Page 5

W e scrambled noiselessly to our feet—and peg leg—but in the shock of Morgan’s vindication, we’d all completely forgotten where the hell to put ourselves. Morgan grabbed Eli’s sleeve and shoved him toward a length of embankment thick with brittle grass where Eli and Emmett quickly hid themselves. He then produced a small bottle from his pocket, uncorked it with his teeth, and dumped its contents over both his gloves.

I knew that acid smell like I knew the taste of sugar. In ironwork, chloroform was a solvent we used sparingly, but Morgan had just saturated his gloves with enough to polish a floor—or knock out a horse.

He whapped me in the chest. Get down! he mouthed.

I dove behind the log and watched. Sonia was suddenly much closer, pale as a ghost with both hands cupped over her ears, terror in the set of her trembling lips, and a Matthias-sized lump in front of her legs. Below them, cutting a V-shaped path through the water, was the moonlit outline of a head.

No puede ser, I thought for all of a split second before my imagination fired off, flipping between visions of a rosy fair-haired maiden and a scaly sea snake with sharklike rows of teeth—until the shadow in the water turned back toward the boat and my head emptied. Two wet, lustrous arms slid out of the surf and gripped a cleat to bring the boat in broadside, revealing a steely back and long, dark waves of hair flowing down it like spilled paint. My breath caught at the sight.

And the thing heard me.

I shoved Matthias’s scarf into my mouth, but it was too late; the figure went still and cocked its ear in my direction. Morgan glared at me like maybe I should get a face full of chloroform.

“NOW!” Matthias’s shout fuzzed through my earplugs.

The net flew out over the water, and Matthias vaulted over the hull, falling on the creature in a giant splash. Eli, Emmett, and Morgan rushed out of their hiding places to help him while Sonia shrieked, clinging to the dinghy for dear life as it pitched and swayed.

My feet went one way, then back, before I realized I had no idea what to do. The men were all wrestling with it, falling over each other and spraying water like alley cats caught in an open hydrant, every sound blunted by the little wads of leather and cotton I’d stuffed in my ears. Suddenly unconcerned with keeping quiet, Morgan roared, “Matthias, hold it down! I can’t get my glove under its nose!”

“Too... damn... slippery!” came Matthias’s strained reply.

With a yelp, Eli fell backward into the water—just zipped out of view like he’d got sucked into a whirlpool.

“Eli!” howled Emmett. “Something’s got him!”

“Benny, for Christ’s sake, do something helpful!” Morgan shouted.

I shook out of my stupor and bungled my way into the shallows, lungs closing and shins screaming at getting unceremoniously baptized in ice water. I could hardly see anything but flying spray, fishnet, and quick flashes of whatever slick and shining thing was writhing inside it. Emmett had ditched wrangling the net to jump on his brother’s flailing feet, so when I saw an arm whip out of the water, I lunged for it and yanked.

No sooner had Eli’s head resurfaced than I felt something snake around my ankle. In a blink, my own foot went out, and I flopped backward onto the pebbled bank, river water rushing up my chest like a frosty curtain.

A hand shot out from between my knees. With the force of a hammer, it made a fist in my coat and dragged the rest of itself onto my chest, soaking the last dry fibers of my clothes and filling my nose with brine. Ropes of long, dark hair draped like seaweed over glistening gray shoulders and the curve of breasts.

?Una sirena!

Its free hand grabbed my bandaged one so firmly the rest of me went limp with agony. My mouth fell open in a shout that couldn’t squeeze past my asthma.

That’s when I heard it: a word, both song and shriek, that blared in my mind like the bells of Visitation Church.

?SáLVALO! it cried.

“S-save it?” I gasped.

An audible crack halted the mayhem. The creature jolted, then slumped face-first against my chest, leaving me an unobstructed view of the derringer’s smoking barrel glinting in the moonlight. Morgan held it, wild-eyed, wet, and heaving in his green suit.

“D-Dios m-misericordioso ...”

Something else was happening.

La sirena ’s body. It was melting . In seconds, it withered and fizzed down until everything from my coat to the bandage on my hand was coated in pearly froth. I didn’t move in case the stuff might make me dissolve like baking soda in vinegar, but then, just as quickly, a gentle tide rose up my chest and carried the foam away.

For a fleeting moment, it seemed everything had gone still except my shaking. I whipped my head around, searching for eyes that had seen what I’d just seen, but every face was hidden, backlit by moonlight.

Except one.

My blood cooled to river water as I realized I’d locked gazes with the thing in the net . Its face was carved in an expression that mirrored my own undiluted shock—eyes wide with horror, mouth open mid-gasp.

Por Dios , it looked human .

The next sound blasted past our earplugs at a volume that sent us cowering where we stood. It came from the creature, an almost musical wail that ripped from its throat and echoed back from every corner of the East River—and deadened the instant Morgan’s glove closed over its nose and mouth.

There was more splashing. Grunts from Matthias. Sonia’s muffled sobs. Then quiet.

We all stood in mute shock; even Sam Morgan looked like a man who, for all his planning, sure as hell hadn’t planned for this.

“Mr. Morgan! Mr. Morgan!” Madam Navya’s high voice pierced the stillness. “Up the road! A light approaches!”

Morgan’s head snapped up. He threw off his gloves, dug the plugs out of his ears, and flung them into the river. “Matthias, get Sonia and stow the boat! Emmett, Eli, Benny—help me move this thing to the tank!”

“M-Matthias,” whimpered Sonia, circling her arms around his neck so he could swing her carefully onto the embankment.

Body shaking apart and chest humming like a busted accordion, I staggered on feet I couldn’t feel toward Morgan, who was roughly maneuvering his hands around the beast’s limp torso in the net.

I’d gotten only the briefest glimpse before Morgan had knocked it out. The way it looked at me—I had to know if my fear had filled in human features where there weren’t any, but the netting was hiding its face. When its head rolled backward, I slipped an arm behind its neck and touched warm skin. How could anything with so little insulation survive a winter out here without dying from exposure, much less generate its own heat?

“Guys...” Eli, pale and gaping, held up a long, glittering tail. Santa María , the body must have been nine feet long, head to fin!

“Stop gawking at it and move!” Morgan jerked his head toward the tank, and as one, we shuffled our soaked and shivering bodies over the rough sand.

“Benny, climb up there and open the hatch,” Morgan ordered, shifting the weight I’d been carrying onto himself. I let go and hastily climbed the rungs, crawled over to open the lattice hatch, then lowered halfway back down to resume my position at the creature’s head.

We hauled it off the ground. It was so heavy and awkward, I thought it made a lot more sense for the strongman to be up here instead of me, but one good pull and three pushes from below sent me onto my back with its dripping head in my lap. The face was colorless in the moonlight and still mostly hidden under hair, but something dark and syrupy dribbling across its forehead made my gut twist.

“Mr. Morgan,” I whisper-wheezed, “I think it’s bleeding!”

Morgan’s face poked out from behind Emmett and Eli on their way up the rungs. “It’s still breathing, isn’t it?”

I checked. Its chest neither rose nor fell.

“I— I can’t tell...”

“It’ll be fine,” he said. “Just get it in the tank!”

We rushed to rearrange the ropes, rolling the body up in the net so we could unroll it into the water. As I did, the hair fell away from its face...

Against its shimmering skin was a pair of thick eyebrows—one of them split and bleeding into its hairline—knitted together in humanlike misery. Long eyelashes rested on either side of a straight nose that sloped toward dark gunmetal lips parted over a set of squared-off teeth. Farther down, I couldn’t find gills or other sharklike traits. No breasts like la sirena . Just a lean, muscled torso that blended into scales at the hips.

Every hair on my neck stood at attention. “Un tritón,” I whispered.

A merman.

“Everything copacetic, kid?” Eli’s worried voice nudged me out of my trance. “You look like the gravity train’s about to take you downtown.”

“Nah, no, I’m fine...”

I blew on my freezing hands and repositioned myself for the final move. As soon as the tail was in, we shifted onto our stomachs and brought the rest of the netting down as far as we could until Morgan gave the signal to let go. The merman splashed in sideways, spraying our kneecaps with water.

“There’ll be no line for the bath tonight, right, Em?” Eli joked, for his twin’s obvious benefit. Emmett looked like someone had hit him with a hundred volts of the creeps.

We resituated the tarp over the tank, offering me another opportunity to look through the bars. Blood ribboned from the merman’s forehead like smoke from an ember, the sinewy arms and barbed fins motionless while its long hair swirled then settled gently around its shoulders. The creature’s chest had just risen in a breath when I finally understood something.

Sálvalo. That didn’t mean “save it.”

It meant “save him .”

Morgan ordered Matthias to drive ahead with Eli and Emmett in the motorcar. Back by the coach, Madam Navya paced in a tiny circle, muttering in a language I’d never heard before. Sonia greeted me on the ground with a towel and a blanket, which she wrapped around my shoulders. I wasn’t sure if I was grateful to have something dry to hold, or miffed that, foreseeing nothing else, Morgan’s retinue had known how stinking wet we’d all get.

“Take these too. Emmett won’t miss ’em.” Sonia pushed a pair of gray stockings into my hand. “You gotta get out of those shoes before your piggies never live to see another market.”

She was trying valiantly to recover her charm, but the tremor in her voice couldn’t sell it. “Hey.” I tried to meet her eyes. “ Hey . You all right?”

Sonia nodded and smiled at the ground. “Jake as cake.”

In short order, Morgan corralled us into the carriage where I was all too glad to go. Remembering I owed Madam Navya a bit of chivalry after accidentally trying to manhandle her earlier, I offered her my hand and helped her up the stepstool into the seat beside Sam, then sat in the back next to Sonia. The Fraülein charitably looked away as my boots came loose and exposed all the holes I hadn’t the skill to darn.

With a snap of the whip, the horses moved and Morgan started laughing—softly at first, then explosively. “I did it, I’ve done it!” he bellowed. “Take that , Reynolds, you highfalutin louse!”

“Dash Mr. Reynolds,” Madam Navya snapped angrily from behind her tightly clasped fingers. “What do you think our fate will be in this life—or the next, for that matter—now that we have stolen a god from the river?”

“Aw, quit it, will ya?” Sonia’s shaking hands dropped her glove. “You’re spookin’ the hell outta me!”

I turned and squinted past the endgate through the gap in the tarp where, incredibly, a merman drifted in the silt. It had turned around, lending me a partial view of its lower half: dark, striped, and glinting like textured chrome, with a sharp crest of fin that began at the small of its back and ended where the crease of knees might be if God had given it legs.

Then again, if the madam was right, maybe God as I knew Him had had nothing to do with it.

“Shame about the mermaid,” Morgan went on as if no one had said anything at all. “We might have had two of them on display for fifty cents a head. But this will do splendidly! I never would have believed it. How many decades of my life had I wasted studying the beasts only to find out the moon was the key all along?”

Was he talking to us or himself? “Key to what, sir?”

Morgan chuckled and snapped the reins. “Fame, wealth, the longevity of my hard-won enterprise.” Another snap. “Redemption.”

I didn’t know what to say. My vision was still branded with the afterimage of the merman’s horrorstruck face.

América, la tierra de oportunidad, I thought. A homeland for “Schemers and Dreamers” who dared to change their fates. But if this was what it took for Morgan to change his, then I wasn’t sure I had what it took to change mine.