When I hear the Honda’s gears grinding in the driveway, I pick up my cell phone. Galen said Rachel never answers, but she calls back if you leave a message. After an automated woman from Trans-Atlantic Warranty Company gives me the option of leaving a message or calling back during normal business hours, I wait for the beep. “Hey, Rachel, it’s Emma. Tell Toraf he’s off the hook for tonight. I can’t make it over there for practice today. Maybe I’ll see him tomorrow.” NOT. I don’t need a babysitter. Galen needs to get it through his thicker-than-most head that I’m not one of his royal subjects. Besides, Toraf earned a place on my equivalent-to-zoo-dirt list, forcing Rayna to marry him and all.

After a few minutes, Rachel makes good on Galen’s promise. When I answer the phone, she says, “Hey there, cutie pie. You’re not feeling bad again, are you?”

“No, I’m fine. Just a little sore from yesterday, I guess. But Mom had to take my car to work, so I don’t have a way to get over there.”

Contemplation hovers in the silence that follows. I’m surprised when she doesn’t offer to come get me. Maybe she doesn’t like me as much as she lets on. “Give me a call tomorrow, okay? Galen wants me to check in with you.”

“That’s so sweet of him,” I drawl.

She chuckles. “Give the guy a break. His intentions are good. He hasn’t figured out how to handle you yet.”

“I don’t need to be handled.”

“Apparently, he thinks you do. And until he doesn’t, I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with me.”

I try not to sound curt when I say, “Do you always do what he says?”

“Not always.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Emma, if I always did what I’m told, you’d be locked in a hotel room somewhere while I secured us a private jet to a place of Galen’s choosing. Now get some rest. I’ll be expecting your call tomorrow.”

*   *   *

Tossing my towel in the sand, I get a running start and make a clean dive into the waves. I expect the first plunge to be refreshing, an exhilarating rush of breath-stealing cold, the kind of frigid any self-respecting New Jersey autumn would produce. But when I surface, I feel gross. The water is lukewarm. Just like my shower. Just like my love life.

I wade against the swells, and then force myself below the influence of the surf. I hold my breath and drift, pressing the start button on Dad’s old stopwatch. And I find one more reason to hate the passage of time: It’s boring. To keep from staring at the minutes dragging by, I recite the alphabet. Then I recite the statistics of the Titanic, just as any obsessed person would do. A few crabs side-wind beneath me, listening to me compare the number of lifeboats to passengers while the waves wash me to shore.

After fifteen minutes, my lungs start to tighten. At seventeen minutes, they feel like a rubberband stretched to max capacity. At twenty minutes, it’s an all-out emergency. I surface and stop the watch.

Twenty minutes, fourteen seconds. Not bad for a human—the world record is set at thirteen minutes, thirty-two seconds. But as far as fish go, it pretty much sucks. Not that fish hold their breath or anything, but I don’t exactly have gills to work with. According to Galen, he doesn’t hold his breath either. Syrena fill their lungs with water and apparently absorb the oxygen they need from it. My faith isn’t strong enough to try. In fact, growing a tail of my own is the only way to make me a believer. Even breaking a human world record on my first trial run isn’t enough to convince me to inhale seawater. Not gonna happen.

I traipse back to neck-deep and clear the time on the watch. Drawing in a lung-packing breath, I press the start button. And then I feel it. It saturates the water around me, thrumming without rhythm. The pulse. Someone is close. Someone I don’t recognize. Slowly, I tiptoe backward, careful not to splash or slosh. After a few seconds, tiptoeing doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If I can sense them, they can sense me. The pulse is getting stronger. They’re heading straight toward me. Fast.

Leaving caution, etiquette, and Dad’s stopwatch behind, I scramble like a lunatic to shallower water. Suddenly, Galen’s order to stay on dry land doesn’t seem so unreasonable. What was I thinking? The little I know about Syrena is what we crammed into the last twenty-four hours at his house. They have a social structure like humans. Government, laws, family, friendship. Do they have outcasts, too? The same way humans have rapists and serial killers? If so, I’ve just done the human equivalent of wandering into a dark parking lot alone. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Gasping into a wave lets me know my lungs aren’t prepped for water just yet. Sputtering and coughing slows me down a little, but the shore is close, and I’ve got my eye on a stick thicker than my arm just beyond the wet sand. That it will break like a twig over the head of any Syrena is not important.

I’m knee-deep when the hand grabs my ankle. I look down, but my attacker is obviously in Blended form, barely making an outline through the waves. The water doesn’t interrupt my scream, but it does shut it off from the human world. The hand is strong and big, pulling me from safety like a rip current. I’m wasting precious air by kicking and screaming at the Blended blob, but going without a fight just won’t do.

The ocean bottom is a steep hill. Only a few fingers of sunlight splay through to the deep. Those fingers disappear as my eyes adjust, casting an afternoon-like glow on everything. The more I struggle, the faster we torpedo through the water—and the tighter my abductor strengthens his hold.