I had almost fallen asleep with Maddie held tightly in my arms when I heard movement outside the motel room door. As soon as I heard the telltale signs of someone trying to jimmy the lock, I reached for Maddie’s gun and held my breath as I watched the door. The lock clicked, the door slowly opened, and I lowered the gun and let my breath out in relief as Mom’s familiar voice called out, “Naiya?”

“Here, Mom,” I replied with a sniffle as all of the stress from the night seemed to hit me at once. Tears clouded my eyes as she came into the room with her medical bag and Dad followed her inside. “M-maddie’s in pretty bad shape. Can you give her something for the pain? I ha.. I had to give her my blood. I was afraid I was gonna lose her.”

Mom was immediately at Maddie’s side prepping an injection of morphine while Dad came and wrapped his arms around me. “It’s okay, Naiya, you did what you had to do. Think carefully, were you followed?”

I shook my head but didn’t relinquish my grip on my sister, she needed to remain in close proximity to a Naethari until the changes were complete if she was going to survive and become one of us. “I don’t think we were followed, but I was tired and I’m about ready to pass out. I used every trick that you taught us and switched vehicles to be sure, but I’m not as experienced as Maddie and I was running short on time with feet to drive with,” I admitted.

“We checked for any signs of physical surveillance on this room and the motel before coming in, so I think you managed to shake anyone who might have been tailing you, I just wanted to make sure that you took precautions,” Dad told me gently as he caressed my cheek. “We’re going to have to strip Maddie down and check for any tracking devices or other forms of electronic surveillance though. Once you’re both clear, we’ll take you somewhere secure, and then I want you to tell us everything that you remember about your encounter, even if you don’t think it could be important.”

As Dad spoke to me, Maddie’s breathing became less labored and her body relaxed some. I nodded, having expected such precautions and then Dad went to go watch for trouble from the window, pulling out his secure phone. A moment later he asked, “Any sign of trouble, Jack?”

I was too focused on helping Mom get Maddie undressed to listen further. I was already naked since I had blood all over me and the clothes I had been wearing would have been too tight on my unshifted form anyway. Mom clucked in concern at the blood-soaked bandages on my sister and went to change them. The bullet wound was already mostly closed and had stopped bleeding, so it seemed like my blood was doing the job.

“It looks like she’s out of the woods, at least as far as the gunshot is concerned,” Mom said with a relieved sigh as she examined the wound. “Gut shots like that can be fatal if not tended to quickly and properly If not from the wound bleeding out, then by sepsis. You most likely saved your sister’s life with your quick actions and by doing what you needed to, Naiya. We’ll need to keep a close eye on her and keep one of you girls close at all times though, from what Kieshala has told me of the process. So we’ll need to lay low for a bit.”

Once she was finished properly bandaging Maddie’s wound again, Mom pulled out a bug sweeper, running it over Maddie, then me, and finally our clothes and purses. I was very relieved when there were no telltale beeps. I still felt the need to ask for confirmation though. “We’re clean?”

Mom nodded and sighed in relief as she said, “They probably didn’t want to get too close while observing you, it would have tipped Maddie off. They couldn’t plant anything directly on you until your encounter with them, and with her injured and you seemingly a teenage girl, they were probably confident of your capture by then so there would have been no need. They likely put something in the SUV while you were shopping though, so it was a good call switching vehicles like you did and leaving everything behind.”

“Do you think someone gave us up?” I asked. “Maddie seemed to think they found her through facial recognition or something. They knew who she was, they made a point of calling her Erica Winslow and using her real name. That means that they’re probably looking for us Naethari. Maddie said that the whole operation stank of black ops, and these guys were American, not locals.”

“She was probably right,” Dad said as he returned from the window. “If it was a covert military operation then they wouldn’t have wasted money on local informants if they already knew Maddie and Natalie’s last known location. It would be much easier to access the local CCTV and traffic cameras than to find someone with information that they could buy. Informants would be a last resort, especially in Cuba.”

“They probably have an informant though,” Mom suggested with a frown. “Someone who knows about you girls, but that could be any of Pierce’s surviving guards or anyone who had access to the lab or Pierce’s private network before we destroyed it. We can discuss that later, once we get to the safe house.”

“Safe house? Why don’t we just leave? You have all of the medical supplies that you wanted. Even if we don’t have enough food supplies, Kieshala has been teaching us how to hunt and gather edible food from the ocean. We could survive on that if we had to.” I didn’t like the thought of someone trying to take away our freedom again, and I wanted to put as much distance between them and us as possible.

“No, Naiya,” Mom said softly as she took my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I know that your instincts are probably telling you to get away, but that is the first thing that they will be expecting us to try after what happened tonight. If they know about you girls, then they will probably be watching the ports and since they know about Maddie, then they probably have pictures and dossiers on the rest of us too. We’ll have to lay low while we try to get some more definitive information on who might be after us, why, and how to make them never fuck with us again.”

As exhausted as I was, I managed to shift and give myself legs for long enough to carry Maddie outside to the bright yellow crew cab pickup. The idea was that the people after us would be expecting us to flee and try to keep a low profile. Our enemies would be expecting us to try to blend in with non-descript vehicles, so we were going to have to break a few of the normal rules and stand out to escape their notice. I had muttered that the only thing that would stand out more was a muscle car and Dad had only said that he was working on it.

It wasn’t easy getting Maddie in the back of that big truck, but I managed it and wrapped us both up in the blankets in the back seat. I was so tired then that I fell asleep for the drive to our new safehouse, clutching Maddie tightly in my arms as we lay in the back seat. It wasn’t comfortable but after the stressful night that I had, I was so exhausted that comfort mattered very little.

Dad said that it was going to take a while to get to our destination anyway. He and Uncle Jack had to plot out a route that would avoid any traffic or CCTV cameras, so a direct route was out of the question. Still, it didn’t feel like I had gotten near enough sleep when Mom’s voice called out insistently, “Naiya, we’re here.”

‘Here’ turned out to be the same villa that we had been staying at since arriving in Cuba. “Umm… I thought we were going to a safe house?” I asked sleepily as I tried to focus enough to shift my tail back into a pair of legs.

“It’s probably as safe as we’re going to get,” Mom replied as she opened the passenger side door and got out. Once she had opened mine as well so I could try and maneuver Maddie and me out of the truck, she added. “They’ll be expecting us to bolt and they’ll be watching the ports and coastlines for that, but if they knew where we were then they would have already hit us here instead of risking going after you and Maddie in a public place. You girls need water access and this place has the pool and ocean access, and this little lagoon is surrounded by cliffs and mostly shielded from view from the open ocean unless you’re looking for it.”

“We’ll stay here for now, and Jack, Carmen, and I will be making some improvements to the security perimeter in case they do find us. If that happens, we’ll have to fight them off and make a break for the open ocean,” Dad put in. “Jack thinks it’ll be best if those of us who could be recognized by facial recognition avoid the city as much as possible, so we’ll be counting on you to gather supplies and information, Naiya.”

“Yeah, can I sleep first?” I asked as I managed to shift back to my Naiya with legs form, slid out of the cab, and gently pulled Maddie into my grip.

“Of course, hon,” Mom assured me as she put an arm around my shoulders to steady me. “We need to make some plans first. A lot will depend on what you can tell us about what happened during your encounter with those soldiers.”

We took Maddie to her room, where Kieshala was already waiting on the bed. Someone must have thought to phone ahead and warn everyone about the situation. I was just glad that someone was thinking because I hadn’t really been doing a good job of that since I had contacted Kara earlier to tell her what had happened and where we were waiting, I had been too worried about Maddie, too stressed out, and too tired.

“I am glad to see you both alive, Naiya,” Kieshala said with a weak smile.

“I… I’m not sure if I did it right, I just kinda went with what I remembered you telling us and then hoped for the best,” I admitted as I laid my sister gently on the bed beside the elder Naethari.

~ You did fine, Naiya. She is changing and your close presence and skin-to-skin contact have allowed her to absorb your primal energy and kept her changes stable. I will hold her and sleep with her until morning and Jenny will take over after breakfast. You must get some proper rest with your mate after your ordeal. ~ It wasn’t quite an order, more like the insistent urging of a concerned and slightly overbearing older sister.

Over the next few minutes, Mom made several trips back and forth to bring in IV bags, a stand for them, an oxygen tank and mask, and various medical monitors and equipment. Then she began carefully inserting or attaching them to Maddie as needed. Despite her focus on the tasks and trying not to let her emotions distract her from doing what needed to be done, she was worried, and I couldn’t blame her.

Maddie was her daughter, and she had almost lost her tonight. I was her daughter too, and she probably would have reacted the same way if it were me lying there, but Maddie was her actual flesh and blood, the girl that she had given birth to. Watching her running around and trying to stay calm, cool, and collected while seeing to the immediate medical needs of that daughter left a burning ache of guilt in my chest.

If I hadn’t been complaining and acting so distracted because it was a little hot, I probably would have noticed our attackers myself. Naethari senses are much better than those of a human. If I had only been paying proper attention, Maddie wouldn’t have needed to take the bullet meant for me. So I was in a somber mood as Aunt Carmen came and ushered me out of the room so Mom could work without me in the way.

“Come, Sirenita,” she said as she picked me up in her powerful arms. “You should be resting in the pool, you can worry about your sister just as well there. No blaming yourself either, you’re not used to this life like the rest of us are. You thought that you were safe, and nobody will blame you for not seeing something that none of us saw coming either. Once your mamá is done we will need to debrief you on what happened, and then you can get some proper rest.

It was my first debriefing and they didn’t do it gently, they couldn’t afford to with all of our lives possibly on the line. Dad, Mom, Uncle Jack, and Aunt Carmen had me tell them what happened from the beginning, and then wanted to know every detail that I could remember. They wanted to know the weapons and gear that our opponents had, down to the model if I could remember them. I did remember some of that stuff, especially with the guns since I had been training with Maddie since we were kids.

My memory was a little better as a Naethari too and I was able to remember details and model numbers that I would have thought long forgotten after a year of not having them drilled into my head. I hadn’t had any time to take off their helmets or the masks underneath to identify any of them, but other than that, they all thought I took care of the situation the best that I could under the circumstances. After all, Maddie was still alive and things could have gone a lot worse.

Going by the information that I was able to provide, on our attackers’ gear, the way they talked, their accents, and other details, they were relatively sure that Maddie was right and they were some sort of American black ops team, probably working for someone in military R&D. As for who had tipped them off about us ‘mermaids’, it could have been Dr. Harris, one of his lab assistants, or any of Pierce’s guards who had stayed in the states to help clean up his messes like good lackeys.

It didn’t really change our game plan, one way or the other, though. Mom was going to keep monitoring Maddie while one of us Naethari was with her at all times. Dad and Aunt Carmen would be helping Uncle Jack to improve security and to do some research on who in military R&D might be interested enough in mermaids to send a team after Maddie. I would probably be the busiest of us all though.

I would be doing all of the legwork and meetups for information under different guises, in addition to buying supplies and doing any number of other things that needed to be done outside of the safety of the safe house. We couldn’t afford to risk any of the others being seen and picked up by a camera or something, those of us with legs anyway. As the only one who could both walk and not be identified, all of that was going to fall on me.

It wasn’t until I was safe in the pool and Kara’s arms and trying to get some much-needed sleep that I finally broke down from what had been a very emotional and physically taxing night. I couldn’t help but feel responsible for Maddie nearly dying. What I had done to those men was taking a toll on my mind and heart as well.

It wasn’t that I felt guilty, they had fucked with me and my sister and were trying to take away our hard-earned freedom so they deserved death and a bit of pain. I just found myself regretting that I couldn’t have done more to get them off our backs and I was worried about what might happen the next time I encountered a team like theirs. I knew in my heart that there would indeed be a next time, it couldn’t be avoided with the places I was probably going to be sticking my nose into, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. I needed to be better when that time came, ready for anything, and I needed to find a way to keep them off our backs for good.

Finally, those thoughts faded as exhaustion overcame my sudden case of nerves and I fell asleep in Kara’s arms. My nightmares that night were harsh reflections of what had happened and all the ways that it could have possibly gone wrong. In many of those visions Maddie died, and we Naethari were captured and enslaved once again. I lost Kara, they took our babies away for experimentation, and we were some kind of sideshow attraction. It felt like I spent more time waking up crying and screaming than actually sleeping by the time I was too mentally exhausted to even dream anymore and fell into a deep sleep.