Unfortunately, the former mermaid had a good ten or fifteen minutes' head start, so by the time Jenna was up on the dock she was nowhere to be seen. The other kids were glad to see Jenna (in John's) body safe and not drowned, but he ran off downtown with barely a word of acknowledgement.
Think, Jen, think, he reminded himself. If you were in her shoes, what would you do? If you had just stolen someone's body...you'd want to make a quick switch, wouldn't you? Yeah, just like dumping a stolen car. There're potential targets all around, but where would be the best place to go? Somewhere with lots of people...and if she picked my body, she'll probably want another teenage girl...that's it! Hailing a cab, Jenna jumped in and was on her way to the mall.
The mermaid had no idea what a mall was, but a couple minutes of inquiry about where all the young women were at got her pointed in the right direction. Of course, she also had no idea about hailing a cab, so she made her way there on foot. Everything was going fine for several blocks; progress was a little slow, as she was still getting used to having legs, but things were getting easier as she went. Unfortunately, another thing she had no idea about was traffic lights, or traffic at all, for that matter.
Jenna satin the backseat of the cab, wishing the driver weren't such a lunatic. He had already zoomed through two red lights, and showed no signs of easing up. By now, Jenna had simply buckled himself in and hoped for the best. The vehicle sped up to another red light, and Jenna caught a brief glimpse of...no, it couldn't be! He screamed for the driver to stop, but it was too late.
The aftermath wasn't pretty. After hitting Jenna's old body full force at fifty miles per hour, the cab plowed into the side of a car that had been making a left turn. Jenna and the other driver, on the right and left sides of their respective vehicles, were furthest from the point of impact and got away with cuts, bruises, and in the other driver's case, a sprained wrist, but the cab driver got messed up badly enough to where he had to be airlifted out to a nearby hospital. And there was nothing that could be done about Jenna's old body; by the time the ambulance arrived, it was dead.
And even worse, so was the ring. The hand it had been on was one of the body parts caught between the two vehicles, and when Jenna finally got a look at it, he could see that the band was a crumpled wreck and the ruby runes had shattered. If there was one comfort in the whole thing, it was that the ring meant that it really had been the mermaid who was killed and not another victim of hers, but that was a small comfort indeed. Jenna sat on the ground, staring at his battered body and weeping. How could he live as a guy for the rest of his life? Would his parents ever believe that their daughter was alive as another couple's son? Would John's parents believe that their had become a mermaid? And how could he tell John that she was stuck as a mermaid?