by Skye Malone
I looked to Zeke. I hadn’t heard that the Sylphaen had grabbed him. Or that those girls…
My stomach turned. I pushed the thought away.
“They told me they planned to give her a drug,” Zeke continued. “Some messed-up form of neiphiandine that they needed her to have for their ‘ritual’. And when I saw her next, they had.”
Ren grimaced. “There is still no proof that she was a victim of any–”
“How about the fact that the first time they tried to catch her, they put her in the hospital with so much head trauma, her human friends thought she would die? Or the fact that drug nearly killed her before she could change fully? Though I’m sure that was all just part of her master plan.”
I swallowed. I knew the hospital had been bad. And I knew it’d hurt when I changed – a lot. I hadn’t known what any of it looked like from the outside, though.
“She does strange things to the water when she touches it, Father.”
My brow furrowed.
“And she’s lived on land her whole life,” Zeke continued. “Hundreds of miles from the ocean, and she’s never once changed until this week.” He paused. “I’m just trying to do the right thing here. Something insane is going on and I don’t want more people getting hurt from it.”
The king regarded him for a moment, and then his gaze turned to me. I tried not to fidget uncomfortably.
His dark blue eyes seemed to look right through me, and I had no idea what he saw.
“What is your name, child?” he asked.
“Chloe.”
“And what is it you want here, Chloe?”
My brow twitched down. “I want this drug gone so I can go home.”
“Where is home?”
I paused. The answer wasn’t Reidsburg. Not really. I didn’t even know what the truth was anymore.
But anything else would make Zeke look bad.
“I live in Kansas,” I said.
Ren looked away, clearly exasperated. “She’s lying.”
“I grew up there.”
“No one could live that far–”
“That is enough,” the king interrupted. He studied me briefly, and then glanced to his other son. “Niall? What of your opinion?”
Niall hesitated. “I didn’t see any Sylphaen,” he allowed, “but I saw what happened when she changed. Zeke’s right. That wasn’t normal. It almost killed her.”
I shivered.
“This could still be–” Ren started.
His father turned to him, and he fell silent.
“Where did these Sylphaen take you?” the king asked Zeke.
“A cave, north of Anelia by a few hundred miles, and about an hour west of the Lirian relay station.”
The king nodded. He glanced to the gray-haired dehaian still waiting in the corner. “Keep her under guard.”
Zeke made an angry sound.
“And put her in a room within the palace,” his dad continued over the noise. “Have the royal physicians examine her.”
He looked back at Zeke while the older dehaian motioned to a guard, who swam from the room.
“Thank you, Father,” Zeke managed.
“You send soldiers to each border,” the king told Ren, “with orders to search out any evidence that the Sylphaen have returned. Send others to locate this cave.”
Ren’s mouth tightened. “They are needed here, Father. The Vetorian mercenaries have–”
“Did you not hear my order, Captain of the Guard?” the king asked with a raised eyebrow.
Ren hesitated, and then grudgingly bowed his head. “I did, sire.”
For a moment, the king regarded his sons, and then his blue gaze moved on to me.
“Unchain her,” he ordered.
A guard came up. A key clacked inside the lock. The shackles dropped from my forearms.
I let out a breath in relief.
“Very well then, my dear,” the king said. “Enjoy your stay at our home. For your sake, I hope you are not found to be a liar.”
I swallowed nervously. One of the guards pressed his hand to the doorframe, turning the plants back to loosely flowing leaves, and then he and several others accompanied the king from the room. Without a word, Ren turned and left by the opposite door.
The gray-haired dehaian motioned to the open door. “This way,” he intoned.
I glanced to Zeke when neither he nor Niall moved.
Closing his eyes, Zeke shook his head.
“Could’ve gone worse,” Niall offered.
Zeke eyed him briefly and then looked to me, worry creeping into his gaze. “You okay?”
I nodded.
He released a breath, which degenerated into a scoff at the end. “Welcome to Nyciena,” he said as he swam for the door.
Chapter Five
Zeke
Pushing past the fejeria in the doorway, I headed into the hall. Chloe and Niall followed me, with four of the palace guards coming behind.
I couldn’t believe how my family was treating her.
Sure, I’d known Ren was uptight. Caught up in how things looked and what people thought because someday he’d take the throne. In matters of what was proper behavior for the rest of us, he was more Dad than Dad – something he seemed to take pride in.
But what he’d done to Chloe…
We didn’t react like that. Shackles and gags and armed guards. We didn’t do those things. Not to strangers. Not to girls who’d just shown up in our waters. Not to anyone but dehaians we knew were our enemies.
No matter what Ren thought of me – and I knew what he thought wasn’t exactly glowing, not that I cared – we did not treat people like that.
I exhaled slowly, working to calm down as I followed Orvien and attempted to ignore the guards. The old chamberlain swam through the hall, never looking back while he led us toward the opposite end of the palace from the royal family’s rooms.
I fought to keep from scowling.
Even at the far side of the palace, she’d have these guards on her. As much as Dad’s decision to keep her under watch like a criminal angered me, I could admit it would probably make her safer too. And whether Ren liked it or not, Dad had ordered the guard to look for the Sylphaen, which might mean those lunatics would be too busy hiding to go after her again.
Hopefully, anyway.
“So, um…”
At Chloe’s hesitant words, I glanced back. Her green eyes wide, she stared around as she trailed us through the long hallway.
I cursed myself for getting distracted. She was under enough stress with the way my family was behaving, and the palace wasn’t close to anything she might have seen on land. Through the chandelier-lit water, the ceiling was a blue-gray blur over a hundred stories up. Arches on the stone walls opened onto other levels above us, and servants shot across the empty space between them. Gold and gems lined the archways and glittered in the light, while the polished stone of the walls reflected their shine. Schools of multicolored fish drifted among it all, protected from the pressure of the water’s depth by the magic surrounding the city.
It had to seem bizarre.
She pulled her gaze from the palace to turn it on me. “You’re a prince?” she asked, looking between me and Niall. “You’re both…”
I hesitated. I hadn’t said anything because there honestly hadn’t been time. And because the question of what she was, why a bunch of psychos were after her, and how she managed to electrocute the water by touching it had all seemed far more important than the fact that, by virtue of being eight whole minutes older than Ina, I was third in line to a throne.
Though from Chloe’s expression, she clearly wouldn’t have agreed with me.
“Yeah,” Niall supplied.
A breath left her. “Why didn’t you mention that?” she asked, looking mostly to me.
I tried not to wince.
“What were you even doing in Santa Lucina?” she persisted. “Shou
ldn’t you have had, like, bodyguards or a retinue or whatever? At first, I mean. Back when–”
“Your majesties,” a pair of servants murmured as they moved past us in the opposite direction.
Chloe’s brow climbed.
“Santa Lucina is our territory,” I explained, “so it’s safe. Normally, anyway.”
“Your territory.”
I glanced to Niall, hoping for some help.
“Part of the Yvarian State,” he clarified. “Like most of the western coastline of North America. Any dehaians who aren’t Dad’s subjects have to receive permission to cross our borders and travel there.”
She stared at him for a heartbeat. “O-okay. But… still. You’re…”
I was really having trouble not wincing at how taken back she looked.
“Dad usually would insist we bring a couple guards with us, yeah,” Niall admitted. “For appearance’s sake, if nothing else. But Ina – that’s his twin sister,” he added with a nod to me, “–she likes to sneak out and party with the humans. Dad hates it when she does that, but if he sent guards, she’d just take off. Zeke’s the only one she doesn’t avoid till she decides to go home. And like Zeke said: usually, Santa Lucina is safe.”
Chloe looked between us again, as though still attempting to get the whole situation to sink in.
“It’s not that big a deal,” I tried.
A half dozen dehaians bowed when we swam by.
Her gaze tracked them and then returned to me, wide-eyed.
I glanced to Orvien, willing him to swim faster to reach whatever room he’d decided she should have.
At a stately pace that would have seemed slow to a snail, the old man headed upward till he reached an archway on the thirty-fifth floor. Silently, we followed while he continued down the twisting corridor beyond the arch, stopping finally at a door partway along the stone hall.
“Your majesties,” he intoned, bowing to us and then motioning to the fejeria.
Two of the guards took up positions by the door, while the other two swam inside.
Restraining a sigh, I pushed past the swaying green plants, and then noted with relief that out of the many rooms in the palace, Orvien at least hadn’t put her in one of the spaces reserved for visitors we didn’t want to have. Those barely qualified as closets. Instead, the place was a standard guest room, with polished stone walls about twenty-five feet high and arched windows shielded by tall stands of fejeria. Through the doorway on the far side, a sand-bed waited with blankets of woven seaweed fibers and walls of opalescent glass. Frosted crystal bowls hung from the ceiling in both rooms, the flames inside them flickering brightly.
I looked back. Chloe was eyeing it all as though she didn’t know what to make of the place.
The fejeria rustled and she spun.
“It’s okay,” Niall assured her.
A trio of dehaians came to a stop. “Prince Nialloran. Prince Zekerian,” the oldest of the three said as he and the others bowed to Niall and me in turn. He glanced to Chloe. “Hello, miss. I am Physician Kyne. These are my assistants, Tiro and Dion. I was told you needed to see us?”
Chloe looked to me.
I nodded. “This is Chloe. She’s a friend of ours. Some people injected her with a modified form of neiphiandine and we need you to make sure she’ll be okay.”
“Modified?” Kyne asked.
“It made changing forms excruciating for her.”
He studied Chloe, his gaze taking on a clinical edge. “And how long ago was she injected?”
I glanced back to her.
“Yesterday afternoon,” she answered.
Kyne nodded, the slight wrinkles of his face deepening while he considered the information. “Very well. Miss, if you would join us?”
He motioned to the decorative stone table in the center of the room, and immediately, his assistants moved to place their bags where he’d directed. Chloe hesitated, her face betraying hints of her nervousness, and then she followed.
“What are you going to do?” she asked, watching as Tiro and Dion drew containers from their bags and set them on the table.
“We’re just going to take some blood to start,” Kyne said. He looked to the amber-scaled dehaian behind him. “Dion?”
The young man picked up one of the containers and came up beside her. “If you would hold out your arm?”
She hesitated again, eyeing the jar and Dion alike, before warily raising her arm. With careful motions, he opened the container and then used a pair of pinchers to extract a transparent creature about five inches long.
“This will only hurt a bit,” Kyne told her.
She didn’t take her eyes from the leech. The thing wriggled as Dion lowered it onto her skin.
It bit down. A startled gasp escaped her and I tensed at the sound, but the pain seemed to pass for her almost immediately. She drew a breath and looked back at me, clearly working to stay calm.
I gave her a smile, attempting to appear encouraging. On her arm, blood started to fill the creature’s body, turning it from transparent to deep red.
“Ugh,” Niall murmured.
I glanced to him in agreement.
Dion pulled the creature from her arm and transferred it back to the container. Tiro took it from him and then handed him another jar.
Niall let out a breath as the next leech bit down. “So you going to be alright keeping an eye on her?” he asked me. “I mean, when you’re not just…”
I tossed him a glare, though it died quickly.
His lip twitched, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it either. “Okay, well, I got stuff to take care of and, uh…” He made an uncomfortable noise as the leech was removed and another replaced it. “Right.”
He swam from the room.
“You’re doing well,” Kyne said to Chloe. “Just one more.”
She gave a tense smile, her gaze anywhere but on the thing on her arm. “What are you going to do with these?”
“This will let us test for the differences in the neiphiandine in your system,” Kyne told her. “Ordinarily, neiphiandine would not cause pain. It’s simply a transformation inhibitor, designed to keep dehaians who may be suffering from a serious illness from changing into unsupportable forms while underwater.”
Her brow furrowed.
“Human, dear,” he elaborated while Dion removed the leech and then placed another on her skin. “Or anything close to. Between a full transformation to survive in the depths and our human forms above water, there are numerous variations – several of which would be lethal down here. Neiphiandine pushes the body into the fullest extent of change and then inhibits the ability to alter shape back again, keeping a sick dehaian from harming themselves in their delirium while this far underwater. That said, however, a single dose would never last beyond a day. Two at the most.”
“And this?”
“Hopefully, it will wear off on its own as well, or we can find a treatment. We won’t be certain till we run some tests.”
Dion removed the creature from her arm.
“There we go,” Kyne said.
He looked to me while Dion and Tiro placed the containers back in their bags. “We will let you know what we find.”
“Thank you,” I said.
They swam past me and left the room. By the door, the guards remained.
Chloe didn’t turn around.
“Could you guys wait outside?” I said to the guards.
They hesitated and then disappeared out the door.
Silence settled over the room.
“Are you alright?” I asked her.
She didn’t respond.
I grimaced, feeling like an idiot. She’d been through who-knew-what in the past week, and that was before my oldest brother decided chaining her up with a magical blindfold and shackles was the bright idea of the day.
Of course she wasn’t alright.
“They’re really good at what they do,” I
tried. “I’m sure they’ll find something to help you.”
She nodded.
“And I’m sorry about earlier,” I continued. “Ren and… just all that.”
Her head turned, though she didn’t meet my eyes. “Not your fault.”
“Still.”
A moment passed.
“So what happens now?” she asked softly.
“You stay with us till we figure this out.”
She looked back at me, and I could see the fear she was working to hide.
“They’ll find a solution, Chloe. And in the meantime, we’ll–”
“You told your dad I did strange things to the water?”
I paused.
“Zeke?”
“Yeah,” I allowed.
“What do I do?”
My mouth tightened. She looked so worried, though she was obviously trying not to show it. I didn’t want to make things worse. “It’s nothing. It’s just, whenever you’re–”
The fejeria rustled. I turned to see Ina poke her head into the room.
“Hey there,” she called. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything? Niall said you might be busy.”
Her grin made me want to scowl.
“No,” I retorted. “Of course not. We were just talking.”
“Oh,” Ina drawled, her eyes twinkling.
I glared.
“So is this her?” she continued as she pushed past the fejeria. “I mean,” Ina glanced to Chloe, “you.” She laughed at herself. “Sorry. Rude, yeah? What’s your name?”
“Chloe, yes,” I supplied. I looked back at Chloe. “And this is my sister, Ina.”
With a chuckle, Ina extended a hand. Chloe hesitated, and then shook it.
“Nice to finally meet Zeke’s mystery girl.” Ina’s smile deepened as she looked Chloe up and down, not letting go of her hand. “You’re even prettier than he said.”
Chloe blinked and blushed as she glanced to me.
“Ina…” I growled.
My sister’s smile took on an impish edge. “What?”
“Can we not do this?”
She gave me a mock-disappointed look. “Oh fine,” she surrendered, letting Chloe’s hand go. “So what were you talking about, then?”
