this time he’ll shake it.
He takes it.
His hand is cold, like gripping metal left out in snow, and suddenly I’m glad he doesn’t shake my hand more often. He lets go first and I breathe a little easier. Frederik and the Thorne Hill Alliance will help me protect the shore. Outside, the rain seems to have stopped, and the familiar blast of Adaro’s horn whispers its way through the walls.
Frederik clears his throat.
“Oh yeah.” I unzip the pocket of my cargo shorts where I keep the pearl.
The pocket is empty.
I unzip the front pocket of my backpack, and after removing empty candy wrappers, it’s still not there.
Frederik starts pacing with his arms crossed, stopping periodically to flick his unnerving black eyes.
I dig into my cargo pockets again, and in one of them is a tiny piece of paper folded a dozen times. When I open it, I see it’s a drawing. Frederik comes and looks over my shoulder. At the slim shoulders and the slender neck and the face that’s tilted slightly down, like she’s thinking, sighing, lamenting. She’s incredibly familiar, like a dream that I’ve had.
Only it wasn’t a dream; it was a memory. This is the woman I saw when I was going down the well.
“Call Marty,” I say. “Tell him to bring Kurt over here now.”
•••
Kurt, Thalia, and Layla follow a happy-stepping Marty McKay. They proceed carefully into the vampire’s lair. Frederik grumbles. Marty whispers that they’re not used to company and the only things to eat are stallion blood and jalapeño chips.
When Kurt sees the drawing on the table, he snatches it back.
“Where did you get this?”
“My pocket!” I point to him. “You’re wearing my shorts.” Kurt folds the paper until it fits in the closed palm of his fist.
“What have you done, Tristan?”
“I’m getting what Adaro and Jesse won’t give us. Numbers. Now empty your—my—pockets.”
Kurt does as I ask. A few crumpled bills, a stick of gum in its wrapper, a handful of coins, and finally, the Venus pearl. I can hear the sigh of relief in Frederik’s unbreathing body. I wonder what kind of species of flower the pearl will bring. I hold it by the chain over his cold, open palm. It spins in a circle, once, twice, and then it’s in the hands of a new owner.
“Brother?” Thalia places her hand on Kurt’s arm. “What is it?” Kurt has a coin in his hand. He’s turning it over, examining all of the ridges. He looks up at me. “Where did you get this?” “The bank? Actually my dad. Money for food, that sort of thing.” “I guess merpeople don’t really have allowances,” Marty says when he looks at the coin in Kurt’s hand. It’s dull gold with the Roman numeral II stamped on it. Marty seems confused. “You’ve met Comit?” “He said he had a collection of bizarre creatures.” I explain about the sea dragon and Comit’s rescue. “Why?”
Kurt can’t seem to put words together, saying only, “You should’ve mentioned this.”
Marty shakes his head. “That place is bad news. I’ve seen people go down there and never come back out.”
Layla takes the coin from Kurt, who snatches it back. “Madame Mercury isn’t that bad,” Frederik says. “Why would they invite you?”
I cross my hands in a T formation. “Time-out. Who the hell is Madame Mercury? Why are you getting so pissed at me, Kurt? And what’s wrong with me that they wouldn’t invite me somewhere?” Kurt holds out the coin to me. “I’ve found her.”
He says it with so much reverence that I don’t understand what he means until he flips the coin, revealing the engraving of a split-tailed mermaid. The engraving is so precise that she even has minuscule scales along her hips. I think of Kurt making the drawing of the same mermaid that’s taped to our Command Central wall. “That’s the oracle,” I say. “Adaro was right. There is another oracle here.” Idiot, I tell myself. An oracle, right under my nose. “I just threw the coins in my pocket and wrote Comit off as another Coney Island crazy.”
“You guys.” Layla holds her hands out. “It could be coincidence.
Maybe this place just has a mermaid as its mascot.”
Frederik speeds out of the room and then returns with the same coin. It has the number II stamp, but when he flips it over, the picture is not of a mermaid but a sliver of the moon. “This is what the coin normally looks like. Those are a message for you.”