Between the lines

“I’m hardly dressed for a wedding,” Oliver demurred.

“We have just the thing,” Ondine said. She swam toward the driftwood door and slid open the latch. As the door swung on its hinges, a tumble of skeletons-hundreds stacked and thrown askew, some still rotting with flesh peeling back from the bone-drifted into the cave. Oliver screamed, backing up against Kyrie, who stroked his hair and kissed his neck. “Don’t be shy,” she said, pushing him forward.

The mermaids swam around one of the corpses, which was decked in the finest of white royal robes, sewn with golden thread. Oliver hardly even saw the finery, however. His gaze was glued to the face of the dead man, still frozen in horror.

“I think,” Marina said, “it will be a perfect fit.”

Behind him, Kyrie shrieked. “Take that off!” she cried. “It’s mine.” Oliver spun to find her fighting Ondine for a tattered snatch of veil. The mermaids’ fingernails clawed the fine fabric to shreds as they argued.

“Ladies,” Oliver said. “I don’t love any of you.”

The mermaids turned, eyes flashing red in unison. “How dare you?” Ondine spit.

Marina crossed her arms. “You think you’re too good for us?”

“No,” Oliver said simply. “I just don’t think you love me either. Isn’t that what true romance is supposed to be about? Finding the person who’s your soul mate. Someone you dream about at night. Someone whose name is on your lips when you wake up in the morning.”

Seraphima, Oliver thought.

“I’m not your destiny. I’m just someone who happened to fall into the ocean.”

Marina shrugged. “Grooms are few and far between,” she said. “We can’t afford to be picky.”

“What if I could promise you each a faithful groom? One so delighted to be in your presence that he’d never leave?”

Kyrie’s eyes flashed green with curiosity. “How would you find such men?”

“Well,” Oliver said. “I’d need my compass back, for starters.”

The mermaids circled, creating a small whirlpool as they whispered, heads bent together. “We need to be sure you’re telling the truth,” Marina said.

“You have my word,” Oliver vowed. He was starting to run out of oxygen. Whatever happened was going to have to happen soon.

“We need something a bit more concrete.” Kyrie’s hair swirled around his chest, pulling him toward a giant pink clamshell that was filled with thousands of keys. Some were rusted, some were covered with seaweed. Some were still shiny, as if they’d just dropped into the ocean this morning.

“Honesty is as rare as a man who can breathe underwater,” Ondine said. “Pick a key.”

Oliver reached into the half shell and waited, letting the keys sift through his fingers, hoping one might burn its silhouette onto the palm of his hand.

He fought to stay conscious. “What happens if it’s the right key?” he gasped.

“Then you’re truthful. You get all the riches inside, and we give you back your compass so you can find us mates.”

“And if it’s the wrong key?”

Kyrie shrugged. “The oxygen spell wears off. And you drown.”

How on earth would he know which key to pick? One wrong choice here would be his last. Oliver blinked, struggling to swallow his panic.

“Come now,” Ondine snapped, leaning over the half shell. “We don’t have all day.” Annoyed, she overturned the bowl of keys, scattering them into the sand at Oliver’s feet.

There was the tiniest flicker in his fading vision-perhaps a ray of sun slanting through the sea, maybe the reflection of a fish’s silver scale. At any rate, it drew Oliver’s attention to his father’s compass hanging around Ondine’s neck.

Very slowly, as he watched, the needle began to jump, quivering to the right until it seemed to be an arrow directly indicating one key that had drifted and fallen a distance away from the others.

It points you home, his mother had said.

Oliver leaned down and grabbed that key. He felt his vision fading as he slid the key into the padlock. It slipped easily, effortlessly, and the hinge fell open. A black cloud of squid ink billowed from inside.

The contents were not gold, or jewels, or anything that would be considered treasure by any stretch of the imagination. The mermaids brought him, one by one, each item from inside the chest.

A fire extinguisher.

A megaphone.

A shark’s tooth.

Oliver blinked, his vision blurred. “But these aren’t riches,” he forced out.

“What makes a treasure a treasure,” Marina replied, “is how rare a find it is, when you need it the most.” She reached toward Ondine and ripped the compass from her sister’s neck, pressing it into Oliver’s palm.

Oliver considered her words. And as he passed out, he thought that maybe this was the best advice one could ever be given about love.

OLIVER

THIS IS WHAT I KNOW ABOUT DELILAH MCPHEE:

She bites her nails when she’s nervous.

She sings off-key.

She mispronounces the word schedule in her flat, odd accent, yet insists that I’m the one who can’t speak correctly.

She has the most mesmerizing eyes. It’s as if she needn’t speak at all, since everything she’s feeling is written within them.

“You’re not listening,” Delilah says.

After my spending hours without her, we are finally together again. It is a little difficult to hear her, because she’s blasting music from that magical box called a radio, in the hopes that it will keep her mother from hearing her talk out loud to me. Behind Delilah’s shoulders I can see the familiar bits of what I know is her bedroom-pink walls, pink lampshades, pink everything. At the edge of my vision is a fringed, furry throw pillow. And yes, it’s pink.

“You keep distracting me,” I tell her.

“All I’m doing is sitting here talking to you!”

“Exactly,” I say, and I smile at her.

I like knowing that when I smile that way, it makes her cheeks go red. It’s interesting that the same thing happens when I smile at Seraphima, but I don’t find that nearly as charming.

I am looking at the way Delilah’s eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks and trying to decide if her hair is the color of milk chocolate or polished teak as she natters on and on. “I completely understand why you feel trapped,” Delilah says. “But it’s better to be trapped and alive-whatever that means inside a book-than free and dead.”

Teakwood, definitely. Or maybe walnut.

“If something as simple as a spider didn’t make it out of this book, how do you think a human being is going to fare? What if I pull you out of the book and you’re only… a word?”

She gets up from where she is lying on her bed, talking to me, and starts pacing back and forth. From this perspective, I can see more of the room behind her: a mirror with pictures affixed around its edge, of Delilah and the girl she was speaking with earlier today; of Delilah with her arms spread wide at the top of a mountain; of Delilah and her mother making funny faces. I think that if I were to get out of this book, one of my first orders of business would be to steal one of those photos, so that I could always have her with me.

The other thing I can see from this angle is the way every inch of her figure is quite visible in the odd clothing she wears-some sort of blue hose with several rips and tears. They’re so tight it’s as if she’s practically wearing nothing.