How to be a Mermaid: A Falling in Deep Collection Novella (3 page)

Because the viewing glass was relatively shallow, our performance was a lot less complex than they usually were. At Neptune’s World, we’d twist and turn and do underwater somersaults, although here, we were highly limited. We were basically doing an elaborate port de bras, or arm movements, smiling and waving graciously at the audience.

I tried to avoid using the breathing hose much at all. When I had started, Neptune made me promise to breathe as much as I needed to. Apparently, one mermaid tried going as long as possible and ended up nearly drowning. As a result, he’d been paranoid ever since. Christine and the others used their breathing hoses almost as much as we do when we breathe outside the water. Yet, I clung onto this notion that using it less made me more like a real mermaid. I held my breath and used it only when necessary.

We mermaids worked well as a unit. We kept an eye on each other, both for keeping ourselves synchronized and to be there in case one of us got into trouble, keeping us in tune with one another. We all enjoyed our jobs. Here in the water, we were right at home, living out our dreams.

Some girls wanted to be mermaids. We
were
mermaids, and that made all the difference. I couldn’t believe that I was here. Regardless of what happened in the future, I’d always remember this as the happiest time in my life.

The music swelled for the climax all too soon, meaning that we were coming to the end of our routine and our performance for the crowd. Underwater, Christine signaled for us to head towards the front glass to wave our goodbyes.

I swam up, breaking through the water. I grabbed onto the edge and hauled myself up as far as my arms would take me. I grinned and waved.

The crowd erupted into cheers and applause.

My wave became less enthusiastic when I locked eyes with Neptune on the sidelines. He always made sure to catch our performances for extra support. Usually, he was the one who started the applause, though not this time. He still had that grim expression on his face. He blinked and shifted his gaze somewhere behind me, and I knew that he was thinking about the poor dolphin calf.

My heart sank, taking the jubilation out of a good performance. My arm fell slowly back to my side, and as the mermaids turned to leave, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something I could do to help little guy.

I’ve never felt so helpless before. Mermaid or not.

***

“Good job today, mermaids!”

Oh no
. I recognized that voice, and after today’s events, he was the last person I wanted to see, especially in the women’s changing room.

Mr. Stevens stood in the doorway, wearing a pristine white button-up shirt and tie. An absolutely ridiculous outfit for the backstage area of the aquarium. Then again, he was the type who always wanted to make the best impressions.

While Neptune was laid-back and easygoing despite his rough exterior, Mr. Stevens was calculated in his manner to come across as a successful executive. He appeared to be in his mid-forties, with salt-and-pepper hair.

The praise would have been more meaningful coming from anyone else.

I looked up, meeting Christine’s eyes in the mirror. She gave me an encouraging grin, which meant that I must have looked as forlorn as I felt. She was wearing a loose-fitting sweater, her blonde hair messily blow-dried after her shower and her makeup a lot less dramatic than it had been for the performance. We all used heavy-duty waterproof makeup for our performances, so seeing us without those masks on made us look like entirely different people.

To my utter relief, she took care of the president for us. I could see Alaina and Jordyn sighing with relief as well.

“Thanks, Mr. Stevens, you too.” Christine got up from her seat and headed to the door. She left the room, leaving us to ourselves.

“Ugh, I hate that guy,” Alaina muttered.

Jordyn smirked. “My sentiments exactly.”

I was glad that I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. As I pulled a sweater on over my tank top and pulled up my jeans, Christine came back into the room.

“Well,” she said with an exuberant smile. “Glad to know that we’re appreciated here.”

“He gives me the creeps,” Jordyn said with a shudder.

Christine chuckled. “He’s not that bad. “ She swung her car keys around her finger. “He’s treating us to dinner.”

“With him?” Jordyn interjected, her distaste apparent on her face.

“No,” Christine said, her smile broadening, “only us mermaids.” We never referred to ourselves as “girls” like most people would. We were always “mermaids” to each other, and I thought that was why I fit in better with them than any other group I’d encountered in my life.

That elicited grins from both Jordyn and Alaina. I still felt a bit out of it, and Christine picked that up. She sat in the chair next to me.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “You seem down.” She placed a hand on top of mine on the chair’s armrest. “You did fine with your meet and greet today. And your performance was fantastic. The crowd loved you.”

I fought the urge to clench my fists in my lap. Yes, it was a good day in those respects, but my thoughts kept drifting back to the baby dolphin in the tank and the child’s voice that I had heard.

Did I really hear it? It sounded so mournful, like there would never be any hope again. Whoever said it sounded far too young to feel that way. And if it was the dolphin, then I was either losing it or something was terribly wrong. I didn’t know which was worse.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I lied. “Just tired. Traveling’s getting to me.”

“I know what will cheer you right uuuup,” she said, drawing out “up” to make it sound like a song. “Dinner, you, me, Jordyn, Alaina?”

A few hours ago, I would have jumped at the chance to connect with them. Now, something was holding me back. I needed time to myself.

“I don’t think I’m up for it tonight,” I said. I offered her a half-smile so she wouldn’t get all motherly on me. “I’m really tired. I’ll meet you guys back at the hotel later.”

Christine immediately frowned and twirled the rental car keys, trying to tantalize me with the thought of a fun dinner. My heart wasn’t into it.

“You’re not coming, Tara?” Jordyn asked, alarmed.

“I’m exhausted.”

“C’mon, Tara,” Christine pushed. When I didn’t acquiesce, she sighed. “All right, I understand. Are you going to be fine by yourself, hun?”

I chuckled dryly, putting on false airs. “Of course.”

She quirked an eyebrow. “All right. Well, we shouldn’t be any later than ten o’clock. Don’t wait up for us.”

Right now, it was seven o’clock. I had three hours to get my head screwed on straight.

“I won’t. Have fun, mermaids.”

The other mermaids waved, giving me hugs. We really were like one big happy family. I was going to be sad whenever I did decide to go back to college and get that “sensible job” that my mother always wanted for me.

Dad would have approved of me being a professional mermaid. I missed him so much; my family was never the same after he died.

Family...

My thoughts once again drifted back to Kai and his piteous cries. I knew what I had to do to get him out of my head. I had to see him again, if only to see if I could comfort him one last time before I went to bed. I wasn’t sure if seeing a dolphin was against the rules or not, yet I could always feign ignorance if I got caught. After all, I was already behind the scenes in the dressing room. It wasn’t like I was going to be sneaking around in places I hadn’t been before.

Mind made up, I got up from my chair, checked to make sure that my mermaid tail was safely zipped up in its garment bag, and rushed out the door. To my delight, no one was there to stop me.

I snuck backstage, trying to act like I knew what I was doing to not raise suspicions, and was grateful that most of the staff and volunteers had left shortly after the aquarium closed.

Happy dolphin clicks greeted me as I neared the pools, and I hoped that one of them was from Kai. However, when I looked across at the quarantine pool, I knew that he hadn’t joined in with his fellow dolphins.

“Hey guys,” I said to the dolphins. One inspected me with a side eye and then crested and submerged again. They were swimming in circles as if they were trying to figure out who I was and what I was doing there. “I’m just here to check in on Kai. See how he’s doing.”

One stuck its head out of the water and squeaked at me. I almost could have sworn it was trying to say,
“Help him out.”
I was transfixed by it, unsure of what to say.

Another piteous cry from the quarantine pool drew my attention back to Kai. I stepped by the pool, seeing the little dolphin floating on his side, towards the top of the water. Like earlier, he wasn’t moving much, only doing the bare minimum to keep himself towards the top of the pool.

The wave of dark, depressed emotions hit me like a brick wall again. Even though I was more prepared for it this time, it still nearly bowled me over.

“It was you,” I managed. “I heard you before. Felt your sadness before.”

There was no response and the deep emotions flowed away like water.

Curious clicks from the other dolphins followed me as I circumnavigated the pool, trying to get the best angle on Kai. He didn’t even look up at me, as if he was ashamed.

“It’s going to be okay, Kai,” I told him. “Tell me what I can do to help.”

I was at the far edge of his pool now, where I was the most exposed to the elements. The evening wind had picked up, and I shivered, looking out over the Atlantic Ocean. The pool had a platform that jutted out about eight yards from the water with a waist-high fence, probably to discourage the dolphins from attempting to jump the distance. From this vantage point, about twenty feet up from the rocky shore, I felt as if I could see everything. The winter moon hung lazily over the horizon, reflected like a mirror on the ocean’s surface.

It was beautiful, and at that moment, I thought how horrible it was for the dolphins to be so close to the freedom and the beauty of the ocean while being held captive. Neptune’s World was a rehabilitation center for injured animals, and once those animals were healthy, they were returned to the ocean unless they could no longer fend for themselves. At the Houston Aquarium, I could tell that these were healthy, strong dolphins, having no other reason to be here than the fact the aquarium needed dolphins. These dolphins weren’t going to be released back into the wild. They were caged.

“Help me. Help me please. I miss Mama.”

I remembered how I felt after my dad died and my mother emotionally distanced herself from me, afraid of getting hurt again. I was so young. I would lie in bed crying, wanting someone to comfort me, to hold me and tell me that they loved me, something that never came from my mother.

Our circumstances might have been different—I was human, Kai was a dolphin—and I couldn’t pretend to know how awful it must be for Kai to be captured. Instead, I could at least offer him some comfort.

I knelt and reached out across the pool to stroke the melon of his head. His slippery skin felt cool against my hand and at my touch, it seemed like he sighed into it. I petted him, feeling protective of the fragile baby.

“You’re going to be okay, Kai,” I whispered.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a man pulling himself up and over the fence by me. At least, I thought it was a man—he was hidden by the shadows and I couldn’t be sure. Curiosity overtook fear and I straightened from my kneeling position to get a closer look. Maybe it was a cleaner. Or a trespasser, in which case, I should be running.

I walked towards the figure as it began crawling across the ground, recovered from its climb.

It was dark, so I could barely see the outline of a man’s body stop and look at me. Then I saw the impossible, long, single fin on his lower half instead of two feet, and the scales cascading down from the man’s waist.

A mer tail. Not like the silicon kind I used for my performances. Even in the dark, I could see that it writhed and moved with a mind of its own, fully an extension of his body.

Reflexes and survival instinct took over before my mind could react. I backpedaled, trying to get away from the mysterious figure, only I misjudged how far I was from the edge of the water. And how wet the ground was.

My foot slipped and I fell head-over-heels backwards, plunging over the side of the fence and onto the rocky crags below. I screamed for help, but when my head struck solid rock and the rest of my body impacted with the ground, I fell into an unyielding darkness, one that was haunted by merman-shaped shadows emerging from the ocean.

I should have gone to dinner with Christine and the others.

My ears were awake before the rest of me. Even
before I opened
my eyes, some man’s voice was yelling at me.

“What is this?” a rough, intense voice demanded. “What were you doing at the prison?”

I swam out of unconsciousness, an uncomfortable experience that revealed my entire body aching, my head most of all. It was so dark, and a strange feeling had overtaken my body. Like I was floating. I tried touching a hand to my head, only to find that I couldn’t.

What the-?

My hands were tied behind my back with what felt like...kelp?

The realization hit me and I thrashed about trying to free myself, and I finally opened my eyes.

I paused for a moment, unable to grasp exactly where I was.

I was...underwater?

Air bubbles popped out of my mouth in a flurry when a scream escaped my throat. A thousand thoughts filled my head, none of them making sense except for the overwhelming dread that I was somehow underwater with my hands tied behind my back. From what I could tell, there was no way I could get air to breathe. I’d lost a lot of air when I screamed.

Oh my god, I was going to drown.

My mermaid necklace was thrust in front of my vision, momentarily disorienting me.

“I demand you to tell me now!”

“What?” I asked out loud. A sharp pain zigzagged across my head from where I’d hit it on the rock. I was trapped underwater and this man wanted to know...what exactly? What my necklace was?

The necklace came even closer to my face, so much that I’d have to go cross-eyed in order to focus on it.

“Where did you get this? What is it?” the man demanded.

“It’s my...” I was unsure and still terrified of my situation. “It’s my necklace.” I gasped for breath, and somehow I was getting air into my lungs. “How...how am I underwater?”

That was the best question that could come to mind to sum up my predicament. I should have asked, “Who are you?” or “Why do you have me tied up?” but my first instinct was survival. I was doing the impossible by being underwater this long.

The intense movements of shoving the necklace into my line of vision paused, as if considering my words. I took this moment to look up at the face belonging to the hands and voice.

It was a boy, one who appeared to be only a few years older than me. He had dark hair that was slightly longer than what was in style, flowing in wisps around his face. His eyes were sea green, framed by a tanned face with a strong jaw. He was muscular, not from pumping weights at the gym, but from necessity. Like he had the body of someone who swam twenty-four hours a day.

He was gorgeous. Supermodel gorgeous.

When he came closer to me, I saw a pattern of angry scars crisscrossing his shoulders and his arms, spider-webbing all the way to his back. I couldn’t tell if they continued from there. It took me a second to realize where I’d seen marks like that before. I’d seen them on some porpoises we’d rehabilitated.

They looked like damage from fishing nets, although why someone like him would have them, I had no idea. It gave him a rugged look, one that didn’t detract from his good looks. If my experience with movie stars told me anything, it was that scars on a good-looking guy made them even more attractive.

I was transfixed for a split second. It actually gave me a bit of respite from freaking out about my predicament.

My aching skull tried to piece together everything. He’d been the one who was yelling at me about my necklace. He wasn’t tied up either, which must have meant that he’d been the one who tied me up. And he was underwater and talking to me.

What the hell?

Then my eyes dipped down, and I saw the tail. Where his legs should have been was a long, salmon-colored fishtail. It looked as complex as the silicon tails that we wore for our performances. Only... I squinted my eyes, inspecting it, and I screamed.

It was real. He had a
real fishtail
.

He was a merman, and he was holding me captive underwater.

I looked at him, locking eyes with him and the terror overtook me again as my vision tunneled. My ears rang and my vision blackened. I was about to pass out again.

“Finn!” someone yelled as darkness edged my vision. “Give her some space, she just woke up!”

There were more of them? It was too much for my injured head to handle. Instead of screaming for help, the ocean faded to black.

***

When I woke up again I felt like I was coming out of a bad dream. Tied up, underwater, a good-looking merman yelling at me about my necklace, a dolphin talking to me and asking for my help…

Someone’s hand gently pressed a compress to my forehead, like my mother soothing me when I was sick. That touch grounded me, made me feel like I was in control again, even though I felt weird, sticky, and waterlogged. I kept my eyes closed, because I wanted to relish this feeling of being safe.

It had been a bad dream. That’s all it was.

“Mom...” My voice sounded far away and muffled. “Mom, I had the strangest...dream. It was a nightmare.”

The hand caressing my face paused, followed by a resigned sigh. Then I heard a voice. It was a woman, maybe elderly, although my ears were still ringing.

“It was no dream,” she said, words coming out muffled.

Like she was underwater.

Like the merman from before.

I snapped my eyes open, meeting violet eyes in a wrinkled face framed by floating white hair. Floating because she was underwater. And she wasn’t my mother.

I screamed, and this time, my hands weren’t bound by kelp. I pushed myself up and tried backing up as far away from her as possible, although whatever bed I’d been laying on was right up against the bare rock of a cave. When I moved, it was like my buoyancy had kicked in and my entire body started floating. I scrabbled against the rock of the cave, terrified.

The woman—mermaid, as I noticed that she had a distinctly purple tail that she used to steady herself in the water—studied me with apprehension. “It’s been so long since we had a...human...visitor,” she said in her gravelly voice.

“Are you real?”

To my surprise, she chuckled, bursts of bubbles erupting from her mouth and around her. “I could be asking the same of you.”

With my hands free, I brought them up to my face. “How am I able to breathe?” I rasped.

She shrugged. “A small trick, don’t worry.”

Don’t worry?
How long was I going to be here? How long have I been here? I hyperventilated and gasped and sputtered.

We were in an underwater cave, like the stereotypical version of Ursula’s home in
The Little Mermaid
. It was dark, and some strange aquatic plants glowed with bioluminescent light, shrouding the entire place in an eerie twilight. The place seemed cluttered, with shelves laden with trinkets and shells and things that I had no idea what they were. There was only a single entrance to the cave from what I could tell, a semicircle that opened to the outside.

The mermaid reached out and steadied me. “Calm down,” she said.

Calm down? I couldn’t calm down. I was stuck underwater with a mermaid and no way to get back to the surface. I really should have taken Christine up on her offer to go to dinner. I should have listened to Mom and gone to college. I should have stayed far away from the ocean. Then I could have avoided this.

“Is she awake?”

I froze, recognizing the voice as the merman from last night. He appeared in the entrance of the cave. My heart sped up, and I tried shrinking even further into the corner, kicking my feet out to propel me into the side. I didn’t want him to capture me again. Not that I was any better off stuck underwater, but I considered the ability to move a step up from where I’d been.

“Stay away from me!” I cried.

He hesitated, those sea green eyes meeting mine.

“He kidnapped me!” I pointed an accusing finger his way.

He gave me an unimpressed look.

“What else did you expect, Finn?” the mermaid asked, her voice amused. “You frightened the poor creature.”

Finn groaned, rolling his head like he was cracking some stress out of it. “She surprised me. First, I saw her near Kai’s tank, and then she had this...” He held up my mermaid necklace. “I didn’t know what to think.”

“You kidnapped me,” I accused again, really because there was nothing else that came to mind. “You tied me up! And give me back my necklace!”

He frowned. “I saved you,” he corrected. He tapped his temple, in the same area where mine throbbed painfully. “When you fell, you hit your head pretty hard. You would have drowned if I didn’t come after you.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Why did you tie me up?”

He crossed his arms and gave me a square look. “Because I thought you were one of the humans who kidnapped Kai. You were near his prison when I came to rescue him.”

My mind was slowly piecing together everything. “Wait...you think I kidnapped Kai? The little dolphin?”

“Surely you don’t think she really did that, Finn,” the mermaid chided, clicking her tongue. “Look at her puny arms. She wouldn’t have been able to lift a dolphin, even a small one like Kai.”

“She could have had a potion,” Finn retorted.

The mermaid rolled her eyes. “What’s your name, child?” she asked, deftly changing the subject.

“T-Tara,” I managed.

“Well, Tuhtara,” the mermaid said, “I’m Nereia and this is my nephew Finn.”

“Tara.”

Finn crossed his arms. “What?”

I shivered, clutching my legs to my chest in a semi-fetal position. “It’s just Tara. Not...Tuhtara.”

Nereia chuckled. “Apologies. As I said, it’s been a while since we’ve had a human visitor.”

I was still trying to process everything. Finally, it felt like something was trying to make sense and I clutched at it like my life depended on it. “Kai was taken?” Suddenly, I knew why the dolphin was so sad. “Is that why he asked me to help him?” I ventured. It was crazy, thinking that a dolphin was speaking directly to me; then again, here I was deep in the ocean, talking to a pair of mermaids.

Crazy was par for the course.

I didn’t get the reaction I thought I would. Finn looked at me in shock while the mermaid raised a quizzical eyebrow, impressed.

“You heard him speak to you?” she asked. “As a human, you could understand him?”

“Yeah?” I said.

“Impossible,” Finn interjected. “Dolphins aren’t supposed to be able to speak to humans.”

This merman had no right to tell me what I did and didn’t hear. I know what I heard—unless I was crazy.

Nereia thoughtfully touched a finger to her chin. “Unless...” she started, her voice trailing off.

“I heard him,” I promised. “Why was he crying for help?”

“He was stolen.” Finn spat the words as if they tasted bad. “By humans.”

“I had nothing to do with that,” I said. “Nothing.”

“She’s telling the truth,” the mermaid said.

“Then why were you by his cage when I was trying to rescue him?”

“I wanted to see if he was all right,” I said. “He felt... I could feel his sadness, and I wanted to see if I could help him. I was performing a mermaid show and—”

“How could you perform a ‘mermaid’ show when you’re human?” Nereia asked, speaking each word slowly.

“I have a tail that I put on, and then I go in the water and go out and do a dance for everyone.”

Their expressions turned into disgust. Finn’s frown was so deep, he looked like a big mouth bass, while Nereia’s face wrinkled into a mask of distaste. It hit me then that me being a mermaid was quite possibly the equivalent of me mocking their culture with inappropriate clothing and customs. Now that I knew that mermaids were real, it struck me how wrong the entire idea of it was.

Who in heck knew mermaids were real?

“Sorry,” I muttered, unsure if even that was appropriate. If I ever got out of here alive, I’d make sure to tell Christine how mermaids really acted. Like concerned old women or haughty, handsome, annoying men. And they didn’t wear sparkly makeup.

“I need to go,” Finn said. He rubbed his hands in front of him, the awkwardness growing between all three of us. “I’ve got to figure out how to tell Nadia and Levi that I haven’t been able to free Kai yet.”

Nereia nodded. “Good luck. You’ll have to figure out how to tell them you dropped Kai’s potion.”

Finn’s face twisted into a frown and he shook his head. “It wasn’t my fault. I was...distracted.” He pointedly glanced at me. “I’ll need a new potion.”

“You know how long those take me to make, Finn,” Nereia warned. “And it gets more and more dangerous every time you go on land.” Her eyes widened slightly. “What if a human saw you?”

Finn gave me a wry glance. “One
did
see me and it’ll be okay. I’ll be more careful next time.”

Nereia’s lips pressed into a thin line. “I’m only worried about you and the deadline we have looming. I just want to help.”