“Drinkin’ brandy with my friend didn’t make me an outlaw. It just made me another person on the island.” He shook his head. “Now you’ve turned my head around with all this foolishness. What were we talking about?”

  “Ruben the Cuban,” I prompted.

  “Right, so Ruben loved to fish, and kept needling me to come along with him. After what happened with Anne, I wasn’t all that tickled to go out to sea, but he finally wore me down by making a wager out of it.” Anne was the name his water fae ex used when she was in human form. He went on. “If I lost at cribbage, I’d fish with him. If I won, he’d give me a box of his factory’s finest.”

  I smiled. “I take it you lost, or there wouldn’t be a story.”

  He looked up at me as he took a puff. “You know that smart mouth of yours is gonna get you in Dutch one of these days.”

  “I think it’s cute that you believe it hasn’t already. So what happened on the fishing trip?”

  Taking a longer drag on his cigarette, he inhaled, paused, and exhaled a puff of smoke before finally answering me. “All right, I don’t wanna be unkind to Ruben, rest his soul, but that was one of the most boring afternoons of my life.”

  “Given how long your life has been, that’s saying something.”

  “You said it.” He shook his head. “After we whiled away most of the day without a single bite, we finally hauled anchor and went back home—and that’s when we saw it. At first, we thought it was a sea lion, at least until, as God is my witness, I saw a woman’s head. Looked like she was in trouble, so I dove into the water with one of the cork vests.”

  “No life-preserver?” I asked in surprise. We had ten inflatable donuts on each of the dive-shop boats.

  “Not like what you’re thinking—those got invented later. Back then, we just had a couple cork vests, and I swam out to put one on the lady so we could rescue her. Except she didn’t need rescuing. She swam under me and came onto Ruben’s boat. I was about fifty yards away when I realized she’d snuck past me, so I turned around to double back. I only caught a few glimpses, but—well, it sure as shootin’ looked like a mermaid. Woman’s head, long tail, and the body was scaly and strange. Reminded me a little of Anne’s true form, to be honest—only got a gander of her like that once, but it was a doozy.”

  I nodded. As a Dís, I’m immune to disguises of any kind, so I only saw Larry’s ex in her true, seaweed-encrusted, yucky form. He was lucky to only get the one gander.

  “I did catch a glimpse of something peculiar. It was beautiful that day, sky blue as a marble, and not a cloud to be seen. But for a few minutes, the sky changed, went all green. Now, I spent some time in Kansas back in the day, and I’ve seen the sky turn that color right before a twister. But down here in Florida? Never seen the like, and never so sudden.” He took a final puff, then dropped the cigarette onto the sidewalk and stepped on it. “By the time I got to the boat, though, the sky was normal and she was gone. And Ruben, he was just sitting there, carrying on to the nines about his brother back home in Cuba and how he wasn’t gonna see him ever again. He wouldn’t move, he barely blinked, he just sat around like a lump, and every time I tried to talk to him, he was just a broken record about his brother.”

  This was all sounding annoyingly familiar. Also, the tornado warning Cole told me about was sounding less far-fetched all of a sudden. “Then what happened?”

  “I managed to steer the boat back to shore, but it wasn’t easy since I hadn’t been on a boat in decades. Ruben wasn’t ever the same after that. Eventually, he became more himself, but we only spoke a few more times here and there. He lost interest in the club, in cribbage, in drinking, and eventually even in work. He sold the factory, moved back to Havana, and I never saw him again.”

  His cigarette done, Larry headed back inside under the giant fish. I followed him, and as I entered, I heard the guitar player start his next song with the words:

  “One Friday morn as we’d set sail

  And our ship not far from land

  We there did espy a fair mermaid

  With a comb and a glass in her hand…”

  I did a double take as I was walking toward the bar, and stopped suddenly. Unfortunately, a tourist was walking toward the restroom from the bar, and crashed right into me, spilling his beer. I apologized and offered to buy him a new one, but he muttered that it was okay and kept going to the men’s room.

  As I sat down at the bar, where a pint of beer was waiting for me (it’s good to be a regular), I caught the rest of the song, and was even more freaked out.

  “Then up spoke the captain of our gallant ship

  Who at once did our peril see

  I have married a wife in fair London town,

  And tonight she’ll a widow be.’

  And then up spoke the little cabin boy,

  And a fair-haired boy was he.

  I’ve a father and a mother in fair Portsmouth town,

  And this night she will weep for me.’”

  I wound up gulping down two-thirds of the pint at once.

  After he finished the song, he said, “And now I take a pause. If you enjoyed what you heard, please make your pleasure known.” With that, he held up the tip jar on the stool in front of him. Surprisingly, he had no CDs for sale, no cards listing his website, or anything like that.

  I approached him as he put his Yamaha in its case. “What was that last song?”

  “It’s called ‘The Wrecked Ship.’ Based on an old sea shanty, I think. Always loved that one.”

  “Yeah.”

  A few days passed, and I didn’t hear anything new about mermaids or boats going missing or tornado warnings or people muttering about the people they left back home. I did hear that Al Martinez quit Azucar to move back to Tampa. The owner of Azucar told me that right before he tried to poach me from Seaclipse, a request that I rejected, though it was flattering. If nothing else, it gave me leverage to bug my bosses for a raise.

  Didn’t know what happened to the four tourists who jammed into the galley with Al, but a little Google-fu revealed more about Ruben the Cuban. His real name was Ruben Hernandez Jr., owner of the prosaically named Hernandez Cigar Factory on Front Street. He sold it in 1922, when Warren Harding really was president, and he moved back to Cuba. The new owners of the factory kept the name, until it was badly damaged by the Labor Day Hurricane in 1935—same one that took out the railroad, actually—and it shut down for good.

  Unsurprisingly, I found nothing online that mentioned that Hernandez saw a mermaid. Still, the details I could find matched Larry’s story.

  I also did a bit of research into mermaid legends, though there was a lot of stuff from a lot of different regions, and not much to match what I’d heard beyond the song the guy at Mayor Fred’s did. I was amused to read that Christopher Columbus made references to seeing mermaids in his journals written during his infamous sea voyage of 1492, though some modern folk assume that he and his crew really saw manatees or rays and were just really hard up for sexual companionship.

  None of my dives took me anywhere near Pickles Reef until the following Monday when the South Dakota Seafarers came back to the Keys. The SDS were a bunch of retirees who got together to do various water-related things, and every three months or so, a group of them came down here. This quarter, I got five of them, and they had their hearts set on diving the wreck of the Duane, a Coastie ship that was deliberately sunk back in the eighties to create an artificial reef. Wreck divers love the Duane, so I usually wind up going there at least twice a month.

  We headed there in Chico this time, on a partly cloudy day with decent winds. Not enough to make the water choppy, thankfully.

  Then the sky turned green.

  For a second, I thought I imagined it. The sky just went from blue and white to an emerald-green instantly. And then it changed back just as fast.

  Before I even had time to process this—or figure out how to answer the inevitable questions from a quintet of senior citizens as to what the hell was going on—I saw a hundred-and-twenty-five-foot gaff-rigged schooner hauling ass across our path. They were at full sail and pootling along at eight knots or so. Frowning, I double checked the charts and realized that they were heading straight for a shallow reef, and if they didn’t change course in about thirty seconds, they were going to crash right into it.

  Then I caught sight of the logo on the side, and realized it was the Lilly, a local schooner that did intimate little cruises for small parties in and around the Bahamas and the Keys. Her captain was Meg Michaels, and she wasn’t usually batshit crazy. In fact, the last time I’d talked to her was about a month ago when she came back from a triumphant second-place finish in the Great Chesapeake Bay Schooner Race, and a bunch of us, including all twelve of her crew, got seriously drunk at Mayor Fred’s to celebrate.

  I snagged the radio. “Chico calling Schooner Lilly. Come about, you’re gonna hit a reef. Meg? It’s Cassie, you there?” I shook my head. “Fuck!” I hit the throttle, even though I knew I wasn’t gonna make it in time.

  I always used to make fun of TV shows and movies where they’d go into slow motion when something bad happens. After watching Lilly slam into the reef, I stopped doing that. It took maybe a second and a half for it to go from going full-bore through the ocean, to jutting at an angle up out of the water with a big-ass hole in the hull, but watching it felt like at least a full minute.

  After sending out a general distress call, which would bring Cole and his buddies out here, as well as any other boats in the area, I set course for what was now a wreck.

  Just like with Soleado, I pulled alongside Lilly, though I was careful to take it slow. At twenty-nine feet, Chico was able to handle the reef better than a schooner four times its length, but I didn’t want to take any risks.

  I tied us to Lilly’s transom, which was the least damaged part of her, and then hopped on board.

  Just like with Soleado, the crew was all bunched belowdecks, this time in the captain’s cabin. (Which told me right there that supernatural forces were at work. Meg didn’t let anyone in her cabin for any reason. In related news, the place was a mess and smelled kinda funky.) I got the same litany of family members they thought they’d never see again, from Meg’s brother in Boston, to the chief mate’s children in Norfolk, to the cook’s husband and kids in New York, to the engineer’s parents in San Francisco, and so on—just like Soleado, and just like that song.

  Cole showed up soon enough, as did two other boats. He regarded me with concern. “This is some very bizarre stuff happening, Cassie.”

  “You ain’t kiddin’.”

  That night, I returned to the Bottroff House, where I shared my room with the ghost of the wrecker captain who originally built the place, Captain Jeremiah Bottroff. As a Dís, I was the only person who could see or hear the captain, which meant I pretty much got stuck with his company, since ’I’ve been his only regular source of conversation for the past century and a half.

  “I got to see how your job used to be today,” I said as I climbed into bed.

  “And how’s that, exactly?” Bottroff asked.

  I told him about Lilly—as well as Soleado, and I threw in Larry’s fish story while I was at it—which prompted a derisive snort from Bottroff.

  “If you didn’t tow the vessel back to shore, if you didn’t claim salvage of a percentage of its cargo in exchange for rescuing them, then what you did was nothing like my own travails as a wrecker.” Back in the nineteenth century, wreckers like Bottroff would rescue boats that crashed on reefs and then do all that stuff he just said. When I first got here, I thought that meant he was a pirate, but it was actually all completely legal, and also seriously regulated. The practice faded away as boat construction improved to the point where those kinds of wrecks weren’t everyday occurrences.

  “Yeah, the Coasties handled the really fun parts.”

  “Actually,” Bottroff said, “your story of the vessel Soleado does have a ring of familiarity to it, as does your immortal friend’s tale of woe. I too encountered a vessel that claimed to have seen mermaids. They, too, babbled about their homes and family. At the time I dismissed them as madmen, but in light of what I’ve seen in the days since my death…”

  “So what happened?”

  “In truth, I only recall the incident, not due to the fatuous ramblings of the passengers and crew, but because I was forbidden from claiming salvage. The boat did not actually come upon a reef, nor was it damaged in any way. Rather it was adrift, and while we did indeed tow them back to shore, the judge denied our salvage claim. As you can imagine, my boys and I were rather upset.”

  That night, I dreamed of a mermaid swimming around one of Seaclipse’s boats, with me and Larry and the guitar player on it, and I started wishing I could see my parents back in La Jolla again. Since I still hadn’t seen the thing, my brain decided to make the mermaid look like the Disney character Ariel from The Little Mermaid.

  The next day, I was working at the B&B all day, with no dives to run, and that night I headed to the open mic at Mayor Fred’s. Larry was there, of course, as was Ginny. The drummer in 1812, as well as being a Norse god and the ex-wife of the trickster Loki, Ginny had been encouraged by the rest of the band to do some singing in addition to her excellent drum work. She wanted to try it at the open mic first, and if she was comfortable with it, she’d sing with the band onstage. Their already-impressive repertoire of covers (and harmonies) would be increased greatly by adding a fourth voice to the mix.

  Because Ginny was there, a third familiar face sat at the bar: Loki, who was trying (and so far, to my delight, failing) to win Ginny back.

  Loki greeted me with the supercilious smile he always used. “Larry informs me that you encountered a havsrå.”

  I blinked. Then I remembered my crash course in Norse myth that I imposed upon myself after learning I was a Dís eight months ago. “Right, that’s what you guys called mermaids.”

  “In a manner of speaking. In truth, the only reason havsrå have been seen in Midgard or Asgard is because of a little joke I played on Thor once. You see, he had just married Sif, even though I kept telling her my cousin would have sexual congress with virtually any female he could get his hands on. To prove his lack of faithfulness, I summoned a havsrå from another of the Nine Worlds, and Thor did indeed attempt to ravish her.”

  I let out a long breath. “Let me guess, the sky is emerald-green on that particular world?”

  “I believe so, yes.” Loki grinned. “Sadly, in the end, no one was happy. The havsrå wished only to go home, Sif was furious at me for starting it all, and as for Thor, he faced certain—logistical difficulties.”

  I chuckled and shook my head. “Couldn’t fit Tab A into Slot B?”

  “Well, a havsrå has no, ah, ‘Slot B’ as such. Sif forced me to send the creature back, and I did. I suppose it’s possible others of her kind have slipped between the worlds and arrived here.”

  “Just to board ships and make them act weird? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Ginny was walking up to the mic now, and started singing an a cappella song called “Seven Bridges Road,” which pretty much ended the conversation. Enraptured, Loki watched her sing the song in a lovely alto, and he clapped the loudest when she was done.

  To be fair, I clapped the second loudest. She absolutely nailed it. When she came back to the bar to hearty congratulations from me, Larry, Loki, and the entire rest of the bar, I asked her, “Why didn’t you sing before?”

  “I must confess, Cassie, that, at this moment, I cannot imagine why.”

  Loki smiled. “I always knew you had a voice that could move the heavens themselves, Sigyn.”

  “Thank you.”

  I shook my head. On the one hand, Loki was a prime asshole. On the other hand, he really did love Ginny.

  Two days later, I was in Harpo, taking three sisters back from a dive near some lovely coral, when I saw a sea lion swim by the boat. Scared the hell out of me at first, but I got a good look at it, and it was an actual sea lion. I found myself remembering the jokes about sea lions being mermaid dogs.

  Just after I caught my breath and recovered, I saw another sea lion tail—but it was green. And then the head popped out, and it looked kind of like a person. The face was more or less feminine, with hair that extended down past her shoulders, but looking a lot like a pelt.

  The tail was definitely that of a sea creature, and the head looked like a woman with funny hair, although her eyes were wide enough to qualify as an anime character; she didn’t have a nose so much as two slits above her upper lip, and her lips were huge and full. But the weird part was her body. She had a flexible torso that didn’t look like a sea lion or a woman—no boobs, no obvious thorax, just a stretch of skin and bone that linked the head to the tail. Two arms grew out of that torso, with no elbows, but ending with three-fingered hands, complete with opposable thumbs.

  I also realized I couldn’t see her skin directly. It was wet and matted and short, but her entire body was covered with the green pelt, making her appear a tiny bit like a green polar bear.

  She was holding something in one hand that looked like a heavily serrated blade, and a glass ball in the other. I shook my head—there’s your glass and comb from the song.

  “Wow, she’s beautiful.” That was one of the sisters, who obviously had a different definition of “beautiful” than mine. Then again, the creature might’ve been using a glamour to appear more attractive to whoever’s looking at her. After all, most of the mermaid stories, from Columbus to Captain Bottroff to Larry to the Walt Disney Company, have them looking all pretty, and if they saw what I was seeing, they wouldn’t think that.

  Anyhow, the mermaid—or whatever—burst through the surface just like a sea lion and flopped onto the deck of Harpo.

  Then she just stared at us.

  The sky turned emerald green—the same color as the mermaid’s pelt.

  The three sisters ran belowdecks and crammed themselves into the head.

  I didn’t move.