Undead and Underwater (15 page)

The irrepressible Jonas took it well, considering. “You guys are vampires now?” he gasped.

“Not her.” Betsy, jerking her head at Fred. Then she nodded at Madison. “Her mom. And me.”

“Is that why you’re chilly to the touch?” Fred asked. She’d been wondering about it before, but in the ensuing excitement had forgotten. But now she was thinking about Betsy grabbing her wrists in the break room, how cold her grasp was. “You can’t keep a ninety-eight point six body temp anymore?”

“No,” she said with a sad sigh. “I’m always cold. Even in summertime. It’s a terrible burden.”

“Try swimming the Arctic Ocean in January sometime,” Fred snapped back, unmoved.

“Ooooh,” Jonas said, leaning back in his chair. “Is there gonna be a mermaid-vampire smackdown?”

“There already was,” Madison said, picking up her drink, looking at it, and putting it down once more. Fred estimated she’d drank about twenty milliliters at most. A waste of a daiquiri. “It was rilly horrible.”

“Whaaaaaaat?” Jonas’s chair came forward with a
thunk
. “And I missed it? Dammit! I knew I should have tracked you down the first time you blew off my text. The event of the century and I was stuck on the Red Line! So who won?”

“I think it was a tie. Then Fred stripped naked and swam in the Giant Ocean Tank and proved she was a mermaid because Betsy never watches TV.”

“And
where
was I? Son of a bitch!” Jonas smacked himself on the forehead, like a man vigorously checking himself for fever. “Okay, from the top. Seriously, guys. Start over. I wanna hear everything. We’re wasting valuable time, time that could be spent making me feel like I was there and didn’t miss the awesomest evening out ever.”

And because Fred and Betsy had the same thought, though they didn’t know it (
I still have questions and Madison still hasn’t told us everything
), the mermaid and the vampire thought that was a fine plan.

“Does he do this a lot?” the vampire asked. Fred noticed that, as she’d sucked all the liquid from her smoothie, she’d begun eyeing Madison’s all-but-untouched drink.
Hmmm. Unnatural thirst? How often does she have to suck down blood? And when did she last do so? Hmmm.
“Just plop himself in the middle of something and assume he belongs?”

“Since we were seven.” Fred sighed.

Betsy’s smile widened. “Yeah. I’ve got one of those, too.” She didn’t elaborate, but unless the vampire was an Oscar-caliber actress, she was looking at Jonas with genuine fondness, and for that, Fred could almost forgive the mind snatch.

CHAPTER

NINE

“So I came to town for the Tall Ships thing—”

Fred winced.
Don’t do it. Don’t. Don’t. She might finally be ready to tell the whole thing. At last you’ll have answers. So keep your piehole shut tight.

“—but, like, they were late or whatever, or I was early, because—”

Jonas frowned at her. “Don’t, Fred.”

“—the ships weren’t there.”

“Of course not!” Fred had held herself in as long as humanly (or Undersea Folk-ey) possible. vzyl “That’s in the summer, as anyone within five hundred miles of Boston knows, it’s
always
in the summer. Who comes for Tall Ships in the spring?”

“Okay, I can see how that would annoy a local,” Betsy conceded, “but come on, are you gonna interrupt after every sentence? How many hours have you allotted to story time? I could be hanging out with my insane husband right this minute.”

Which was worse, being reprimanded by a thieving vampire, being confronted with Madison’s essential stupidity, realizing that Jonas would rip into her snobbery when he could get her alone, or knowing the vampire was correct? “Nnngghh. Go on. Sorry.”

“And also, I thought maybe mermaids would be interested in tall ships, and maybe I could meet a couple more. You, um, you said you’d introduce me to some, but you’ve been super busy.”

I will not feel guilty. I will not feel guilty. I will not feel guilty for politely blowing her off.

“And also, I was hoping to meet some people that I’d met online, doing the PR stuff for the NEA and for you.”

“For me?”

“Fred doesn’t even do her own PR stuff; she wouldn’t stick you with it,” Jonas agreed.

“Except I did,” Fred said slowly, remembering.

Jonas threw up his hands. “Well,
great.
”

“Madison offered to catch the e-mails for NEA’s ‘Ask a Mermaid’ page.” Just saying the name of the thing out loud made her want to break things. “The volume. You wouldn’t believe the volume of stupid, stupid, stupid questions. There were almost as many of those as there were sex questions. You wouldn’t believe what some people wanted me to do with my tail.”

Betsy made a strange sound and clapped her hands over her mouth; Fred realized she’d barked laughter without meaning to. She took her hands away and said, “It’s awful you had to be exposed to those and then exposed Madison to those.”

“Well.” Fred coughed. “Madison was there and she offered and she’s good at it.” Fred saw the young woman blush with pleasure, the first time that evening she hadn’t looked like she was coming down with a violent stomach virus. “And she offered to do the press releases, too, and I said sure.”

Jonas was nodding. “Okay, yeah, I get it.” To Betsy: “Fred hates that shit. If she had her way, she’d dig a hole in a Cape Cod sand dune and live in it and hardly ever leave it except to bitch at tourists for building sand castles in her yard and maybe bathe.”

Fred kept her mouth shut.
It’s not like he’s lying. Ahhhh . . . my own sand dune . . . my own hole in the beach . . .
The thought was so haunting and beautiful she wanted to cry.

“Okay, so I was rilly, rilly flattered that Fred trusted me with it.”

More like couldn’t be bothered with it and didn’t care who did it as long as I didn’t have to, but okay. Sure. Please go on.

“I figured if I did a good job, maybe I could meet some more of your Undersea friends.”

“Awww, Madison.” Jonas patted her hand. “That’s where you went wrong. Fred doesn’t
have
any friends, Undersea or otherwise, except me, and that’s just because I lost the coin toss with God.”

Betsy had now snaked Madison’s drink for herself and was sucking it down. “So you dumped your job on Madison, who did her best to make you proud . . .”

“Hey!” Fred said sharply. “It was never my job. Dr. Barb set the whole page up after the Folk outed themselves on CNN. There are pages on the website for the penguins and the sea turtles, and those aren’t my job, either.”

“Yep, that’s true. Fred’s former boss is my current sexy squeeze . . . She told me you weren’t keen on the idea, which is Freddish for
get away from me with that thing before I vomit and embark on a killing, puking rampage
.”

“What did she expect? I had next to no privacy after all that. People would come up to me and do the weirdest things. Mermaids don’t grant wishes, that’s myth number one I’d like addressed and then smothered. Thank God I was the unofficial bridge between the races, because after a while the royal family appointed actual capable ambassadors, which we all should have realized they should have done in the first place. I’ll be the first to admit: even though I signed on for it, I sucked at that job.”

“We can’t all be recovering Miss Congenialities,” Betsy said cheerfully.

“Okay, whatever. After a few months it got so bad I got the hell out of Dodge. I’ve been tagging along with my fiancé while he makes the fellowship rounds.” Fred pointed to her head. “This weird red is not my natural hair color.”

“It’s nice, though,” Betsy commented after eyeing the fake hue. “Auburn, with deeper auburn lowlights.”

“Thank you,” Jonas said, bowing from the waist. He managed to do it from a chair without looking ridiculous. “Fred kicked up such a fuss you’d think I’d shaved it instead of dying it Awesome Awesome. (And if that’s not a real name for a hair color, it should be.)”

“I didn’t ask you to do that,” she snapped. “I had a box of Yuck-O Brown Number Twenty-one all ready to go.” Even now, the memory of Jonas’s horrified screams made her shudder. He’d actually knocked her to the ground to wrench Yuck-O Brown Number Twenty-one out of her hand, then dragged her to a salon and personally supervised the cut and coloring. “That was three hours of my life, gone forever.”

“Oooh, I wish my friend could do that!” Betsy said, looking at Fred’s hair with renewed interest. “She just laughs at my home-dye errors. What color is it under all that?”

“Green,” Fred answered curtly. She did not want the discussion veering further toward her hair.

“Sorry, what? Green? Your natural hair color is—oh, right. Mermaid thing.”

“Ooooh, but all those who truly lurrrrrrv her see it as blue,” Jonas said, fluttering his eyelashes.

Fred longed to punch him. “Some people see it as blue,” she admitted. “I hate the ambiguity . . . Blue, green, who gives a shit? It just perpetuates the stereotype that the Folk are magical. We’re not.”

They looked at her.

“We’re not!” She shook off their stares. “Anyway, thanks to Jonas, I’m harder to recognize now. Case in point, Betsy: you had no idea who I was.”

“You should set the bar higher,” the vampire advised. “I’ve been dealing with a bunch of my own shit lately. Me not knowing who you were isn’t the same as the average gal on the street not knowing.”

The thought that Betsy would willfully ignore spectacular current events further irked Fred, who wasn’t blind to the irony. She hated the fuss and she got annoyed when someone didn’t know about the fuss.
Jonas is right; he really is one of my few friends, and for years he was my
only
friend. This sort of thing is the reason why.
Still . . . “This was an unprecedented event in history!”

“Hey, my shoe closet wasn’t gonna organize itself, okay? And that’s only one of the things I got stuck dealing with. I’ve got more on my plate than whatever the latest fad is.”

“Fad?”

“Anyway,” Jonas broke in, “Madison was nice enough to help you out with work you had no intention of doing. And then . . .”

“Then I met these guys—they sent lots of stuff to Fred’s page—”

Not my page!
Fred closed her eyes but said nothing.

“And they seemed rilly nice and they, like, had all these great ideas to help the Folk—cool stuff like how to use legal precedent to show the world that anything abandoned in the ocean, y’know like ship wrecks and pirate booty and all that, they had a way to prove how it all legally belongs to the Undersea Folk.”

Ah. This was sensible. Though most of the planet (the ones who didn’t think the mermaid thing was a hoax) outwardly embraced the Undersea Folk, some countries had gotten touchy about the Folk’s vast treasure. A few of the dignitaries realized the Folk had in their possession, among other goodies: caches of Confederate gold, Blackbeard’s treasure (scooped from caves of the Cayman Islands), Incan gold from lakes in the Colombian Andes, King John’s crown jewels, fist-sized diamonds from the wreck of the
Flor de la Mar
, and other priceless artifacts (including the
Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi
sword, the
Aphrodite of Cnidus
, Michelangelo’s
Sleeping Cupid
, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria) and began legal proceedings to get “their” property back.

The Folk’s response to this was simplicity itself: finders keepers. As King Mekkam said, “How can treasures that rested on the bottom of the seas for centuries, treasures gone so long no one living even remembers them much less requires them, how can such things belong to any lander now living?” The king had been too polite to point out that the Undersea Folk were well within lander laws regarding salvage: they took the risk, they got to keep the goodies. It was a growing problem; Fred acknowledged to herself that she would have looked into the strangers’ ideas just as Madison had.

“Anyway, they had other ideas, too, and so we agreed to meet and they thought I was you and then they tried to kill me.”

Betsy, who’d had a look of polite interest on her face, sat up straight, the better to look straight at Madison. “You’re kidding.”

Fred, who could feel her eyebrows arching (they were also red, thanks to Jonas’s tireless efforts to drive her mad with minutia), asked what, to her, was the obvious question: “How could they think you were me?”

Madison sucked in breath, then let it out. “CauseItoldthemIwas.”

Jonas cringed, waiting for the inevitable shit storm from Hurricane Fred. When no one said anything, Madison continued in a small voice: “I told them. I said I was you.”

It took Fred a moment to find her voice. “Why?”

“Yeah,” Betsy said, also puzzled. “Why would you ever say that? Of all the un-fun weirdos you could be, why would you ever—”

“I’m handling this, Betsy.”

“—ever—”

“Do you mind?”

“—
ever
want to be her?”

“Because that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be!” Madison flashed, anger chasing shame in her shout. “Why d’you think out of all the aquariums in the country—”

“How many can there be?” the vampire from Minnesota asked. “Six? Seven?”

“Sixty-three,” Fred and Madison said in unison. Madison continued alone. “Why d’you think I ended up here? I’ve been following your career since your research project at Woods Hole. People don’t really like you—”

“You are wise to see the truth,” Jonas noted.

“—but they fall all over themselves offering you fellowships and grant money. Then, boom! You’re a mermaid.”

“Boom?”

“And not just any mermaid—”

“A seriously grumpy one. With blue hair except when people think it’s green.”

“Betsy,
shut up
.”

“Okay, but you know I’m right.”

“I know what you think of me—another spoiled brat intern playing at marine bio on her mama’s money—”

“I didn’t think you were a
brat
, per se,” Fred mumbled. She could feel herself blushing but, unlike Madison’s rosy cheeks, it wasn’t from pleasure.
Everything she’s said is right. So who’s the
real
dumbass, Fredrika Bimm?