Page 29 of Midnightsong
“Ah, good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming.” He adjusted the lapel microphone on his collar. “I know it’s Saturday, you’re all supposed to be off, sleeping off your hangovers from last night. Or maybe you’d rather be playing video games or hanging out with your friends. Not stuck here with me.” Chuckles rumbled across the room. “But I think you will all find this as fascinating as I did. Look at this.” Dr. Williams stepped aside, waving his hand up and down in front of his projector screen.
Angie leaned in for a closer glance. What exactly did he want them to see?
It was a point-of-view of something or someone swimming through the ocean.
A diver?
“That, my friends, is a mermaid.” He put his hands on his hips, his voice booming and triumphant, grinning so wide that Angie could see his gums.
“Don’t tell me he made us get out of bed to see a mermaid,” Leo said under his breath.
“Leo, come on, just because you’re not interested doesn’t mean no one else is.” Reesa rolled her eyes, her attention rapt on the mermaid and Dr. Williams.
Angie swallowed hard as the point-of-view made a one-eighty, and the telltale caudal fins of a mer brushed past the camera. She sucked in a breath, darting her eyes to Reesa, Leo, and Dr. Williams.
A faculty member, who Angie recognized as her Marine Conservation professor, raised her hand. “Dr. Williams, how exactly did you get hold of a mermaid? They are elusive, no?”
Angie wanted to know the same thing.
“I spoke with my colleagues from SMOSA and local fisheries, and they assisted me with locating a mermaid. I only put a tracker on her and have been watching her movements for the past few days. Apparently—” He paused when the video panned down the mermaid’s copper tail, where she had an open wound.
“—Victim of a shark attack. But look at her the next day.” Dr. Williams’ voice was breathy and held an air of wonder as he skipped to the next video. Still from the mermaid’s point-of-view, she had turned to look at her tail in the same area where the wound was the day before.
“Her tail is completely intact. No scarring. No blood. No signs that the wound was ever there. A deep wound like this would take weeks to heal, but her? One hundred percent healed in a day.”
A collective gasp rang out through the audience. Angie thought to the healers that healed this mermaid’s wound, drifting momentarily to Kaden. With any luck they could help him with his odd condition too. He swore it was nothing and he needed rest, but the last time she saw him, he looked, well, like what she would look like if she were coming down with an illness. She had to ask him again the next time she talked to him because she couldn’t shake the niggling feeling there was something he wasn’t telling her.
“But wait, there’s more.” Dr. Williams skipped to his next video clip. This one, the mermaid had surfaced on land and was sitting at an unknown location. The professor ran the clip for thirty more seconds and paused it. “Look. They can breathe on landandthe sea. Their skin and senses must adapt so quickly.”
A pause as he scanned the room.
“I want to research how they heal wounds so quickly. This could be a breakthrough for the medical community.” He was fully facing them now, his stance wide, chest puffed out, stretching the buttons on his white dress shirt. His dark brown eyes were wild behind his glasses. “Miracles could be performed!”
Murmurs of ‘incredible’ and ‘intriguing’ rumbled through the faculty section, and ‘wow’ and ‘so cool’ through the students.
Angie raised her hand and Dr. Williams called on her. “How do you plan to do that? Are you going to capture this mermaid?” She willed him to say no. The mermaid deserved to be free, not taken into human custody for study.
To her relief, Dr. Williams shook his head. “No need.” He turned off the projector and strode to the center of the room where he rolled out a worktable with something wrapped in a black bag atop it and turned on the projectors at the side of the room.
Angie’s trapezius muscles throbbed and she hadn’t realized she was holding her shoulders so close to her ears. The bag was large and she estimated it to be longer than a tall human.
It can’t be.
Her heart dropped into her work clogs and she sat back in her chair when Dr. Williams unzipped the bag and rolled the creature out: a merman with short, dark hair and a copper tail. The lifemate of the mermaid in the video. Dr. Williams was going to dissect him. Angie was going to be sick.
“Excuse me, Ty, did the fisheries and SMOSA get you this one too? Where are they finding these mer?” A different professor asked.
“He was with the mermaid when I went out with some of my colleagues to the fishery. The merman was already dead, beached, and the mermaid was with him. Probably the same shark attacked them both if I had to guess by the wound on him—” Dr. Williams moved his camera down to the merman’s side where there was a jagged, semicircular wound. “And on her. Looks like she might have escaped and came back for him when we found her.”
Or they had been attacked and chased by a shark to the surface and the merman died trying to protect his lifemate. Angie let out a hard sigh and closed her eyes, slumping in her chair.
“And your colleagues were okay with you taking both mer? They didn’t want to study it for themselves?” the first female professor piped up.
“Of course they did. But my chief of staff asked me to head this research study if I disclose my findings to them. As for the mermaid, her video feed is broadcast to my department, so they see what she’s doing twenty-four-seven.”
It didn’t surprise Angie that they treated the mer like animals to be followed and studied. Again, the thought came to her to take it on herself and educate her classmates and professors. The mere thought of outing herself as a friend of the mers, and all the attention that would come with it, made her limbs shake. Worse was the thought of being in the public eye and speaking on her experiences, dredging up painful memories of the horrors she was subject to and witnessed.
No, she wasn’t ready for that. She pushed the notion from her mind.
