Salt & Venom (Blood, Bloom, & Water Book 2) Read online

  “See her in safely?” asked Calder, and I realized he wasn’t talking to me.

  With a splash, he dove into the moat, and I felt safe to turn around again, catching sight of the way his whole body seemed to glow as he slipped by.

  “Sorry to ask the champion this, but do you mind grabbing the prince’s things?”

  I whipped around, almost forgetting Llyr was there. His arms were stuffed to the brim with the others’ clothes.

  “Oh, yeah, sure,” I said, scrambling to pick up the haphazard pile of clothing Calder had left behind. “This doesn’t seem to be a very convenient way of doing things,” I pointed out, falling into place behind Llyr as he led me back into the garage. My eyes kept watering and blinking as they tried adjusting to the dimmer, normal light inside the garage.

  “Yeah,” said Llyr, putting a palm against an electronic pad beside the door. “Some of us just keep a change of clothes in the cars, but then we can’t bring our phones.” He nudged a phone atop the pile with his nose as the door swung inward widely. “Waterproof cases help, but tails don’t really have pockets.”

  He stepped inside and I went to follow, but I gasped the moment my foot touched down inside the short, glass walkway.

  Below my feet were endless depths of water, some brown fish swimming past like a dull and lifeless aquarium display. But more alarmingly was the fact that my foot had just been submerged ankle-deep in cold, cold water.

  Chapter Ten

  “I think you have a leak,” I said, my silver-studded footwear not exactly suited for this kind of submersion, even if they were—technically—boots.

  “Oh, sorry about that.” Llyr looked over his shoulder and stood there, totally unperturbed by the water covering his feet as he carried laundry down a spooky aquatic glass tunnel, like that was the most normal thing in the world. The light from the UV lamps outside brightened the glass considerably, warping it like some kind of aquarium funhouse. “Should have warned you. I’m so used to it.” He lifted one of his feet up, the droplets pattering one after another back into the sheen of water below. He had a pair of those mesh aquatic shoes on. Cheater.

  “Let me guess,” I said, taking one exaggerated step after another, cringing as the water splashed up the calves of my pants, “a deterrent against vampires?”

  “That, and we just like the feel of water.” He reached the other side of the walkway and waited for me to catch up before placing his palm on another security sensor to get the door to unlock. Sheesh.

  “I take it Calder can’t have a lot of human friends swing by.” My boots echoed with a clang below me. At the end of the glass walkway right before the second door was a metal panel. I stomped on it, the sound muted beneath the water, but nothing happened.

  “None of us do,” he said. “But that doesn’t really matter. We can hang with friends at school—and besides, family is all that really matters.”

  That’s a little creepy. “Wait. ‘None of you’?” I lifted one foot and then the other onto a welcoming mat awaiting us on the other side of the door, which was blessedly dry. My foot tingled at the thought of Calder, and I quickly focused on other things—puppies, onions, feet, feet—to ensure my tail didn’t make a surprise appearance.

  “Yes, we all live here.” Llyr was placing his stack of other people’s clothing on a table next to a washing machine, sliding the extra aquatic shoes he carried on the tiled floor beneath the table and then neatly folding the rest before depositing them in baskets. “All the merfolk. Our numbers have greatly diminished in the past few centuries, but… Living together is more convenient.”

  Unceremoniously dropping Calder’s stack on the table beside Llyr, I kicked off my boots, peeling off my drenched socks as I took in the place. The entryway with two washing machines and two dryers was long and fairly cramped, but the light—a much more welcoming, softer light than the ones blaring out there—at the end of the narrow room drew my attention. I padded over on wet feet, realizing the light was blue and shimmering, like the reflection of an indoor pool lit from down below in a dark room.

  That was exactly what I found in the grand entryway of the room, a dual staircase meeting up in a big balcony overlooking a giant indoor pool.

  “Who was your contractor for this?” I wondered aloud.

  An echoing call of “whoo!” drew my attention, followed by a splash. Calder popped his head out of the pool, followed by Bay and Cascade. Laguna was already floating languidly on her back, her eyes closed and her hands clasped over her abdomen—her breasts bare but just barely covered with her frizzy, red hair.

  Add that to the strip tease outside and it was clear this family was very comfortable around one another.

  “Queen Nerida’s grandfather had it built.” Llyr made me jump, sneaking up behind me like that. “And it was mostly done by family. Many of our parents are contractors by trade.”

  Mermen and mermaid construction workers. Vampire movers. Sure, sure.

  “And that goes to the basement?” I pointed at the pool where a grand, empty space ought to have been. I leaned backward to get a better look at the other side of the nearest staircase and saw it led off to a kitchen that jutted out from the house at a perpendicular angle.

  “Yup,” answered Llyr. “And so does that door”—he pointed to a nondescript door on one wall—“because we need to be able to access the furnace and the sump pump and all that good stuff, which is blocked off from the pool by a seven-inches-thick glass wall.”

  “Spoken like the child of a carpenter,” I said, at a loss for what else to say.

  Cascade swam over to the edge of the pool and clutched the side, a strand of dark, wet hair pasted across her forehead somehow making her even prettier. “Come on in,” she cooed, her long eyelashes fluttering. “The water’s divine.”

  My feet were moving before I could even blink.

  “Knock it off, cuz.” Bay swam up behind her and clonked her unceremoniously on the head. “That’s our champion you’re messing with.”

  I stopped cold. That siren call thing again? Ugh. What was the point of that? Maybe they could lure the vampires to their watery dooms.

  “It wasn’t on purpose,” she said, rubbing the top of her head and sending Bay a withering glare.

  “Oh, good, you’re all home!”

  Nerida walked out of the kitchen, dressed to the nines in a blouse and dress pants, reminding me somewhat of Noelle. She had on an impeccably blemish-free apron over her outfit, though, and I didn’t think Noelle would have bothered with that.

  She smiled. “You all look to be in one piece… Did it go well?”

  The sound of splashing water behind me made me spin on my heel, forgetting for a second that that way lay a bunch of nude people. Calder was lifting himself off the edge of the pool, the top portion of his merman tail shimmering until the entire thing was out of the water, morphing quickly back into human legs.

  I spun back to face Nerida, the sloshing water behind me indicating that more of the group was following suit.

  “We didn’t win anything,” I said since Nerida seemed to be waiting for an answer and no one else was saying anything. But for the pit-pat of bare feet on the floor and the movement of the water, the place had gone awfully quiet, the laughter and murmuring suddenly gone.

  “Well, I’d call an unexpected battle you escaped unscathed a win, dear.” Nerida stepped forward, her arm outstretched and slipping behind my back like we were old friends. My skin crawled just slightly at the touch as she guided me toward the kitchen. “I know this conflict all comes down to you,” she said. Beyond the kitchen was a dining hall with an incredibly long table—and at least two dozen women, men, and little kids sitting down at it, digging into serving bowls of food. Their soft chatter came into focus now that we were closer, ringing out along the rounded ceilings. “But we don’t expect you to do everything alone.” She guided me past the kitchen and into an empty seat at the foot of the table. The room went silent as all eyes turned to me, someone�
�s spoon halfway to his mouth, another slowly putting her glass back down on the blue tablecloth.

  “Hey!” shouted one man abruptly, his arms reaching outward. “Mija, did you kick some vampire butt today?”

  Cascade slid into the room from behind me, her hair damp, but her clothes back in place. She kissed her father atop the head as she took an empty seat beside him. Laguna and Llyr and then Bay also spoke in quiet tones to people I assumed to be their own parents before taking the few remaining empty seats beside them.

  Now that I thought about it, if there were this many merfolk, why on Earth were they sending their teens out to help me? Why not send the whole cavalry, or at least the fittest among those who weren’t, technically, still kids? My eyes flitted over the adults of the group. There were no bodybuilders among them or anything, but they seemed capable, some lean, some more filled out. They looked like any old parents.

  Actually, that explained quite a lot. My mom and dad would do a lot for their kids, but I couldn’t picture them taking on vampires. They wouldn’t be physically capable of it.

  Calder walked in quietly and took a chair beside mine, Nerida standing behind the last remaining empty one across from him on my other side. “We celebrate the small victories here,” she said loudly, her voice carrying across the room. She picked up her glass. The liquid inside was a deep blue, almost like it had been dyed with food coloring to achieve a tropical, crystal color. “After so many years of setbacks and waiting for this moment… I thank the next generation, the ones who will lead our people into a new, better life”—she looked pointedly at Calder then and he shirked under her gaze, his fingers cupping his own glass that had been filled with the bright blue liquid—“for their part in seeing to our plans for the future.”

  Murmurs throughout the table echoed in the grand space, and some of the adults broke out into a weird burbling call, like some kind of lovebird—or probably more appropriately, a dolphin. Glasses clinked and Nerida looked down at me, her eyes wide, her smile practically pasted on. I lifted up my own bright blue goblet, already poured and waiting for me like they’d been expecting a guest, and clinked it against hers before taking a sip.

  It tasted sweet. Like nectar. With such a salty, salty tang. I gagged before I could stop myself.

  “Now let’s get back to eating,” said Nerida, setting her beverage back on the table with a clunk. She pulled out her chair to sit down and started scooping some kind of dark green leafy casserole onto my plate. “Eat up, dear,” she said. I picked up a fork and poked at it.

  “Kelp,” said Calder under his breath.

  My eyebrow shot up as I watched him dig into his, his lips pinched. Somehow, kelp and fish—there were several blackened trout on platters, picked at and dug into, leaving behind a morbid collection of bones and flesh—made sense for merfolk, but I’d seen him dig into junk food of the more bovine variety.

  “Do you mind if I use your phone?” I asked Calder then after my third or fourth bite of the stuff. I was getting used to it—it actually had a nice, cranberry-like flavor that kicked in during the aftertaste. “I left mine at Paisley’s.” I sighed. Paisley or one of the guys might notice it, but now that I was going to Central, it would be a bigger pain to get it back.

  “Oh, I already called your mother, dear,” said Nerida. I stared at her. Since when did she know my mom’s number? Or figure out that was who I was going to call—since Orin had brainwashed both Mom and Dad into accepting me living with Mom full-time until all this was over? “I told her you were spending the night here with my niece, Laguna, and her friend, Cascade, two young women eager to show you around at Central on your first day.” She intertwined her fingers, her pearly white teeth sparkling as she looked down the table at those gathered around us. I followed her gaze and took note of whom I presumed to be Laguna and Llyr’s parents, the tanned bald man with a short, golden beard and the pale redhead with a pixie cut, her freckles even more pronounced than her children’s. Glancing back and forth from them to Nerida, I pegged the man for her brother—or Calder’s father’s.

  “I…” I looked to Calder for help, but he was gulping down his drink now, the mesmerizing blue liquid disappearing at an unearthly pace. I snapped back to Nerida. “I didn’t know you even knew my mom.”

  “Well, I made a point of getting to know her,” she said. She picked her cloth napkin off her lap and dabbed at the corners of her lips with it. “I met her at that store she works at—the wholesale one?” Her face seemed to blanch. “And I took her out for coffee during her break, introducing myself as her daughter’s boyfriend’s mother and telling her all the good things she needed to know about Central.”

  “O… kay,” I said, my mind running wild over the amount of time she’d have had to get this done. Orin had convinced Mom and Dad to give Calder a chance, whatever their thoughts about his pantslessness had been. But even so, this didn’t feel right. Mom barely had friends, and now Nerida was acting all cozy with her behind my back?

  “The kids will take you to Central for your first day tomorrow morning,” she said, laying the napkin beside her practically scraped-clean plate. “Then, if you insist on returning to your mother’s after that, we can provide a rotating cover of guards to keep an eye on you from the street.”

  “If I insist…?” I set my fork down, the sound louder than I’d intended in the cavernous vastness of the space. The steadily moving current of the river behind the property—visible through the wide glass door at the back of the room—distracted me for a moment, making me lose my train of thought.

  “Well, of course. Just look around you.” Nerida swept her arms around the table as other members of the table started to get up, stacking plates of those around them—other than the group that had arrived with me, who were filling up on their last servings before those plates disappeared as well. “This place is a veritable vampire-proof fortress,” she said, settling back into her chair as casually as if she’d just proclaimed her surroundings the most natural kind of home in the world. “You’ll be safe here. Protected. Which reminds me. We’ll scan your palm into our security system tonight so you can access the locks.” She smiled broadly, threading her fingers together. “The champion of water has a home here.”

  I played with my fork, sneaking a glance at Calder, but he was digging his own into a piece of fish, entirely focused on the task, ever the doormat for his domineering mother.

  “Thanks,” I said, clearing my throat. “But I… I have a life to live,” I said. Nerida’s lips puckered. “And in any case—this conflict is never going to be over if I just run and hide.” I nodded, convincing myself as much as her. “We need a plan.” My eyes darted over the crowd of merfolk-posing-as-humans. “And I think I have an idea.”

  Chapter Eleven

  We’d have a “war council” tonight.

  After my first day of school. And I insisted I was going home after this time.

  After hearing my idea, Nerida had complimented me for my bravery, my leadership, but had said she needed to discuss it with her fellow merfolk, and besides, it had been a long day and many of them had work tomorrow. She’d gathered her own plate and mine as she’d stood, instructing Calder to finish up his last few bites so she could add his to her stack. Blindsided, I hadn’t gotten out more than a few more words before she had joined a number of the other merfolk in the kitchen, laughing and holding conversations with them as they went to work rinsing and loading the dishes, a hostess at a house party unconcerned with the bloodsucking vampires hovering near her door.

  Calder had nodded at me, mumbling something that might have been “sorry” again, and then retreated out the kitchen with Bay and Llyr. Cascade had been talkative enough to plaster over the knowing sense of unease that had me feeling on edge, glancing every which way and expecting to find a pale man in sunglasses. Her dad had done the palm-scan thing for me with a computer and scanner in a little office, which had made me feel like I was part of some high-tech spy thriller. He’d cracked a l
ot of cheesy jokes all the while about me “lending him a hand,” clearly embarrassing Cascade. Afterward, the adults had all hung out in a big living room and the people my age had gone upstairs. The room Cascade shared with Laguna—college-dorm style, though with plenty of space for each to claim a corner—had had room for me on a pull-out couch. I’d stared at Laguna’s glow-in-the-dark seashell stickers on the ceiling over my head as I’d lulled off to sleep, the thundering of my heart so loud, I wondered for a while if I’d ever sleep again.

  In the morning, I’d showered and borrowed a set of Cascade’s clothes. She liked pretty stuff, so apparently I was going to make my first impression at a new school in a puffy blue midriff-bearing blouse that exposed one shoulder and a thin sea-blue cardigan that only buttoned halfway up. Central had lax dress code rules, they told me. I finished off the outfit with a pair of wave-patterned light blue leggings under a navy skirt. No more gothic punk for me, not that I’d ever been overly committed to the look. The makeup was too much of a hassle.

  So sweet and cheery Ivy Sheppard, Central High student, I’d be. It wasn’t like I planned to be at this school for too long anyway.

  Bay was still chewing on a third extra English muffin he’d grabbed from the lavish breakfast buffet that had been available to us in the merfolk dining room as we pulled into Central’s parking lot. I’d hopped in a navy-blue sedan with Cascade, Bay, and Llyr, leaving poor Laguna to sit beside Calder in his truck.

  My hands felt empty without my phone. I felt itchy in someone else’s clothes. Lost as I took in our surroundings.

  “Have you been here before?” asked Llyr as the last of the car doors shut behind me.

  “To Central?” I took a good, long look at the place, the people shuffling inside, the small groups milling about in front of the doors, their breath visible as their mouths moved. Even with rising temperatures by day’s end, it was the time of year where the mornings were super cold. “Maybe once or twice for an away game? But over there.” I nodded to the state-of-the-art baseball diamond with bleachers and a boarded-up concession stand. The guys were annoyed that Central had gotten the budget for such an upgrade our freshman year.