I nodded. My interactions with the mers always involved me shapeshifting my form to a mermaid tail. I knew how to swim with one, and I was a trained dancer from long ago. One of my masters had crazily wished for it.
So while I didn’t know all of the specifics of this job, I did feel more than prepared for it.
“Great!” Christine exclaimed. “Most of the mermaids who come through here have never swum with a tail before, so they had a greater learning curve than you, I’m sure. This interview will be broken up into two parts: one where you talk with Neptune and me. And the other where you audition in the water. Think you’re up for that?”
I nodded. “Absolutely.” The nerves had turned to adrenaline now and I couldn’t stop smiling back at her.
This was, after all, its own kind of magic, creating a spectacle for viewers. I couldn’t think of anything better for a djinni pretending to be a human than to be at a place where I could pretend to be a mermaid. James had initially been confused by my decision to apply for this job, but I knew deep down it was right.
Christine chuckled lightly as she led me down the halls. “Wonderful,” she said. She leaned into me conspiratorially. “Don’t be nervous, and you’ll ace it, I’m sure.”
5
James met me outside of Neptune’s Aquarium. I couldn’t hold it in any longer, so I ran up and threw my arms around him.
“Whoa, easy there,” he said. “You’re gonna knock my glasses off.”
“I got the job!” I cried. “They want me to come in next Monday and I’m going to train with them for a few weeks before my first performance!”
A lopsided smile came to his lips as he regarded me proudly. “Well congratulations, genie,” he said. “Told you.”
“You did,” I said, linking my arms through his. I did that whenever I could to be near him.
I told him everything about Christine and her warm, bubbly nature. I’d met Neptune during my interview, a weathered old man who looked like he had spent way too much time out in the sun and sea. He reminded me of a ruler I once knew. The gruffness was only a façade and I easily got around it to talk to the real Neptune.
By the end of our chat, I knew I’d won them over. And the audition was no problem with my performance skills.
“Where do you want to go to celebrate?” James asked as we got to his car (which traveled far faster than any horse or man). He unlocked it and opened the door for me.
“How about that place that has the hamburgers?” I asked as I sat in the passenger’s seat.
I discovered those my first week of freedom and I hadn’t been able to find anything else that made my mouth water as much since.
James chuckled as he got into the driver’s seat. “Sounds perfect,” he said as he took my hand, and I nearly giggled in delight at the gesture.
Who knew what the future held for a former djinni in this new world? There would be times ahead that would be tough, sure. I’d lived too long to kid myself about that.
But there was one thing I did know: so long as I had James with me, I could keep learning and adapting to my new reality. Whether we were together as friends or if our friendship developed into something more, I knew I could count on him, and he could count on me.
I would become a mermaid and make children’s dreams come true. Show that there was magic in this world, no matter how small.
That was my happy ending. Even though it had been James’s wish, it was also my wish come true.
The End
About Erin
Sci-fi junkie, video game nerd, and wannabe manga artist Erin Hayes writes a lot of things. Sometimes she writes books.
She works as an advertising copywriter by day, and she’s an award-winning New York Times Bestselling Author by night. She has lived in New Zealand, Hawaii, Texas, Alabama, and now San Francisco with her husband, cat, and a growing collection of geek paraphernalia.
You can reach her at [email protected] and she’ll be happy to chat. Especially if you want to debate Star Wars.
www.erinhayesbooks.com
More from Erin
All Tara ever wanted was to be a mermaid.
So she takes a year off between high school and college to don a fake tail and tour aquariums across the country in a professional mermaid troupe.
Everything’s great until she meets a gorgeous real-life merman named Finn. Suddenly, what she thought was a dream turns out to be a nightmare - she’s turning into a mermaid herself. For real.
Yet when she returns to the sea to seek out Finn and reverse her transformation, she finds herself in the middle of an impending war between the land and sea. Tara may have always wanted to be a mermaid, but now it’s sink or swim. In order to survive, she has to learn how to be one, too.
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Splintered Magic
Aileen Harkwood
1
I’ll never know what got Coco. Something nasty, with sharp teeth, and a mouth the size of a watermelon split sideways. At least, that’s what it looked like when I found her.
My grandmother’s terrier lay three feet from the edge of the city parking lot, motionless, concealed almost entirely by bushes. If I hadn’t looked in this direction when I got out of my car, I’d have never have seen her, but something made me turn, a flicker of malevolent energy at my back, running its bony finger lightly down my spine.
I hovered atop one of those long, cement block things they put in parking spaces to stop you from driving any farther forward, gazing down at her body. My throat felt swollen inside like I was going into anaphylactic shock and couldn’t breathe. I wanted to call Coco’s name, wake her up, but I knew it was useless. She was gone and had been for hours, probably since the night before.
My feet curled around the edge of the narrow slab of cement in their thin, rubber-soled sneakers, clinging hard as I rocked gently in distress. Wearing my favorite hoodie, skirt, and leggings, all black, I have no doubt I looked like a spastic vulture with PTSD ready to fall off its perch.
“Isn’t that your grandmother’s dog?” a voice asked.
My face shot up at the sound and I finally dropped off the block, feet slapping the asphalt. Pluto stood next to me, so close it showed how out of it I was not to have heard him walk up.
“It was,” I said.
I’ve known Pluto since the third grade, when his family moved to town and bought the Greely Mansion, a pigeon gray Victorian with gingerbread trim hanging all over it, and a first floor that didn’t look strong enough to hold up two more stories, not to mention the fourth-story towers.
Pluto crouched down, examining the largest of the bite wounds on poor Coco’s body. Even in a squat, his blonde head almost came up to the level of my chest. I’d never seen him bare-chested, but from the way his shoulders and chest filled his shirts I imagined he resembled one of those fitness equipment guys who spend an entire thirty-minute infomercial, arms and legs pumping away on the Glute Blaster 5000, or whatever. His perfectly muscled chest would be slicked with baby oil—what was with that anyway? you needed to be oiled to work out?—and he’d never get winded no matter how long he rode his glorified stair stepper into the wee hours of the night.
In fact, if it weren’t for the deformed right brow he could have been a model. Still could, if you Photoshopped that away. He was Scandinavian, with resigned features that said he could take up permanent residence in an ice hotel, two hundred miles north of Oslo in the dead of winter, and not shiver once.
Pluto wasn’t his real name, obviously. No one would name their kid that. It’s a nickname I gave him in junior year of high school. Pluto for plutocrat, a person with so much power either through money or politics or both, that they were royalty in a society that didn’t have royals. Being a poor person, who’s worked a crap job for a crap boss since I was sixteen, I don’t like rich people, and his family is filthy with the stuff. I have also never liked that he’s smarter than me. I don’t like anyone who is smarter than me. After I came up with the n
ickname I decided to keep it because it fit who he was, a Richie Rich, but back then the word plutocrat showed him, I thought, that I wasn’t some dumb local girl. Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you’re stupid. I hadn’t called Pluto by his real name since.
Following that brief glance to acknowledge his presence, my gaze was pulled back to Coco with the force of a tractor beam.
“Bear, probably,” I said, putting forth a theory.
Anyone with a half a brain cell could see a bear hadn’t done this. Not even a grizzly could have made those marks. We don’t have grizzlies around here since this is, you know, California and all our grizzlies went extinct about a hundred years ago. I was in standard operating, don’t-let-them-think-you’re-a-freak mode, however, and suggesting it was a bear was what I thought a normal person would say.
Pluto gave me a skeptical look. I couldn’t tell if the skepticism was directed at my comment specifically or me in general.
“Or a great white,” I said.
I was unable to keep the angry sarcasm out of my voice. Coco hadn’t gone easily. I could see it. He could see it.
“We’re at least a mile in from the beach,” he said in response to my great white comment. Was he really taking my suggestion seriously?
“It’s called hyperbole,” I said.
“Besides,” he continued, ignoring me. “The curve is too flat.”
“What?”
“The curve of the jaw is too flat for a shark.”
In reality, I knew it was neither a bear, nor the rare, improbable land shark, but something much, much worse.
“You didn’t think I believed a great white ate my grandma’s dog, did you?”
“With you, Saige, it’s hard to be sure.”
I hesitated, not sure what to do.
“Pluto, I don’t know–”
“Saige!” My name was shouted from across the street and half a block away.
I turned and looked over my shoulder at the person who’d called out. My boss, Andrea. I wasn’t late yet for work, having pulled into the parking lot a full eighteen minutes ahead of my shift, but you wouldn’t know that from Andrea. She stood out front of Scented Miracles, holding the front door wide open as she gestured manically. Working for Andrea, all I can say was the struggle was real. The woman thought she owned me, and I should gratefully dedicate my entire life to her store that sold handmade aromatherapy candles. They were her candles, not mine, her store, not mine. I was a minimum wage slave and didn’t have a piece of it. Yet, incredibly, she couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to live her dream twenty-four hours a day. Just let me freakin’ come to work and do my job and leave me alone when I’m not there.
“Saige!” she cried out again. “I need you.”
I wasn’t in the mood for a shouted conversation and dug into my pocket for my cell. Holding it up so she could see, I pointed at it, and then lowered it and texted her.
g-moms dog attacked
Instead of texting me back, the phone screeched out the ringtone I’d assigned to Andrea, the sound of a car crashing over and over again.
I groaned. I should have known texting back would be too much to ask.
“What are you doing standing there?” Andrea said as soon as I answered. “Why aren’t you in here, clocking in? We’re swamped. I need you at the register now.”
For Andrea, swamped meant there were more than two customers in the store at the same time.
“I told you,” I said. “It’s Coco, my grandmother’s dog. She’s been attacked. I just found her.”
“Is she alive?”
“Um, no.” That ugly feeling, the one that had me rocking to myself earlier, raked its claws through my insides. This was more than a tragedy. What had happened to the dog was fundamentally off. My senses cringed at the wrongness of it.
“You don’t need to take her to the vet?” Andrea said.
“No. It’s too late. But–”
“Then isn’t this something you can handle after work?”
I lowered the phone from my ear and looked at her. Hopefully, she was far enough away she couldn’t read the expression in my eyes or more importantly fear it. I knew the freak side of my nature peeked out from behind the mask I habitually lived behind, ready to go to war over Andrea’s callousness. I shook my head at her, ended the call and then turned away.
I half-expected her to cross the street and rush up behind me, demanding I get inside now, and get to work now, but instead her spike heels clicked sharply on the sidewalk, stomping back into Scented Miracles. The string of bells on the shop door jangled as it shut.
My attention returned to Coco and what I’d been about to say when Andrea had interrupted.
“I don’t know what to do,” I told Pluto.
What a pathetic thing to say. The dog had died defending itself from an impossible being with a cruel appetite, and I couldn’t manage something as simple as transporting her body home?
“Wait here,” he said.
He headed to his car, a gleaming silver luxury SUV, popped the back hatch and returned a minute later with a blanket. Gently, he gathered up the dog’s slack body and wrapped it in the blanket, carrying the bundle to his car. I followed in his wake, unable apparently, to think independently.
“Let’s go see your grandmother,” Pluto said. “Leave your car here. We can pick it up later.”
On the ride home, I thought about Coco and the huge mistake I’d made that could have saved her life. The night before, after work, my headlights had picked out a dog trotting along the side of the road. I was driving fast and only got a brief glimpse, but I thought it looked like Coco. Except, I’d remembered her lying by the wood stove in the kitchen when I’d left for Scented Miracles at one in the afternoon. She was a medium-sized dog and I couldn’t see her covering eleven miles in so short a time.
It must be someone else’s dog, I’d thought.
It seemed logical that since my grandmother had gotten the terrier here in Lost Cliff as a puppy, that puppy had come from a litter, and some of Coco’s siblings had also grown up in the area. Why hadn’t I stopped and tried calling her name, just to be sure? Why had I zoomed along, not even slowing? I blamed myself.
Of course, other questions needed answers. Why couldn’t my grandmother be bothered to keep track of her dog? She’d often let Coco out and forget about her for hours at a time. True, the terrier had never wandered far before now, content to lay on the porch while being neglected by her owner, but still, grandma should have known Coco getting lost was a real possibility. When the dog hadn’t come in the night before, why hadn’t my grandmother asked me for help? I would have hopped in the car immediately and whipped around the neighborhood searching. Had Lida not noticed her pet was missing?
The bigger, more terrifying question was what had hurt Coco like that? What did it look like? Sound like? Move like? Nothing natural, that much I knew. Plus, it had killed but not eaten. Why? I hoped it wasn’t because the thing enjoyed doing it. Worse, I couldn’t begin to predict what it would do next.
I’d known something was wrong in Lost Cliff for months. I could feel the darkness seeping up from the beach and out of the storm drains, its clammy tentacles snaking through the redwoods that ringed our North Coast town, a poisonous fog that could burn lips and scar souls. In December, at least twenty seagulls took up residence in the rafters of the town bandstand for three days, only they weren’t normal seagulls. Each bird sported a tiny cluster of bright red feathers that I swear looked like someone had used it for a voodoo doll, sticking a long needle in the center of its breast and drawing blood. Seagulls with red feathers? No one had ever heard of it.
In January, a child playing in the tide pools discovered a human toe tangled in a sea anemone. The little boy had been attracted to the gold ring on the toe that flashed in the water. It turned out the body part came from a woman who had drowned with six others when their boat overturned thirty miles north of us. Nothing else about her was missing. Marine scien
tists gave the odds of this tiny piece of her being discovered at all, let alone where it was found, as astronomical. Both the birds and the body part were bad omens, I could tell you that, but portending what?
Now, here we were in February, and I could feel that thing out there, lurking, stalking us, ready to make a hellacious mess of our lives. I had to do something.
For now, though, I had my grandmother to comfort.
Pluto turned off the highway and pulled the sleek SUV into my driveway. He turned off the engine, got out, and quietly went to retrieve Coco from the back.
My grandmother and I lived on the poor side of town, really several miles beyond that, deep in the gloom of the redwoods. It was a beautiful gloom, but still gloom, especially depressing in the winter. The closer you were to the beach, the richer you tended to be. The poorer you were, the farther inland you got stuck, living in continual shadow.
Our family home was a dilapidated version of the Greely Mansion, or a house close enough to be its ready-for-the-wrecking ball twin. Where the gray paint at Pluto’s house was ever-fresh, thanks to regular maintenance, ours peeled and flaked with multi-colored layers stretching back to the 1800s. Mostly it was yellow, sort of a dull sunflower, a color my mother once insisted showed the sun was doing its best to shine on our lives, even though we got less than an hour of the stuff per day.
Grandma Lida came out onto the wraparound porch as we walked up to the base of the front steps with Coco. She’d left her walker inside and her shimmering white hair cascaded around her shoulders. Lida appeared decades younger than her years, not in the scary, plastic surgery way that actresses in their eighties employ to horrifying effect, but not in the natural sense either. This was magic, trumped up and applied with a heavy hand, makeup troweled on before a performance. I surmised the heavy hand was in Pluto’s honor.
Not Just Voodoo Page 7
