Page 30 of Sink or Swim

The gruff, burly man from earlier steps forward and claps his hand on my mate’s shoulder. I snarl at him by instinct, and he lifts his hands into the air in surrender as he takes a few steps back. “Territorial girl you got there, Nick.”

Nick chuckles as he shakes his head. “Yeah. Oona, these are friends, remember. They’re helping. Please be … nice.”

I narrow my eyes and thrash my tail. The boy-men eye it warily. “What is ‘nice?’” Nick hasn’t used that word before, I don’t think.

Nick smirks at me and says, “I’ll tell you later. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

NICK

Oona swims beside our boat as we high-tail it back to the docks. We manage to evade Jonah’s men, but we have a few close calls, and it’s hard convincing my eight-foot girlfriend that no, she can’t take on twenty armed guards all by herself.

The woman thinks she’s an invulnerable superhero, and that worries me. I have a lot of faith in her, but not even she is impervious to a hailstorm of bullets. She already got hit by one earlier, and while she can heal herself easily enough, we don’t want to press our luck.

We sneak her into the back of our headquarters, and Maurice immediately calls a group meeting in the rec room.

Oona stares at the pinball machines in one of the corners and startles when the flashing lights get a little too flashy for her.

“Oona, come sit with me,” I say, and pat the sofa cushion. Oona reluctantly tears herself away from the pinball machines and sits down next to me. I take her webbed claws into my hands and rub the back of her knuckles with my thumb.

“Maurice is your leader,” Oona says in her tongue, and I can’t help but chuckle at the flatness in her tone as she stares up at Maurice.

“Yeah. Maurice is our leader,” I say in her tongue. “And my friend.”

Oona glances behind the sofa at Kyle, Dwight, and Reese sitting at the bar. “And the hatchlings? What are they? His children?”

Reese sniffles into his rum and Coke while Dwight lifts a brow and asks, “What did she just say? Come on, man. Translate!”

I turn around to look at the three and say, “She thinks you’re hatchlings and Maurice is your dad.”

Maurice, who is mid-sip of his beer, chokes so hard it comes out in a spray. Kyle and the others immediately protest. Loudly.

“I’m twenty-two!” Kyle retorts. “C’mon, lady! I can grow a beard!”

“And I have a retirement fund,” Dwight says, shaking his head. “That’s cold.”

I laugh so hard tears stream from my eyes, and Oona, who hasn’t seen me laugh this hard before, knits her brows in concern. Leaning forward, I kiss her on the lips to reassure her. “It’s okay, sweetheart, I’m not in pain. It’s just … you took them down a few pegs, I think.”

“I have no idea what that means, and I don’t know what a peg is,” she mutters.

Now that we’re back in Sugardove City, I’ll be able to get her an actual thesaurus to help her with her vocabulary. We also have the internet, so maybe language classes won’t be so difficult anymore.

Maurice dabs at his mouth, then leans against the wall and says, “All right, all right. That’s enough. We need to talk about what we learned. First of all, congratulations to Nick and Oona. I’m glad that you weren’t talking out of your ass and making shit up.”

I raise my brows. “Wait, you thought I was lying about Oona?”

“Dude,” Dwight mutters. “You were talking about a lagoon creature.”

“I’m not a creature. I am a person,” Oona growls. Dwight flinches and goes deathly pale.

“He didn’t mean that,” Reese interjects. “You’re lovely, Oona.”

I lift one of Oona’s hands to my lips and brush them against her cool skin. “It’s okay, love.”

Maurice clears his throat. “Okay, that was a jest. No need for any bloodshed. I didn’t think Nick was actually lying,” he says, and there’s a twinkle in his eye as he looks at me. “But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, I suppose. And thank you, Oona, for offing our nastiest competition. They’ll be scrambling for months trying to pull their heads out of their asses. And we destroyed their machines in the process, so they won’t be recovering any time soon.”

“Yeah, what was that all about?” Kyle asks before I can. I’ve been wondering about the alligators in the tubes since we found them. “They were experimenting on gators?”

“I’m not entirely sure, but the gators must have something to do with their Stim production,” Maurice says as he strokes his mustache. “I don’t know. We’ll probably learn more in the coming weeks. For now, we can take pleasure in knowing we fucked them over.”

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