Fathom by L. Standage (spanish books to read .TXT) 📕

“Second to last on the left, next to yours.” The one where Natasha and Calder had been talking. “Garage is through there,” Eamon said, pointing with a thumb toward the door behind the kitchen. I strode over to the door and opened it. The minivan sat snugly in the garage. Other boxes and various duffle bags sat along the left wall. I spotted the hoard of bottled water at once, but before I could bend to pick up the topmost case, someone spoke.

“Hey, come hold this for me.”

I looked around. Calder stood, leaning over a table on the right-hand side of the garage. The minivan had blocked him from view.

Eager to help him, hoping to earn a bit of kindness or at least tolerance from him, I walked around the van to where he sat, staring into a microscope. Without looking up, he held out a glass test tube with a tiny drop of blue liquid at the bottom of it. On the table sat a cluttered chemistry set. Several books and a spiral notepad lay open around the equipment.

I held the test tube while he used one hand to drop a clear liquid into another tube he was holding over a Bunsen burner in his other hand. The liquid in the tube turned from blue to red.

“What are you working on?” I asked, fascinated by the color change. He looked up, as though surprised to hear my voice. His Adam’s apple bobbed as his eyebrows knit.

“Um. Nothing. Here.” He held out his hand for the test tube. I passed it to him but in the exchange, our fingers bumped and the test tube slipped. He snatched for it. It hit the counter and fell to the floor with a tinkling crash. I gasped.

“I’m so sorry!”

“Forget it.” He waved me off. “Just go. I’ll clean it up.”

I turned and hurried for the door, almost forgetting the case of water. I stopped and stepped back, then reached around for a case and was forced to show Calder my burning face one more time before I could escape.

By dinnertime, Walter, Uther, Cordelia, and Natasha hadn’t come back yet, so the rest of us ate together. Well, I say together because we all ate at the same time, but I sat on the couch with Samantha and Seidon. Eamon sat in another chair at the edge of one of the computer tables, and Calder ate by himself in the kitchen, leaning over his dinner plate on the counter and absorbed in a book. What was he reading?

“This is good, Eamon,” said Samantha. “What is it?”

“Just bacon hash,” he replied. “Good, honest Irish food.”

“It is very good. Different,” said Seidon. I nodded, glancing once at Calder to see what he thought, but he continued eating in silence. Soon though, he scraped his plate clean, closed the book, threw the paper plate in the garbage, and went back into the garage.

“What’s he doing in there?” I asked, avoiding eye contact with Samantha.

“Testing some blood samples,” said Eamon. I felt a prick of interest and wished I could observe Calder’s work, but I probably ruined some of it when I broke a test tube. He wouldn’t want me anywhere near that stuff. Eamon continued. “He’s categorizing them, making notes. We like to keep certain tabs on some of the merpeople we deal with. He found blood on the beach belonging to Marinus.”

“On La Jolla beach?” I said.

“Aye.”

“We saw Calder that day when he was collecting it, didn’t we, Liv?”

“Yeah. I wondered what he was doing.” I stood to take my plate to the garbage. Along the way, I glanced at the dog-eared paperback novel Calder had been reading: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Really? I stopped in surprise and thought of my own bookshelf back home, containing similarly battered copies of the series. Calder was a Harry Potter fan? It seemed so...light. So likeable. So not Calder.

“Do you need some of my blood too?” Seidon asked, interrupting my strange surprise.

“Oh, surely not, Your Highness,” said Eamon. “I wouldn’t dare take a single drop of your blood. Your mother would have me horsewhipped.”

“What’s a horsewhip?” he asked with interest.

“Something I don’t want to get whipped with,” Eamon replied.

“It would probably feel a little like getting caught in the tentacles of a jellyfish,” I said. Eamon laughed. Seidon’s eyebrows rose.

“Ouch.” Seidon shrugged. “But no, Mother would never do that if taking my blood meant keeping us safe.”

Eamon smiled, but shook his head. “In this line of work, it’s best to err on the side of not angering merworld queens.”

This line of work? I chortled. “How did you get into this…business, or whatever you call it?”

Eamon chuckled again. “Oh, it’s been a lifelong calling, really. Always knew merpeople existed. Grew up knowing.”

“Wow. And what about everyone else?”

“Well, Uther came into it about twelve years ago. We hired him for some security work, and he came to find out the truth about a certain young lady we were escorting back to the English Channel. Walter knew about it before he met up with us. He was a connection Calder’s mam had known during her younger days of traipsing around with merpeople. I’ve known Calder since he was a lad; like my family, his family has been doing this for generations. And Natasha had been threatened by a lovesick merman who she’d come across in Melbourne nearly a year ago. Long story short, he told her the truth, she spurned his advances, and we had to step in. Told her to stay away from the ocean, but she’s been with us ever since.”

I remembered Natasha’s face as she told me she knew Marinus and put two and two together.

“Marinus?” I asked.

“The very same.”

“Really?” Samantha’s eyes widened. “Ugh, what a creep.”

“Poor Natasha. Kind of hard for a marine botanist to stay away from the ocean,” I said.

“She’s a good lass and a big help.”

“So, you just travel around looking for mermaid troubles?” Sam