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My eyes struggled to open when I came to. I must have been knocked out before I hit the ground because all I remembered from the last time I was awake was falling.

Now, wherever we were, light surrounded us, and for a moment there I thought it was sunlight. For a moment, I thought we were outside and the tunnel wasn’t going to collapse on our heads, and my family would never have to wonder where I ended up, whether I was dead or alive while my body rotted underground in some unknown location in Verenthia.

I was wrong.

It wasn’t sunlight that was out there behind my lids. It was plants that glowed, and fish that glowed, and crystal that glowed all around me.

“Nilah, wake up!”

Rune’s voice pierced through the air and filled my ears, and I sat up in time to see him getting dragged over the rocky surface where I’d woken up by…

Water.

I blinked a few times. Tendrils made out of water were wrapped around both his legs, and they were dragging him toward the nearest pool barely three feet away.

My instincts reacted. I moved forward, landing on the ground on my stomach, and I gripped his outstretched hand.

I had no idea what the hell was happening, but I was not going to let fucking water kill Rune now.

But when I gripped his hands, I wasn’t strong enough to pull him free, or even hold him in place. Instead, the water pulled both of us.

Rune looked up at me, eyes dark and mouth open, and he looked just as terrified as he had been when the tunnel was about to fall on our heads.

“Run at the first chance you get. Don’t hesitate, don’t wait for me—just run .”

Then he slipped into the water.

A scream ripped out of me before I could help it. Rune let go of my hands as his lit up from within, and his shadows came out and slipped into the water, but they faded away again quickly. He wasn’t drowning, though—the pool only reached up to his waist when he sat at the bottom of it, and the fish, big and small, all glowing , were eating the shadows that had come out of him.

“What is happening, fuck, what is happening, Rune?!” I grabbed him by the arm and tried to pull him up, but I couldn’t even move him. It was like his ass was glued to the bottom of that pool, which made absolutely no sense to me.

“We’re in a mermaid cavern. Calm down, breathe,” Rune said. “You can’t get me out—save your strength.”

“But…but?—”

“Breathe, Wildcat. Look. ”

So, I did.

I fell on my ass and I finally looked around, but I found it very hard to believe what my eyes were telling me. We were in a cavern with a large pool of water ahead, and eight other, smaller ones around it. Moss and glowing plants grew on the yellowish stone walls and the ceiling, which was as high as that of the tunnels. There was a tiny hole close to the other end of the cavern where a little sunlight slipped through, but that’s it. That’s the only connection this place seemed to have to the outside world—over water, that is.

There were wooden boxes in the distance, full of fish that still glowed even though they weren’t moving, a couple full of plants, and a few full of those crystals we’d seen in that tunnel. Tempest crystals, Rune had called them, and more grew on the rocks, too, at the edges of the smaller pools.

But it was what moved in the biggest one that made me freeze and made my heart stop and my breathing slow down all the way.

Mermaids.

Three mermaids were in the water, swimming slowly, with only the upper half of their faces above the surface. Their big wide eyes were on me and Rune, and they moved fast, so fast, from one side to the other. I could only see their silhouettes through the light of the fish that swam with them.

They had arms. They had fishtails instead of legs.

Mermaids are real.

“Listen to me,” Rune whispered. “Others have already gone to notify their leader. They’ll be here any minute. I will try to distract them, and you can run.”

“No.”

“ Yes. Do you see that hole in the ceiling where the sun is coming through? Try to climb up there. Try to get out.”

“Rune, I’m not going anywhere without you,” I said, eyes on the mermaids, the anticipation killing me.

“You must ,” Rune said. “Listen to me, damn it?—”

“Stop talking,” I said. “I am not leaving without you and that’s the end of it. You said mermaids have elemental powers and can control water.” Which I’d seen firsthand when the water of that pool wrapped around his legs to pull him down. So fucking impossible, but it had happened right in front of my eyes.

“They do. And these fish can consume my magic. It’s not strong enough to kill them,” Rune said.

“Why aren’t they putting me in the water?” I asked, and one of the mermaids swam up, revealed to me her entire face.

Big eyes. Long, pale lips. Her hair must have been blonde though it shone blue because of the lights of the water, and it was sleeked back behind her head. She wore nothing, no shells for a bra, and I could see half her breasts and half her nipples just peeking through the surface.

Slowly, she moved a little closer to the edge, which was possibly ten feet away from us, but I still had the urge to move back.

“Because you’re mortal. They can sense it,” Rune said, and he tried again to release his magic into the pool he sat in, but the fish, more than fifteen of them, simply swam around and ate the shadows.

“What if we just pull them out?” I tried to reach for the fish, but Rune grabbed my wrist.

“Don’t touch the water,” he told me. “Listen to me, Nilah. You have to run. Now, before the leader gets here.”

I swallowed hard because the mermaid was now at the very edge, and she raised her hands and put them on the rocks.

Hands that had gills on the knuckles, and she had these nets between her fingers, too. Her skin had a blueish tint to it, but I couldn’t be sure if that was from the light or the water.

Then one of the other mermaids came to stand beside her, too, and they were both looking at me.

“I’ve never seen a mortal before,” said one, and I swear I’d never heard a more beautiful voice. Soft and melodic and as sweet as a lullaby.

“Wildcat,” Rune whispered, but I was already standing up.

The thing was that this was already a done deal. There was no way I was leaving Rune here and running on my own. It wasn’t going to happen. And we either died here together right now or we survived—both of us. If I could still move and he couldn’t, that meant it was up to me to figure out how we were going to get out.

And, by God, if there was any kind of way out, I was going to find it.

“Hello,” I said to the mermaids and waved my hand.

“She looks so ordinary,” said the other one, and then the third came to join her friends, too.

There they were, mermaids with big eyes and long blonde hair, naked, and with silver fish scales merging into the skin around their ribs. I was dying to see their fishtails, not going to lie, but I was dying to get the hell out of there more.

“M-my name is Nilah,” I said. “It’s actually the name of some kind of water sprites. Like…like mermaids. We, um—we’re just passing through. We didn’t mean to bother you.”

The mermaids looked at one another. Then the one in the middle said, “How did you find our cavern?”

“By accident, I assure you. If you let my friend go?—”

“No,” said the one on the right. “Fae have no right to be in the Mercove without permission. He has violated the law. He must be punished.”

They all had some kind of an accent I couldn’t really put my finger on. Like their tongues weren’t quite used to pronouncing English words all the time.

“I understand that, but I promise we won’t be back if you let us go,” I tried again, though there was a voice in the back of my head that insisted I was wasting breath here.

Then the mermaid on the right said to the others, “I wonder if Ghila will eat her.”

“I wonder if she’ll let us taste her,” said the other.

“I heard mortal flesh tastes better than fenfish.”

Goose bumps erupted all over my body. I had no idea who Ghila was or what the hell fenfish were, but I was not going to sit around and wait for them to eat me.

Slowly, I squatted down near Rune again, and I tried to figure out how I could pull him out of that pool. This whole place was a trap, the cavern big, but we were surrounded by stone walls, and just that small opening on the ceiling to the far left. The hole through which we’d fallen was too far up and too far away from the walls, impossible to reach without rope or something to climb. And there was no rope or any kind of ladder here, just those boxes close to the other side of the big pool, and they were filled with fish and plants and crystals.

“What are they doing here?” I whispered.

“Collecting merchandise to sell. Those plants are highly poisonous, and those feed mermaids. They use the tempest crystals to create steam traps and cook their fish in the water,” Rune said.

“They sell these to other mermaids?” I had no idea why that sounded so strange.

“Mostly,” Rune said. “I can’t break the magic. There’s three of them. They’ll catch me before I can run.”

That was true. If they really had that kind of power over water, and this place was full of water everywhere we looked…

My heart beat loudly in my ears. The mermaids laughed at whatever they were whispering in each other’s ears, and then one of them jumped over the other two. She jumped right over them and revealed to me her tail in all its glory.

It was long. It was silver and purple and blue. It looked very little like in movies back home, and a lot like an actual fish’s, with fins all over, big and small, and spikes that began on her human back and went all the way down to the tip of her fishtail.

My heart continued to beat when she slipped under the water again.

Suddenly I had the conviction that I was not going to be food for mermaids. I was not going to be served to these creatures together with dead fucking fish, cooked or boiled or however they liked their mortal meat.

No.

“The poisonous plants. There,” said Rune, nodding to the other side of the pool across from the boxes against the rocks. The weeds indeed grew on the mossy surface of the rocks, but it wasn’t just moss like I’d thought. There was something else among the weeds, like algae, or maybe this was an altogether different moss from the one that grew on Earth. Either way, those plants grew on them, and they glowed and looked so beautiful it was hard to imagine they were actually poisonous.

“That’s not it,” I told Rune. Because those plants would have to be ingested to work, and I highly doubted I could convince these mermaids to eat it—unless I laced my skin with it and told them to take a bite. Which I was not going to do.

Rune said something else, but I didn’t hear it. All I heard was the beating of my heart that shook me to my core, and the sound of water dripping everywhere, and the sound of those mermaids giggling with one another. My eyes scanned the entire cavern once more—there had to be a way out. We could come out the same way we came in.

“Nilah.”

I looked down at Rune who was looking at the pool, at the fourth mermaid that had popped out of the surface, this one with hair an auburn red and eyes as blue as mine.

“We don’t have much time,” Rune whispered. “What are you thinking?”

As much as I wanted to keep looking at the mermaids—Rune told me that that was part of their magic, too, keeping your senses on them so they could better distract you—I didn’t. I looked back at the other end of the pool where they swam.

“WWBD,” I said absentmindedly.

He looked at me, still trying to pull himself up by pushing against the edge of the pool, but the water wouldn’t let him move at all.

“What?”

“What would Betty do,” I whispered.

“Betty? Your friend Betty?”

Aw, he remembered!

I nodded. “And the answer is always to raise hell .”

Rune looked so perfectly confused. He had no clue what the hell I was talking about, and that was okay.

“I’m going to try something, Rune. It might not work. There’s a good chance that I made it up the first few times, but it’s the best chance we got.”

He shook his head. “What are you talking about?”

I looked down at him one last time and the urge to kiss him was so strong that I did it. I leaned in and kissed him on the forehead quickly, then stood up. “I hope for both our sakes that it works. If it doesn’t, I’ll see you in heaven, Mr. Moody.”

“Nilah, what are you doing?!” he called, but I continued to walk ahead, and strangely I was calm. Maybe because I knew that this either worked or didn’t, and if I wasn’t free at the end, I’d be dead. It would be over for real. I didn’t allow myself to think about home or my family or Rune—anything at all. I just hid my hands behind my back and moved closer to the mermaids.

God help me, I’m really doing this…

“You know, we have stories about you back in Nerith,” I said, while Rune called for me to get back, to get behind him, but I didn’t even turn my head.

“The Little Mermaid is actually one of my favorite stories, and her name is Ariel and she has a green fishtail and red hair—like yours,” I told the auburn-haired one.

They looked at one another and smiled, swam a little closer.

“Do tell us more, mortal,” one of the others said.

“What is it like in Nerith? What are the mermaids like there? How powerful are they?”

“How beautiful?”

“Very,” I said and closed my eyes, fisted my hands and called for some part of me, some kind of a warmth that I had only felt a handful of times and I still didn’t know how to remember it correctly. It had been there every time I was especially terrified or out of control after my nightmares. It had been there a couple of days ago when I was in that forest, watching Rune about to get killed by the incubi.

Well, now the mermaids were going to do the same. They were going to kill him and eat me if I didn’t do something about it.

“They’re very, very beautiful…”

The mermaids were intrigued. They continued to ask me questions, all at the same time.

I said whatever came to my mind first with barely any focus.

And while I spoke, something inside me clicked just like it had the first time I went through the Aetherway. Just like that morning in the dark forest. I felt the heat spreading in the center of my chest, and I felt it when it moved to my shoulders, down my arms.

Please be real, please be real, please be real, I prayed with all my being, and the voices of the mermaids, the lights of the caverns—none of it existed for me anymore. I no longer spoke, even though they continued to ask me questions.

All I needed was to make things float—especially those boxes at the edge of the pool. Especially the three full of tempest crystals that could burn underwater .

I pushed against the heat, pushed it harder down my arms and to my hands, and I willed it to spread out of me in the only way I knew how to do it—by imagining it. I imagined my hands were glowing with golden light, and I imagined magic coming out of them, picking everything up, throwing it to the sides. Making a mess, an even bigger mess than it did in my room when I was all alone. Making a mess out of those mermaids, too.

I imagined it—and then I heard the screams.

My eyes opened. My hands were raised to my sides and my palms were lit from within. One of the mermaids, the first one who had approached me, was trying to get back in the water because she was floating over the surface of the pool.

She was floating like she was being pulled out by some invisible force, and then two of her friends reached for her hands and pulled her down hard. The water splashed when she went under—and she wasn’t the only one.

Rocks and glowing flowers and drops of water were in the air that hummed with raw energy. My hands were shaking and this light inside me didn’t want to be contained anymore, and I suddenly had no idea if I was stopping it from coming out of me or if I was trying to get it to make things explode.

No idea—but the boxes full of dead fish and plants and crystals were in the air, four feet high, moving to the sides. A couple more feet, and they’d be right over the water.

A couple more feet and all those crystals would fall in the pool and those mermaids would no longer be able to stop us.

Then I felt the water.

Human beings don’t actually have a specific sense to feel water. Our skins detect changes in temperature, pressure, and texture, and that’s how we’re able to tell that we’re touching water. Just some fact we learned in school that came to my mind, which seemed to be working in slow motion just now. Very slow motion as I looked down at my legs and saw these tentacles made of water trying to wrap themselves around my boots, but they failed to do so for whatever reason. They failed to wrap all around me like they’d done with Rune because something stopped them and pushed them back, broke their form and turned them into splatters—before they reformed into those tentacles to try again.

Then I saw the silhouettes—all those big silhouettes in the water of the pool barely four feet away from where I was standing. Mermaids—a lot of mermaids—and they were coming for me.

They were coming for us.

My heart skipped a long beat. My eyes moved to the boxes again, floating in the air together with more rocks now, bigger rocks, and the cavern was groaning. The ground was shaking a little bit, too—but the boxes were right over the edge of the pool. Right over it.

The surface of the water broke. More mermaids—and mermen—than I could count were hissing at me, showing me their teeth—all sharp as razors. My instincts moved me back. Fear squeezed my neck, and suddenly all the heat that had gathered in my body exploded out of my skin.

It felt like it tore me wide open when it did, and I screamed, but it wasn’t pain I felt. Just release of pressure. A lot of fucking pressure.

The ground shook once more. The world seemed to freeze in front of my eyes for a split second.

Then everything started to move again, and the mermaids hissed, and the rocks fell.

The boxes fell on the edge of the pool, on the rocks. Wood and dead fish and plants exploded in the air on all sides. Almost an entire box full of tempest crystals fell in the water, and that’s when everything changed.

The screeching sound that was coming from the mermaids filled my ears. They were screaming in pain, and the water was turning red, and the surface was suddenly full of dead fish that were just popping up on the surface while the water bubbled. Boiled.

“Nilah!”

I turned around with my eyes wide open, unsure of whether to scream again, and I found Rune had made it out of that pool. He was out and he was struggling to stand up, to get to me faster.

The ground shook harder, and pieces of rock were falling everywhere around me. I couldn’t move—forget running. The big pool had turned completely red, not with blood but with those crystals. They’d become red as soon as they hit the water, and they were still red as they floated around the dead fish on the surface, and the water continued to boil. To steam. To suffocate me little by little.

Something grabbed me from behind.

I found myself upside down before I knew I had voice to scream with. I did scream again, I thought, but it made no difference.

Because I blew it. I ruined everything. I overdid it, and now this cavern was going to fall on us just like that tunnel had been about to, and we were going to die. We were going to die under these rocks, and nobody would even know it. Nobody would ever find my body or Rune’s.

“Hold on. I got you, just hold onto me, Wildcat. Please hold on.”

My arms moved—Rune wrapped them around his own neck. Then he pulled me up and wrapped my legs around his hips, too, begged me to hold on to him again. By some miracle, my body obeyed. My limbs locked around him and then he was moving. He was climbing.

Sunlight on my face.

It must have been a dream, but God, it felt so good. The warmth, a different kind, felt incredible on my skin, but it was gone too soon. I tried to blink my eyes, to see where Rune was taking us, why he was bothering to even try. We were already dead, weren’t we? The entire cavern was going to fall on us. There was nowhere to go.

I tried to focus but it was impossible. My mind was halfway gone, and my senses no longer responded properly.

“Just a little more. Just a little more…”

Rune’s voice remained in my ears when the darkness pulled me under all the way.