Whatever it was, it was a good thing Alshain was here. Izar had not a moment to waste, but he wanted to thank Alshain for having saved him from Saiph and Antares earlier by tossing him overboard. He crept along the docks, half-crouching, until he stood at the stern of the fifty-foot-long vessel. His step as light as a fox’s, he leapt over its rails. He remembered the first time he’d clambered onto Alshain’s trawler—in the middle of the night, with rain pounding the platform and lightning cracking the sky open.
Now, as before, there was no one on the platform. Izar strode to the narrow set of stairs on the other side of the platform, leading belowdecks. Upon the top stair shone a drop of blood, red as a poppy. His heart thudding, Izar skulked down the stairs. To the side of the lowest stair, he saw Alshain’s seven-foot-long frame, lying crumpled.
Alshain had been shot in the heart, and his blood was soaking into his scraggly beard. The precision of the shot and the location of Alshain’s body, close to the stairs, suggested that he’d heard someone above deck and had been about to climb up, but had been shot before he’d taken his first step.
But why? Why would Saiph or Antares have ordered Alshain shot?
Saiph might have assumed that with Alshain dead, even if Izar managed to escape his underground prison, he would be unable to transform into a merman, and thus would be unable to try to kill Castor, save Coralline, or otherwise attempt to escape into the ocean. Saiph didn’t know that Izar did not require Alshain’s moonmumble potion to transform to a merman. Perhaps Antares didn’t know it, either; twenty-five years ago, when Izar was three, he’d transformed to a human without a potion, but Antares had been transforming simultaneously, according to Zaurak’s recounting of events, so had not seen it.
Squatting next to Alshain, Izar closed the unseeing eyes gently with a hand. It was his fault Alshain was dead, just as it was his fault Zaurak was dead—it was their association with him that had killed both of them. He could not let the same happen to Coralline.
Whirling around, he ran up the narrow stairs, but came face-to-face with the barrel of a gun. Serpens grinned at him from behind his red beard, his face as menacing as the spears in his earlobes. There was nowhere for Izar to go—he could not move forward, for Serpens was blocking his path, and he could not retreat down the stairs, for Serpens would simply shoot him in the back. He put his hands in the air.
Serpens pointed the gun at Izar’s heart. His finger paused on the trigger—he would take his time to kill Izar, he would enjoy it as a hunter might luxuriate over a kill.
The people in Izar’s life flashed before his eyes: Antares lighting a match then drowning the flame in a glass of water; Saiph handing Bumble back to him, with the teddy bear’s innards streaming out; Maia tugging his hands out of the hood of her car and slapping his face; Zaurak shaking his hand on his first day at Ocean Dominion; Ascella frowning at the scar across his jaw as at chipped nail varnish; Coralline staring at him with her big blue-green eyes as she leaned against her shark; Coralline—it was her face Izar wished to hold in his mind in the moment before he died.
His smile widening, Serpens started to press the trigger—but a dark, strapping figure vaulted upon him, a mermaid tattoo on his arm. Deneb Delphinus, who’d served as derrickhand atop Dominion Drill I.
The gun fell out of Serpens’s hands and between Izar’s feet. Deneb wrestled Serpens to the ground, but Serpens, almost as sinewy, fought back and started to rise—Izar grabbed the gun, turned it around, and knocked the handle into the top of Serpens’s skull. Serpens’s limbs went slack, and he collapsed on the platform, his head lolling. Izar helped Deneb to his feet and shook his hand, clasping it with both of his.
“You seem to be my bodyguard, Deneb. This is the third time you’ve saved me. Thank you.”
Deneb shrugged, as though it was simply a part of his job description.
“How did you know to find me here?”
“I saw you on the docks,” he said, “and I was about to approach you—there’s something I want to talk to you about—but then I saw Serpens stalking you with a gun. I figured he intended to kill you, and I decided to save you.”
“I’m glad for it. What did you want to talk about?”
“I was in your Invention Chamber.” He shuddered.
“Was it you who tidied it up?”
“Yes.”
“And did you put in the new shelves, planning for mass production of Castors?”
“I certainly didn’t! I hate Castor. To be honest, I wanted to burn down your Invention Chamber, but, somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
“Me neither,” Izar said quietly.
Izar looked with Deneb toward the bronze glass skyscraper of Ocean Dominion, forming an arrow to the sky. Izar had held a lit matchstick above the pail of combustible chemicals in his Invention Chamber, but he’d snuffed it out. No sane person would describe the Invention Chamber as warm or cozy but, to Izar, it had been. He had spent more time there than in his own apartment, often sleeping on the floor when the hour grew late. For all of his adult life, the Invention Chamber had served as his asylum, and Ocean Dominion as his home.
“I resign from Ocean Dominion,” Deneb said.
“That makes two of us.”
“I’m surprised. When we last spoke, on Dominion Drill I, you said that the ocean and all its inhabitants are ours to dominate.”
“I said that before I fell in love with a mermaid, Coralline.”
Deneb’s eyes widened until they resembled black marbles. It would be a dream come true for him to even catch sight of a mermaid, Izar knew, let alone fall in love with one.
“My brother, Saiph, is on his way to Coralline’s village, where he plans to kill her through Castor. Will you help me save her?”
“I will!” Deneb said eagerly.
“Thank you. Let’s set forth.”
Izar would have to writhe and drown in order to transform into a merman, but he would rather die a hundred deaths before Coralline died one.
Coralline and Ecklon hovered together inside the kitchen of Kelp Cove, facing each other, holding hands. The waitstaff had left as soon as Coralline and Ecklon had entered, such that the two of them were alone, surrounded by the smooth, sultry scents of wines.
Coralline’s words tumbled out in a trembling, almost incoherent stream: “I fell in love with someone else.”
“I know. Izar.”
She blinked at Ecklon in rapid succession.
“I was a detective on your case, Cora. As such, I was following your every move from a distance.”
There was no ire or indignation in his silver-gray eyes. “Why didn’t you say anything before?” Coralline asked quietly.
“I was waiting for you to tell me. And I’m glad you did. Regardless of the painfulness of the truth, I couldn’t bear the thought of your lying to me.”
“If you know about Izar,” Coralline whispered, “then you know we can’t marry.”
“You faced extraordinary obstacles during your elixir quest. You were not yourself.”
“You’re making excuses for me.”
“Maybe I am,” Ecklon said, clasping her hands tighter, “but we can still make our relationship work. I’m willing to let the past be the past, in favor of a future with you.”
The past . . . Coralline thought of her six-month relationship with Ecklon: The day they’d met, at The Irregular Remedy, when she’d set his elbow, the time he’d gotten her a bowl of buttonweed when she’d been sick with the flu, the autographed copy of The Universe Demystified he’d given her on her birthday, the rose petal tellin shell he’d presented her when he’d proposed. She thought of how he’d ventured into the wave of black poison to save Naiadum, of how he’d twirled her in circle upon circle upon finding her at the Telescope Tower, of how valiantly he’d fought to clear her name of her murder charge, risking his tenured post at Urchin Interrogations for her.