Salt & Venom (Blood, Bloom, & Water Book 2)

by Amy McNulty

  So that was what that had been all about? “If I know, she thinks I’ll drop out.”

  “Won’t you?” He made a hmm sound deep inside his throat.

  “And with no champion of water, the war is back to a stalemate.”

  He nodded, shifting so he could get a better grip on my hand as he clasped it to his chest. “That might mean we couldn’t find another champion for a generation.” His face seemed purposefully left blank. “There could be decades before two young women lived in the house at the same time. Or whomever my descendant preferred to make a champion.”

  By the time Autumn was our age, both Ember and I would be out of the house, and since it was Noelle’s house, on the off chance she and Dad had divorced by then, he and Autumn wouldn’t be the ones to stay there. She’d have to move or have twins with Dad or some other new guy or marry a new guy with two teen daughters. He was right. The chances of two potential champions putting down roots on those consummate lands were slim.

  Still, it would make this all somebody else’s problem. For both of us. Dean might still be the prince of vampires by then, but Calder would be king—or gone by the time there were two champions there. We both could be.

  “When your mother was princess, were they waiting for a young man and a young woman to live there?”

  Calder lowered my hand, nodding. “An old widow with a daughter lived there the first couple decades. Then the daughter moved out and the widow just kept… staying there for decades. No chance of fresh blood in the house.”

  “I’m surprised no one staged a haunting or something to get her to move out.”

  Calder’s grin practically reached his ears. “Maybe we would have if we’d have had your guidance back then.” The smile dropped. “But the faery was very clear. No harming or frightening the house’s inhabitants.”

  If Orin was so sick of waiting for this battle to begin, I was surprised he’d even had that rule in place. “But Ember…” I cocked my head.

  “She had an older brother on her father’s side, but he rarely set foot in there,” said Calder. “Besides, by then, Mom had already married my father. She couldn’t spend her whole life waiting for something that might happen. She thought it better to have a child and see if the young couple that moved into that house could bear a new set of champions for him or her.”

  “They had Ember,” I said.

  “And then they got divorced.” Calder’s lips pinched. “That woman was stubbornly single for too long afterward. I got so used to hearing my parents complain about it that it all felt like a distant dream. This destiny I was supposed to bear. Like my mother and her father before her, I was convinced I could live a normal life, that this war wouldn’t start when it was my turn to be prince.”

  I giggled a little at the idea of a “normal life,” considering our surroundings. Once more, I took in the subtle beauty of the bubbles going up and down in the wide-open space around us.

  “So Mom and Wilhelmina… Came to a truce.”

  “What?” I must have heard him wrong.

  “They scouted single fathers with a daughter the right age and they… they set them up on a date.”

  “What?!” I ripped my hand from Calder’s, pressing back against the wall. “Vampires and merfolk set my dad up with Noelle?”

  He shrugged, like he hadn’t just blown my mind with the fact that these warring species had set aside their differences to purposely drag me into this. “Your dad and Ember’s mom were in business together anyway. All it took was a vampire going in as Ember’s mom’s secretary and planting some ideas in her head…”

  “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.” Both my hands were waving in front of me. “They don’t even love each other? This was all a trick? Some brainwashing?”

  Calder shook his head adamantly. “No. We didn’t think the faery would allow that—besides, he’s the only one who can outright convince someone of something that isn’t true. The bloodsucker just nudged them to come together, that’s all.”

  “Well, it certainly worked.” I scoffed. I’d always thought Dad had been a bit nuts to rush headlong into this relationship so quickly. Brainwashing might have explained the whole thing. Though apparently if my merman boyfriend was to be trusted, it was just my dad being lonely after too many years “focusing on his girls” and barely dipping a toe in the dating waters.

  He kept talking. “Mom and Wilhelmina clashed a bit that night of the trek into the woods. Mom got angry the vampire prince had even been there on what was technically our property and called up the school to yell at her about it, but the vampire queen reminded her that Orin’s cabin was neutral ground and, in any case, it was hardly fair to expect them to stay out of the woods if it was necessary for them to be there to declare a champion.” He swallowed visibly. “The little truce was over nearly as soon as it began.”

  It did seem bogus that the merfolk would insist Dean never set foot on their land—especially if they wanted him to get a champion and wanted this whole thing to begin. Frankly, I was surprised vampires and merfolk had ever gotten along long enough to concoct the whole marriage thing.

  They’d been united in one desire: to pit one hapless girl against another for a chance to finally eradicate each other once and for all.

  “During the first war,” I began, “if the vampires lost, why was one still left?”

  “We didn’t know there was.” Calder shrugged. “But it didn’t surprise us that much when they came back. The mermaids didn’t win that first battle.”

  “Huh? But your mom said—”

  “No one won. Not really. Not like we hope to now.”

  “I don’t understand. Your mother explicitly told me the merfolk won that ancient battle.”

  A deep sigh escaped Calder’s lips, turning into airy bubbles that spread up and to the surface. “Maybe we did beat them into submission—enough to keep them away. For a long time.”

  “How did your people do that?”

  Calder grimaced. “We took out their champion.”

  A grim image of Ember lying lifeless flashed before my eyes. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

  “Our champion didn’t take out their champion. We took out their champion. The merfolk. Then we wiped the vampires out, or so we thought…”

  I gasped.

  Calder’s mouth popped open and hung that way for a moment before the words started tumbling out of him. “But you have to understand—we didn’t know. This…. This proxy war thing, it wasn’t fully established. My ancestors saw a danger in these undead creatures and found the champion versus champion thing too slow-moving. Too unsure. They were dangerous—and we didn’t know if they would stop biting humans while we fought by proxy. They didn’t stop biting humans, didn’t stop adding to their numbers.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. It wasn’t like Calder or his family and friends had had a role in all of that. But his mother had kept the truth from me. Just like she’d wanted to keep the truth about the orb from me.

  “But if we had really won, once and for all, champion versus champion… Things would be different now.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  Calder’s head snapped up, alert to the point where I had to peer over my shoulder to make sure there wasn’t any threat. The sky rumbled overhead.

  “Just, look…” he said, practically pinching his scalp as his fingers wove between the follicles of his hair. “The vampires didn’t win, either. Or we would have been gone for good.” He nodded, but it seemed as if that was to convince himself as much as it was to convince me. “Merfolk had the upper hand. We got to spread out, enjoy the peace of living in the oceans without the threat of bloodsuckers snatching it all away… And then Wilhelmina resurfaced and tricked my great-grandfather into trying to settle their differences ‘peacefully.’”

  “The vampire merman,” I said, my breaths slowing as I tried to focus on it.

  “Right,” said Calder. He grabbed my hand again. “Ivy, I know th
is is a lot. I wish it didn’t have to be you who has to deal with it all.”

  Our eyes locked and I felt my resolve softening under the eagerness in his irises. It couldn’t be the siren call. Not when I was a mermaid, too.

  “I wish none of this was happening,” he said. “Really, I do.” He broke our gaze and swallowed noticeably. But then his grip on my hands tightened. “But if we don’t win this war, my people will die. I can’t allow that.”

  “And if I don’t win this war for you, you’ll just be left in limbo for generations to come.”

  His hands moved from mine to cup the sides of my face. The way he looked at me… It would have sent tingles to my toes if I’d had them. “And vampires will keep breeding in the meantime, killing humans to make them walk among the undead. Even Ember’s own father seems poised to be one of them.”

  “You need this to be over,” I said, my fingers tracing his arm as he kept his palms on my cheeks. “And the vampires put people in danger—”

  His lips moved forward and pressed against mine.

  My insides were a jumble of feelings. The kiss felt great—amazing under the cozy comfort of these waters’ depths. But there was so much that weighed on my mind. And I realized suddenly with a start that if he were just some swim team boy and I were just some average girl, these brief blips of passion… they wouldn’t last.

  We didn’t have what Ember and Dean did.

  I pulled away, gently, letting him tease my lips once more with a little nibble before we parted.

  I couldn’t look him in the eyes.

  “Let’s… Let’s do this,” I said, not ready to tell him I would probably be walking away when it was all over. “Time to kick some vampire butt.”

  He was a good guy. He did what he thought was best. And he cared—about me, about his friends, about inconveniencing other people.

  But this was about saving the merfolk to him more than it was about me.

  So I would help him out. As a friend.

  I met his eyes again as his hands fell from my face, retracting back to his torso as he put a little extra space between us in this tiny alcove. His face sunk at my unspoken rejection.

  “We have less than a week to plan the battle that will end this thing,” I said. “So let’s focus on that.”

  He nodded silently, the bob of his Adam’s apple eliciting a slight swallowing noise that made me want to sweep him up in my arms again and kiss his hurt away.

  Forget my brain. I was a teenager. Hormones came with the territory for a good chunk of us, right?

  We spent a few more minutes kissing, his lips traveling down my neck, pushing aside my shirt slightly to access my shoulders, before we finally broke away and swam back to his house, hand-in-hand.

  He was my merman boyfriend for one more week at least.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The past week had been suspiciously quiet. After school, the merfolk and I went over the different parts of the house the people might defend. The youngest merkids were going to wait it out with some of their parents and the few older merfolk in the lake during the conflict. Everyone else had a place and a role to play.

  Mine was getting Ember there—with Calder’s help. Cascade and Bay would be on standby back at the house. Laguna and Llyr would mingle amongst Dad and Noelle’s guests to act as our backup.

  Good thing because now that the wedding ceremony was here, I discovered there were vampires up the wazoo at this party.

  “Yvonne!” said Noelle as she touched her cheek lightly to the cheek of a pale brunette wearing, no surprise, some dress more at home at a costume party. “So glad you could come! We owe this all to our own little cupid.”

  The woman laughed, a theatrical, overly loud laugh. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. You don’t know how happy I am everything worked out between you two.” She didn’t wear sunglasses. Instead, her eyes were unnaturally black, even over the whites of her eyes. She trained those eyes right on me and the chip I had brought halfway to my mouth started shaking in my hand.

  “Some wear contact lenses,” whispered Calder in my ear. He had on a dress shirt unbuttoned at the collar and a pair of khakis. He hadn’t swapped his aquatic shoes for dress shoes, though. “But they’re still easy to spot, right?”

  As if the paleness and clothes alone didn’t give them away. I looked around the kitchen and out into the backyard. It wasn’t really warm enough for an outdoor party, but Dad and Noelle had a wooden arch brought out back and had decorated it with autumn leaves and colors anyway. Folding chairs were divided into two sections in half a dozen rows. Food was set up buffet-style here in the kitchen and people were supposed to take their plates to the rest of the downstairs—the family room, the dining room—to mingle.

  The party was just getting started, but there were already four people who looked like they’d stepped out of a 1945 celebrity-studded affair, two of whom wore sunglasses. The other, a guy who seemed vaguely familiar as the one who might have wanted to take a bite out of me before, had those same black eyes.

  A pair of shiny, small irises out at me from the cracked door to the basement, Artemis’ ears pasted back in a perpetual show of displeasure. Whether from the fact that the house was so busy, period, or because bloodsuckers walked among those gathered, I could only guess. The skittish thing had barely warmed up to me during the short time I’d lived here.

  But things would be back to normal soon. Ember would have to forgive me. She’d understand.

  And besides, Calder had been right to keep the news about Ember’s dad from his mom, now that I knew how she made a habit of dancing around the truth and trying to keep things from me. We had the orb. It would have to do as bait. If they knew about Ember’s dad, they might have used him as bait, and I wasn’t going to let anyone else get hurt, even if he had almost run us off the road.

  If he was being used as a bloodbag, he may have been similar to an addict. If I got Ember to surrender, I’d cut off the source of his “fix”—vampire venom—and save him, too.

  Ember had to come around.

  Whenever she showed up to her own house.

  “You’re sure your friends aren’t coming?” asked Calder quietly. “What about your mom? She might have been safer here, if this is really neutral ground.”

  Mom had been invited and hadn’t made a stink over it or anything, but I could tell by the way her jaw clenched just slightly as she dropped Autumn and me off that the idea of going this far to celebrate Dad’s remarriage wasn’t on her list of priorities. “She wore her workout sweats and took off,” I said. “Are you sure Cascade’s dad is keeping tabs on her today?”

  He nodded. “But we don’t have enough people to spare to watch all of your friends.”

  “Paisley got sick and Lyric has some track thing.” My lips pinched. “If Lyric and I were on better terms, she might have stopped by after her meet.”

  “Rather than spend time with her girlfriend?”

  I finally remembered to dip the chip that had been trembling in my hand. “Raelynn would be welcome to come with her, too, but according to Paisley’s text, she has a Model U.N. thing today. They took a bus to Milwaukee this morning.”

  Calder narrowed his eyes as he surveyed the crowd. Llyr clutched a cup he never brought to his lips a few feet away from a vampire in shades who grinned over and over as he made small talk with some not-vampire woman Noelle had greeted heartily. The woman kept fanning herself with her hand and taking furtive sips of her drink, even though it could hardly be called hot in here.

  “Hey, sport.”

  Dad made me whip around, even though I recognized his voice almost immediately.

  He smiled as he ladled himself a cup of punch. “Whoa. Jumpy.”

  I laughed nervously and hogged another chip.

  “You look nice,” said Dad, slipping in beside me and kissing me atop the head. I had on a flowy, long black skirt for instant mermaid tail generation, paired with a tight navy blouse under which I wore a bikini top i
nstead of a bra. I was ready.

  Out of habit, I smoothed the hair he’d mussed and Dad chuckled. “All right, all right. Your old man will stop embarrassing you.” He shifted his plastic cup to his left hand and held his right out to Calder. “Nice to see you again, kid.”

  Clearing his throat, Calder took Dad’s hand. “Yes, sir. Thanks for having me. Congratulations.”

  “Well, we’ve actually been married about a month, but let’s keep that under our hats.” Dad winked. “Who doesn’t love a proper excuse to party, right?”

  “Oh my gosh! Lacey! This can’t be Dante.” The echoing footsteps of Noelle in her tight-fitting, lacey lavender dress, turned our heads as she ran toward the door. She exchanged a hug with Journey Slowe’s mom, whom I recognized from the pre-Homecoming fracas, followed by the cook from the diner I figured must have been Journey’s dad, and Dante Johnson, one of the guys from Union High. Journey’s cousin, now that I thought about it. But Journey herself was absent.

  “Hey, Mrs. Goodwin,” said Dante. His hands were in the pockets of an oversized puffy jacket at odds with his dress shirt, tie, and pants.

  “It’s Ms. Goodwin-Sheppard now,” said Noelle, beaming and giving him a hug. “But you can call me ‘Noelle,’ dear.” She held him by his arms. “Gosh, I haven’t seen you since you were this high.” She held a hand out to her side.

  “Excuse me, hon,” said Dad, patting my arm and going over to join his wife.

  “What about the team you hung out with?” asked Calder in a low voice once Dad had stepped away.

  “Baseball?” I shrugged. “That was mostly due to proximity to Paisley. Not sure I’m close enough to any of them to invite them to my dad’s wedding ceremony.”

  Calder’s deep inhale startled me. He gripped the edge of the table. He hadn’t snacked on anything.

  “Relax,” I said, sliding my hand over his. “Nothing’s going to happen for a while yet.”

  Calder took inventory of the areas around us—the outside, the family room, the small bit of the dining room we could see from where we were standing. “That’s if they don’t start something sooner.”