“I don’t have an answer for you.” He runs his hands through his hair. “She’s before my time. All I know are stories.”
“Then guess.”
He sits for a moment. Rays of sunlight break through a patch of clouds and illuminate the kitchen. “Power. The throne. It’s what she wanted the first time. You are so very different from the other mermen competing. Perhaps she wants you on her side. You are the only champion with a third of the trident, and you’re of her family.”
I scratch the inside of my elbows, suddenly feeling like she’s in my veins. “Or she’s just after all the champions, and she’s going to take us out one by one.”
“That too.”
Suddenly my mom walks into the kitchen and pulls us into bonecrushing hugs. Her red hair gets all over my face, and I breathe her scents in deeply—powder and roses and somehow always something of the sea, like she never left.
“Bruises.” I groan. “They hurt.”
“We’ve been so worried.” Her bright turquoise eyes search my face like I just fell off the monkey bars and make me feel selfconscious in front of Kurt.
For a long time we don’t say anything else.
She turns on the TV in the kitchen. The morning news is reporting a dead boy on the beach this morning. The footage is dark and grainy. They interview a homeless woman who used the pay phone when she saw the kids screaming on the beach. The reporter comes back on. Despite her neat lady suit, the reporter has hair that’s messed up like she got a call and rolled out of bed. She’s standing on the Manhattan side of a bridge.
It reminds me of something Frederik said. The news lady glances back at the remnants of a second crime scene. Another boy was found in the Hudson by the South Street Seaport yesterday. The wounds are consistent with shark bites, and local fishermen are trying to catch the rogue shark blamed for the attacks.
“Rogue shark?” My mother sucks her teeth. “It’s muddy Hudson water, not Cape Cod.”
Then the weather girl comes on and announces bright and sunny skies for the rest of the week until a storm on Thursday. My stomach heaves. Another storm?
I hit the mute button.
“There’ve been more of them,” Mom says. “Always boys. Your dad’s been using red tacks for where bodies have turned up. The blue tacks are for you.”
I look at the map of the world and the smaller one of just New York. Clusters of red along the Coney Island coast. Ryan’s house in Sea Breeze. Even up by the Bronx. I add another red and then a blue to the Key West part of Florida where I estimate the Vanishing Cove might be. The news shifts back to the bridge and I think of my dream. Frederik standing under it.
“Mom, do you know the other landlocked that live in the city?”
“I’m not landlocked, Tristan.” She frowns. “I chose this life.”
“Okay, but you got stripped of your tail. Even if it was your choice, you still can’t go back to court. Isn’t that what the landlocked are?”
“Why are you asking me this?”
Kurt says, “What Tristan means is, has there been a time when you’ve come across the banished?”
That’s not what Tristan means, but Kurt and my mom seem to have a “court” bond that I’ll never understand.
“It’s just something my friend Frederik said this morning.” I don’t know why she’s getting so mad. “He said all he knew of our people were the landlocked and the old man under the bridge. Does that mean anything to you?”
“I don’t like the idea of you befriending vampires.” She starts making breakfast. Cracking eggs open and tossing out the shells. She clucks her tongue when she misses the garbage.
I clean it up for her. “Ma, Frederik’s a cool vampire.”
“Doesn’t change that they like to drink mermaids dry. Either way, I wonder if he means Gregorious.”
“The historian?” Kurt asks. “I thought he was dead.”
Mom pinches her chin thoughtfully. “If he’s alive, he must be six hundred by now.”
I raise my hand, regretting the pain that shoots up my arm. “Share with the class?”
“The last time Toliss came to the shore,” Mom says, grinding tons of sea salt into the pan, “not the time that I stayed, but around the ’40s, one of our historians stayed on land. He wanted to record our histories here. I tried to find him when I was pregnant with