I felt his skin warm under my hands as a natural flush colored his cheeks just as his eyes fluttered open. Bodies were soon surrounding us and there was no mistaking the wailing cries of his mother as she pushed her way through the crowd, gathering her son up, crushing him to her chest. I sat back on my heels and was suddenly aware of the stinging cuts on my calf and quickly stood up to take the weight off of it. Now that I was out of the water, it was finally bleeding steadily down my leg and staining the sand.
“I can look at that for you.” I turned to see a paramedic standing just behind me, inclining his head towards my leg.
“What about the kid?” I asked.
“They’ve got it under control,” he said, and I looked back at Toby and his mother and saw three other EMTs escorting the pair back up to the parking lot to the waiting ambulance.
“That’d be great, the salt is really a bitch,” I said with a shaky laugh, limping my way back to the sidewalk. The paramedic took my upper arm in one of his hands, gently guiding me should I stumble.
I sat on the curb of the parking lot while the paramedic cleaned the scratches on my leg, gritting my teeth against the sting of the antiseptic. I looked down at the wounds now that the sand had been cleaned away and noticed that there were four running scratches, all about three inches long, one not quite as wide as the other three. I held my hand out in front of me and looked at the width of my fingernails and knew that whatever that thing was, it had hands and fingers just like a human.
“You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d say these were claw marks,” the paramedic said, turning my leg a little awkwardly to get a closer look. “How’d you do this?”
“Sea urchin,” I said quickly, trying to keep my voice light.
“What?”
“When I was running after the mom, I slipped in the shallows and scratched it on an urchin; this stretch of beach is spotted with them,” I told the lie easily because it was half true. Tourists often came to the mercy of the rocks and urchins hidden in the shallows all along this part of the beach. Many local surfers wore surf booties to help navigate their way into the water because of them as well. I never needed to wear booties; with my elemental earth magic, I was able to walk over the rocks, sand, and urchins as if I was part of it, my feet just slipping into them and through with liquid ease.
“Huh, doesn’t look like a scratch though,” he said, looking up at me, still holding onto my leg. “I mean, I know we get the stray seal every now and then, that could be it, but I think you’d’ve noticed that.”
“Well, there’re rocks down there too.” I shrugged. “And then I was in the water pretty shortly after, so it probably got worse in there.”
“Actually, the water can sometimes help injuries; hurts like a bitch, but sometimes it can help.” I knew that, but was trying to play dumb so he’d just let it go. I noticed then he was studying my face more intently than the situation called for, so I met his eyes and held them with my stare and pushed against his aura. Finding no spark of psychic ability, I was satisfied that he couldn’t see the truth hidden in my mind.
“Well then, maybe it wasn’t an urchin; maybe it was a broken piece of glass or something,” I said, shrugging again.
After a moment he said, “Yeah, that could explain it. Well, doesn’t look like you’ll need stitches, so there’s the bright side.” He stood, holding out a hand to help me up. I followed him over to the ambulance, feeling compelled to check on Toby and his mother before I took off to find my discarded shorts that I was hoping were still where I tossed them.
“Toby, honey, I understand that was scary for you, but that’s enough,” I heard Mary saying to her son as we got closer.
“But mommy! I’m not lying!” Toby argued in that tone all kids get when they’re frustrated that, for once, when they really were telling the truth, they weren’t being heard.
“Toby,” Mary warned in a perfect mom voice.
“It was mermaids! Like in the movie! They wanted me to play with them, so I followed them into the water—”
“That is enough,” Mary said, cutting off the end of Toby’s sentence. “Do you think he hit his head? Or maybe the lack of oxygen for so long has something to do with this?” she asked the paramedics around her.
“Sometimes, after a traumatic experience, kids make up something less scary for them to deal with as an explanation for what happened. Maybe he saw dolphins, that would make sense,” the eldest of the four EMTs said, but I wasn’t really listening to him at that point. All my attention was on Toby, who was sulking in his mother’s lap.
“Oh, honey, thank you so much,” Mary said, becoming aware of my presence.
“No worries,” I said with a shake of my head and smiled.
“No, really, if it weren’t for you, my baby…” Her voice caught in her throat and she paused to blink back fresh tears. “Well, anyway, I want you to know how grateful I am. If you’ll come with me or give me your address, I’d like to give you—”
“Oh no, no, no,” I said quickly, waving a hand at her to stop her. “Seriously, that’s totally okay.”
“But no one else would help me and you risked your life. I mean, that riptide caught you; you could’ve drowned too.”
“No, I’ve been swimming my whole life, at this very beach, so really it wasn’t much risk on my part,” I said, taking a step towards her and reached out to touch Toby’s cheek with my fingers. “Listen, little man, just be careful, okay? Next time the mermaids ask you to play, just tell them you can’t. Mommy can’t swim and I won’t always be here.” I said the last looking into Mary’s face and I watched her blush under my stare.
“Anyway, I gotta go find my shorts, if they’re still there,” I said with a smile and stepped back, turning away from the group.
“Wait.” The same young EMT that had cleaned my leg reached out and touched my arm to stop me. “We don’t have riptide here… In Oxnard, yeah, maybe even a little up the coast, but not here.”
“Huh, weird,” I said.
“Yeah, weird,” he agreed and let his hand fall away from me. I didn’t hang around long enough to give anyone else a chance to stop me again and took off at a jog to find my shorts.
I jogged down the sidewalk until it curved away from the beach, leading out to a trail that followed the riverbed for day hikers. I walked over to the rocks that separated the sidewalk from the sand of the beach and did a balancing act as I walked over them, looking for where I thought I had tossed my shorts. The chill of being half wet and half dry had finally worn off as the morning sun beat down on me, drying me completely. After five minutes of looking, I caught sight of my shorts and veered towards them. I hadn’t tossed them as high as I had thought and had to get close to the wet sand to reach them.
As I reached for them, my fingers closing around the waistband, I stumbled, catching my balance on a rock, scraping my palm. I hissed at the sting and stood up, holding my shorts in my uninjured hand. While examining the scrape, movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. I turned, looking out over the sea and to the horizon, and there, just twenty yards or so out to sea, I saw the dark outline of a head and shoulders. It waited there for a few moments and I knew it was looking at me. In a flash, it was under the water and gone, but not before I saw the flick of tailfin break the surface of the water.
Chapter Two
Mermaids, the kid had said. They sure looked like mermaids, creepy mermaids, I’d give him that much. But of all the mythical creatures in the world, mermaids were one of the few I just didn’t believe in. Maybe it’s because they’re said to live in the depths of the oceans and we just hadn’t been able to plumb far enough to find them. I believed in water dragons and undines, but then again, I had seen both of those things in my life. Had I succumbed to the “seeing is believing” state of mind? Surely not.
Driving down Main Street, I contemplated the face of the creature that had dragged me under the water while trying to find that ever-elusive parking space. I w
as meeting Jodi and Steven for breakfast at a little outdoor café we liked to come to on the weekends. I finally found a space half a block away from the café and pulled in.
“This is amazing,” Steven said as I walked up to the table he and Jodi were already sitting at.
“What?” I asked, even though I had a feeling I knew what he was going to say.
“We’re on time and you’re late,” he said with a grin, pushing a chair out for me with his foot. Jodi gave me a tired smile, her over-large sunglasses hiding most of her face as she clutched a coffee cup in her hands.
“Sorry, there was a thing at the beach this morning,” I said, nodding to the waiter across the way who raised a coffee carafe, asking silently if I wanted any.
“Dude, you are insane. It’s barely ten o’clock right now and you’ve already been at the beach?” Jodi asked, setting her cup down. “So, do we dare ask what happened?”
I smiled a thanks at the waiter who appeared at my side with a fresh cup of coffee and waited to answer Jodi until after we had put in our breakfast orders. “This little boy got pulled under and the mom couldn’t swim,” I explained, adding ample amounts of cream and sugar to my coffee.
“Damn tourists,” Steven muttered, and I nodded in agreement.
“So you came to the rescue?” Jodi prompted.
“Well, you know how it is; people scream for help and all anyone does is stare at them,” I said, pausing to take a sip of my coffee. “But that’s not really the biggest part of the story.” I filled them in on the strange new riptide in the water and creature that had taken hold of me, pausing to show them my injured leg; both Jodi and Steven hissed at the sight of it.
“So the kid said mermaids called him in?” Steven asked, his brow wrinkled in confusion.
“That’s what he said,” I repeated, holding my cup in my hands to chase away the chill I was suddenly feeling.
“But, those aren’t real, right?” Jodi said, finally sitting up a little straighter in her chair. “I mean, I know anything is possible, but mermaids?”
“Yeah, that’s what I’ve been going over in my head too.” I paused as the waiter brought out our orders and left again only to be back in a moment to refill our coffees. Once he was gone, I continued, “I’ll tell you what though, if they are mermaids, then they’re freaking creepy looking things.”
“So not half-naked, beautiful young women who sing with crabs and fish?” Steven asked, a sly grin on his face. “Are you saying I have no hope of seeing any muscle bound lovelies either?”
“Dude, you get pulled under by one and see how funny it is. I’m telling you,” I said, stabbing at some potatoes, “if mermaids are real, and that’s what these things are, they’re not good. I mean, the damn thing smiled when it cut my leg.”
“Creepy,” Jodi said, and Steven and I nodded. “So I guess my hopes of a quiet, laid back summer are totally shot now.”
“I dunno,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I mean, there haven’t been any disappearances at the beaches or unexplained drownings. Maybe it’s nothing; maybe it was just a weird coincidence.”
“Yeah, because you, Queen of Karmic Rule, believe in coincidences,” Steven said, waving his fork in my direction. I didn’t really have anything to say to that; he was right. It would bug me until I knew what was going on, and if something happened to a kid because we didn’t look into it, I’d feel terrible.
“Guess it’s my fault that we haven’t taken the time to study the water elementals since none of us are water,” I said.
“No, we have studied some,” Jodi said, shaking her head. “You’re in-tuned to water almost as much as earth, so we’ve looked into it.”
“Not enough,” I said with a heavy sigh. “And not for a really long time.”
“Okay, so we start now,” Steven said with a lot more excitement than I would’ve expected from them considering Jodi was right; we were all hoping for a nice, quiet summer after all the hell we’d been through during the school year. “So, first question we answer, are mermaids real?”
“No,” Jodi and I said together. We laughed and she bowed her head slightly to me, so I continued. “There isn’t one book out there that talks about mermaids that’s not total fiction.”
“Does that make them unreal?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Jodi picked up for me. “Because no matter how far-fetched something is, you can find at least one book that’ll mention some culture believing in them. Mermaids don’t fit that bill.”
“What about in Greek and Roman mythology? They talk about sea creatures all the time.”
“Right, we’re not saying all sea creatures aren’t real, just mermaids,” I said, swirling the last few dregs of coffee in my cup. “You’re probably thinking of sirens or Neptune or Poseidon, and there are a lot of myths that say quite a few sea nymphs are Poseidon’s children.”
“What about sea nymphs? Are those real?” Steven asked looking between Jodi and me.
“Well, I suppose. I mean, forest nymphs are real enough,” I said, looking to Jodi.
“That’s true. I’ve only heard of them living near rivers or lakes when you talk about water nymphs, but I guess they could live in the oceans too,” Jodi said, looking past us as if reading a book in her mind.
“Or at least, being able to travel in the oceans,” I offered, and Jodi nodded.
“Okay, but have you ever heard of them having fishtails?” Steven asked.
“No, but then again, anything I’ve ever read actually says that it was believed they actually were the river or lake they inhabited. And for the forest nymphs, they really were the trees,” I explained. “Just that they appear as beautiful women to mortals.”
“Then maybe these things just appear to have fishtails,” Steven offered. “You know, maybe they somehow found out that would work to entice little kids because of the fairy tales.”
“How? By renting a copy of The Little Mermaid?” Jodi asked, laughing, making Steven blush lightly.
“Well, if they did,” I said before Steven could respond, “then they didn’t get the character down very well because these were ugly and creepy looking.”
“I guess it’s summer school time for us, huh?” Jodi asked and I could hear the resigned tone in her voice. I knew how she felt.
“Well here’s the bright side,” Steven said as we all stood up, tossing money on the table to pay the bill. “At least it looks like no humans are responsible for these things. Maybe we won’t be sending anyone to jail this time.”
***
Hours later and without much to show for our efforts, we were leaving the local metaphysical store my mentor, Deb, managed. We had found a few books on Greek and Roman legends about water gods, sea, river, and lake varieties, and the minor gods and goddesses they were believed to have produced, but nothing that really elaborated past our own theories. The only thing that seemed like it might fit the bill were the water nymphs we had already suspected and mainly because, so far, they were the only things that seemed to shape shift when they interacted with humans.
“Why don’t we all go to the beach together and see if we see anything?” Jodi suggested as we all piled into my Camaro. After breakfast we had headed back to my house so I could switch out vehicles and put my board away, leaving Steven’s car parked at my house.
“Do you really think the things will come back in the same day?” Steven asked from the back seat.
“Who knows,” Jodi said as I backed out of the parking space. “Humans wouldn’t, but these aren’t humans, so we can’t judge them by human standards. Maybe if you or I see them, we’ll recognize them.” Jodi said recognize like she and I had recognized each other as children and as we had recognized Steven in freshman year; as soon as we found each other, we knew we were kindred spirits waiting all our lives to find each other.
“None of us are water elementals. What makes you think we’ll recognize them?” Steven asked.
“Wishful thinking,” I offered and Jodi made a no
n-committal noise in agreement. I drove us to the beach. After paying for a spot in the paid parking lot, I tossed the ticket stub on the dashboard and climbed out with the others. Without waiting for them, I crossed the crumbling sidewalk and made my way down the few feet of rocks that led to the sand and stood there, looking out over the water. It was that perfect time of day where the tides weren’t waging war with each other and the waves were just right for almost any size surf board, and, as I had expected, there were twice as many heads in the water now than there had been this morning.
“Where did you see the things?” Steve asked, now standing to my left with Jodi on my right. I was very aware of the anxiety swirling in his stomach. Steven, being a fire elemental, had an ingrained fear of water and was a very weak swimmer, only having learned because his parents forced him for safety reasons when he was a child. To this day, I had never seen Steven in water deeper than knee level, and even then he needed someone close by in case he panicked.
“Just out there, near Rivermouth,” I said, pointing down the beach past the last parking space in the lot that disappeared around a bend of land and rocks.
“You don’t think you called those things, do you? Messing with the water that way?” Steven asked, and I could hear the worry in his voice.
“No, I don’t,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m not messing with the actual tides or even the water; it’s the Earth underneath that I’m working with. I cause little earthquakes in the shifting plates and the ripple effect happens, causing the waves.”
“Good point,” he said, nodding. “Then I don’t get it, why did they show up?”
“Should we try walking out to Rivermouth?” Jodi asked.
“Yeah, why not?” I said, taking a step to lead the way, only to stop when my stomach knotted up with nerves that didn’t belong to me. I turned and held out a hand for Steven, who hesitated a little. “Don’t worry, Jodi and I won’t let anything happen to you.” He gave a shaky laugh and took my offered hand, walking reluctantly with me. I fed him calming, soothing thoughts as we walked, and by the time we were wading through the ankle deep runoff from the Rivermouth that emptied into the sea and were stepping on the soft sandbar, he was as calm as I could ever hope he would be.
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