Addicted -- Chapter 1

Author's Note:

Hello Havenites,

Welcome to the first chapter of book two in the Haven High series. This book features two other characters that are near and dear to my heart. Cameron Murdoch and Megan Merrick. These two teens are soulmates. They are meant for each other, which is not to say they are without their own set of challenges when it comes to them being together. Will their love win out in a world that is constantly trying to tear them down?

Read on and find out.

Cameron Murdoch -- Halfblood Selkie (Dylan O'Brien)

Megan Merrick -- Halfblood Mermaid (Holland Roden)

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Cameron Murdoch was in his family's noisy kitchen looking out over San Francisco Bay, pouring himself a cup of the sweet nectar of the gods or as mere mortals referred to it 'coffee', He was standing amid the chaos that is their usual Monday morning ritual, and given the ruckus being created by his nine person family, he was surprised he could even think, let alone reflect over the past month, but he was used to the din.

It had been three weeks since the attack on the Yule Ball and the kids were just getting back to the swing of things in school after the Christmas Break. It had been touch and go for awhile there as to whether any of them would go back to Haven High with their magic still intact.

Every one of them had been taken in to custody by the guards for investigation after the event, even the ones who hadn't made it past the ice wall. They were all interrogated in separate cells with none of the basic human rights that non-magical creatures enjoy. Since the council in no way could convince their Unenlightened parents or caregivers of a school trip during the holidays they were replaced by changelings.

Zach had hulked out again until they moved his cell next to Lauren's. He calmed down when he could sense her again. Xan had told him that after the event. He couldn't say why he'd felt the need to tell him, but when Xander the Son of Ozweina the Slavic Goddess of echo, gossip, fame and glory says 'Rumor has it' you can bet it will have significance for you in the future.

The council was convinced that Cam and his friends were conspiring with Lauren's Brother, Liam and his crew to take down their magical world. They had kept them for days drilling them for information, trying to pit one against the other, like it was a criminal investigation, threatening them with being wiped. But none of them had broken under the pressure not even Lauren who was still weak from blood loss due to her brother's attempt on her life.

His crew had all stuck to the story they'd rehearsed. 'They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time,' luckily they were proficient enough to fight back,' 'they owed a great deal of thanks to the school for their training,' 'they had only used magic nothing else.' Yada yada yada.

Thank God they were able to hide their weapons from detection. Heaven knows their amateur glamours and charms never would have passed expert scrutiny if not for their brilliant Fae friend.

In the end, it took the Royals substantiating their story,  before the guards would even think of letting them go, but finally much to the relief of the kids they brought them home at midnight on Christmas Eve and swapped them out for their reasonable facsimiles.

Cameron's father had been beside himself -- all the magical parents were. They knew a changeling when they saw one. His sisters had told him that everything had been breaking down in the house just before Christmas. They couldn't get the Christmas lights to keep working; they had to get an electrician in twice, because the fuses kept blowing.

That wasn't surprising to Cam; he knows better than most that magical creatures disrupt technology. Somehow they'd dealt with the problem at his High School but still no one's cells worked a damn there. The administration blamed it on the all brick early 19th century edifice, but the magic creatures knew better.

They weren't even allowed anywhere near the computer labs, in fact there was a permanent big yellow sign erected in the hallway leading up to it that read DANGER ELECTRICAL HAZARD in big bold black letters, which meant to them "Hey you magic wielder stay The 'F' out"

That's why his household had a lot of simple devices: no high end cappuccino machine here --nope. They had a gas stove, tea kettle, coffee press, and hand operated bean grinder. His father had a serious coffee addiction that he had inherited. Lord knows they needed the java juice given their schedule.

His father, Malcolm Murdoch, and he are Selkies, which simply means seal shifters, and they live by the call of the sea. His father is a fullblood Selkie and his mother is entirely human, which means she is also entirely Unenlightened about their world. He doesn't know how his Dad does it. Lying to her day in and day out, and he also has no clue how his mother has never figured it out, but they say 'love' is blind. And his parents had plenty of that.

He couldn't say how his father hid the seal skin from his mother as it was attached to him at all times. Given the fact they had had seven children: him the only boy and the oldest and his six younger sisters; then, she must have had plenty of opportunities to see him naked. Nope not going there, he thought, just going to chalk it up to a really good charm.

He on the other hand was a halfblood which means he wasn't born with a seal skin already attached. He had to be gifted one when he became Enlightened . Which is a tricky business if you're not given one as it can mean certain death for the Halfling -- as the draw of the sea is irresistible.

When his powers had awoken his mother had thought he was just going through a growth spurt when he complained about an ache in his bones. Now he could deftly describe it as an itch deep beneath his skin that he just can't scratch. It's much like the maddening itch of a mending limb after a bad break – it's as if the itch is buried so deep inside you under an impenetrable cast and you just can't get to it.

He hadn't talked about the weird experiences he was having with his father and as a result he had nearly died because of it. He would go to sleep practically rocking in his bed with the irritating feeling under his skin. And that is when it happened; he began to dream of the sea.

This in retrospect was understandable, given that they lived near the water, they played on the water, and his father and mother even worked on the water. Their whole family's life was a seafaring one, but this was different. This was more menacing. He kept dreaming that he was under the water and not on top of it, and the surface where the waves crested was unreachable and he was drowning.

One morning he had even woken up by the shore with no recollection of how he'd gotten there. But the draw of the sea was so great that he just wanted to keep walking straight into the surf, even though he was now awake. He had shuddered at the thought that it was February and the water temp would have only been in the low fifties. He had thrown off his Pajama pants and boxers and dove in. But swimming on the surface wouldn't do, he needed to be under the waves. For some reason it had become a biological imperative. He had submerged finally getting the relief he had sought for weeks when a harbor seal came out of nowhere, clutched his upper arm in his teeth and drug him ashore.

He had visited the council that night and had become Enlightened. His father went away for a week at that point and had come back with a skin he could use. Apparently it had been his grandfathers, but when he'd questioned him, his father had been adamant that they were not to speak of it, ever again. Now he carries it everywhere he goes in a tattered old back pack. His father had taken it to a Hale Witch, almost immediately, to be spelled to look like a ratty old hoody if anyone Unenlightened looks in his bag.

Now he and his father satisfy their necessity for the sea with a morning dip at 5am and another one just before they go to sleep, which doesn't leave a lot of time for sleeping hence the caffeine addiction. It had been even more brutal to work in the training schedule the gang had devised before the attack at the Yule Ball last semester. He was barely sleeping and had felt like a walking zombie for weeks. It was no wonder Meg and he never made it through the rapidly closing hole of the ice wall.

Secretly, he hadn't been disappointed. He and Megan, a halfblood mermaid, aren't land creatures they belong to the sea. They're strongest in the water or they would be if Meg could just get over her fear of it. He doesn't know how she can do it. How she can resist the urge, but she does.

She had come to him after he had recovered from the poison of the metal shards at the Samhain Ball distraught that she had not been able to help. Her fear of open water of any kind had kept her from playing a more vital role in obtaining the antidote.

It was only because of that he was finally able to convince her to let him help by slowly introducing her to the sea. So now every Saturday and Sunday they spend as much time as they can at the beach. Sometimes they even go to the pier or the docks, but mostly they sit on the shore.

And they talk about anything and everything, and he tells her about all the wonders of the deeps and she listens. At the pier there are steps that end in a little slab of cement that hovers over the water's edge. He uses his powers to call all kinds of water creatures to him and they come. She loves to reach out her hand and touch them: stingrays, seals, even sharks come to greet her, but she especially loves the dolphins she has a special affinity for them; he can tell.

One day he hopes to help her become comfortable enough so that he can take her out in his small sailboat. He just knows she'll love the thrill of skimming over the water's surface at breakneck speed; she's that daring. Nothing scares her except the water. She's the bravest and brightest person he knows and he's thankful everyday she's in his life.

That's why he divides his time: between school and the gang and the sea, with time in his Alchemy lab in his basement. He constructed it when the gang needed to find away to defeat the insurgents trying to destroy the magical world. Since then he'd come up with several potion grenades that when thrown cause any number of ill affect for the person they hit. Of course, he has to make sure his aim is true. He wouldn't want to spell any of his friends by accident.

For some strange reason he's a gifted alchemist. Selkie's aren't supposed to have an affinity for spellcraft or portions, but for some inexplicable reason not another person in his class or even the school can outperform him in Knight's class. Knight is the once most honorable Galahad of the Round Table and is his Alchemy and Chemistry teacher at Haven High School 'of Magic and ordinary teens'. He's considered the best alchemist in North America. Unfortunately for Cam, because of his affinity he's also his mentor, which trust him isn't as cool as you might think. To say that Knight demanded excellence would be an understatement.

So Cam spends most of his free time in his Lab. There's another more important reason on most evenings you can find him there. Cam just has to find away to ensure he doesn't reject the seal skin he inherited. That's right, with halfblood Selkies there are no guarantees. Just like a transplant patient can reject an organ after transplant so too can a halfblood reject their seal skin. It helps if it's a family heirloom, but again there's no guarantee.

If he rejects his skin he'll never be able to help Megan or his sisters who are not yet Enlightened, but may be one day? If he could find a solution before his younger siblings have to deal with the draw of the sea and the potential rejection of a non inherited skin then all will be right in his almost perfect world. He just needs to concoct the perfect anti-rejection potion then maybe he can finally rest easy.

So that's what keeps him up at night -- those minor worries of doom and gloom -- but he'll find a solution or die trying, so he thinks, as he sucks back his third coffee of the morning, while his second youngest sister screams bloody murder as his father tries to comb out her tangled long blond hair.

Taking a quick look at his watch, he notes that Megan's should be picking him up any time now in her new red Volkswagen Bug a present from her very rich, but very absentee Diplomat father.

He and Meg both live in one of the more exclusive neighborhoods in San Fran on Sea Cliff Ave, she in one of the most expensive condos in the world and he and his nine person family in the smallest house on their waterfront street. Still it had cost nearly twenty million to purchase, his father had confided in him.

That's the thing about being an immortal you have a lot of time to save. Malcolm Murdoch had told Caroline Murdoch that he'd inherited it from a distant relative, but if they had any other family, than the nine of them, Cam wasn't aware of it.

Their new 5 bedroom 3 bathroom abode was a far cry from their three bedroom one bath cottage on Seal Bay Island off the coast of Portland Maine. He'd spent twelve glorious years there before his father came to them and announced that they would be moving to San Francisco he'd explained that the Seal Conservationist Society had asked if he would head up the program to protect the harbor seals that live year round in the Bay.

His father had come to their attention when he put forth a theory for the decline of the Maine Harbor Seal population. It was due to the kill off of sardines because of Chemical pollutants being dumped on the Canadian side of Passamaquoddy Bay. A quick test of the waters there proved his theory and reopened the long lasting controversy over the demarcation of the bay between the two countries.

After that his Marine Biologist father and mother could have written a ticket for anywhere in the world where seals are declining. Little did the Unenlightened know that instead of years of research he had simply asked the seals what was happening. But it got them this sweet property a stone's throw from the water, which was a godsend for his father and him. The less time they had to spend getting to the water the more time they had to spend in it.

Megan pulled up in his circular two car garage drive and honked her horn. He grabbed his red backpack that he went nowhere without and took off for the door. He stepped outside in a light hoody. It was one of those rare January days: the sun was shining brilliantly instead of the fog and rain they were used to at this time of year. He was pumped to see that Meg had the top down and they would be riding to school for the first time with it down since she got it for her birthday a week ago.

Cam took a quick look for the location of Meg's crutches and spied them safely tucked away in the back seat before vaulting right over the closed door and into the passenger seat beside a smiling Meg.

Megan Merrick was a stone cold fox, the prettiest girl in school, and a badass with the best ass. He thought as he chuckled to himself. She had fiery red hair, electric blue eyes and a killer smile, and he didn't deserve her, not one bit.

"Hey Babe," she said before planting a quick kiss on his lips. "Buckle up where going to be late."

********************THANKS FOR READING***************

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