The Vicious Deep Read online

  The water trembles. Something bumps and pushes against my tail. The water glows so brightly that I have to look away. There’s a second splash, and the wind gets knocked out of me by a knee. My tail, with a mind of its own, knocks everything in its reach onto the floor. I try to pull myself as upright as I can. When I look again, he’s taken full form. He’s landed completely on top of me. He pushes himself up by holding the sides of the tub, as though he’s afraid his legs will give out.

  He takes in my mom, standing with the bottom of her dress soaking up the water, and Dad, looking more amused than should be allowed for someone sitting on the toilet. Naked guy notices he’s naked and uses his hand to cover his junk. He tosses his hair back. The dark, wet curls stick to his neck and around a face that is familiar, but I just can’t place it. Not that I want to. I want him to get out of my bathtub and put some clothes on. Instead the guy turns to me and bows—stands with his back straight in the world’s best attempt to look poised, stoic even.

  “Well,” he says, clearing his throat, “this is awkward.”

  Sorry,” the naked guy standing in the bathtub says, “so sorry.”

  There’s a trace of not so much an accent but an over-enunciating of words. He looks down at the deflating bubble bath and thankfully sits immediately. He turns around and turns the faucet off. It stays off.

  His hair is the same length as mine, right to the base of our ears and messy in curls like we spend too much time at the beach. There’s this sculpture in the Greek section at the Met that Layla dragged me to a few weeks ago that looks just like him. He doesn’t look fazed, but his violet eyes gape at me. He sort of bows.

  “I have a fishtail, and that’s not half as weird as this right here.” I point at him and look to my mother for some sort of explanation. “Mom?”

  “Priscilla—?” is what she says instead.

  Naked guy bows at my mom too, then shakes his head. “She’s dead. For quite a while, actually.”

  “Who the hell are you?” I say finally. “Am I going to be a mermaid magnet now or something?”

  “Tristan!”

  “My name is Kurtomathetis,” he says with his head held high, “and I am not a mermaid, as I am clearly not a woman. I am a merman, as are you, but of course you’ve already figured that out.”

  “Fine—Kurtom—can I just call you Kurt?—we’re mermen. Most importantly, how come you don’t have a tail, and how do I get rid of mine?”

  He sighs, and I can feel the exasperation in his voice as thick as wading in mud. “I am part of the Sea Court. I am to be your guide—your guardian, if you will. My purpose is to make sure you’re safe at all times. It is the highest honor of the sea folk.”

  “Sea Court?” It’s foreign in my mouth.

  Kurt turns his attention to my mother. “He really knows nothing?”

  “I know stuff!” I yell. “Not mermaid stuff but—”

  Kurt and my mother move to talk over each other, but the sink faucet bursts on again. Dad stands back as a lime-green fish pops out. Like when Kurt appeared, the sink is flooded with a bright light. Dad has a bewildered smile on his face. “I hope the neighbors don’t come up and complain,” he says.

  I sure hope it’s not another naked mer-guarding guy. And it isn’t. There’s a girl no older than fourteen sitting in the sink. Her skin is pale, but it has a slight greenish tinge; her hair is long and wet and a shade of black with green. Her hair covers her breasts and pools in her lap. She reminds me of a green Rapunzel. Dad grabs Mom’s bathrobe off the hook behind the door and wraps her in it. She hops off the sink with the tiniest splash, ties the robe around her waist, and gathers her hair to one side.

  “Thalia!” Kurt’s proper nose is wrinkled with the kind of annoyance that I’ve only seen siblings have toward each other. He chokes on the beginning of every sentence he tries to speak and slaps his hands in the water, adding to the pool on the bathroom floor. “What—I can’t believe—may I too have a cloth?—why—what are you doing here?”

  Thalia’s slender frame looks even more so in the big robe. Her lips are full and pink, and her eyes a cattish green-yellow, twinkling with mischief. She turns to me, gathers the hem of the bathrobe, tucks one foot behind the other, and curtseys. She turns to my mother and does the same. “Lady Sea.”

  She looks in the sink as Dad comes back with a red-and-black flannel robe for Kurt. She sticks her hand in the water and pulls out a long, skinny bottle full of iridescent black liquid that seems to be moving in a continuous swirl inside. “You forgot the ink,” she says.

  Kurt ties Dad’s bathrobe around the middle and stumbles out of the tub like he’s not used to his legs yet. He makes to grab for the vial between Thalia’s fingers, but she takes one step back, smirking. “Only if I can stay.”

  “Very well.” He makes fists at his sides.

  She doesn’t hesitate and hands it over.

  He snatches it and puts it in the robe pocket. “Good. Great. Now leave!”

  “But—you said I could stay! Your word is binding!”

  “Right. Binding to the king, not my sister.”

  Mom brings her hand to her mouth, covering the chuckle that’s escaping her lips. I laugh too, but only because I like seeing this guy get so huffy and puffy.

  Thalia looks indignant but not defeated. She stomps one foot on the floor, and water splashes. “That’s thanks for you. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “This is my duty, not yours. Now go before I tell the king.”

  Her yellow-green eyes are wide with a new realization. “You can’t. We’ve no contact with Toliss until Arion’s ship gets here.” The silence that follows should be accompanied by a So there. Na-na, na-na-na.

  “Hello? Remember me? One of you. Kurt, Kurt’s little sister, Mom. Tell me how to turn back!” I say loudly.

  Kurt pulls the vial out of his pocket. I don’t have a good feeling about it.

  “You were never given the rites of the newborn. Only court merfolk can shift. You are not an average merman, as you are, quite literally, half human. When you were born—”

  “Kurt, one thing at a time, please,” Mom says. And I thank her, because my headache is back and all I want is a warm, dry bed.

  I dip myself into the bathwater, this time preparing for the gills to open and shut again when I surface.

  “As part of the Sea Court, we get our legs whenever we visit shore. There was a time when all creatures coexisted on this plane. Humans, fey, shifters, and what humans started calling monsters. Then suddenly it changed. Humans outnumbered all of us. They wanted us gone. Those who didn’t want to start wars chose to move their courts to hidden islands. Ours is the only isle that is still in this realm, with the exception of two fairy islands. We cover them with mists so humans cannot detect them, and from a distance it looks like a storm at sea.

  “Courts?” I find myself saying. “In the stories it’s always just one mermaid.”

  “The Sea King took away our legs to keep us from straying. But that doesn’t stop some from showing themselves to humans. The easiest thing in the world is to fall in love with one of us. Shakespeare and Donne were particularly obsessed, as were all the poets who’d caught a glimpse. Or thought they did. Besides, it’s usually the mermaids who get caught on land.”

  “Because mermen don’t like getting dry?”

  Kurt takes on a face that Ryan made when he tried to explain to Angelo the difference between a microcosm and a macrocosm. “Mermaids are more likely to seek a human’s affections than mermen. I suppose we lack the same amount of curiosity when it comes to human lovers. So there are fewer merman sightings recorded. Because of that, there’s the misconception that mermen are unattractive. As you can see in the case of you and me, that is not so.”

  I mean, not to sound like an ass, but I was thinking the same thing.

  My father snickers, and my mother purses her lips.

  “But enough about us man-hungry mermaids,” my mother says. “Are you quite sure you know h
ow to do that, Kurt?”

  He holds up the vial to the light and shrugs. “I’ve read all the texts, and I’ve seen it executed on a few lucky merfolk who’ve pleased the king enough and were granted land legs. And the less lucky, who’ve been banished to land for having displeased him as well.”

  Read. Seen. There is no I’ve done anywhere in there.

  “What exactly are you going to do? What do you mean you’ve only seeing it done?” It’s all making me so warm that I let the cold water run, adding another inch to the pool on the floor.

  “Many pardons, Lord Sea—”

  “Whoa.” I hold up my hand. “Don’t you ever call me that again.”

  But he continues over me. “—I forget you’re half human and have a shorter attention span. It is incredibly rare that a human and our kind can actually conceive a fully human child that is also fully mer-kin. There have been creatures with the heads of fish and the bodies of humans. Sometimes they come out incredibly deformed and, usually, don’t live past a few months.

  “But I digress. This”—he holds the vial close to my face so that I can see that the ink is swirling on its own like a tiny black hole collapsing—“is an ink that allows us to shift whenever we want. It is the blood of the abyss, primordial and, of course, painfully difficult to extract. The king has one of the last known cephalopods that carry it. Once that’s gone, we won’t be able to go on land anymore. Not that it would be such a bad thing. Can’t really miss what you never had, can you?”

  “Cephalopod?” All those years of wandering through the Coney Island Aquarium, and I can’t even remember that.

  “Squid,” Dad answers. His voice pulls me out of Kurt’s explanation and grounds me. I’m glad he’s here. Thalia is holding the rainbow fish in a jar. They both press their noses on the glass, like a double aquarium.

  “Do I have to drink it?”

  Kurt turns his back to me, and sure enough there’s a tattoo on the center of his back level with his shoulder blades. It’s a trident, the middle spear slightly longer than the outer two prongs. The stem of the trident ends in a sharp triangular point.

  “Do you have one?” I ask my mother. The question leaves my mouth before I even know why it matters. It matters because she’s my mother, and I would’ve noticed.

  She pulls her hair over her shoulders, like opening a curtain. No, I would not have noticed it. The mark where the ink used to be is the color of pearl, maybe two shades lighter than the rest of her skin. “My father extracted the ink himself. I can never change again.”

  My fingers hover over the trident, stopping short of touching it. “What does it mean?”

  “It is the symbol of the Sea Court.” I’m glad she’s not facing me, because now I can smell her sadness pouring over her, like pure sea.

  “Okay, so a tattoo. I can deal with that. At least I don’t have to get my lip pierced or have a stick driven though my nose.” Kurt stares at me with confused violet eyes. I emphasize, “Right?”

  “Oh, yes,” he says. “I mean, no. No piercings. Though the trend has become popular among the younger ones.”

  “Darn that MTV,” Dad says.

  “I have your permission, right?” I ask him.

  “If not, I think we’re going to need a pretty big fish tank.” Dad’s smile betrays the smell of worry he’s giving off like burnt rubber cement. “Or we could rent a room at the aquarium. Whatever is cheaper.”

  Kurt doesn’t try to understand the joke and shrugs off the comment. He kneels beside me, and my mind races. What if he does it wrong and I get stuck like this forever? Can I still have sex with girls or only other mermaids? Where the hell does my dick go? What if Layla sees me this way?

  I don’t have much longer to think, because as soon as Kurt uncorks the vial with a surprising champagne-bottle pop, he tells me, “This is going to sting.”

  And sure enough, it does.

  The ink is a shiny, black blur spilling out of the slim glass, and it knows just where to find me.

  It coils in the air slowly, like a spinning Milky Way. I focus on the things that make it sparkle and wonder why I have to be a creature that’s half glitter. Why can’t my mom be half powerful genie or like a werewolf, anything that doesn’t look like a ten-year-old girl bedazzled the bottom half of her Ken doll.

  Kurt is whispering something in what I recognize as Latin, thanks to Mrs. Santos, who drags me and Layla to the Latin mass at the Greek church, even though Layla says she’s an atheist and I’m not Greek.

  The coil freezes, then blurs out of sight. I know where it’s gone the instant I feel the burn in my skin. I let myself fall backward into the tub with a splash. I can feel my fins parting, and the burn is now everywhere. It’s like being ripped in half over a fire pit and then being left there until the fire simmers and there’s nothing left but ash.

  The back of my head hits the bottom of the tub, and when I take a deep breath, I forget I don’t have gills anymore. The rose-soap water snakes down my throat. The strangest feeling is not having water go down the wrong pipe but the fact that my leg muscles feel like they’re reverberating right at the core. I push myself up and cough until my throat feels raw.

  Mom holds a towel in front of me and I take it, drying my face first, then standing to wrap it around my waist. It hurts to stand, like the day after doing squats in Mr. Loughlin’s fitness class.

  “I’m sorry this is happening,” Mom says. “It wasn’t supposed to.”

  I’m shivering. I’m shivering, I’m naked, I’m wet, and in a handful of days I’ve nearly drowned, hallucinated, and turned into a mythical creature. Yeah, none of this was supposed to happen.

  “I’m going to clean up,” Dad says. He runs out and comes back with a mop and every towel we own to carpet the tiles and soak up the water.

  “Get dressed, honey,” Mom says. She rubs my face with her hand, and part of me wants to rest my head on her shoulder like when I was little and didn’t want to start kindergarten without her. The other part of me, the part that’s angry like I’ve never thought I could be, flinches from her touch.

  “Let’s get you kids some clothes,” she tells Kurt and Thalia.

  “I’m going to bed,” I announce.

  “But there’s so much we have to discuss,” Kurt protests. We stand in the living room. I can hear Mom rummaging through her closet and Dad wringing out the towels into the tub and then laying them out on the floor again.

  “Yeah, well, unless the information is going to change in the next ten hours, I think it can wait.”

  Kurt goes to speak, but Thalia says his name hard. “Kurtomathetis. Remember our place.”

  Yeah, as in they’re know-it-all mermaids and I’m just a human guy. Or I was.

  Kurt’s face changes from a tight-lipped expression to just plain pissed-off and then right back to full control in seconds. “Forgive me. This is a lot to gather.”

  “I’ll see you guys in the morning.”

  The land-locked mer-siblings watch me sulk to my room and close the door. My navy blue sheets have never felt softer against my abused skin. I feel for traces of scales on my body, but this time there aren’t any. Where my gills are shut against the air, I can feel raised keloids, like the scar on my mother’s back.

  I bury my face against my pillow and let my body sink into everything that’s happening. I’d pinch myself if everything didn’t already hurt. The sounds of my house slow down: the squeak of the metal in the pull-out couch as it’s being unfolded, the rustle of Kurt and Thalia helping my parents making it up with sheets and blankets, and their low voices most likely discussing me, or maybe how much they wish they weren’t here.

  Duty was what Kurt had said. He has a duty, and it’s me. What’s my duty? Before the storm, before the shift, my only duty was being the best swimmer and saving a life if it needed saving. Can I still do those things without being this—thing?

  I look at the clock on my nightstand before shutting my eyes. It isn’t even midnight yet.

/>   I dream of the whirlpool again, but all I see is the water. Clear bubbles. Stillness and the infinite black-blue ocean. This time I’m swimming with the Great White. Up close I can see he’s got his own armor with a gleaming metal ring around his head. The ring has two grips at either side. I tighten my hold on them as he pulls me through the water.

  When I wake up, I feel like I’ve been asleep for days. My legs ache when I push myself off my bed. For a moment, sitting in the middle of my blue comforter and surrounded by swim trophies, posters of vintage cars, calendar girls holding surfboards, and pictures of the past seventeen years of my life, I forget about the wave, the whirlpool, the silver mermaid, Kurt and Thalia, my mom’s lack of worry at what’s happening. Everything but the tattoo.

  I reach over my back and trace the raised skin. In the mirror, I see myself as I have always been—the same wavy brown mess of hair, freaky turquoise eyes, lifeguard tan. The mirror doesn’t show the other half—the gills and the scales, the giant blue fishtail. The magic hums in my veins, wanting to be released, craving water the way I also crave air, and I wonder if one of those needs is ever going to be greater than the other.

  “Honey?” The knock on the door snaps my eyes away from my reflection. “Tristan, are you awake?”

  Part of me, the part that wishes I were just a swim-team jock with nothing to worry about but girls and winning, wants to go back to sleep, to never change into a merman again. To know that I’ve just imagined this connection to the ocean. That I’m just a regular guy after all.

  But I’ve never been that guy, not really. Kurt said that I’m rare, but being rare doesn’t make you special. I feel like one of the freak-show acts on the boardwalk. Step right up and see the merboy, merguy, merman. Where does his ding-dong go? Nobody knows! How fast can he swim? Just step right up to the glass. Remember! He goes to school in your very neighborhood and doesn’t do much else. Actually, come to think of it, he’s not that interesting after all.