Free Aquatic Attraction by Charlie Richards

Chapter One

    Niall tried sucking in a deep breath and spent the next twenty seconds coughing up water. He bent over at the waist and rested his hands on his knees as he regained a semblance of composure. “Damn, I hate shifting to human,” he wheezed. Finish the shift before trying to breathe through my nose. What a juvenile mistake.
    He felt a smack on his back and stumbled forward a step. “No, you don’t.” Niall glanced up to see Branson grinning down at him. “You’re just out of practice. How long has it been? Thirty years since you’ve been topside?”
    Nodding, Niall straightened to his full six-foot-two-inch height and stretched. He took a few steps on the well-muscled legs he’d just formed and realized, with some relief, he hadn’t lost the ability to move as a human. The man to his left chuckled, and Niall looked toward him.
    Drew grinned, watching him. “Just like riding a bike, eh?”
    Niall shook his head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” When both men chuckled, he rolled his shoulders in irritation and focused his attention on the beach. They’d come ashore in a secluded cove, and Niall looked out over the ocean waves. A strange sense of foreboding crashed over him, like a wave breaking over the beach. Shaking off the feeling, he glanced at a narrow trail leading up out of the rocks. “Is that the way?”
    All mirth disappearing, Branson nodded. “Stay behind me, Prince.”
    Niall shook his head as he followed the slightly shorter man out of the rocks and into a forest of tall trees. He glanced around, amazed anew at the massive trunks. He wondered how he’d forgotten the beauty of the surface world. Thirty years is a long time. “You can’t call me that up here, Branson,” he reminded absently.
    “Yes, sir.”
    He heard the hesitation in Branson’s voice and smiled faintly. “We’re business associates, remember? It’s Niall Karson.”
    He almost grinned at his two friends’ non-committal grunts. Though they’d all grown up together, played together as young spawn, both Branson and Drew took formality very seriously. Once they’d become royal guards, Niall had watched the gap grow between them. He’d always felt it too bad that they couldn’t continue to look at him as the same merman they’d grown up with.
    Pulling his thoughts to the present, Niall spotted the car through the trees. “Nice,” he murmured.
    Now, Drew grinned. “Gotta say the cars have vastly improved in the last thirty years. There are clothes in the trunk.”
    Niall glanced down at the sarong the men of his people automatically created to cover their genitalia when they shifted shape. “What? Not appropriate?” he joked.
    His two companions chuckled, glancing at their own sarongs. While Niall’s was a deep, royal blue, his two friends created green sarongs. Drew’s a pale, metallic color while Branson wore a dark, seaweed green. Drew felt under the tire well of the front, passenger wheel and pulled out a small box. From it, he extracted the car’s key. He ran his hand over the BMW’s side lovingly before opening the trunk and tossing a small satchel to each man.
    Five minutes later, dressed in slacks, dress shirts, and ties, they drove north toward Seattle.
    * * * *

    Carlye Layton glared at the printouts. “This makes no sense,” she muttered irritably, staring at the small dark spots on the aerial read-outs in front of her.
    “What doesn’t?”
    Her head snapped up. Her eyes widened when she saw her coworker standing in the doorway. “What are you doing back already, Deb? I thought you were at lunch.”
    Deb rolled her eyes. “I was at lunch…two hours ago! Don’t you have a meeting to get to?”
    “It’s not until three o’clock,” Carlye replied, waving her hand distractedly as she returned her focus to her computer screen.
    “Uh, yeah,” Deb moved further into Carlye’s office and pointed at the computer monitor. “And it’s 2:45 now.”
    Carlye looked to the left