A/N: It's been forever! I had ¾ of this chapter written and ready to go and my computer basically died on me. This was last year and I just decided it wasn't meant to be. But I know how the story ends and I figured there are at least a few of you who'd like to know too! There are two chapters left, and I'll post much, much sooner.

Thanks for sticking it out. Hope it was worth the wait.

Chapter 10

Lewis watched his wife and his friend huddled together in the back seat for a moment, then glanced out the window towards the beach. Time to move, he told himself, shaking himself out of his stupor. He undid the parking brake and pressed his foot to the gas pedal.

He must have pressed it down a little harder than intended because Cleo yelped from the back seat and he heard shuffling behind him as they tried to re-orient themselves.

"Sorry," he said, not sounding terribly sorry at all, he realised. He had a lot of other things on his mind.

"It's fine," Cleo said. "Just be careful. What are you in a rush for now, anyway?"

Lewis considered staying quiet. If he said what his thought was aloud, he was risking staining the image of Zane even more in their minds. Then again, there was no chance he'd be able to do what he needed to do without their help. If he was right. If his suspicion was correct.

"I don't think Zane just decided he didn't want to be with us anymore," Lewis said. "I think he has some unfinished business."

"What do you mean?" Cleo asked. Lewis noted that Rikki, who had never been the silent type, still hadn't said a thing.

"I mean that there's one other person who knows about mermaids, who knows about you and who might be a threat, from his perspective," Lewis said.

Silence answered his statement, which told him that they hadn't come to the same conclusion yet.

"His father," Lewis said finally.

"What about his father?" Rikki finally spoke up. "What does Harrison have to do with this?" Her voice sounded a bit rough, which was unsurprising given that she had been choked only a few minutes before.

Lewis hoped Cleo would take this one. They hadn't told her, they realised, that Zane's own father paid for the years of torture that he had endured, and had profited handsomely from it. And, of course, he may well have come to Sylvia looking to restart production before the profits dried up.

"Zane's dad was the main investor in Denman's work," Cleo said after a pause. Lewis focused on the road ahead, trying not to think about anything but that. He needed to have some moments of zen in the next few hours if he was going to be prepared for what came next.

"He paid for Zane to be tortured?" Rikki asked, her voice a little shaky. "That's… beyond fucked up."

"We don't know if he realised it was Zane," Cleo hastened to add. Lewis knew this was the truth from what he and Cleo had learned, but he had his own suspicions about what Harrison knew about the situation. He hadn't gotten to his position in life by being unable to connect dots. Even he had to realise his missing son and a miraculous find by Linda Denman might be related.

"But now you think Zane is going to go after his father, to–" Rikki started, still sounding all shades of miserable.

"Finish the job, yeah," Lewis interrupted. "Look, I failed him with Sylvia, I won't fail him with this. If he's not going there, then… fine, we'll just have paid a visit to an old acquaintance."

"And bring us right into the forefront of his thoughts," Rikki retorted. Lewis was quiet for a moment at that. She wasn't wrong, exactly.

"You could stay away," Lewis suggested, knowing how that argument wasn't exactly very valid. They could stay away, sure, but they wouldn't, and of course, even if they did, Lewis was a pretty stark reminder of the Denman episode all on his own.

"I think it's the right decision to go there," Cleo said. "At least to warn him to maybe go hide out for a bit."

Rikki snorted.

"He's going to go into witness protection and hide from his crazy merman son who can kill him with his thoughts?"

On the one hand, Lewis was relieved that the sarcasm and verve were back, on the other he knew that the only way that could happen on the heels of so many disturbing events in quick succession was by pushing everything deep down. They were all going to need a lot of therapy when this was over.

"No, not witness protection," Lewis said. "But maybe he can at least prepare–"

"Prepare how, Lewis?" Rikki said, this time the bitterness in her voice seeping through. "Did you see what he did to me? Did you see how he did it?"

"Yes."

Lewis had seen it, of course, had tried to talk Zane out of the trance he seemed to be in, when he started to choke her. He had gotten up close when he realised Zane wasn't using his hand to do it, and that frightened him a fair bit. He knew about the telekinesis of water, what Cleo had done, of course. But he had never seen this before. What else could Zane do that they weren't aware of?

"I don't think he would have done anything to permanently injure you, Rikki, for what it's worth," he offered, and Rikki said nothing. Fair enough, he hadn't been on the receiving end of a telepathic choke hold.

"If you think the right thing to do is not to go, then we won't go," Lewis said finally. "I won't go either. But–"

"But it is the right thing," Cleo said. "If we can prevent whatever might happen, then we have to do that."

"Assuming we can even find him," Rikki finally said. "You said this whole business made him very rich. I can't imagine he'd still be in his old neighbourhood."

"He still lives at his old house," Lewis replied quickly. "I asked Emma to find out through her parents, before we came to Melbourne."

"Why?" Rikki asked.

"I don't know," Lewis said. "But if he's still living there, and he's home, then Zane will have no trouble finding him."

The car was silent for a few minutes, nothing but the sound of the engine and other cars flying past to be heard. Finally, Lewis heard Rikki sigh heavily.

"You're making a lot of assumptions, Lewis," she said. "What's to say that Zane's not just going to… I don't know… swim off?"

"Call it a gut feeling," Lewis replied. And it was true. He had ignored that feeling six years ago when Zane first came to him with the Denman story. He had ignored it too when he heard how Zane had taken a job with her and called Rikki to say goodbye. He wasn't going to ignore it again. Whatever differences he had had with Zane, those were kids' problems and not something he was going to carry with him into his adult life. He'd be 25 soon, it was time to grow up and leave childish things behind.

"Lewis?" Cleo said. "I was just thinking. You said that Denman and the other woman had Zane captive for years."

"Yeah," Lewis replied tersely, not wanting to dwell on that much.

"Why?" Cleo said. "I mean, why didn't he escape as soon as he could? With the things he can do, I don't get why he just stayed."

"Dunno," Lewis said honestly. "Maybe it took him that long to learn to do those things."

The car was quiet again, this time for a longer stretch. Lewis was starting to think he might not be able to make another eight-odd hours of driving without some kind of rest. Maybe he could ask Cleo to take over. He heard shuffling again behind him, and then Cleo's voice, soft and gentle.

"It'll grow back."

"I know," Rikki replied sullenly. "I know it's stupid to be upset about that. It could have been so much worse, I mean…" She trailed off, but Lewis knew that what she would have said out loud was "Look at the state of Zane."

"It's always grown so fast," Cleo said reassuringly, and Lewis realised in that moment that Rikki's new super-short haircut was a recent development, probably thanks to Sylvia Thomas. They had dodged so many bullets that night. Hair grew back, but what if they had started with other 'extractions'?

They drove on like that, Cleo and Rikki talking quietly in the background occasionally. Though more often than not, Cleo was the one talking. At one point, Cleo fell asleep, but Lewis could see Rikki staring straight ahead, her eyes focused narrowly ahead of her and tears rolling silently down her cheeks. He had never seen Rikki Chadwick cry before. He wasn't really coping well with the sight of it.

"He does love you, Rikki," Lewis said then. "He wouldn't have come to help you if he didn't. But he's been through so much."

"He told me he's beyond saving," she told him in a monotone. "That the Zane I knew was dead and he's all that's left."

"It's a bit melodramatic," Lewis replied, trying to lighten the mood and failing. He cleared his throat and tried again.

"He has been alone this whole time, when he wasn't being held prisoner. It can't be easy to trust anyone right now. Imagine yourself in that situation."

Lewis was a good deal more trusting and open than Rikki, and he could only begin to imagine how much distrust he would feel towards anyone at all after a fraction of what Zane had seemingly endured.

"I do," Rikki said to him. "I've been imagining it this whole time. The trouble is, I don't even know what happened to him exactly. I just see what it's done to him. And that's the worst part. He doesn't want help because for him, it's a dirty word."

Cleo shuffled in her sleep and both Rikki and Lewis hushed for a moment.

"We need to let the others know," Rikki said, whispering this time. "Emma and Bella. Especially Emma, they grew up together."

Lewis nodded, but he didn't come out and say that he was going to be making that phone call. Emma was deep into her PhD on the other side of the country and Bella was traveling the world singing. Zane Bennett didn't seem like he would be a pressing concern for either of them. Lewis felt another pang as he realised just how easily he had slipped out of their lives.

"You should get some more rest," Lewis said, trying to close the conversation. "We have hours to go, still."

"What about you?"

"I'll manage," he said, trying to put on a brave face. "Besides, if things go pear-shaped, then you'll be the ones who need your energy. I'll just be cannon fodder for a pissed off superman."

Rikki didn't reply to that, and she did eventually close her eyes and settle.

Lewis kept driving, all the while letting his mind whirl in a thousand different directions. What were they going to do if they got there and Zane was there? Or worse, what would they do if, as Rikki was predicting, he just swam off?

***ITD ITD ITD ITD ITD***

What felt like an eternity later, and several stops for petrol and necessities, they were pulling into the street where they had spent so much of their time as teenagers. Rikki and Cleo were both still sleeping, and Lewis didn't want to wake them, but fortunately the car stopping was enough to rouse them from their light sleep.

"Are we here?" Cleo asked and Rikki nodded.

"So we're going in?" Lewis said, turning around one last time. "Not too late to decide–"

"Stop talking, Lewis," Rikki said. Then, as an afterthought, "Thanks for everything. Thanks for driving."

Lewis shrugged, and they all got out of the car, taking a moment to stretch after a long, cramped journey.

"Never doing that again," Cleo said. "I'd rather walk."

"Or swim," Rikki added.

The attempt at humour fell flat, and they grimly looked up at the long drive to the house. Lewis took a deep breath and rang the doorbell. He couldn't hear the chime, of course, but after a minute there was a buzz and gravelly man's voice asked who it was.

"My name's Lewis McCartney, Mr. Bennett," he said. "I'm here with Cleo and Rikki, we were friends of–"

"I know who you are," the voice on the other end said abruptly.

"We need to talk to you about Zane," Lewis continued. "It's urgent, we've been driving all day, and we're worried that–"

Cleo shoved him in the ribs, and Lewis realised that here, on the street, was not the place to be talking about things.

"Can we come in?"

There was a long silence, and Lewis was getting ready to jump the fence, when there was a click and it opened. They walked together up the long drive. The house remained as pristine and beautiful as he remembered it from years ago. The view of the sea from here was incomparable. It must have been amazing to grow up here. Somehow, he had never asked Zane about that.

As they reached the house, they saw that the door was open. Letting themselves in, they saw that there was a figure sitting in the smaller lounge to the right of the front entryway.

"So you want to talk about Zane," Harrison Bennett said. He was in shadow, and as they approached, they saw that he looked like he had aged 100 years in the time since they had last seen him.

"We came to warn you," Rikki said, eyeing him carefully. She certainly hadn't forgotten how he had looked so hungrily at them when he had first discovered their secret nearly a decade ago.

"Warn me?" Harrison said, looking suddenly at her with wild eyes. "About what? About Zane?"

"Yeah," she replied. "It's going to sound pretty crazy, but you have to believe us. He's not well, he's been violent and we think he might have his sights set on you."

Harrison grimaced.

"I don't even know if Zane is still alive," he whispered. Then louder, "I have spent the last two years, and a small fortune, trying to find him. If you're telling me he's alive and has a grudge against me, well… I'll just choose to ignore that second part. He deserves to hate me, I think."

Lewis wanted to ask if he understood why exactly Zane hated him, and see if he could lift the veil on whether Harrison knew about what had happened to Zane, when there was a sound in the corner of the room. The lounge had a set of French doors leading out onto a balcony. The sound had come from there, the clumsy footsteps of someone not quite comfortable with walking. Lewis blanched and glanced quickly at Cleo and Rikki, who shifted their feet.

Harrison was oblivious.

"Well? What's this warning?"

"They came to tell you to hide from me."

Zane's voice was like ice, and Lewis felt chilled to his marrow.

"Zane?" Harrison said, disbelief, joy, grief and all other kinds of emotions crowding into his tone. He rose to stare at his resurrected son. "Is it really you?"

Zane stepped out of the shadow of a curtain and Lewis took an involuntary step back. He had seen Zane angry before. Hell, the other night he had seen him in nothing less than a murderous mood. But this was something else altogether. He didn't look entirely human, more sharklike, with his usually warm brown eyes nearly black.

"I'm not going to give you a lot of time," Zane said, and he was circling Harrison now, the limp seeming more pronounced on the fine marble floors. "But I need to know. Was it true, what Sylvia Thomas told me? That you knew about what was happening in their lab and pressed on?"

Harrison paled, but he didn't tear his eyes away from his son.

"I knew, but I did raise objections," Harrison said. "I swear to you, I did. Their poor victim - I tried to do what I could for her–"

"Her?" Zane cut him off. "So you really didn't know."

"What didn't I know?" Harrison asked, now staring with bewilderment at his son, noticing not just the limp, but his shaking hand, his prematurely grey hair.

"You didn't know what your money paid for," Zane said, sneering.

He spared a glance at Lewis and the two girls.

"I don't want to do this with you here," he said, and he sounded somewhat pained, a bit of humanity returning to his features. Lewis thought he looked slightly ashamed of himself. "You should leave."

"We're not going anywhere," Cleo said, sounding braver than Lewis felt.

"You know I can make you," Zane said, not skipping a beat. He stared into her eyes and then sighed.

"Zane, this isn't the way to solve this problem," Rikki began and he rounded on her.

"You don't know anything about real problems," he snarled, and she stepped back, eyeing him warily. "Come to stare at the freak, I guess? All of you? Fine!"

He ripped off the black turtleneck he was wearing in a swift motion, and all three of them gasped. Harrison moaned.

Zane's torso and arms was a collection of scars and wounds. There were two points at his waist where it looked like a chunk had been cut out. The burn scar that Rikki and Lewis had seen around his neck stood out like an ugly red choker. His wrists were worse, parts nearly black where it looked like there had been an infection.

"The miracle cure of Theramar," Zane said, as if he was repeating rehearsed lines. He turned to look at his father. "Do you like what your investment bought you? I'm told the returns were spectacular, I'm surprised you didn't move to a nicer part of town with those profits."

Harrison was staring at Zane as if he was seeing a ghost, shaking his head, and his lips trembling.

"This," Zane said, indicating one of the missing chunks of his waist, "Was where they wanted to see what would happen if they just removed some flesh. Nothing I'd miss, wasn't that nice of them?"

He indicated a line running below his ribcage, a neat scar that looked like a healed incision from surgery.

"This was when they wanted to see if my lungs were still ordinary or if the change made them into something else. Results inconclusive. They had trouble holding me down, as they didn't want to sedate me."

Harrison had fallen to his knees, muttering, "Nononononono" all in one long phrase.

"This," Zane said, with what seemed like particular relish, and pointing to his bum leg, "Is a souvenir of when they hobbled me while I had legs, before forcing the change. Just to see how I'd heal. It was important for the research, so they said. Funnily enough, it didn't heal properly."

"So you see, your investment cured thousands at the expense of one. Was it worth it?"

Harrison had buried his face in his hands and continued the muttered 'no's.

"Look at me when I'm speaking to you," Zane said, vicious and angry. Harrison's head flew back and he was looking straight at him.

Lewis realised in that moment that coming here was a mistake. They couldn't stop what Zane was going to do, he was too powerful. And besides, even if they could stop it, Lewis wasn't entirely sure that he wanted to. A not insignificant part of Lewis told him that Harrison Bennett deserved every horror that Zane was about to visit on him. A larger part of him, though, screamed that this was not about Harrison. It was about Zane and what patricide would do to him.

Before he could move, or say something, though, Harrison was screaming and clutching his hand to his face. Lewis wanted to grab Zane's hand but saw that Zane was just as bewildered as he was.

"You filthy, evil, horrible excuse for a man!"

Rikki's voice was loud, and angry, and she was openly crying for the third time in 24 hours. Her hand was held out and up, and Lewis realised she was using her power on Harrison, burning his face.

"Rikki," Zane whispered, looking more like himself by the second and slightly frightened.

"Your own son. YOUR OWN SON!" Rikki screeched, followed by a string of words that Lewis knew she knew, but had never heard her deploy quite so fluently.

"Rikki! Stop, you'll kill him!" Zane said, grabbing her hand. The movement stopped the flow of energy to Harrison's face, and he fell back, moaning and cradling his right cheek and eye with both hands.

"I want to kill him!" Rikki screamed. "He did this! He did this to you!"

She was about to raise both of her hands to attack again, when Zane grabbed her left hand and Cleo grabbed her right.

"He's not a threat," Zane said, sounding hollow. But Lewis was relieved to hear that animalistic rage had gone out of him. Something about what Rikki had done had snapped him out of it.

"How can you say that?!" Rikki exclaimed, turning to him and trying to tug her hands out of Cleo's and Zane's grasps. "How can you say that when he did all this to you?"

"Because he didn't know," Zane said. "I was wrong. He's not a threat. I shouldn't have come here."

He turned to face his father, then and Lewis watched as Zane the teenage boy briefly made an appearance in his old friend's mien.

"You were wrong to do what you did," he said calmly. "You should never have agreed to it, because you knew what would happen. It doesn't matter that you didn't know it was me. It was enough that some poor soul was going to suffer what those two monsters did. I see now that Sylvia lied to me about what you might have known."

Harrison was muttering still, occasionally daring a glance up at him from his spot on the floor.

"I'm leaving now," Zane continued. "You'll never see me again, unless you try something that could hurt… any of us. You should know that Sylvia Thomas is dead. Nobody else will come looking for me, or us."

He walked up close to him.

"I know you regret what you did. I regret it, too. For what it's worth, I don't think you'd do it again, knowing what you know now. But you can't change the past. And I can't bear the sight of you."

He walked away then, and the others followed him, only casting a brief glance back at Harrison, who finally sat up and tried to say something. As a group and without a word they ignored him and filed out the beautiful doorway, walking down towards the sea and the sunset.