad and Grey are meeting me at sunset on Saturday.”

  “Yup,” Rachel answered. She waggled her eyebrows at Kendra and made a ridiculous kissy face. “I wouldn’t dream of missing my chance to meet the elusive Grey, merman sex god.” She cackled at the blush pricking Kendra’s cheeks and leaned against the sink with one hip, nodding toward the still-snoozing Sid. “Though that one is skipping out.”

  Kendra followed Rachel’s earlier example and kicked at Sid’s dirty boots. He grumbled and slit open one eyelid to glare at Kendra. “Seriously? All you ever go on about is meeting the merpeople again. ‘Oh! The merpeople,’” Kendra cooed in a poor approximation of Sid’s peculiar British-French hybrid accent. “‘How I want to meet them! How jealous my father will be if I meet them and he never does! Sacrebleu!” She giggled, one hand dramatically at her forehead. “Je m’appelle Sidney Martin! Yo soy a Descendant!”

  “Your French is atrocious, madam,” Sid growled, but one corner of his lips twitched with a smile. “And that last bit wasn’t even French.”

  Kendra nudged his bent knee with her toe. “Really, Sid. What excuse do you have?”

  Rachel dried the last of her daggers and wiped her hands on the towel. She crossed her arms over her thin tank and leveled her narrow-eyed gaze on Sid. “He’s got to attend Manis for Mainecoons with Beth Ann,” she said. “Poor house cat hygiene is an epidemic, you know.”

  Sid met her eyes, his jaw tight. He kept his eyes on her as he calmly kicked off his boots—getting dirt all over the floor in the process—then ground his grimy, stinky stocking feet into Rachel’s comforter. She shrieked and bounded over to him and grabbed his ankles, trying to haul him off her bed. To which Sid grabbed hold of her headboard and stubbornly refused to move.

  A chirp echoed from deep in his pocket, and Sid let go of the headboard to reach for his phone. Rachel used it as an opportunity to heave Sid off her bed. He landed with a thud and a murderous glare then answered his phone.

  “Hey, Beth Ann!” He chirped as brightly as his phone. Rachel groaned, to which Sid threw a rude gesture. “No, of course I didn’t forget,” Sid continued into his phone. “I just need to—No, I’m not there. I was working out with Rachel, so I’m still in their—No, you don’t need to do—”

  A knock on the door cut him off. Sid pulled a face like a kid caught with too much candy. He was slow to his feet, and even slower to the door. But Rachel didn’t miss the smile he planted on his face before swinging the door open.

  Beth Ann Page stood in the doorway, her phone still held to her strawberry glossed lips. She smiled brightly at Sid then Rachel, but her short, pink nails dug into the leather of her ever-present, tiny Louis Vuitton bag. “Gawd,” she sniffed, striding into the room with a perfectly tan hand at her nose. “What is that smell?”

  Sid leaned in for a kiss, but the girl sidestepped him, her stick-straight, platinum hair swinging out behind her. “Ewwww!” She shrieked, nose wrinkled. “Have you been, like, rolling around in a pig pen?”

  Rachel grinned. Sid should be happy; it turned out she and Beth Ann did have something in common. They both thought Sid reeked.

  Beth Ann scurried away to lean against the vanity, and Rachel’s eyes went wide. She bounded over to the sink and shoved her soiled plaid shirt over the weapons, but she’d moved a half-second too late for Beth Ann’s sharp gaze. “What are those?”

  Rachel answered by dropping her even dirtier sock over the tip of her dagger poking from under the plaid shirt.

  Beth Ann shivered in disgust. “Whatever.” She turned to Sid, Rachel and Kendra forgotten. “Are you planning on showering before our date tonight?”

  With a last look over his shoulder to Rachel, Sid led Beth Ann out of the dorm room without a goodbye. The door hadn’t even shut before Beth Ann was complaining loudly. Rachel heard the word “losers” tossed out. Her lip curled.

  Kendra flopped back onto her bed and twisted for the Corpus always kept in the bottom drawer of their shared nightstand. “He has got to get sick of that girl at some point, right? I mean, it’s bad enough we’re stuck with Sid, but to have Beth Ann tagging along
too?”

  Kendra flipped through the Corpus, muttering something about finding a catty snob predator somewhere within the pages of the demon lexicon. But Rachel wasn’t really listening. She dug Sid’s blood-caked knives out of his gear bag and cleaned them, her thoughts on Beth Ann and her fellow Descendant. What was it he possibly saw in her? Except if maybe it was less about seeing something and more about getting something. Rachel grimaced and shook her head to clear her thoughts. She did not want to think about those two together.

  Rachel grabbed a clean towel from a hook next to her closet door. She didn’t need to think about Beth Ann Page for another second. What she needed was the world’s hottest shower.

  CHAPTER 4

  The setting sun turned the water to a slick of blood. Rachel shivered in the April breeze and told herself it was just a trick of the light. She knew these Georgia waters. She knew they were a clear gray-blue beneath the glare of the sun. Still …

  Rachel rubbed the goosebumps from her arms and turned away from the bow of the boat and back toward Kendra and her mom. It’d been a good day; there was absolutely no reason for any apprehension. She and Kendra had done the easy drive back to their seaside hometown of Shipley on Friday after class and spent the next day lounging around doing nothing in particular.

  There was something about coming home from college for a weekend, something special. Rachel found that exact spot in bed where she was most comfortable; she perched on her favorite stool in the greenhouse like she had as a little girl and watched her mom cultivate the plants that went into her special Descendant concoctions. Rachel loved college, but that didn’t mean she never got homesick. And after those sleepless days tracking the wendigo, a weekend at home was needed. It made the knot of anxiety unwind inside of her and relax. If only just a little bit.

  The water was slack in Breaker Cove, and the trees pressing against the gritty sand beach stood thick with dripping Spanish moss. There were better beaches north of them, and better diving south around Shipwreck Cay. The desolation made it the perfect spot for Kendra’s free-dives to the merpeople. On this chilly spring evening, the three women had Breaker Cove all to themselves. The entrance to the caves was somewhere in the deeper waters away from the southern point of the cove, though Rachel didn’t know exactly where—only Kendra knew that.

  The girl in question zipped her wetsuit up her back and gathered her hair into a short pony that stuck straight up from the crown of her head. Behind the goggles, Rachel noticed she’d swiped mascara onto her lashes. “You coming in?”

  Rachel plucked at her own wetsuit pulled half down around her waist. The deep water of Breaker Cove was still cold with winter, and the wind off the open ocean was sharp. “I’m right behind you. You’ve got your watch set so you’re not under too long?”

  Kendra jiggled her wrist and took big, awkward steps to the back of the boat. The flippers attached to her feet slapped with each footfall.

  “Does your dad know you’re coming?” Daphne Chase had already suited up. Her goggles were pushed into her hair, and Rachel tried not to laugh at the way her mom’s thick bangs stuck up over the goggles and gave her head a peacock fan.

  The grin that spread across Kendra’s face in answer rivaled the brightness of the sun. She always got like this before a dive—giggly and jiggly and nearly jumping out of her skin with anticipation. How Rachel had never figured out the girl was half-mermaid in the years they’d been best friends was beyond her.

  “Okay,” Rachel said, wriggling her wetsuit up over her torso. “We’ll just snorkel at the surface and watch out for any other divers. Have fu…” Rachel trailed off. Kendra had already dived overboard and disappeared under the red-orange water with one powerful kick.

  Rachel chewed on her cheek for a moment until the bubbles where Kendra had splashed in drifted across the water’s surface. She turned back to her mom with a sigh.

  Daphne perched at the edge of a seat and pulled on her flippers. Her fingers shook, the only clue that she was jittery at the prospect of finally meeting one of the merpeople. She’d been the only Descendant living along the entire East Coast for twenty years, but the merpeople were an untrusting people. “So,” she said, her voice light. “Have you seen Jake lately?” She snapped on the second flipper with a little grunt and peered up at her daughter.

  “Uh, not lately,” Rachel answered, her own voice just as carefully casual. She didn’t know how much her mom knew about her and Jake’s weird quasi-relationship. “I got coffee with him when I was home for Christmas, but we haven’t really talked since.” They hadn’t talked. Though they had, unfortunately, moved on to other activities that Rachel vowed afterward she wouldn’t repeat.

  “He’s a good kid,” Daphne said.

  “Yeah,” Rachel agreed. “We’re just very different.” She chewed at her cheek again, her forehead drawn as she thought of her ex-boyfriend. He hadn’t left Shipley, but he was actually doing pretty well working for his uncle’s tourist fishing outfit. Rachel pushed away the memories of her time with Jake. “He was a good first boyfriend,” she said with some finality. It was true. He had been a good first boyfriend, not a current boyfriend.

  “And Sid,” Daphne asked. “Where’s he this weekend?”

  Rachel’s nostrils flared in annoyance, and she ducked her head at the sharp look from her mom.

  Daphne flip-flopped closer and squeezed Rachel’s shoulder. “With Beth Ann, I take it. Are you okay with him dating that girl?”

  Rachel pulled away from her mom’s warm hand and soft eyes and quiet, searching voice. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Why would I care?”

  Daphne reached for Rachel again, but Rachel sidestepped her mom and inched closer to the diving platform off the back of the boat. “If you ever want to talk about it…”

  “Oh, God! You think I have a thing for Sid!” Rachel shook her head in disgust to prove she really, really didn’t. “I barely like him! I mean, yeah, he’s a good hunter. And I guess he’s taught me some good fighting techniques. And okay, I admit he’s not nearly as annoying as when he first showed up and started horning in on my life.” Her mom’s eyebrows shot up, but Rachel kept going. “Seriously, Mom. Seriously. Sid’s just a friend.”

  The smile pulling across Daphne’s lips made Rachel sputter. Why was she smiling like that … like she knew something Rachel didn’t? It made Rachel’s cheeks go hot despite the chill in the air.

  “You know, I don’t go around bugging you about why you never told me I was a Descendant,” Rachel countered. That certainly wiped the smile off her mom’s face.

  In fact, the smile kept falling, and both of Daphne’s hands balled tight together at her waist. She sat down hard at the edge of the boat and spoke to her lap. “I did my best, Rachel.”

  Rachel’s insides twisted at that. She opened her mouth, but wasn’t entirely sure what to say. Daphne’s shoulders heaved in a sigh, and she finally looked up at her daughter.

  “Did you know I had an aunt? I never met her, but she was your grandmother’s older sister.”

  “But then how …” It was the eldest Chase daughters who inherited.

  “Her name was Vivienne, and she was raised to be a Descendant. Every day of her life, she had this burden hanging over her. Can you imagine, knowing the moment you turn eighteen you’ll have this incredible responsibility handed to you?” Daphne shook her head. “No, not responsibility, Vivienne called it her death sentence. And she made it that. She killed herself the day before her birthday, and the inheritance passed down to her younger sister.”

  Rachel’s heart ached. Water slapped against the boat’s hull, a hollow smack that she felt through her feet. Would she have wanted to know what she’d become her entire life? To know each passing second hauled her closer to some unseen fate? But Sid had lived with that, and he turned out fine. He knew what was coming and was prepared. He hadn’t opened his eyes on his eighteenth birthday and suddenly been able to see monsters.

  “I wanted,” Daphne st
arted, her voice shaking. She pulled in a ragged breath. “I wanted to give you a real childhood, Rachel, like your grandmother gave me before I inherited. No child should be burdened with this.”

  Rachel’s shoulders sagged with guilt. She had to say something, to tell her mom she had given her a good childhood, but somehow the words stuck in Rachel’s throat and refused to come out. She shifted back and forth on her feet. “I, uh … we should get in and watch for Kendra,” she finally whispered, hating herself for the things she couldn’t say.

  Rachel jumped in, and a few minutes later she jostled on the waves as her mom did the same. Daphne swam close, reached through the water, and squeezed Rachel’s hand. It was amazing how a gesture so small could do so much to make Rachel feel better and more ashamed at the same time.

  *

  They’d been floating at the surface for about forty minutes, peering into the inky blue darkness below, when a shadow ascended from the deep. Rachel motioned for her mom and pointed, but Daphne was already staring at the emerging shadow.

  It grew larger each second, first a flash of gold catching the very last fingers of sunlight, then a swishing fish tail. The shadow became a merman jetting straight for them, but Rachel only grinned around her snorkel mouthpiece.

  Kai, Kendra’s dad, gave one more powerful burst of his tail and sliced the water with his bare, thick arms. Rachel bobbed in Kai’s wake as he broke the surface and flipped her body down to tread water. The chill air smacked against her skin above the water, and her teeth chattered after she spit out the mouthpiece, but she grinned again. Kai had led a handful of other merpeople last October when she, Sid, and Kendra had faced a coven of sirens and their kraken. She wouldn’t have been able to defeat the coven—and she probably would have lost Kendra—if not for Kai’s help. It’d been a few months since she’d seen the merman, yet she’d recognize him anywhere. Though his skin was a darker golden brown than Kendra’s, his pointed chin and light eyes were a replica of her best friend’s.