“You’re hurting me!” I wail. We stop fast enough to give me whiplash.

“Oops, sorry,” the blob says, materializing as Toraf. He releases my ankle.

“You!”

“Of course it’s me. Who else would it be?”

*   *   *

We surface against the night sky. Stars fill my vision, but I’m not sure if they’re real or the result of running out of oxygen. Toraf shows off by shooting his body out of the water, slicing through the waves on the tip of his tale like a dolphin at Seaworld. “Stop messing around,” I tell him. “How did I do that time? Give me the watch.’”

“Twenty-seven minutes, nineteen seconds,” he says, placing it in my outstretched hand. He gasps. “Whoa. What’s wrong with your hands?”

“What do you mean?” I turn them over and over, straining to see in the moonlight. No blood, cuts, scrapes. Wiggling all ten fingers, I tell him, “There’s nothing wrong with them, see?”

His widened eyes make me check again. Still nothing. “Toraf, if this is another joke—”

“Emma, it’s not a joke. Look at your hands! They’re … they’re … wrinkled!”

“Yes. That’s because—”

“No way. I’m not going down for this. This isn’t my fault.”

“Toraf—”

“Galen will find some way to blame me though. He always does. ‘You wouldn’t have gotten caught if you didn’t swim so close to that boat, tadpole.’ No, it couldn’t be the human’s fault for fishing in the first place—”

“Toraf.”

“Or how about, ‘Maybe if you’d stop trying to kiss my sister, she’d stop bashing your head with a rock.’ How does my kissing her have anything to do with her bashing my head with a rock? If you ask me, it’s just a result of poor parenting—”

“Toraf.”

“Oh, and my favorite: ‘If you play with a lionfish, you’re going to get pricked.’ I wasn’t playing with it! I was just helping it swim faster by grabbing its fins—”

“TOR-AF.”

He stops pacing along the water, even seems to remember that I exist. “Yes, Emma? What were you saying?”

I inhale as if I’m about to submerge for the next half hour. Letting it out slowly, I say, “This isn’t anybody’s fault. My skin gets all wrinkled like that when I stay in the water too long. Always has.”

“There’s no such thing as staying in the water too long. Not for Syrena. Besides, if your skin wrinkles like that, you’ll never be able to blend.” He holds his hand out to me, shows me his palm, smooth as a statue. Then he submerges his hand and it disappears. Blended. He crosses his arms, triumphant. The accusation is clear.

“Oh, you’re right. I’m just a human with thick skin, purple eyes, and hard bones. Which means you can go home. Tell Galen I said hi.”

Toraf opens and shuts his mouth twice. Both times it seems like he wants to say something, but his expression tells me his brain isn’t cooperating. When his mouth snaps shut a third time, I splash water in his face. “Are you going to say something, or are you trying to catch wind and sail?”

A grin the size of the horizon spreads across his face. “He likes that, you know. Your temper.”

Yeahfreakingright. Galen’s a classic type A personality—and type A’s hate smartass-ism. Just ask my mom. “No offense, but you’re not exactly an expert at judging people’s emotions.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

“Sure you do.”

“If you’re talking about Rayna, then you’re wrong. She loves me. She just won’t admit it.”

I roll my eyes. “Right. She’s playing hard to get, is that it? Bashing your head with a rock, splitting your lip, calling you squid breath all the time.”

“What does that mean? Hard to get?”

“It means she’s trying to make you think she doesn’t like you, so that you end up liking her more. So you work harder to get her attention.”

He nods. “Exactly. That’s exactly what she’s doing.”

Pinching the bridge of my nose, I say, “I don’t think so. As we speak, she’s getting your mating seal dissolved. That’s not playing hard to get. That’s playing impossible to get.”

“Even if she does get it dissolved, it’s not because she doesn’t care about me. She just likes to play games.”

The pain in Toraf’s voice guts me like the catch of the day. She might like playing games, but his feelings are real. And can’t I relate to that? “There’s only one way to find out,” I say softly.

“Find out?”

“If all she wants is games.”

“How?”

“You play hard to get. You know how they say, ‘If you love someone, set them free. If they return to you, it was meant to be?’”

“I’ve never heard that.”

“Right. No, you wouldn’t have.” I sigh. “Basically, what I’m trying to say is, you need to stop giving Rayna attention. Push her away. Treat her like she treats you.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t think I can do that.”

“You’ll get your answer that way,” I say, shrugging. “But it sounds like you don’t really want to know.”