Page 76 of Midnightsong
Please contact my office or reply to this email to arrange a suitable time for our meeting.
Thank you for your dedicated work with merfolk and I look forward to meeting with you soon.
Sincerely,
Kevin K. Wester
Governor of Washington State
Angie jumped from her seat, covering her mouth as she read the email again. She replied with her schedule for the week, and twenty minutes later, a reply came in to meet in three days after she was done with classes.
She was scheduled to work at the aquarium that evening, so she texted Grayson asking to switch her shift.
Next, she had to talk to Cassia and let her know. With a spring in her step, Angie threw open her nightstand cabinet, her seaflute, and her notepad with her mer contacts.
Despite imploring them to answer, scribbling Cassia and Varin’s Renyuhua names into the seaflute yielded no response from either of them.
She could try Calora, if only she knew the mermaid’s name in Renyuhua. Angie’s heartbeat raced. She needed another plan, needed to get to them.
Her diving outfit peeked out from her closet and she chewed her bottom lip. The palace was too far from the shore, and she would never make it there before she ran out of air.
“Damn it,” she muttered, gripping her scalp, pacing back and forth across her living room and drawing Lulu’s attention.
She had nothing.
Lulu jumped onto one of her heavy-duty wall shelves, knocking over a seaglass sculpture Kaden had made for her. “No, no, no!” She lunged and cupped it in her palms before it crashed to the floor, and she let out a moan of relief.
It was a tiny fishing ship sculpture; from the days they spent watching ships sail by. She ran her fingers over the ridged top, emotions welling in her heart.
She missed his voice, his company, his touch. Thinking of him didn’t cause a sharp stab of pain anymore, and after placing the ship back to its proper place, she put Kaden’s name onto the seaflute at her bedside.
No answer from him either, and she sagged against her bed, her next breath hitching.
The ship gave her an idea. She didn’t know if any dive shops could take her out at the last minute at five p.m., but she might get lucky with shops that were open for night dives.
A search through her web browser yielded five in the area and she called all of them until one twenty minutes away from her was able to take her out on a private boat.
Angie confirmed and grabbed her dive bag and drysuit. She rushed to her car and floored it to their meeting site.
First, Cassia and Varin. Then she had to try Kaden again when she got home.
“Thank you so much for taking me last minute,” Angie told the ship captain. He drove them out ten miles west, thirty minutes on his pontoon boat, and they bobbed with the waves. The palace wouldn’t be far from here. “You don’t have to wait for me. I’ll get back on my own.”
She didn’t want him to wait because she didn’t know how long she would be. Cassia and Varin would surely send an available sentinel to escort her back once they heard what she had to say.
“You sure?” The captain set his lips in a thin line under his mustache. “I’m not supposed to leave you here.”
“I’ll pay you extra. I can find my way back on my own.” Angie rifled through her wallet and handed him sixty dollars in twenty-dollar bills, the amount of cash she always carried on her.
“You going mer hunting?” The captain pocketed her money.
“Something like that.”
The captain shrugged. “If, you’re sure. Still, I’ll hang around the area for a while. Just throw up your safety sausage if you need me to come get you, okay?”
“Thank you again.” Angie put her rebreather in her mouth and puffed up her BCD.
With a giant stride, she cracked the sea’s surface and landed among the rocky seas, waves splashing into her mask and temporarily blocking her vision.
