onna! Lonna!”
My loud whispers rose over the sea breeze as we made our way along the wet rocks of the dark beach.
After a couple hours of flying, the five of us had finally crossed into the kingdom of Adelaide. Now we were searching its shores for the only acquaintance I thought might be able to guide us where we needed to go. The ever elusive but lovably frank Lonna Langard—one of the princesses of the undersea kingdom of Mer.
Searching a coastline for a single mermaid was a difficult task. But anything was easier than the uncomfortable journey we’d taken to get here.
The flight over had been rough in two senses. For one, I was currently in a substantial amount of pain. Two, I’d been traveling with four people who were super mad at me.
SJ and I were already in a weird place. Daniel was extremely ticked off that I had preferred to plunge to my doom rather than accept his help. And Blue and Jason were upset that I’d done this after they’d explicitly lectured me about how we needed to trust each other.
The two of them were also peeved about how I’d reacted when they’d come to my aid—showing aggravation instead of gratitude.
I got why that would irritate them. But they’d misunderstood my reaction. I was grateful that they’d been there. If they hadn’t, I could have been killed. But that understanding aside, they’d abandoned the train’s engine room without being certain that the magic hunters wouldn’t attack again. And worse, in coming to my aid they’d put themselves in danger. If anything had happened to them while trying to protect me, I’d never forgive myself.
The way I saw it, if my weakness caused me to get hurt, that was my problem. I didn’t want my friends risking their lives for me. I cared too much about them to be okay with that. Furthermore, I was just as adamant about retaining my dignity in their eyes.
How was I supposed to prove to them that I could be strong if they never gave me the chance? No. This was not how it was supposed to happen. I needed to become a hero on my own.
I was either going to come out of this saga a stronger archetype by my own devices, or succumb to the damsel proclivities of my old princess archetype in the same way. They couldn’t save me, and I didn’t want them to.
As a result of my friends’ frustrations, none of them had been in the mood to chitchat on our way over here. None of them had wanted to ride with me either. They’d paired up on the other two Pegasi, leaving me to fly Sadie solo.
This hurt, but not enough to make me regret my actions. They could be mad at me all they wanted. In spite of the close calls, if I had to do it all over again my choices would remain the same.
I would still instruct Blue and Jason to stay and guard the engine room because it was for the good of the other people on the train. I would still be mad at my friends for coming to save me because it put them in the crosshairs of a fight that was mine to contend with. And above all else, I would still not trust Daniel to catch me. That was definitely one leap of faith I had not been ready to take and likely never would be.
It was true he’d caught me. He didn’t let me fall, and that mattered. But there was that moment when I’d been falling that he’d paused. He didn’t come after me right away. The hesitation only lasted a few seconds, but it was there. And that mattered too.
Our group had landed in the backyard of Adelaide Castle. It was dark and in the earliest hours of the morning, so no one saw us. From there I’d steered us toward the back of the palace where the dumpsters were. It was as secluded now as it had been when I’d jumped out that bathroom window on the night of Adelaide’s ball almost six weeks ago.
The castle stable was nearby. Not knowing how long we’d be gone, we snuck our Pegasi inside where they’d have hay, water, and warmth until we returned.
We took the path I’d taken to the beach on the night of the ball, avoiding the beam of the lighthouse and the attention of the one guard half-consciously patrolling the area. Now we were on the sand searching for the mermaid princess I’d met here months ago.
I’d hoped it wouldn’t be too hard to find her. I realized there was plenty of sea and plenty of fish in it. But at the time of our encounter, Lonna had pointed out a rock formation that she liked to frequent when it wasn’t occupied by enamored Mer-people.
“Lonna,” I called out again as we drew near the rock in question. The others and I carefully made our way across a span of slippery stones that stretched into the ocean. “Lonna!”
At last I saw her. She was facing the other direction and leaning against the wet rock taking in the moonlight like a sunbather absorbing the summer’s warmth.
“Lonna,” I repeated.
She still didn’t hear me.
“Lonna!” I snapped louder.
“Awwg!”
Lonna spun around and half ducked beneath the water—only leaving her enormous purple eyes, blonde widow’s peak, and the tops of her fingernails visible as she eyed us behind the safety of her rock.
“It’s okay. It’s me,” I said softly as I stepped closer and moved into the moonlight.
Lonna propped herself up a little higher. She smiled with delight when she recognized my face. “Hey, Poofy Dress! I remember you. Uh . . . what was your name? Carly?”
“Crisa.”
“Right, right. Long time no see.” She tucked her wet blonde hair behind her ears then noticed the others. “Who’re your friends?”
“Lonna, meet SJ, Blue, Jason, and Daniel. SJ, Blue, Jason, Daniel, meet Lonna.”
Introductions out of the way, I crouched down low so Lonna and I were at eye level. “So, Lonna. I sort of need a favor. It’s about the holes in the In and Out Spell.”
Lonna raised her eyebrows. “Girl, did my dramatic hair toss and swim away the last time we hung out not get the message across? I may like breaking rules, but this is serious business. Mer-people are not supposed to talk to you, or any two-leggers, about the holes.”
“Yeah, I remember. But if memory serves, you also said that if I wanted answers I had to find them for myself. And I’m here to tell you that I did. I know that the holes in the In and Out Spell are wormholes that lead to other lands.”
Lonna tilted her head in surprise. “How did you figure that out?”
I considered telling her about Harry the White Rabbit, but for the sake of time I decided there was a better, faster way to get the point across.
“With this.” I held up Harry’s Hole Tracker, which was strapped to my wrist. “It’s a Hole Tracker. It locates holes that appear in the In and Out Spell. Earlier today it showed me one off this coast. It’s gone now, but it looks like another one has opened underneath the ocean about fifty miles out. Do you think you could get us to these coordinates?”
I pushed a small button on the side of the watch where the third hand pointed to a tiny glowing circle that had turned black and started to pulse. In response (as I’d discovered from fiddling with it during our earlier carriage ride) a projection of light emanated from the watch, displaying a viridescent map. In the area off Adelaide’s coast there were degrees of longitude and latitude beside a black, swirling dot.
Lonna took my right wrist in her hand and pulled me closer, studying the map. She furrowed her brow as she calculated something. Eventually she shrugged. “Yeah, I can get you there. Let’s do it.”
“Hang on,” SJ said, seeming surprised. “You are a princess of Mer and humans are not supposed to have access to waters that extend into your territory. You are just going to take us to this location without so much as asking why we want to go there?”
Lonna blinked, also surprised. She glanced at me and tilted her chin toward SJ. “What’s her deal?”
“She likes rules,” I explained.
“Then we have fundamentally different values,” Lonna huffed. She tucked another strand of hair behind her ear then took a couple of casual strokes backwards. “Crisa, is your mission important?”
“Yes.”
“Will it bring any harm to or inconvenience my people?”
“No.”
“Then we’re good. Well, there might be one slight problem, actually. In order to get to that spot you’ll need to hold your breath underwater for like two hours. I don’t suppose any of you can do that, can you?”
I grinned. “Now that you mention it . . .”
The last time I’d been swimming was when we’d been trapped inside that watery deathtrap at Fairy Godmother Headquarters. Needless to say this was a marked improvement.
We’d been jettisoning through the ocean at a quick and easy pace for a while now thanks to Lonna. She’d been using her mermaid powers to control the currents to carry us the whole way. We didn’t even have to kick; we just floated along as we were guided by the forceful but gently moving funnel Lonna had conjured around us.
Apparently mermaids were at their core another form of magical creature. Each had a little bit of magic inside that sustained a single power. Just like me, but without all the Fairy Godmother backstory and restriction, or the risk of being pursued by magic hunters on the surface.
Lonna’s power was controlling currents, and I couldn’t have been more grateful. The private, powerful rush of water was moving us at an extremely fast speed, but we barely felt a thing inside it. That was lucky for me. The injuries I’d accumulated within the last twenty-four hours would’ve by no means allowed me to swim on my own for two hours. Traveling like this I hardly had to exert any effort at all. The caressing waters almost felt therapeutic.
I clutched my tender ribcage—worried by the thought of the fully realized pain that would return the second we left Lonna’s gentle waters.
Trying to take my mind off it, I reminded myself of the positives. The most prominent of which being that we were all still breathing.
The saltwater taffy we’d gotten from the Valley of Edible Enchantments was working perfectly. One solid bite was all it took for the magic to kick in. The moment we’d ingested the taffy, a set of gills had appeared on our necks. They were shimmering and turquoise—making it look like we were suffering from some sort of bejeweled rash. The skin between our fingers, too, had changed. It had turned sparkling turquoise and stretched—giving us webbed digits.
The final side effect of the taffy’s magic was the flux in eye color. The whites of our eyes had been washed out with a shade of pale blue, and our pupils were now rimmed with glowing rings of rose gold.
It was a weird combination of side effects, but we couldn’t argue with the results. We’d been breathing underwater for a long time. We even had plenty of taffy leftover in case we wanted to make journeying to oceanic holes in the In and Out Spell a regular venture.
For the majority of the swim I had been keeping my distance from Daniel and my friends. The current allowed plenty of room for it. Still, I decided that being confined together in these waters presented the best opportunity for me to try and smooth things over with Jason and Blue.
Lonna was leading our group about twenty or thirty nautical feet ahead with the pair of them slightly behind her. The wormhole we were after—as represented by the black circle on my Hole Tracker—was pulsing more rapidly with each passing minute. I figured this meant we didn’t have much farther to go before arriving at our destination. So I didn’t have much time left to garner up the courage to talk to my friends.
Using my arms and legs, I slowly propelled my body forward within our contained current, my webbed fingers allowing me to cut through the water with ease. Soon enough I reached Blue and Jason. When neither of them acknowledged my presence I decided to just delve right into what I had to say.
“Guys,” I began, “about the train—”
“Just because we can breathe underwater doesn’t mean we have to talk, Crisa,” Blue said, cutting me off.
Ouch.
“Look, I know you’re mad, but I don’t really think—”
“You mean you didn’t really think,” Blue interrupted a second time.
All right, not cool.
I felt my pride begin to overshadow my good intentions, and my mouth opened before my brain could stop it. “Hey, I’m not the one who left the engine room defenseless because of some baseless urge to come to my rescue,” I retorted.
“We’re not the ones who came up with a plan that put ourselves in a risky position where we would inevitably need defending,” Blue shot back.
She huffed indignantly—her wavy hair swishing around her like a clump of seaweed. “Crisa, keeping stuff to yourself and pushing us away on a personal level is one thing. But it’s like I said before, we trust you when it matters. Mainly because we thought we could always count on you to do the smart thing—the right thing—instead of letting your pride interfere with your judgment. But tonight you proved us wrong. You took advantage of our faith in you. You picked your ego over common sense and ended up outnumbered and outmatched on a train roof because of it.
“It was stupid, Crisa; stupid and selfish and totally uncalled for. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, I hate to break it to you, but that thought to come to your rescue was anything but baseless given how many times you’ve almost been killed in the last couple weeks.”
The very pride she was accusing me of flared up inside even more and I narrowed my eyes at her. “I can take care of myself, Blue.”
“Really? Cuz it sure didn’t look that way when you were cornered without a weapon by, like, ten dudes. Or when you were dangling from the side of that train.”
“Agree to disagree.”
“Unbelievable.”
“Hey, what do you want me to do—apologize for the actions of the psychos that put me in those positions?”
“Of course not, Crisa,” Jason interceded. “That’s not what matters here. Look, you needed help. It’s no big deal. That’s why we were there, and that’s why Daniel was there too. But taking advantage of our trust to convince us you didn’t need help, being mad at us when we gave it to you anyway, and then choosing to take your chances with a death drop rather than accept Daniel’s help, that’s just . . . I don’t even know what to call it.”
“Careless, rude, idiotic, ridiculous—”
“Blue, I think she gets it,” Jason interjected.
“Does she?” Blue asked. “Because after she so thoroughly ignored our advice about counting on all of us and trusting Daniel, I’m not sure how much is actually seeping in.”
Bitterness burned in my throat. “If that’s how you feel then maybe you should stop preaching your words of wisdom and just let me make my own decisions when it comes to who I should and shouldn’t trust.”
“Fine,” Blue said flatly. “Trust whoever you want. I don’t care. Better watch out, though. Given that you don’t want to count on any of us, it looks like that’s gonna be a real short list.”
The statement took me off guard, causing me to stop kicking as I had been doing to keep up with them. I was carried backwards by the current, away from Blue and Jason. My hair flowed around me with a mind of its own. I didn’t fight the flow of water, and instead let it take me past Daniel to the very rear of our group where SJ floated.
I started lightly kicking again to keep pace with her. After a time, despite the fact that she and I were not on the greatest terms either, I could not help but vent my frustrations in a desperate attempt to get a bit of understanding from someone.
“Can you believe Blue?” I finally asked her.
SJ looked at me with a puzzled expression. “Given that she told me what you did and, more importantly, what you did not do, yes. I can.”
I rolled my eyes. Why had I even bothered? She was equally disappointed in my behavior as of late and was in no position to offer the kind of consolation I sought.
“At least you got a whole new swell of members to the Crisanta Knight Hate Club,” I said in response.
“Oh, settle down,” SJ replied with an almost amused huff. “We are not exactly having T-shirts made. And anyways, Blue does not hate you. None of us do. She and the others are simply upset by your lack of faith in them. Right now it only seems worse because she is all worked up the way I was initially. Give her a little time and I am sure she will cool off. Plus, look on the bright side—we are underwater, so I imagine doing so will not take very long.”
I blinked as I processed her words. “SJ, did you just make a joke?”
She gave me a small smile. “You looked like you needed it.”
I nodded. “I did. You’re a good friend, you know that?”
“I know.” She shrugged. “And so are Blue, Jason, and Daniel. I only wish you would trust us the way good friends are supposed to.”
“I know, I know,” I replied with a sigh. “I’m working on it.”
“For your sake I certainly hope so. Blue and Jason filled me in on what they told you when you were having dinner earlier. After everything that happened tonight, I hope you see now that they were right. If you do not start really trusting us, then it is only a matter of time before something goes wrong and someone gets more than just their feelings hurt.”
“Don’t be so dramatic, SJ. Everything turned out okay, didn’t it?”
“Through luck, not design,” she said earnestly. “You fell off a train, Crisa. And before that you came close to being killed in many more colorful ways. You are okay; it is true. However, you definitely would not be if it were not for the good fortune of having friends who ignore your foolish wish to handle everything on your own and consistently show up just in time to save you.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” I argued. “I mean is it really so absurd a notion that I didn’t need saving, that I could’ve gotten by without any help?”
“I do not know, Crisa. Why not ask that gigantic rock monster who would have crushed you to dust had I not come to your aid in the Therewolves’ tunnel system?”
I glanced at her. “All right, fine, point taken. Maybe I did need your help then. But don’t try to generalize it into some sort of lifelong pattern. That was one rock monster, one time.”
“And what about tonight?” she asked.
“Okay, yeah, maybe I needed help tonight too.”
“And in Century City, and at Fairy Godmother Headquarters, the Twenty-Three Skidd tournament,” SJ listed. “The Forbidden Forest. Oh, and let us not forget the matter of your wand. If it were not for the previously unknown fact that it floats, and that I spotted its glow on the lake when Daniel and I were trying to catch up with the train, it would be lost forever right now.”
I glanced down at my soaked-through satchel bobbing along at its regular place across my shoulder—my wand securely tucked inside.
I had to admit SJ had been quite the savior for me tonight in regards to my precious weapon. Like she’d said, if it hadn’t been for her, the thing would be lost somewhere in the realm’s largest lake versus safe within my bag. I had been flat-out overjoyed when she’d returned it to me post our train escape—overjoyed and relieved and beyond grateful.
“I appreciate you finding my wand, SJ. You know that I do,” I responded. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if I’d lost it. But all those other times—”
“All those other times were no different,” SJ interrupted. “You needed us then just like you needed us tonight. I am only glad we know better now than to believe you when you insist otherwise.”
My cheeks flushed with a combination of anger and embarrassment. “See, this is exactly why I don’t just ask you guys for help in the first place.”
“Because you are too stubborn to admit that you need it?” SJ countered.
“No, because then you’ll all start thinking that I can’t get by without it, and I can’t have that!”
I realized that my heart was pounding faster and I’d inadvertently been clenching my fists so tightly that my knuckles had turned white. I quickly looked away from SJ. My mouth had just admitted something that neither my brain nor my heart had meant for it to.
“What are you talking about, Crisa?” SJ asked carefully, noticing my withdrawn reaction.
“Never mind. Just forget it.”
“Crisa—” she started to probe.
Thankfully she was kept from finishing the inquisition. Just then our current current was evaporated by a distant Lonna as we came upon our entrancing destination. The wormhole floated in the waters ahead. The thing was as large as a Therewolf’s face, the deepest black possible, and swirled in a clockwise motion, small sparks coming off it like tiny warnings.
“Whoa,” I heard myself say as I swam up to join the others.
“I know, right?” Lonna said, grinning. “Okay, boys and girls, here’s the scoop. I’ve got zero idea where this thing leads. The few Mer-people that have gone through holes in the In and Out Spell don’t exactly come back to tell the tale.”
Lonna pointed at her tailfin and smiled in a self-satisfied sort of way. “And yes, that pun was intended.”
I couldn’t help but smile a bit. This was my kind of mermaid.
“All I do know for certain is that you’ll end up somewhere in the water,” she continued.
“If no one that’s gone through a wormhole has ever come back, how can you know for sure?” asked Blue.
“The holes that appear in Mer are two-way streets,” Lonna explained. “All Mer-people have met fish that accidentally crossed over here through holes in whatever ocean resides on the other side. Some holes appear at regular spots and times, you see. So you can literally just hang out and wait to meet whoever passes through and ask them what their journey was like. I’ve heard you experience a lot of barf-inducing disorientation. So my advice: brace yourselves and think a lot of happy thoughts.”
I floated toward the hole and nodded. “Good tip. But seriously, Lonna, thank you for—”
“Breaking a million and one Mer-people rules by getting you here? Don’t worry.” She winked. “I’m happy to do it. Your fondness for living on the edge is the main reason I like you. In any case, good luck! I hope you guys find what you’re looking for.”
Me too, the voice in my head echoed as the others came beside me and we stared into the depths of the wormhole—this tear in dimensions, worlds, and the consistency of what we’d been taught to believe our entire lives.
“If you don’t die going through there, bring me back a souvenir!” Lonna shouted as she started to swim away.
“Will do!” I called back.
And with that, the five us swam through the hole and into the unknown.