Page 20 of Make Out With A Merman

Her friend is shaking. I lock eyes with him. “Hands on the rim. Now. Don’t move unless I say.”

They listen. Thank the gods, they listen.

I kick hard, using my tail to stabilize, shifting the boat’s angle while assessing the flow.

It’s not natural. It’s notright.It moves like it’s got a mind. Like something underneath is stirring, testing the surface.

It pulses again.

My spine prickles. I grit my teeth and push through it.

Takes everything I’ve got to drag the canoe out of the drag zone. Once it clears the invisible line, the pull vanishes just like that.

Gone.

Like it was never there.

I guide them back, breathing hard, jaw locked so tight I taste blood.

On shore, Callie’s already helping the kids out, calming them with that voice of hers, warm and strong like a campfire on a bad night.

“You okay?” she whispers as I haul myself onto the dock beside her.

“No,” I mutter.

She frowns.

I shake my head. “That wasn’t wind. That wasn’t water physics.”

“You think it’s the rupture?”

“Iknowit is.”

She swallows, quiet now. “How bad?”

I glance out at the lake, where the surface ripples soft and innocent.

“It’s waking up,” I say. “And it’s hungry.”

Later, I’m in the staff lodge with a towel around my neck and the old depth charts spread out on the floor. Julie crouches beside me, reading the notations in quiet horror.

“I thought it was sealed,” she says.

“It was. But seals weaken. Magic isn’t static.”

Callie walks in with a thermos and sets it in front of me without speaking.

I take it, nod once. She doesn’t smile. Doesn’t tease. Just sits down beside me, cross-legged, serious.

“Tell me what we’re looking at,” she says.

I point to the rift zone on the south map. “That’s where it pulled them. It was mild this morning. Barely a grab. But if it spreads”

“we could lose someone,” she finishes.

I nod.

Julie exhales. “What do you need?”

---