How to be a Mermaid (The Cotton Candy Quintet #1)(9)

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.”