Chap. 1

Jessie

Mary finally seriously got to talk to Will, and after she did, she called me the next morning. She explains what went down, tells me what happened. I listen intently as my stomach drops with every word. It drops even further when she mentions that she told Will about me. Luckily, I kept myself from screaming. When she finishes, she tells me to come to her house and bring the crystal from the moon pool. Although slightly confused, I tell her I will and hang up the phone.

I grab my cell phone and bag and prepare to leave. I quickly trot up the stairs, knock on Lee's door and poke my head in. "I'm going out."

She pulls a headphone from one of her ears. "Where to?"

I reluctantly tell her the answer, knowing what she'll say. "Mary's house."

She groans. "Why?"

"Because I can."

She groans again. "Why are you always going over there? And you never say why, like it's some big secret."

I slightly panic internally. I had no idea that LeeAnne even noticed it like that. I still try and make my way out of it. "I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm just going over there to hang out since she's my friend."

I can see the pang of jealousy in her eye. She still wishes she were friends with Mary after she had decided to drop her as a friend. But that was her problem, not mine. She rolls her eyes. "Whatever you say," she says sarcastically. "Just don't be home too late."

"Alright," I reply and leave without another word. As I start back down the steps, I think about Lee's last statement telling me not to be home too late. I guess she really does care about me.

As I start out the door, I feel in my pocket for the crystal and find it to be there. I start out for Mary's house and soon find myself in a jog to get there.

As soon as I arrive, I knock on the door and go in. I stop dead, as I expect to see Mary. Instead, I see her, Will, Cleo, Bella, and Rikki. This can't be good, I think.

"What's going on?" I blurt without really thinking.

Mary chuckles. "A lot," she says through a laugh. I walk over to where she's sitting on the couch and sit next to her.

Will, however, gets straight to the point, I guess out of nervousness. "We know you and Mary are mermaids." My eyes widen at that. I can't believe he just said that in front of three people who didn't know I was a mermaid and two non-mermaids. I almost could have strangled him.

"Let me explain," Mary says quickly. I look to her, the slight fury that I'm allowing to show still probably burning in my eye. She started at what probably made me the angriest. "Cleo and Rikki are mermaids, too."

That made me feel a little better. At least when Will blurted it out he was blurting it out to other mermaids. Mary continued. "And they all know about us. When Bella saw me as a mermaid, she consulted it with them and then told Will about it."

"But only to protect each other and you guys," Bella chimes. She looks guilty, probably about telling the others and Will, as we were obviously trying to keep it a secret.

"Right," says Mary. "That's when Will found out about me. After he tried confronting me about it, I decided to trust him when he told me about Bella, but he wasn't handling it well. That's when he went to the café, where he told the girls everything he knew about me being a mermaid and they got wet, while you stood by and watched." I felt myself blush a little.

Mary continued. "After you came here and told me what you saw, Will came back and I confronted him about it. He explained himself and told me that the other two girls were mermaids. That's when I told him you were a mermaid." It's starting to make sense.

"After we both spilled, I told him everything we knew that made us mermaids. And that's when the problems started." Mary finishes.

I gulped. "Problems?" I ask quietly.

"Yeah…" Rikki says. It's the first time I've heard her speak.

"You see, how you two became mermaids is entirely different from the way they became mermaids," Will explains, motioning to the girls. "So we don't know what's happened to you."

I take this all in slowly. My previous relief was gone. I thought that when Will found out we'd start getting answers, especially with Bella in the picture. But now that we're even more of freaks than before, that hope was gone.

Mary interrupts my thoughts. "I explained how we became mermaids to them. The only thing the same for theirs was the moon pool. But what happened to us has happened to them in different ways."

I'm confused now. Cleo sees this. "We all became mermaids in a moon pool under the full moon, but you didn't." I'm surprised at her boldness and openness at telling us what happened. "But we've dealt with things that turned you into mermaids. Like the water tentacle that pulled you into the pool. We've dealt with that for months."

That statement kind of scares me. Bella picks it up next. "And the crystals in the rock," she says. She removes a necklace from her neck. "Just like this." She reaches her arm out and I take the necklace. I study the stone at the end of the string. It's a blue crystal. I remove my crystal from my pocket and compare the two. They're extremely similar.

As I hand Bella her necklace back, Mary starts talking again. "We think it was these crystals that triggered what ever happened in the moon pool." She held her own up to show the rest of the group. "When we put them in the indents in the rock, the place just seemed to come alive," Mary explains.

"Only your two crystals?" says Will. "Because maybe if we can recreate what happened in the cave on Mako Island, we can figure out how you became mermaids."

That sounded like a good plan to me. But Mary interjected. "There's only one problem with that plan."

It sounded fine. "What's the problem?"

"Anna has the other crystal."