Page 121 of Female Fantasy
The prince of Atlantia is letting me go.
“I love you,” he whispers.
The strength of his kiss sings in the oxygen now flowingthrough my blood, resurrecting my brain and paying a visit to my heart. The water around me grows taut, a quiet vibration that no human could ever hear.
But I can.
I should not be able to.
But even in death, I can.
Ryke lets out a quiet yelp, backing away just as lightning strikes from above, where my spirit lingers. The water all around my slain body begins to gurgle like a pot beginning to boil, blurring his view of me. I feel the electricity answer the call of my blood, dancing with the oxygen and the energy from Ryke’s kiss. Together, they dance down my body, repairing my bones one by one. My skin melts and hardens and twists until I am as tough as leather: scales. An elegant, muscular new appendage extends from my once-human spine, a straw-like yellow, as golden as Ryke’s eyes and as potent as the sun.
For I am the sun, ready to rise again.
Somewhere in between the land of the living and the resting place of the departed, where I sit and watch, entranced, another being appears. A female. Tall and strong, with a mind of steel and energy unlike anything I have ever felt before. Though I cannot see her, I feel her take my spirit in her arms. She lightly traces my face with her fingers, allows her breath to fill my lungs. A faint drumming sound begins.
My own heart, learning to beat once more.
“Light of my light, blood of my blood,” Amphitrite says, her voice overpowering the noise. “You carry the line. The line cannot die. The line lives on in you.”
Her power kisses my own, then disappears.
And when I awake, sitting upright with a sudden breath, it is not as a mere human.
But as a mer.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I sit on the sidewalk, my ankles crossed and a blanket around my shivering shoulders, as two cops haul Clarisse and Thomas into a police car. Clarisse is still blabbering about the gum stuck in her hair, her cheeks streaked with melted mascara and her red lipstick still smeared all over her teeth. Thomas still has his eyes closed, no longer able to rub his temples, thanks to the silver handcuffs around his wrists.
Serves him right.
Let’s see how he likes restraints.
Nico is across the street with his arms around his mother, talking her down. When she saw on the news that her son had been involved in an armed assault a block away from her apartment, she came running.
In front of me, a third officer struggles to shackle Little Lester, who is screaming in a foreign language, a slightlyunhinged gleam in his eyes. Every few seconds, he points at me and lets out a string of profanities as the cop tries to wrestle him into submission.
His partner turns to me and groans. “Just got off the phone with FBI Director Simon Fischer. Apparently, the feds have been trying to track these three down for months. Those two have been going from town to town all over the Northeast, swindling innocent people and tracking down bounties. Apparently this one”—he indicates the mobster—“got into a bit of trouble in Yorktown. Owes the Rudaj Organization an ungodly amount of money.”
I raise an eyebrow. “The Rudaj Organization?”
“Albanian Mafia. Traffickers—arms, drugs, girls. You name it. This guy appears to have severely pissed off one of the bosses by screwing him out of a considerable payday. They tracked him down a few months back, and he blackmailed these two idiots into helping him collect from your boyfriend to pay them off. And when that didn’t work…”
I swallow the lump forming in my throat. “Let me guess. He figured kidnapping and ransom might do the trick?”
The cop snaps his fingers. “Bingo. And those two bozos have done a pretty terrible job of covering their tracks. We have footage of them pulling what appears to be a toy gun on a cashier. And they keep leaving empty liquor bottles with their prints in the cars they ditch. I assume the alcohol might be a little bit to blame for their slippery fingers. But for amateur con artists, they sure do move fast. And when criminals cross state lines as quickly as they’ve been doing, it leaves our peoplewith a lot of paperwork and a nightmare headache. Hence why it’s taken so long for the feds to nail ’em.” He shudders, shaking his head. “I knew there was a reason I avoided casinos. Sad, sad places. Always been afraid of unhappy endings.”
“Me too!” I say, choking on a laugh.
The cop leans forward and high-fives me. “Well, we can’t thank you enough. If your friends hadn’t called this in, we’d still be chasing these three around in circles.”
My cheeks flush with pride at the memory of my Salty Girls coming to my rescue.
My very own Upper Shoal.
My dolphin horde.
