Chapter 1: Chapter One

There’s nothing like a missing tooth to top off an otherwise shitty day. But I knew my luck would have to turn around eventually. Well— I hoped it would. Because at the end of the day, I choose to be an optimist. And I knew my tooth would regrow by morning. 

Never saw that fucking claw coming, I thought, looking over at the bloody molar sitting in the sand. Water washed over it, and the thing vanished in foam. 

Anyone can be a cynic. Some folks treat cynicism as a hard-earned skill, but in my experience, it’s the default state of most humans. So maybe the fact that I’m only half human allowed me to shed mine a little easier than most, which meant I had less to brag about than the people who wake up and choose to be hopeful about what their day might bring. 

Of course, even optimistic people have shitty days. Some of us have quite a few. Being a semi-cheerful soul doesn’t mean I’m somehow oblivious to the struggles of my home and the people who live here. It just means I choose to try and keep my head up during the challenging moments, minutes, hours, days, and weeks. Am I always successful? No. But I celebrate the moments when I am. And I believe that’s important. 

Getting back to shitty days, well, I rescued a child today. And I’d failed to save another. Felt like a seven-ten split in bowling. Three outcomes. You get one pin and miss the other, you get both pins, or you get none. 

I chose to be optimistic this morning when my radio beeped twice. 

Missing person, I thought at the time, already preparing to enter my brisk, dark domain. 

The call came in around 11:45 a.m. A couple of kids were running around the Ocean Gateway Pier. There one minute, gone the next. Foggy. Parents never heard a splash. 

“If I had a dollar for every case that started this way, I could afford to go back to school and finish my French degree,” I’d said when Justin finished reading the kids’ descriptions. 

Then I started looking. I didn’t think I was looking for bodies but for living children, a boy and a girl. I intended to return both to their parents, maybe a little scratched up, possibly missing a limb, but still breathing. See? Optimist. Hours of searching along the floor of Portland’s harbor. Wet. Cold. But I was no stranger to the Fore River. 

Found them, I remembered thinking at the time, my chest tightening. And they weren’t all I discovered. Their culprits swam before me, a consortium of krabbor. 

A small black and blue two-way radio bound to the back of my belt beeped once, bringing me back to the present. Someone wanted my attention and an update. 

“Hey, Harbor Warden, you got anything for me? Captain Jane is asking after you,” a deep voice spoke into my earpiece. 

Justin sure does have peculiar timing, I thought. And the fact that he called her Captain Jane meant his boss was standing next to him. Otherwise, he’d have just said boss or Jane. 

I looked over where the sun had set behind Portland at least half an hour ago. Darkness defeated by hundreds of lights from the houses behind Fort Allen Park. 

By now, my eyes would be entirely silver and much wider than during the day. But decent night vision was a nice tradeoff. 

“Casella? You hear me?” Justin asked before static stole the airwaves again. 

I nodded to nobody in particular. Fort Georges was deserted, save for hundreds of rats, beady red eyes staring my way, wondering if I’d leave so they could nibble on the monstrous crustacean parts littered across the beach behind the unconscious girl and me. 

“Yeah, Justin. Tell the captain I’ve recovered the girl,” I said, looking down at her. She wore stained jeans and a long-sleeve shirt with a Creeper on it. Her long brown hair clung to her wet face as she breathed and shivered. 

“Well, that’s certainly good news,” Justin said, and I could tell he was nodding on the other end as he talked to me. “Any sign of the boy?”

My stomach flipped. I didn’t want to say the words to Justin, but I guess I should’ve been grateful Jane eventually would speak with the parents. I didn’t have to deliver the bad news, just the still-breathing kid. 

“Wasn’t much left of him when I arrived,” I said, watching the girl who’d just gone from having two brothers to one. And I’d wager she’d always be grateful her older brother had stayed at the hotel sick, so he didn’t have to go through what she did today. 

I pulled a blue elastic band off my wrist and used it to tie my long white hair into a high ponytail. My hair did not stick to my neck and back as the girl’s did. It slid across my shoulders and back without resistance. My skin and hair were a bit more oily than the average human's. 

“You need a boat launch, Casella?”

Shaking my head again, not sure to who since no one else was awake on this island but me, I told Justin to send a chopper instead. 

“The girl probably has the beginnings of hypothermia. She’s almost as pale as I am— well, okay, that’s an exaggeration. Nobody is as pale as I am when I’ve been in the water at night.” 

Justin said something I couldn’t understand, which meant he was probably covering the mic and speaking with his boss. 

“Captain Jane wants to know why a chopper is necessary. We’ve got a boat launch ready now. But it’ll take us longer to get a pilot in the air,” Justin said. 

I looked back out at the dark waves and shook my head again. 

“No good. I don’t want to put the girl back in the water, on top or below. There’s no guarantee the krabbor would just let her go if they sensed us. I’m not sure they know I’m up on the island right now, or they probably would have come ashore to kill me and reclaim their dinner,” I said. 

More offhand noise from the covered microphone. 

“Chopper will head your way in 15. Are you gonna need a cleanup crew?” Justin asked. 

“No. The rats here will make sure the sun rises on a clean beach,” I said, looking back at their glowing eyes. 

“Over and out.” 

I pulled off the tight single-strap backpack I’d been carrying all day and unzipped it. Water fell off the sides, but all the inner contents were still dry, like always. I pulled out a solar blanket and wrapped the girl inside as best I could as I heard the sound of tiny paws moving closer to me on the beach. 

“She gonna be okay?” a male voice said. 

Looking over, I saw a shaggy critter covered in dark brown fur, with a large white patch around his head, shaking himself dry. The creature’s solid black eyes darted back and forth from the girl to me. 

“Yeah, Ten. She’ll be fine,” I said. 

The sea otter watched as I tightened the blanket around her as best I could. Her breathing slowed a little bit, but she still had a pulse. I watched the skyline for a blinking red light indicative of a chopper. After a few minutes of silence, I spotted it lifting from the city, defying gravity with its dancing blades. 

When it drew closer, I pulled out a flare, sealed my backpack again, and lit the stick. A rushing hiss and crimson light bathed the beach. I groaned and tossed it a few feet closer to the rats, which scurried backward but did not entirely retreat. They were patient enough to wait for their meal. 

Twenty minutes later, the chopper landed at Portland Medical Center, with the EMTs staring at the otter curled in my lap. 

“Don’t worry. He’s helicopter-broken,” I yelled over the noise of whirling blades. 

Neither responded, but the girl on my left chuckled. My furry friend rolled his eyes. 

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“Honestly, the indignity of it all. I’m far more educated than either of these humans. How many lines of ‘King Lear’ do you think they can recite? If they could hear me speak—”

Interrupting my friend with a quick pat on the head, I giggled. 

I watched as they took the girl down into the hospital, conflicted that I’d saved her but only her. With little warning, the helicopter pilot lifted off again, flying me back to a helipad behind the Maine Port Authority. 

Ducking my head, I hopped out with Tenebrae walking behind me. While the pilot shut the whirlybird down, I looked up at the Casco Bay Bridge looming not far away. Then I walked over to a single-story brick building with a tin roof. Its proper name was the Yutani Aquatic Research Post. But I always called it YARP, which drove Jane crazy. That was half of why I did it. The other half was it was a fun noise to make.  

 Iron bars covered the windows thanks to an attack on the facility five years ago. The bricks stopped about 10 feet short of the water’s edge, a concrete platform I’d dived off more times than I could count. 

I inhaled deeply and stretched before going inside. The chilled sea breeze that made folks from Away cough and bark spilled into my lungs. I felt at home with each breath. And I smiled before punching my code into a metal keypad and hearing a loud buzzer on the other side of the door. Several locks clicked, and the heavy steel thing swung open toward me. 

Walking into a cozy room Justin jokingly dubbed the Command Center, I smelled coffee. Tenebrae was on my heels. 

A tall bald man who somehow looked like he was scowling even when he laughed sat over at a couple of computer monitors. Behind him stood a large round table covered in maps. To his right, a desk covered in radio equipment, filling that side of the room with a muted static. 

Three fluorescent tubes without diffusers cast a harsh light over the room. I hated it, but Justin claimed it kept him awake on his 14-hour shifts. The man worked hard to put food on the table for five children, each of whom inherited a measure of his goofy energy. 

Standing up, I saw Justin wearing a blue sweater and tan pants. He walked over to a coffee maker that’d been assembled when humanity first learned of Odin and filled a mug. 

Bringing it over to me, he smiled— er, scowled. Smowled?

“Kick some krabby ass tonight or what?” he asked, playfully punching my shoulder. I cringed.

“Just hand over the damn coffee, ya jerk,” I said. 

He laughed and, to my annoyance, sang. 

“When they see me walking down the street, (hey, hey, hey). When the fellas want to speak, (hey, hey, hey). On their faces, they wear a silly smirk. 'Cause they know I'm the king of a Cool Jerk!” 

Sipping coffee that was just slightly less awful than his performance, I clicked my tongue and said, “Wow, Justin. Eve must have proposed immediately upon hearing your voice.” 

He raised an eyebrow and said, “You should hear my other classic. When I'm giving the youngest a bath, I sing a mean Row, Row, Row, your boat.” 

I took another sip of coffee and applied a thick layer of optimism. It wasn’t Dunkin’. But it was, at the very least, hot, just like the tall woman who walked into the Command Center with a tight blonde bun trailing behind her. She stood in a gray pantsuit and looked me up and down, her brown eyes scanning for apparent signs of damage like I was her prized and secret weapon. Which, I guess as she was YARP Captain, and I was Harbor Warden, I kind of was her secret weapon. 

Helping to keep Portland safe against whatever threat crawls out of the sea, I thought. Just like my mother and grandmother and on the line up to our ancestors who were here centuries ago. 

“Really couldn’t get the boy, huh?” Jane asked with a slight frown. I liked Jane. We got along most of the time, but sometimes the way she acted like I could have succeeded if I’d just applied myself 10 percent more really pissed me off. 

Still, I held my temper in check against the 45-year-old captain. 

“He was dead by the time I found them, captain,” I said. 

Jane squinted. 

“And you couldn’t retrieve the body? Parents are going to bury an empty casket,” Jane said, walking over and glancing at Justin’s computer screen for a moment. I think it was a radar display. Then she turned back to me. 

“I’ll put this in the report later, but when I arrived, all that remained of the boy was his head and a single shoulder. And four krabbor were fighting over it,” I said, crossing my arms. 

Jane nodded her head. Then she cocked it at an angle that told me she was about to say something else that would piss me off. 

“And you couldn’t kill them and retrieve the head?”

Tenebrae scoffed. 

“The weight of this sad time we must obey, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” Tenebrae recited. Of course, I was the only one who understood his Shakespeare, much good as it did me. 

With another deep breath, I kept my cool and asked the captain a question. 

“You ever seen a krabbor up close, captain?”

An intense stare, followed by a sigh, told me she hadn’t. 

“They’re 250 pounds of shell, claws, and jaws. I had enough trouble killing one of them to save the girl. And I didn’t exactly make it out unscathed,” I said, revealing first my missing tooth, then pulling up the long sleeve of my skin-tight gray shirt to reveal a still-bleeding gash that ran from just above my wrist past my elbow. I showed her the chunk of flesh that’d been bitten out of my leg last. A thin layer of translucent slime covered each wound. My wonderfully-inhuman body made the slime to stop any bleeding. Mermaids learned early on how deadly a trail of blood in the water could be. Evolution was a brutal yet necessary teacher, especially in the sea.  

The captain legitimately gasped. Her secret weapon had limitations, and krabbor were hefty foes. Bottom line? I was lucky to get the girl away, only having to fight one of them while the others were distracted feeding on the boy. 

“Are you going to be okay?” Jane asked, with a completely different tone. The captain was a hardass, but she knew when a line had been crossed. 

“I’ll go see the doc. But this is the third krabbor abduction this month when normally we’d only see that many in an active year. There are 200 of those things throughout Casco Bay, captain, and I barely held my own against one. Getting the girl back was an act of Rán,” I said, sliding my pants back down. 

Justin whistled and shook his head before taking a drink of his coffee. I did the same, minus the whistling. 

“How did the girl survive that long? She went missing before noon,” Jane asked. 

I shrugged. 

“Krabbor don’t eat until nightfall. It’s icky to you, but they probably coated her and the boy in thick saliva that stopped their heart and kept ‘em fresh until supper time. When I got her ashore, I got her breathing again after killing the krabbor about to eat her.” 

With that, I finished my coffee, and Jane cleared her throat, looking at Justin’s screen again. 

“One empty casket is tragic, captain. But it sure beats two.” In this job, I had to look on the bright side or seek a different career. With a brief nod, Tenebrae and I dismissed ourselves to see the doc.  

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