Until Calder lifted his head and looked around.
“Did you hear that?” he said.
“What?”
“Listen.”
I listened, my heart plunging again into the agonizing panic I never wanted to feel again. I clung to Calder like a life preserver. Then the sound came again.
“Wait, I heard it too,” I said, looking around for the source. It sounded like a voice. I turned toward the door to the cabin to see if it was one of the others, but no one was there.
“Olivia.”
I jumped and looked down.
“Seidon?”
He appeared in the water just beyond the boat, only visible from his head to his bare shoulders. He looked up at Calder and me, his arms floating upon the water at his sides.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner. I came as quickly as I could.”
“I’m so glad you’re okay!” I said. “But Sam—”
“Samantha’s alive. She’s all right.”
At first, the wall of denial enclosed me. I shut my eyes, my hands shaking. Seidon had to be joking. Sam had been shot. She fell into the ocean. She didn’t come up. How could she be alive? My hands clutched at my face as a cascade of emotion tumbled out of me. My wracking sobs threatened to crack my ribcage.
Calder put his arm back around my shoulders. “Olivia, breathe. What happened, Seidon?”
“She saved us. Well, me actually. Cordelia got away but she remained just beneath the boat, calling reinforcements to help. The Zydrunas guard captured Marinus. We allowed Linnaeus to drown, but we took Samantha with us.”
“You…you took her with you?” I asked. “Where? How? How did she survive?”
“She saved the life of a member of the royal family at great cost to her own. Her wounds were too severe for us to allow humans to look after her. She was granted the chance to be taken to Zydrunas to be healed by one of our physicians. She’s going to be fine.”
“How?”
“It’s simple, really. The kiss of a merperson.” He grinned.
“The kiss of—Seidon, just come out with it!”
He sighed in frustration. “I’m not supposed to tell humans about it. I’m already in enough trouble because of things I’ve said while we were on land.”
“Just tell me!”
But Calder spoke instead. “I’ve heard of this before. The kiss of a merperson keeps a human alive. It has to be done under the water, where the merperson is from. It keeps the human in a sort of limbo. They don’t age, they don’t die, they don’t need to eat or even breathe. It’s how mermaids claim humans.”
Seidon gave Calder a long, suspicious gaze. “How do you know about that?”
“Have you ever—” I asked him, but he interrupted me.
“No. I’ve only been told about it.”
“I didn’t tell Samantha about it before because I was forbidden—and because it’s an insidious thing to do. It’s basically keeping a human as a toy. It’s an old practice and hasn’t been done in centuries. In this situation, though, I had to, or she would have died. I wasn’t even sure it would work because I wasn’t in my true form at the time.”
“Then she’s alive? It worked?”
“Yes,” he replied, his smile spreading. Finally, relief—wonderful, glorious relief—grew inside me. Half laughing, half crying, I wrapped my arms around Calder’s waist. His arm squeeze my shoulder.
“When will she be back?” I asked.
“Well, she would have come up to see you now, but she’s still changing.”
“Changing?”
“It was the only way. If she didn’t come with us, she would have died. And if she didn’t become one of us, she would have had no life at all. She made the decision herself and was granted the honor only because—”
“Samantha is a mermaid?” I shouted. All reason fled my brain, leaving behind a buzz of incoherent thoughts I couldn’t grab a hold of. It had been so much worse to think she was dead. But now she was a…
“Please, understand,” Seidon said. “We had to.”
Without thinking, I broke away from Calder and launched myself from the boat and plunged into the water next to Seidon. As I swam toward the surface, he grabbed a hold of me.
“Take me to see her!” I said. “Please! I saved your people too! I kept your secrets! Please!”
“Olivia, calm down,” said Seidon. “I can’t take you.”
“Why not? Do I have to step in front of a bullet too? Oh wait, I already did that!”
“Please. Your life is here. You have a future. She didn’t.” He held me in the water while I sobbed. Then he continued. “She will be able to come back.”
My crying lessened, but my breath came in jerky gasps as I shivered from the cold of the water.
“Sh-she w-will?”
“Yes. She’ll be able to come and see you and her family and everything. I just wanted to come and tell you so you would know she’s okay.” He gazed at me with a small twinkle in his eye. “She’s perfect.”
“So her choice was death or become a mermaid?”
“Would you rather she chose the first?”
Humbled, I shook my head.
“I know we’ll never be able to thank you enough for what you’ve done. You both have helped stop an evil man from destroying our lives—our world, even. But you’re needed on land. And believe me, Samantha will have a life with us. She’s already charmed the salt out of my parents.” He smiled.
At last, I nodded and smiled and wrapped my arms around his neck as warm tears fell from my eyes. He hugged me back. My bare legs brushed against his scales and I looked down.
“Can I see your tail?” It was too dark. The water might as well have been ink.
“It hasn’t finished forming yet,” he said, looking embarrassed about it.
“I don’t care.”
He lifted one of his feet out of the water. It looked like he wore a long flipper. The tail elongated outward from his foot, which wasn’t really a foot at all anymore, just half a fin. I ran my fingers over the smooth, silvery scales.
“It’s beautiful.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Here, you’re freezing. Calder, help her.” With astonishing speed,
