Bryce frowned down at a crustacean—some type of mammoth blue crab—picking its way along the floor beside the quay’s stone block, sorting through a pile of beer bottles. The remnants of last night’s drunken revels. “Have you ever been down to the mer-city?”

“No.” Hunt rustled his wings, one brushing against her shoulder. “Happy to stay above the surface.” The river breeze drifted past, chill despite the warm day. “You?”

She rubbed her hands down her arms along the smooth leather of Danika’s old jacket, trying to coax some warmth into them. “Never got an invite.”

Most never would. The river folk were notoriously secretive, their city beneath the surface—the Blue Court—a place few who dwelled on land would ever see. One glass sub went in and out per day, and those on it traveled by invitation only. And even if they possessed the lung capacity or artificial means, no one was stupid enough to swim down. Not with what prowled these waters.

An auburn head of hair broke the surface a couple hundred yards out, and a partially scaled, muscled arm waved before vanishing, fingers tipped in sharp gray nails glinting in the sun.

Hunt glanced to Bryce. “Do you know any mer?”

Bryce lifted a corner of her mouth. “One lived down the hall my freshman year at CCU. She partied harder than all of us combined.”

The mer could shift into fully human bodies for short periods of time, but if they went too long, the shift would be permanent, their scales drying up and flaking away into dust, their gills shrinking to nothing. The mer down the hall had been granted an oversize tub in her dorm room so she didn’t need to interrupt her studies to return to the Istros once a day.

By the end of the first month of school, the mer had turned it into a party suite. Parties that Bryce and Danika gleefully attended, Connor and Thorne in tow. At the end of that year, their entire floor had been so wrecked that every one of them was slapped with a hefty fine for damages.

Bryce made sure she intercepted the letter before her parents got it out of the mailbox and quietly paid the fine with the marks she earned that summer scooping ice cream at the town parlor.

Sabine had gotten the letter, paid the fine, and made Danika spend the whole summer picking up trash in the Meadows.

Act like trash, Sabine had told her daughter, and you can spend your days with it.

Naturally, the following fall, Bryce and Danika had dressed as trash cans for the Autumnal Equinox.