Fathom (12 page)

Word must have gotten out that Kira was missing.

Then I saw Brianna talking to a small group of people on the front porch. She pointed toward the car and, after that, everyone nodded and smiled.

She must have told them that Kira was safe, that we were taking her home.

I climbed into the front passenger seat and waited.

“Kira, can you hear me?” I asked, keeping my voice soft.

“Mmmm?” She moved like someone asleep and tugged the blanket off her face, still covered with tiny green scales. Her eyes blinked open and their gaze filled the backseat with a soft blue light.

She looked so vulnerable. Part of me wanted to take her in my arms, to give in to the Burning. She had no idea how strong her pheromones were right now, much stronger than before she turned. The other part of me wanted to protect her from anyone who might want to hurt her—myself included.

“Are you awake?”

She nodded. “Where am I?”

At least she could talk now. I noticed that her gills were fading, beginning to blend in with the skin on her neck.

Thanks the gods.

“You have to focus on what I’m saying. You can hear me, can’t you—”

Another nod. She tried to sit up, but I held my hand out toward her, palm open.

“No, don’t get up,” I warned her. I glanced back at the humans on the porch. Several of them were staring at the car. I hoped they didn’t come over here. I sent a quick, silent warning to Brianna—
Keep them away!

“Why can’t I sit up?” Kira asked.

“You need to listen to me, you have to turn back into a human.”

She frowned.

“Think about your family, your home, your school, think about all the things you like to do—”

She stared up at the ceiling, listening to my voice.

“Think about what it means to be human, think about the last time you looked at yourself in the mirror—”

A tear trickled down her cheek. Confused, I wondered why she would react this way. Didn’t she know how beautiful she was? I’d seen how every other girl at the party had looked at her tonight. They had all wished that they looked like her. And the guys—well, I didn’t want to think about what they had been wishing.

“Think about the color of your skin,” I said.

“I hate the color of my skin,” she whispered.

“You have to change,” I told her. “You have to, or we can’t take you home.” Anger crept into my voice now. It was intentional, still I hated doing it. “Change, now! Turn!”

More heads looked my way. I lowered my voice. “Kira, do this for your father. He loves you.”

Her eyes met mine and I could see that I’d finally found the one thing that really mattered to her.

“You have to change if you want to see him again. Now! Change!”

Her eyes filled with tears and the glow faded. Her skin seemed to melt as I stared at her, the iridescent scales blurred, green gave way to pale yellow and then finally turned to the softest pink. A rosy hue now colored her lips and her cheeks, her eyes were once again a mesmerizing shade of ocean blue-green.

I sighed and my limbs relaxed. I hadn’t realized until now how tense I was.

Then the driver-side door opened and Brianna climbed inside. She shifted the car into gear.

“We have to go,
now
,” she said, grabbing the steering wheel. Tires spun when she pressed her foot against the gas pedal. “My neighbors called the cops!”

Just as we were driving away, I saw Sean running through the house, opening the front door, then jogging down the front stairs. He called out, “Kira!” But he stopped abruptly when the car pulled away. Kira was now sitting up in the backseat.

He wasn’t looking at her.

He was staring at me, in the front seat. I was the reason why he stopped running.

He must have thought Kira was leaving because of me. And then—right on cue, as if heaven and earth and the great briny deep were all plotting together—Riley sauntered up behind him, a concerned look on her face. She wrapped one arm in his, feigned an emotion she knew nothing about—empathy—and stood beside him.

She said something to him, but of course I had no way of knowing what. The expression on his face darkened and he watched the car with a scowl as we attempted to drive away.

But we didn’t get far, not even to the end of the driveway because that was when the world exploded in flashing lights. Two black and white cars came out of nowhere and blocked our exit to the main road. Brianna cursed and slammed her fist against the steering wheel and Kira started crying. I had no idea what was going on, even when several men got out of the cars, came over and shined flashlights in our window.

“You have to get out of the car,” Brianna told me then. “The police are here.”

Kira:

The car jerked to a stop and suddenly lights flashed in my eyes, blinding me. I couldn’t see anything but wavering silhouettes—apparently my eyes hadn’t fully adjusted yet. My stomach lurched when the car door opened and someone ordered me to get out. I stumbled into the street. Everyone looked like a shadow in the bright light. I couldn’t tell who was who. Somewhere, back up the road, the party was still going on, music and laughter shredding night air.

Then another police car squeezed past us, siren screaming, lights burning hot.

I felt sick and confused. My head hurt and part of me kept trying to figure out what had just happened.

Had I really turned into a sea monster? And had Caleb helped me turn back? I wanted to ask him a million questions, but I couldn’t see where he was.

Unfortunately that was when I recognized one of the voices that surrounded us.

It was Mr. O’Brien. Sean’s dad.

Great, I was being arrested by my next-door neighbor and the father of my best friend. Just when I thought it couldn’t get much worse, another familiar voice rumbled out of the chaos.

Dad.

Big holy crap, my dad was here too.

•

Apparently being drunk and getting arrested makes me write poetry. Really bad poetry. Somehow I got hold of a sharpie and wrote a slew of almost illegible words on my arm. I didn’t see them until I woke up the next morning, one arm shielding my eyes from the sunlight, my mouth half-open and drooling. I stumbled to the bathroom, threw up, then attempted to wash my face. That was when I looked in the mirror and saw the marks on my arm.

I groaned. Then threw up again.

My vision blurred, I tried to read what I had written. My drunken self leaving a coded message behind for my sober self.

Walk in a straight line.

Cry if you have to—

Don’t tell anyone.

Pray that those two friends

you had on Friday

still like you on Monday.

I sighed, then ambled down the hallway and went back to bed.

Can ye fathom the ocean, dark and deep,

where the mighty waves and the grandeur sweep?

—Fanny Crosby

Kira:

Seagulls flew overhead and the water rushed toward me, a crescendo of curling wave and foam. It stretched thin, surging forward until it swirled around my feet in eddies of blue and gray. The ocean was teasing me. Trying to get me to come out and play. It would sweep away from me, impatient, then gather courage to swell and crash forward again.

The seals were gone and the water felt cold and the sun burned my eyes.

I pulled on a pair of sunglasses, something I almost never wore, wondering why my eyes were so sensitive to the light today. Then I sat in the sand, my wetsuit still draped over one arm, not sure whether I wanted to go swimming today or not.

I couldn’t help going over what had happened last night, trying to piece it all together. But no matter how hard I tried it didn’t make sense. From the moment I took that fruit drink—the one that had been spiked—it all seemed like one long, brightly colored hallucination. Of course, there was one other conclusion. I started digging small tunnels in the sand with my fingers, trenches to trap the seawater when it came tumbling over me.

I could be going mad.

My mind could be filled with discordant images, the jagged bits of my brain trying desperately to communicate with me, to tell me that something was wrong, and all of this could be part of the puzzle.

In other words, I could be just like my mother.

Inside my head, a psychotic breakdown could be brewing and my strange memories of last night, even my uncharacteristic behavior the past few days, could all be signposts on the road to the madhouse.

The water rushed over my feet, my shins, my thighs. It curled and flipped, spraying my face, tickling me with a layer of salt.

Or—

I imagined a thunderstorm of noise and lightning flashes. Don’t go that way, my wounded mind seemed to be saying. Don’t think it, this is the first step to the madness that waits—

Or, everything that happened last night could be true. I could really be some sort of monster, some sea creature with green skin and gills. And if I was a sea creature, then all those teenagers who just came to Crescent Moon Bay must be sea creatures too—

This was the tenth time this morning that I’d tried to figure it all out and every time I ended up at the same place.

Nowhere.

None of it made sense. Not one bit of it.

I stood up and brushed off the sand, headed back up the cliff. I was grounded and stranded at home, basically an indentured servant. I’d already finished my homework, cleaned the house, organized all the kitchen cupboards and straightened the tools in the garage. I wasn’t getting paid for any of this, either.

I nodded at Dad as I ambled through the ankle-deep grass in the backyard. He ran the back of his hand over his forehead, brushing away the sweat as he pruned the garden. Sleeves rolled up, his arms bronzed by the sun, he stopped working long enough to give me a thin smile that seemed to say, I’m concerned about you.

I hiked up the porch steps, kicked the sand off my feet, then stepped into the living room. I could tell Gram was pretending to be domestic—she was cooking a roast. Burning it, most likely. Before long she’d give up and ask me to take over. Sometimes I wondered how Dad survived as a kid. He must have eaten a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Anyway, right now both of them were busy, so I had a needle-thin window of opportunity here.

Granted, I would much rather have called Sean and talked to him about what had happened last night. I’m sure he thought I was nuts, flirting with him in my driveway and then leaving the party with another guy. And I wished I could call Brianna and ask her where she and Caleb had been taking me when the cops showed up. But the police never gave us a chance to talk to each other. You’d have thought that someone had been murdered or something.

Although that could have happened.

Riley and her crew could have drowned me. If I hadn’t managed to get away. And yeah, if I hadn’t turned into some sort of green slimy Creature from Crescent Moon Bay.

But I couldn’t call anybody right now. Couldn’t e-mail them either.

Because Dad had used his mad computer skills to lock me out of the Internet and Gram had the home phone in her pocket. But I still had resources. And I needed some answers—immediately. I needed to figure out whether I’d been hallucinating last night or whether I was losing my mind or whether those girls had used some creepy spell to turn me into a sea monster. And if they had used a spell, I needed to find a way to make sure that it never happened again.

I glanced out the window, saw Dad using an ax to trim the branches on a nearby hawthorn tree; then I snuck to the edge of the living room, peeked in the kitchen and saw Gram bent over a cookbook, tumbler half-full of Jameson. She took a sip, then poured the rest of the glass over the roast. This was my chance.

I crept across the living room, down the hallway and opened the door to Gram’s room.

I never went in there unless she invited me. I always wondered what she did in there, imagined her casting spells and getting the cat to tell her all my secrets. Took me years to trust that cat. Now he was my best pal and Gram was the one I wondered about.

Meanwhile, right now her curtains were drawn, light filtered through with hesitancy, as if sunlight wasn’t welcome. Goose bumps danced over my arms and legs as I crossed the threshold. I held my breath, searching the room with a swift glance. I knew she had a small library somewhere. I’d seen her reading strange books late at night, cup of hot tea in one hand, the other hand, gnarled and curved, tracing the words, her mouth moving as she read.

Finally I spotted a small bookcase next to her closet. The floor betrayed me, though, creaking as I crossed the room on tiptoes. I knelt down, tried to read the titles, some covered with dust, some so worn the spines were cracked and the letters were almost gone. I knew the books I wanted, or at least I thought I did, but it took awhile to find them. Then finally I had them both tucked under my arm. I replaced them with two of my own books so her shelf wouldn’t look too empty.

A ray of sunlight poked through the drapes just then, sliced the floor and pointed to another book, one that I wouldn’t have thought of. I took that one too, hoping Gram wouldn’t notice since it would leave an open space.

Then I crept away, out of her room and down the hall, into my own room. Quick, I slid all three books under my bed. Just in time too, because I heard her in the living room. A heavy sigh and then she called my name, frustration in her voice.

“Kira.”

Couldn’t look like I had been expecting this, so I feigned irritation. “What?” I called back. I opened my door and saw my grandmother, tumbler half-full of whiskey again. Her hair hung down her back in a long braid. For a minute, in the dimly lit room, I saw her as a young girl, prominent cheekbones, delicate nose. She looked like she could be my age. Then the sunlight poured in from my room and she aged in an instant. Her shoulders sagged and fine lines framed her eyes, her fingers curled and her hair turned grey.