My Online Alien Merfolk is Real novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Heat Lamp

I don't remember crossing the yard.

I remember the gaff in Maya's hands, because she'd pulled it off the boathouse wall and swung it before I got there.

The man in the dry suit went down on one knee with a yell, and the black pole skidded across the boards.

"Don't you touch him," Maya said, in a voice I had never heard from her. "Don't you dare."

The deputy came pounding up the path behind us.

I didn't wait to see the rest.

I dropped to the dock beside Velun and turned him over.

His skin was dry as paper, and his eyes were open, staring at nothing.

His fingers were locked in a stiff claw.

"Velun. Velun, look at me."

His chest moved, a thin shallow flutter.

His gill slits had stopped opening.

"You're okay," I said. "You're okay. I've got you."

I got my arms under his shoulders and dragged him toward the water.

He was heavy as a drowned boat.

Gus appeared out of the dark, wet to the knees from the tug, and took his feet without a word.

Together we swung him off the dock and into the black pool, and he sank.

I went in after him.

The water closed around my chest, cold enough to hurt.

I wrapped both arms around him and held his face above the surface.

"Breathe," I said. "Come on, breathe."

For a long minute nothing happened.

Then the slits in his neck gave a little shudder and opened, and a whole pale line of color ran back into his skin.

His eyes went from blank to gold.

"Sorcha," he said, in a cracked whisper.

I made a sound that wasn't a word and pressed my forehead to his.

By the time the deputy had two men in cuffs and Brent in the back of a patrol car, it was nearly midnight.

Half of Port Harlan stood on my lawn in their slickers, and I had a mug of coffee someone had pressed into my hands.

Nobody asked what was in the pool.

I think they saw the lights, and the black pole, and the way I stood with my back to the boathouse door.

They were my father's people.

One by one, they came up and said something short.

"Sorry for your trouble."

"We'll be around."

"You call if he comes back."

Gus herded the last of them out of the yard at one.

Maya hugged me so hard my spine cracked.

"I'm sleeping in the cottage," she said. "Do not wake me for anything short of a tidal wave."

Then there was only the sound of the water, and the door clicking shut behind my sister.

I went down the path to the boathouse.

Velun was sitting on the ledge in the shallow end, in two feet of water, with his legs folded under him.

He wore my father's trousers, soaked through.

His shoulders hung forward.

"The pole," he said when he saw me. "It stops the gills. It doesn't burn. It is only a long, cold nothing."

"Are you hurt?"

"I'm cold and I'm sore." His mouth twitched. "I think I fought badly."

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