Total pages in book: 33
Estimated words: 31279 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 156(@200wpm)___ 125(@250wpm)___ 104(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 31279 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 156(@200wpm)___ 125(@250wpm)___ 104(@300wpm)
It isn’t a CPR kiss. It isn’t you’re dying, breathe; it’s you’re alive, remember? It’s salt and rain and something that tastes like yes. For a crazy beat of a second, I think about wedding rings and halls full of relatives and how none of it has ever felt like this.
Then she’s gone. A flash of red sliding over the gunwale, a swirl of water, a ripple that might be a tail if tails on humans were a thing, and I wasn’t concussed.
“Wait,” I try, but the word is a croak.
The deck tilts again. The rain is a curtain. Somewhere, my EPIRB dutifully pings its little heart out, and the locator at my chest decides to take a nap.
I clutch at the slick deck and laugh—because if I don’t laugh, I’ll hurl—and let the dark come in on a rush like a wave.
Chapter 3
Ariel
I lie in my shell-bed with the palace gone quiet around me, dawn only a pale idea above the lake. Under my pillow is… contraband. I slip the leather folder free and ease out the little rectangle inside. Driver’s license. Everett’s smile beams at me from the slick human plastic, all easy confidence and sunshine. My thumb finds the curve of his mouth. Ridiculous, how something flat can feel like a heartbeat.
The storm has moved on, but it left last night behind like a shell I can’t stop pressing to my ear. Boom, fall, splash. No time for laws or consequences. Only one thought—save him. When I reached him, he was limp, gray, wrong. Then color. Breath. And—stars help me—the kiss. My fingers wander up to my lips, and the memory shivers through me like a warm current.
The surface holds a strange silence. No current cradling me. No water weight holding me in its soft hands. Just air. Thin, dry, and unfamiliar.
A trumpet blast shatters the quiet. The summons. I jolt, and the license spins out of my hand. I fumble it against my tail like a clumsy seal.
“Nope,” I whisper, snatching it back.
The folder and card vanish into my hair bun—Ariel’s Felony Updo—while I tug on a sea-silk top dyed to match my eyes. If I don’t answer the horn, I’ll suffer a week of palace confinement and lectures.
I slip into the plaza with the rest of the kingdom, throat tight. The water tastes like worry. Does everyone know? Did someone see me? Is today the day the world I love narrows to a door that locks behind me?
Whispers ripple like a school of fish.
“Someone went out in the storm… beyond the boundary…”
I edge toward the back, pretending to admire a coral carving. My nerves jangle so loudly that I don’t notice the solid body until I collide with it. Hard. My bun explodes. Red hair billows, and with it, like the world’s worst confetti, the leather folder and the little square of plastic.
I reach. Another hand reaches faster.
“Well, well,” Salina sings, triumph gleaming in her eyes. “What’s this, Ariel?”
Every gaze tips toward me. Curiosity. Confusion. Then the quick, neat click into disapproval.
Salina holds the items up like she’s speared a sea dragon. She drops them, and I rush to clutch them to my chest even though hiding is pointless. The tide is already turning against me.
“Ariel.”
Father’s voice is not a shout. It doesn’t need to be. It moves through the plaza, and the plants lean with it. He hovers above us, a storm with white brows and blue eyes—my eyes—held painfully steady.
“What is the meaning of this?” he asks, his voice dangerously quiet. Don’t lie, rides on the current of his words.
My mouth opens. Closes. Tears sting my eyes. “Father…”
“No excuses. Tell me true.” His gaze touches the folder, my face, the crowd. “Did you have contact with a human? It is bad enough to hoard their trash, but rumors have reached me of a human who was saved from drowning last night. Was it you?”
Dropping my gaze to the lakebed, I watch the little snails making their slow pilgrimages between the stones. I could lie. I could try. I don’t.
“Yes,” I whisper. Then, too fast, too desperate: “But he’s a good human—”
The water around Father fizzes with the sharp, angry bubbles that happen when his control slips. “No,” he says, and that one word hurts more than any shout. “You are a princess, but you are not above our laws.”
“The human would have died without me.” My voice trips over itself, pleading. “The rules are… they’re old, Father, and the world is—”
“How dare you?” The red flush across his cheekbones is a map of every fear he’s carried since my mother died. “Humans destroy our weed forests, our kelp beds, the lives that share this lake with us. They poison our water with their chemicals and choke it with their junk. If they knew we existed, they would take us apart to see what we’re made of. As it is, their carelessness is killing us all.” As it killed your mother. He doesn’t need to say the words aloud for them to find their mark.