Page 15 of Midnight Waters

The door closed on them and when the silence returned, the sound of my thrumming heartbeat filled the air.

Mallory put her hands on her hips. “You’ve got some decent self-defence skills there, Maeve.”

I shrugged. “They get me by.”

Mainland Europe was a much riskier place than Dusk. I had been sure to go to regular combat classes just to keep myself safe.

“Well, if you can stop all your family behaving quite as rashly as your father, I have hope for the Arrowoods after all,” she said.

Dad shook, his jaw clenching. “I know you think that this is some petty squabble, Gretchen, but we have lost many lives in this fight. We can’t just end it.”

“And yet end it you should,” Mallory said. “Wouldn’t that save more lives? Wouldn’t it have saved Ray’s?”

I rubbed my temples to calm the headache brewing there.

It hadn’t taken long for the feud and the curse to take centre stage in my life again. No wonder I had left.

Mallory raised her finger, and Dad closed his mouth, though his cheeks remained red and his eyes hard.

“I’ve given this speech to both your families too many times,” she said. “And frankly, I didn’t expect to have to give it again, today anyway. All I want to know is, can you retrieve this body for me?”

“Yes,” I said, eager to move the conversation along. “We can.”

“We have the skill set available to us.” Dad thrust his hands into his pockets, all formality gone.

Mallory opened her mouth to speak but a question burned in my throat that I couldn’t leave unanswered.

“Is Ben right, Chief?” I asked. “Do you think body is Tyler Bakewell?”

“At this point it’s too early to say,” she said. “But given that he is the only person on the island who has been missing for twenty-four hours, it’s likely that we will be retrieving Tyler’s body, yes.”

I dropped my hands to my sides, my shoulders sinking. It seemed even less fair than Ray’s death that someone as young as Tyler could lose his life.

“But where is the body, exactly?” Dad asked.

Mallory picked up a pen and twirled it between her fingers. “That’s where we may have a problem. The body is in merfolk territory.”

“Why is that a problem?” I asked.

The merfolk on and around Dusk kept their distance from the “land dwellers” as they referred to us. But there had always been an element of cooperation between us.

What had changed since I left?

“The merfolk have expressed their concerns in the run-up to the new tourist season,” Mallory said. “Tourists have disrespected their boundaries over the past few years. We didn’t take their demands as… seriously as we should have, and they have banned land dwellers from their waters.”

I fiddled with the ends of my hair. “Have they cut off all communication?”

“The only thing we have available to us is the visitor’s boat,” Mallory said.

The boat the merfolk had established to carry land-dweller visitors to and from Magdora, their island off Dusk’s south coast, was under their control. By disallowing boats and Dusk residents into their waters and on their land, they had made themselves clear: only they would decide who could visit them.

It was all I could do not to make a curt remark about the police department’s lack of tact. The merfolk didn’t ask for much, but they drew hard boundaries.

“I’ll see if I can talk to them,” I said.

Mallory raised her head an inch. “You still have a good relationship with them?”

“I mean, it’s been a while, but I hope so.”

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