Teardrop (Teardrop Trilogy 1)

by Lauren Kate

  She closed her eyes and saw the halo of blond hair above her, blocking out the moon, and felt the life-giving air entering her lungs, the arms that carried her there.

  Ander.

  “I thought it was a dream,” she whispered.

  Ander sighed heavily, as if he knew exactly what she meant. He took her hand. “It happened.”

  “You pulled me out of the car. You swam me ashore. You saved me.”

  “Yes.”

  “But why? How would you even know I was there?”

  “I was in the right place at the right time.”

  It seemed as impossible as all the other things Eureka knew were real. She stumbled to her bed and sat down. Her mind was spinning.

  “You saved me and let her die.”

  Ander closed his eyes as if in pain. “If I could have saved you both, I would have. I had to choose. I chose you. If you can’t forgive me, I understand.” His hands were shaking when he ran them through his hair. “Eureka, I am so sorry.”

  He had said those same words, just like that, on the first day they met. The sincerity of his apology had surprised her then. It had seemed inappropriate to apologize so passionately for something so slight, but now Eureka understood. She felt Ander’s grief about Diana. Regret filled the space around him like his own thunderstone shield.

  Eureka had long resented the fact that she’d lived and Diana hadn’t. Now here was the person responsible. Ander had made that decision. She could hate him for it. She could blame him for her crazy sorrow and attempted suicide. He seemed to know it. He hovered over her, waiting to see which direction she’d take. She buried her face in her hands.

  “I miss her so much.”

  He fell to his knees before her, his elbows on her thighs. “I know.”

  Eureka’s hand closed around her necklace. She opened her fist to expose the thunderstone, the lapis lazuli locket.

  “You were right,” she said. “About the thunderstone and water. It does more than not get wet. It’s the only reason the twins and I are alive. It saved us, and I would never have known how to use it if you hadn’t told me.”

  “The thunderstone is very powerful. It belongs to you, Eureka. Always remember that. You must protect it.”

  “I wish Brooks …,” she started to say, but her chest felt like it was being crushed. “I was so afraid. I couldn’t think. I should have saved him, too.”

  “That would have been impossible.” Ander’s voice was cold.

  “You mean the way you saving both me and Diana would have been impossible?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t mean that. Whatever happened to Brooks—you wouldn’t have been able to find him in that storm.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Ander looked away. He didn’t elaborate.

  “You know where Brooks is?” Eureka asked.

  “No,” he said quickly. “It’s complicated. I’ve been trying to tell you, he’s not who you think he is anymore—”

  “Please, don’t say anything bad about him.” Eureka waved Ander off. “We don’t even know if he’s alive.”

  Ander nodded, but he seemed tense.

  “After Diana died,” Eureka said, “it never occurred to me that I could lose anyone else.”

  “Why do you call your mother Diana?” Ander seemed eager to steer the subject away from Brooks.

  No one except Rhoda had asked Eureka that question, so she’d never had to voice a real answer. “When she was alive I called her Mom, like most kids do. But death turned Diana into someone else. She isn’t my mother anymore. She’s more than that”—Eureka clutched the locket—“and less.”

  Slowly Ander’s hand cupped her hand cupping the two pendants. He squinted at the locket. His thumb rolled over the clasp.

  “It doesn’t open,” she said. Her fingers curled around his to still them. “Diana said it was rusted shut when she bought it. She liked the design so much she didn’t care. She wore it every day.”

  Ander rose on his knees. His fingers crept around the back of Eureka’s neck. She leaned into his addictive touch. “May I?”

  When she nodded, he unclasped the chain, kissed her softly on the lips, then sat next to her on the bed. He touched the gold-flecked blue of the stone. He flipped the locket over and touched the raised intersecting rings on the underside. He examined the locket’s profile on either side, fingered the hinges, then the clasp.

  “The oxidation is cosmetic. That shouldn’t prevent the locket from opening.”

  “Then why doesn’t it open?” Eureka asked.

  “Because Diana had it sealed.” Ander slid the locket off the chain, handed the chain and thunderstone back to Eureka. He held the locket with both hands. “I think I can unseal it. In fact, I know I can.”

  28

  SELENE’S TEARLINE

  A thunderclap shook the foundation of the house. Eureka scooted closer to Ander. “Why would my mother have sealed her own locket?”

  “Maybe it contains something she didn’t want anyone to see.” He slipped an arm around her waist. It felt like an instinctive motion, but once his arm was there, Ander seemed nervous about it. The tops of his ears were flushed. He kept looking at his hand as it rested on her hip.

  Eureka laid her hand over his to reassure him that she wanted it there, that she savored each new lesson on his body: the smoothness of his fingers, the heat inside his palm, the way his skin smelled like summer up close.

  “I used to tell Diana everything,” Eureka said. “When she died, I learned how many secrets she kept from me.”

  “Your mother knew the power of these heirlooms. She would have been afraid of having them fall into the wrong hands.”

  “They fell into my hands, and I don’t understand.”

  “Her faith in you survives her,” Ander said. “She left you these because she trusted you to discover their significance. She was right about the book—you got to the heart of its story. She was right about the thunderstone—today you learned how powerful it can be.”

  “And the locket?” Eureka touched it.

  “Let’s see if she was right about that, too.” Ander stood in the center of the room, holding the locket in his right hand. He turned it over. He touched its back with the tip of his left ring finger. He closed his eyes, pursed his lips as if he were going to whistle, and let out a long exhale.

  Slowly his finger moved over its surface, tracking the six interlocking circles Eureka’s fingers had traced many times. Only, when Ander did it, he made music, as if sweeping the rim of a crystal goblet.

  The sound made Eureka leap to her feet. She clutched her left ear, which was not used to hearing but somehow heard these strange notes as clearly as she’d heard Polaris’s song. The locket’s rings glowed briefly—gold, then blue—responding to Ander’s touch.

  As his finger moved in figure eights, mazelike swirls, and roseate patterns around the circles, the sound it produced shifted and spun. A soft hum deepened into a rich and haunting chord, then rose into what sounded almost like a harmony of woodwinds.

  He held that note for several seconds, his finger tranquil in the center of the locket’s back. The sound was reedy and unfamiliar, like a flute from a far-away, future realm. Ander’s finger pulsed three times, creating church-organ-like chords that flowed in waves over Eureka. He opened his eyes, lifted his finger, and the extraordinary concert was over. He gasped for air.

  The locket creaked open without another touch.

  “How did you do that?” Eureka approached him in a trance. She leaned over his hands to examine the locket’s interior. The right side was inlaid with a tiny mirror. Its reflection was clean and clear and slightly magnified. Eureka saw one of Ander’s eyes in the mirror and was startled by its turquoise clarity. The left side held what looked like a piece of yellowed paper wedged into the frame near the hinge.

  She used her pinky to pry it free. She lifted a corner, feeling how thin the paper was, sliding it carefully out. Beneath the paper she found a sm
all photograph. It had been trimmed to fit the triangular locket, but the image was clear:

  Diana, holding baby Eureka in her arms. She couldn’t have been more than six months old. Eureka had never seen this picture before, but she recognized her mother’s Coke-bottle glasses, the layered shag of her hair, the blue flannel shirt she’d worn in the nineties.

  Baby Eureka gazed straight at the camera, wearing a white pinafore Sugar must have sewn. Diana looked away from the camera, but you could see the bright green of her eyes. She looked sad—an expression Eureka didn’t associate with her mother. Why had she never shown this picture to Eureka? Why had she gone all these years wearing the locket around her neck, saying it didn’t open?

  Eureka felt angry with her mother for leaving so many mysteries behind. Everything in Eureka’s life had been unstable since Diana died. She wanted clarity, constancy, someone she could trust.

  Ander bent down and picked up the little yellowed slip of paper, which Eureka must have dropped. It looked like expensive stationery from centuries ago. He turned it over. A single word was scrawled across it in black ink.

  Marais.

  “Does this mean anything to you?” he asked.

  “That’s my mother’s handwriting.” She took the paper and stared at every loop in the word, the sharply dotted i.

  “It’s Cajun—French—for ‘marsh,’ but I don’t know why she would write it here.”

  Ander stared at the window, where shutters blocked the view of the rain but not its steady sound. “There must be someone who can help.”

  “Madame Blavatsky would have been able to help.” Eureka stared grimly at the locket, at the cryptic piece of paper.

  “That’s exactly why they killed her.” The words slipped from Ander’s mouth before he realized it.

  “You know who did it.” Eureka’s eyes widened. “It was them, those people you ran off the road, wasn’t it?”

  Ander slipped the locket from her hand and placed it on her bed. He tilted her chin up with his thumb. “I wish I could tell you what you want to hear.”

  “She didn’t deserve to die.”

  “I know.”

  Eureka rested her hands on his chest. Her fingers curled around the cloth of his T-shirt, wanting to squeeze her pain into it.

  “Why aren’t you wet?” she asked. “Do you have a thunderstone?”

  “No.” He laughed softly. “I suppose I have another kind of shield. Though it’s far less impressive than yours.”

  Eureka ran her hands over his dry shoulders, slid her arms around his dry waist. “I’m impressed,” she said quietly as her hands slipped under the back of his shirt to touch his smooth, dry skin. He kissed her again, emboldening her. She felt nervous but alive, bewildered and buzzing with new energy she didn’t want to question.

  She loved the feel of his arms around her waist. She pulled closer, lifting her head to kiss him again, but then she stopped. Her fingers froze over what felt like a gash on Ander’s back. She pulled away and moved around his side, lifting up the back of his shirt. Four red slashes marked the skin just below his rib cage.

  “You’re cut,” she said. It was the same wound she’d seen on Brooks the day of the freak Vermilion Bay wave. Ander only had one set of gashes, where Brooks’s back had borne two.

  “They aren’t cuts.”

  Eureka looked up at him. “Tell me what they are.”

  Ander sat down on the edge of her bed. She sat next to him, feeling warmth emanate from his skin. She wanted to see the marks again, wanted to run her hand over them to see if they were as deep as they looked. He put his hand on her leg. It made her insides buzz. He looked like he was about to say something difficult, something that might be impossible to believe.

  “Gills.”

  Eureka blinked. “Gills. Like a fish?”

  “For breathing underwater, yes. Brooks has them now as well.”

  Eureka moved his hand from her leg. “What do you mean, Brooks has gills now as well? What do you mean, you have gills?”

  The room was suddenly tiny and too hot. Was Ander messing with her?

  He reached behind him and held up the green leather-bound book. “Do you believe what you read in this?”

  She didn’t know him well enough to gauge his tone of voice. It sounded desperate—but what else? Did it also betray anger? Fear?

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It seems too …”

  “Much like fantasy?”

  “Yes. And yet … I want to know the rest. Only part of it’s been translated and there are all these strange coincidences, things that feel like they have something to do with me.”

  “They do,” Ander said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Did I lie to you about the thunderstone?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then give me the chance you’re giving this book.” Ander pressed a hand to his heart. “The difference between you and me is that from the moment I was born I have been raised with the story you found on these pages.”

  “How? Who are your parents? Are you in a cult?”

  “I don’t exactly have parents. I was raised by my aunts and my uncles. I am a Seedbearer.”

  “A what?”

  He sighed. “My people come from the lost continent of Atlantis.”

  “You’re from Atlantis?” she asked. “Madame Blavatsky said … But I didn’t believe …”

  “I know. How could you have believed? But it is true. My line was among the few who escaped before the island sank. Since then, our mission has been to carry forward the seed of Atlantis’s knowledge, so that its lessons will never be forgotten, its atrocities never be repeated. For thousands of years, this story has stayed among the Seedbearers.”

  “But it’s also in this book.”

  Ander nodded. “We knew your mother possessed some knowledge of Atlantis, but my family still has no idea how much. The person who murdered your translator was my uncle. The people you encountered at the police station, and on the road that night—those people raised me. Those are the faces I saw at the dinner table every night.”

  “Where exactly is that dinner table?” For weeks, Eureka had been wondering where Ander lived.

  “No place interesting.” He paused. “I haven’t been home in weeks. My family and I had a disagreement.”

  “You said they wanted to hurt me.”

  “They do,” Ander said miserably.

  “Why?”

  “Because you are also a descendant of Atlantis. And the women in your lineage carry something very unusual. It is called the selena-klamata-desmos. That means, more or less, Selene’s Tearline.”

  “Selene,” Eureka said. “The woman engaged to the king. She ran off with his brother.”

  Ander nodded. “She is your matriarch, many generations back. Just as Leander, her lover, is my patriarch.”

  “They were shipwrecked, separated at sea,” Eureka said, remembering. “They never found each other again.”

  Ander nodded. “It is said that they searched for each other until their dying day, and even, some say, after death.”

  Eureka looked deeply into Ander’s eyes and the story resonated with her in a new way. She found it unbearably sad—and achingly romantic. Could these thwarted lovers explain the connection Eureka had felt to the boy sitting next to her—the connection she’d felt from the moment she first saw him?

  “One of Selene’s descendants carries the power to raise Atlantis again,” Ander continued. “This is what you just read in the book. This is the Tearline. The Seedbearers’ reason for existing hinges on the belief that raising Atlantis would be a catastrophe—an apocalypse. The legends of Atlantis are ugly and violent, filled with corruption, slavery, and worse.”

  “I didn’t read anything about that in here.” Eureka pointed at The Book of Love.

  “Of course not,” Ander said darkly. “You’ve been reading a love story. Unfortunately, there was more to that world than Selene’s version. The Seedbearers�
� goal is to prevent the return of Atlantis from ever happening by—”

  “Killing the girl with the Tearline,” Eureka said numbly. “And they think I carry it.”

  “They’re fairly certain.”

  “Certain that if I were to weep, like it says in the book, that—”

  Ander nodded. “The world would flood and Atlantis would return to power.”

  “How often does one of these Tearline girls come along?” Eureka asked, thinking that if Ander was telling the truth, many of her family members might have been hunted or killed by the Seedbearers.

  “It hasn’t happened in nearly a century, since the thirties,” Ander said, “but that was a very bad situation. When a girl begins to show signs of the Tearline, she becomes a kind of vortex. She piques the interest of more than just the Seedbearers.”

  “Who else?” Eureka wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  Ander swallowed. “The Atlanteans themselves.”

  Now she was even more confused.

  “They are evil,” Ander continued. “The last possessor of the Tearline lived in Germany. Her name was Byblis—”

  “I’ve heard of Byblis. She was one of the owners of the book. She gave it to someone named Niobe, who gave it to Diana.”

  “Byblis was your mother’s great-aunt.”

  “You know more about my family than I do.”

  Ander looked uncomfortable. “I have had to study.”

  “So the Seedbearers killed my great-aunt when she showed signs of the Tearline?”

  “Yes, but not before a great deal of damage was done. While the Seedbearers try to eliminate a Tearline, the Atlanteans try to activate it. They do this by occupying the body of someone dear to the Tearline carrier, someone who can make her cry. By the time the Seedbearers succeeded in murdering Byblis, the Atlantean who had occupied the body of her closest friend was already invested in that world. He stayed in the body even after Byblis’s death.”

  Eureka felt an urge to laugh. What Ander was saying was insane. She hadn’t heard anything this crazy during her weeks in the psychiatric ward.