Girls Day Out: A Syrena Legacy Story

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Begin Reading

Preview for
Of Neptune

Girls Day Out

My first attempt at making sushi for Galen sucks. The rice won’t stick to the seaweed in some places, which looks like bald patches. The body of it looks chunky here, skinny there, because I didn’t cut the cucumber thinly enough and the avocado is too mushy to stay in place.

So my California roll resembles a balding snake that swallowed a toy train. And now I have to slice it up into recognizable little wheels and hope Galen believes it’s the same thing that Rachel used to fix him.

I raise the knife, ready to massacre my masterpiece, when I hear the sliding glass door in the living room open behind me. It could be anyone except Galen; he’s in Saturday detention for fighting in school. In his defense, he tried not to brawl. He really did. He bumped into the guy on accident, and the guy took all kinds of offense. I was so proud of how patient Galen was about the whole thing. He didn’t even throw the first punch. But the guy was bent on fighting. And while Galen didn’t start it, he did finish it. With finesse, I might add. Which is why he has not
one
Saturday detention, but
two
. So until four thirty this afternoon, I have to entertain myself.

Rayna pulls up a barstool beside me at the counter, wrapped in one of our many beach towels and dripping salt water on the counter where she reaches for my leftover crab meat. She eyes my creation warily. “It smells right,” she says. “But it looks funny.”

“But you’d still eat it?”

She sniffs. “Is that the fake crab meat?”

“You tell me.”

She pops a piece into her mouth and chews slowly. “It’s fake.”

“Nope. It’s real.”

“Then something’s wrong with it. It’s not fresh.”

By fresh, she means that I didn’t catch it, murder it, and mutilate it myself in the last half hour. I set the knife down, too unsettled to cut into the roll just yet. “It is fresh. I got it from the grocery store.”

“Galen likes fresh.
Real
fresh.”

“Galen is going to eat this, I promise you.” There’s a trick I learned while babysitting Chloe’s younger brother. When he didn’t want to take his medicine, I spooned it into his mouth, then blew in his face, which causes a person to reflexively swallow.

I’m quite certain this tactic works on Triton princes as well.

She raises a doubtful eyebrow.

“What are you doing here anyway? Where’s Toraf?”

She shrugs. “We’re fighting. And I need to use your computer thing.”

I nod toward the couch where my laptop is snuggled into the throw blanket. I’d been doing some online shopping. My favorite new thing is to dress Galen. And he doesn’t even put up much of a fight about it. “What do you need it for?”

Rayna seats herself and opens the laptop while I wrap the roll in foil. I’ll slash it up later. I don’t want to do it in front of know-it-all Rayna, and I’ve lost my confidence right now anyway. Maybe when I open it again, it will miraculously be the sterling example of what a California roll should be. I put it in the fridge and walk over to the couch, plopping down beside her.

“What are you doing?”

She’s all concentration. “I’m looking at the sail dates for the cruise lines.”

Of course. Because fish princesses love to go on cruises. “Okey-dokey, then.”

Rayna turns to me. “You never know what those stupid humans are going to throw overboard.”

“Mostly trash, I’m guessing.”

“Sometimes. But sometimes, it’s treasure. Stuff you wouldn’t believe.”

To Rayna, a plastic comb could be treasure. “Try me.”

She’s getting excited, I can tell. These are the only times Rayna looks truly innocent, when she’s talking about her human treasures. “A lot of times they toss in those gold dollar things. Rachel told me they do that for good luck. Idiots. I have like a million of those or something.” She pecks at the keyboard with one finger, leaning in to scan the screen. “One time someone tossed a ring overboard, a real diamond ring. I showed it to Rachel and she just couldn’t believe someone would do that. She thought maybe they didn’t mean to, but I told her I saw them do it. It was a man and a woman, and they took it off her finger, threw it into the ocean, and laughed when it hit the water.”

“Celebrating a divorce, probably.”

She turns to me. “A what?”

“A divorce. It’s when humans who are married decide they don’t want to be married anymore.”

“An unsealing then.”

“Pretty much.”

She nods, referring back to the computer screen. “So that man must have been her new mate, you think? Oh, here’s one that sailed yesterday from Charleston, going to the Bahamas. We should hit that one.”

“We? Are you inviting me to come along?”

She ignores my question, and points to the screen which now displays a map of the Atlantic Ocean. “According to their itinerary, they should be about … here. We could get there within a few hours if we catch the current.”

I’m already texting Galen, telling him I’ll be home late tonight.

He texts back:
Should I be worried?

Probably, but admitting that would just complicate things, so I just explain:
Going to hunt down cruise ships with Rayna.

Galen isn’t happy:
Toraf is going, right?

Me:
Ummmm…

Galen:
Give me the odds.

This is the short way we use to end a potential argument. He simply asks me what the odds are that I can be swayed to
not
do whatever it is we’re talking about, and if I give him too high a figure, he’ll usually drop it.

I try not to be too pushy, but I don’t see the harm in this outing. I mean, Rayna does this a lot and she always comes back in one piece. Why can’t I just follow along for fun? And everyone knows Galen is just a tad overprotective, which is probably all this is right now.

He doesn’t really
not
want me to go, he would just rather I went with him. Which isn’t an option, because this is the week he chose to bust some guy’s lip open at school.

Me:
I really would like to go
.

Just when I think we might have to actually argue, he gets back to me:
Have fun, angelfish. Be careful.

Sweet
. “What should I bring?” I say, struggling to pull myself up from the butt-gobbling seat cushion. We’ve needed a new couch for a while.

“I’ve been taking a pillow case.”

“I’ll get one from the spare bedroom.” Mom’s not going to love that, but I’ll put it back after. If all goes well.

*   *   *

Rayna swims over to me looking like a U.S. Marine with a fin. Seriously, the only thing she’s missing is heat-seeking missiles and camouflage war paint. She’s got a rope-o’-goodies slung over her shoulder. The first thing I notice is that two homemade spears are secured to it with complicated-looking knots. I wonder if she dipped the tips in lionfish venom like Mom showed her. If so, how does she expect to give me a piggyback ride with lethal weapons dangling everywhere? Um, no. Also, what the crap would we even need those for?

Plus, she’s brought along snorkeling gear. Two sets, complete with masks, snorkels, and flippers all hitched together with rope laced through them. A mermaid. With a snorkel set.

Finally, there’s a freaking dead fish flapping behind her, tied through the tail, staring at me with frozen horror and shock, all mouth open and unblinking eyes and loosely swaying body. Obviously a snack, but for real? A dead fish is going to be slapping my arms every five seconds while we travel? This is where I draw the line. “Eat the fish now or lose it forever.”

“I’m the one swimming for two here. What if I get hungry?”

“I assume that’s what the spears are for.”

She shakes her head. “What if we come across sharks? Boats always throw their chum overboard. It attracts all sorts of predators.”

“Hi. I’m Emma. I have the Gift of Poseidon. Possibly you’ve heard of it?”

Rayna crosses her arms. “Sure, you could just order the sharks away. But wouldn’t you rather spear one?”

“Nope.”

“And if I want to?”

“Hope you can hit a moving target, because I’ll be making sure it swims away. Like, fast.”

Rayna’s whole face puckers into a pout. “This promises to suck.”

I’ve never heard her use the word “suck” before; I wonder if she’s testing it out on me. But I’m not about to teach a chic-fish grammatically correct human slang. Especially not this one. Her screwups are bound to be entertaining if she continues to be all proper with it.

I wait for her to remove the spears and poke them into the sand. Then she sets the dead fish to sea so it can be someone else’s snack. She eyes the snorkel gear. I shake my head. “What’s it for?”

“So we can act undercover. Like we’re snorkeling instead of treasure hunting.”

“We’re in swimsuits. Swimming around. And besides, it’s not illegal to be treasure hunting.”

“This could have been a fun day,” she mutters, removing the rope altogether. “But nooooo. Princess Poseidon is allergic to fun.”

“And Princess Triton is allergic to traveling lightly.” Okay, that was stupid, but I had to say something. “You told me all we needed were pillow cases.”

She turns and shows me her back. I know she wants me to grab her shoulders so we can go, but the way she’s turned away from me is meant as an insult. Like a shunning or something. I latch onto each of her muscular shoulders and squeeze, hoping to at least get a reaction from her. But my hands are too weak, her skin is too thick, and her stubbornness is too strong to solicit any kind of acknowledgement from her.

So we travel in silence, gliding through the water, staying close to the surface. We pass fishing boats and ocean liners, but so far we haven’t come across our cruise ship,
The
Enchantment
(Rayna swears she knows the difference between the bottom of a cruise ship and the belly of a freight ship, especially this particular line of boats). Not that we’re expecting ours anytime soon; Rayna says we’re more than halfway to it, and no other cruising vessels should be in the vicinity. So it should be easy to spot and easy to follow.

This is the first time I’ve realized that treasure hunting might be boring. I mean, we’re not looking for buried chests of gold or scavenging through underwater archaeological tombs. All we’re doing is chasing
The Enchantment
, a cruise line’s version of a floating casino/resort, hoping someone drops something more significant than a flicked cigarette over a balcony railing.

And I told Galen I would be home late for this? I’m missing out on Galen time—for
this
?

What made me think this could be fun? Fan-flipping-tastic.

“There it is,” she says after a while.

I squint into the distance and catch a glimpse of a black object slicing through the surface. “That’s too small,” I say.

I can practically hear her roll her eyes. “It’s still far away from us. But that’s it. See how it’s getting bigger the closer we get?”

“Bigger” is an understatement.
The Enchantment
is ginormous. The specs online said it holds over three thousand passengers. Surely one of them wants to throw something overboard in the next few hours. I try to dismiss the swirl of excitement in my stomach, telling myself that it will most likely be a quarter or a penny or something. They’ll use the Atlantic Ocean for a giant wishing well. “Have you ever thrown anything back?”