The Coral Crown

Chapter four

I swam cautiously around the island. I had gotten better at swimming and could now go faster, so it didn't take me long. The island seemed uninhabited, so i climed up on the beach and pulled myself to a spot where the waves couldn't reach me. For a long time, I just sat and thought about why this had happened ot me. I remembered Maria calling me princess and then Morgan confirming it. I was pulled away from my thoughts by a sudden pain in my tail. I thought it might have started to work when the pain grew too much to bear. I screamed and scrambled to get back to the water. Once i was in, i sat on a rock shaped like a bench. I stared at my tail and wondered what went wrong. Maybe that was one part of the fairytales that wasn't true.

I came up to the surface and stared at the beach. What I saw scared me. A long trail of blood was seeping into the sand. I thought it was from my tail until I saw that it reached up to the spot where my head was. I remembered hitting my head on the rock and just shrugged it off. It was only a cut and I knew from cleaning up my "sisters" that head wounds bled a lot. I wondered when social services would realize that kids didn't fall down the staris as much as "dad" said we did. I dove back underwater, trying to think of another way to get back to normal. I didn't realize that I was swimming until I bumped into something hard. I needed to stop hitting my head or I would end up with some serious brain issues. I looked up to see what I had hit, believing it to be just another rok, and saw the biggest mouth I had ever seen. I realized that it belonged to a shark and let out a useless scream. Then I fainted. When I woke up, I had a serious case of déjà vu, waking up in a cave. Only this time, I was surrounded by sharks, and there wasn't one mermaid in sight.