“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 wee
ks. 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
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.
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