He freezes, unable to move.
Flying onto the sand in a spinning tangle of limbs, I hold the woman down with one arm once we come to a stop and twist the gun away from her with my free hand. She bucks beneath me to dislodge my hold, but even with half my attention focused on immobilizing the second spy, she’s no match for my strength.
“How many are you?” I demand. “Did Ehmora send you to spy on me?” She grits her teeth and struggles harder, kicking her knees up. I lean down. “Stop struggling, and answer my questions, or you will be sorry.” Instead, the woman twists beneath me to give herself the leverage to smash her forehead into mine. Blazing greenish-gold light flares around us at the contact, but I barely budge. Her eyes widen as she falls back.
“You don’t know what I am, do you?” I whisper as the lights wink down my neck and arms. “As you can see, I’m not like you, and you have no idea what I’m capable of.” I draw my glimmer in, dragging its captive toward us until the man is just a few feet away. “Cooperate or he dies. Slowly.” She stares at him for a minute but then turns back to me with a hard look in her eyes.
“What do I care about him?” she says.
“Because you’re all hired guns?” I toss back. “Do you even know what you’re doing? Who you’re working for? What she’s done? What she is?”
I’ve never killed a human before, but I’ve had more than enough practice incapacitating prey bigger than me down in the depths of the ocean. I’ve numbed their reflexes with my glimmers, even put them into a comatose state. But what I’m about to do goes against everything I’ve been taught by my father—to never use my powers against humans.
My father is dead. And my mother is a prisoner.
The playing fields have shifted.
I push forward just as I did with Speio—only I’m not giving energy—I’m draining the water from his brain with savage force, watching as the man’s face turns purple and visibly thins. He starts to gasp and clutch at his head, clawing at his scalp as if trying to get me out of him. Horrified, I stop and am completely unprepared for the fist that connects with the side of my temple.
The glimmer connection severs and the man crumples to the ground before dragging himself arm over arm in the opposite direction. Another blow jabs me in the stomach, and then I’m hitting the sand, vaulting onto my feet to face the woman. She’s holding a knife in one hand, her face coldly furious. She’s no novice.
She lunges toward me with the knife, dropping into a crouch and slashing at my waist. I lean backward nearly parallel to the ground and the blade manages only to cut through my clothes. Shaking my head to clear it of the disorientation from detaching the glimmer, I raise my hands in the air, calling her forward. My brain still feels cloudy, and she jumps in once more, slashing wildly as if to take advantage of my confusion. She’s fast and well trained.
A hot welt braises my upper arm and I feel blood pour down. That strike was aimed at my neck but I spun counterclockwise at the last moment, deflecting it with my arm. The woman is backing away, staring at the glittery fluid on the blade of her knife.
“What are you?”
“Oh, so now you want to know?” I say casually, slapping my palm over the gash and applying pressure to stop the bleeding. “What do you think I am?”
She lifts the blade to her nose and sniffs in the darkness. “This isn’t blood.”
“No, it’s not,” I say. “Why are you spying on me?” The woman eyes me warily, her gaze dipping to the knife and back to me, then narrowing. She’s smart enough to know that I’m not human but she’s cautious, too. She’s been a soldier for far too long. She doesn’t have to answer but she does, still studying me.
“Standard surveillance operation.”
“With tranquilizer guns? Really? What do you think you’re surveying? Wild animals?”
“Looks like it.” She raises her eyebrows. I have to admire this woman’s gumption—she doesn’t back down, that’s for sure.
“She’s just like me, you know,” I tell her. “Your employer? Worse, probably. And you’re dabbling in things you have no idea about. Do you even know who I am?”
She shrugs. “I work for hire. If the money’s good, I don’t ask questions. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a royal of Europe. Political espionage happens every day. You’re just the mark today.”
I glare at her. “You think I’m European? You just saw my blood on your knife, glowing an unnatural shade of the northern lights, and you think I’m a mark from Europe?” I want to laugh so badly, I can’t even control myself. I snort loudly. “Look again. And remember your colleague. His brain didn’t exactly collapse by itself, did it?”
Her eyes harden in the space of a breath. She shifts the knife from one hand to the other. “Whatever you are, you still bleed. So you can still die.”
Our stalemate is over. We circle each other like two predators, but I’m growing tired of the game. I don’t want to fight or to extend this pretense that she’s a match for me. With a vicious push of my glimmer, I force her to drop the knife. She glances at me incredulously, but I don’t stop. I force her to her knees. Strangely enough, she’s harder to control than the previous guy, but she’s had a lot of torture resistance training, probably from her days in the military.
“How many of you are there?”
She sets her jaw. I squeeze harder and watch her eyes dilate. “Forty,” she says under duress.
“Where?”
“Everywhere. At your home, at your school. Everywhere you go, we follow.”
“Why?” I ask, wondering if Echlios knew of these spies.
“She wants to know where you are at all times. And who your friends are.” Alarm swirls in my stomach. Jenna would be the first person on her radar. I grit my teeth—everyone’s at risk.
“Who are the others?” But my question is too vague—and she won’t give me names. She’ll make me kill her before she does. I need to ask her nonthreatening questions that I can somehow put together for myself. “Do I know any of you? Are any of you in my circle of friends?”
The smile titling the corners of her lips is faint but chilling. She repeats her earlier words. “We are everywhere.” Which means Ehmora has spies on the inside. I shudder at the thought. It could be anyone, people I trust, people I see every day.
“Where is my mother?” I ask urgently. At her blank look, I rephrase the question. “The other woman. Where is she being held?” I see a flicker of something in the woman’s eyes but still, she resists, pressing her lips shut. I push hard, closing the glimmer around her mind like a net. Tiny blood vessels in her eyes are bursting red already from the pressure. In seconds I’ll be down to yes or no answers. “Is she in San Diego?”
“Yes,” she spits out, froth flecking the corners of her mouth.
“La Jolla?”
“No.”
Time is running out. The woman’s eyes have started rolling back in her head, but I can’t stop myself. I have to know more, whatever she is hiding. My frustration makes me desperate. I shape the glimmer into sharp points and press into her body. She screams and falls to her stomach in the sand, her torso twisting into an ugly concave arch.
“Where is she?” I hiss. I’m in front of her now, so close that I can smell the fear of death clothing her skin. I don’t care. Grabbing her convulsing shoulders, I pull her to face me in a rage-induced fog. “Tell me. Tell me now!”
“Nerissa!” someone shouts. “Stop. You’re killing her!”
Rough hands rip me away from the woman, and the fog in my head clears as my glimmer slams back to me with a jolt. Deprived of my prize, the beast in me gnashes its teeth and my eyes focus on the owner of the voice.
Speio.
I scowl ferociously at him as the clouds above us thicken to make the night even blacker than it is, blocking out the moon completely.
“We both know how well I respond to orders,” he says. “And I couldn’t let you kill her. Her blood would be on your hands.”
A cold sense of reason seeps into me as thunder crashes above, responding to the call of my rattled emotions. Lightning splits the clouds, and the seas rise to meet the sky. “It’s not like our people haven’t killed humans before. And they want to kill us. They’re all working for her. Her blood means nothing,” I spit.
“Riss, this is what she wants. She needs to get under your skin to make you respond differently than your father taught you...with anger and rage, and without compassion. This isn’t you. You know it’s not.” He glances at the woman lying on the sand, her chest rising and falling in faint motions. “Killing her would push you over the edge. You know that. You’re too smart not to know that.”
I fall to my knees, touching my head to the sand and feeling the first drops of rain pounding into my back. “You’re wrong,” I say bitterly. “Compassion? I wouldn’t know the meaning of the word. I didn’t do anything. All I did was run away like a spoiled little brat. And when my father told me to stay away, it was what I wanted, even though I knew deep down it was the cowardly thing to do.”
Speio kneels next to me but he doesn’t touch me. “I know you feel like it’s all on you, Riss. But it’s not. You obeyed your father’s last wishes. What happened after that is not your fault.”
“But my mother—”
“You thought she was dead. You had nothing to do with how and when she was taken.”
“I could have helped her,” I argue weakly.
“How? She was gone. Your father didn’t tell you for a reason, Nerissa. Maybe he didn’t want to hurt you.”
“Why?”
“Need makes us do dark things,” he says with a cryptic twist of his mouth, and then swallows hard. “We will find your mother, but you can’t keep doing this to yourself. And you can’t do it alone. You have to trust someone.”
“Who, Speio?” I say, turning to face him. “Who can I trust? Ehmora has spies everywhere, even among our friends. We can’t trust anyone.”
“You can trust me,” he says. “And Echlios, and Soren. We want what you want. To return home with you as the queen. Now, let’s go back to the house.” Speio helps me stand, not that I need the help, but I like the gesture. He’s not usually this gracious. The rain eases and stops, and the clouds separate to reveal a portion of the round white moon.
“What about her?” I ask as we walk past the woman that I’d nearly killed.
“I’ll take care of it,” he says, stooping down to check her pulse. I’m so focused on not staring at the woman’s near-motionless body that I don’t see the movement at first. All I sense is a blur of something barreling toward me.
Something huge, and powerful, and angry.
Curled thorns ring outward from its head, and its face is elongated into a ridged, fang-filled snout. Thick muscular arms bend downward into finned claws. The lower half of its body is still fully human, adding to its hideous mongrel appearance.
It’s not human. It’s something else.
The creature leaps over the woman and Speio, slashing out with a paddle-size talon to swipe first at his accomplice and then at Speio, knocking him senseless. The monster man clicks and pulses in my native tongue, and in the split second before impact, I recognize the second spy from earlier. So my glimmer hadn’t killed him! Because he isn’t even human. Shock stuns me into immobility. At the last moment, I dive and roll out of the way, sensing something oddly familiar. Yet not at the same time.
He’s Aquarathi.
But that’s impossible. Our laws compel him to reveal himself to me, but I sensed him as only human. I’m unprepared for the man’s counterattack as his blow catches me in the side of the head, and I’m staggering backward. Hot fluid drips into my eyes and stars hover in my vision. Disoriented, I fall onto my hands, my mind reeling with doubt and question after question.
How is he able to survive? Or to transform? Or to not pledge obeisance to me, the living heir? Water sees water, doesn’t it?
The creature advances and is nearly on top of me. “I am your queen, stand down,” I command him. His eyes burn a putrid shade of yellow as his jaws open and unhinge with a series of furious clicks. His breath is fetid. I know he won’t kill me—Ehmora needs me alive, after all—but I know contact is going to hurt like hell.
I brace myself.
The creature’s bulk falls against me, his body shuddering as the smell of burning flesh fills the air with sparks flying all around us. Belatedly, I realize that he isn’t moving, and I shove him away, confused and relieved. Speio must have taken him out.
“Speio? What’d you do?”
“No, it’s not Speio, it’s me,” says a female voice. I blink twice just to make sure that what I see is real. Jenna is there like an avenging angel, holding a smoking device in her hand. “I Taser-gunned his ass.”
“Didn’t I tell you to go home?” I say, dazed.
“Yeah, I did go home. To get this.” She taps the Taser gun in her other hand like a baseball bat. “Water and electricity don’t exactly mix. And I’ve always got your back, no matter who or what comes after it.” I’m still shaking my head in complete awed disbelief at her courage when Speio teeters over to us.
“What the hell was that?” he asks, rubbing his head.
“One of us.”
His eyes widen. “But he should have revealed himself to you.”
“I know. And he didn’t. I only felt him as human. We have to talk to Echlios.” We glance down at the man-creature that has slowly reverted to his full human form. “We need to take him with us. The woman, too.”
“She’s dead. He killed her,” Speio says.
“Why would he do that?” Jenna blurts out.
“To shut her up? She was human, easy for us to break down,” Speio says, barely looking at her. “They must be hiding something big to take out their own people. Any idea where they came from? Did he look familiar to you at all?” I shake my head, thinking hard. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anything that looks like him.
“What did he say to you?” Jenna asks me hesitantly. “He spoke in your language, right? I recognized it from the last time at your house.” I lock eyes with Speio, who even after Jenna has saved both of our hides shakes his head. He still doesn’t trust her.
But I do. She’s earned it.
“He called me the false queen.”
16
THE LAW OF NATURAL SELECTION
Echlios’s face is impassive as he studies the withered carcass. The wires from the Taser gun are still connected to the man’s back, the areas around both entry points on his upper hip blackened and charred. The man’s entire body looks like it has been drained of every drop of water.
“Is he dead?” I ask.
Echlios glances at me, then Jenna. “I’m not sure.” He removes the sturdy pieces of metal gently from the thing’s back, but still chunks of flesh flake away from the prods. Brittle remnants of hip bone are visible underneath.
I feel bile rising in my throat and look away. Jenna is still holding the Taser gun, her face as colorless as mine must be. “How’d you know that would work?” I say quietly, sipping some water out of a bottle.
“Salt,” Jenna says. Her voice trembles a little, something she’s trying valiantly to hide, but it’s obvious that she’s more than a little shaken up. “It’s the mineral in water that acts as the conductor for electricity. You have a lot of it so...” She trails off.
“Aren’t Taser guns supposed to be nonlethal?” Speio remarks in a prickly voice, glaring at Jenna as if she didn’t just save his life.
“They are,” she returns, obviously gl
ad to focus on anything but the charred body beside us. “I modified the voltage and the metal conductors. They’re silver.” She shoots him a grim smile. “Turns out, not just for werewolves.”
“Werewolves don’t exist,” he says sourly.
“But you do.”
“Why?” I say, interrupting their heated exchange. “What made you modify it, Jenna?”
She stares at the ground, gripping the Taser gun close to her. She pauses, considering her words carefully. “After that night, when you told me what you were, I was scared. I didn’t think you would hurt me, but others—” she breaks off, her gaze flying to Speio, who flushes red “—may not have been so inclined. I wanted...protection.”
“Did you say something to her?” I ask Speio, not missing his guilty look.
“He didn’t have to,” Jenna says. “Everything between us changed after that day. Like he couldn’t even look at me. It made me nervous...and I guess I just wanted to be prepared. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I say, standing and gesturing for her to follow me out to the patio. “I would have done the same thing if a friend of mine went all weird for no reason.” Glaring at Speio over my shoulder, I nod at the weapon in her hands. “Well, you probably saved both of us tonight with it, so I can’t say anything but thanks. Where’d you learn to modify a Taser gun, anyway?”
“YouTube,” Jenna says, more color coming back to her face from the fresh air. “You’d be amazed at the stuff on there. There was even a video on how to turn a Taser gun into a teleporting device.” She laughs thinly. “Yeah, if you want to teleport to deep-fried city.” She stares at the device, hefting it. “I didn’t even know if it would work. I wasn’t even thinking when I shot it, but I’m lucky it went into the human part of him.”
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