Swimming Without a Net Read online

“I assume you guys hang out in the Black Sea because it’s enclosed? Easier to stay hidden? I mean, up here, you’re—we’re—myths. No one’s been able to prove the Undersea Folk exist.”

  “You are correct, Fredrika,” Kertal said, setting his empty glass down on the kitchen table. “Your studies of the sea have served you well.”

  “Yes, I have my name on all sorts of pretty papers.”

  “Many centuries ago the royal family chose the Black Sea for precisely that reason. That is not to say we all live there; the Undersea Folk are scattered all over the world.”

  “I live in Chesapeake Bay,” Tennian whispered.

  “But the seat of power has always been in the Black Sea. However, there are so many of us, and it can be a difficult place to get to in a short time without rousing suspicion. So the Pelagic will be held in the waters of the Cayman Islands.”

  “Ah, the glorious Caymans. What are you, repping the chamber of commerce?”

  “No,” Kertal the Humorless replied. “We will wait while you collect your things.”

  “Hold up, hold up. So this Pelagic, the purpose of which neither of you have bothered to explain, won’t be where the royal family hangs out, and we won’t be going to Turkey. But we’ll have a fine time hanging out in the Caymans.”

  “I do not know how fine a time it will be,” Kertal said soberly.

  “Oh, here we go.”

  “Many of our people do not wish to remain myths.”

  “Oh, ho.”

  “This goes directly against the wishes of the royal family.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Thus, the Pelagic: a meeting of all Folk, to decide a common action. They are quite rare; the last one was held—ah—” He glanced at Tennian and the small woman shook her head. “—was a while ago. Decades.”

  Fred smelled a rat. Or a fish. But there was time to get to the bottom of that later. “So you guys are getting together to figure out whether to go public or not?”

  “Not ‘you guys.’ All of us. You, too, Fredrika.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Is that a fact?”

  “The High King insists.”

  “So? I’m not one of his subjects.”

  “Excuse me,” Tennian murmured, “but you are.”

  “Want to arm wrestle for it?”

  “The king requires your presence,” Kertal droned on. “As does His Highness, Prince Artur.”

  “And I’m definitely not at his beck and call. Sorry you came all this way for nothing, help yourselves to more water, good-bye.”

  “The prince suspected you would be…intractable.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “Try unbudgeable.”

  “He asked us to remind you that he saved your life.”

  “He didn’t stop me from getting shot!” And why was the thought of seeing the redheaded bum again so thrilling? Not to mention the idea of meeting other Undersea Folk. Of course, if they were all as stodgy as these two, it’d be a long time in the Caymans. Which reminded her…“How long is this Pelagic supposed to last?”

  “Until the majority comes to an agreement, approved by His Majesty.”

  “But that could take—I have no idea how long that could take. How many mer-dudes will show up?”

  “Thousands.”

  “Thousands?”

  “Perhaps. There is no way to tell.”

  “Is there anything you can commit to?”

  “We cannot leave without your agreement and attendance.”

  “Oh, friggin’ swell.” Fred rested her chin on her fist and thought. The other two watched her do it, and said nothing. Finally she said, “Is Artur sending duos of ambassadors to all the Undersea Folk?”

  Again, they exchanged a look. But this time Tennian spoke up. Barely. “No. You are considered a special case, and essential to this gathering.”

  “According to whom?”

  “The entire royal family.”

  Fred gave thanks she was sitting down, because otherwise she was fairly certain she would have fallen on her ass.

  Four

  “But why?” she managed after gasping like a landed trout.

  “It is not for us to know.”

  “Just ‘go fetch Fred,’ is that it?”

  “Yes,” Kertal replied.

  “And I’m supposed to pack a bag and follow you guys to the Caymans?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “You owe a debt to the royal family,” Kertal reminded her.

  “And you’re a subject,” Tennian added unhelpfully.

  “I am not! And I do not.” Still. Talk about a once in a lifetime opportunity. The marine biologist in her was itching to get a look at a meeting populated with thousands of mermaids. But it chafed, being ordered to go like that. Shit, her mom had quit trying to give her orders by the fourth grade.

  She wondered how the other Folk knew to come to the Caymans, then remembered how her father’s people communicated: by telepathy. Duh. How else did you talk underwater?

  Fred opened her mouth to argue more when she heard the rattle of keys and her front door burst open. Jonas was framed in the doorway, panting, clutching her doorknob so hard his knuckles were white. “What’d I miss?”

  “Apparently I’m going to the Caymans.”

  “How come?”

  “Super secret mermaid business.”

  Her friend beamed. “Great! I’ll go pack your things. Good thing you’ve got tons of vacation time coming. Don’t worry, I’ll fix it with Barb.”

  Fred covered her face with her hands. “Shit.”

  “Will I need a passport?”

  “You’re not coming,” she tried, already knowing the outcome.

  “Ha! Think I’ll miss out on a chance to stock up on some of that yummy rum? And do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a vacation? Never mind how long it’s been since you’ve had one.” To Tennian and Kertal: “Classic workaholic, you guys. No hope at all.” To Fred: “Besides, you’ll just get into trouble by yourself.”

  “Sir, you are not invited,” Kertal said.

  “Sir, I’d like to see you stop me. I would also like to find out who does your hair.”

  “Bipeds are not welcome,” Tennian mumbled.

  “And your hair.”

  Fred saw her chance, and jumped at it. “I’m only going if he goes.” Had she really just said that? She mentally replayed the last five seconds. Yes, she had. “That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”

  This time, the Grim Duo didn’t bother exchanging glances. They just nodded in perfect weird unison.

  “Woo-hoo!” Jonas yowled. “I’ll go pack my swim trunks.”

  Five

  “I don’t know why you’re so excited,” Fred grumbled as Jonas stomped on the accelerator. As it was fall, and midweek, traffic to Cape Cod was light. And Jonas was enjoying his new toy, a gray Ford hybrid. “I haven’t even decided to go.”

  “Yuh-huh!” He beeped the horn at a dawdling tourist—they both hated it when morons went fifty miles an hour in the passing zone—and whipped past the small blue Volkswagen.

  Fred slammed her finger down on the window button and yowled into the wind, “Passing zone is for passing, shithead!”

  “Don’t make me put the child locks on the windows again,” Jonas warned. “And you did so say you were going. You told what’s-their-names you’d go if I could go.”

  “Yeah, well, I lost my temper there for a second. Frankly, I can’t figure out why we’re even going to my mom’s.”

  “Because nice and loving daughters tell their hot moms when they’re leaving the country.”

  “That’s enough about my hot mom,” Fred warned, knowing it was no use. The former hippie, Moon Bimm, was in ridiculously good shape for a woman in her early fifties. To Fred’s eternal despair, she had personal knowledge that Moon still had the sex drive of an eighteen-year-old.

  “Say,” Jonas said cheerfully, reading her mind as usual, “remember
last year when you walked in on her and Sam doing the wild thing on the—”

  Fred jabbed the volume button.

  “Didn’t your stepfather have to go see a chiropractor after you threw him off your mom?” Jonas screamed over the music.

  Fred rolled the window back down and stuck her head out, doglike, for the next half hour.

  “Come on, show me,” Jonas begged.

  So she took her friend around the side of the cream-colored Cape Cod house with the hunter green shutters, and showed him the now-fixed sliding glass kitchen door. The one she’d broken through last fall when she thought her mother was in danger at the hands of a merman. The first one she’d ever met.

  “Jeez,” Jonas said, impressed. He rapped his knuckles on the glass. “This shit is thick. And you just walked through it?”

  “Kicked it in. Then walked.”

  “The extreme always makes an impression,” Jonas said, quoting a line from his all-time favorite movie, Heathers. He’d had an absurd crush on Winona Ryder since Mermaids.

  “Then what?”

  “Then I met Artur, High Prince of the Undersea Folk, whom I had assumed was committing felony assault on my folks.”

  “Not knowing,” Jonas added, having begged to hear the story about a thousand times, “that Moon had already charmed him with her extreme hotness and everything was fine.”

  “Anyway,” she continued with a glare, “Sam got the door fixed the next day, end of story.”

  “Ah, Sam. Ridiculously fortunate (wealthy) hubby to the delicious Moon, trodden stepfather to the grumpiest mermaid on the planet. Agh!”

  Fred flinched, then looked. The man in question, her stepfather, was blinking at them through the glass (and his bifocals). Sam was a few inches shorter than Fred, with graying brown hair pulled back in his usual ponytail, which only highlighted his bald spot.

  He hit the latch and slid the door open. “Hello, Fred. Jonas. We have a guest.” Code for: ix-nay on the ermaid-may uff-stay.

  “We won’t stay long,” Fred promised, stepping past her stepfather.

  “Maybe only for dessert. Did Moon make ice cream again?” Jonas asked.

  “Are you kidding?” Sam smiled and opened the freezer. “What’s your favorite flavor?”

  “Wh-who’s that?” a trembling voice asked.

  Sam stretched out one of his rough amateur carpenter’s hands and, after a long moment, a little girl (Fred put her age at about five, unless she was malnourished, which was certainly likely given her bone structure and large, almost bulging brown eyes) reached out and grasped one of Sam’s fingers. “Ellie, this is my daughter, Fred, and her best friend, Jonas.”

  Ellie was now standing almost behind Sam, and Fred could only see one big brown eye. Jonas, busily building himself a six-scoop sundae, looked up from licking a spoon and waved.

  “Who’s he?” Ellie whispered.

  Sam knelt, very slowly, and took Ellie by the shoulders, very gently. “That is my daughter’s very best friend in the world. He was picked on all the time in school and Fred had to watch out for him. She protected him. He would never, ever hurt you.”

  “But you don’t know.” Ellie’s expression had the faraway look of a child in a nightmare she would never wake from. “Only God knows everything.”

  Fred coughed, which caused Sam and Ellie to look over at her. “Hey, Ellie. Watch this.”

  Mentally apologizing to her oldest friend, Fred seized Jonas by the shirt collar and heaved him out of his chair and through the (fortunately open) sliding door.

  Six

  Jonas was densely built (“Deliciously so,” Dr. Barb might have said over the sound of Fred’s retching), but no match for Fred’s hybrid strength, and the air velocity he achieved was really quite something.

  Fred ignored his wail (“My sundaeeee!”), which became easier to do the fainter it got. “See that, Ellie? Like Sam said, my friend would never hurt you. But if he did, if he contracted rabies and went crazy and actually tried to put his hands on you in a way you didn’t like, I’d kick his balls up so high, he’d choke on them. ’Kay?”

  Ellie edged around Sam and peered up at Fred. “Do you work out?”

  “No, I hate gyms. And I hate tracks. I never work out if I can help it. Well, I swim.” She thought, something so fun and necessary wasn’t really working out, was it? “A lot.”

  Fred, of course, had known about the foster children her mother and Sam had been taking in. Some only stayed a week or two while various paperwork plodded through the system. Some only stayed a few hours. And some, like Ellie, had been around for months, because Sam was the only adult male she would tolerate. Ellie had been known to set fires around males who frightened her. Burning to death, she had explained to an ER attending (as well as several social workers), was preferable to Being Touched Like That Again.

  The girl, as terrifying as she was vulnerable, was looking up at her. “I like your hair,” she almost whispered.

  “Thanks.” Fred self-consciously fingered her greenish strands. “Can Jonas come back in?”

  “It’s your house,” Ellie pointed out, holding out her hands in a gesture of helplessness which showed Fred the severe scars crawling up and down the girl’s forearms.

  “Actually, it’s Sam’s house,” Fred corrected her mildly, gnawing on the inside of her lower lip so she wouldn’t shake the biological father’s address out of the kid. “And my mom’s. But if you don’t want him to come back in, he can have his ice cream on the lawn.”

  “I hate youuuuuu,” Jonas’s voice floated in.

  To Fred’s amazement, the solemn, damaged child smiled. “He can come in. As long as you’re here.”

  “As you wish, Ellie.” Sam knelt and gently pulled the little girl around until she was standing in front of him. “But even if Fred wasn’t here, I would protect you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Sam. I have to go. Commercial’s over.” She walked out of the kitchen without another word.

  “What the hell?” Jonas bitched, walking back in while brushing leaves out of his not-so-perfectly coiffed hair. “Do you ever ask yourself why you don’t have a large social circle, Fred? Do you?”

  “Sorry.” She wasn’t. “Had to make a point for the foster kid du jour.”

  “Oh, right. I forgot. But jeez! A little warning next time! Thanks for aiming me at the big pile of leaves.”

  “Welcome,” she said, pretending she had done so on purpose. “Finish your sundae, you slob.”

  “Hey, I’m crawling with leaves and dead bugs and I still look better than you do.”

  This was true, so Fred dismissed the argument and turned to Sam, seeing him with new eyes. Oh, he looked the same. Myopic brown peepers blinking almost constantly, slim build, small potbelly, the perpetual ponytail.

  He’d been there from her earliest memory, and she’d always known he hadn’t been her real father, even though her mother hadn’t told her so until Fred was nearly thirty. For heaven’s sake, Sam panicked in a tide pool, whereas Fred had been breaststroking alongside wild dolphins since she was seven.

  No, Sam was Sam, and for once she was grateful, for she realized how much this gentle man had to offer a child, any child. Certainly he treated her mother like a queen. And not out of fear of what Fred would do to him, either.

  In fact, she was forced to admit to herself, it couldn’t be easy having a mermaid for a stepdaughter, especially one as, uh, passionate as she was.

  “What kind of marks are on her arm?” she asked abruptly, because the last thing she was going to do was go all mushy on Sam of all people. “Kitchen knife?”

  “You should see her back,” Sam said quietly, taking off his glasses and wiping them furiously on his faded Rolling Stones T-shirt. “Box cutter. Her dad works in a liquor warehouse. Likes to keep one on him for emergencies.”

  “File.”

  He blinked at her with watery brown eyes and put the glasses back on. “Sorry?”

  “Her file. Gimme.”
>
  Sam actually smiled. “I was hoping you’d drop by, Fred, and her file is in my office, in your drawer.”

  Your drawer. A Sam-ism for a large file cabinet in the west corner of his office. Three feet deep, four drawers high. Never locked. Meticulously organized. Every drawing, every clay pot, every useless ashtray, every book report, every term paper Fred had come up with, from kindergarten to her doctoral thesis, was in that file cabinet. Sam had always left notes, books for her to read, information he wanted her to have, in the top drawer in the file marked “Fredly Fire.” That’s where Ellie’s file would be. No doubt along with a copy of Seven Highly Effective Habits for Undersea Folk.

  Sam usually put up a bit more of a fuss when it came to violence, or proposed violence, so Fred narrowed her eyes at him and asked, “Isn’t this the part where you preach peace and love?”

  “I’ll leave that, in this case, to your mother. Who is watching cartoons in the living room with Ellie. I’ll go get her.”

  “Hey, Sam.”

  He turned and arched his graying brows.

  “Thanks.” And not just for Ellie. But she wouldn’t—well, couldn’t—get into that now.

  Her stepfather nodded and padded out of the kitchen.

  “Foster parents get files?” Jonas asked, scraping his bowl. “You’ll be able to track down Daddy-o? Maybe pitch him headfirst into an industrial dryer and push Spin? Don’t even think about going without me.”

  “Of course I’m thinking about going without you. Given Ellie’s phobia around grown men, it’s not hard to figure out who the bad guy is. And as a matter of fact, they don’t give very detailed files. You know the term hacker, of course.”

  “Enlighten me, o brilliant fish tail,” Jonas said with a mouth full of strawberry ice cream. “Pretend I’m an ignorant slob just like you.”

  “The term was created for Sam.” Fred was smirking in spite of herself. She’d figured that out on her own by age ten. “He could use a computer as a spyglass before anyone knew it was possible. And he doesn’t take a kid into his house until he knows everything.”