“Okay,” my mother said slowly, looking relieved. “So we have a plan. I’ll speak to some people tomorrow morning and try to find someone who would be willing to turn soon and then half-turn you. First, of course, you’re going to need to take the cure. I think you’ll want to rest a bit before that though… you’ve heard all about how painful it is.” She shuddered just at the thought.
Yes, I’d been told how painful it was supposed to be. But I was willing to undergo any kind of pain if it meant solving my problem once and for all.
At least I had some peace of mind now that we had a plan, which was more than I’d had just an hour ago. Heck, more than I’d had since I left The Shade.
Now that I was able to relax a little more, I leaned back in my seat, my hands resting on River’s lap rather than gripping her waist as I had been doing.
“Where’s Rose?” I asked. “And what’s been happening here in The Shade since I’ve been gone? The black witches? Are they still a threat?”
My mother smiled broadly at me. “Rose is on her honeymoon.”
I almost jolted River from my lap. “Honeymoon? What! With whom?”
“With Caleb,” my mother said.
“Jesus. They hit it off fast,” I said.
“Well, it had been a year… A very intense year.”
Once the shock started to wear off, I was filled with a feeling of melancholy.
I missed my sister’s wedding.
I wondered what else I had missed.
“When will Rose and Caleb return?” I asked.
“They’re due back any day now. They’re actually a little late… You have no idea how much Rose has missed you.”
“I’ve missed her too,” I said.
“You’re also going to have a cousin soon,” my father said. “Or should I say, another cousin. Vivienne’s pregnant. It won’t be much longer before she’s due. Claudia and Yuri are due for a baby too. Liana and Cameron returned—only recently, actually. Oh, and your grandfather hooked up with a werewolf.”
My head reeled. “My God. I really have missed a lot.”
“As for the witches,” my father continued, “they are no longer a threat. We managed to finish them off.”
“How on earth did you do that?”
I insisted that my parents do the same thing that I had done—start from the very beginning, tell me everything that had happened since I had left the island.
When they had finally finished, I felt overwhelmed. I was amazed at how much everyone in The Shade had grown during recent events, especially my sister. Dragon-pacifier? Fire-wielder? Who would’ve thought?
“I wonder whether I possess hidden fire powers as a human,” I said.
“It’s possible. You can try to summon them after you take the cure,” my father said.
“And what about these tattoos?” River asked, rolling up the sleeve of her robe. “And this weird echoing in our ears? Will we just have to learn to live with it, or could your witches do something about it?”
“I suggest we get Corrine and Ibrahim to see the two of you first thing in the morning,” my father said. “We can talk to them about finding a cure for you, and also see if they have any ideas on what could have happened to you and Ben in The Oasis—”
“What the—” Eli exclaimed as his eyes fixed on the submarine behind us.
I turned around to see two heads poking out of the hatch. The mermaid and merman. Their scaly faces looked dry and shriveled as they placed one hand after another on the slippery roof of the sub and squelched out.
“Merfolk!” my parents gasped at once.
Before any of us could stop them, they’d slid off the side of the submarine and plopped into the ocean.
“Damn it!” My father looked furious as he stared down into the water. “What were you doing with those in your sub?”
I realized I’d forgotten to tell him that we still had them in the vessel.
“I didn’t know what else to do with them. If I let them back into the water while we were still outside The Shade, I was worried they were going to try to smash up the submarine again.”
“They had better not try to harm our humans,” my mother said, looking anxiously down at the waves. After their adventures in The Cove, she had experienced firsthand that merfolk were not the cuddliest of creatures.
As we stood watching the two green shadows swim further up the shore and fade beneath the water, Eli muttered what I guessed all of us were thinking:
“This place is turning into a zoo.”
Chapter 24: Ben
My father said that he would ask one of our witches—or perhaps even Micah—to track down the merfolk tomorrow and expel them outside of the boundary. We had absolutely no reason to show mercy to them, certainly not when it came with a risk to our humans. We already had the occasional shark problem on Sun Beach, and the last thing we needed was a couple of nasty merfolk.
We continued talking some more as each of us remembered details we had missed out in the initial recounting of our stories, and then my parents left for all of us to get some rest. They said that they would come to meet us at the submarine in the morning around 9am.
That left River and me with some time to ourselves. Inside the submarine wasn’t an appealing place to sleep that night, to say the least, thanks to the fishy smell the merfolk had released after breaking free from their cabin. Although it wouldn’t be as safe as being inside the submarine where the smell of human blood would be less, we decided to lie on the roof of the submarine. As long as I kept River close to me, I was confident I’d be all right. We dried the flattest part of the submarine’s roof with towels, then spread out spare blankets to make it comfortable and lay down beneath the stars.