Warren Carmichael frowned as he sipped at his morning cup of Joe. He had to have it sent up via room service with his breakfast and the coffee was not as good as he had become accustomed to since his arrival in Cuba. Usually, he would have Corporal Morales pick it up from a café a few blocks away, at least then the woman would be making herself useful.

He didn’t like having women under his command, and this one he had to be especially careful of, given her history. Brigadier General Karl Thompson was a credit to the military before that little slut had accused her former commander of rape, and he didn’t want to follow in Karl’s footsteps. It had all been hushed up, of course. Karl was offered early retirement to avoid a court martial and the little slut had been given a promotion, a transfer, and some threats to keep her quiet.

It galled him that a good officer had been ousted from the army while that bitch was given exactly what she was probably after in the first place. This was why he didn’t believe that women belong in the military. They weren’t tough enough to do the job, they were a constant temptation, and when things get too tough, they cried rape, sexual harassment, or some such.

At least having her make coffee runs and interviewing tourists and locals for any signs of those mercs had made her somewhat useful. Still, he always made sure that she was being watched by one of his men until the one watching her last night lost her in a crowd of tourists. The night before he had the same man, Sergeant Whitmore, following her and he claimed that she had just wandered the tourist traps and beaches aimlessly. Whitmore had assumed that last night would be the same, but then he lost her, and she didn’t return to the hotel.

He knew that he should have kept a tracking device on the bitch. Was she planning something? Or was she just entertaining some local men? At least he could write her up for dereliction of duty, he had been waiting a while to have something on her. Still, he wondered where she was and what trouble she was getting into without someone to keep an eye on her.

He got an answer as he was checking his email, though it did not seem related at first. Then he saw the name of the sender, Danica Holmes, a name that made him burn with rage. The subject line said simply, ‘Remember me?’ It was enough that his free hand was shaking with fury as he used the other to select the message and open it.

There was no text except for a colon and a P made in the irksome shape of someone sticking out their tongue and there was a video file that he immediately opened. He was too angry to think of running it through a virus scanner, a mistake that he would later come to regret. None of that was important at the moment though, right now all that he could think about was that girl as he opened the video file.

And then, there she was, right there on his screen, smiling at him. “Hi, Warren. Do you mind if I call you Warren? We didn’t really get to meet in person when I escaped that little trap of yours. You know me as Danica Holmes, though you’ve probably figured out by now that it’s not my real name. My name is unimportant; I have so many of them after all. Anyway, this isn’t a social call; I have something that I think belongs to you.”

The camera panned outward briefly to show that Holmes was wearing a loose white dress and standing beside a chair, which held a bound, gagged, and terrified-looking Corporal Luiza Morales. “That bitch!” the general snarled, though which woman it was directed at was debatable. It definitely would have applied to both the girl who was now taunting him and the incompetent woman who had allowed herself to be captured.

Holmes walked away from Morales to sit in another chair to the right, and then the camera focused once more on her, taking Morales out of the picture. Holmes looked at the camera again and her expression was now far colder and more menacing than he would have previously given the lush at Frost’s party credit for. “You killed someone important to me. An eye for an eye, Warren.” Then she pulled a gun from a table beside the chair, aimed it to the left, and pulled the trigger.

“There, now we’re even, Warren,” Holmes said, her voice taunting him as she spoke his name, though her expression was still that of a cold-blooded killer. “Now, onto other business. You have been warned to back the fuck off and leave my friends and the beings that they are protecting alone. I warned you the night that your men killed Madeline MacArthur, but you can’t seem to take the hint. This is your last warning, back off and leave Cuba or you will die at our hands.”

“This girl playing mercenary has the nerve to threaten me?!” The thought galvanized him. He would have what he came for, and that bitch would give him the answers herself. He would get them out of her between screams of pain and begging for mercy if he had to. He was dealing with real soldiers and fighting wars when she was still a gleam in her daddy’s eye.

“Just in case you’re stupid enough to keep coming after us, I think it’s only fair to let you know exactly what you’re dealing with. Those ‘mermaids’ that you’re after, they’re small potatoes.” Even as she spoke the words, Holmes’s features began to shift until he was looking at the mystery girl who had killed the strike team sent in to retrieve Madeline MacArthur. “You recognize me, right? I’ve escaped you twice now and killed seven of your men. It’s actually a little insulting that you’re going after mermaids when I’m the real prize here, Warren. I took out your black ops team as if they were a bunch of mall cops, and I’ll do the same to anyone else that you send after us.”

Then her face and body shifted again, briefly changing to look like Private Adams, then she was an exact duplicate of Corporal Morales and she smiled coldly at him with his subordinate’s face. “I can be anyone, go anywhere, and you will never know who I am until I strike, and you’re dead. Remember how I deal with people who cross me, Warren.” The camera moved to her left to show Corporal Morales slumped in the chair, the side of her head a red mess and a look of horror etched onto her face and empty eyes.

Warren stared at the screen, filled with impotent rage at this girl who had now bested him three times. He suddenly wanted something a lot stronger than coffee as the camera swung back toward Morales’s doppelganger, still with that cold smile on her face. Whatever she was, she wasn’t human, and he had to consciously ignore the chill that ran down his spine and that brief spike of terror as he focused instead on how valuable she would be. He still intended to capture the mermaids of course; they would be useful in their own way, but the potential of this inhuman girl was something that every military organization on the planet would love to have for black ops. In the meantime, he would have to take security measures against her to make sure she wasn’t impersonating anyone close to him.

The girl shifted back to the face and body she had worn when taking down his strike team to say, “Goodbye, Warren, make the right choice here and back off.” Was that maybe her true form? Was there a time limit on how long she could hold other forms? She had spent the whole evening on Frost’s yacht as Danica and he had been watching her for most of that time. And when he had his people look into her, she didn’t exist beyond her social media presence.

Those thoughts were interrupted as she added, “Oh, and before I forget, did you check this file for viruses? Good on you if you did. If you didn’t, well, that little worm has been doing its job since you opened this file, so thanks for all the information.”

Warren yelled in fury and quickly closed the file.

I slept in until after lunch, but then we did have a bit of a busy night. All of the other Naethari were still asleep, so I quickly shifted to give myself legs, donned the dress that I had worn last night for the show, and went off in search of breakfast. On the way, I checked Maddie’s former room and was pleased to find Luiza inside and sleeping. Not that I thought that she would go back to her boss now that we had ‘killed’ her. It was the out she had been looking for to escape the military after all, and she seemed to be looking forward to the possibility of having stronger magical abilities as a Naethari.

Mom and Aunt Carmen were in the kitchen working on breakfast with several large stacks of pancakes showing that they had been up and at it for a while now. The pancakes and the big pot of oatmeal would hopefully be enough to feed all of us, but I figured that I should go out to the lagoon and collect some fresh seafood as well. By the time that I returned with a pair of large buckets filled with cod and shrimp, the others had joined the waking world and Luiza, Uncle Jack, and Dad were at the breakfast table with Mom and Aunt Carmen.

Since Nat and Maddie were still getting used to moving around with their tails, we brought breakfast to them and the others in the pool. Dad and Uncle Jack helped me to bring the food to the pool and the latter commented as we ate, “It looks like Carmichael opened our video this morning. The worm copied all of the files on his personal laptop and sent them to my cloud. There isn’t a lot there pertinent to us, other than video clips and other files that he probably got from Harris. Nothing surprising there.”

I smiled as I imagined Carmichael’s face turning various shades of red as he watched that video. “They can’t use that to track us, can they?” Nat asked.

“No, I took the usual precautions. If they try to follow the trail doggedly enough to trace any recent connections to the cloud or Danica’s fake email, it’ll lead them to an ISP in Germany. It should keep them busy for a while. I’m still more concerned with you showing off your abilities as you did, Naiya,” he replied, turning to me as he said the last.

“At least I didn’t change into any animals,” I offered with a shrug between bites of breakfast. I didn’t like changing into a male form, even as briefly as I did, but it was needed to make Carmichael think that I could be anyone. “This was the best plan we had. This is going to have him looking over his shoulder and concentrating on security though. Between that and looking for us Naethari, and whatever he thinks I might be, he will have his local resources spread thin. This should hopefully keep the heat off us until Maddie and Nat have some time to get used to their new bodies and aetral, and then we can move on to phase two.”

There were a lot of things about this plan that none of us really liked, so I could understand where he was coming from. Kieshala hadn’t been happy about using what little mana she had been able to gather so far to provide the brief illusion to make Luiza’s ‘death’ convincing either. Sacrifices needed to be made until we were ready for phase two.

Casually showing off my abilities was going to make Carmichael cautious, and hopefully paranoid. I had been pushing his buttons throughout the video too and I was hoping that I had goaded him enough that he wouldn’t be thinking clearly where I was involved anymore. We had shown him that both girls who had foiled his plans were the same person, hopefully spread some misinformation as well, and if he thought both Maddie and Luiza were dead then he would underestimate our numbers.

The purpose of the video had been to bait Carmichael, put him off balance, have him jumping at shadows, and divide his attention. I thought that it would serve its purpose well, and we even gave him another chance to back off, not that any of us thought he would. All the information that we had on him, now expanded by Luiza’s personal experience, said that he would take the bait.

He was too determined to get what he wanted, and I had just given him another juicy target to sink his teeth into. He was probably furious with me too, so even if he wasn’t determined to get what he was after, that would put me in his crosshairs. That suited us just fine though, it would make it that much easier to lure him into a trap. He had killed Sandro, almost killed Maddie, and had been hunting us down since he arrived in Cuba. He had made it personal, and he was going to pay for fucking with us, just as Hart and Pierce had before him.