Elaine made a sharp right turn ahead. The caravan of kids followed her and so did I. Mark, the gaunt man, scooped the smallest child up and carried her.
Something hit the hull. The colossal ship trembled.
Boom!
Boom! Boom!
My brain helpfully supplied a vision of enormous tentacles wrapping around the vessel.
I burst through the door after the kids, into a stairwell dimly lit by a single feylantern above. The children pounded up the metal stairs. I rushed upward. One turn. Two…
The door behind me burst open. Garvey hauled his bony body through it and started up the stairs.
Round and round, we charged up the stairs.
The door below us snapped open again. Water shot into the stairwell, foaming and rising.
“Faster!” I yelled.
The kids huffed in front of me, slowing down.
The water caught Garvey. A long, buttery creature swirled in its depths, wrapped around the old man, and pulled him under.
The ship groaned, metal screeching, and moved.
I clung to the stairs.
The ship froze again.
“Almost there!” Solina screamed.
The kids stomped up the steps. I chased them.
Ahead a door banged open.
I rounded the stairs and burst through the door onto a deck fifty feet above the sea. I was on the side facing the shore. The beach was a thousand feet away. A gigantic octopus tentacle, ten feet across, gripped the ship next to me.
When that monstrosity pulled the ship into Manannán’s domain, it would take us with it. Even if we jumped down into the sea, when the ship moved, it would generate a current that would suck us in, and Manannán wouldn’t let us go.
We had to make it to solid ground before he took the ship. That was our only hope.
The children leaped off the deck into the water below.
The tentacles squeezed. Metal screamed in protest.
A thousand feet to the shore. And so far down.
Darin grabbed my hand and ran to the deck. I didn’t have time to think about it. The deck ended, the water yawned at me, for a terrified moment I was airborne, and then I plunged into the ocean.
The water swallowed me. I went in deep and kicked randomly, not sure which way was up. In front of me, the dark mass of the cruise ship slid backward, dragged off by something too colossal for a human mind to comprehend. A current gripped me, pulling me back toward the ship.
Darin shifted. His body twisted, and then the human was gone. A merman looked at me with turquoise eyes, his body flowing into a powerful fish tail. Darin spun me around, and we shot away from the Emerald Wave as if dragged by a speed boat.
The sea gripped us, not wanting to let go, trying to pull us back toward the cruise ship.
Darin sped up.
We flew through the ocean depth, trying to fight against the current.
There wasn’t enough air.
Suddenly the pressure vanished. Darin stopped and pulled me up. We surfaced. The sandy beach was only twenty feet away. I dropped my feet and touched the bottom.
The sky above us glowed gently with the promise of sunrise, pink and lavender brightening the deep indigo of the retreating night. The Emerald Wave was gone, and the strange nexus of magic had vanished with it.
I took a deep breath and lay on my back. I was so tired.
Something splashed through the water toward me, but I was too exhausted to react.
Curran’s face appeared above me. “Hey, baby.”
I reached out and touched his face. Real and warm. “Hey.”
“Went swimming without me?”
“I thought you might catch up.”
He wrapped his arms around me. “I was delayed.”
“They showed up?”
“They did.”
The first sliver of sun broke the horizon. The water sparkled. A couple dozen feet away, Antonio and Leslie staggered onto the beach, holding hands. A tan, naked man with red hair paced up and down the surf, looking nervously in our direction.
“Is our son okay?”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” I snuggled against him. “Who is the naked guy on the beach?”
“Troy. He’s a medmage. He says he trained with Doolittle.”
“Oh good. I think my left arm is broken.”
Curran made a low growling noise. I put my good arm around him and kissed him.
A beautiful mermaid slid past us in the water, her dark, curly hair streaming behind her in wet spirals, her eyes bright red, and I realized it was Solina. She was smiling.
“Ready to go home?” Curran asked.
“In a minute.”
In the distance Darin leaped out of the water, his tail a brilliant, heart-breaking blue. Behind him the rest of the kids jumped like a pod of dolphins, their tails, fins, and scales glistening.
We floated in the warm water, while the sun rose and the mer-children from a dozen myths played in the waves.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All the thanks in the world to
Nancy Yost and the lovely team at NYLA for dropping everything and working on this story on super short notice;
Rossana Sasso for the content edit;
Stefanie Chin for the copyedit;
Maura O’Toole, Maria Rumorh, Harriet Chow, Katherine Heasley, Cassandra Bell, and Gail Leifkovitz for the beta edit;
and Jeaniene Frost for hysterically laughing when we told her this was going to be a “short story.”