Oceanborn
Oceanborn
Amalie Howard
The coronation is over.But the battle has just begun.Nerissa Marin has won her crown. But can she keep it? Already, her ties to the human realm are driving a wedge between Nerissa and her people. When word arrives that her part-human prince consort, Lo, has been poisoned, she makes the difficult choice to leave Waterfell and return landside. As the royal courts debate her decision, even more disturbing rumors surface: a plot is rising against her, led by someone she least expects.On land, Nerissa learns another shocking truth–Lo does not remember who she is. As her choice to try to save him threatens her hold on her crown, changing loyalties and uncertainty test her courage in ways she could never have imagined. Nerissa will have one last chance to prove herself as a queen…and save the undersea kingdom she loves.
The coronation is over.
But the battle has just begun.
Nerissa Marin has won her crown. But can she keep it? Already, her ties to the human realm are driving a wedge between Nerissa and her people. When word arrives that her part-human prince consort, Lo, has been poisoned, she makes the difficult choice to leave Waterfell and return landside. As the royal courts debate her decision, even more disturbing rumors surface: a plot is rising against her, led by someone she least expects.
On land, Nerissa learns another shocking truth—Lo does not remember who she is. As her choice to try to save him threatens her hold on her crown, changing loyalties and uncertainty test her courage in ways she could never have imagined. Nerissa will have one last chance to prove herself as a queen…and save the undersea kingdom she loves.
“It’s good to see you, Lo,” I whisper against his neck.
As if a spell has been broken, Lo pulls away, his eyes narrowing a fraction in frustration as he struggles to remember. “So you’re Nerissa? Bertha told me that we were friends.”
“Friends,” I repeat, hearing my own voice break slightly on the word.
“We went to school together, right? Dover?”
I swallow hot bile at his nervous recitation. Even prepared, his reaction comes as a shock. I don’t even want to look at Bertha or Grayer, or even Echlios. I don’t want to see the expressions on their faces. Instead I smile through trembling cheeks and watery eyes. “Yes. We met at Dover. You don’t remember me at all?”
The look in his eyes is tortured, as if he’s struggling to place me in his head. “There’s a part of me that feels like it does know you,” he says, gesturing to his chest. “But I can’t remember it here.” His fingers jerk to his head and then flutter to his sides in a defeated motion. “I’m sorry.”
Praise for Amalie Howard and Waterfell, book 1 of The Aquarathi (#ulink_5c518477-75e0-5b18-a1bc-3e66bd30f87f)
“Howard has crafted a page-turning blend of magical realism and fantasy.… Plot shifts, surprises, and a love affair not yet fully realized sets readers up for the second in the fascinating trilogy.”
—Booklist
“A fantastical surf-and-turf romance.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Exhilarating, romantic, and totally unique, Waterfell is an absolute page-turner!”
—Kristi Cook, New York Times bestselling author of the Winterhaven series
Books by Amalie Howard available from MIRA Ink (#ulink_97103456-c22a-5b87-80f0-3481c675faef)
The Aquarathi
(in reading order)
WATERFELL
OCEANBORN
Oceanborn
Amalie Howard
www.miraink.co.uk (http://www.miraink.co.uk)
For my brothers, Gian Kris and Givan Kyle, who are the true ninjas.
Contents
Cover (#u993abba9-bf9e-56d0-841f-bc16139d06f9)
Back Cover Text (#u28fd6810-be0c-5a30-b275-734f7d2447d4)
Introduction (#ue47c1748-0338-5c5f-84ad-8edc449dc3a1)
Praise (#ub1955e68-3e6a-52db-aafd-9760dd0e5144)
Booklist (#u99877431-9d62-5a4e-a108-a188db54e91f)
Title Page (#ufe0c46cf-8dbe-5a34-aadf-57eb6e019f5e)
Dedication (#u8f6c4d9f-a46a-550e-8136-2a07dc7d7e26)
Epigraph (#u42dc5e6b-658a-59d6-80de-9ebd9cc47fc3)
1 Glory and Pain (#u1d9ac237-57e3-54d5-8106-97774cf6a9d3)
2 Impossible Choices (#u6d131bdb-de3f-547f-b7d3-093b19c676e8)
3 Confusion (#u349994a3-b74c-5d57-9793-389919b4e38a)
4 Surf Your Heart Out (#uf522785e-6b62-51dc-ac9e-21d3d5dc2a6d)
5 Game On (#u13d746d5-41b9-5dbe-8c6e-2437644a6f58)
6 Make Your Move (#u55609773-ff34-5e3a-8e77-1724e7f338f1)
7 Stop, Drop and Roll (#litres_trial_promo)
8 A Kiss Is Just a Kiss (#litres_trial_promo)
9 The Challenge (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Water and Blood (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Braving a Glimmer (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Monster (#litres_trial_promo)
13 The Rules of the Game (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Sleight of Hand (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Friends and Frenemies (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Hell Froze Over (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Chimeras (#litres_trial_promo)
18 The Call of Land and Sea (#litres_trial_promo)
19 Clash of the Teen Titans (#litres_trial_promo)
20 A Queen’s Word (#litres_trial_promo)
21 Catch and No Release (#litres_trial_promo)
22 Second Chances (#litres_trial_promo)
23 Vendetta (#litres_trial_promo)
24 Leap Before You Look (#litres_trial_promo)
25 Girlfriends, Grenades and Goodbye (#litres_trial_promo)
26 The Art of War (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Playlist (#litres_trial_promo)
Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Epigraph (#ulink_3e8e74f9-0a08-575c-9669-20ff315e4809)
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin—his control
Stops with the shore.
—Lord Byron
1 Glory and Pain (#ulink_01c13aa8-1bc1-55bd-9148-9d0d42bc5286)
We are savage. We are proud. We are the dark rulers of the sea.
Deep in the ocean near the earth’s core, I survey the Aquarathi people—a firestorm of color—as the four courts pay homage to their new queen. Closest to me, the Gold Court stands quietly proud. The Sapphire Court is flamboyant in their tribute. The Emerald Court, more demure. But the Ruby Court, I watch with silent, cautious eyes. Months before, they supported a rival queen in her bid against the High Court, and she almost won.
Almost.
The great hall of Waterfell is deep and cavernous, with cobbled golden stalactites and stalagmites spanning its entire length to meet in the middle like majestic columns. In the human world, I learned about the marble pillars of the ancient Greeks. Ours remind me of the pictures I saw of theirs, only the ones around me are far older and more forbidding. The floor glitters with all manner of earthly minerals, reflecting off our bodies like prisms.
Today we celebrate my coronation as heir to the High Court. In Aquarathi society, it’s a pivotal milestone, one made even more momentous by the fact that my father—the last king—is dead. If he were alive, years from now he would be the one to transfer the proverbial baton to me. The endorsement from one ruler to another is a vital piece of our tradition. An Aquarathi coronation isn’t the same as humans might expect from what they know of royalty in the media, but power is passed from the old monarch to the new one in a ritual that’s just as significant.
Aivana, which translates into the human language as beautiful flower, refers to an ancient Aquarathi practice. Like Sanctum, it is a gift born to those of royal blood. In our world, when kings or queens die, they can bequeath their power, should they so choose, to a next of kin. Aivana is not only a transfer of Aquarathi energy from one ruler to the next; it’s a transfer of trust—a blessing of sorts from the old to the new.
In a parallel world, my father would be alive and standing at my side. I can picture his face, silvery blue and radiant with pride. Everyone would watch with bated breath as he touched his nose to mine and bent his forehead to rest directly upon my brow. We would both glow so brightly that the light would extinguish all colors save ours. Together, we would bestow Sanctum—an ancient Aquarathi practice used by royals to strengthen our people—to everyone in the room, reminding them of our strength and our love. Eventually his bioluminescence would fade, merging into mine and signaling the rise of a new ruler.
But my father isn’t here, and there’s no one to pass along a crown to make this any easier or to make the Aquarathi immediately accept me. I am alone. And I am already a queen. My coronation is but an afterthought. My people watch me in expectant silence, crowding into the great hall of Waterfell like silent luminescent candles flickering in a body of water. A shiver winds through me as I study their faces—my fledgling rule has already raised questions and a near-royal coup. I’ve had to earn their approval. I still have to.
I wish I were back in La Jolla.
The thought is errant. And cowardly. I am Aquarathi, not human. And I belong here. I know that. But the truth is, I miss being human—playing hockey and surfing, lunches in the quad, hanging out with my best friend, Jenna. Being human. But I’m not just a girl. I’m part of an alien marine species living on this planet, and my place is in the ocean, not landside.
I almost smile, remembering snippets of a conversation I had with Jenna during one of our sunny lunches in the Dover Prep courtyard, a couple weeks after I’d revealed what I was to her.
“So, do you live in a giant underwater castle? You know, like Ariel?”
I snorted soda through my nose at the Disney reference. “Um, no. There are no underwater castles in the ocean, Jenna, and I definitely don’t sit on rocks grooming my hair in the sunlight waiting to be rescued by Prince Eric...even though he is kind of dreamy.”
Jenna grinned. “Well, now that you’ve gone and dashed all my childhood ideals, enlighten me.”
“Disney version or Jeopardy version?”
“Jeopardy.”
“We live in underwater caves. We hunt, we sleep, we reproduce and we work. As a species, think of us as a cross between whales, dolphins and wolves. No castles, no tea parties, just the occasional sushi brunch. We’re just like any other sea creature living in pods...pretty boring really.”
“Don’t you have an economic or political structure?”
“An economy of what? Trading in plankton? Our political structure is divided into four courts, as you know, with one high court. Unlike most humans,” I said with a grin, “we are a very simple species.”
“I don’t get it. I mean, you’re so evolved. Intelligent.”
“Why? Intelligence is measured in different ways, not necessarily according to human standards or human categories. For us, it’s about self-awareness. We exist within the parameters of our world, within our social and cultural structures, living as one with the environment. We don’t belong up here, involved in politics and MTV and wireless Internet. A killer whale doesn’t just get up and say, ‘I want to play some video games and maybe try using a fork,’ and neither would any Aquarathi. It doesn’t make us any less intelligent.”
“Yes, but you can transform to be like us. Human.”
“Not all of us. Most Aquarathi can only exist in human form if they’re in close proximity to me. It’s not our natural state.”
She stared at me as if I were an imbecile missing the big picture. “Still, for argument’s sake, think of what you could do if you did—I mean you could be a part of the government instead of working policy change from the sidelines. You could make sure we don’t do anything to jeopardize your species. You could play an active part. I mean, more than you already do in secret, and you wouldn’t have to hide.”
“If the humans knew about us, it would lead to worse things, Jenna.”
She was so passionate, and what she said was partially true. We could make ourselves known. But what would stop us from seizing control and overpowering the humans if they didn’t like our ways? It would be easy, with all of our abilities. After all, that was what Ehmora wanted. She wanted to control people so that this planet wouldn’t face the same brutal end that Sana, our home planet, faced at the hands of the hominids there.
But that wasn’t what my father wanted. And it’s not what I want. There are always going to be those who think we are a stronger and smarter species—those like Ehmora who would view humans as less than. Those are the few who won’t be happy coexisting. Eventually the humans would grow to fear us and we’d end up in the same place that Sana did—in an interspecies war. No, it’s better that we live in secret, affecting change from the sidelines, as we have done for millennia.
And now it’s my turn to take the reins.
My eyes flick to the restless Ruby Court. Those Aquarathi have been the slowest to accept my rule over the past few weeks, especially after the death of their leader. But I beat Ehmora on the sands of battle, and their allegiance has been sworn, if not truly won. I’m still working on that. Some of them still support what Ehmora was fighting for, and they’re the dangerous ones...stirring seeds of malcontent.
I take a breath and close my eyes. On cue, the crown of bones on my brow pushes forward like a fan of finely webbed coral. I center myself, feeling my core connect with the heart of Waterfell—and the beating hearts of all the Aquarathi within it—until we are one and the same. I am a daughter of the old kings and a mother of the new. Every living creature in this room is tied to me. I exhale, and the whispered breath ripples across the hall from body to body, heart to heart. I open my eyes—the glow in the room is almost blinding, a tumultuous kaleidoscope like the northern lights in Earth’s sky.
Echlios, my Handler and captain of my royal guard, moves forward to stand beside me, his body rigid. I can see the approval flashing in his bright silver eyes. He nods and arches his long neck, his dark red scales glittering, as he bares it to me in a gesture of submission. Golden-green lights shimmer down the length of my body, mirroring the deep ruby of his, and I click fiercely in my native tongue to my people, calling water-to-water and blood-to-blood.
My water is yours as yours is mine, I tell them, whispering the oaths I would have sworn to my father. Power ripples along my spine, making my golden colors flare so brightly that every finned head dips in deferent succession—gold to green to blue, and finally to red in a wave of reluctant molten crimson.
I must rule by strength now. Not just by love.
Trust is a luxury, and the time for compassion in Waterfell has come and gone. Ehmora planted dark seeds of doubt and confusion. If I don’t control my people, all of the humans will be at risk. And everything my father fought and died for will be for nothing. I can never let that happen, even more so now that I am bonded to a hybrid—a half-human, half-Aquarathi prince.
I arch my neck, my tail curling through the water...and freeze as a violent wave of pain crashes into me like a rogue tsunami, destroying everything in its path. Lo’s name reverberates like a hammer in my brain as if the sharp thought of him has summoned his consciousness to me in full force. My lights flutter and die. I can feel the startled pulses and the clicks of the courts, but I can’t focus on them.
All I know is Lo’s pain...a deep, shattering, all-consuming pain, as if a thousand blades are carving my body at once. The navy swirls on my flanks—Lo’s marks—deepen like ink, sinking into me with scorching pressure. Everything disappears and I feel only the pull of the bond...and the one on the other side of the bond...calling to me.
And in that moment, I know. The threat isn’t here.
It’s there.
In seconds, Echlios is glued to my side, the rest of his guards surrounding us in a protective circle. “My lady, what is it?”
“Lo,” I gasp. “Something’s wrong. He’s hurt.”
“I’ll go.”
“No,” I insist, nearly doubling over. “The coronation—”
“Can wait.”
I shake my head, feeling my ties to the Aquarathi start to fade. I swallow. “This is too important.”
Echlios nods, but I can see the uncertainty flicker across his face. Because of the bond with Lo, I am vulnerable, and if Lo is hurt, I can be, too. Echlios’s mate, Soren, joins us, her eyes flashing gold fire. As my Handler, she is so in tune with me that she has felt the fear I’m now trying desperately to conceal.
Her voice is gentle, as is the pale green tail fin circling me in a protective manner. “Breathe, Nerissa. Try deep calming breaths. It will help with the pain. Echlios will go. It is his duty to protect you...and the prince regent.”
I do as she says, letting the salt water enter through my gills and breathing out the sharp, pulsing pain until it becomes a dull throb. Nodding weakly to Echlios, I watch as Soren dismisses the courts that have come to pay their respects to the new queen. I don’t know what they’re saying, but I have to imagine that seeing their new ruler in an incapacitated state on the first day of her coronation has to be cause for concern. Still, that anxiety pales in comparison to the urge I feel to take off in a sprint for the mainland in response to the pull of the bond.
“I need a minute,” I pulse to Soren as another wave of dizziness overcomes me.
“Go. I’ll convene the High Council,” she says to me and then frowns, her eyes narrowing in concern. “Not too far, Nerissa.”
I nod and make my way out of the throne room and into the tunnels beyond. There are two silent black forms behind me—Nova and Nell—twins and two of my royal guard that I’m aching to get rid of. They’re young but fierce—Echlios thought our closeness in age would make me less uncomfortable with having permanent shadows glued to my every move. I didn’t mind, until now.
“Stay here,” I click to the twins at the tunnel’s exit. “I’m going to be right over there.”
I swim away from Waterfell with a few short, powerful strokes, but stay within watching distance of the two guards. Their forms are indistinct, cloudy shapes, which means they can still see me and that’s all that matters. I close my eyes and stay perfectly still, clearing my mind of everything but the feel of the water against my skin and the soft muted sounds of ocean life around me. I let the sea do what it does best—heal.
For a heartbeat, floating in a sea of space and nothing, it’s easy to imagine that I live in a world where everything is different. That my parents are alive and together. That my father is here to watch my coronation with pride. That the one who has my heart isn’t a million miles away...and that he hasn’t been hurt, or worse.
Lo...the prince regent. My mate.
We are bonded for life, bound by an unbreakable tie. We belong to each other in a way that only lovers can know. My gaze falls on the bands of navy shimmering through my golden-green scales—the marks of our bonding—and green bioluminescent lights tingle along my sides in automatic response. Fighting another wave of panic, I try to push the thought of him—and the thought of his blue-black eyes, so like the shadowy darkness of the ocean surrounding me—from my mind, but it’s like trying to separate my skin from my body. Every breath I inhale, he inhales with me. As if in response, the tug from before becomes more insistent, less painful now but still sharp. I can only hope that Echlios finds him safe.
Drifting deeper into the deep blue coldness, I don’t resist as the current drags my body with insistent force. I’m not afraid. I can handle the ocean at its worst, control it even, but I let it take me, enjoying the feel of not having to be strong for just a moment. I don’t care that I’ve lost sight of my two guards or that the dim lights of Waterfell have faded. There’s nothing around me but pitch-black murky gloom. I’m the deadliest predator out here, so it’s not like I have anything to fear—especially with Ehmora dead and her allies in hiding. Those Echlios hunted down either swore fealty to me or were executed.
Inexorably, my thoughts return to Lo, the son of the very one who tried to usurp my throne. Ehmora’s son. Sure, he killed her—for me—but our relationship is still delicate at best, and even at the core, a lifelong genetic bond wouldn’t be the only thing that would hold me to him. At first, being with Lo was an act of defiance and desperation on my part. I wanted to be close to someone, to forget for a while what I was and pretend to be a human girl. But that one moment cost me so much. I bonded myself to the son of my enemy.
“Planning to drift to China?”
The unexpected voice jerks me out of my thoughts. Speio, the son of Soren and Echlios, is both my oldest friend in the world and, without a doubt, the biggest thorn in my side. I eye him, watching the tense way he’s swimming toward me. His body is slender and pale gold like his mother’s, with luminous green fins spanning his entire length. While the look in his eyes isn’t exactly aggressive, the slow sideways motion of his body is. “Do you have any idea how far out you are?”
“No,” I say truthfully. “I lost track.”
Speio bares his teeth in borderline disrespect. “Everyone’s on high alert because of what happened. The least you can do is stay with your guards.”
“Since when do you care, Speio?”
Speio’s resentment toward me was no secret while we lived on land—after all, he was landlocked after Dvija and coming of age. Which, in his own words, was a punishment worse than death. His baser instincts made him stupidly trust Ehmora and basically hand-deliver me to her on a platter. While I forgave him for his temporary lunacy, trust is a harder thing to regain.
“I care if you get hurt. Or if Lo is hurt.”
I stare at him sharply. “What do you know about Lo?”
“I know more than you think,” he says. I’m too drained to rise to the bait, so instead I start the swim back to Waterfell, the water in my body guiding me there. Speio follows. “You sure you don’t want to know?”
“Know what, Speio?”
“I followed my father to La Jolla and I talked to Cara.”
Cara? My archnemesis whom he hooked up with before we left California?
“That’s weird. I thought you were done with the humans and you couldn’t wait to come back home,” I say.
Speio shoots me an exasperated stare. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want to keep myself in the loop, especially with the threat of hybrids running around.”
This time he has my attention. “What did you say?”
“You heard me. Hybrids,” he says. “What did you think, Riss? That they were just going to go away now that you’ve returned to your rightful place hidden in the deep? Ehmora’s minions still want to take over the world. All you’ve done by getting rid of one of their leaders is slow them down.”
I frown. “But Echlios says we haven’t seen any hybrids in weeks. And what does Cara have to do with any of that? She’s human. She doesn’t even know what we are.”
“That doesn’t mean more of them don’t exist,” Speio says. “We have to be careful. And Cara’s been hanging out with Lo this summer.” I try to ignore the stab of jealousy those words cause in the pit of my stomach, but it’s a losing battle. I can picture Cara’s toned form in a swimsuit and imagine exactly what hanging out with Lo means. Speio grins, obviously enjoying my discomfort.
I swipe a clawed forearm at him. “You are the worst friend in the world, you know that? So, what did Cara say? And what did you tell her, by the way? That you were just dropping in from the other side of the world?”
“Um, Lo’s bonded to you, Riss. It’s not like he’s going to go chasing after someone else,” he says with a knowing look at my suddenly savage tone. “Calm down. Cara just thinks I was visiting from Los Angeles. Plus, Lo has been a perfectly well-behaved boy, if you must know. No hookups, not even with Cara,” he clarifies with a very human-looking eye roll. “He’s been surfing and working at the Marine Center all summer.”
Even though I’m telling myself that I wasn’t worried about what Lo was doing, I can’t help the immediate relief that sweeps through me. I told him he had to find himself, and I didn’t put any rules around what that should be. Any normal boy would have taken that as permission to play the field and have fun. Then again, Lo isn’t any normal boy.
“Anyway...” Speio continues. Something flashes in his eyes before it’s hidden. I gesture at him to continue. “Cara mentioned that Lo’s been getting sick.”
“Sick? What kind of sick?”
“Kevin at the center said that he passed out a couple times over the past few weeks. He told them it was dehydration, but last week he passed out again in front of a bunch of people on the beach. They called 911.”
“Did they take him to a hospital?” I ask quickly, even though I know that it would have been all over the news and would have filtered to us in a heartbeat. I can see the headlines now—Alien Species Discovered. They Walk Among Us! San Diego would be the next Roswell, New Mexico.
“No, Jenna was there. She told the paramedics that he’s a diabetic and had low blood sugar. Don’t ask me how that girl proved it, but she did. Anyway, Cara said that Lo went home with Jenna. That was last week.”
“But I didn’t feel anything those other times,” I say. “Via the bond, I mean.”
“That’s what happened this morning?”
“Yes. It was bad, Speio, like I was being gutted from nose to tail. It was so strong I could barely handle it. It felt...wrong.”
Speio leans his body into mine in a comforting gesture. “He’ll be okay, Riss,” he says slowly with an uncertain look at me. “Look, I know things between us haven’t been great, and I know that’s my fault. I know you don’t trust me. But I care about you, and I care about Lo.”
“You hate Lo.”
“I don’t hate Lo,” Speio says as we swim past a row of unfamiliar underwater mountains. I must have drifted farther than I’d expected. “I thought that he was hiding something, and he was. But now, well, he’s a part of you...so that means he’s a part of us.” Speio stops, considering his words. “And if something happens to him, that’s going to be bad for everyone here, right?”
“Nothing bad’s going to happen to Lo,” I say swiftly, just as I feel the pull of home. We’re nearly back.
“No, you’re right,” he says. “Riss?”
“What?”
“I want you know that I’m here no matter what. I mean, I know you don’t trust me and you have every right not to, but if we have to go back for Lo, then I’ll go back with you, okay?”
“What about finding your mate here in Waterfell?” I ask. “It’s what you’ve always wanted.”
Speio shrugs, another humanlike gesture that almost makes me smile. “It’s what I thought I wanted because I couldn’t have it when we lived on the mainland. But turns out, just because we’re home doesn’t mean that I’m going to bond with someone. Plus, I miss skateboarding. And surfing. And our friends. And believe it or not, a part of me wishes that I could finish my senior year at Dover.” He stares at me, his eyes vulnerable. “Too human?”
“Not at all,” I admit, floored by his candid admissions. “I feel like that, too. I miss Jenna and Sawyer. I even miss Cara sometimes.” Cara...said archnemesis who’d had her eye on Lo and had been determined to banish me to hell when she realized that we were a couple. She even hooked up with Speio to get back at me. I grin. “But only on very special occasions.”
Speio eyes Nova and Nell, who don’t know whether to be annoyed at my disappearing act or relieved that I’ve returned before they got flayed alive by Echlios for letting me out of their sight in the first place. “You looked really good up there today, Riss,” he says so softly that I can hardly hear him. “Like a real queen. Your father would have been proud.”
“Thanks,” I say, startled.
But Speio is already swimming away. It’s more words than we’ve spoken in months, and I realize that I’ve missed him. I think back to what he said about Lo and frown. Dehydration is a common affliction for our species, particularly because of the combination of water and salt in our bodies. But Lo is a hybrid, which means that he should be able to tolerate it better than we can. Or maybe it’s the reverse.
The way Echlios explained it, Lo is the best of both worlds—an Aquarathi with transmuted human DNA that allows him to live comfortably on land or in the sea. He is the product of accelerated evolution based on the laws of natural selection...accelerated because his mother and her cronies induced those genetic characteristics. We faced and fought others that looked like hideous mutations, hybrids that Ehmora, my mother and the brilliant genetic-scientist ex-headmaster of Dover Prep had concocted. As far as we know, Lo is the only perfect hybrid in existence. But maybe he isn’t perfect. Maybe he’s flawed in some terminal, human way.
The furious outward rush of breath leaves me weak. Lo can’t be sick. He can’t be. He’s meant to be with me. All of a sudden, those countless arguments I had with myself about leaving him behind become meaningless. The only thing I can think about is Lo and figuring out what’s wrong with him...figuring out how I can save him. Because I did this. It’s my fault. The guilt is nearly suffocating. Maybe if I hadn’t been so selfish about keeping us apart, things would be different. He would be happy and healthy, here with me where he belongs. Instead I’m going to lose him.
“Soren,” I pulse, entering the core of the High Court. The Aquarathi in the chamber clear out, their heads bowed. I can sense the underlying tension, and a certainty that something isn’t quite right floods my body. I try not to let the fear invade my head, but it does, like insidious ink. “Any news?” I ask her. “Is Echlios back?”
“Yes, there’s news, and no, Echlios is not back,” she says slowly. I can feel her sadness in the water rushing around in her body. I can see it in the shimmer of her melting green eyes.
“What is it? Is Lo okay?”
“Nerissa...”
Heaven help me, I already know what she’s going to say. I want to shake her, to smash my head into her side. I want to scream my fear and shed it from the inside of my skin. Instead I pull on a composed mask and deaden the emotion running rampant within me. “Just say it, Soren. Tell me. I can handle it, I promise.”
But I can’t handle it at all, not when her lips shape the words that make my bones thin to air and my heart crumble into unrecognizable fragments. “It’s not good. He’s dying.”
2 Impossible Choices (#ulink_d9aff99d-00f8-58dd-9f11-34a5a7d89026)
The faces of the six members of the Aquarathi High Council could be hewn from calcified rock. The lower-court kings and queens have already been briefed on the situation—I can see their varying reactions in the tilt of their heads and the rigid stance of their bodies. Their royal guards, including mine, the ever-present Nova and Nell, line the rear of the hall in a silent, ominous row.
Soren calls the meeting to order—she’s acting in Echlios’s stead since he’s still landside. I swallow hard and bury my grief deep. I greet each of the High Council in turn, all of them baring their necks to me in respectful deference—Queen Miral and her consort, Hevan, from the Gold Court, Queen Castia from Emerald, King Verren and Queen Aylis from Sapphire, and lastly, Keil, the new king of the Ruby Court.
I watch him surreptitiously as he takes his place in the circle. Keil, Ehmora’s cousin, is young but ambitious. He’s probably the only other Aquarathi on this council who’s around the same age as me. As if reading my thoughts, he winks at me and I blink, startled at the familiarity. I remember training with him when we were young, and have several memories of him being rebellious and funny, but it’s not like we’ve seen each other a lot since then, nor is he someone I would consider an ally. The other royals are all far older—and likely more worldly in the ways of ruling—than either of us.
I clear my throat—my job is to reassure and to calm, to keep my internal fears compartmentalized. And the last thing I want to do now is to appear weak. “Before we start, what is the update on the oil spill off Hawaii? Has it been mitigated?”
Hevan, Gold Court consort, nods. “Yes, my queen. Most of it has been isolated with booms and removed with skimmer equipment. We have done what we can to assist with more rapid biodegradation from below the surface.”
“Any more information on what caused it?”
Hevan hesitates, looking to his queen for guidance. Miral nods. “Someone hacked the ship’s computer, forcing it to capsize. We’re still working on it.”
I have my guesses as to who could forcibly cause an ocean tanker to capsize and have the means to do so—Cano, it seems, will do anything to prove that he’s still around. If we trace it back to him, maybe we can finally hunt him down and learn where he’s been hiding. “Keep me informed the minute you hear anything. Any news from our friends at NOAA on the proposed initiatives to mark up the bills on marine debris at the recent House Committee meeting?”
“Yes, the bill was successfully amended, and funding allocated.”
“Excellent. And the senate hearing on the offshore-industrial-waste issue?”
“Still on track for next month.”
“Good.”
I inhale deeply to counter my sudden inability to breathe, forcing the simmering dread out of my mind. Time to address the real reason the High Council had been convened. “As you’ve been recently informed, my...the regent has fallen ill. Echlios has been dispatched to further assess the situation. There’s no cause for alarm.”
“No cause for alarm,” Castia from the Emerald Court huffs. “You are bonded to the creature. We saw you collapse from whatever it was you felt during the coronation! You cannot underestimate the bond, even one as...unique as yours.” It’s clear from her tone that unique was far from her intended word choice. “If he is in fatal danger, then you are in danger. And we are in danger.”
“The prince regent is safe for the moment,” Soren interjects in a firm, respectful tone. “As is your queen.”
“Safe?” Castia hisses. “Look at her. She can barely focus despite the pretense.”
“If the regent is dying, then you should go to him,” King Verren says with a disgusted look at Castia.
“I cannot leave Waterfell,” I say despite the lurch in my stomach at his words. I eye the Sapphire Court king, who has always been a strong ally.
“You invite destruction,” Castia says under her breath.
Soren bristles beside me, but I shoot her a warning glance. Tensions are skyrocketing already, it seems. “Explain what you mean, Castia,” I say carefully.
“What about these hybrid abominations that Ehmora created?” She spits out the name in distaste.
“Most of them have been eliminated, Castia. You know that. Echlios made sure of it. We haven’t had any sightings of them in weeks.”
“And the human, Cano? What of him?”
I sigh. “We’re still looking for him.”
“So he’s still at large?”
“What is your point, Castia?”
Her eyes glitter like jade stones. “My point, my queen, is this—how do we know that this human isn’t working with your...prince regent? How do we know that this half-human hybrid son of Ehmora’s won’t lead him right to us? That this isn’t all some intricate ploy to infiltrate Waterfell...to expose us?”
I lift my chin and hold her challenging stare. “Lo is bonded to me. His loyalty is to me, and to Waterfell. He would never betray us to Cano.”
“Your duty is to your people, not a hybrid.”
King Verren and Queen Aylis share an anxious glance at Castia’s provocative words. He moves forward. “I think what Castia is trying to say and failing to do so is that even if he does not intend to be disloyal, the prince regent is vulnerable.” He looks at me with an almost apologetic expression, as if supporting Castia’s claims is the last thing he wants to do. “Which means that you, too, are vulnerable. What if Cano attacked him to get to you?”
“Attacked him? How?” I ask.
“The bond is enduring, and if yours is anything like ours,” Aylis murmurs, “you will feel every bit of his suffering as if it is your own, my queen. If the prince is dying, then you, too, are compromised.”
“You are the only one who can give him the strength to survive the journey back here, and bring him back safely,” Verren says. “You must go.”
“But how can I?” I whisper, my heart aching as if it’s being torn into two—love and duty clashing like titans—even as Verren’s soft words make a fragile, if unrealistic, hope bloom in my chest. As much as every cell inside me wants to go to Lo, how can I abandon Waterfell and expose my people with the threat of Cano still looming? But how can I forsake Lo, either? I swallow hard. “You suggest the impossible, Verren,” I say softly. “If I go, our people are at risk. If I don’t go, he dies. How can I possibly choose?”
“Your place is here,” Castia snarls. “That creature is not oceanborn.”
“Mind your words, Castia,” Verren snarls back.
A wave of nausea makes my vision swim for a second. I steady myself and ignore the concerned glance that Soren sends in my direction. Following the attack during the coronation, I’ve been experiencing ongoing tremors—nothing like the first, but painful just the same. My claws curl into fists to quell their sudden shaking.
“We need you to continue to be a strong queen,” Verren continues with a knowing glance, and then adds quickly, “As you have been. And you can be that only with the regent at your side. Alive and well.”
I glance at Miral, queen of the Gold Court, who until now has been silent. She, too, has been one of my stronger supporters over the last few weeks. “Miral? What is your say on this?”
“I agree that this Cano is a threat. My reports have been unreliable, but he still poses a risk to us. If our existence is to remain a secret, then we must find and deal with the threat. While I agree that your prince is loyal and he has more than proven himself, he is still exposed, especially to this man. As are you.” She exchanges a look with the Sapphire Court royals. “And Aylis is right. We cannot know how his illness will affect you.”
“Keil?” I turn to the Ruby Court king.
“I think you should stay. Let Echlios handle the boy. If you leave now, the Aquarathi will view your absence once more as a conscious decision to choose this hybrid over them.” He flicks his tail indolently. “It is, after all, reminiscent of your past behavior.” As much as his blunt words sting, I know he’s right. My duty as queen is to the Aquarathi people. I open my mouth to say as much, but Keil isn’t finished. “That said, Cano is a threat, the prince is dying, you will be weakened and we will be defenseless if we don’t do anything, so I propose four months.”
“Four months for what?” I say, surprised.
“Four months to finish what you started landside,” he says coolly. “Lure Cano out of hiding, remove the threat, save your prince, return to Waterfell. Uphold your oaths to defend our people.”
The suggestive note in his tone makes me bristle, but I ignore it. “Just like that? And what if four months isn’t enough?”
Keil’s answer is as diplomatic as the conciliatory smile he sends my way. “Let’s cross that bridge should we come to it, shall we? For now, you may choose a proxy to act in your stead.”
“And the Aquarathi?”
“We will make sure our courts understand what is at stake,” he says, his gaze sweeping the chamber. “Are we in agreement?”
* * *
The High Council had argued for hours after Keil’s bombshell suggestion. While the Gold and Sapphire Courts were in agreement to protect the prince regent, Castia was of the mind that the laws of the wild should apply—meaning Lo would live out his days and die like any other sick Aquarathi, regardless of the effect it had on me or my ability to lead. In the end, after impassioned debate on all sides, they had all reluctantly agreed to Keil’s proposal. To his dismay, I left Miral in charge, and we had four months to join Echlios and “fix” the problem. If we didn’t return to Waterfell in that time frame, I’d likely be forced to abdicate despite Keil’s generous—and calculated—words about crossing that bridge if we came to it.
After I got over the initial shock of the High Council’s decision, it was a foregone conclusion that we would return to La Jolla in short order. Hybrid or not, Lo was one of us and we couldn’t abandon him. Especially not if an attack on him made me—and Waterfell—vulnerable to exposure.
And so, in much the same way as we left La Jolla, we arrive in the dead of night to join Echlios in our old house on the beach with a plan to get ourselves back into the routine of being human...not an easy task given the new weight sitting on our shoulders. We aren’t here to learn or to acclimatize to humans. We’re here to save one of us.
San Diego is the same as when we left it a few months ago...warm, sunny and clear blue skies stretching for miles. I didn’t realize how much I’d miss the sky—the unending canvas of it, stretching out from the arms of the horizon, or the white tendrils of clouds drifting past and tinged in sunlight. Waterfell is beautiful in a different way, but nothing there can mimic the simple beauty of daylight.
Soren extends a glimmer outward and confirms that the beach is deserted. Shifting into human form feels strange, as if my body has forgotten how to do it, but of course it’s just muscle memory. My bones crack and dissolve inside me, condensing and reshaping into the form of delicate human bones. Oddly, it hurts a little this time and I’m enveloped by a suffocating sensation as if I’m being stretched infinitely and then reformed into something far too tight. I try to relax into it and not force the shift—forcing means broken or excruciatingly misshaped bones. Breathing deeply, I focus on the ridged planes of my face softening and reshaping into smooth contours of cheek and brow. Human skin stretches over the shimmering gold-green tissue as I wave a slender forearm in front of me. My eyes are the last things to change, the protective coating slipping over the large, brilliant irises of my species. The hazel-hued shield mimics the appearance of human eyes.
Soren is already halfway up the beach, her nude form camouflaged by a glimmer. Even though the beach is deserted, anyone watching would see only sand. I glance at Speio, who is just completing his transformation. I catch him right at the moment when his face is halfway between beast and human. I’m shocked by how grotesque he appears as the fangs in his gaping mouth shift into human teeth and the puckered scaly hide of his face burns a mottled green. For a second he reminds me of the hybrid we killed, and a sour feeling fills my stomach. Lo is a hybrid, too.
“What’s wrong?” Speio asks, shift complete, looking every inch like a tall, boyish seventeen-year-old with a shock of white-blond messy hair falling over one eye. His chest is lean and muscled, much the same as his Aquarathi one, but that’s where my scrutiny stops. As much as I love Speio and have seen him naked countless times, I have to draw the line somewhere.
“Nothing,” I say averting my eyes. “You just looked...weird.”
He shoots me a confused look. “You’ve seen me change a gazillion times.”
I shrug and wrap my arms around myself, the slick fuzzy feeling of my new skin slightly off-putting. “Seriously, it was nothing. I’m worked up about Lo and whether he’s getting ill because of his, you know, hybrid genes.”
“Could be,” Speio says with a forced grin. “Or could be anything. Maybe it’s a royal bonding thing we don’t know about. It’s going to be fine, Riss. Echlios will figure it out.”
But I can see in Speio’s eyes that he, too, thinks it’s because Lo is a hybrid. It’s the only explanation. Aquarathi don’t get sick—it’s the reason we were able to come to another planet and survive, thrive even—our immune systems are incredibly strong. So it stands to reason that Lo is sick because of his integrated human DNA...which means we have no idea in hell of how to help him.
Fighting my defeatist attitude, I enter my old room from the patio entrance off the pool deck and grab the robe hanging on the hook near the door. Echlios had the housekeepers come in to ready everything for our arrival, and the room looks exactly as I left it—my little mini pieces of Waterfell and home away from home. Glittering sea-glass ceiling, stained glass windows, walls painted in shimmering shades of blue...and one solemn auburn-haired best friend.
“Jenna,” I gasp, and throw myself into her arms. “What are you doing here? Did you talk to Echlios? Have you seen Lo? What happened?”
Jenna nods, hugging me even more tightly to her after my rapid-fire questions. She doesn’t answer immediately but pulls me over to the side of the bed and pats the spot next to her. I sit.
“Guess you didn’t think you’d be back to visit me so soon,” she says, her mouth twisting in a half smile. “Wish it was under better circumstances.”
“Soren says Echlios is with him at his house,” I blurt out. “She wants me to wait to talk to Echlios, but it feels like I’m going burst out of my skin.” I gesture at my human body. “Something doesn’t feel the same. Like I’m going to explode into nothing.”
“That’s just panic, Riss. It’s okay. Lo is fine,” she says gently. “At least he seems fine on the surface, except for the passing out. That started in the last few weeks. I mean...he was fine. Surfing, working, hanging out. Then all of a sudden, he wasn’t around. Sawyer tried calling him, and he was just holed up in his house. We thought he had the flu or something.” She pauses, her eyes shifting and becoming shadowed. “But then we found out about the memory loss.”
“The what?” I say in a shocked whisper. This is beyond bad. There’s no awful human-brain condition I’ve learned about that doesn’t start with some kind of degenerative memory loss—Alzheimer’s. Huntington’s. Dementia.
“After he collapsed on the beach a week ago, he had no memory of how he’d gotten there. I thought it was just a concussion from surfing or something, you know, so I didn’t think much of it.” She stops, watching me carefully. “We can talk tomorrow if that’s better.”
“No,” I say. “Please, Jenna. I want to talk now.”
Jenna takes my slack-fingered hand into hers and squeezes reassuringly. The light touch makes me want to snatch my hand away, because I know whatever she’s on the verge of saying is going to be bad. I take a deep breath. “Lo asked Sawyer about his mother. About Ehmora.”
“What do you mean? As in what exactly?”
“He asked him whether he’s seen her around lately.”
I can’t help it. My jaw drops open. Ehmora is dead. Lo killed her three months ago. “What did Sawyer say?”
“He asked him why, and then Lo told him that she’d gone on some business trip and he hadn’t seen her since. It was weird, Sawyer said, like totally out of the blue. Then he dropped the subject and they started talking about surfing as if he’d never even brought it up in the first place.”
“Sawyer doesn’t know about Ehmora, does he, Jenna?” I ask. Jenna would never give away what we are, not even to her boyfriend of three years, but I have to ask, anyway.
“Of course not. He just told me about it, and that’s when things started to click into place. I did some research on his symptoms—dehydration, disorientation, unconsciousness and memory loss—but none of the existing diseases seem to match them. And it’s not like we can take him to a hospital. They’d drag him to an underground, classified bunker in the blink of an eye.”
“That was quick thinking, by the way,” I say, remembering that she somehow convinced the paramedics that Lo didn’t need to be admitted. “The thing with the diabetic stuff.”
“It’s amazing they even believed me,” Jenna says. “It sounded so outlandish when I said it, but Lo was awake and nodding, so maybe they believed him.”
“It was a glimmer,” I murmur softly, nodding. It’s something small, but Lo using a glimmer gives me hope, because at least he still knows what he is. And because he’s a hybrid, holding on to his human form is far easier for him than it is us, so there’s no immediate risk of exposure. I suppress a small sigh of relief.
“A what?”
“Something that we can do,” I say. “Remember when you asked me about mind control last spring?” Jenna’s blue eyes almost bug out of her head, but she’s known my secret long enough to know that I’d never use it to hurt her. “We can...suggest things to people. Not Speio or Soren so much, but me. And now Lo.”
“Because he’s with you, a queen?”
“Yes, and because he’s the son of a queen.”
“Oh.”
I study Jenna, surprised by how much I missed her in three months. She’s become far more than just a best friend. She’s family. And because I trusted her with our secret, she’s now a part of us.
“You cut your hair,” I say, only just noticing the layered strands resting on her shoulders and the new sheared fringe across her brow.
“The bangs were a bad idea.” She brushes them back with one hand. “But at least it’ll grow. It was way shorter than this at first. I looked like one of those weird dolls with the button eyes. I must have been having separation issues when you left, because I literally chopped it off one afternoon.”
“It looks good.”
“It looks like crap, but thanks for the vote of support,” she says with a smile. “You look the same.”
“I mimic, remember? I can make myself have a short, spiky Mohawk if I want to,” I say, shrugging. “Figured I look like this already, why change? Don’t traumatize the humans any more than I have to and all that.”
“That’d be interesting. Maybe I should have done that.” She flips her hair self-consciously. “Sawyer hates it.”
I roll my eyes. “That boy would be in love with you if you were bald, so don’t even try to tell me that. I’ve never seen anyone so crazy about anybody else, ever.”
“I have,” Jenna says, and then bites her lip, her face flushing as the brief lightheartedness between us disappears in an instant. She clears her throat and grabs my hand. “Lo was a mess this whole summer, you know. Without you. Every time I saw him, I could tell what being apart from you was doing to him. Cara tried to move in, and he shut that down so quickly I think she’s still recovering from the shock.”
“Don’t make me feel worse than I already do.”
“Why did you tell him to stay, Riss? It’s obvious that you two are meant to be together, even outside all of your bondage stuff.”
“Bond-ing.”
“Whatever. He loves you. You love him. I don’t understand why you did what you did. And frankly, maybe he’s sick because he has a broken heart.”
“Seriously?” If the situation weren’t so not funny, I would have laughed. “You sound like Sawyer. Humans don’t get sick and die over a broken heart. That’s ridiculous. They die from diseases.”
“It was Sawyer’s idea,” Jenna admits. “And there are plenty of cases throughout history where people have gotten ill from the stress of emotional trauma. There’s even an official condition called stress cardiomyopathy, caused by a temporary weakness of the heart from intense emotional issues.”
“Easy on the big words.”
“Let me make it simple for you. It’s like your girlfriend telling you that she doesn’t want to be with you even though she loves you but isn’t quite sure how you’re going to fit in her future and whether you have a place there. How’s that?”
“Ouch. Harsh,” I say, and pause, cringing. “And I didn’t say that. I told him we needed space to figure things out.”
“Same diff.”
“So, even if it were true, are you saying this is my fault?” I’ve already thought it myself, but hearing another person say it out loud is something else entirely.
Jenna takes a deep breath. “Riss, I’m your best friend, and you know we’ve always told each other the truth even when it hurts. I’m telling you now. You made a mistake telling him to stay here. And maybe it’s the human side of him that’s making him sick, but we humans are more fragile than you could ever imagine. Our emotional responses can have catastrophic effects on our physical health. When Sawyer and I broke up sophomore year, I got really sick, remember? For some inexplicable reason, my immune system decided to go on vacation. I have no proof, but the brain/body connection is a powerful thing. Don’t underestimate it.” I try to stand, but she grasps my shoulders, forcing me to remain where I’m sitting beside her on the bed. Her eyes are clear and compassionate, as if she can see the guilt consuming me in waves. “I’m not judging you or blaming you. I’m just glad you’re here now, that’s all.”
In truth, Jenna’s words are like whips, but they’re whips that I’ve already flayed myself with a dozen times over. I know I shouldn’t have made him stay here, but I thought it was the right thing to do...to give him the space to figure out who he was in relation to me and vice versa. Only maybe in teenage hindsight, it was a stupid decision—and according to Sawyer and Jenna, I’d only succeeded in breaking his heart.
“Riss,” Jenna says, her voice nearly inaudible. “There’s one more thing. It’s the reason Echlios wants to talk to you first before you see Lo.”
“What’s that?” I ask. Jenna’s mouth twists as if she’s about to say something that is as horrible as the look on her face. “Spit it out. Whatever you’re going to say can’t be worse than what you’ve already said. Truth, remember?”
“Okay,” she agrees slowly. She blurts it out in a rush. “You should know that Lo asked Echlios two days ago who you were.”
Turns out truth is overrated.
3 Confusion (#ulink_e0b10dfe-3028-582e-b6a0-86e0d9599c34)
I’m a nervous wreck. Not because I’m seeing Lo for the first time in months, but because there’s a huge chance he won’t even recognize me. I think that’s why Echlios wanted to prepare me before I saw him. There’s also a good chance that Lo may recognize me if I’m right in front of him, but I don’t want to give myself false hope.
“Are you okay?” Echlios asks, as he pulls into Lo’s driveway.
“Fine.”
“That’s six ‘fines’ since we left the house.”
“What do you want me to say, Echlios? That I’m terrified? That I’m scared out of my mind that the boy I’ve bonded with won’t know who I am? That I’m going to lose him? That without him, it feels like I won’t be able to hold myself together? That without him, I’m dissolving?” I say in a dead, emotionless voice. “Let’s just leave it at ‘fine,’ okay?”
Echlios’s jaw drops open. “I didn’t...realize.”
I swallow thickly. It’s completely incongruous, really, the whole situation. I’m the one who was hung up on the whole bonding thing. Lo and I bonded. But something inside me couldn’t quite sit with the idea that I was tricked, and instead of accepting what was completely natural and consensual on both sides, I pushed it away. And now there’s a very real possibility that the boy I love doesn’t even know who I am.
“It’s okay. Let’s just get it over with,” I say, forcing a bravado that I don’t feel into my voice.
Grayer, Lo’s valet-slash-butler, opens the door. His face is as stoic as I remember, but something like pity flashes in his eyes for a second, making me want to scrape that dead expression off his face with my nails. I don’t want his pity, or anyone’s for that matter, because it means that I’ve already lost.
“Where is he?” I blurt out, earning a censorious glance from Echlios. But I don’t care. I want to see Lo for myself before reading other people’s expressions and having to accept their hidden compassion.
“He’s over here,” a blonde, hefty-looking woman says from down the hall.
“Hi, Bertha.”
Bertha, Lo’s housekeeper, is as Amazonian-looking as ever, but she manages a small smile in my direction before enfolding me into an unexpected bear hug. Her affection throws me for a minute, but Lo is the closest thing she has to a son and I know that she knows how Lo feels—felt—about me. I return the hug a little more fiercely than I’d intended, stunned by my sudden surge of emotion.
“How is he?” I ask.
“We have our good days and our bad days. He’s having a good day today. He surfed early this morning and seems to be in bright spirits. Come.” She gestures for me to follow her into the sunroom that overlooks the ocean and the entire La Jolla coastline down to the beach below. Echlios and Grayer follow like silent shadows. I don’t want to let my eyes linger on the beach beyond the wall-to-wall glass windows...and the exact spot where Lo and I were together...but I do, anyway.
And then I turn in slow motion to the boy getting up from the couch. My heart climbs its way into my throat and stays there, choking me with silent, vicious pain. He looks the same—the salt-bleached sandy hair that’s now curling into his collar, the bronzed sunburned cheekbones, and the wide, smiling mouth. Those dark, bottomless blue eyes reach into the most hidden parts of me and claim ownership. They’re full of polite interest, but there’s no recognition in them at all. I can’t breathe, far less speak.
“Lo, you have a special visitor,” Bertha says gently, her face stricken, mirroring my own response, still stuck in my chest. “This is Nerissa.”
His eyes narrow at the sound of my name, but nothing clicks in them that suggests he recognizes it. Lo glances at Bertha and she nods. He looks confused for a second but then smiles widely and sticks his hand out. “Hi, Nerissa.”
The sound of his warm voice wrapping around my name is my undoing. That hasn’t changed—not the way he and only he says my name, like it’s a sensual act instead of a mere word. Even if he doesn’t know me, some part of him still does. It has to. I can’t help myself—I step closer, ignoring his outstretched palm, and wrap my arms around the nape of his neck. I breathe in the smell of salt on his skin and press my temple against the soft stubble on the underside of his jaw. His body tenses, but I feel his arms slip around my waist in a tentative hug. I hug tighter, tears smarting behind my eyelids at how intimately familiar his human body feels against mine.
“It’s good to see you, Lo,” I whisper against his neck.
As if a spell has been broken, Lo pulls away, his eyes narrowing a fraction in frustration as he struggles to remember. “So you’re Nerissa? Bertha told me that we were friends.”
“Friends,” I repeat, hearing my own voice break slightly on the word.
“We went to school together, right? Dover?”
I swallow hot bile at his nervous recitation. Even prepared, his reaction comes as a shock. I don’t even want to look at Bertha or Grayer, or even Echlios. I don’t want to see the expressions on their faces. Instead I smile through trembling cheeks and watery eyes. “Yes. We met at Dover. You don’t remember me at all?”
The look in his eyes is tortured, as if he’s struggling to place me in his head. “There’s a part of me that feels like it does know you,” he says, gesturing to his chest. “But I can’t remember it here.” His fingers jerk to his head and then flutter to his sides in a defeated motion. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I tell him in a choked voice. “You’ll remember.”
“I had some kind of seizure while driving and now I have a concussion—” Lo points to his skull “—hence the amnesia. I’m sorry I don’t remember much,” he says to me, and then forces a grin, one that still makes my knees turn into rubber. “I’d like to think yours is a face I wouldn’t forget, but I guess the silver lining is that we get to know each other and be friends again.”
But obviously, he has forgotten—not just meeting me, but me, period. “I’d like that,” I say, unable to voice the truth that we are so much more than friends. I avoid Echlios’s eyes. “You seem to be taking it well, your memory loss.”
Lo shrugs, his mouth twisting in that casual, cute way of his, as if he’s trying to put on a brave front. “I’m hoping the doctors will fix it eventually. I just have to do the therapy and hope that it comes back. Freaking out doesn’t help anyone.”
It sounds so much like something he’d say that it’s hard to think that parts of him aren’t all there, or that maybe he’s pretending and this is some big prank. But I know it isn’t. I see it in his eyes—in that assessing look people give you when they’re meeting you for the first time. He doesn’t remember me at all.
“I’m sorry.”
Lo slides me a soft smile. “I guess I remember the big things. The little things will come back in time.” He trails off in awkward silence but then grins brightly. “Hey, I’m parched. You want a drink? Bertha makes the best pink lemonade this side of the Pacific.”
Dying a little inside, I nod, and he walks out of the room, followed by a silent Bertha. I sit weak-kneed on the couch that Lo vacated a few minutes before, my heart feeling as if it’s being crushed beneath a hammer.... I remember the big things.
“Exactly how much does he remember?” I ask Echlios in an unsteady voice.
“He has many, if not all, of his long-term memories, but there are big gaps in his short-term memory. Our local contacts have confirmed that he is suffering from some kind of retrograde amnesia, but we can’t quite place whether the concussion from the accident caused the amnesia or if it was a symptom of something else prior to the accident. Bertha said that he couldn’t remember little things at the beginning of the summer, long before any of this happened.
“Don’t worry. We’re flying in a top-notch neurosurgeon from L.A. at the end of the week. One of ours,” he adds.
Of course, one of ours. We are a water species, living for the most part in the shadows of the deep, but that doesn’t mean we don’t keep our fingers on the pulse of everything landside, from global policy to technology to politics to neurosurgeons. If it can help Lo, I’m all for it.
“You think the amnesia was already there before he passed out?” I ask. “From what?”
Echlios walks to the wall of windows, staring out at the ocean beyond. His face is creased, the lines on his forehead deep with tension. He takes a deep breath as if trying to find the right words. “Stress,” he says after a while. “Emotional trauma.”
Jenna’s earlier words come back to haunt me...about people dying of broken hearts and being physically compromised by their intense emotions. “Emotional trauma,” I repeat.
Echlios nods. “He killed his mother. We have no idea what kind of effect that can have on someone.”
“She wanted to kill him,” I argue weakly.
“Doesn’t matter. It’s still traumatic.”
“Why?”
Echlios sighs. “Because he’s part human. He can’t turn it off as easily as we can. Humans aren’t predators. It’s not so simple for them.” He stops and walks toward me, his voice gentling. “What’s going on with Lo is an incredibly rare form of amnesia—dissociative amnesia—that occurs after intense emotional shock. At least, that’s the initial diagnosis.”
As much as I try, I can’t seem get my mind around it. Maybe it’s because I don’t have any human DNA, or maybe our Aquarathi brains don’t work that way. It’s not a lack of empathy, necessarily, more of an adapt-to-survive way of thinking. Emotions just aren’t that critical to us—sure, we have them deep down, as I’d discovered from my people when I fought Ehmora in the arena, but other physiological needs like hunger and thirst take precedence. It’s a matter of survival in the wild. Humans let emotions affect them far too much and, obviously now in Lo’s case, to the point of physical weakness.
At that moment, Lo reenters the room carrying two tall glasses of pink lemonade. “Here you go.”
“Thanks,” I say. It was easier with him out of the room. My senses are so acutely tuned in to him that now I feel claustrophobic, as if his very presence is suffocating me. On top of that, every drop of water in my body is reaching toward him...reaching for its other half. The sensation is dull and aching, as if my skin is separating from the flesh beneath it. I take a deep breath and a sip of my drink.
“So, will you be at Dover for our senior year?” Lo asks, resuming his position on the couch beside me.
“I don’t think so. We’re not here for long. School started a few weeks ago, right?”
“Yeah.”
Our conversation seems normal on the surface, but underneath, it feels stilted and uncomfortable, as if we’re two kids set up by overeager parents. I clear my throat awkwardly. “So I guess I’ll see you around—”
The shrill sound of Lo’s cell phone interrupts my sentence. “I have to take this, hang on,” he says to me, and taps on the screen. “Hey, Cara, what’s up?”
Lo walks to the other side of the room, but I can still hear his side of the conversation. My stomach free-falls to my feet. They’re making plans to meet up at the Crab Shack. “No, I’m free,” he says. “I can meet you in, like, half an hour. Seriously, I’m almost done here.” I’m crumbling inside with every word...every little sound that leaves Lo’s mouth, saying I’m nothing to him.
Sinking into the couch, I’m barely conscious of Echlios taking a seat next to me. I was wrong about us being emotionless. Maybe our emotions run far deeper than those of humans, because nothing should feel like this. Nothing should feel like my very bones are breaking into tiny little pieces inside me, turning into ash. This isn’t survival now; it’s something else entirely...something beyond my comprehension.
“Echlios—” I choke out. And he’s there, grabbing my numb fingers in his and drawing me back from the edge of the abyss.
“Breathe,” he pulses to me softly in our language.
“I need to go. It hurts too much to be this near him,” I whisper.
Before Lo and I bonded, I wasn’t able to feel him as an Aquarathi because of his hybrid genes, and the link that finally connected us feels like it’s weakening by the second. Queen or not, I can feel him leaning away, and there’s no way to stop it.
Or maybe there is.
I squeeze Echlios’s hand, unsure of what I’m about to do but knowing that I must do it nonetheless. “Can you wait outside? Take Bertha with you. I know what I have to do.”
“My queen, I must insist—” Echlios says, his eyes widening at my meaning.
“Echlios, please. I have to know. And this is the only way—surely you of all people know that.”
“But a glimmer?” Echlios’s eyebrows snap together so tightly I’m surprised that he can see anything beneath that ominous frown. “What if he latches on unconsciously? You’re bonded now. That connection goes both ways.” He shakes his head. “With the amnesia, it’s just too dangerous.”
“I’ll deal with that if it happens, but from what I’ve seen, he won’t notice it. He doesn’t know me. Trust me, I’ll be safe, I promise. I have to try, Echlios. Please.”
Echlios watches me, his eyes like a brewing thunderstorm, but eventually he nods and gives in to my wishes. “Be careful, then. If you feel anything, you separate immediately, okay? I’ll be right outside this door.”
“I will,” I promise, even though a part of me deep down wants Lo to feel my glimmer and take me into him. I want him to fight for me.
After Echlios leaves, I source the water in my body and prepare myself for hydroprojection, or as we call it, glimmering. I can connect with other Aquarathi as well as humans via the moisture in the air and in their bodies. It allows me to speak to them, understand their impulses or even control them by the power of suggestion, if necessary. Which I’ve only ever done once. And never to any of my friends.
So this is still new for me, which is why Echlios is on edge. If Lo’s Aquarathi side unconsciously fastens to my glimmer for whatever reason, he could suck the energy right out of me through our bond...as in my entire Aquarathi life force. But I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, and I’ve no intention of letting that happen. It’s a risk, but one I’ll take.
Calling upon my water, I pull it toward my center until it’s a heavy weight resting near the middle of my chest. Gently, I push it toward Lo, who is still talking to Cara. The sound of her name ripples through me like a tidal wave, and the glimmer dissipates in a wild rush, slamming back into me and making me breathless. I’m still gasping and trying to compose myself as Lo ends his call and walks back over to me.
“You all right?” he says, frowning.
“Fine,” I manage, coughing. “Lemonade went down the wrong way.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and then gestures to the phone in his pocket. “Sorry about taking that call, too. I didn’t mean to be rude. That was just Cara, one of my friends.”
I take a gulp of my drink, ignoring the sharp sting of jealousy, and will myself to focus on what I’m about to do. “So, do you still hang out with Sawyer and Jenna?”
Lo’s eyes light up. “Sure. Sawyer’s teaching me how to surf, and Jenna takes pictures of me looking like an idiot.”
Teaching Lo how to surf? The Lo I know could school Sawyer on all the ins and outs of surfing. He’s that brilliant on the wave.
“I doubt that,” I say, surprised that the amnesia would affect his actual abilities.
“Well, I’m better than I used to be,” he says with a modest grin. “Hours of practicing. I’m determined to surf at Trestles one day.”
Choking back the immediate retort that he used to dominate at Trestles and every other expert break in San Diego, I remain silent. That’s different, too, I notice. Lo used to be arrogant and cocky. Now he’s all vanilla pudding and apple pie, like a Stepford version of himself. It’s not bad...I just miss the undertone of funny-boy snark. It kept me on my toes, and the witty comebacks had made Lo Lo. Maybe it’s selfish, but I have to know what’s in his head and whether any of the Lo I know and love is still in there somewhere deep down. I have to do the glimmer—it’s the only way to be sure.
“So, how was the Marine Center this summer?” I ask to get him talking. I see his surprised expression and add, “We worked there together last year.”
“Wow, we really did know each other well,” he says with a rueful smile. “Seriously, I feel like I can’t stop apologizing to you for not remembering any of this.”
“It’ll come back.”
“I hope so,” he says in earnest.
As Lo launches into some of the new ocean-conservancy initiatives he was overseeing at the center, I clear my head of everything but water and pull myself together once more. The glimmer stretches outward like a shimmering golden net and then connects with his. The pull of him is so seductive, so visceral, that I almost lose hold of the glimmer. What I’m doing is not exactly Sanctum. Instead I’m just trying to see if my Aquarathi side recognizes its mate within him. If Lo were himself, he’d naturally be able to feel me doing this and enjoy it as much as I do, but it’s obvious that he has no idea who I am...or what I am. For all intents and purposes, he’s just another person.
Only he’s not. He’s my mate.
And even in glimmer form, the act of being inside him is as intimate as being with him—even more so. I can barely breathe. Every inch of my skin feels electrified from the contact between us. The bond is still there, and strong. A thrill of brief relief flutters through me—he hasn’t forgotten me entirely, even if the human part of him has.
Lo is still talking and, slowly, I glimmer past the barrier of his thoughts, trying to see past the indistinct memories...to see anything that would give me a sliver of hope. But other than the instinctual recognition from the dormant glimmer within him, there’s nothing. There’s no indication that he knows me at all.
Water rushes in my ears and I snap back into myself with a jolt, realizing that Lo is shaking my shoulders.
“What?” I gasp.
“Nothing,” he says. “You looked like you were in a trance or something. Are you okay?”
“Fine. I must be tired, jet-lagged.”
“Oh, right, you flew a long ways.”
I nod, unable to speak, watching as Lo stands awkwardly with an odd expression on his face. He hesitates and then blurts out the question on the tip of his tongue. “Did you feel anything strange just before?”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Never mind.” He opens his mouth and closes it, and then laughs out loud at himself. “It was nothing. I felt a weird connection, like from my belly button, as if something was pushing me toward you.” He pauses, still looking awkward. “And then there was this bizarre glow stretching between us. You didn’t feel or see anything?”
I shake my head and swallow. “No.”
“Twilight Zone!” He shrugs with an embarrassed grin. “Maybe your jet lag is contagious, or maybe Bertha put crack in the lemonade.” The slight appearance of the old Lo takes me by surprise, and my pulse leaps. Maybe he’s not all gone. “Anyway, thanks again for stopping by. We should hang out before school. Maybe this weekend? Surfing Sunday?”
“I’d like that.” I stand, not wanting to prolong the agony by watching him leave to go meet Cara. “Thanks for...seeing me.”
“Sure thing. Catch you later, Nerissa.”
During the car ride home, I stay silent. But I can feel Echlios’s heavy stare, and I know I’m going to have to tell him what I saw with the glimmer. It’s not something I can keep to myself, not now when we have so much on the line. We pull into our driveway and I turn to face him.
“He doesn’t know me.”
Echlios frowns, sympathetic. “Did you see anything at all?”
“There’s no tumor or dementia, or anything like that from what I could sense, but you’re right about the amnesia. It’s definitely there.” I pause and assess what I felt. “No other kind of infection was present. But there was something else that caught my attention that didn’t quite fit, like really heightened brain activity on the human side.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I barely got a read from the Aquarathi side of him.” I raise terrified eyes to Echlios. “It’s like he doesn’t know what he is. At all.”
“You mean—”
I nod. “I think he thinks he’s human.”
4 Surf Your Heart Out (#ulink_7e6f586c-161d-5365-96f9-d41125e5a91a)
The warm sun on the patio is definitely something I’ve missed. Jenna waves from the middle of the pool and I smile back, lifting a hand and watching the greenish-gold lights flicker down my forearm in response to the sun’s rays. There’s nothing quite comparable to sunlight, not even in the warm, jeweled depths of Waterfell. And while I miss my home, I’ve missed being here, too. And I missed my best friend. I’ll admit freely that Jenna is the only person keeping me from falling to bits.
What I discovered about Lo has kept me wide-awake every night. After all, how do you make sure that a hybrid Aquarathi human doesn’t go off the deep end if and when he starts exhibiting alien qualities? Not even the High Council could have anticipated this. It’s uncharted territory for us—not just because Lo is a hybrid, but because he’s a hybrid who thinks he’s a human—so all in all, the situation has potentially catastrophic consequences, simply because he puts our entire species at a greater risk of exposure.
For the moment, we agreed that Echlios would keep an eye on him at home, and I’d do the same at school, which means official reenrollment at Dover. That wasn’t part of the original plan. Readjusting will be tricky. I went from girl to alien queen in the span of four short months, and now I have to revert to who I was before. On top of that, going back to high school means seeing the boyfriend who isn’t really my boyfriend anymore on an excruciating daily basis. It’s going to be unbearable.
I sigh and say as much to Jenna. She swims to the side of the pool and props her chin on her forearms on the edge. She stares at me with a thoughtful expression, studying the flickering lights underneath my skin.
“Can’t you just mind-meld him into remembering you? You know, with that shimmer-glimmer thing you do?” she asks, nodding at my forearms.
“Not that easy,” I say. The lights on my arm die a swift death at the turn of the conversation. “I tried, and there was nothing there—nothing of me, anyway. It’s like any memory of us has been wiped out of his head completely.”
I gulp past the lump of misery in my throat. Apparently everything I learned during my previous human initiation cycle doesn’t apply to relationships. Turns out you can break someone’s heart...so much so that he eliminates everything about you just so he can cope.
Jenna hauls herself out of the pool and grabs a towel from the side table. “I did a little research on what you told me. Dissociative amnesia is pretty common after trauma, but the memories do come back most of the time. You have to believe that.”
“I don’t have a year, Jenna. I have months, and then I have to make a decision to go back, with or without him. With him would be so much better. Without him means things I don’t want to consider.”
“What things?” Jenna says, her eyes narrowing.
I meet them honestly, my heart in mine. “You know our laws, Jenna. We can’t take the risk that he’ll expose us.”
“Oh.”
She doesn’t say anything more but stares at the undulating surface of the pool, lost in thought. She loves Lo as a friend, but if the time comes and we decide to leave without him, she’ll have no say in what happens to him. She knows that as well as I do. After a while, she turns to me again.
“Won’t that...hurt you, too?”
“Yes.”
Her face drains of color. Jenna doesn’t know the intricate ins and outs of bonding, but I told her what Soren once told me. If Lo dies, a part of me will die, too. And I’ll never be able to bond with anyone again. Those are the rules of what we are—we bond for life.
“Well, you’re just going to have to make him fall in love with you again,” Jenna says with a forced, overbright smile.
“We’ve bonded, Jenna. There’s nothing beyond that.”
“For Aquarathi,” she points out. “Not humans. And Lo’s part human, right? Look, you said it yourself. He already loves you because you’re bonded. There’s a part of him that recognizes itself in you and probably always will. You just have to make him see that. As much as the human brain can incapacitate itself, so it can rebuild itself. It’s a two-way street.” She pauses, her expression intense. “And maybe if you can do that, then you can get him to remember everything else. Damaged neurons self-repair.”
“You know this how?”
“Told you. I did research,” she says, taking a peach from the fruit basket on the table and biting into it. As always, I’m amazed at Jenna’s base of knowledge. She’s more than smart—she’s practically a human encyclopedia. And what she doesn’t know, she makes it her business to learn. Like, obviously, rare neurological conditions. “According to some studies, once you get the cells refiring, the rest is inevitable. The human brain is an amazing thing. It can actually rewire itself.”
I snort and attempt a lame joke. “So you’re saying I have to hot-wire him?”
“Baby steps, Riss.” Jenna laughs. “Remember last year? I mean, you couldn’t even flirt without popping a blood vessel and freaking out. Every time Lo made a move, you, like, ran the other way like a frightened bunny.”
“Did not,” I retort, flushing.
“Total bunny.” Jenna grins, enjoying my discomfort. “Your scary sea-monster side was completely bunnified.”
“My scary sea-monster side is going to make an appearance if you don’t quit it,” I threaten, baring perfectly human white teeth in her direction.
“Oooh, I’m so scurred!”
“You should be,” I say, and remove the human eye film from my eyes, revealing the shimmery multicolored iris and pale gold sclera beneath.
“You think some gorgeous eyeballs are going to freak me out?” she says, sticking her tongue out and rolling her eyes. “Been there, done that.”
I shake my head at her comical expression and we both start laughing. Six months ago when Jenna found out the truth about me, she could barely look at any of us without her blood rushing around inside her in terror, and now she’s totally at ease with the whole alien-best-friend thing. Things could have turned out worse if she hadn’t been okay with it. Way worse...as in goodbye-best-friend worse.
“So, what does Speio say about all this? Coming back to Dover? Pretending to be human?” Jenna asks.
She and Speio weren’t exactly on the best of terms during the last year. He was averse to me revealing anything to Jenna, and even though she ended up saving our collective hides on more than one occasion, things between them never went back to the way they used to be. I do give him props, though, because before we left he apologized to Jenna.
“He’s fine with it, actually,” I tell her. “Volunteered to come this time around.”
“I thought he wanted to be back there.”
I snort out loud. “He did, and then he realized that females are the same, no matter the territory. They don’t come running just because a male decides he’s ready for a mate. Let’s just say that Speio had a rude awakening.”
Jenna’s eyes widen with that little bit of gossip. “So no bonding?”
“Nope.”
“Wow, payback’s a bitch,” Jenna says. “Although I still feel sorry for him. All we’re looking for is love at the end of the day. Aliens need love, too. Maybe that’s all he really wants.”
“And alien booty.”
“TMI!” Jenna screeches, covering her ears. “Oh no! Icky mental image! Thanks for that,” she says, and tosses her towel at me. I can’t help laughing at her grossed-out expression.
“Come on,” I say. “It’s not that bad. We coil around and—”
“Stop! My bleeding ears!”
We are laughing so hard by then that Jenna starts snorting through her nose, a snort that she futilely tries to stifle when Speio walks out of the living room toward us.
“What’s so funny?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she spurts through her teeth, clamping her lips together and turning a splotchy shade of red. “Girl stuff.”
Speio rolls his eyes skyward and shoots me a withering glance. I keep my thoughts carefully guarded and my face blank, knowing that he’d flip out if he knew we were making fun at his expense. He’s still a little sensitive about the whole not-bonding thing.
“Whatever,” he says. “So, are you guys going to the meet? Sawyer just texted me to see if you were on your way.”
“Crap,” Jenna squeals, jumping up to grab her phone out of her bag. “Yikes. He’s texted me, like, thirty-eight times.” She shrugs into a pair of cutoff jean shorts and glares at me. “Move your ass, queen of the sea! We have to go.”
I sink backward into the lounger. “Do I have to? I’m not sure I’m ready to mix and mingle.”
“It’ll be good for you,” Jenna says, her head disappearing into a neon-colored tank. “Plus, Lo’s going to be there.” She throws a meaningful look in my direction. “He asked you to come today, remember?”
I offer a noncommittal shrug. I don’t know why I’m so cagey about going. Maybe it’s because I don’t want anyone—particularly any of our old friends from school—seeing that Lo’s amnesia is so bad that he can’t remember his own girlfriend. I don’t want to feel their pity, or worse.
Jenna reads me easily. “Better to get it over with now than on Monday when you have nowhere to go but a four-walled classroom. It’ll be fine, Riss. I’ll be there, and Sawyer, and Speio,” she says with a glance at him.
“Are you going?” I ask Speio.
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
Speio reddens as if he’s hiding something. “You have to go. You’re signed up to surf,” he blurts out. “Sawyer did it!”
“What?” I splutter. “I haven’t surfed in months. I’m not up for a surf meet!”
“Maybe it’s what you need,” he says.
Jenna agrees with Speio, nodding emphatically. “Totally what you need. It was my idea, by the way, so don’t be mad at Sawyer or Speio.”
“What are you guys? Best friends now?” I say with a halfhearted glare. I’m not a fan of being tricked and pushed into things, but Jenna’s probably right. If I’m out surfing, I’m hardly going to be thinking about what people are saying about me. Or focusing on Lo. Or on Cara being all over Lo. Or vice versa. That last thought makes my stomach flip-flop, and not in a good way.
“Fine. Let’s go.”
I grab a shorty wet suit and tuck my surfboard next to Speio’s in the back of the Jeep before climbing in beside Jenna. It’s only a fifteen-minute ride from La Jolla to Pacific Beach Drive where Speio says the competition is being held.
She eyes me. “Seriously, I don’t know what you’re getting so worked up about. You command the sea. This is your space. Be one with it.”
“Calm down, Yoda.”
I stare out the window, preoccupied—or forcing myself to look preoccupied—to avoid further conversation. As we near the location, I’m surprised at the amount of traffic and cars parked along the side of the road. I can just see the tops of a few dozen multicolored tents along the edge of the beach.
“Which meet is this again?” I ask, my suspicion growing by the minute at the throngs of people walking toward the beach.
“RUSH,” Jenna says sheepishly.
“What?” I nearly choke. The RUSH Annual Surf Series is one of the biggest surf competitions in San Diego, and is sponsored by the coolest surf magazine on the planet. I ignore the sudden dip of my stomach. Not only will Lo be watching, but thousands of people will be there, including photographers. “How did we even get in for that? I didn’t qualify to compete.” I stare at her with a disbelieving frown.
“Slow your roll, princess,” Jenna says. “Sawyer hooked it up.”
“How?”
“Technically, it’s only an exhibition heat. He showed them some footage of you from last year and he called in a favor. No biggie.”
“You’re killing me. Really.”
Jenna grins, hopping out of the Jeep as soon as Speio comes to a spot in the narrowest parking spot possible. “What better way to start your senior year at Dover than with a splash? No pun intended.”
“This is a Pro-Am competition,” I say with overexaggerated emphasis. “As in pro. RUSH is more than a big deal. And the exhibition surfers at these events are professional surfers, not amateurs.”
“Seriously, Nerissa Marin, can you stop being such a wuss and suck it up for half a second? You’re a great surfer. Better than great, if you know what I mean,” Jenna says, grabbing my board and shoving it toward me. I shoot her a dry look. “Go have fun. And show off a bit. What could go wrong?”
The question is so loaded that I nearly start laughing hysterically. Besides enticing giant ocean predators like great white sharks, which are attracted to Aquarathi pheromones—mine in particular—what could possibly go wrong other than the worst possible thing? Like mangled, chewed-up people everywhere.
Speio pats my arm, sensing my panic. “It’s a new moon,” he says quietly. “Full moon’s already gone, so you should be fine. Just try to keep it together.” Okay, correction...maybe it’s not the worst thing, since our pheromones are at their peak during the full moon, but that doesn’t mean it’s not risky.
With a resigned sigh, I walk down to the crowded beach, where we meet up with Sawyer. He’s at one of the tents, pinning his number onto his rash guard. His smile is infectious as he comes in for a warm hug.
“Hey, Riss! Glad you got here.”
“Thanks for the heads-up,” I tell him, punching him half-playfully in the arm.
“Any surfing down in Cape Town?” Sawyer says, his teeth white in his darkly tanned face. A move to South Africa was the cover story for why we left months ago. “Heard there’s good swell there year-round.”
“Nope, didn’t surf at all,” I say truthfully, grabbing a piece of wax off one of the nearby tables. “I’m going to be rusty. Hope you don’t have too much riding on me not completely wiping out.”
“It’s only exhibition,” he says, and nods out at the ocean, where the waves are breaking in perfect sets. “Epic out there. I had an early-morning heat and it wasn’t near as clean as those. High tide. Offshore winds. Epic combo.”
“If you say so.”
I survey the teeming beach—only exhibition...with a gazillion people watching my every move. Waving goodbye to Sawyer, I head over to where Speio’s standing and crouch down next to him on the sand, slowly rubbing wax onto the deck of my board with rhythmic, consistent strokes. I breathe in and slowly exhale with each circle, feeling my body calm and center.
“Hey,” a voice says over my shoulder, making my skin leap like it’s alive. Only one person has that effect on me. I look up, shading my eyes from the sun.
“Hi, Lo.”
“You came,” he says, crouching down beside me. “You’re surfing?”
“Sawyer’s idea,” I say, trying not to let his proximity or the citrusy-vanilla smell of him affect me. It’s a losing battle. Here, with the ocean so close, everything is amplified. For me, anyway. I haul a deep breath into my lungs, furiously scrubbing the square of wax onto the board and remembering Speio’s words about keeping it together. Fat chance with Lo looking on every second.
“So, you any good?” Lo asks, and then answers his own question. “Well, you must be if you’re surfing RUSH. Heard it’s the epic of the epics.”
“Yeah.”
“You nervous?”
“Some.”
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Lo says with an awkward smile. “See you around.” I know my body language and monosyllabic answers are anything but welcoming, but I can’t help it.
Keep it together, I remind myself. “See you.”
“Good luck, but I’m sure you won’t need it.”
I don’t allow myself to turn fully around, but my gaze follows him despite my better judgment. Bad move. I’m just in time to see a bikini-clad Cara throw herself into his arms. Lo catches her effortlessly, tossing her over his shoulder. She laughs at something he says and kisses him on the cheek. I duck my head, letting my hair cover my overheated face. The jealousy that spins through me is like acid, scorching every part of my insides without mercy. I gasp, nearly doubling over my board.
Speio is at my side in a second, his hand over mine stalling my movement with the wax. “You all right?”
“Fine.”
“You sure?” he says, his face concerned. He looks over his shoulder, and understanding dawns in his eyes. “You know they’re just friends, right?” he says. His hand tightens on mine. “You don’t have to do this, Riss. Stay here, I mean.”
I squeeze his fingers, forcing the ache into a dark corner of my brain. “I have to deal with it sooner or later. Jenna’s right. Better out here than in a closed environment.” A loud bullhorn has everyone breaking out in a wave of mad cheering as the announcers of the event broadcast the exhibition heat. “That’s me. Don’t worry, Speio. I’ll be okay.”
As I paddle out to the lineup with the five other surfers in my heat, I try to leave all my negativity back on the beach. Being extra careful, I duck-dive under the oncoming waves, letting the ocean flow over and into me, taking strength from its dark blue depths. This is my space...my world. It’s where I belong. With every stroke, I feel stronger.
Out past the breakers, I straddle my board and float, facing the beach. People cover every possible inch of sand for miles. I know exactly where Lo is because I can feel the magnetic pull of him even as far away as I am, but I keep my eyes averted, searching instead for the red flag of Jenna’s hair. Instead a distorted, misshapen face beneath a wide-brimmed hat catches my attention, and I blink, my stomach dipping in fear. But when I look back, the hulking figure is gone. Shaking my head to clear it, I spot Jenna, jumping up and down and waving madly. I wave back and drop down to grab the rails of my board.
The waves are breaking in perfect sets, with glassy blue faces and white-tipped crests. Sawyer’s right—conditions couldn’t be more perfect. Paddling effortlessly, I streak past one of the other surfers to grab the second wave in the set. I pop up and carve steeply down the face of the wave, marveling at my human body’s muscle memory. Everything feels fluid, as if my bones are one with the wave.
Exhilarated, I trail my right hand across the wave’s face and then crank my hips up and over so that the board shifts into a sharp cutback. I’m gliding over the foamy crest, nearly suspended in air for a breathless moment and then slipping back down onto the face. By the time the wave starts to run out of steam, I’m on fire, adrenaline rushing through my entire body.
The cheering from the beach is deafening as I pump a triumphant fist in the air and somersault off my board over the back of the wave. I surf several more waves, even doing a three-sixty spin and a back flip off the last one, before heading back to the beach.
But once I’m back and surrounded by unfamiliar faces, I remember the figure I spotted from the lineup. I summon Speio and tell him in a few short words what I might have seen.
His eyes widen as he scans the crowd. “Are you sure that’s what you saw? A hybrid?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was a trick of the sunlight.”
“I’ll check it out.”
A grinning Sawyer thumps me on the back, along with a giant throng of people yelling out all kinds of greetings, as Speio melts into the crowd.
“Feel better?” Jenna asks me with a knowing smile.
“Yeah.”
“Good. You totally rocked it out there. No one,” she says pointedly, “could keep their eyes off you.” The lurch of happiness in my chest is squashed by the sudden warning look in her eyes at someone over my shoulder. “Speaking of...”
“Jenna, help me with these boards, will you?” Sawyer yells out. She throws me an apologetic look and shrugs, mouthing, Sorry. As she leaves, I turn around to face a very impressed Lo and his not-so impressed entourage of Cara and her cronies.
“You were brilliant,” he breathes, extending his hand for a high five. I slap it with mine, wincing at the torture of the too-brief contact, and fight the urge to beat a hasty retreat up the beach behind Jenna.
“Thanks,” I murmur, glancing at the others beside him. “Cara,” I manage civilly.
In response, she drapes a possessive arm around Lo’s waist. “Oh, hey, Nerissa, didn’t know you were back.”
Sure she didn’t. Last semester, I found out that Cara had lived with a foster family before enrolling at Dover, where her uncle—Cano—was principal. In some small way, she, too, was an outsider trying to fit in. She and Lo became friends, probably because they connected over the whole foster-life similarities. Lo told me that she’d never felt she could confide in anyone until she met him, and he liked being able to help. Deep down, I know I shouldn’t fault Cara. Of all people, I know what it’s like to want to run away from who you are—I did that for the past few years, and my people paid the price. I just wish she wasn’t so smug and obnoxious all the time, but then again, maybe that’s a front, too.
“Yes,” I say. “Back for the semester.”
Cara’s voice is an insidious purr. “I think you’ll find that senior year is going to be a lot different from junior year. There’ve been a few interesting changes. I can help you work those out if you like.”
Or maybe it isn’t a front...maybe she’s just Cara, plain and simple.
“Thanks for the heads-up,” I say coolly, refusing to let my eyes follow the motion of her palm against Lo’s rib cage. I fight an equally violent urge to smash her pretty face in with the sharp end of my board. Instead I look away with effort. “I think I can manage on my own.”
“You do that,” she says. “Lo, you coming? We’re going to get floats.”
“In a sec,” he says to her. “I’ll catch up.”
Cara shoots me one of her oh-so-familiar death glares of impressive proportions and I wink back, taking small pleasure at the instant heat blooming in her cheeks. Despite knowing that sinking to her level won’t solve anything, I can’t help giving in to the desire to make her suffer just a tiny bit for the grope-fest she just flaunted in my face.
“So, how amazing were you out there?” Lo says, shaking his head in admiration.
I try valiantly not to blush, or in my case, go all bioluminescent at his sincere compliment. “Thanks. Would you believe it if I told you that you used to surf pretty much exactly like that before?”
“There’s no way I could surf like you.” The warmth in his voice is deep and velvety, doing things to me that leave me breathless. And his eyes...I force my gaze away, looking for anything to stop those eyes from breaking me into a million pieces.
I swallow and force a smile to my lips. “You did, and you will. One day. It will all come back...all of it.”
“I hope so.”
His whisper is soft, wistful almost—I don’t know why it sounds like a promise, but something in it does. And for a second, looking into those earnest, bottomless blue eyes, I let myself hope, too.
5 Game On (#ulink_bb19f204-8b73-5854-ad0c-ac4d36eb1f3c)
It is dark and empty—a cavernous, echoless abyss. There’s no light, only oily black depths beneath and beside me. I am but a speck at its epicenter. I scream, but the only thing that escapes my mouth is a mute bubble that floats away into the ever-deepening silence. I thrash, my arms and tail caught in the motionless void. It is futile.
I am trapped.
Something snakelike slithers down my arm, and then another and another, until my body is fraught with it. Glowing red eyes appear in the distance, drawing closer and closer, blackened tentacles bleeding outward and encircling me.
Ehmora.
“You’re dead,” I say. “We killed you.”
“Did you?” The voice laughs, the sound like a volley of bullets. “Then why am I here?”
“You’re a ghost. A nightmare. Nothing more.”
“So it would seem....”
I jerk upward gasping, sweat dampening my neck and back. My entire body is shaking from the visceral dream. I can still feel her tentacles cutting into me like a fiery brand. Of its own volition, my gaze slides down to the vinelike navy tattoo winding around the tops of my shoulders and neck. I take a breath, banishing the remnants of fear. The tattoo is a mark of the bonding with Lo, nothing more. It’s not alive. There are no tentacles. And Ehmora is dead.
Still, the implication of the dream is haunting. I felt so powerless and alone in the abyss, unable to move or act. The phantom Ehmora’s last words were so utterly chilling...so knowing...that I can’t help the shiver winding its way through me.
Attempting to exorcise my irrational fears, I step out to the patio and into the cool night air and lie back on a lounger to stare into the dark sky. It’s a cloudy night, with no moon or stars visible above. The wind whistles through the tops of the palm trees along the edges of the property, growing louder by the second. The unpredictable shift is in response to me—I’m sure of it.
I’ve always had a tempestuous relationship with weather, and while I’ve learned to harness my emotions, sometimes it’s impossible to keep it all in. For a heartbeat, instead of suppressing my feelings, I release my inner demons, watching as jagged lightning rips the sky into two. Sure enough, the first droplets of rain hit my face and bare legs. The ensuing storm is violent but brief, the angry purple sky fading as the clouds part to reveal a gilded sliver of moon. The release feels good as the rain intensifies into a pelting force and I relish the sting, letting it filter through me. Eventually the rain gentles to something more tender as my thoughts drift to Lo. The drops of water from above mix with the salty tears on my face, and I allow myself the luxury of crying for the first time in months.
A queen must show no weakness.
Curled into a ball with sobs racking my body, I don’t even notice the gentle stroking across my shoulder at first. But after a few seconds, I lean back into the person lying beside me on the lounger, hugging me from behind.
“It hurts too much,” I choke out.
“It’s okay, child.” Soren’s voice is soft, pulsing in our language. Her fingers are softer still, caressing my back in a soothing motion.
“I did it, Soren,” I whisper brokenly. “I made it happen.”
“No, my lady,” she says. “You could not have predicted any of this. You did what you thought was best to keep him safe. To keep all of us safe.”
“He should have been with me. In Waterfell. Not here. And not alone.” My words are raw, shattered gasps, clawing their way out of my throat. “He couldn’t have known what bonding would feel like, either. And I pushed him away, ripping us both apart when we should have been together. Thinking it would be better. For both of us. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t.”
Soren turns me around gently to face her, her eyes flashing green fire. “Don’t do this to yourself, Nerissa. It is what it is.” She wipes the tear-rain combination from my face with her thumb. “Lo is seeing the neurosurgeon this week. We’ll know more then on how we can help him.”
“We don’t know that we can help him,” I say in a defeated voice. “His human DNA is doing things that we have no experience with.”
“He’s Aquarathi, too,” Soren says. “Which means his capacity to heal is better than any human’s.”
I meet her eyes, hope blooming softly. “I hope you’re right.”
“See what the doctor says, and we’ll go from there. Come on, let’s get you back to bed. Big day of school tomorrow.”
“Soren, did you talk to Speio? About what I saw on the beach?”
Soren nods, her face grim. “No traces of anything.”
“Was he sure?”
She pulls me close in a warm embrace. “Don’t worry. Echlios will make sure Speio didn’t miss anything. Now, you need to get some rest.”
Despite Soren’s comforting words, I can’t help feeling a sense of dread, like an invisible net is closing in, one that we can’t see or avoid no matter how hard we try. I know what I saw earlier—it was one of Cano’s creatures...watching...and wanting me to see it. Taunting me...Cano’s way of saying I have no idea what’s coming next. And the truth is, none of us do. Not even with Lo. At the end of the day, he’s still a cross-species alien/human hybrid, and anything the neurosurgeon says will be speculation at best.
With a last look at the rapidly clearing skies, I allow Soren to walk me back to my room, where I fall into a fitful sleep.
* * *
“Come on, slowpoke!” Jenna shouts, slamming her locker shut. “English is this way. Forget how to navigate these hallowed halls already?”
I haven’t exactly forgotten, but the sight of Cara all over Lo at the far end of the lockers is already making me sick to my stomach. It’s not so much her flirting that’s getting me...it’s the look on Lo’s face, as if he’s enjoying every minute of it. Which, I remind myself, he’s bound to...he’s a boy.
I remember Jenna’s words from yesterday evening when we’d driven back from the beach. Fight fire with fire.
Of course, it didn’t help that she made me watch Grease for inspiration—girl-next-door tutorial on how to lure the quintessential bad boy—emphatically stating that there’s nothing that black leather pants can’t accomplish. Laughing, I told her she’d have to kill me before getting me anywhere near leather pants. But she has a point. He’s not exactly going to notice me if I’m a mute wallflower.
Smoothing my hair and cringing inwardly, I take a deep breath, lick my lips and strut past them.
“Hey, Lo,” I say in a breathy voice, blushing furiously at how ridiculous I must sound. But obviously he doesn’t think so. Neither does Cara. They both stare at me—him with an appreciative smile, and her, not so much. But I’m not there to win Cara over. I’m there for Lo. “You heading to English?” I ask him, ignoring her scowl. “I wanted to ask you something about Sawyer.”
“Yeah,” Lo says, grabbing his books. “What’s up?”
Elated, I ignore Jenna’s raised eyebrows and congratulatory wink from the rear of the room as we walk into class together. I turn slightly and see Cara trailing behind us, her face a hilarious combination of thunder and puke. Sawyer waves, and Lo plunks down in a vacant seat next to him. I take the spot next to Jenna and stifle a grin as Cara is forced to grab one of the few open seats at the front of the class.
Nerissa, one. Cara, zero.
Mr. Donovan clears his throat and pushes his spectacles up on his nose, smiling widely. “Welcome, class, we have a few new faces this week.” Everyone looks around in unison to check out the “new faces.” So far, it looks like one new girl and a guy who I thought graduated last year. Guess not. Oh, and me, which would explain why everyone’s staring at me as if I have a bull’s-eye tattooed on my forehead. Technically, I’m not new but, well, tell everyone else that. Mr. Donovan continues. “This week, we are going to start with The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, which is one of my favorite plays.”
Amid the groans from the class, I smile to myself...finally something new that I haven’t read on my own. At least I can drown myself in that if things get rough—nothing like academics to take a girl’s mind off unrequited love. I glance at Lo through my lashes. He’s flipping through the pages of the play, his lower lip caught between his teeth. I can’t help noticing how cute he looks, yet how different. Gone are the rebellious flip-flops from last year, which aren’t part of the Dover Prep uniform, as well as his permanently sand-covered feet. Gone also are the days when he used to cut class just to go surfing. The old Lo would have been horrified to be in class on time or to be caught without an appropriately bored expression on his face. A part of me desperately misses that boy, but I know he’s in there somewhere...somewhere beneath the meticulously neat hair and immaculate uniform.
Mr. Donovan thumps his book on the desk, making me jump, and people swivel to the front of the class. “You are going to work in groups of four or five, and each group will be assigned a specific theme to discuss. As part of your midterm, there will be a debate between each of the groups to prove or disprove the theme you have been assigned. This will count toward half of your final grade in this class, so please take it seriously. The group assignments are as follows.”
The assignments are all alphabetical, so my silver lining is that Cara is an A last name and Lo is an S, but nothing prepares me for the pure venom that comes my way when Lo and I somehow end up in the same group. In this class there aren’t many last names between Marin and Seavon. Jenna is also in our group, as well as two other boys. Sawyer is with Speio, so he doesn’t look too miserable at having to split up from Jenna. The new girl—Rian Thorn—is with them.
Jenna catches my eyes and I can see her lips twitching as she nods at the theme that Donovan has just written up on the blackboard for our group. I almost snort—The Double Life. Someone definitely has a sense of humor, considering that there are two aliens pretending to be human in this group alone. Well, not that Lo knows that he’s alien, but who’s counting?
The rest of the morning passes in a bustle of activity, running from class to class, and getting myself reacquainted with the routine. After American Government, Advanced Math and French class, I trudge toward the cafeteria and toss my books and my food-laden tray down onto an empty table. Jenna, Speio, Sawyer and surprisingly Lo immediately join me. They look exactly how I feel. Wiped.
“Seriously,” I say. “Is senior year supposed to be death in a backpack? It’s only lunchtime, for crying out loud. How’d you guys survive weeks of this already?”
“Dover Prep prides itself on academic preparation for college-bound students,” Jenna intones, mimicking the opening statements on the Dover Prep brochure.
“Guess they didn’t include torture and cruel or unusual punishments,” Sawyer quips.
“I didn’t think it was too bad,” Lo says, and we all turn to him in unison, our expressions identical.
“Who are you and what have you done with Lo?” Sawyer says, widening his eyes in mock shock. “Oh, right, he’s on hiatus, which means new Lo loves schoolwork.”
Lo reddens. “I don’t love it. I just don’t think it’s that bad. Big difference.”
“Well, the old you couldn’t be bothered, that’s all,” Sawyer explains. “I mean, you haven’t even asked me to cut school once. So it’s weird seeing you, of all people, flipped around and all about the books.”
“Sorry.” Lo shrugs. “It’s just that I don’t know how I used to be, and it feels like I should be good in school because this stuff isn’t too complicated to me. If I do it well, why not do it?” We all start laughing and Lo gets even redder, realizing that that, too, is something the old Lo would never say. “Look, I’m just trying to figure out who I was. Give me a break, will you?”
“Sorry, man, just playing around,” Sawyer says, chucking him in the shoulder. “We all know who you are. You’ll remember soon enough.”
“I guess we haven’t really seen you since school started,” Jenna pipes up. “You’ve been over there.” She nods across the room.
“Sorry, Cara’s been helping out,” Lo says a trifle defensively. “I didn’t want to be mean.” His eyes dart over to where said stony-faced helper is sitting with her entourage. “I think I’ve made her mad by even coming over here.”
“The old Lo wouldn’t have cared,” I blurt out, earning a swift glance from Lo.
“The old Lo sounds like he was a dick.”
“Hardly. He just saw through the bullshit. He knew how to read people.”
“Like you?”
“Especially me,” I say quietly. The memory of a different type of conversation, on a boat in the middle of the harbor, whispers through my mind. Lo had always been able to see right through me, even at my worst.
“Wow, you two want to take it down a notch, or what?” Jenna interjects to diffuse the sudden tension hovering over the table. “Dick or not, you’re still our friend.”
Lo lounges back in his seat. “So, what else did I do? Or not do? Besides not caring about school, seeing through bullshit and being an amazing surfer, according to Nerissa.”
The sound of my name on his lips makes my stomach feel all fluttery, but I stuff a huge bite of cheeseburger in my mouth so I don’t have to talk. Sawyer does instead. “Well, she’s right. You were pretty awesome, but you’re getting there,” he says. “We’ll have you back surfing double overheads in no time. Right, Riss?”
Lo’s eyes meet mine. “Sure,” I choke out, stuffing another bite into my mouth. “Sorry, hungry,” I say by way of apology and stare at my tray, avoiding Jenna’s amused look.
“So, since we’re on the topic, can I ask you guys a weird question?” Lo says, his eyes making the rounds at the table. Jenna nods on behalf of everyone. “Did I...date Cara?” The dead silence is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Everyone around me stares at the tabletop. Surprised, Lo hurries to explain. “I mean, it’s just that she’s so possessive sometimes, and I feel as if she expects me to be a certain way, so...” He trails off, a helpless expression on his face.
“Do you like Cara?” Jenna asks carefully.
“She’s all right,” he says. “A little neurotic, but who isn’t? And she’s been supernice over the last few weeks.”
“That’s not an answer.”
I try to act like the real answer to Jenna’s question won’t affect me, but it’s a losing battle. The silence thickens to uncomfortable proportions, and I realize that I’m holding my breath. I exhale silently.
“I guess I do. Or did. I don’t know. I mean, it feels like we’re close.”
“So, which is it?” The question isn’t from Jenna. It’s from me. I’m shocked that I’ve even said anything, but obviously I have, if Jenna’s open-jawed expression is any indication.
“I don’t know,” Lo says. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make things weird.” He laughs awkwardly. “Please tell me I didn’t insert my foot in my mouth because I dated any of you?”
To everyone’s surprise, Speio leans in, his face grave. “Well, I didn’t want to have to tell you this way. But, well, we dated. We were in love. I’m heartbroken that you don’t remember the glorious nights we shared.”
Relieved at Speio’s thoughtful intervention, I try not to burst out laughing at the convincing wounded expression on his face, but the look on Lo’s face is priceless. His eyes are wide and he’s staring from Speio to each of us in turn.
“Really?” Lo asks just as Sawyer muffles a snort.
Speio and Sawyer convulse into gales of laughter. “No, dude. Not really.”
“Not that I would care either way,” Lo says, grinning good-naturedly at their teasing. “I mean, you’re a good-looking guy, and, well, I’m me. So naturally, I could see how you would be devastated.”
“There’s a spark of the old Lo.” Speio grins. “But yeah, not devastated.”
“Yeah, that would be Nerissa,” Sawyer blurts out, and Jenna kicks him in the shins. His eyes widen in delayed realization of his gaffe and he gapes, panicked, from me to Lo, his mouth opening and shutting like a fish. A part of me hopes that Lo didn’t hear, but of course, I don’t have that kind of luck.
“What?” he says. “Why would she be— Oh.”
“We dated briefly,” I say in as normal a voice as I can manage, despite my quickened pulse.
Lo’s eyes are liquid. “We dated?”
I’m saved from having to answer as a shrill voice interrupts us. “I’d hardly call throwing yourself at someone dating, but whatever. Nerissa never says no, if you know what I mean.”
As much as I want to stuff Cara into a tiny box for her catty comment, I’m grateful for not having to answer Lo’s husky, far-too-intimate question. Pushing back from the table, I grab my backpack and tray. I’ve had enough of this conversation, and I have no interest in rising to Cara’s baited words. Jenna, however, has no such compunction.
“You wish that were true, Cara,” Jenna says with an eye roll in Lo’s direction as she, too, stands and gathers her things. Her eyes are glittering like an avenging angel’s, leaping to my defense. “If you must know, Cara was the only one who couldn’t help flinging herself at you. If you don’t believe me, ask her what she went as last year to Junior Prom.”
“Shut up, Jenna,” Cara seethes.
But Jenna doesn’t wait for Lo to ask. “You were Neptune, and she was your slutty little sea snake.”
“I was an electric eel!” Cara screams shrilly.
“Eel, slutty sea snake. Same diff,” Jenna tosses over her shoulder, nearly shoving her chair into Cara. She’s about two inches shorter than Cara, but it doesn’t make a difference as she steps up a hairbreadth from Cara’s nose. “I’d be very careful if I were you,” she says to her softly. “When Lo regains his memory—and he will—you’re going to look quite the fool because you’re not his girlfriend. So remember that when you’re trying to rag on my friend. Nerissa may have the patience not to respond to your crap, but I don’t, so back the hell off.”
I swear that everyone’s collective jaw is on the floor, mine included, as Cara swings on her heel and storms off.
“You coming?” Jenna asks me in a casual voice as if she didn’t just flay my archnemesis alive in front of the entire cafeteria. “See you after school, hon,” she says to Sawyer, and bends to kiss his cheek.
“You are so hot right now,” he says.
“I know.”
“Thanks, I think,” I say to Jenna, following her into the hallway. I wave halfheartedly in the general vicinity of our table, not interested in seeing what anyone thinks of Jenna’s outburst—particularly Lo. Or Speio, for that matter. “What happened to your speech about forgiveness last year, and taking the high road with Cara?”
Jenna grins. “No one but me calls my best friend a tramp and gets away with it.” She sends me a sidelong glance. “Sorry, I couldn’t help it. I know you don’t like scenes, but with all the Lo stuff, I just kind of lost it.”
I smile. “No, it’s okay,” I say. It was oddly satisfying to see Cara looking like she was throwing up in her mouth. “But you know there’s going to be payback, right?”
“I’m not afraid of Cara,” Jenna says, wiggling her eyebrows. “Plus, I can feed her to my very own sea monster as a snack if she gets out of line.”
I snort out loud. “Remind me never to get on your bad side.”
A toothy grin. “See? I don’t have to have fins to be fearsome.”
I nod vigorously. “No. You definitely don’t. We’ll make an honorary Aquarathi of you yet.”
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
6 Make Your Move (#ulink_8a2f5d65-6096-5471-83e4-dd008472384b)
“Poisoned? What do you mean some kind of biological agent?” I’m nearly screaming the rapid-fire questions at Echlios. “And how would someone even get close enough to poison Lo? Was it Cano?”
“All we know is that it’s some kind of biotoxin,” Echlios says. “And we don’t know that it was Cano, although he is a strong possibility.”
I know it’s him—every instinct inside me says it’s him. Cano is still on the loose, and out there...trying to destabilize us. He’s the only one who would attack Lo with something like this, something this diabolic. He was the one to help Ehmora with her hybrids and to combine the DNA strands in the first place—and he’s the only one who would know about Lo. From what we’ve all learned last year, he is not to be underestimated, notwithstanding the fact that he’s a brilliant biologist. This has his signature all over it.
My body is shaking so hard it feels like my teeth are going to shatter inside my mouth. I can feel the dull knuckle of bones already protruding from my brow, see the freckle of fins appearing and disappearing down my cheek like a wave of reptilian skin in the mirror across the hall. I’m as weak at controlling the transformation impulse as I am at controlling the chaos in my head. My breath comes in shortened, desperate bursts, and I grab the edge of the wooden table in my fists. It crumbles to splinters at my touch.
“My queen...Nerissa, please calm down,” Echlios says, his eyes anxious.
“Don’t tell me to calm down,” I rage, my clothing popping as razor-sharp fins emerge along the length of my spine, ripping through my cotton shirt like butter. “You’re telling me that someone deliberately poisoned Lo. How?” Soren’s fingers reach across to mine, her calming energy sweeping across our human skins and sinking into me. Accepting her gesture, I breathe slow and deep. “How, Echlios?” I ask less forcefully this time.
“Injected or ingested, we presume,” Echlios says, resuming his seated position. I follow his lead and focus on keeping my breathing even. “But we have no way to be sure. We got lucky. The tests were inconclusive at first. The memory loss was just that—retrograde dissociative amnesia from the shock of what happened with his mother. But then Dr. Watson saw something and ordered more tests, this time checking for specific blood and neural toxicity. He saw some kind of odd discoloration in a group of cells near the memory center. He’d had a hunch that the memory loss didn’t seem fully consistent with dissociative amnesia—it appeared as if it were being aggravated by something else. A marine biotoxin of some sort.”
“What is that?” Speio asks softly. “Something from the sea?”
“It’s an organic toxin that occurs organically in nature from certain types of oceanic algae blooms, like the red tide,” Echlios says. Speio and I exchange a glance. We’ve both surfed at night during the red tide in San Diego, when the phytoplankton bloom makes the water turn a psychedelic blue.
“We’ve never gotten sick from that,” Speio blurts out. “Or any of our friends.”
“That’s because our Aquarathi immune systems aren’t affected by this toxin, but even so, the tide isn’t necessarily caused by toxic algae. Some blooms are toxic, some aren’t.”
“So humans can get sick from it?” I ask.
“Sometimes. In rare cases, mammals and humans get infected from eating contaminated shellfish. In its natural form, it’s called domoic acid, and the normal side effects range from nausea to coma to death,” Echlios explains. The blood drains from my face. “However, in Lo’s case, it appears that it has been chemically altered, which is how we knew that he has been poisoned.”
“Altered? Why?”
“Because his Aquarathi DNA would find a way to combat the infection. They’ve somehow made it more resistant and human-centric at the same time. Meaning that it only targets the human cells and that it can’t be detected by his Aquarathi immune system.”
“That’s just perfect,” I mutter. “Trust Cano to come up with a marine toxin to weaken the hybrids he engineered in the first place to be sea creatures like us. It just seems wrong.” I can’t help shuddering.
“He’s clever,” Echlios says. “It’s the perfect fail-safe.”
Echlios is right. If something had gone wrong during their species-grafting experimentation, they would have needed something immediate to weaken the hybrids. Since human DNA is weaker than ours, it makes sense that they would have targeted the human cells. But I’d bet anything that Cano wanted to make the toxin as lethal as possible, not to use just as a fail-safe but as a weapon.
Snapping out my smart phone, I quickly run a search for domoic acid poisoning. According to the first website, it’s also called amnesic shellfish poisoning. I scan the immediate symptoms—vomiting, nausea, cramps—but I’m more interested in the neurological symptoms farther down, like dizziness, disorientation, short-term memory loss and seizures...the ones that could lead to comas and death. And then my gaze spans down farther and my breath hitches in my throat.
There is no cure.
The rush of fear nearly makes me double over, but I can’t afford to let it derail me. Nobody creates a poison without creating its remedy, especially for someone as valuable as Lo. Not even Cano would be that foolish...at least I hope he wouldn’t. With a fortifying breath, I process all of the information from Echlios and the website as clinically as I can, but I can’t seem to get my mind around one thing. I glance at Echlios, pocketing my phone.
“Even if it were Cano or Ehmora’s people, Lo was—is—her son, and the perfect hybrid specimen. Why would they want to hurt him?”
Echlios spreads his palms to the sky. “If it means getting you out of Waterfell, I can see that being an option. Ehmora viewed him as an expendable bargaining chip. Why wouldn’t they continue to do so? Bringing you here disrupts the courts and could create chaos.”
“Wait a second,” I muse. The vision of my dream, of Ehmora telling me she isn’t dead, hovers over me like a wet, dark cloud. Even from the grave, we can’t escape her influence. “You think Lo was poisoned to draw me back here?”
“It’s possible. In Waterfell, you are safe. It’s impenetrable.” Echlios shakes his head. “Here, it’s open and we are vulnerable in human form. They knew you’d have no choice but to come back for him once you felt him deteriorating.”
“Deteriorating? You mean from the amnesia?”
Echlios stares at me. “No. From his failing body.”
Of course. Lo’s dying. As if I could forget.
Soren clears her throat, the soft pulsing sound reminding me to breathe, despite the fact that my body has gone completely immobile after Echlios’s quiet words. “We also believe they—both Neriah and Cano—have been watching him, and that they still have ties to the school. Spies,” she says.
The mention of my mother’s name makes my stomach twist into ugly knots. It’s been hard not to think about her, but I’ve taught myself to be numb if and when I ever do. After her being instrumental in my father’s murder, her betrayal had become unforgivable when she and her lover—Ehmora—decided to kill me for my throne.
“That’s not possible,” I say. But of course it is. Just because we killed Ehmora and chased my mother and Cano inland doesn’t mean that they’d give up on Ehmora’s plans. If either of them is still alive, we are at risk...as they’ve obviously proven with Lo. Castia, the Emerald Court queen, was partially right. They wanted me back here.
“There’s more,” Soren continues, glancing at her son. “We suspect that there is a spy in school who’s feeding Cano information. Keeping tabs on you and on Lo.”
“Like who? The acting headmaster?”
“No. Echlios glimmered her weeks before we arrived,” Soren says. “Could be a teacher. The school nurse. Other students.”
“Can’t we just leave?” Speio asks. “Take Lo with us to Waterfell and figure it out there?”
Echlios shakes his head. “That was my plan until Nerissa saw something when she glimmered him last week. He doesn’t seem to know what he is, so—”
“So we can’t take the risk of him freaking out a hundred thousand leagues under the sea,” Speio finishes, wide-eyed.
“Or trying to return to human form,” Echlios says grimly.
“It’s not just that,” Soren interjects. “How do we even get him to remember who or what he is? If this is part of a greater scheme to weaken the Aquarathi, that needs to happen sooner rather than later. The longer we stay here, the more we are at risk.” She glances at me. “The more our queen is at risk.”
“And Waterfell,” I add.
“There is another alternative. Castia—” Echlios begins, but I cut him off with a furious glare, already preempting what he’s going to say. The very thought of what Castia suggested about letting Lo die alone makes me sick to my stomach.
“That’s not an option,” I say. “We can’t abandon him. That’s a death sentence and you know it. The High Council has given us a chance and time to do something. We have to try. For him, and for Waterfell.” And for me.
Echlios nods, bowing his head, and for a second I think I see what looks like relief flash across his face. A cold feeling slithers through me.... I left Lo behind before the last time we left for Waterfell. Did he think I’d do it now?
“We stay together,” I say firmly. “We have just under four months to find Cano, figure out what he’s plotting and find a cure.” I break off abruptly and stare at Echlios, recalling what I read on my phone not two minutes before. “Please tell me there is something that can save him, Echlios.”
“I believe there is. Cano is far too meticulous not to have reengineered a natural toxin without also creating its counter remedy.” Echlios pauses. “And if Lo were to die, they would have no leverage, which leads me to believe that the effects of this toxin can be reversed or at least stopped.”
“And Lo’s memory loss?”
Echlios’s face is compassionate. “That’s a bit more complicated. The biotoxin inhibits the brain from healing itself. He could be trying to repair those neurons as we speak and yet be completely limited by the toxin’s effects.”
Speio’s voice is small. “Will he be able to remember who he is?”
“Probably not without help,” Echlios says. “If we don’t counter the chemical effects, and soon, I’m afraid the memory loss could become permanent. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he adds gently, seeing my stricken expression. “For all we know, Lo could start remembering things tomorrow. We Aquarathi are nothing if not strong. We fight even when we are down—it’s the core of who we are. And that is true, too, at a base, cellular level.”
I try not to put too much faith in Echlios’s words, but a part of me fervently hopes that Lo’s Aquarathi side will step up and defend itself. I can’t imagine any part of myself not fighting to survive. It’s in our nature. Hybrid or not, he’s Aquarathi through and through, and he’s bonded to me. That has to count for something.
The small bloom of hope blossoms into something bigger, and takes root deep in my abdomen.
I have to make him remember who he is.
* * *
Slamming my locker shut, I make my way out to the parking lot. Jenna has hockey practice and I’m left to my own devices. She’s the mastermind, not me, but I have a plan and one that I hope is going to work. The first step is to get Lo out of Cara’s clutches. Shaking my head as I exit the school, I can’t help comparing the incongruous parallels of the whole situation. Cara Andrews is like the human part of Lo fighting for dominion, and I’m his Aquarathi side, determined to reclaim what is mine. I’m not in the least bit threatened by Cara, but I am worried that Lo will want to gravitate toward his human side and to the familiar. In the grand scheme of things, I’m someone new to him.
That has to change, starting with evening shifts at the Marine Center. It wasn’t easy to get my old job back, but thankfully the manager, Kevin, hasn’t lost his memory and remembers my involvement last year. Plus, a sizable donation from the Marin family fund for the oceanic conservation drive didn’t hurt matters. As a result, I’ve been able to secure a few hours during the week after school.
Hefting my backpack into the rear of the Jeep, I climb in and surreptitiously peek at Lo and Cara in the rearview mirror, standing next to her car.
“So you can’t come over to study?” Cara is saying to Lo in the parking lot, her arm wrapped around his. Seriously, it’s like she can’t stop touching him every infernal second.
“Sorry,” Lo says with an easy grin. “Some of us have to work. Can you give me a ride over there? Caught a ride with Sawyer this morning after our surf lesson, so no car.”
And that’s my cue.
Putting the Jeep into reverse, I swing out and pull alongside. Cara’s face immediately tightens. “I can give you a ride,” I say to Lo. “I’m heading over there myself.”
“Since when?” Cara says.
“Since I work there,” I say sweetly.
“How did you—” she begins, and then snaps her mouth shut, eyeing me with a suspicious frown. “I thought you said they didn’t have any open slots,” she says to Lo. The flirtatious tone has gone into accusatory mode. Obviously she tried to get a job there to spend more time with Lo.
“They didn’t,” he says, shrugging.
I smile widely. “What can I say? I’m special. Come on, Lo. We’re going to be late. Get in.”
Resisting the urge to peel out of the parking lot and leave black tire marks in my wake, I drive more sedately, keeping my exhilaration contained. I don’t even know why I’m keeping score, because it’s so childish, but I do, anyway. Nerissa two, Cara zero.
My exhilaration wanes into acute awareness of Lo sitting in the passenger seat, and all of the unsaid things from the other day in the cafeteria lying between us. Neither one of us says anything, but the silence is comfortable instead of awkward.
“Hey, what song is this?” Lo says, twisting the volume button on the car stereo.
I fumble for my phone on the middle console and chuck it at him. “It’s just a playlist I’m working on. That one’s called ‘As the Rush Comes’ by Motorcycle.”
“I like it. Very mellow,” he says, stroking the face of the phone with his thumb and scrolling through the playlist. “I know some of these. You have good taste.”
I laugh. “You know some of those because they’re yours. You and I started this playlist.”
With a raised eyebrow, he selects the next song. The opening chords of Blackmill’s “The Drift” comes on. “This is one of my favorites. I love the piano instrumental with the backbeat. It’s tight.”
“Yep,” I say. “You got me into them. Here, hand that over for a second. Bet you don’t know these guys, but this one is all you.” With a quick swipe, I select the last song I added to the playlist. I don’t add that I’ve listened to the chorus of the song at least a hundred times while torturing myself about what he’s been doing all summer with Cara.
“Who is it?” he says after a few bars, his foot tapping against the floor.
“Morgan Page’s ‘The Longest Road,’ Deadmau5 remix.”
“Catchy.”
“Great lyrics,” I add.
“I can see that,” he says quietly. His gaze flutters on me for a second and then drifts away when mine flicks to his. I don’t know if he’s agreeing with me or appreciating that they mean something to me. He looks as if he has more to say, but then he bites his lip and releases a slow sigh. He stares out the window for a moment before shifting in his seat to face me. “Sorry about the other day at school,” he blurts out. “I didn’t realize we were a couple. I mean, it makes sense. When you were at my house, I felt something. It was so strong, like this weird pull toward you. Sorry, it wasn’t weird...” He trails off with a stammer. “I am totally screwing up what I want to say.”
“I know what you mean, Lo.”
“I wish I could remember. I don’t know how I could forget you or us, that’s all,” he says, shooting me a look that makes my heart flip-flop. “Sawyer told me that it was love at first sight,” he adds with a laugh, “and then he told me the truth...that I had to work hard to even get you to go out with me.”
“Hardly,” I protest, but I can’t hide the blush that heats my neck, nor the fact that it threatens to go supernova at his next words.
“I’m sure it was worth it,” he says quietly.
At a stop sign, I turn to smile tremulously at him, my heart beating a hundred miles a minute. “It was for both of us. You helped me figure out a lot of things about myself. We’re pretty similar, you and me.”
“Seems like it,” he says with a thoughtful glance, studying the playlist on the phone’s screen. “You know, I was surprised that people didn’t tell me about you. I asked because I found a prom photo earlier this summer.” His teeth flash white for a second. “One of me dressed in some seaweed with this totally hot girl.”
I know the one he’s talking about—it was one of the few photos we took together at Jenna’s house right before Junior Prom. “We were Neptune and Salacia. Roman gods of the ocean.”
“I figured it was some kind of theme,” he says with a somber smile. “I think Bertha thought it would be better if I didn’t know. It’s not like you were still around, so she told me you were someone I’d gone with. Maybe she thought it would be too painful if I couldn’t remember. I mean, there I was staring at this girl with this expression...like she was everything to me and I couldn’t even remember her name. I think Bertha felt sorry for me.” He trails off to stare out the window, his voice going so quiet that I have to strain to hear him. “I wish someone had told me, because maybe I could have tried harder. Maybe I could have done something differently, made myself remember somehow.” He shrugs, watching me, his tone wistful. “Because now here you are, and all I want is to be that guy in that photo.”
Lo’s eyes are intense and it’s all I can do not to start crying then and there. “That guy is still in there, Lo,” I say. “And that girl will always be here, waiting for you. You just have to take it one day at a time.”
Everything inside me tenses up when he reaches over and slides his palm over the back of my hand on the gearshift, holding it there for the rest of the ride. I’m afraid to even look at him, so I swallow hard and keep my eyes on the road, barely conscious of anything but the warm seal of his skin on mine. We listen to the rest of the playlist in silence until I pull in to the Marine Center parking lot.
“I’m sorry,” he says, drawing his hand away. “I didn’t mean to overstep—”
“You didn’t. This is new to me, too. One day at a time. Deal?”
“Deal,” Lo says, then hops out of the Jeep with an overbright grin as if to make up for the earlier turn in the conversation. “Thanks for the ride. So this is going to be like old times, right?”
The question takes me aback for a second before I realize that he’s joking. “You can’t even remember last week,” I toss back. “What do you know about old times?”
“I guess you’ll have to show me.”
I take a breath to calm my racing pulse and manage a half-teasing smile. “I don’t think you’re quite ready for that, but I’ll let you know when.”
“Promise?”
The evocative meaning in that single word makes my bones dissolve into nothing. Which explains why you couldn’t knock the smile off my face as we walk into the Marine Center.
“Hey, Riss!” Kevin shouts, jumping over the counter to sweep me into a huge bear hug. “So glad you’re back. Place just hasn’t been the same without you. Where’s your partner in crime?”
“Jenna? Don’t worry, I’ll get her back here to do her share. She’s at a hockey game.”
“No hockey for you this year?”
“I’m focusing on other things,” I say. Yeah, like finding a cure for my boyfriend’s imminent doom. I smile brightly. “But hey, at least Lo’s been here holding down the fort.”
Kevin grins, chucking Lo in the shoulder. “Well, if he could only remember his name, it’d be awesome,” he teases.
“That joke never gets old,” Lo says good-naturedly. “So, what do you have for us today? Beach cleanup?”
Consulting a clipboard on the desk, Kevin purses his lips. “Actually, someone just called in from La Jolla Shores saying that they thought they saw a bunch of garbage bags caught in the kelp beds. You guys want to check it out? Just radio back if you need help. Standard swipe and dump, shouldn’t take the two of you too long.”
“We’ll take care of it,” I say.
“Riss, you remember where the boat is, right?” Kevin asks, tossing me a set of keys attached to a bright yellow foam oval. “It’s good to have you back.”
“Great to be back.” I find that I mean it. I’ve missed the Marine Center and doing my part to protect the world’s oceans. It is where I live, after all, and although we aren’t allowed to interfere in the day-to-day politics of people who share the planet with us, marine conservancy is an area where we can get more actively involved.
Lo and I get changed in the respective bathrooms and meet out on the beach near the shed where all the gear is stored.
“We probably won’t need these if those bags are just floating, but do you remember how to scuba?” I ask him, tugging on one of the air tanks and tossing it into the back of the dune buggy.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/amalie-howard/oceanborn/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Amalie Howard
The coronation is over.But the battle has just begun.Nerissa Marin has won her crown. But can she keep it? Already, her ties to the human realm are driving a wedge between Nerissa and her people. When word arrives that her part-human prince consort, Lo, has been poisoned, she makes the difficult choice to leave Waterfell and return landside. As the royal courts debate her decision, even more disturbing rumors surface: a plot is rising against her, led by someone she least expects.On land, Nerissa learns another shocking truth–Lo does not remember who she is. As her choice to try to save him threatens her hold on her crown, changing loyalties and uncertainty test her courage in ways she could never have imagined. Nerissa will have one last chance to prove herself as a queen…and save the undersea kingdom she loves.
The coronation is over.
But the battle has just begun.
Nerissa Marin has won her crown. But can she keep it? Already, her ties to the human realm are driving a wedge between Nerissa and her people. When word arrives that her part-human prince consort, Lo, has been poisoned, she makes the difficult choice to leave Waterfell and return landside. As the royal courts debate her decision, even more disturbing rumors surface: a plot is rising against her, led by someone she least expects.
On land, Nerissa learns another shocking truth—Lo does not remember who she is. As her choice to try to save him threatens her hold on her crown, changing loyalties and uncertainty test her courage in ways she could never have imagined. Nerissa will have one last chance to prove herself as a queen…and save the undersea kingdom she loves.
“It’s good to see you, Lo,” I whisper against his neck.
As if a spell has been broken, Lo pulls away, his eyes narrowing a fraction in frustration as he struggles to remember. “So you’re Nerissa? Bertha told me that we were friends.”
“Friends,” I repeat, hearing my own voice break slightly on the word.
“We went to school together, right? Dover?”
I swallow hot bile at his nervous recitation. Even prepared, his reaction comes as a shock. I don’t even want to look at Bertha or Grayer, or even Echlios. I don’t want to see the expressions on their faces. Instead I smile through trembling cheeks and watery eyes. “Yes. We met at Dover. You don’t remember me at all?”
The look in his eyes is tortured, as if he’s struggling to place me in his head. “There’s a part of me that feels like it does know you,” he says, gesturing to his chest. “But I can’t remember it here.” His fingers jerk to his head and then flutter to his sides in a defeated motion. “I’m sorry.”
Praise for Amalie Howard and Waterfell, book 1 of The Aquarathi (#ulink_5c518477-75e0-5b18-a1bc-3e66bd30f87f)
“Howard has crafted a page-turning blend of magical realism and fantasy.… Plot shifts, surprises, and a love affair not yet fully realized sets readers up for the second in the fascinating trilogy.”
—Booklist
“A fantastical surf-and-turf romance.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Exhilarating, romantic, and totally unique, Waterfell is an absolute page-turner!”
—Kristi Cook, New York Times bestselling author of the Winterhaven series
Books by Amalie Howard available from MIRA Ink (#ulink_97103456-c22a-5b87-80f0-3481c675faef)
The Aquarathi
(in reading order)
WATERFELL
OCEANBORN
Oceanborn
Amalie Howard
www.miraink.co.uk (http://www.miraink.co.uk)
For my brothers, Gian Kris and Givan Kyle, who are the true ninjas.
Contents
Cover (#u993abba9-bf9e-56d0-841f-bc16139d06f9)
Back Cover Text (#u28fd6810-be0c-5a30-b275-734f7d2447d4)
Introduction (#ue47c1748-0338-5c5f-84ad-8edc449dc3a1)
Praise (#ub1955e68-3e6a-52db-aafd-9760dd0e5144)
Booklist (#u99877431-9d62-5a4e-a108-a188db54e91f)
Title Page (#ufe0c46cf-8dbe-5a34-aadf-57eb6e019f5e)
Dedication (#u8f6c4d9f-a46a-550e-8136-2a07dc7d7e26)
Epigraph (#u42dc5e6b-658a-59d6-80de-9ebd9cc47fc3)
1 Glory and Pain (#u1d9ac237-57e3-54d5-8106-97774cf6a9d3)
2 Impossible Choices (#u6d131bdb-de3f-547f-b7d3-093b19c676e8)
3 Confusion (#u349994a3-b74c-5d57-9793-389919b4e38a)
4 Surf Your Heart Out (#uf522785e-6b62-51dc-ac9e-21d3d5dc2a6d)
5 Game On (#u13d746d5-41b9-5dbe-8c6e-2437644a6f58)
6 Make Your Move (#u55609773-ff34-5e3a-8e77-1724e7f338f1)
7 Stop, Drop and Roll (#litres_trial_promo)
8 A Kiss Is Just a Kiss (#litres_trial_promo)
9 The Challenge (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Water and Blood (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Braving a Glimmer (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Monster (#litres_trial_promo)
13 The Rules of the Game (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Sleight of Hand (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Friends and Frenemies (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Hell Froze Over (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Chimeras (#litres_trial_promo)
18 The Call of Land and Sea (#litres_trial_promo)
19 Clash of the Teen Titans (#litres_trial_promo)
20 A Queen’s Word (#litres_trial_promo)
21 Catch and No Release (#litres_trial_promo)
22 Second Chances (#litres_trial_promo)
23 Vendetta (#litres_trial_promo)
24 Leap Before You Look (#litres_trial_promo)
25 Girlfriends, Grenades and Goodbye (#litres_trial_promo)
26 The Art of War (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Playlist (#litres_trial_promo)
Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Epigraph (#ulink_3e8e74f9-0a08-575c-9669-20ff315e4809)
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin—his control
Stops with the shore.
—Lord Byron
1 Glory and Pain (#ulink_01c13aa8-1bc1-55bd-9148-9d0d42bc5286)
We are savage. We are proud. We are the dark rulers of the sea.
Deep in the ocean near the earth’s core, I survey the Aquarathi people—a firestorm of color—as the four courts pay homage to their new queen. Closest to me, the Gold Court stands quietly proud. The Sapphire Court is flamboyant in their tribute. The Emerald Court, more demure. But the Ruby Court, I watch with silent, cautious eyes. Months before, they supported a rival queen in her bid against the High Court, and she almost won.
Almost.
The great hall of Waterfell is deep and cavernous, with cobbled golden stalactites and stalagmites spanning its entire length to meet in the middle like majestic columns. In the human world, I learned about the marble pillars of the ancient Greeks. Ours remind me of the pictures I saw of theirs, only the ones around me are far older and more forbidding. The floor glitters with all manner of earthly minerals, reflecting off our bodies like prisms.
Today we celebrate my coronation as heir to the High Court. In Aquarathi society, it’s a pivotal milestone, one made even more momentous by the fact that my father—the last king—is dead. If he were alive, years from now he would be the one to transfer the proverbial baton to me. The endorsement from one ruler to another is a vital piece of our tradition. An Aquarathi coronation isn’t the same as humans might expect from what they know of royalty in the media, but power is passed from the old monarch to the new one in a ritual that’s just as significant.
Aivana, which translates into the human language as beautiful flower, refers to an ancient Aquarathi practice. Like Sanctum, it is a gift born to those of royal blood. In our world, when kings or queens die, they can bequeath their power, should they so choose, to a next of kin. Aivana is not only a transfer of Aquarathi energy from one ruler to the next; it’s a transfer of trust—a blessing of sorts from the old to the new.
In a parallel world, my father would be alive and standing at my side. I can picture his face, silvery blue and radiant with pride. Everyone would watch with bated breath as he touched his nose to mine and bent his forehead to rest directly upon my brow. We would both glow so brightly that the light would extinguish all colors save ours. Together, we would bestow Sanctum—an ancient Aquarathi practice used by royals to strengthen our people—to everyone in the room, reminding them of our strength and our love. Eventually his bioluminescence would fade, merging into mine and signaling the rise of a new ruler.
But my father isn’t here, and there’s no one to pass along a crown to make this any easier or to make the Aquarathi immediately accept me. I am alone. And I am already a queen. My coronation is but an afterthought. My people watch me in expectant silence, crowding into the great hall of Waterfell like silent luminescent candles flickering in a body of water. A shiver winds through me as I study their faces—my fledgling rule has already raised questions and a near-royal coup. I’ve had to earn their approval. I still have to.
I wish I were back in La Jolla.
The thought is errant. And cowardly. I am Aquarathi, not human. And I belong here. I know that. But the truth is, I miss being human—playing hockey and surfing, lunches in the quad, hanging out with my best friend, Jenna. Being human. But I’m not just a girl. I’m part of an alien marine species living on this planet, and my place is in the ocean, not landside.
I almost smile, remembering snippets of a conversation I had with Jenna during one of our sunny lunches in the Dover Prep courtyard, a couple weeks after I’d revealed what I was to her.
“So, do you live in a giant underwater castle? You know, like Ariel?”
I snorted soda through my nose at the Disney reference. “Um, no. There are no underwater castles in the ocean, Jenna, and I definitely don’t sit on rocks grooming my hair in the sunlight waiting to be rescued by Prince Eric...even though he is kind of dreamy.”
Jenna grinned. “Well, now that you’ve gone and dashed all my childhood ideals, enlighten me.”
“Disney version or Jeopardy version?”
“Jeopardy.”
“We live in underwater caves. We hunt, we sleep, we reproduce and we work. As a species, think of us as a cross between whales, dolphins and wolves. No castles, no tea parties, just the occasional sushi brunch. We’re just like any other sea creature living in pods...pretty boring really.”
“Don’t you have an economic or political structure?”
“An economy of what? Trading in plankton? Our political structure is divided into four courts, as you know, with one high court. Unlike most humans,” I said with a grin, “we are a very simple species.”
“I don’t get it. I mean, you’re so evolved. Intelligent.”
“Why? Intelligence is measured in different ways, not necessarily according to human standards or human categories. For us, it’s about self-awareness. We exist within the parameters of our world, within our social and cultural structures, living as one with the environment. We don’t belong up here, involved in politics and MTV and wireless Internet. A killer whale doesn’t just get up and say, ‘I want to play some video games and maybe try using a fork,’ and neither would any Aquarathi. It doesn’t make us any less intelligent.”
“Yes, but you can transform to be like us. Human.”
“Not all of us. Most Aquarathi can only exist in human form if they’re in close proximity to me. It’s not our natural state.”
She stared at me as if I were an imbecile missing the big picture. “Still, for argument’s sake, think of what you could do if you did—I mean you could be a part of the government instead of working policy change from the sidelines. You could make sure we don’t do anything to jeopardize your species. You could play an active part. I mean, more than you already do in secret, and you wouldn’t have to hide.”
“If the humans knew about us, it would lead to worse things, Jenna.”
She was so passionate, and what she said was partially true. We could make ourselves known. But what would stop us from seizing control and overpowering the humans if they didn’t like our ways? It would be easy, with all of our abilities. After all, that was what Ehmora wanted. She wanted to control people so that this planet wouldn’t face the same brutal end that Sana, our home planet, faced at the hands of the hominids there.
But that wasn’t what my father wanted. And it’s not what I want. There are always going to be those who think we are a stronger and smarter species—those like Ehmora who would view humans as less than. Those are the few who won’t be happy coexisting. Eventually the humans would grow to fear us and we’d end up in the same place that Sana did—in an interspecies war. No, it’s better that we live in secret, affecting change from the sidelines, as we have done for millennia.
And now it’s my turn to take the reins.
My eyes flick to the restless Ruby Court. Those Aquarathi have been the slowest to accept my rule over the past few weeks, especially after the death of their leader. But I beat Ehmora on the sands of battle, and their allegiance has been sworn, if not truly won. I’m still working on that. Some of them still support what Ehmora was fighting for, and they’re the dangerous ones...stirring seeds of malcontent.
I take a breath and close my eyes. On cue, the crown of bones on my brow pushes forward like a fan of finely webbed coral. I center myself, feeling my core connect with the heart of Waterfell—and the beating hearts of all the Aquarathi within it—until we are one and the same. I am a daughter of the old kings and a mother of the new. Every living creature in this room is tied to me. I exhale, and the whispered breath ripples across the hall from body to body, heart to heart. I open my eyes—the glow in the room is almost blinding, a tumultuous kaleidoscope like the northern lights in Earth’s sky.
Echlios, my Handler and captain of my royal guard, moves forward to stand beside me, his body rigid. I can see the approval flashing in his bright silver eyes. He nods and arches his long neck, his dark red scales glittering, as he bares it to me in a gesture of submission. Golden-green lights shimmer down the length of my body, mirroring the deep ruby of his, and I click fiercely in my native tongue to my people, calling water-to-water and blood-to-blood.
My water is yours as yours is mine, I tell them, whispering the oaths I would have sworn to my father. Power ripples along my spine, making my golden colors flare so brightly that every finned head dips in deferent succession—gold to green to blue, and finally to red in a wave of reluctant molten crimson.
I must rule by strength now. Not just by love.
Trust is a luxury, and the time for compassion in Waterfell has come and gone. Ehmora planted dark seeds of doubt and confusion. If I don’t control my people, all of the humans will be at risk. And everything my father fought and died for will be for nothing. I can never let that happen, even more so now that I am bonded to a hybrid—a half-human, half-Aquarathi prince.
I arch my neck, my tail curling through the water...and freeze as a violent wave of pain crashes into me like a rogue tsunami, destroying everything in its path. Lo’s name reverberates like a hammer in my brain as if the sharp thought of him has summoned his consciousness to me in full force. My lights flutter and die. I can feel the startled pulses and the clicks of the courts, but I can’t focus on them.
All I know is Lo’s pain...a deep, shattering, all-consuming pain, as if a thousand blades are carving my body at once. The navy swirls on my flanks—Lo’s marks—deepen like ink, sinking into me with scorching pressure. Everything disappears and I feel only the pull of the bond...and the one on the other side of the bond...calling to me.
And in that moment, I know. The threat isn’t here.
It’s there.
In seconds, Echlios is glued to my side, the rest of his guards surrounding us in a protective circle. “My lady, what is it?”
“Lo,” I gasp. “Something’s wrong. He’s hurt.”
“I’ll go.”
“No,” I insist, nearly doubling over. “The coronation—”
“Can wait.”
I shake my head, feeling my ties to the Aquarathi start to fade. I swallow. “This is too important.”
Echlios nods, but I can see the uncertainty flicker across his face. Because of the bond with Lo, I am vulnerable, and if Lo is hurt, I can be, too. Echlios’s mate, Soren, joins us, her eyes flashing gold fire. As my Handler, she is so in tune with me that she has felt the fear I’m now trying desperately to conceal.
Her voice is gentle, as is the pale green tail fin circling me in a protective manner. “Breathe, Nerissa. Try deep calming breaths. It will help with the pain. Echlios will go. It is his duty to protect you...and the prince regent.”
I do as she says, letting the salt water enter through my gills and breathing out the sharp, pulsing pain until it becomes a dull throb. Nodding weakly to Echlios, I watch as Soren dismisses the courts that have come to pay their respects to the new queen. I don’t know what they’re saying, but I have to imagine that seeing their new ruler in an incapacitated state on the first day of her coronation has to be cause for concern. Still, that anxiety pales in comparison to the urge I feel to take off in a sprint for the mainland in response to the pull of the bond.
“I need a minute,” I pulse to Soren as another wave of dizziness overcomes me.
“Go. I’ll convene the High Council,” she says to me and then frowns, her eyes narrowing in concern. “Not too far, Nerissa.”
I nod and make my way out of the throne room and into the tunnels beyond. There are two silent black forms behind me—Nova and Nell—twins and two of my royal guard that I’m aching to get rid of. They’re young but fierce—Echlios thought our closeness in age would make me less uncomfortable with having permanent shadows glued to my every move. I didn’t mind, until now.
“Stay here,” I click to the twins at the tunnel’s exit. “I’m going to be right over there.”
I swim away from Waterfell with a few short, powerful strokes, but stay within watching distance of the two guards. Their forms are indistinct, cloudy shapes, which means they can still see me and that’s all that matters. I close my eyes and stay perfectly still, clearing my mind of everything but the feel of the water against my skin and the soft muted sounds of ocean life around me. I let the sea do what it does best—heal.
For a heartbeat, floating in a sea of space and nothing, it’s easy to imagine that I live in a world where everything is different. That my parents are alive and together. That my father is here to watch my coronation with pride. That the one who has my heart isn’t a million miles away...and that he hasn’t been hurt, or worse.
Lo...the prince regent. My mate.
We are bonded for life, bound by an unbreakable tie. We belong to each other in a way that only lovers can know. My gaze falls on the bands of navy shimmering through my golden-green scales—the marks of our bonding—and green bioluminescent lights tingle along my sides in automatic response. Fighting another wave of panic, I try to push the thought of him—and the thought of his blue-black eyes, so like the shadowy darkness of the ocean surrounding me—from my mind, but it’s like trying to separate my skin from my body. Every breath I inhale, he inhales with me. As if in response, the tug from before becomes more insistent, less painful now but still sharp. I can only hope that Echlios finds him safe.
Drifting deeper into the deep blue coldness, I don’t resist as the current drags my body with insistent force. I’m not afraid. I can handle the ocean at its worst, control it even, but I let it take me, enjoying the feel of not having to be strong for just a moment. I don’t care that I’ve lost sight of my two guards or that the dim lights of Waterfell have faded. There’s nothing around me but pitch-black murky gloom. I’m the deadliest predator out here, so it’s not like I have anything to fear—especially with Ehmora dead and her allies in hiding. Those Echlios hunted down either swore fealty to me or were executed.
Inexorably, my thoughts return to Lo, the son of the very one who tried to usurp my throne. Ehmora’s son. Sure, he killed her—for me—but our relationship is still delicate at best, and even at the core, a lifelong genetic bond wouldn’t be the only thing that would hold me to him. At first, being with Lo was an act of defiance and desperation on my part. I wanted to be close to someone, to forget for a while what I was and pretend to be a human girl. But that one moment cost me so much. I bonded myself to the son of my enemy.
“Planning to drift to China?”
The unexpected voice jerks me out of my thoughts. Speio, the son of Soren and Echlios, is both my oldest friend in the world and, without a doubt, the biggest thorn in my side. I eye him, watching the tense way he’s swimming toward me. His body is slender and pale gold like his mother’s, with luminous green fins spanning his entire length. While the look in his eyes isn’t exactly aggressive, the slow sideways motion of his body is. “Do you have any idea how far out you are?”
“No,” I say truthfully. “I lost track.”
Speio bares his teeth in borderline disrespect. “Everyone’s on high alert because of what happened. The least you can do is stay with your guards.”
“Since when do you care, Speio?”
Speio’s resentment toward me was no secret while we lived on land—after all, he was landlocked after Dvija and coming of age. Which, in his own words, was a punishment worse than death. His baser instincts made him stupidly trust Ehmora and basically hand-deliver me to her on a platter. While I forgave him for his temporary lunacy, trust is a harder thing to regain.
“I care if you get hurt. Or if Lo is hurt.”
I stare at him sharply. “What do you know about Lo?”
“I know more than you think,” he says. I’m too drained to rise to the bait, so instead I start the swim back to Waterfell, the water in my body guiding me there. Speio follows. “You sure you don’t want to know?”
“Know what, Speio?”
“I followed my father to La Jolla and I talked to Cara.”
Cara? My archnemesis whom he hooked up with before we left California?
“That’s weird. I thought you were done with the humans and you couldn’t wait to come back home,” I say.
Speio shoots me an exasperated stare. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want to keep myself in the loop, especially with the threat of hybrids running around.”
This time he has my attention. “What did you say?”
“You heard me. Hybrids,” he says. “What did you think, Riss? That they were just going to go away now that you’ve returned to your rightful place hidden in the deep? Ehmora’s minions still want to take over the world. All you’ve done by getting rid of one of their leaders is slow them down.”
I frown. “But Echlios says we haven’t seen any hybrids in weeks. And what does Cara have to do with any of that? She’s human. She doesn’t even know what we are.”
“That doesn’t mean more of them don’t exist,” Speio says. “We have to be careful. And Cara’s been hanging out with Lo this summer.” I try to ignore the stab of jealousy those words cause in the pit of my stomach, but it’s a losing battle. I can picture Cara’s toned form in a swimsuit and imagine exactly what hanging out with Lo means. Speio grins, obviously enjoying my discomfort.
I swipe a clawed forearm at him. “You are the worst friend in the world, you know that? So, what did Cara say? And what did you tell her, by the way? That you were just dropping in from the other side of the world?”
“Um, Lo’s bonded to you, Riss. It’s not like he’s going to go chasing after someone else,” he says with a knowing look at my suddenly savage tone. “Calm down. Cara just thinks I was visiting from Los Angeles. Plus, Lo has been a perfectly well-behaved boy, if you must know. No hookups, not even with Cara,” he clarifies with a very human-looking eye roll. “He’s been surfing and working at the Marine Center all summer.”
Even though I’m telling myself that I wasn’t worried about what Lo was doing, I can’t help the immediate relief that sweeps through me. I told him he had to find himself, and I didn’t put any rules around what that should be. Any normal boy would have taken that as permission to play the field and have fun. Then again, Lo isn’t any normal boy.
“Anyway...” Speio continues. Something flashes in his eyes before it’s hidden. I gesture at him to continue. “Cara mentioned that Lo’s been getting sick.”
“Sick? What kind of sick?”
“Kevin at the center said that he passed out a couple times over the past few weeks. He told them it was dehydration, but last week he passed out again in front of a bunch of people on the beach. They called 911.”
“Did they take him to a hospital?” I ask quickly, even though I know that it would have been all over the news and would have filtered to us in a heartbeat. I can see the headlines now—Alien Species Discovered. They Walk Among Us! San Diego would be the next Roswell, New Mexico.
“No, Jenna was there. She told the paramedics that he’s a diabetic and had low blood sugar. Don’t ask me how that girl proved it, but she did. Anyway, Cara said that Lo went home with Jenna. That was last week.”
“But I didn’t feel anything those other times,” I say. “Via the bond, I mean.”
“That’s what happened this morning?”
“Yes. It was bad, Speio, like I was being gutted from nose to tail. It was so strong I could barely handle it. It felt...wrong.”
Speio leans his body into mine in a comforting gesture. “He’ll be okay, Riss,” he says slowly with an uncertain look at me. “Look, I know things between us haven’t been great, and I know that’s my fault. I know you don’t trust me. But I care about you, and I care about Lo.”
“You hate Lo.”
“I don’t hate Lo,” Speio says as we swim past a row of unfamiliar underwater mountains. I must have drifted farther than I’d expected. “I thought that he was hiding something, and he was. But now, well, he’s a part of you...so that means he’s a part of us.” Speio stops, considering his words. “And if something happens to him, that’s going to be bad for everyone here, right?”
“Nothing bad’s going to happen to Lo,” I say swiftly, just as I feel the pull of home. We’re nearly back.
“No, you’re right,” he says. “Riss?”
“What?”
“I want you know that I’m here no matter what. I mean, I know you don’t trust me and you have every right not to, but if we have to go back for Lo, then I’ll go back with you, okay?”
“What about finding your mate here in Waterfell?” I ask. “It’s what you’ve always wanted.”
Speio shrugs, another humanlike gesture that almost makes me smile. “It’s what I thought I wanted because I couldn’t have it when we lived on the mainland. But turns out, just because we’re home doesn’t mean that I’m going to bond with someone. Plus, I miss skateboarding. And surfing. And our friends. And believe it or not, a part of me wishes that I could finish my senior year at Dover.” He stares at me, his eyes vulnerable. “Too human?”
“Not at all,” I admit, floored by his candid admissions. “I feel like that, too. I miss Jenna and Sawyer. I even miss Cara sometimes.” Cara...said archnemesis who’d had her eye on Lo and had been determined to banish me to hell when she realized that we were a couple. She even hooked up with Speio to get back at me. I grin. “But only on very special occasions.”
Speio eyes Nova and Nell, who don’t know whether to be annoyed at my disappearing act or relieved that I’ve returned before they got flayed alive by Echlios for letting me out of their sight in the first place. “You looked really good up there today, Riss,” he says so softly that I can hardly hear him. “Like a real queen. Your father would have been proud.”
“Thanks,” I say, startled.
But Speio is already swimming away. It’s more words than we’ve spoken in months, and I realize that I’ve missed him. I think back to what he said about Lo and frown. Dehydration is a common affliction for our species, particularly because of the combination of water and salt in our bodies. But Lo is a hybrid, which means that he should be able to tolerate it better than we can. Or maybe it’s the reverse.
The way Echlios explained it, Lo is the best of both worlds—an Aquarathi with transmuted human DNA that allows him to live comfortably on land or in the sea. He is the product of accelerated evolution based on the laws of natural selection...accelerated because his mother and her cronies induced those genetic characteristics. We faced and fought others that looked like hideous mutations, hybrids that Ehmora, my mother and the brilliant genetic-scientist ex-headmaster of Dover Prep had concocted. As far as we know, Lo is the only perfect hybrid in existence. But maybe he isn’t perfect. Maybe he’s flawed in some terminal, human way.
The furious outward rush of breath leaves me weak. Lo can’t be sick. He can’t be. He’s meant to be with me. All of a sudden, those countless arguments I had with myself about leaving him behind become meaningless. The only thing I can think about is Lo and figuring out what’s wrong with him...figuring out how I can save him. Because I did this. It’s my fault. The guilt is nearly suffocating. Maybe if I hadn’t been so selfish about keeping us apart, things would be different. He would be happy and healthy, here with me where he belongs. Instead I’m going to lose him.
“Soren,” I pulse, entering the core of the High Court. The Aquarathi in the chamber clear out, their heads bowed. I can sense the underlying tension, and a certainty that something isn’t quite right floods my body. I try not to let the fear invade my head, but it does, like insidious ink. “Any news?” I ask her. “Is Echlios back?”
“Yes, there’s news, and no, Echlios is not back,” she says slowly. I can feel her sadness in the water rushing around in her body. I can see it in the shimmer of her melting green eyes.
“What is it? Is Lo okay?”
“Nerissa...”
Heaven help me, I already know what she’s going to say. I want to shake her, to smash my head into her side. I want to scream my fear and shed it from the inside of my skin. Instead I pull on a composed mask and deaden the emotion running rampant within me. “Just say it, Soren. Tell me. I can handle it, I promise.”
But I can’t handle it at all, not when her lips shape the words that make my bones thin to air and my heart crumble into unrecognizable fragments. “It’s not good. He’s dying.”
2 Impossible Choices (#ulink_d9aff99d-00f8-58dd-9f11-34a5a7d89026)
The faces of the six members of the Aquarathi High Council could be hewn from calcified rock. The lower-court kings and queens have already been briefed on the situation—I can see their varying reactions in the tilt of their heads and the rigid stance of their bodies. Their royal guards, including mine, the ever-present Nova and Nell, line the rear of the hall in a silent, ominous row.
Soren calls the meeting to order—she’s acting in Echlios’s stead since he’s still landside. I swallow hard and bury my grief deep. I greet each of the High Council in turn, all of them baring their necks to me in respectful deference—Queen Miral and her consort, Hevan, from the Gold Court, Queen Castia from Emerald, King Verren and Queen Aylis from Sapphire, and lastly, Keil, the new king of the Ruby Court.
I watch him surreptitiously as he takes his place in the circle. Keil, Ehmora’s cousin, is young but ambitious. He’s probably the only other Aquarathi on this council who’s around the same age as me. As if reading my thoughts, he winks at me and I blink, startled at the familiarity. I remember training with him when we were young, and have several memories of him being rebellious and funny, but it’s not like we’ve seen each other a lot since then, nor is he someone I would consider an ally. The other royals are all far older—and likely more worldly in the ways of ruling—than either of us.
I clear my throat—my job is to reassure and to calm, to keep my internal fears compartmentalized. And the last thing I want to do now is to appear weak. “Before we start, what is the update on the oil spill off Hawaii? Has it been mitigated?”
Hevan, Gold Court consort, nods. “Yes, my queen. Most of it has been isolated with booms and removed with skimmer equipment. We have done what we can to assist with more rapid biodegradation from below the surface.”
“Any more information on what caused it?”
Hevan hesitates, looking to his queen for guidance. Miral nods. “Someone hacked the ship’s computer, forcing it to capsize. We’re still working on it.”
I have my guesses as to who could forcibly cause an ocean tanker to capsize and have the means to do so—Cano, it seems, will do anything to prove that he’s still around. If we trace it back to him, maybe we can finally hunt him down and learn where he’s been hiding. “Keep me informed the minute you hear anything. Any news from our friends at NOAA on the proposed initiatives to mark up the bills on marine debris at the recent House Committee meeting?”
“Yes, the bill was successfully amended, and funding allocated.”
“Excellent. And the senate hearing on the offshore-industrial-waste issue?”
“Still on track for next month.”
“Good.”
I inhale deeply to counter my sudden inability to breathe, forcing the simmering dread out of my mind. Time to address the real reason the High Council had been convened. “As you’ve been recently informed, my...the regent has fallen ill. Echlios has been dispatched to further assess the situation. There’s no cause for alarm.”
“No cause for alarm,” Castia from the Emerald Court huffs. “You are bonded to the creature. We saw you collapse from whatever it was you felt during the coronation! You cannot underestimate the bond, even one as...unique as yours.” It’s clear from her tone that unique was far from her intended word choice. “If he is in fatal danger, then you are in danger. And we are in danger.”
“The prince regent is safe for the moment,” Soren interjects in a firm, respectful tone. “As is your queen.”
“Safe?” Castia hisses. “Look at her. She can barely focus despite the pretense.”
“If the regent is dying, then you should go to him,” King Verren says with a disgusted look at Castia.
“I cannot leave Waterfell,” I say despite the lurch in my stomach at his words. I eye the Sapphire Court king, who has always been a strong ally.
“You invite destruction,” Castia says under her breath.
Soren bristles beside me, but I shoot her a warning glance. Tensions are skyrocketing already, it seems. “Explain what you mean, Castia,” I say carefully.
“What about these hybrid abominations that Ehmora created?” She spits out the name in distaste.
“Most of them have been eliminated, Castia. You know that. Echlios made sure of it. We haven’t had any sightings of them in weeks.”
“And the human, Cano? What of him?”
I sigh. “We’re still looking for him.”
“So he’s still at large?”
“What is your point, Castia?”
Her eyes glitter like jade stones. “My point, my queen, is this—how do we know that this human isn’t working with your...prince regent? How do we know that this half-human hybrid son of Ehmora’s won’t lead him right to us? That this isn’t all some intricate ploy to infiltrate Waterfell...to expose us?”
I lift my chin and hold her challenging stare. “Lo is bonded to me. His loyalty is to me, and to Waterfell. He would never betray us to Cano.”
“Your duty is to your people, not a hybrid.”
King Verren and Queen Aylis share an anxious glance at Castia’s provocative words. He moves forward. “I think what Castia is trying to say and failing to do so is that even if he does not intend to be disloyal, the prince regent is vulnerable.” He looks at me with an almost apologetic expression, as if supporting Castia’s claims is the last thing he wants to do. “Which means that you, too, are vulnerable. What if Cano attacked him to get to you?”
“Attacked him? How?” I ask.
“The bond is enduring, and if yours is anything like ours,” Aylis murmurs, “you will feel every bit of his suffering as if it is your own, my queen. If the prince is dying, then you, too, are compromised.”
“You are the only one who can give him the strength to survive the journey back here, and bring him back safely,” Verren says. “You must go.”
“But how can I?” I whisper, my heart aching as if it’s being torn into two—love and duty clashing like titans—even as Verren’s soft words make a fragile, if unrealistic, hope bloom in my chest. As much as every cell inside me wants to go to Lo, how can I abandon Waterfell and expose my people with the threat of Cano still looming? But how can I forsake Lo, either? I swallow hard. “You suggest the impossible, Verren,” I say softly. “If I go, our people are at risk. If I don’t go, he dies. How can I possibly choose?”
“Your place is here,” Castia snarls. “That creature is not oceanborn.”
“Mind your words, Castia,” Verren snarls back.
A wave of nausea makes my vision swim for a second. I steady myself and ignore the concerned glance that Soren sends in my direction. Following the attack during the coronation, I’ve been experiencing ongoing tremors—nothing like the first, but painful just the same. My claws curl into fists to quell their sudden shaking.
“We need you to continue to be a strong queen,” Verren continues with a knowing glance, and then adds quickly, “As you have been. And you can be that only with the regent at your side. Alive and well.”
I glance at Miral, queen of the Gold Court, who until now has been silent. She, too, has been one of my stronger supporters over the last few weeks. “Miral? What is your say on this?”
“I agree that this Cano is a threat. My reports have been unreliable, but he still poses a risk to us. If our existence is to remain a secret, then we must find and deal with the threat. While I agree that your prince is loyal and he has more than proven himself, he is still exposed, especially to this man. As are you.” She exchanges a look with the Sapphire Court royals. “And Aylis is right. We cannot know how his illness will affect you.”
“Keil?” I turn to the Ruby Court king.
“I think you should stay. Let Echlios handle the boy. If you leave now, the Aquarathi will view your absence once more as a conscious decision to choose this hybrid over them.” He flicks his tail indolently. “It is, after all, reminiscent of your past behavior.” As much as his blunt words sting, I know he’s right. My duty as queen is to the Aquarathi people. I open my mouth to say as much, but Keil isn’t finished. “That said, Cano is a threat, the prince is dying, you will be weakened and we will be defenseless if we don’t do anything, so I propose four months.”
“Four months for what?” I say, surprised.
“Four months to finish what you started landside,” he says coolly. “Lure Cano out of hiding, remove the threat, save your prince, return to Waterfell. Uphold your oaths to defend our people.”
The suggestive note in his tone makes me bristle, but I ignore it. “Just like that? And what if four months isn’t enough?”
Keil’s answer is as diplomatic as the conciliatory smile he sends my way. “Let’s cross that bridge should we come to it, shall we? For now, you may choose a proxy to act in your stead.”
“And the Aquarathi?”
“We will make sure our courts understand what is at stake,” he says, his gaze sweeping the chamber. “Are we in agreement?”
* * *
The High Council had argued for hours after Keil’s bombshell suggestion. While the Gold and Sapphire Courts were in agreement to protect the prince regent, Castia was of the mind that the laws of the wild should apply—meaning Lo would live out his days and die like any other sick Aquarathi, regardless of the effect it had on me or my ability to lead. In the end, after impassioned debate on all sides, they had all reluctantly agreed to Keil’s proposal. To his dismay, I left Miral in charge, and we had four months to join Echlios and “fix” the problem. If we didn’t return to Waterfell in that time frame, I’d likely be forced to abdicate despite Keil’s generous—and calculated—words about crossing that bridge if we came to it.
After I got over the initial shock of the High Council’s decision, it was a foregone conclusion that we would return to La Jolla in short order. Hybrid or not, Lo was one of us and we couldn’t abandon him. Especially not if an attack on him made me—and Waterfell—vulnerable to exposure.
And so, in much the same way as we left La Jolla, we arrive in the dead of night to join Echlios in our old house on the beach with a plan to get ourselves back into the routine of being human...not an easy task given the new weight sitting on our shoulders. We aren’t here to learn or to acclimatize to humans. We’re here to save one of us.
San Diego is the same as when we left it a few months ago...warm, sunny and clear blue skies stretching for miles. I didn’t realize how much I’d miss the sky—the unending canvas of it, stretching out from the arms of the horizon, or the white tendrils of clouds drifting past and tinged in sunlight. Waterfell is beautiful in a different way, but nothing there can mimic the simple beauty of daylight.
Soren extends a glimmer outward and confirms that the beach is deserted. Shifting into human form feels strange, as if my body has forgotten how to do it, but of course it’s just muscle memory. My bones crack and dissolve inside me, condensing and reshaping into the form of delicate human bones. Oddly, it hurts a little this time and I’m enveloped by a suffocating sensation as if I’m being stretched infinitely and then reformed into something far too tight. I try to relax into it and not force the shift—forcing means broken or excruciatingly misshaped bones. Breathing deeply, I focus on the ridged planes of my face softening and reshaping into smooth contours of cheek and brow. Human skin stretches over the shimmering gold-green tissue as I wave a slender forearm in front of me. My eyes are the last things to change, the protective coating slipping over the large, brilliant irises of my species. The hazel-hued shield mimics the appearance of human eyes.
Soren is already halfway up the beach, her nude form camouflaged by a glimmer. Even though the beach is deserted, anyone watching would see only sand. I glance at Speio, who is just completing his transformation. I catch him right at the moment when his face is halfway between beast and human. I’m shocked by how grotesque he appears as the fangs in his gaping mouth shift into human teeth and the puckered scaly hide of his face burns a mottled green. For a second he reminds me of the hybrid we killed, and a sour feeling fills my stomach. Lo is a hybrid, too.
“What’s wrong?” Speio asks, shift complete, looking every inch like a tall, boyish seventeen-year-old with a shock of white-blond messy hair falling over one eye. His chest is lean and muscled, much the same as his Aquarathi one, but that’s where my scrutiny stops. As much as I love Speio and have seen him naked countless times, I have to draw the line somewhere.
“Nothing,” I say averting my eyes. “You just looked...weird.”
He shoots me a confused look. “You’ve seen me change a gazillion times.”
I shrug and wrap my arms around myself, the slick fuzzy feeling of my new skin slightly off-putting. “Seriously, it was nothing. I’m worked up about Lo and whether he’s getting ill because of his, you know, hybrid genes.”
“Could be,” Speio says with a forced grin. “Or could be anything. Maybe it’s a royal bonding thing we don’t know about. It’s going to be fine, Riss. Echlios will figure it out.”
But I can see in Speio’s eyes that he, too, thinks it’s because Lo is a hybrid. It’s the only explanation. Aquarathi don’t get sick—it’s the reason we were able to come to another planet and survive, thrive even—our immune systems are incredibly strong. So it stands to reason that Lo is sick because of his integrated human DNA...which means we have no idea in hell of how to help him.
Fighting my defeatist attitude, I enter my old room from the patio entrance off the pool deck and grab the robe hanging on the hook near the door. Echlios had the housekeepers come in to ready everything for our arrival, and the room looks exactly as I left it—my little mini pieces of Waterfell and home away from home. Glittering sea-glass ceiling, stained glass windows, walls painted in shimmering shades of blue...and one solemn auburn-haired best friend.
“Jenna,” I gasp, and throw myself into her arms. “What are you doing here? Did you talk to Echlios? Have you seen Lo? What happened?”
Jenna nods, hugging me even more tightly to her after my rapid-fire questions. She doesn’t answer immediately but pulls me over to the side of the bed and pats the spot next to her. I sit.
“Guess you didn’t think you’d be back to visit me so soon,” she says, her mouth twisting in a half smile. “Wish it was under better circumstances.”
“Soren says Echlios is with him at his house,” I blurt out. “She wants me to wait to talk to Echlios, but it feels like I’m going burst out of my skin.” I gesture at my human body. “Something doesn’t feel the same. Like I’m going to explode into nothing.”
“That’s just panic, Riss. It’s okay. Lo is fine,” she says gently. “At least he seems fine on the surface, except for the passing out. That started in the last few weeks. I mean...he was fine. Surfing, working, hanging out. Then all of a sudden, he wasn’t around. Sawyer tried calling him, and he was just holed up in his house. We thought he had the flu or something.” She pauses, her eyes shifting and becoming shadowed. “But then we found out about the memory loss.”
“The what?” I say in a shocked whisper. This is beyond bad. There’s no awful human-brain condition I’ve learned about that doesn’t start with some kind of degenerative memory loss—Alzheimer’s. Huntington’s. Dementia.
“After he collapsed on the beach a week ago, he had no memory of how he’d gotten there. I thought it was just a concussion from surfing or something, you know, so I didn’t think much of it.” She stops, watching me carefully. “We can talk tomorrow if that’s better.”
“No,” I say. “Please, Jenna. I want to talk now.”
Jenna takes my slack-fingered hand into hers and squeezes reassuringly. The light touch makes me want to snatch my hand away, because I know whatever she’s on the verge of saying is going to be bad. I take a deep breath. “Lo asked Sawyer about his mother. About Ehmora.”
“What do you mean? As in what exactly?”
“He asked him whether he’s seen her around lately.”
I can’t help it. My jaw drops open. Ehmora is dead. Lo killed her three months ago. “What did Sawyer say?”
“He asked him why, and then Lo told him that she’d gone on some business trip and he hadn’t seen her since. It was weird, Sawyer said, like totally out of the blue. Then he dropped the subject and they started talking about surfing as if he’d never even brought it up in the first place.”
“Sawyer doesn’t know about Ehmora, does he, Jenna?” I ask. Jenna would never give away what we are, not even to her boyfriend of three years, but I have to ask, anyway.
“Of course not. He just told me about it, and that’s when things started to click into place. I did some research on his symptoms—dehydration, disorientation, unconsciousness and memory loss—but none of the existing diseases seem to match them. And it’s not like we can take him to a hospital. They’d drag him to an underground, classified bunker in the blink of an eye.”
“That was quick thinking, by the way,” I say, remembering that she somehow convinced the paramedics that Lo didn’t need to be admitted. “The thing with the diabetic stuff.”
“It’s amazing they even believed me,” Jenna says. “It sounded so outlandish when I said it, but Lo was awake and nodding, so maybe they believed him.”
“It was a glimmer,” I murmur softly, nodding. It’s something small, but Lo using a glimmer gives me hope, because at least he still knows what he is. And because he’s a hybrid, holding on to his human form is far easier for him than it is us, so there’s no immediate risk of exposure. I suppress a small sigh of relief.
“A what?”
“Something that we can do,” I say. “Remember when you asked me about mind control last spring?” Jenna’s blue eyes almost bug out of her head, but she’s known my secret long enough to know that I’d never use it to hurt her. “We can...suggest things to people. Not Speio or Soren so much, but me. And now Lo.”
“Because he’s with you, a queen?”
“Yes, and because he’s the son of a queen.”
“Oh.”
I study Jenna, surprised by how much I missed her in three months. She’s become far more than just a best friend. She’s family. And because I trusted her with our secret, she’s now a part of us.
“You cut your hair,” I say, only just noticing the layered strands resting on her shoulders and the new sheared fringe across her brow.
“The bangs were a bad idea.” She brushes them back with one hand. “But at least it’ll grow. It was way shorter than this at first. I looked like one of those weird dolls with the button eyes. I must have been having separation issues when you left, because I literally chopped it off one afternoon.”
“It looks good.”
“It looks like crap, but thanks for the vote of support,” she says with a smile. “You look the same.”
“I mimic, remember? I can make myself have a short, spiky Mohawk if I want to,” I say, shrugging. “Figured I look like this already, why change? Don’t traumatize the humans any more than I have to and all that.”
“That’d be interesting. Maybe I should have done that.” She flips her hair self-consciously. “Sawyer hates it.”
I roll my eyes. “That boy would be in love with you if you were bald, so don’t even try to tell me that. I’ve never seen anyone so crazy about anybody else, ever.”
“I have,” Jenna says, and then bites her lip, her face flushing as the brief lightheartedness between us disappears in an instant. She clears her throat and grabs my hand. “Lo was a mess this whole summer, you know. Without you. Every time I saw him, I could tell what being apart from you was doing to him. Cara tried to move in, and he shut that down so quickly I think she’s still recovering from the shock.”
“Don’t make me feel worse than I already do.”
“Why did you tell him to stay, Riss? It’s obvious that you two are meant to be together, even outside all of your bondage stuff.”
“Bond-ing.”
“Whatever. He loves you. You love him. I don’t understand why you did what you did. And frankly, maybe he’s sick because he has a broken heart.”
“Seriously?” If the situation weren’t so not funny, I would have laughed. “You sound like Sawyer. Humans don’t get sick and die over a broken heart. That’s ridiculous. They die from diseases.”
“It was Sawyer’s idea,” Jenna admits. “And there are plenty of cases throughout history where people have gotten ill from the stress of emotional trauma. There’s even an official condition called stress cardiomyopathy, caused by a temporary weakness of the heart from intense emotional issues.”
“Easy on the big words.”
“Let me make it simple for you. It’s like your girlfriend telling you that she doesn’t want to be with you even though she loves you but isn’t quite sure how you’re going to fit in her future and whether you have a place there. How’s that?”
“Ouch. Harsh,” I say, and pause, cringing. “And I didn’t say that. I told him we needed space to figure things out.”
“Same diff.”
“So, even if it were true, are you saying this is my fault?” I’ve already thought it myself, but hearing another person say it out loud is something else entirely.
Jenna takes a deep breath. “Riss, I’m your best friend, and you know we’ve always told each other the truth even when it hurts. I’m telling you now. You made a mistake telling him to stay here. And maybe it’s the human side of him that’s making him sick, but we humans are more fragile than you could ever imagine. Our emotional responses can have catastrophic effects on our physical health. When Sawyer and I broke up sophomore year, I got really sick, remember? For some inexplicable reason, my immune system decided to go on vacation. I have no proof, but the brain/body connection is a powerful thing. Don’t underestimate it.” I try to stand, but she grasps my shoulders, forcing me to remain where I’m sitting beside her on the bed. Her eyes are clear and compassionate, as if she can see the guilt consuming me in waves. “I’m not judging you or blaming you. I’m just glad you’re here now, that’s all.”
In truth, Jenna’s words are like whips, but they’re whips that I’ve already flayed myself with a dozen times over. I know I shouldn’t have made him stay here, but I thought it was the right thing to do...to give him the space to figure out who he was in relation to me and vice versa. Only maybe in teenage hindsight, it was a stupid decision—and according to Sawyer and Jenna, I’d only succeeded in breaking his heart.
“Riss,” Jenna says, her voice nearly inaudible. “There’s one more thing. It’s the reason Echlios wants to talk to you first before you see Lo.”
“What’s that?” I ask. Jenna’s mouth twists as if she’s about to say something that is as horrible as the look on her face. “Spit it out. Whatever you’re going to say can’t be worse than what you’ve already said. Truth, remember?”
“Okay,” she agrees slowly. She blurts it out in a rush. “You should know that Lo asked Echlios two days ago who you were.”
Turns out truth is overrated.
3 Confusion (#ulink_e0b10dfe-3028-582e-b6a0-86e0d9599c34)
I’m a nervous wreck. Not because I’m seeing Lo for the first time in months, but because there’s a huge chance he won’t even recognize me. I think that’s why Echlios wanted to prepare me before I saw him. There’s also a good chance that Lo may recognize me if I’m right in front of him, but I don’t want to give myself false hope.
“Are you okay?” Echlios asks, as he pulls into Lo’s driveway.
“Fine.”
“That’s six ‘fines’ since we left the house.”
“What do you want me to say, Echlios? That I’m terrified? That I’m scared out of my mind that the boy I’ve bonded with won’t know who I am? That I’m going to lose him? That without him, it feels like I won’t be able to hold myself together? That without him, I’m dissolving?” I say in a dead, emotionless voice. “Let’s just leave it at ‘fine,’ okay?”
Echlios’s jaw drops open. “I didn’t...realize.”
I swallow thickly. It’s completely incongruous, really, the whole situation. I’m the one who was hung up on the whole bonding thing. Lo and I bonded. But something inside me couldn’t quite sit with the idea that I was tricked, and instead of accepting what was completely natural and consensual on both sides, I pushed it away. And now there’s a very real possibility that the boy I love doesn’t even know who I am.
“It’s okay. Let’s just get it over with,” I say, forcing a bravado that I don’t feel into my voice.
Grayer, Lo’s valet-slash-butler, opens the door. His face is as stoic as I remember, but something like pity flashes in his eyes for a second, making me want to scrape that dead expression off his face with my nails. I don’t want his pity, or anyone’s for that matter, because it means that I’ve already lost.
“Where is he?” I blurt out, earning a censorious glance from Echlios. But I don’t care. I want to see Lo for myself before reading other people’s expressions and having to accept their hidden compassion.
“He’s over here,” a blonde, hefty-looking woman says from down the hall.
“Hi, Bertha.”
Bertha, Lo’s housekeeper, is as Amazonian-looking as ever, but she manages a small smile in my direction before enfolding me into an unexpected bear hug. Her affection throws me for a minute, but Lo is the closest thing she has to a son and I know that she knows how Lo feels—felt—about me. I return the hug a little more fiercely than I’d intended, stunned by my sudden surge of emotion.
“How is he?” I ask.
“We have our good days and our bad days. He’s having a good day today. He surfed early this morning and seems to be in bright spirits. Come.” She gestures for me to follow her into the sunroom that overlooks the ocean and the entire La Jolla coastline down to the beach below. Echlios and Grayer follow like silent shadows. I don’t want to let my eyes linger on the beach beyond the wall-to-wall glass windows...and the exact spot where Lo and I were together...but I do, anyway.
And then I turn in slow motion to the boy getting up from the couch. My heart climbs its way into my throat and stays there, choking me with silent, vicious pain. He looks the same—the salt-bleached sandy hair that’s now curling into his collar, the bronzed sunburned cheekbones, and the wide, smiling mouth. Those dark, bottomless blue eyes reach into the most hidden parts of me and claim ownership. They’re full of polite interest, but there’s no recognition in them at all. I can’t breathe, far less speak.
“Lo, you have a special visitor,” Bertha says gently, her face stricken, mirroring my own response, still stuck in my chest. “This is Nerissa.”
His eyes narrow at the sound of my name, but nothing clicks in them that suggests he recognizes it. Lo glances at Bertha and she nods. He looks confused for a second but then smiles widely and sticks his hand out. “Hi, Nerissa.”
The sound of his warm voice wrapping around my name is my undoing. That hasn’t changed—not the way he and only he says my name, like it’s a sensual act instead of a mere word. Even if he doesn’t know me, some part of him still does. It has to. I can’t help myself—I step closer, ignoring his outstretched palm, and wrap my arms around the nape of his neck. I breathe in the smell of salt on his skin and press my temple against the soft stubble on the underside of his jaw. His body tenses, but I feel his arms slip around my waist in a tentative hug. I hug tighter, tears smarting behind my eyelids at how intimately familiar his human body feels against mine.
“It’s good to see you, Lo,” I whisper against his neck.
As if a spell has been broken, Lo pulls away, his eyes narrowing a fraction in frustration as he struggles to remember. “So you’re Nerissa? Bertha told me that we were friends.”
“Friends,” I repeat, hearing my own voice break slightly on the word.
“We went to school together, right? Dover?”
I swallow hot bile at his nervous recitation. Even prepared, his reaction comes as a shock. I don’t even want to look at Bertha or Grayer, or even Echlios. I don’t want to see the expressions on their faces. Instead I smile through trembling cheeks and watery eyes. “Yes. We met at Dover. You don’t remember me at all?”
The look in his eyes is tortured, as if he’s struggling to place me in his head. “There’s a part of me that feels like it does know you,” he says, gesturing to his chest. “But I can’t remember it here.” His fingers jerk to his head and then flutter to his sides in a defeated motion. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I tell him in a choked voice. “You’ll remember.”
“I had some kind of seizure while driving and now I have a concussion—” Lo points to his skull “—hence the amnesia. I’m sorry I don’t remember much,” he says to me, and then forces a grin, one that still makes my knees turn into rubber. “I’d like to think yours is a face I wouldn’t forget, but I guess the silver lining is that we get to know each other and be friends again.”
But obviously, he has forgotten—not just meeting me, but me, period. “I’d like that,” I say, unable to voice the truth that we are so much more than friends. I avoid Echlios’s eyes. “You seem to be taking it well, your memory loss.”
Lo shrugs, his mouth twisting in that casual, cute way of his, as if he’s trying to put on a brave front. “I’m hoping the doctors will fix it eventually. I just have to do the therapy and hope that it comes back. Freaking out doesn’t help anyone.”
It sounds so much like something he’d say that it’s hard to think that parts of him aren’t all there, or that maybe he’s pretending and this is some big prank. But I know it isn’t. I see it in his eyes—in that assessing look people give you when they’re meeting you for the first time. He doesn’t remember me at all.
“I’m sorry.”
Lo slides me a soft smile. “I guess I remember the big things. The little things will come back in time.” He trails off in awkward silence but then grins brightly. “Hey, I’m parched. You want a drink? Bertha makes the best pink lemonade this side of the Pacific.”
Dying a little inside, I nod, and he walks out of the room, followed by a silent Bertha. I sit weak-kneed on the couch that Lo vacated a few minutes before, my heart feeling as if it’s being crushed beneath a hammer.... I remember the big things.
“Exactly how much does he remember?” I ask Echlios in an unsteady voice.
“He has many, if not all, of his long-term memories, but there are big gaps in his short-term memory. Our local contacts have confirmed that he is suffering from some kind of retrograde amnesia, but we can’t quite place whether the concussion from the accident caused the amnesia or if it was a symptom of something else prior to the accident. Bertha said that he couldn’t remember little things at the beginning of the summer, long before any of this happened.
“Don’t worry. We’re flying in a top-notch neurosurgeon from L.A. at the end of the week. One of ours,” he adds.
Of course, one of ours. We are a water species, living for the most part in the shadows of the deep, but that doesn’t mean we don’t keep our fingers on the pulse of everything landside, from global policy to technology to politics to neurosurgeons. If it can help Lo, I’m all for it.
“You think the amnesia was already there before he passed out?” I ask. “From what?”
Echlios walks to the wall of windows, staring out at the ocean beyond. His face is creased, the lines on his forehead deep with tension. He takes a deep breath as if trying to find the right words. “Stress,” he says after a while. “Emotional trauma.”
Jenna’s earlier words come back to haunt me...about people dying of broken hearts and being physically compromised by their intense emotions. “Emotional trauma,” I repeat.
Echlios nods. “He killed his mother. We have no idea what kind of effect that can have on someone.”
“She wanted to kill him,” I argue weakly.
“Doesn’t matter. It’s still traumatic.”
“Why?”
Echlios sighs. “Because he’s part human. He can’t turn it off as easily as we can. Humans aren’t predators. It’s not so simple for them.” He stops and walks toward me, his voice gentling. “What’s going on with Lo is an incredibly rare form of amnesia—dissociative amnesia—that occurs after intense emotional shock. At least, that’s the initial diagnosis.”
As much as I try, I can’t seem get my mind around it. Maybe it’s because I don’t have any human DNA, or maybe our Aquarathi brains don’t work that way. It’s not a lack of empathy, necessarily, more of an adapt-to-survive way of thinking. Emotions just aren’t that critical to us—sure, we have them deep down, as I’d discovered from my people when I fought Ehmora in the arena, but other physiological needs like hunger and thirst take precedence. It’s a matter of survival in the wild. Humans let emotions affect them far too much and, obviously now in Lo’s case, to the point of physical weakness.
At that moment, Lo reenters the room carrying two tall glasses of pink lemonade. “Here you go.”
“Thanks,” I say. It was easier with him out of the room. My senses are so acutely tuned in to him that now I feel claustrophobic, as if his very presence is suffocating me. On top of that, every drop of water in my body is reaching toward him...reaching for its other half. The sensation is dull and aching, as if my skin is separating from the flesh beneath it. I take a deep breath and a sip of my drink.
“So, will you be at Dover for our senior year?” Lo asks, resuming his position on the couch beside me.
“I don’t think so. We’re not here for long. School started a few weeks ago, right?”
“Yeah.”
Our conversation seems normal on the surface, but underneath, it feels stilted and uncomfortable, as if we’re two kids set up by overeager parents. I clear my throat awkwardly. “So I guess I’ll see you around—”
The shrill sound of Lo’s cell phone interrupts my sentence. “I have to take this, hang on,” he says to me, and taps on the screen. “Hey, Cara, what’s up?”
Lo walks to the other side of the room, but I can still hear his side of the conversation. My stomach free-falls to my feet. They’re making plans to meet up at the Crab Shack. “No, I’m free,” he says. “I can meet you in, like, half an hour. Seriously, I’m almost done here.” I’m crumbling inside with every word...every little sound that leaves Lo’s mouth, saying I’m nothing to him.
Sinking into the couch, I’m barely conscious of Echlios taking a seat next to me. I was wrong about us being emotionless. Maybe our emotions run far deeper than those of humans, because nothing should feel like this. Nothing should feel like my very bones are breaking into tiny little pieces inside me, turning into ash. This isn’t survival now; it’s something else entirely...something beyond my comprehension.
“Echlios—” I choke out. And he’s there, grabbing my numb fingers in his and drawing me back from the edge of the abyss.
“Breathe,” he pulses to me softly in our language.
“I need to go. It hurts too much to be this near him,” I whisper.
Before Lo and I bonded, I wasn’t able to feel him as an Aquarathi because of his hybrid genes, and the link that finally connected us feels like it’s weakening by the second. Queen or not, I can feel him leaning away, and there’s no way to stop it.
Or maybe there is.
I squeeze Echlios’s hand, unsure of what I’m about to do but knowing that I must do it nonetheless. “Can you wait outside? Take Bertha with you. I know what I have to do.”
“My queen, I must insist—” Echlios says, his eyes widening at my meaning.
“Echlios, please. I have to know. And this is the only way—surely you of all people know that.”
“But a glimmer?” Echlios’s eyebrows snap together so tightly I’m surprised that he can see anything beneath that ominous frown. “What if he latches on unconsciously? You’re bonded now. That connection goes both ways.” He shakes his head. “With the amnesia, it’s just too dangerous.”
“I’ll deal with that if it happens, but from what I’ve seen, he won’t notice it. He doesn’t know me. Trust me, I’ll be safe, I promise. I have to try, Echlios. Please.”
Echlios watches me, his eyes like a brewing thunderstorm, but eventually he nods and gives in to my wishes. “Be careful, then. If you feel anything, you separate immediately, okay? I’ll be right outside this door.”
“I will,” I promise, even though a part of me deep down wants Lo to feel my glimmer and take me into him. I want him to fight for me.
After Echlios leaves, I source the water in my body and prepare myself for hydroprojection, or as we call it, glimmering. I can connect with other Aquarathi as well as humans via the moisture in the air and in their bodies. It allows me to speak to them, understand their impulses or even control them by the power of suggestion, if necessary. Which I’ve only ever done once. And never to any of my friends.
So this is still new for me, which is why Echlios is on edge. If Lo’s Aquarathi side unconsciously fastens to my glimmer for whatever reason, he could suck the energy right out of me through our bond...as in my entire Aquarathi life force. But I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, and I’ve no intention of letting that happen. It’s a risk, but one I’ll take.
Calling upon my water, I pull it toward my center until it’s a heavy weight resting near the middle of my chest. Gently, I push it toward Lo, who is still talking to Cara. The sound of her name ripples through me like a tidal wave, and the glimmer dissipates in a wild rush, slamming back into me and making me breathless. I’m still gasping and trying to compose myself as Lo ends his call and walks back over to me.
“You all right?” he says, frowning.
“Fine,” I manage, coughing. “Lemonade went down the wrong way.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and then gestures to the phone in his pocket. “Sorry about taking that call, too. I didn’t mean to be rude. That was just Cara, one of my friends.”
I take a gulp of my drink, ignoring the sharp sting of jealousy, and will myself to focus on what I’m about to do. “So, do you still hang out with Sawyer and Jenna?”
Lo’s eyes light up. “Sure. Sawyer’s teaching me how to surf, and Jenna takes pictures of me looking like an idiot.”
Teaching Lo how to surf? The Lo I know could school Sawyer on all the ins and outs of surfing. He’s that brilliant on the wave.
“I doubt that,” I say, surprised that the amnesia would affect his actual abilities.
“Well, I’m better than I used to be,” he says with a modest grin. “Hours of practicing. I’m determined to surf at Trestles one day.”
Choking back the immediate retort that he used to dominate at Trestles and every other expert break in San Diego, I remain silent. That’s different, too, I notice. Lo used to be arrogant and cocky. Now he’s all vanilla pudding and apple pie, like a Stepford version of himself. It’s not bad...I just miss the undertone of funny-boy snark. It kept me on my toes, and the witty comebacks had made Lo Lo. Maybe it’s selfish, but I have to know what’s in his head and whether any of the Lo I know and love is still in there somewhere deep down. I have to do the glimmer—it’s the only way to be sure.
“So, how was the Marine Center this summer?” I ask to get him talking. I see his surprised expression and add, “We worked there together last year.”
“Wow, we really did know each other well,” he says with a rueful smile. “Seriously, I feel like I can’t stop apologizing to you for not remembering any of this.”
“It’ll come back.”
“I hope so,” he says in earnest.
As Lo launches into some of the new ocean-conservancy initiatives he was overseeing at the center, I clear my head of everything but water and pull myself together once more. The glimmer stretches outward like a shimmering golden net and then connects with his. The pull of him is so seductive, so visceral, that I almost lose hold of the glimmer. What I’m doing is not exactly Sanctum. Instead I’m just trying to see if my Aquarathi side recognizes its mate within him. If Lo were himself, he’d naturally be able to feel me doing this and enjoy it as much as I do, but it’s obvious that he has no idea who I am...or what I am. For all intents and purposes, he’s just another person.
Only he’s not. He’s my mate.
And even in glimmer form, the act of being inside him is as intimate as being with him—even more so. I can barely breathe. Every inch of my skin feels electrified from the contact between us. The bond is still there, and strong. A thrill of brief relief flutters through me—he hasn’t forgotten me entirely, even if the human part of him has.
Lo is still talking and, slowly, I glimmer past the barrier of his thoughts, trying to see past the indistinct memories...to see anything that would give me a sliver of hope. But other than the instinctual recognition from the dormant glimmer within him, there’s nothing. There’s no indication that he knows me at all.
Water rushes in my ears and I snap back into myself with a jolt, realizing that Lo is shaking my shoulders.
“What?” I gasp.
“Nothing,” he says. “You looked like you were in a trance or something. Are you okay?”
“Fine. I must be tired, jet-lagged.”
“Oh, right, you flew a long ways.”
I nod, unable to speak, watching as Lo stands awkwardly with an odd expression on his face. He hesitates and then blurts out the question on the tip of his tongue. “Did you feel anything strange just before?”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Never mind.” He opens his mouth and closes it, and then laughs out loud at himself. “It was nothing. I felt a weird connection, like from my belly button, as if something was pushing me toward you.” He pauses, still looking awkward. “And then there was this bizarre glow stretching between us. You didn’t feel or see anything?”
I shake my head and swallow. “No.”
“Twilight Zone!” He shrugs with an embarrassed grin. “Maybe your jet lag is contagious, or maybe Bertha put crack in the lemonade.” The slight appearance of the old Lo takes me by surprise, and my pulse leaps. Maybe he’s not all gone. “Anyway, thanks again for stopping by. We should hang out before school. Maybe this weekend? Surfing Sunday?”
“I’d like that.” I stand, not wanting to prolong the agony by watching him leave to go meet Cara. “Thanks for...seeing me.”
“Sure thing. Catch you later, Nerissa.”
During the car ride home, I stay silent. But I can feel Echlios’s heavy stare, and I know I’m going to have to tell him what I saw with the glimmer. It’s not something I can keep to myself, not now when we have so much on the line. We pull into our driveway and I turn to face him.
“He doesn’t know me.”
Echlios frowns, sympathetic. “Did you see anything at all?”
“There’s no tumor or dementia, or anything like that from what I could sense, but you’re right about the amnesia. It’s definitely there.” I pause and assess what I felt. “No other kind of infection was present. But there was something else that caught my attention that didn’t quite fit, like really heightened brain activity on the human side.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I barely got a read from the Aquarathi side of him.” I raise terrified eyes to Echlios. “It’s like he doesn’t know what he is. At all.”
“You mean—”
I nod. “I think he thinks he’s human.”
4 Surf Your Heart Out (#ulink_7e6f586c-161d-5365-96f9-d41125e5a91a)
The warm sun on the patio is definitely something I’ve missed. Jenna waves from the middle of the pool and I smile back, lifting a hand and watching the greenish-gold lights flicker down my forearm in response to the sun’s rays. There’s nothing quite comparable to sunlight, not even in the warm, jeweled depths of Waterfell. And while I miss my home, I’ve missed being here, too. And I missed my best friend. I’ll admit freely that Jenna is the only person keeping me from falling to bits.
What I discovered about Lo has kept me wide-awake every night. After all, how do you make sure that a hybrid Aquarathi human doesn’t go off the deep end if and when he starts exhibiting alien qualities? Not even the High Council could have anticipated this. It’s uncharted territory for us—not just because Lo is a hybrid, but because he’s a hybrid who thinks he’s a human—so all in all, the situation has potentially catastrophic consequences, simply because he puts our entire species at a greater risk of exposure.
For the moment, we agreed that Echlios would keep an eye on him at home, and I’d do the same at school, which means official reenrollment at Dover. That wasn’t part of the original plan. Readjusting will be tricky. I went from girl to alien queen in the span of four short months, and now I have to revert to who I was before. On top of that, going back to high school means seeing the boyfriend who isn’t really my boyfriend anymore on an excruciating daily basis. It’s going to be unbearable.
I sigh and say as much to Jenna. She swims to the side of the pool and props her chin on her forearms on the edge. She stares at me with a thoughtful expression, studying the flickering lights underneath my skin.
“Can’t you just mind-meld him into remembering you? You know, with that shimmer-glimmer thing you do?” she asks, nodding at my forearms.
“Not that easy,” I say. The lights on my arm die a swift death at the turn of the conversation. “I tried, and there was nothing there—nothing of me, anyway. It’s like any memory of us has been wiped out of his head completely.”
I gulp past the lump of misery in my throat. Apparently everything I learned during my previous human initiation cycle doesn’t apply to relationships. Turns out you can break someone’s heart...so much so that he eliminates everything about you just so he can cope.
Jenna hauls herself out of the pool and grabs a towel from the side table. “I did a little research on what you told me. Dissociative amnesia is pretty common after trauma, but the memories do come back most of the time. You have to believe that.”
“I don’t have a year, Jenna. I have months, and then I have to make a decision to go back, with or without him. With him would be so much better. Without him means things I don’t want to consider.”
“What things?” Jenna says, her eyes narrowing.
I meet them honestly, my heart in mine. “You know our laws, Jenna. We can’t take the risk that he’ll expose us.”
“Oh.”
She doesn’t say anything more but stares at the undulating surface of the pool, lost in thought. She loves Lo as a friend, but if the time comes and we decide to leave without him, she’ll have no say in what happens to him. She knows that as well as I do. After a while, she turns to me again.
“Won’t that...hurt you, too?”
“Yes.”
Her face drains of color. Jenna doesn’t know the intricate ins and outs of bonding, but I told her what Soren once told me. If Lo dies, a part of me will die, too. And I’ll never be able to bond with anyone again. Those are the rules of what we are—we bond for life.
“Well, you’re just going to have to make him fall in love with you again,” Jenna says with a forced, overbright smile.
“We’ve bonded, Jenna. There’s nothing beyond that.”
“For Aquarathi,” she points out. “Not humans. And Lo’s part human, right? Look, you said it yourself. He already loves you because you’re bonded. There’s a part of him that recognizes itself in you and probably always will. You just have to make him see that. As much as the human brain can incapacitate itself, so it can rebuild itself. It’s a two-way street.” She pauses, her expression intense. “And maybe if you can do that, then you can get him to remember everything else. Damaged neurons self-repair.”
“You know this how?”
“Told you. I did research,” she says, taking a peach from the fruit basket on the table and biting into it. As always, I’m amazed at Jenna’s base of knowledge. She’s more than smart—she’s practically a human encyclopedia. And what she doesn’t know, she makes it her business to learn. Like, obviously, rare neurological conditions. “According to some studies, once you get the cells refiring, the rest is inevitable. The human brain is an amazing thing. It can actually rewire itself.”
I snort and attempt a lame joke. “So you’re saying I have to hot-wire him?”
“Baby steps, Riss.” Jenna laughs. “Remember last year? I mean, you couldn’t even flirt without popping a blood vessel and freaking out. Every time Lo made a move, you, like, ran the other way like a frightened bunny.”
“Did not,” I retort, flushing.
“Total bunny.” Jenna grins, enjoying my discomfort. “Your scary sea-monster side was completely bunnified.”
“My scary sea-monster side is going to make an appearance if you don’t quit it,” I threaten, baring perfectly human white teeth in her direction.
“Oooh, I’m so scurred!”
“You should be,” I say, and remove the human eye film from my eyes, revealing the shimmery multicolored iris and pale gold sclera beneath.
“You think some gorgeous eyeballs are going to freak me out?” she says, sticking her tongue out and rolling her eyes. “Been there, done that.”
I shake my head at her comical expression and we both start laughing. Six months ago when Jenna found out the truth about me, she could barely look at any of us without her blood rushing around inside her in terror, and now she’s totally at ease with the whole alien-best-friend thing. Things could have turned out worse if she hadn’t been okay with it. Way worse...as in goodbye-best-friend worse.
“So, what does Speio say about all this? Coming back to Dover? Pretending to be human?” Jenna asks.
She and Speio weren’t exactly on the best of terms during the last year. He was averse to me revealing anything to Jenna, and even though she ended up saving our collective hides on more than one occasion, things between them never went back to the way they used to be. I do give him props, though, because before we left he apologized to Jenna.
“He’s fine with it, actually,” I tell her. “Volunteered to come this time around.”
“I thought he wanted to be back there.”
I snort out loud. “He did, and then he realized that females are the same, no matter the territory. They don’t come running just because a male decides he’s ready for a mate. Let’s just say that Speio had a rude awakening.”
Jenna’s eyes widen with that little bit of gossip. “So no bonding?”
“Nope.”
“Wow, payback’s a bitch,” Jenna says. “Although I still feel sorry for him. All we’re looking for is love at the end of the day. Aliens need love, too. Maybe that’s all he really wants.”
“And alien booty.”
“TMI!” Jenna screeches, covering her ears. “Oh no! Icky mental image! Thanks for that,” she says, and tosses her towel at me. I can’t help laughing at her grossed-out expression.
“Come on,” I say. “It’s not that bad. We coil around and—”
“Stop! My bleeding ears!”
We are laughing so hard by then that Jenna starts snorting through her nose, a snort that she futilely tries to stifle when Speio walks out of the living room toward us.
“What’s so funny?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she spurts through her teeth, clamping her lips together and turning a splotchy shade of red. “Girl stuff.”
Speio rolls his eyes skyward and shoots me a withering glance. I keep my thoughts carefully guarded and my face blank, knowing that he’d flip out if he knew we were making fun at his expense. He’s still a little sensitive about the whole not-bonding thing.
“Whatever,” he says. “So, are you guys going to the meet? Sawyer just texted me to see if you were on your way.”
“Crap,” Jenna squeals, jumping up to grab her phone out of her bag. “Yikes. He’s texted me, like, thirty-eight times.” She shrugs into a pair of cutoff jean shorts and glares at me. “Move your ass, queen of the sea! We have to go.”
I sink backward into the lounger. “Do I have to? I’m not sure I’m ready to mix and mingle.”
“It’ll be good for you,” Jenna says, her head disappearing into a neon-colored tank. “Plus, Lo’s going to be there.” She throws a meaningful look in my direction. “He asked you to come today, remember?”
I offer a noncommittal shrug. I don’t know why I’m so cagey about going. Maybe it’s because I don’t want anyone—particularly any of our old friends from school—seeing that Lo’s amnesia is so bad that he can’t remember his own girlfriend. I don’t want to feel their pity, or worse.
Jenna reads me easily. “Better to get it over with now than on Monday when you have nowhere to go but a four-walled classroom. It’ll be fine, Riss. I’ll be there, and Sawyer, and Speio,” she says with a glance at him.
“Are you going?” I ask Speio.
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
Speio reddens as if he’s hiding something. “You have to go. You’re signed up to surf,” he blurts out. “Sawyer did it!”
“What?” I splutter. “I haven’t surfed in months. I’m not up for a surf meet!”
“Maybe it’s what you need,” he says.
Jenna agrees with Speio, nodding emphatically. “Totally what you need. It was my idea, by the way, so don’t be mad at Sawyer or Speio.”
“What are you guys? Best friends now?” I say with a halfhearted glare. I’m not a fan of being tricked and pushed into things, but Jenna’s probably right. If I’m out surfing, I’m hardly going to be thinking about what people are saying about me. Or focusing on Lo. Or on Cara being all over Lo. Or vice versa. That last thought makes my stomach flip-flop, and not in a good way.
“Fine. Let’s go.”
I grab a shorty wet suit and tuck my surfboard next to Speio’s in the back of the Jeep before climbing in beside Jenna. It’s only a fifteen-minute ride from La Jolla to Pacific Beach Drive where Speio says the competition is being held.
She eyes me. “Seriously, I don’t know what you’re getting so worked up about. You command the sea. This is your space. Be one with it.”
“Calm down, Yoda.”
I stare out the window, preoccupied—or forcing myself to look preoccupied—to avoid further conversation. As we near the location, I’m surprised at the amount of traffic and cars parked along the side of the road. I can just see the tops of a few dozen multicolored tents along the edge of the beach.
“Which meet is this again?” I ask, my suspicion growing by the minute at the throngs of people walking toward the beach.
“RUSH,” Jenna says sheepishly.
“What?” I nearly choke. The RUSH Annual Surf Series is one of the biggest surf competitions in San Diego, and is sponsored by the coolest surf magazine on the planet. I ignore the sudden dip of my stomach. Not only will Lo be watching, but thousands of people will be there, including photographers. “How did we even get in for that? I didn’t qualify to compete.” I stare at her with a disbelieving frown.
“Slow your roll, princess,” Jenna says. “Sawyer hooked it up.”
“How?”
“Technically, it’s only an exhibition heat. He showed them some footage of you from last year and he called in a favor. No biggie.”
“You’re killing me. Really.”
Jenna grins, hopping out of the Jeep as soon as Speio comes to a spot in the narrowest parking spot possible. “What better way to start your senior year at Dover than with a splash? No pun intended.”
“This is a Pro-Am competition,” I say with overexaggerated emphasis. “As in pro. RUSH is more than a big deal. And the exhibition surfers at these events are professional surfers, not amateurs.”
“Seriously, Nerissa Marin, can you stop being such a wuss and suck it up for half a second? You’re a great surfer. Better than great, if you know what I mean,” Jenna says, grabbing my board and shoving it toward me. I shoot her a dry look. “Go have fun. And show off a bit. What could go wrong?”
The question is so loaded that I nearly start laughing hysterically. Besides enticing giant ocean predators like great white sharks, which are attracted to Aquarathi pheromones—mine in particular—what could possibly go wrong other than the worst possible thing? Like mangled, chewed-up people everywhere.
Speio pats my arm, sensing my panic. “It’s a new moon,” he says quietly. “Full moon’s already gone, so you should be fine. Just try to keep it together.” Okay, correction...maybe it’s not the worst thing, since our pheromones are at their peak during the full moon, but that doesn’t mean it’s not risky.
With a resigned sigh, I walk down to the crowded beach, where we meet up with Sawyer. He’s at one of the tents, pinning his number onto his rash guard. His smile is infectious as he comes in for a warm hug.
“Hey, Riss! Glad you got here.”
“Thanks for the heads-up,” I tell him, punching him half-playfully in the arm.
“Any surfing down in Cape Town?” Sawyer says, his teeth white in his darkly tanned face. A move to South Africa was the cover story for why we left months ago. “Heard there’s good swell there year-round.”
“Nope, didn’t surf at all,” I say truthfully, grabbing a piece of wax off one of the nearby tables. “I’m going to be rusty. Hope you don’t have too much riding on me not completely wiping out.”
“It’s only exhibition,” he says, and nods out at the ocean, where the waves are breaking in perfect sets. “Epic out there. I had an early-morning heat and it wasn’t near as clean as those. High tide. Offshore winds. Epic combo.”
“If you say so.”
I survey the teeming beach—only exhibition...with a gazillion people watching my every move. Waving goodbye to Sawyer, I head over to where Speio’s standing and crouch down next to him on the sand, slowly rubbing wax onto the deck of my board with rhythmic, consistent strokes. I breathe in and slowly exhale with each circle, feeling my body calm and center.
“Hey,” a voice says over my shoulder, making my skin leap like it’s alive. Only one person has that effect on me. I look up, shading my eyes from the sun.
“Hi, Lo.”
“You came,” he says, crouching down beside me. “You’re surfing?”
“Sawyer’s idea,” I say, trying not to let his proximity or the citrusy-vanilla smell of him affect me. It’s a losing battle. Here, with the ocean so close, everything is amplified. For me, anyway. I haul a deep breath into my lungs, furiously scrubbing the square of wax onto the board and remembering Speio’s words about keeping it together. Fat chance with Lo looking on every second.
“So, you any good?” Lo asks, and then answers his own question. “Well, you must be if you’re surfing RUSH. Heard it’s the epic of the epics.”
“Yeah.”
“You nervous?”
“Some.”
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Lo says with an awkward smile. “See you around.” I know my body language and monosyllabic answers are anything but welcoming, but I can’t help it.
Keep it together, I remind myself. “See you.”
“Good luck, but I’m sure you won’t need it.”
I don’t allow myself to turn fully around, but my gaze follows him despite my better judgment. Bad move. I’m just in time to see a bikini-clad Cara throw herself into his arms. Lo catches her effortlessly, tossing her over his shoulder. She laughs at something he says and kisses him on the cheek. I duck my head, letting my hair cover my overheated face. The jealousy that spins through me is like acid, scorching every part of my insides without mercy. I gasp, nearly doubling over my board.
Speio is at my side in a second, his hand over mine stalling my movement with the wax. “You all right?”
“Fine.”
“You sure?” he says, his face concerned. He looks over his shoulder, and understanding dawns in his eyes. “You know they’re just friends, right?” he says. His hand tightens on mine. “You don’t have to do this, Riss. Stay here, I mean.”
I squeeze his fingers, forcing the ache into a dark corner of my brain. “I have to deal with it sooner or later. Jenna’s right. Better out here than in a closed environment.” A loud bullhorn has everyone breaking out in a wave of mad cheering as the announcers of the event broadcast the exhibition heat. “That’s me. Don’t worry, Speio. I’ll be okay.”
As I paddle out to the lineup with the five other surfers in my heat, I try to leave all my negativity back on the beach. Being extra careful, I duck-dive under the oncoming waves, letting the ocean flow over and into me, taking strength from its dark blue depths. This is my space...my world. It’s where I belong. With every stroke, I feel stronger.
Out past the breakers, I straddle my board and float, facing the beach. People cover every possible inch of sand for miles. I know exactly where Lo is because I can feel the magnetic pull of him even as far away as I am, but I keep my eyes averted, searching instead for the red flag of Jenna’s hair. Instead a distorted, misshapen face beneath a wide-brimmed hat catches my attention, and I blink, my stomach dipping in fear. But when I look back, the hulking figure is gone. Shaking my head to clear it, I spot Jenna, jumping up and down and waving madly. I wave back and drop down to grab the rails of my board.
The waves are breaking in perfect sets, with glassy blue faces and white-tipped crests. Sawyer’s right—conditions couldn’t be more perfect. Paddling effortlessly, I streak past one of the other surfers to grab the second wave in the set. I pop up and carve steeply down the face of the wave, marveling at my human body’s muscle memory. Everything feels fluid, as if my bones are one with the wave.
Exhilarated, I trail my right hand across the wave’s face and then crank my hips up and over so that the board shifts into a sharp cutback. I’m gliding over the foamy crest, nearly suspended in air for a breathless moment and then slipping back down onto the face. By the time the wave starts to run out of steam, I’m on fire, adrenaline rushing through my entire body.
The cheering from the beach is deafening as I pump a triumphant fist in the air and somersault off my board over the back of the wave. I surf several more waves, even doing a three-sixty spin and a back flip off the last one, before heading back to the beach.
But once I’m back and surrounded by unfamiliar faces, I remember the figure I spotted from the lineup. I summon Speio and tell him in a few short words what I might have seen.
His eyes widen as he scans the crowd. “Are you sure that’s what you saw? A hybrid?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was a trick of the sunlight.”
“I’ll check it out.”
A grinning Sawyer thumps me on the back, along with a giant throng of people yelling out all kinds of greetings, as Speio melts into the crowd.
“Feel better?” Jenna asks me with a knowing smile.
“Yeah.”
“Good. You totally rocked it out there. No one,” she says pointedly, “could keep their eyes off you.” The lurch of happiness in my chest is squashed by the sudden warning look in her eyes at someone over my shoulder. “Speaking of...”
“Jenna, help me with these boards, will you?” Sawyer yells out. She throws me an apologetic look and shrugs, mouthing, Sorry. As she leaves, I turn around to face a very impressed Lo and his not-so impressed entourage of Cara and her cronies.
“You were brilliant,” he breathes, extending his hand for a high five. I slap it with mine, wincing at the torture of the too-brief contact, and fight the urge to beat a hasty retreat up the beach behind Jenna.
“Thanks,” I murmur, glancing at the others beside him. “Cara,” I manage civilly.
In response, she drapes a possessive arm around Lo’s waist. “Oh, hey, Nerissa, didn’t know you were back.”
Sure she didn’t. Last semester, I found out that Cara had lived with a foster family before enrolling at Dover, where her uncle—Cano—was principal. In some small way, she, too, was an outsider trying to fit in. She and Lo became friends, probably because they connected over the whole foster-life similarities. Lo told me that she’d never felt she could confide in anyone until she met him, and he liked being able to help. Deep down, I know I shouldn’t fault Cara. Of all people, I know what it’s like to want to run away from who you are—I did that for the past few years, and my people paid the price. I just wish she wasn’t so smug and obnoxious all the time, but then again, maybe that’s a front, too.
“Yes,” I say. “Back for the semester.”
Cara’s voice is an insidious purr. “I think you’ll find that senior year is going to be a lot different from junior year. There’ve been a few interesting changes. I can help you work those out if you like.”
Or maybe it isn’t a front...maybe she’s just Cara, plain and simple.
“Thanks for the heads-up,” I say coolly, refusing to let my eyes follow the motion of her palm against Lo’s rib cage. I fight an equally violent urge to smash her pretty face in with the sharp end of my board. Instead I look away with effort. “I think I can manage on my own.”
“You do that,” she says. “Lo, you coming? We’re going to get floats.”
“In a sec,” he says to her. “I’ll catch up.”
Cara shoots me one of her oh-so-familiar death glares of impressive proportions and I wink back, taking small pleasure at the instant heat blooming in her cheeks. Despite knowing that sinking to her level won’t solve anything, I can’t help giving in to the desire to make her suffer just a tiny bit for the grope-fest she just flaunted in my face.
“So, how amazing were you out there?” Lo says, shaking his head in admiration.
I try valiantly not to blush, or in my case, go all bioluminescent at his sincere compliment. “Thanks. Would you believe it if I told you that you used to surf pretty much exactly like that before?”
“There’s no way I could surf like you.” The warmth in his voice is deep and velvety, doing things to me that leave me breathless. And his eyes...I force my gaze away, looking for anything to stop those eyes from breaking me into a million pieces.
I swallow and force a smile to my lips. “You did, and you will. One day. It will all come back...all of it.”
“I hope so.”
His whisper is soft, wistful almost—I don’t know why it sounds like a promise, but something in it does. And for a second, looking into those earnest, bottomless blue eyes, I let myself hope, too.
5 Game On (#ulink_bb19f204-8b73-5854-ad0c-ac4d36eb1f3c)
It is dark and empty—a cavernous, echoless abyss. There’s no light, only oily black depths beneath and beside me. I am but a speck at its epicenter. I scream, but the only thing that escapes my mouth is a mute bubble that floats away into the ever-deepening silence. I thrash, my arms and tail caught in the motionless void. It is futile.
I am trapped.
Something snakelike slithers down my arm, and then another and another, until my body is fraught with it. Glowing red eyes appear in the distance, drawing closer and closer, blackened tentacles bleeding outward and encircling me.
Ehmora.
“You’re dead,” I say. “We killed you.”
“Did you?” The voice laughs, the sound like a volley of bullets. “Then why am I here?”
“You’re a ghost. A nightmare. Nothing more.”
“So it would seem....”
I jerk upward gasping, sweat dampening my neck and back. My entire body is shaking from the visceral dream. I can still feel her tentacles cutting into me like a fiery brand. Of its own volition, my gaze slides down to the vinelike navy tattoo winding around the tops of my shoulders and neck. I take a breath, banishing the remnants of fear. The tattoo is a mark of the bonding with Lo, nothing more. It’s not alive. There are no tentacles. And Ehmora is dead.
Still, the implication of the dream is haunting. I felt so powerless and alone in the abyss, unable to move or act. The phantom Ehmora’s last words were so utterly chilling...so knowing...that I can’t help the shiver winding its way through me.
Attempting to exorcise my irrational fears, I step out to the patio and into the cool night air and lie back on a lounger to stare into the dark sky. It’s a cloudy night, with no moon or stars visible above. The wind whistles through the tops of the palm trees along the edges of the property, growing louder by the second. The unpredictable shift is in response to me—I’m sure of it.
I’ve always had a tempestuous relationship with weather, and while I’ve learned to harness my emotions, sometimes it’s impossible to keep it all in. For a heartbeat, instead of suppressing my feelings, I release my inner demons, watching as jagged lightning rips the sky into two. Sure enough, the first droplets of rain hit my face and bare legs. The ensuing storm is violent but brief, the angry purple sky fading as the clouds part to reveal a gilded sliver of moon. The release feels good as the rain intensifies into a pelting force and I relish the sting, letting it filter through me. Eventually the rain gentles to something more tender as my thoughts drift to Lo. The drops of water from above mix with the salty tears on my face, and I allow myself the luxury of crying for the first time in months.
A queen must show no weakness.
Curled into a ball with sobs racking my body, I don’t even notice the gentle stroking across my shoulder at first. But after a few seconds, I lean back into the person lying beside me on the lounger, hugging me from behind.
“It hurts too much,” I choke out.
“It’s okay, child.” Soren’s voice is soft, pulsing in our language. Her fingers are softer still, caressing my back in a soothing motion.
“I did it, Soren,” I whisper brokenly. “I made it happen.”
“No, my lady,” she says. “You could not have predicted any of this. You did what you thought was best to keep him safe. To keep all of us safe.”
“He should have been with me. In Waterfell. Not here. And not alone.” My words are raw, shattered gasps, clawing their way out of my throat. “He couldn’t have known what bonding would feel like, either. And I pushed him away, ripping us both apart when we should have been together. Thinking it would be better. For both of us. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t.”
Soren turns me around gently to face her, her eyes flashing green fire. “Don’t do this to yourself, Nerissa. It is what it is.” She wipes the tear-rain combination from my face with her thumb. “Lo is seeing the neurosurgeon this week. We’ll know more then on how we can help him.”
“We don’t know that we can help him,” I say in a defeated voice. “His human DNA is doing things that we have no experience with.”
“He’s Aquarathi, too,” Soren says. “Which means his capacity to heal is better than any human’s.”
I meet her eyes, hope blooming softly. “I hope you’re right.”
“See what the doctor says, and we’ll go from there. Come on, let’s get you back to bed. Big day of school tomorrow.”
“Soren, did you talk to Speio? About what I saw on the beach?”
Soren nods, her face grim. “No traces of anything.”
“Was he sure?”
She pulls me close in a warm embrace. “Don’t worry. Echlios will make sure Speio didn’t miss anything. Now, you need to get some rest.”
Despite Soren’s comforting words, I can’t help feeling a sense of dread, like an invisible net is closing in, one that we can’t see or avoid no matter how hard we try. I know what I saw earlier—it was one of Cano’s creatures...watching...and wanting me to see it. Taunting me...Cano’s way of saying I have no idea what’s coming next. And the truth is, none of us do. Not even with Lo. At the end of the day, he’s still a cross-species alien/human hybrid, and anything the neurosurgeon says will be speculation at best.
With a last look at the rapidly clearing skies, I allow Soren to walk me back to my room, where I fall into a fitful sleep.
* * *
“Come on, slowpoke!” Jenna shouts, slamming her locker shut. “English is this way. Forget how to navigate these hallowed halls already?”
I haven’t exactly forgotten, but the sight of Cara all over Lo at the far end of the lockers is already making me sick to my stomach. It’s not so much her flirting that’s getting me...it’s the look on Lo’s face, as if he’s enjoying every minute of it. Which, I remind myself, he’s bound to...he’s a boy.
I remember Jenna’s words from yesterday evening when we’d driven back from the beach. Fight fire with fire.
Of course, it didn’t help that she made me watch Grease for inspiration—girl-next-door tutorial on how to lure the quintessential bad boy—emphatically stating that there’s nothing that black leather pants can’t accomplish. Laughing, I told her she’d have to kill me before getting me anywhere near leather pants. But she has a point. He’s not exactly going to notice me if I’m a mute wallflower.
Smoothing my hair and cringing inwardly, I take a deep breath, lick my lips and strut past them.
“Hey, Lo,” I say in a breathy voice, blushing furiously at how ridiculous I must sound. But obviously he doesn’t think so. Neither does Cara. They both stare at me—him with an appreciative smile, and her, not so much. But I’m not there to win Cara over. I’m there for Lo. “You heading to English?” I ask him, ignoring her scowl. “I wanted to ask you something about Sawyer.”
“Yeah,” Lo says, grabbing his books. “What’s up?”
Elated, I ignore Jenna’s raised eyebrows and congratulatory wink from the rear of the room as we walk into class together. I turn slightly and see Cara trailing behind us, her face a hilarious combination of thunder and puke. Sawyer waves, and Lo plunks down in a vacant seat next to him. I take the spot next to Jenna and stifle a grin as Cara is forced to grab one of the few open seats at the front of the class.
Nerissa, one. Cara, zero.
Mr. Donovan clears his throat and pushes his spectacles up on his nose, smiling widely. “Welcome, class, we have a few new faces this week.” Everyone looks around in unison to check out the “new faces.” So far, it looks like one new girl and a guy who I thought graduated last year. Guess not. Oh, and me, which would explain why everyone’s staring at me as if I have a bull’s-eye tattooed on my forehead. Technically, I’m not new but, well, tell everyone else that. Mr. Donovan continues. “This week, we are going to start with The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, which is one of my favorite plays.”
Amid the groans from the class, I smile to myself...finally something new that I haven’t read on my own. At least I can drown myself in that if things get rough—nothing like academics to take a girl’s mind off unrequited love. I glance at Lo through my lashes. He’s flipping through the pages of the play, his lower lip caught between his teeth. I can’t help noticing how cute he looks, yet how different. Gone are the rebellious flip-flops from last year, which aren’t part of the Dover Prep uniform, as well as his permanently sand-covered feet. Gone also are the days when he used to cut class just to go surfing. The old Lo would have been horrified to be in class on time or to be caught without an appropriately bored expression on his face. A part of me desperately misses that boy, but I know he’s in there somewhere...somewhere beneath the meticulously neat hair and immaculate uniform.
Mr. Donovan thumps his book on the desk, making me jump, and people swivel to the front of the class. “You are going to work in groups of four or five, and each group will be assigned a specific theme to discuss. As part of your midterm, there will be a debate between each of the groups to prove or disprove the theme you have been assigned. This will count toward half of your final grade in this class, so please take it seriously. The group assignments are as follows.”
The assignments are all alphabetical, so my silver lining is that Cara is an A last name and Lo is an S, but nothing prepares me for the pure venom that comes my way when Lo and I somehow end up in the same group. In this class there aren’t many last names between Marin and Seavon. Jenna is also in our group, as well as two other boys. Sawyer is with Speio, so he doesn’t look too miserable at having to split up from Jenna. The new girl—Rian Thorn—is with them.
Jenna catches my eyes and I can see her lips twitching as she nods at the theme that Donovan has just written up on the blackboard for our group. I almost snort—The Double Life. Someone definitely has a sense of humor, considering that there are two aliens pretending to be human in this group alone. Well, not that Lo knows that he’s alien, but who’s counting?
The rest of the morning passes in a bustle of activity, running from class to class, and getting myself reacquainted with the routine. After American Government, Advanced Math and French class, I trudge toward the cafeteria and toss my books and my food-laden tray down onto an empty table. Jenna, Speio, Sawyer and surprisingly Lo immediately join me. They look exactly how I feel. Wiped.
“Seriously,” I say. “Is senior year supposed to be death in a backpack? It’s only lunchtime, for crying out loud. How’d you guys survive weeks of this already?”
“Dover Prep prides itself on academic preparation for college-bound students,” Jenna intones, mimicking the opening statements on the Dover Prep brochure.
“Guess they didn’t include torture and cruel or unusual punishments,” Sawyer quips.
“I didn’t think it was too bad,” Lo says, and we all turn to him in unison, our expressions identical.
“Who are you and what have you done with Lo?” Sawyer says, widening his eyes in mock shock. “Oh, right, he’s on hiatus, which means new Lo loves schoolwork.”
Lo reddens. “I don’t love it. I just don’t think it’s that bad. Big difference.”
“Well, the old you couldn’t be bothered, that’s all,” Sawyer explains. “I mean, you haven’t even asked me to cut school once. So it’s weird seeing you, of all people, flipped around and all about the books.”
“Sorry.” Lo shrugs. “It’s just that I don’t know how I used to be, and it feels like I should be good in school because this stuff isn’t too complicated to me. If I do it well, why not do it?” We all start laughing and Lo gets even redder, realizing that that, too, is something the old Lo would never say. “Look, I’m just trying to figure out who I was. Give me a break, will you?”
“Sorry, man, just playing around,” Sawyer says, chucking him in the shoulder. “We all know who you are. You’ll remember soon enough.”
“I guess we haven’t really seen you since school started,” Jenna pipes up. “You’ve been over there.” She nods across the room.
“Sorry, Cara’s been helping out,” Lo says a trifle defensively. “I didn’t want to be mean.” His eyes dart over to where said stony-faced helper is sitting with her entourage. “I think I’ve made her mad by even coming over here.”
“The old Lo wouldn’t have cared,” I blurt out, earning a swift glance from Lo.
“The old Lo sounds like he was a dick.”
“Hardly. He just saw through the bullshit. He knew how to read people.”
“Like you?”
“Especially me,” I say quietly. The memory of a different type of conversation, on a boat in the middle of the harbor, whispers through my mind. Lo had always been able to see right through me, even at my worst.
“Wow, you two want to take it down a notch, or what?” Jenna interjects to diffuse the sudden tension hovering over the table. “Dick or not, you’re still our friend.”
Lo lounges back in his seat. “So, what else did I do? Or not do? Besides not caring about school, seeing through bullshit and being an amazing surfer, according to Nerissa.”
The sound of my name on his lips makes my stomach feel all fluttery, but I stuff a huge bite of cheeseburger in my mouth so I don’t have to talk. Sawyer does instead. “Well, she’s right. You were pretty awesome, but you’re getting there,” he says. “We’ll have you back surfing double overheads in no time. Right, Riss?”
Lo’s eyes meet mine. “Sure,” I choke out, stuffing another bite into my mouth. “Sorry, hungry,” I say by way of apology and stare at my tray, avoiding Jenna’s amused look.
“So, since we’re on the topic, can I ask you guys a weird question?” Lo says, his eyes making the rounds at the table. Jenna nods on behalf of everyone. “Did I...date Cara?” The dead silence is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Everyone around me stares at the tabletop. Surprised, Lo hurries to explain. “I mean, it’s just that she’s so possessive sometimes, and I feel as if she expects me to be a certain way, so...” He trails off, a helpless expression on his face.
“Do you like Cara?” Jenna asks carefully.
“She’s all right,” he says. “A little neurotic, but who isn’t? And she’s been supernice over the last few weeks.”
“That’s not an answer.”
I try to act like the real answer to Jenna’s question won’t affect me, but it’s a losing battle. The silence thickens to uncomfortable proportions, and I realize that I’m holding my breath. I exhale silently.
“I guess I do. Or did. I don’t know. I mean, it feels like we’re close.”
“So, which is it?” The question isn’t from Jenna. It’s from me. I’m shocked that I’ve even said anything, but obviously I have, if Jenna’s open-jawed expression is any indication.
“I don’t know,” Lo says. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make things weird.” He laughs awkwardly. “Please tell me I didn’t insert my foot in my mouth because I dated any of you?”
To everyone’s surprise, Speio leans in, his face grave. “Well, I didn’t want to have to tell you this way. But, well, we dated. We were in love. I’m heartbroken that you don’t remember the glorious nights we shared.”
Relieved at Speio’s thoughtful intervention, I try not to burst out laughing at the convincing wounded expression on his face, but the look on Lo’s face is priceless. His eyes are wide and he’s staring from Speio to each of us in turn.
“Really?” Lo asks just as Sawyer muffles a snort.
Speio and Sawyer convulse into gales of laughter. “No, dude. Not really.”
“Not that I would care either way,” Lo says, grinning good-naturedly at their teasing. “I mean, you’re a good-looking guy, and, well, I’m me. So naturally, I could see how you would be devastated.”
“There’s a spark of the old Lo.” Speio grins. “But yeah, not devastated.”
“Yeah, that would be Nerissa,” Sawyer blurts out, and Jenna kicks him in the shins. His eyes widen in delayed realization of his gaffe and he gapes, panicked, from me to Lo, his mouth opening and shutting like a fish. A part of me hopes that Lo didn’t hear, but of course, I don’t have that kind of luck.
“What?” he says. “Why would she be— Oh.”
“We dated briefly,” I say in as normal a voice as I can manage, despite my quickened pulse.
Lo’s eyes are liquid. “We dated?”
I’m saved from having to answer as a shrill voice interrupts us. “I’d hardly call throwing yourself at someone dating, but whatever. Nerissa never says no, if you know what I mean.”
As much as I want to stuff Cara into a tiny box for her catty comment, I’m grateful for not having to answer Lo’s husky, far-too-intimate question. Pushing back from the table, I grab my backpack and tray. I’ve had enough of this conversation, and I have no interest in rising to Cara’s baited words. Jenna, however, has no such compunction.
“You wish that were true, Cara,” Jenna says with an eye roll in Lo’s direction as she, too, stands and gathers her things. Her eyes are glittering like an avenging angel’s, leaping to my defense. “If you must know, Cara was the only one who couldn’t help flinging herself at you. If you don’t believe me, ask her what she went as last year to Junior Prom.”
“Shut up, Jenna,” Cara seethes.
But Jenna doesn’t wait for Lo to ask. “You were Neptune, and she was your slutty little sea snake.”
“I was an electric eel!” Cara screams shrilly.
“Eel, slutty sea snake. Same diff,” Jenna tosses over her shoulder, nearly shoving her chair into Cara. She’s about two inches shorter than Cara, but it doesn’t make a difference as she steps up a hairbreadth from Cara’s nose. “I’d be very careful if I were you,” she says to her softly. “When Lo regains his memory—and he will—you’re going to look quite the fool because you’re not his girlfriend. So remember that when you’re trying to rag on my friend. Nerissa may have the patience not to respond to your crap, but I don’t, so back the hell off.”
I swear that everyone’s collective jaw is on the floor, mine included, as Cara swings on her heel and storms off.
“You coming?” Jenna asks me in a casual voice as if she didn’t just flay my archnemesis alive in front of the entire cafeteria. “See you after school, hon,” she says to Sawyer, and bends to kiss his cheek.
“You are so hot right now,” he says.
“I know.”
“Thanks, I think,” I say to Jenna, following her into the hallway. I wave halfheartedly in the general vicinity of our table, not interested in seeing what anyone thinks of Jenna’s outburst—particularly Lo. Or Speio, for that matter. “What happened to your speech about forgiveness last year, and taking the high road with Cara?”
Jenna grins. “No one but me calls my best friend a tramp and gets away with it.” She sends me a sidelong glance. “Sorry, I couldn’t help it. I know you don’t like scenes, but with all the Lo stuff, I just kind of lost it.”
I smile. “No, it’s okay,” I say. It was oddly satisfying to see Cara looking like she was throwing up in her mouth. “But you know there’s going to be payback, right?”
“I’m not afraid of Cara,” Jenna says, wiggling her eyebrows. “Plus, I can feed her to my very own sea monster as a snack if she gets out of line.”
I snort out loud. “Remind me never to get on your bad side.”
A toothy grin. “See? I don’t have to have fins to be fearsome.”
I nod vigorously. “No. You definitely don’t. We’ll make an honorary Aquarathi of you yet.”
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
6 Make Your Move (#ulink_8a2f5d65-6096-5471-83e4-dd008472384b)
“Poisoned? What do you mean some kind of biological agent?” I’m nearly screaming the rapid-fire questions at Echlios. “And how would someone even get close enough to poison Lo? Was it Cano?”
“All we know is that it’s some kind of biotoxin,” Echlios says. “And we don’t know that it was Cano, although he is a strong possibility.”
I know it’s him—every instinct inside me says it’s him. Cano is still on the loose, and out there...trying to destabilize us. He’s the only one who would attack Lo with something like this, something this diabolic. He was the one to help Ehmora with her hybrids and to combine the DNA strands in the first place—and he’s the only one who would know about Lo. From what we’ve all learned last year, he is not to be underestimated, notwithstanding the fact that he’s a brilliant biologist. This has his signature all over it.
My body is shaking so hard it feels like my teeth are going to shatter inside my mouth. I can feel the dull knuckle of bones already protruding from my brow, see the freckle of fins appearing and disappearing down my cheek like a wave of reptilian skin in the mirror across the hall. I’m as weak at controlling the transformation impulse as I am at controlling the chaos in my head. My breath comes in shortened, desperate bursts, and I grab the edge of the wooden table in my fists. It crumbles to splinters at my touch.
“My queen...Nerissa, please calm down,” Echlios says, his eyes anxious.
“Don’t tell me to calm down,” I rage, my clothing popping as razor-sharp fins emerge along the length of my spine, ripping through my cotton shirt like butter. “You’re telling me that someone deliberately poisoned Lo. How?” Soren’s fingers reach across to mine, her calming energy sweeping across our human skins and sinking into me. Accepting her gesture, I breathe slow and deep. “How, Echlios?” I ask less forcefully this time.
“Injected or ingested, we presume,” Echlios says, resuming his seated position. I follow his lead and focus on keeping my breathing even. “But we have no way to be sure. We got lucky. The tests were inconclusive at first. The memory loss was just that—retrograde dissociative amnesia from the shock of what happened with his mother. But then Dr. Watson saw something and ordered more tests, this time checking for specific blood and neural toxicity. He saw some kind of odd discoloration in a group of cells near the memory center. He’d had a hunch that the memory loss didn’t seem fully consistent with dissociative amnesia—it appeared as if it were being aggravated by something else. A marine biotoxin of some sort.”
“What is that?” Speio asks softly. “Something from the sea?”
“It’s an organic toxin that occurs organically in nature from certain types of oceanic algae blooms, like the red tide,” Echlios says. Speio and I exchange a glance. We’ve both surfed at night during the red tide in San Diego, when the phytoplankton bloom makes the water turn a psychedelic blue.
“We’ve never gotten sick from that,” Speio blurts out. “Or any of our friends.”
“That’s because our Aquarathi immune systems aren’t affected by this toxin, but even so, the tide isn’t necessarily caused by toxic algae. Some blooms are toxic, some aren’t.”
“So humans can get sick from it?” I ask.
“Sometimes. In rare cases, mammals and humans get infected from eating contaminated shellfish. In its natural form, it’s called domoic acid, and the normal side effects range from nausea to coma to death,” Echlios explains. The blood drains from my face. “However, in Lo’s case, it appears that it has been chemically altered, which is how we knew that he has been poisoned.”
“Altered? Why?”
“Because his Aquarathi DNA would find a way to combat the infection. They’ve somehow made it more resistant and human-centric at the same time. Meaning that it only targets the human cells and that it can’t be detected by his Aquarathi immune system.”
“That’s just perfect,” I mutter. “Trust Cano to come up with a marine toxin to weaken the hybrids he engineered in the first place to be sea creatures like us. It just seems wrong.” I can’t help shuddering.
“He’s clever,” Echlios says. “It’s the perfect fail-safe.”
Echlios is right. If something had gone wrong during their species-grafting experimentation, they would have needed something immediate to weaken the hybrids. Since human DNA is weaker than ours, it makes sense that they would have targeted the human cells. But I’d bet anything that Cano wanted to make the toxin as lethal as possible, not to use just as a fail-safe but as a weapon.
Snapping out my smart phone, I quickly run a search for domoic acid poisoning. According to the first website, it’s also called amnesic shellfish poisoning. I scan the immediate symptoms—vomiting, nausea, cramps—but I’m more interested in the neurological symptoms farther down, like dizziness, disorientation, short-term memory loss and seizures...the ones that could lead to comas and death. And then my gaze spans down farther and my breath hitches in my throat.
There is no cure.
The rush of fear nearly makes me double over, but I can’t afford to let it derail me. Nobody creates a poison without creating its remedy, especially for someone as valuable as Lo. Not even Cano would be that foolish...at least I hope he wouldn’t. With a fortifying breath, I process all of the information from Echlios and the website as clinically as I can, but I can’t seem to get my mind around one thing. I glance at Echlios, pocketing my phone.
“Even if it were Cano or Ehmora’s people, Lo was—is—her son, and the perfect hybrid specimen. Why would they want to hurt him?”
Echlios spreads his palms to the sky. “If it means getting you out of Waterfell, I can see that being an option. Ehmora viewed him as an expendable bargaining chip. Why wouldn’t they continue to do so? Bringing you here disrupts the courts and could create chaos.”
“Wait a second,” I muse. The vision of my dream, of Ehmora telling me she isn’t dead, hovers over me like a wet, dark cloud. Even from the grave, we can’t escape her influence. “You think Lo was poisoned to draw me back here?”
“It’s possible. In Waterfell, you are safe. It’s impenetrable.” Echlios shakes his head. “Here, it’s open and we are vulnerable in human form. They knew you’d have no choice but to come back for him once you felt him deteriorating.”
“Deteriorating? You mean from the amnesia?”
Echlios stares at me. “No. From his failing body.”
Of course. Lo’s dying. As if I could forget.
Soren clears her throat, the soft pulsing sound reminding me to breathe, despite the fact that my body has gone completely immobile after Echlios’s quiet words. “We also believe they—both Neriah and Cano—have been watching him, and that they still have ties to the school. Spies,” she says.
The mention of my mother’s name makes my stomach twist into ugly knots. It’s been hard not to think about her, but I’ve taught myself to be numb if and when I ever do. After her being instrumental in my father’s murder, her betrayal had become unforgivable when she and her lover—Ehmora—decided to kill me for my throne.
“That’s not possible,” I say. But of course it is. Just because we killed Ehmora and chased my mother and Cano inland doesn’t mean that they’d give up on Ehmora’s plans. If either of them is still alive, we are at risk...as they’ve obviously proven with Lo. Castia, the Emerald Court queen, was partially right. They wanted me back here.
“There’s more,” Soren continues, glancing at her son. “We suspect that there is a spy in school who’s feeding Cano information. Keeping tabs on you and on Lo.”
“Like who? The acting headmaster?”
“No. Echlios glimmered her weeks before we arrived,” Soren says. “Could be a teacher. The school nurse. Other students.”
“Can’t we just leave?” Speio asks. “Take Lo with us to Waterfell and figure it out there?”
Echlios shakes his head. “That was my plan until Nerissa saw something when she glimmered him last week. He doesn’t seem to know what he is, so—”
“So we can’t take the risk of him freaking out a hundred thousand leagues under the sea,” Speio finishes, wide-eyed.
“Or trying to return to human form,” Echlios says grimly.
“It’s not just that,” Soren interjects. “How do we even get him to remember who or what he is? If this is part of a greater scheme to weaken the Aquarathi, that needs to happen sooner rather than later. The longer we stay here, the more we are at risk.” She glances at me. “The more our queen is at risk.”
“And Waterfell,” I add.
“There is another alternative. Castia—” Echlios begins, but I cut him off with a furious glare, already preempting what he’s going to say. The very thought of what Castia suggested about letting Lo die alone makes me sick to my stomach.
“That’s not an option,” I say. “We can’t abandon him. That’s a death sentence and you know it. The High Council has given us a chance and time to do something. We have to try. For him, and for Waterfell.” And for me.
Echlios nods, bowing his head, and for a second I think I see what looks like relief flash across his face. A cold feeling slithers through me.... I left Lo behind before the last time we left for Waterfell. Did he think I’d do it now?
“We stay together,” I say firmly. “We have just under four months to find Cano, figure out what he’s plotting and find a cure.” I break off abruptly and stare at Echlios, recalling what I read on my phone not two minutes before. “Please tell me there is something that can save him, Echlios.”
“I believe there is. Cano is far too meticulous not to have reengineered a natural toxin without also creating its counter remedy.” Echlios pauses. “And if Lo were to die, they would have no leverage, which leads me to believe that the effects of this toxin can be reversed or at least stopped.”
“And Lo’s memory loss?”
Echlios’s face is compassionate. “That’s a bit more complicated. The biotoxin inhibits the brain from healing itself. He could be trying to repair those neurons as we speak and yet be completely limited by the toxin’s effects.”
Speio’s voice is small. “Will he be able to remember who he is?”
“Probably not without help,” Echlios says. “If we don’t counter the chemical effects, and soon, I’m afraid the memory loss could become permanent. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he adds gently, seeing my stricken expression. “For all we know, Lo could start remembering things tomorrow. We Aquarathi are nothing if not strong. We fight even when we are down—it’s the core of who we are. And that is true, too, at a base, cellular level.”
I try not to put too much faith in Echlios’s words, but a part of me fervently hopes that Lo’s Aquarathi side will step up and defend itself. I can’t imagine any part of myself not fighting to survive. It’s in our nature. Hybrid or not, he’s Aquarathi through and through, and he’s bonded to me. That has to count for something.
The small bloom of hope blossoms into something bigger, and takes root deep in my abdomen.
I have to make him remember who he is.
* * *
Slamming my locker shut, I make my way out to the parking lot. Jenna has hockey practice and I’m left to my own devices. She’s the mastermind, not me, but I have a plan and one that I hope is going to work. The first step is to get Lo out of Cara’s clutches. Shaking my head as I exit the school, I can’t help comparing the incongruous parallels of the whole situation. Cara Andrews is like the human part of Lo fighting for dominion, and I’m his Aquarathi side, determined to reclaim what is mine. I’m not in the least bit threatened by Cara, but I am worried that Lo will want to gravitate toward his human side and to the familiar. In the grand scheme of things, I’m someone new to him.
That has to change, starting with evening shifts at the Marine Center. It wasn’t easy to get my old job back, but thankfully the manager, Kevin, hasn’t lost his memory and remembers my involvement last year. Plus, a sizable donation from the Marin family fund for the oceanic conservation drive didn’t hurt matters. As a result, I’ve been able to secure a few hours during the week after school.
Hefting my backpack into the rear of the Jeep, I climb in and surreptitiously peek at Lo and Cara in the rearview mirror, standing next to her car.
“So you can’t come over to study?” Cara is saying to Lo in the parking lot, her arm wrapped around his. Seriously, it’s like she can’t stop touching him every infernal second.
“Sorry,” Lo says with an easy grin. “Some of us have to work. Can you give me a ride over there? Caught a ride with Sawyer this morning after our surf lesson, so no car.”
And that’s my cue.
Putting the Jeep into reverse, I swing out and pull alongside. Cara’s face immediately tightens. “I can give you a ride,” I say to Lo. “I’m heading over there myself.”
“Since when?” Cara says.
“Since I work there,” I say sweetly.
“How did you—” she begins, and then snaps her mouth shut, eyeing me with a suspicious frown. “I thought you said they didn’t have any open slots,” she says to Lo. The flirtatious tone has gone into accusatory mode. Obviously she tried to get a job there to spend more time with Lo.
“They didn’t,” he says, shrugging.
I smile widely. “What can I say? I’m special. Come on, Lo. We’re going to be late. Get in.”
Resisting the urge to peel out of the parking lot and leave black tire marks in my wake, I drive more sedately, keeping my exhilaration contained. I don’t even know why I’m keeping score, because it’s so childish, but I do, anyway. Nerissa two, Cara zero.
My exhilaration wanes into acute awareness of Lo sitting in the passenger seat, and all of the unsaid things from the other day in the cafeteria lying between us. Neither one of us says anything, but the silence is comfortable instead of awkward.
“Hey, what song is this?” Lo says, twisting the volume button on the car stereo.
I fumble for my phone on the middle console and chuck it at him. “It’s just a playlist I’m working on. That one’s called ‘As the Rush Comes’ by Motorcycle.”
“I like it. Very mellow,” he says, stroking the face of the phone with his thumb and scrolling through the playlist. “I know some of these. You have good taste.”
I laugh. “You know some of those because they’re yours. You and I started this playlist.”
With a raised eyebrow, he selects the next song. The opening chords of Blackmill’s “The Drift” comes on. “This is one of my favorites. I love the piano instrumental with the backbeat. It’s tight.”
“Yep,” I say. “You got me into them. Here, hand that over for a second. Bet you don’t know these guys, but this one is all you.” With a quick swipe, I select the last song I added to the playlist. I don’t add that I’ve listened to the chorus of the song at least a hundred times while torturing myself about what he’s been doing all summer with Cara.
“Who is it?” he says after a few bars, his foot tapping against the floor.
“Morgan Page’s ‘The Longest Road,’ Deadmau5 remix.”
“Catchy.”
“Great lyrics,” I add.
“I can see that,” he says quietly. His gaze flutters on me for a second and then drifts away when mine flicks to his. I don’t know if he’s agreeing with me or appreciating that they mean something to me. He looks as if he has more to say, but then he bites his lip and releases a slow sigh. He stares out the window for a moment before shifting in his seat to face me. “Sorry about the other day at school,” he blurts out. “I didn’t realize we were a couple. I mean, it makes sense. When you were at my house, I felt something. It was so strong, like this weird pull toward you. Sorry, it wasn’t weird...” He trails off with a stammer. “I am totally screwing up what I want to say.”
“I know what you mean, Lo.”
“I wish I could remember. I don’t know how I could forget you or us, that’s all,” he says, shooting me a look that makes my heart flip-flop. “Sawyer told me that it was love at first sight,” he adds with a laugh, “and then he told me the truth...that I had to work hard to even get you to go out with me.”
“Hardly,” I protest, but I can’t hide the blush that heats my neck, nor the fact that it threatens to go supernova at his next words.
“I’m sure it was worth it,” he says quietly.
At a stop sign, I turn to smile tremulously at him, my heart beating a hundred miles a minute. “It was for both of us. You helped me figure out a lot of things about myself. We’re pretty similar, you and me.”
“Seems like it,” he says with a thoughtful glance, studying the playlist on the phone’s screen. “You know, I was surprised that people didn’t tell me about you. I asked because I found a prom photo earlier this summer.” His teeth flash white for a second. “One of me dressed in some seaweed with this totally hot girl.”
I know the one he’s talking about—it was one of the few photos we took together at Jenna’s house right before Junior Prom. “We were Neptune and Salacia. Roman gods of the ocean.”
“I figured it was some kind of theme,” he says with a somber smile. “I think Bertha thought it would be better if I didn’t know. It’s not like you were still around, so she told me you were someone I’d gone with. Maybe she thought it would be too painful if I couldn’t remember. I mean, there I was staring at this girl with this expression...like she was everything to me and I couldn’t even remember her name. I think Bertha felt sorry for me.” He trails off to stare out the window, his voice going so quiet that I have to strain to hear him. “I wish someone had told me, because maybe I could have tried harder. Maybe I could have done something differently, made myself remember somehow.” He shrugs, watching me, his tone wistful. “Because now here you are, and all I want is to be that guy in that photo.”
Lo’s eyes are intense and it’s all I can do not to start crying then and there. “That guy is still in there, Lo,” I say. “And that girl will always be here, waiting for you. You just have to take it one day at a time.”
Everything inside me tenses up when he reaches over and slides his palm over the back of my hand on the gearshift, holding it there for the rest of the ride. I’m afraid to even look at him, so I swallow hard and keep my eyes on the road, barely conscious of anything but the warm seal of his skin on mine. We listen to the rest of the playlist in silence until I pull in to the Marine Center parking lot.
“I’m sorry,” he says, drawing his hand away. “I didn’t mean to overstep—”
“You didn’t. This is new to me, too. One day at a time. Deal?”
“Deal,” Lo says, then hops out of the Jeep with an overbright grin as if to make up for the earlier turn in the conversation. “Thanks for the ride. So this is going to be like old times, right?”
The question takes me aback for a second before I realize that he’s joking. “You can’t even remember last week,” I toss back. “What do you know about old times?”
“I guess you’ll have to show me.”
I take a breath to calm my racing pulse and manage a half-teasing smile. “I don’t think you’re quite ready for that, but I’ll let you know when.”
“Promise?”
The evocative meaning in that single word makes my bones dissolve into nothing. Which explains why you couldn’t knock the smile off my face as we walk into the Marine Center.
“Hey, Riss!” Kevin shouts, jumping over the counter to sweep me into a huge bear hug. “So glad you’re back. Place just hasn’t been the same without you. Where’s your partner in crime?”
“Jenna? Don’t worry, I’ll get her back here to do her share. She’s at a hockey game.”
“No hockey for you this year?”
“I’m focusing on other things,” I say. Yeah, like finding a cure for my boyfriend’s imminent doom. I smile brightly. “But hey, at least Lo’s been here holding down the fort.”
Kevin grins, chucking Lo in the shoulder. “Well, if he could only remember his name, it’d be awesome,” he teases.
“That joke never gets old,” Lo says good-naturedly. “So, what do you have for us today? Beach cleanup?”
Consulting a clipboard on the desk, Kevin purses his lips. “Actually, someone just called in from La Jolla Shores saying that they thought they saw a bunch of garbage bags caught in the kelp beds. You guys want to check it out? Just radio back if you need help. Standard swipe and dump, shouldn’t take the two of you too long.”
“We’ll take care of it,” I say.
“Riss, you remember where the boat is, right?” Kevin asks, tossing me a set of keys attached to a bright yellow foam oval. “It’s good to have you back.”
“Great to be back.” I find that I mean it. I’ve missed the Marine Center and doing my part to protect the world’s oceans. It is where I live, after all, and although we aren’t allowed to interfere in the day-to-day politics of people who share the planet with us, marine conservancy is an area where we can get more actively involved.
Lo and I get changed in the respective bathrooms and meet out on the beach near the shed where all the gear is stored.
“We probably won’t need these if those bags are just floating, but do you remember how to scuba?” I ask him, tugging on one of the air tanks and tossing it into the back of the dune buggy.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/amalie-howard/oceanborn/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
Amalie Howard
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
Отзывы: Пока нет Добавить отзыв
О книге: The coronation is over.But the battle has just begun.Nerissa Marin has won her crown. But can she keep it? Already, her ties to the human realm are driving a wedge between Nerissa and her people. When word arrives that her part-human prince consort, Lo, has been poisoned, she makes the difficult choice to leave Waterfell and return landside. As the royal courts debate her decision, even more disturbing rumors surface: a plot is rising against her, led by someone she least expects.On land, Nerissa learns another shocking truth–Lo does not remember who she is. As her choice to try to save him threatens her hold on her crown, changing loyalties and uncertainty test her courage in ways she could never have imagined. Nerissa will have one last chance to prove herself as a queen…and save the undersea kingdom she loves.