Chapter 2: Chapter Two

The walk from YARP to the doc’s place didn’t take long. Just a nice chilly jaunt up State Street where at least three people stopped to look at me, trying to figure out what exactly their eyes saw. And twice as many paused to look at what they thought was a strange cat walking beside me. But Ten weighed twice as much as even the fattest house cat and was three times as loyal. 

Overhead, clouds built up and covered the stars. My sight remained plentiful behind the sunglasses on my nose. Though I guess since I wore them at night, they were more like moonglasses. Ha. 

Tenebrae had once encouraged me to go into stand-up comedy, but I didn’t like giving people much of a chance to look at me. My appearance invited too many questions. And standing on a stage with two or three spotlights pointed my way wasn’t my idea of keeping a low profile. 

What would they see and question first? The tiny translucent scales on my legs? Maybe it’d pass for body glitter if they were a drinking audience. What if they got a good look at the small ridges along my ribs that pushed against my shirt? Would they suspect gills that were sealed tight? Perhaps the light inside the comedy club would be too dim, and my eyes would revert to the way they are now, an inch wider than the average human eye, the entire socket colored bright silver. That’d freak them out nice. 

“Cass, you’re missing the turn,” Tenebrae said, and I paused. I’d been lost in my thoughts again. If anything pointed to me being half-human, it was that troublesome habit. 

Full-blooded mermaids didn’t waste time wandering their thoughts. Fuckers didn’t even sleep. They just kept moving, plotting, and hunting. 

“Sorry, Ten. I was distracted,” I said. 

“Pain finally catching up to you?” the otter asked. 

Now that he mentioned it, the numbing from my body’s slime was starting to lose its effect. Stuff was great if I was in a scrap. But once the adrenaline wore off, I always found out how temporary its relief truly was. 

The bite in my leg was worse than the tear in my arm, and with each step I took up the hill, the throb worsened. 

“Shitass lobster on steroids,” I muttered. 

Fortunately, we were just a few blocks away from the doc. She ran a veterinary clinic by day, and if you were very nice and said please, the doc would allow you to pay her lots of money for an after-hours visit. That’s where she saw the majority of her clients, most a little more monster than human. 

As my leg gradually woke up to the fact that a chunk of flesh was missing and subsequently let me know that, I turned onto Pine Street, walked by the gay bar I intended to visit after I saw the doc, and rounded the corner past a bakery to find myself at the Brackett Street Animal Hospital. A small rectangular sign with the outlines of a dog, a cat, a bunny, and a lizard hung above the front door. 

A little paper clock on the door window said, “Closed. Back at 7 a.m.” The arms on the clock belonged to a black cat. 

Ronnie always did like little cute things like this, I thought. 

The sign was new, or I hadn’t been here in a hot minute. 

“Ten, when was the last time I was on this porch?” I asked. 

“Three weeks ago. You dislocated your shoulder fighting the idiots smuggling cocaine on that fishing boat,” he said, staring up at me from the porch of the vet clinic that looked more like a house than a business. 

Of course, I couldn’t remember if the decoration was new! It was three weeks ago. Ask me what I watched on television three hours ago, and I probably couldn’t tell you. I wasn’t sure which half of my biology to blame that on. That’s why I had Tenebrae remember stuff for me. The little guy was the brains of the operation. I was the gills. 

I’m sure a normal person would say they’re the muscle of the operation, but outside of the water, I was only a little stronger and faster than the average athlete. And on a really hot, dry day? Maybe not even that. 

“Right. . . well I don’t know if this cute little cat clock is new then,” I said. 

Ten didn’t even dignify that with a response. He chose that option a lot more than folks might expect. I chose to think of it as mercy on his part. 

“Well, now, wait a second. I’ve seen Ronnie sooner than that, right?” I asked. 

Ten rolled his eyes. 

“You went to a movie with Ms. Diar last weekend,” the otter said. “You just haven’t been to this office since you dislocated your shoulder. My gods, you’d be entirely helpless without me. You realize that, right?”

Winking, I said, “Hey, that’s why I don’t waste money on a day planner. I’ve got you.” 

“That’s not something to be proud of, Casella!” 

Ignoring my friend’s pitiful outburst, I reached into my backpack and pulled out a little black smartphone that I paid an engineering student at Portland College a fortune to design for me. I wasn’t looking for super fast internet or the ability to steal nuclear codes. What I desired was a device that was truly waterproof in every definition of the word, not just an iPhone that could survive being dropped in the pool now and again. 

Rán knows a mermaid could truly push the limits of just how “waterproof” commercial smartphones were. 

Trying not to be overly cliche, I texted Ronnie, “You up?”

About 30 seconds later, she responded with, “Business or pleasure?”

“Standing at your office door needing a little attention,” I wrote. 

“That doesn’t exactly answer my question, does it?” she responded with a winking emoji. And I giggled, despite my leg starting to feel like I’d put it through a garbage disposal. 

The porch light clicked on, and I saw a figure move the curtain over the door’s glass to get a look at me. Then came the click of three locks I’d heard far too often. Floor, knob, and deadbolt. Backing up, I watched Ronnie open the door, barely missing my nose. 

She stood before me in a short pink robe, her long raven hair wrapped in a blue bath towel. Whoops. I think I’d caught her at a bad time. At least she hadn’t just finished painting her nails. They were forest green and painted days ago. The vet looked me over with her ocean blue eyes and spotted my wounds under my skintight shirt and pants. Guess the way I was standing betrayed me. 

“I was hoping you were going to say pleasure, Cass. This was supposed to be my night off,” she said with just a hint of pouting in her voice. You’d only hear it if you’d listened to her talk for hours about dolphins or how much she hated “Free Willy.” 

Trying to cross my arms and failing as searing pain raced up the nerves toward my shoulder, I was left with no card to play except whimpering. 

“Fine,” Ronnie sighed. “Come on in. Though, call me jealous. I’d prefer to be the one making you whimper.” 

I smiled weakly as I stepped inside, only dragging my hurt leg enough to earn extra sympathy. Though, after a decade of patching me up, I wasn’t sure how much sympathy Ronnie had for me anymore. 

“Trust me, I’d much rather you be eating me instead of krabbor. I don’t leave injured when you do it,” I said. 

When Tenebrae came in, he chuffed. 

“Could you two please have some common decency?”

I grinned at him like a fifth grader making a fart joke. Some things would always be funny, like grossing out the otter with details of our indecent escapades. 

“Let me guess. Fuzzypants griping about our sexcapades?” 

“He can be a bit of a prude for a species where males get the girls pregnant, leave them with the young, and move on to another partner,” I said, raising an eyebrow. 

That did it. 

Tenebrae snapped at me, saying, “Hey! I’ve told you multiple times. River otters do that, the conniving chorades. Sea otters typically mate for life.” 

He puffed out his little brown and white chest as he said that like he’d won some kind of moral superiority contest. 

In truth, Ronnie and I only talked the way we did to get a rise out of him. I usually texted her what he said later. She got a kick out of it. Ronnie called Tenebrae the most “British otter that’s actually American.” 

We hadn’t actually slept together much since breaking up last year. Ronnie was something between a friend and a romantic partner. But her polyamorous ways, which I totally respected, weren’t for me. I like knowing that a partner is committed to me and only me. 

And I’d pin that on having an absentee father, but honestly, I probably blamed that for too many of my habits, I thought. 

Ronnie took me upstairs where she lived and I waited on her bed while she blow-dried her hair. When she came out, the vet put her hands on her hips. 

“Oh great. Now my bed is gonna smell like Casella,” she said. 

“Is that bad?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. 

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My ex smirked and said, “No, I love the way you smell, like sea salt and rain.” Somehow my eyebrow found another half inch, rising higher. That was some gay shit. 

When I failed to retort, we went back downstairs into Ronnie’s operating room, and she had me strip and sit on a long sanitized metal table. It was somehow colder than the seafloor in Portland Harbor. I shivered. 

“Damn, Cass. What did you say did this to you?”

“Krabbor,” I said. “Claws and jaws. I hate the fuckers.” 

The vet had changed into a pair of overalls and put on some thin plastic gloves, which I knew would just end up in the ocean. But I didn’t bother making a fuss. 

After looking at my wounds with a portable surgical light, Cass went into her office, adjacent to the OR with a swinging metal door. Inside, I heard the clicking of a small safe I knew she kept under the desk. 

She came back in with a silver needle and thread. I always got a kick out of the fact silver accelerated the healing process for mermaids and killed werewolves faster. 

As she stitched up my arm, I hissed, particularly as she pulled my oily skin closer together to seal the wound. With silver stitches, it’d probably heal completely in a week. 

When Ronnie finished stitching the wound, she kissed it, leaving the imprint of her peach lip balm on my skin. It made me shiver. She flashed me a quick look because Ronnie knew exactly what it’d do to me. I tried to play faux disgusted as though the vet had somehow defiled my chaste and pristine image. But we both had memories of the filthy shit we’d done to one another. So instead of looking like an outraged nun, I just giggled. 

“C’mon, Ron,” I said, still smiling. “Kisses and grins are wicked sins for us. You know that.” 

She had me open my jaw and looked at the missing tooth. 

“You’re sure that’ll grow back by tomorrow?” she asked. “Because I love your pointed teeth, and I hate the idea of you missing even one of them for long.” 

I nodded, mouth still open. And she handed me an ice pack for the bruise on my cheek where that fucking crustacean hit me. When I held the ice pack, Ronnie kissed me lightly on the nose and watched me shiver again. 

This bitch knows what she’s doing, I thought. 

We locked eyes, and the vet’s stare told me Ronnie knew that I knew what she was doing. And she didn’t care. 

“Shameless flirt,” I said. “How’s Robert?” 

Before she could reply, Tenebrae scoffed and muttered something about Hippocrates rolling over in his grave at this shameful dishonoring of sacred medical practices.

Ronnie looked away and walked over to a refrigerator to grab something. When she came back, the vet set to work on my leg. 

“Ron?” I asked. 

She gritted her teeth and remained silent while I was anything but as she sewed up this wound. 

When my ex finished, I heard a small pop as she pulled the cap off something. And before I could respond, she’d stabbed me to death with the world’s biggest needle, right into my thigh! Was she amputating my leg? Gods almighty, Veronica Diar would know the wrath of Rán for this betrayal. 

As if she sensed my thoughts, the vet said, “Calm down, you baby. It’s a broad-spectrum antivenom. I don’t like the fact that fucker sank its mandibles into you. You know krabbor are venomous.” 

I growled as she pulled the needle out. 

“You told me my mermaid blood made me immune to any venom in the sea,” I said, scowling.

She discarded the needle into an orange biohazard bin and covered my thigh with a little kitten bandage. 

“No, that’s what you wanted to hear. What I said was, it’s hypothetically possible your mermaid blood gives you some protection from a limited scope of venomous creatures. But without further testing, I can’t know how limited it is.” 

Now Tenebrae chimed in. 

“It’s funny, I remember Ms. Diar saying those exact words,” he said, putting his paw on his cheek and acting shocked. 

I turned to him so fast with a death glare that my neck popped. 

“Don’t you start,” I said, before turning back to my ex, who silenced me by kissing my thigh as she had every other wound on my body tonight. 

“Are you trying to get me fired up so you can lead me back upstairs? Because I love you, but I don’t want to be doing stuff if you’re still with Robert,” I said, crossing my arms. 

Ronnie frowned again and hopped on the table next to me. 

“She goes by Robbie now. And we broke up a couple of days ago because Robbie thinks she might be straight. So she’s figuring that out,” Ronnie said. 

I gasped and leaned my head on her shoulder. 

“I’m sorry, Ron. I didn’t know. You should have texted me,” I said. 

She shrugged. 

“It’s silly, but I guess I thought it was too pitiful to pester you about. I want her to be happy, but it still hurts,” she said, quietly, playing with my hair, twirling it between her fingers. 

I nodded. 

“That’s a rough spot to be in. And I’m guessing you wanted a little sympathy sex from yours truly?”

“If you were up for it,” she said, that little pout creeping back into her voice. 

I climbed off the table and extended my hand. 

“Let’s go have a few drinks at Moonstones and see where the night takes us,” I said. 

Gradually, a smile crept back onto Ronnie’s face. She climbed off the table and stood five inches over me, reminding me that mermaids weren’t exactly known for their vertical prowess. I was just under five-and-a-half feet tall. 

“Okay, fine. I’ll loan you a pair of jeans and a blouse,” she said. 

“What’s wrong with the clothes I wore in here?” I asked. 

The vet shrugged and said, “What clothes? All I see is a girl sitting on my operating table in her underwear and a sports bra.” 

For the first time, I realized my pants and shirt were missing. She’d disposed of them without my knowledge. 

“Hey! You need to give those back! I’m running out of skintight stuff to do my swimming in,” I said, looking around at all the cabinets and drawers, wondering where she’d stuffed my slimy clothes. 

Grabbing my hand, Ronnie started to lead me back to her room. 

“Come on, let’s go get you changed. Tenebrae, you can chill upstairs while we’re gone. We’ll be back in an hour or two. I suspect you’ll both be spending the night here,” the vet said. 

I stole a look around the hallway but found no sign of my clothes. When we got upstairs, I asked Tenebrae, “You had to have seen what she did with them. Where are my clothes?”

But the fuzzy bastard still wasn’t over the death glare I’d given him earlier, and I was going to pay for it. 

He sassed, “Shall I add a visit to the tailor in your day planner?”

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