Oceanborn

by Amalie Howard

  “Yes,” she says. “And no. In the end, Lo did her a favor, really. She had changed, morphed into someone I could hardly recognize.” Her voice grows nostalgic. “We were so young and idealistic when we met. We wanted to shape the world—be something. Our research would bring us into a new age. But of course, those were dreams. The reality became something far different.”

  “Because of Cano?”

  “Because of many things. People make choices for the greater good, not really knowing what that entails...the sacrifice involved. You, especially.”

  “Me?” I ask, not connecting the dots.

  “Your father did well with you.” She smiles fondly. “Despite the terror that you were.” I glance at her sharply and her smile widens. “Oh, I kept tabs on you and all your antics over the years. Soren,” she adds at my frown.

  “Soren,” I gasp. “You hate Soren.”

  “So it would seem.”

  I ask the question that has been burning a hole in my chest through all the years, through all the loss, through all of it. “Why...did you leave me behind?”

  “I could have taken you with me,” she says. “But a child on the run, in exile? It wasn’t a life I wanted for you. You would have become twisted, as I am.”

  I frown. “Twisted?”

  “The humans. Their energies leach into us, no matter how much we try to stay disconnected. Their desires are so all-consuming that they start to consume you, too.” Her voice fades to next to nothing. “Before you know it, you’re on a path you don’t really want to be on, and you’ve lost everything that ever meant something.”

  “Is that why you’re helping me now?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. “It’s not the only reason.”

  “Then, why?”

  “I once told you we don’t know how to love,” she says, turning to me and grimacing. She clutches her side and groans. The same sour smell from earlier rises on the night air.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m fine.” She holds up a hand in midair. “Let me finish what I started to say. I don’t have much time. We Aquarathi do know love. Only for us, there’s no name for it,” she says. I frown again, confused. She lets her hand flutter downward, toward the side of my face where she tucks my hair behind my ear. I hold my breath at her gentle touch, her fingers lingering on my cheek for half a second. “When you have your own child one day, you will know what it is to love someone with every single drop of water in you. You will learn what it’s like the moment that your heart starts living and beating outside your body.” She closes her eyes and swallows, obviously in some kind of pain. “You are my heart.”

  My mother doesn’t open her eyes after she murmurs those last words, and I am frozen, mute. Her head slumps forward and I scramble to my knees. “Mom?” I say, clutching her shoulders. “What’s going on?”

  Her eyes flutter open, brilliant like mine, her chest heaving with the effort. “Biotoxin. Lethal dose.”

  “Lethal?” I repeat in a disbelieving whisper. “But it can’t hurt us.”

  “Reengineered with sea-snake venom.” She inhales a labored breath. “Prototype. Effective to paralyze in small doses, lethal in larger ones, especially to...Aquarathi.”

  “What? How?”

  “Cano,” she breathes. “Smarter than I thought.”

  “We can get the serum.”

  Her smile is sad. “It’s far too late for that. I destroyed the whole lab and everything in it.” She pauses, swallowing painfully. “I hid some extra vials of serum in my house, but it’s too far.”

  “But you swam here. You managed to get away from him. Why didn’t you get it before you came here?”

  “Didn’t want to risk it. I wanted to get here before...” She heaves a breath into her lungs. “I had a choice—you or...the serum. Couldn’t do both in time.”

  I am reeling. “Let’s go now. We can get there and back.” I jump to my feet, still holding on to her arms.

  “Too...late.” My mother slumps against me, forcing us both back to the sand, the foul smell of the poison rotting her body from the inside out curling around us. “I destroyed the lab, but he will create more. You will be defenseless against it. Go...” A bubble of saliva foams at the corner of her mouth. “To my house...Ehmora’s house. Look for a case...bed wall panel...silver BT9...use it.”

  I form a desperate glimmer and engage Sanctum, forcing my strength into her. “Wait. You can’t go. Not now,” I whisper.

  “Already dying,” she says, her voice a shade stronger, but not much. “Sanctum won’t work, but thank you.” She leans her forehead onto mine, opening herself so that we are connected. Though her body is degenerating faster than she or I can repair it, her glimmer is as powerful as ever. “You are a far worthier queen than I ever was. I am so proud of you, so proud of the leader you have become. There’s so much I want to say to you...so much you need to know...but not enough time.” My mother places her hand against my chest over my heart. She meets my eyes with fierce spirit, a shimmer of what she once was. “This is what I came here for...Aivana, my gift to you.”

  A rush of raw power fills my body as it leaves hers. It’s the only thing that is sustaining her dying body. I gasp against the sheer force of it, filling me like light.

  “What are you doing?” I cry, trying to push her hands away. “No!”

  “My water is yours,” she murmurs, restraining me gently with the last of her fading strength. “You will need it for what’s coming. Keep the hybrid prince near. You need him, too, more than you know.”

  “Wait? What’s coming? Cano?”

  “Worse,” she whispers. “Much worse.”

  “What?” I say, terrified. “Mom, what’s coming?”

  In her final breath, my mother exhales a single word that makes my blood run cold. “Others....”

  23

  Vendetta

  “I’m so sorry, Riss,” Lo is saying. I’ve just finished telling them what had happened on the beach. Lo’s voice comes to me like an echo from somewhere far away, as if he isn’t sitting right in front of me and holding my numb fingers. I nod automatically, my eyes wandering from face to face, the ache in my chest growing deeper by the minute. I’d held my dead mother in my arms, only releasing her back to the ocean when first light crept across the sky. That was where Echlios found me in the earlier hours of the dawn, tortured and weeping, ankle-deep in a thrashing ocean beneath storm-tossed skies.

  I raise burning eyes to Soren. “She said she didn’t hate you.”

  “No, she didn’t,” she agrees softly. “She entrusted you to me.”

  “So what was that all about, that time when I summoned her back on the beach? You were nearly at each other’s throats. I didn’t imagine that.”

  “You didn’t. Your mother changed over the years. When she made me swear a blood oath to protect you with my life, I took—and still take—that oath very seriously. Even if it meant protecting you from her. She didn’t like that.”

  “She respected you for doing it,” I say.

  “Thank you, my queen.”

  “Soren,” I remind her, rubbing my eyes of any remaining sleep. “I’m not a queen anymore, remember?”

  “As you say.”

  I lean back in my chair and cross my arms, watching each of them in turn—my only remaining Aquarathi family. “There’s something else. At the end, before she died, she performed Aivana.”

  Dead silence descends—no one even breathes. Some Aquarathi kings and queens prefer to die with their power. To others, it is lost before it can be given, as had happened with my father. However, it is a power that can never be taken by force—it must be willed to the recipient.

  Just as Neriah willed hers to me.

  I clear my throat. “I have to go to Ehmora’s house to get something
that my mother left,” I say into the void of speechless stares. “In Rancho Santa Fe.”

  “What are the ‘others’ she said are coming?” Carden ventures.

  “We have to assume an army of hybrids that Cano has created in his own image. Meaning tens if not hundreds like him. With Lo’s blood.”

  “Oh.”

  “And he’s concocted a prototype biotoxin that can kill us, which means we have to find him before he can mass-produce it, and kill him first.”

  “How?” Carden stammers, shaken by the unveiled anger in my tone.

  “I summon him.”

  “But he’s a hybrid,” Speio interjects.

  “No,” I clarify. “He’s a human playing God with Aquarathi DNA. Lo’s DNA, to be specific. And I’m hoping that because Lo is bound to me, he will be, as well. And then I’ll kill him.”

  I can see the concerned looks on Soren’s and Echlios’s faces, but I don’t care. I’ve never wanted anyone dead more. Killing Cano will be getting rid of scum that no one will miss. And since I’m no longer a queen, I don’t have to answer to anyone—far less a group of Aquarathi who willingly exiled me.

  I stand. “Are you coming?” I growl to Lo.

  “Yes.”

  “Nerissa—” Echlios begins, and breaks off at the icy glare I turn on him. He sighs. He’s been down this road with me too many times. “Be careful. Take Speio with you.”

  “I think they should go alone,” he mutters. “Less conspicuous.” My eyes flick to his. Since when does Speio not want to jump on the bandwagon? I shrug because he’s right. It will be less noticeable with Lo and me.

  “You okay?” I ask Speio as I walk past him on the way to get my car keys.

  “Yes,” he says, and then opens and shuts his mouth as if he wants to say more and doesn’t.

  I remain mostly silent on the drive up to Rancho Santa Fe, even though I can feel Lo’s occasional glances. When we get to the gated security entrance, Lo shows them his ID and they let us through. Luckily the house is still in his last name and hasn’t yet been sold, though it’s been on the market for months.

  “You know what you’re looking for?” Lo asks me.

  “Where’s the bedroom? Your mother’s?” My mother’s.

  “Up here,” he says.

  I follow Lo up a wide staircase covered in plush carpeting to the master bedroom at the top of the stairs. Everything in the house has been repainted and staged to sell, but I can still feel the remnants of them here in this room. Looking around the elegantly decorated room, I suspect that a lot of the furniture belonged to his mother. And mine.

  I take a shaky breath. “She mentioned a bed panel.”

  Lo nods at the intricate paneling of the bed’s headboard. “That’s the only paneling in this room. There’s got to be a secret alcove behind one of them. Come on, you take that side, and I’ll take this one.”

  Together we press against each of the panels and meet in the middle. There’s one more right at the top of the center of the headboard. That has to be it. I press the smooth wood and it slides inward, revealing a tiny alcove. In it are four cylindrical tubes filled with different-colored liquids as well as a thumb drive on a lanyard.

  “Are those...?” Lo breathes.

  “Biotoxin serums,” I say. “One human, one Aquarathi, and the cure for each. She was clever, stowing these away. She probably guessed that Cano was going to turn on her. Too bad she didn’t have it close by when he did.” I grab hold of the lanyard. “What’s on this do you think?”

  “No idea, but my laptop’s in my car.”

  We leave the house as quietly as we entered it and head back to Lo’s car. With bated breath, we plug in the device and wait as a folder opens up on the laptop. There are two internal folders within the main drive—one marked Cano and the other marked Nerissa. Lo shoots me a questioning look, his fingers hovering over the touchpad on the laptop.

  “Click on the Cano one,” I say, swallowing past the burgeoning lump in my throat. He does, and a list of files pops up.

  Lo scrolls through them, his eyes widening. “Are you seeing this?” he asks incredulously. “Names, addresses, labs, plane tickets, hotels, meetings, you name it, it’s here. About five years’ worth.”

  “She’s been tracking him,” I say slowly as the magnitude of what she’s given us starts to sink in. “Open that one,” I say, pointing to a file marked San Diego. “It’s a map of all his properties. See the X’s?” I jab at the screen. “There’s the Sierra house, the apartment in La Jolla and the ones in Imperial Beach. Two of those are marked in red—I’ll bet anything they’re the ones with the labs.”

  “You know what this means, right?” Lo meets my heated gaze. “With this, we can destroy all of them.”

  “Yeah.” Placing my hand over his on the touchpad, I move the cursor to the file marked Travel and click on it. “He’s been all over the world with a lot of recent trips to New York. Wonder what’s there.”

  “Any maps on New York?”

  I look through the list. “No.”

  “Then it’s probably nothing,” Lo says. I want to say that with Cano there’s always something, but it’s not like I have much else but a gut feeling to go on. Lo glances at me. “You want to see what’s in the other file?”

  The one marked with my name.

  “Sure,” I say, but my voice breaks a bit. Lo opens the file and all I can do is stare, my jaw hanging open. Dated folders going back almost six years are filled with photographs—me here in California, my first day at Dover, pictures with Jenna, playing hockey, sitting on the grass studying, surfing, pictures with Speio and Soren and Lo. I look so happy in all of them, nearly always smiling. One with Lo catches my eye and I blush. I’m sitting in the courtyard at Dover, an open book in my lap, and I’m staring at a boy you can just see at the corner of the photo. The picture is in profile and the look on my face is wistful and filled with longing. The camera somehow managed to catch the faint shimmer of something golden and bioluminescent on my cheek. Of course she knew how I felt about him—she captured it right here in shades of vibrant color.

  “She must have been keeping tabs on you, too,” Lo says, making me jump. I close the file and exit out of the drive in a hurry.

  “Yeah,” I say, but I can hardly get the word out, my throat is so choked. I put the lanyard around my neck and tuck it into my shirt. “Let’s go back to your place. I want to do the summons on the beach, where it’ll be the most powerful.”

  Lo shoots me a look as if he isn’t too sure about the summons, but he just nods. “All right.”

  The drive to Lo’s house in La Jolla seems endless, with the disk drive and all its contents burning a hole in my chest. I can’t stop thinking about the fact that Neriah had watched me for so long. It didn’t even bother me that she’d had someone following me to take the photos. I’m sure that she’d probably gotten some of them, like the ones of me at the pool in our house, from Soren herself. It makes me feel sorry that she’d had a relationship with me through the detached lenses of a camera for so long. If only she had come to me earlier...maybe things could have been different. Or maybe, they’d be the same. I sigh. Martyrizing her won’t make her choices with Ehmora any less real or horrible. Still, I can’t believe how much it hurts.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” I say, and then take a breath. It’s Lo after all. “It’s hard to have something that you’ve always wanted last for five minutes before it’s taken from you. Or to realize that you may have been wrong about someone all along.”

  Lo smile is sympathetic as he pulls into his driveway. “At least you know she was thinking about you.”

  “I guess.”

  We don’t go inside, although we both wave at Grayer and Bertha, Lo’s solemn staff, before walking down to the quiet, semiprivate stretch of beac
h that’s in front of the house. “You sure you want to do this?” Lo asks.

  “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.” I can feel my mother’s energy swirling inside me, merging with mine as I form the summons. I tie it in to the glimmer I felt from Cano the day before and release it over the ocean. I have no idea if it’s going to work—whether he’ll be bound to obey via Lo’s blood—but at least it’s something.

  “What now?” Lo says, watching me.

  “We wait.”

  We sit on the sand, facing the ocean. Lo slips his hand into mine, rubbing his thumb in slow circles on my palm. He can tell that I’m on edge but knows me enough to leave well alone. I’ll talk when I’m ready. And there’s no way I’m ready right now. It’s as if I’m holding myself together by the thinnest thread, and the minute I release it, I’ll break. I’d rather save that for Cano. I remain silent.

  “Can you do me a favor?” I ask Lo after a while.

  “Anything.”

  I remove the lanyard from my neck. “Can you email the file on Cano to Echlios? Just in case Cano doesn’t show? At least, we’ll have a backup plan. He’ll be able to send his men to scout these locations and we can find him that way.”

  “You’ll be all right?” he says, taking the thumb drive from me. His back is to the sun and his face is shaded, but I can feel his worry.

  “Yes.”

  “What if Cano shows up?”

  I stare at him with a wry smile. “Trust me, you’ll know it.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Lo says, dropping a quick kiss on my head.

  I watch him over my shoulder as he jogs back to the house and disappears inside. The truth is, I don’t know if Cano will come—it’s a long shot at best to think that the summons will work.

  But I want him to come.

  I want him to show up and face me one-on-one. I want to feel his bones shattering beneath my claws, feel the final push of his heart as he draws his last dying breaths. I want him to pay for what he did to my mother...for what he did to Lo, and to me. The sky turns brittle and dark, thick clouds rolling in from the sheer visceral force of my thoughts.