“Dual citizenship, it looks to me,” Thomas said, ogling her tail.

“You are not helping.”

“You may not put your mouth on her without my—ow.”

“I’m trying not to stare but you guys keep giving me new things to look at. That punch, for example. Didn’t it hurt like hell?”

“It did,” Artur said, gingerly pressing the flesh below his eye.

“We have enough shit to worry about without this weird possessive streak of yours. If I want all twelve Boston Celtics to put their mouths on me, that’s my business and not yours.”

“Yeah,” Thomas added.

“And you.”

He leaned away from the tank. “If my theories on differences in strength evolution between bipeds and mermaids are true, I really don’t want you to slug me.”

“You’re not helping, either. Both of you, quit with the groping and the kissing.” She had never, in her life, had to say such a thing. And she never, in her life, could have imagined the circumstances in which she was saying it.

“Then there is little for me to do,” Artur teased.

“No, there’s a lot. Artur noticed your little toxin problem,” she said to Thomas. “I thought you guys could work together.”

“Ummmm,” Thomas said, eyeing Artur. “That’s pretty interesting. I’s’pose you guys would notice that stuff way before we did. What, you live around here?”

“No, I live on the other side of the planet. Some of our folk were in the area and reported what they sensed. When word reached my father the High King, he set me this task.”

“So the royal palace or coral reef or whatever is in the Black Sea?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder why word took so long to—”

“There are only a million of us on the planet.”

“Oh. Ah. Hmm. And with the planet being mostly water—”

“Exactly.”

Exactly indeed. It explained why Fred had never bumped into another of her kind, though at one point she’d swum along the entire eastern sea shore. Telepathy, she supposed, could only reach so far.

“Then how—”

“You know, I just did this with Jonas not half an hour ago,” Fred broke in. “You two run along and get acquainted.”

They both frowned at her. “What are you talking about?”

“The question of my lodging has not yet been settled.”

“Yeah, but now you have someone new to settle it with.”

They frowned at each other, then turned their sour expressions back on her. She elaborated. “Uh… you guys team up, like Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy. Or Owen Wilson and everybody. Solve the case. And I’ll—” Get back to my life, was her thought. Her nice, boring, controlled, uncomplicated life.

Why didn’t it feel as appealing as it had this morning?

“But you have to help us,” Thomas said at the exact same moment Artur commanded, “It ill becomes you to set aside your duty.”

“Aw, no… not both of you at once…”

Thus followed a lecture, from both of them at once, about the sanctity of the seas and her duty as a scientist as well as a mermaid and how three heads were better than two and how her duty was to her prince and her career, yak-yak, until finally she was almost shouting, “All right, all right, I’ll help, just cut it out!”