“Rio!” My dad’s voice sliced through the sudden tension in the kitchen. “Apologize to your sister.”
“Yeah, like that’s going to happen.” He shoved away from the table and headed toward the stairs.
“Rio!” My dad made to follow him.
I started to tell him not to worry about it, that I was used to Rio’s little fits, but Sabrina beat me to it. She laid a hand on my dad’s arm and murmured something to him I couldn’t hear. But whatever it was, it drained the anger from him.
Which, conversely, only made me angrier. Who the hell did she think she was, butting into my family’s private business? She might be our dad’s girlfriend, but that didn’t give her the right to interfere between him and us. The fact that I had just been about to tell him to let it go as well was completely beside the point.
Mark cleared his throat, made a show of glancing at the clock. “We should probably get going, Tempest. The game starts in less than an hour.”
I could have kissed him. God knew I was more than ready to get the hell out of Dodge for a while.
After disentangling myself from Moku—which was much easier said than done—I left him and Mark settled on the couch watching Phineas and Ferb reruns as I dashed up to my room to get changed. Though the homecoming game didn’t start until seven, Mark and I were supposed to meet our friends early so that we could get seats together in what was sure to be a packed stadium.
I’d planned on a quick change—it was just a football game after all—but once I got to my room, I found myself leaning against the wall and taking deep breaths as I tried to calm down from my intense and crazy reaction to Sabrina. While it was true I didn’t like her, she wasn’t the first person I hadn’t gotten along with since becoming mermaid. And no one else had encapsulated me with such deep-seated fury that my powers spun out of control whenever she was in the room.
So what was it about her that set me off like that? I’d spent the last year working on gaining total control over my power. I didn’t know why my discipline had suddenly abandoned me, but I didn’t like it. At all. Any more than I liked her.
I tried to tell myself I was being stupid, that I was just jealous because she was obviously trying to usurp my relationship with Moku. Which, if I were honest, was more than enough to make me hate her. I adored Moku, would do anything for him, and the idea of some stranger waltzing in and messing with that made me furious.
But this was more than that, more than simple anger or distrust or dislike. When I looked at her, I felt uneasy. Defensive. Murderous. Only Tiamat herself brought emotions like those out in me. The fact that some redheaded bimbo was suddenly engendering such confusion and rage made me nervous. And suspicious.
Although I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do about my suspicions. I had no proof that anything was up, no evidence that she was anything but the high-priced hairdresser she claimed to be. Yet every time I’d seen her, my reaction to her had been stronger, more violent. Surely that wasn’t a coincidence.
Since there was nothing I could do about it now—somehow I doubted my dad would take kindly to me electrocuting his girlfriend—I walked over to my closet and stared at the wardrobe that looked both familiar and yet completely alien as well. After wearing bikinis and sarongs for close to a year, it felt strange to be standing in front of row after row of jeans; thin, clingy sweaters; tank tops; and T-shirts. There was also a handful of dresses—each one of which I remembered picking out for a specific occasion—and yet it still felt like they belonged to someone else. To someone I used to be.I reached out, stroked my hand over what had, at one time, been my favorite sundress. It was the same blue as my eyes, with little bow straps and a short, full skirt that I loved because it made me feel feminine and sexy, two things that had never really been my strong suit. I’d always been too busy keeping up with the guys—on my surfboard and off—to pay much attention to the whole girly-girl routine.
That was one thing that hadn’t changed since I’d become mermaid, but standing here in the middle of the room I’d taken such pains not to spend time in these last couple of days, it felt like it was the only thing that hadn’t.
Even after two and a half days on land, my clothes felt awkward on my body, chafing and itching and sagging in all the wrong places. My naturally curly blond hair was freaking out, like it had forgotten how to be dry after so many months underwater. Even my bed was all wrong—hard and lumpy and uncomfortable compared to the mattress of encapsulated water I slept on deep in the Pacific.
I loved my family, loved Mark, but these days being here had become just as painful as not being here.
Letting go of the dress, I told myself to get on with it. To grab a pair of jeans and a sweater heavy enough to keep at bay the omnipresent chill I felt whenever I was on land. After all, Mark was waiting for me.
Mark, who had accepted the truth of my duality without so much as a minor freak-out.
Mark, who had nearly died at the hands of Tiamat because of me.
Mark, who—despite everything—still wanted me. Still loved me with the same desperate intensity that I loved him.
It should be more than enough. It was more than enough. Except when it wasn’t.
Frustrated with the confusion tumbling through me like pebbles caught at high tide, I walked to the plate-glass window that made up the western wall of my bedroom. Looked out at the dark blue waves lapping against the sand and wondered what the hell my problem was.
I had never been one of those girls who thought she deserved everything, who believed it was her right to have her cake and eat it too. And yet here I was, clinging to two lives that really couldn’t coexist, no matter how much I wanted them to. I was tied to one, desperate to hold on to the other, and in the end was doing justice to neither. The fact that Mark and my father and Moku and the merpeople of Coral Straits were too polite to tell me so didn’t mean that it wasn’t true. I hadn’t believed Kona, hadn’t believed Hailana, when they’d told me I had to choose. I’d been so certain I could be both mermaid and human. So what if my mother hadn’t been able to make it work? That didn’t mean I couldn’t. I just had to work harder at it than she ever did.
Intellectually, I knew the smart thing—the reasonable thing—to do was to give up my humanity. To dive deep into the Pacific and never come back here again. After all, the human world didn’t need me; it would go on spinning quite nicely without me in it. The same couldn’t be said of the Pacific, which was poised on the brink of a deadly war. A war in which I was a key player.
But sometimes the smart thing wasn’t necessarily the right thing. I had tried going deep before, had tried leaving behind my family, Mark, my whole life. It hadn’t worked for me any more than ignoring my mermaid heritage had. Besides, I couldn’t leave my family at the mercy of that woman. Not when every warning signal I had stood at full alert whenever she was around.
I shifted a little so that I was resting, full body, against the cool glass of the window. As I did, the cheap throw rug beneath my feet crunched as I stepped on splatters of paint I had dropped there in what felt like a different life. Looking at the small purple and blue flakes had me longing for the feel of a paintbrush in my hand, something I hadn’t allowed myself to want in months, because it was impossible. Oil painting wasn’t exactly a doable hobby for a mermaid.