“Let me guess,” Lo says to a dazed Cano, who is struggling to stand, and wipes his hands on his pants before stepping over the glass window. “He was your best guy?”
Cano stares from me to Lo, his eyes widening. He throws his hands into the air in a gesture of surrender as Lo moves to stand by my side. “I accept your offer.”
“My offer was rescinded when you tried to kill me,” I say coldly.
Cano grins, cocking his head to the side. “You know nothing about anything, do you, foolish child. About what’s coming. You need me.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Cano. No one needs you. Finish what you started. Finish your battles or run like the coward you are.”
His mouth curls at the insult and the challenge. If looks could kill, I’d be a pile of smoldering ash, but I hold my ground.
“If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s to survive,” he screams. Cano’s eyes narrow to slits and he charges me.
With a deep breath, I let him get close, so close that I can smell his fetid breath, before easing the two silver syringes out of Lo’s back pocket. Time slows as I gather my strength to duck and roll beneath Cano, twisting to plunge the two syringes simultaneously into the back of his neck.
“Survive that, douche bag,” I say, crouching on the floor and watching as his body crumples and starts convulsing.
“What’d you do?” Cano mumbles.
“Gave you a taste of your own medicine. You did say it was your best work, so I wanted to make sure you sampled both—one for the human side of you and one for anything that thinks it’s Aquarathi.” I lean down with a whisper. “My mother sends her regards.”
Cano’s body goes rigid as the toxins make their way simultaneously to his heart. He stares at me. His mouth opens as if he wants to say something more but can’t, and then he falls backward, grabbing at his chest.
“Now he’s dead,” I say to Jenna.
She just looks at me and shakes her head. “And you worry about me with one grenade.”
Outside, the scene is just as bloody as the one inside the room, with half-strewn hybrid bodies littering the grass and the nearby rocks. Echlios, Speio and Doras are standing like victorious gladiators in the middle of an arena, with triumphant grins plastered on their faces. Ten-to-one odds are nothing to them. Cano would have been better off sending three hundred hybrids instead of thirty.
“Good workout?” I call out.
Echlios grins and embraces me in a fierce one-armed hug. “Good to see you, my lady. Everything okay in there?” He nods toward the bunker.
“All good. Let’s go home.”
Echlios nods to Doras before helping me onto the docked boat. Doras, Erathion and Mae will stay behind to clean up and make sure that all evidence of any alien remains has been removed and destroyed. Despite technically being in Mexican territory, we encounter no issues, but that could be due to the rain and thick fog that has come out of nowhere...a manifestation of my panic, perhaps. Nonetheless, the trip back to La Jolla on the Marine Center’s boat is quick. We dock it on the pier near our house. One of the men will return it in the morning—Kevin won’t mind.
Soren is waiting as we walk up to the house, her eyes flooding with tears as I fall into her arms. “What am I going to do with you?” she murmurs against my hair. “Running off by yourself like that again. Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” I assure her. “A little worse for wear. The boys and Jenna saved the day.”
“Cano?”
“Gone, for good this time. Let’s just say he got his just deserts.”
“So it’s over?”
I smile. “I think so.” I glance at Jenna with a smirk. “Although someone needs to have a chat to Jenna about teenagers using grenades.”
“She did what?” Soren yells.
Echlios and Speio both back out of the room, leaving poor Lo to stand defenseless to brave Soren’s wrath. I start laughing at the bewildered expression on his face, so hard that my stomach hurts, and then I’m crying, the tears falling out of me like a waterfall. It must be post-traumatic stress or something. I sink to my knees, my face in my hands, sobbing. Soren gathers me into her body, rocking me as if I’m a small child.
“It’s over, my darling,” she soothes me. “Just let it out.”
“I don’t understand,” I sob. “I feel so out of control, like everything inside me is bursting into a million pieces.”
“You’ve been through a lot in the last few days. It’s natural.”
“Not for me. I’m Aquarathi.”
Soren brushes my hair gently. “One who is bonded to a hybrid prince. Human emotion isn’t weakness, it’s a gift. Treat it as such. To know love, you must know pain, and vice versa.”
“It hurts too much.”
“Tomorrow, things will be easier.”
I raised drenched eyes to hers. “Will they?”
“Yes, I promise. Now, come on. Let’s get you out of these clothes and into the shower. You’ll feel better.”
Soren’s right. A shower will help. I feel as if I still have Cano’s grime all over me, with the phantom remnants of his biotoxin crawling under my skin. In my bathroom, I turn the water on to as hot a setting as I can manage and scrub my human skin until it’s pink and raw. I stay in the water so long that the pads on my fingers turn wrinkled and pruney, but I can’t bring myself to get out.
My mind is racing. Everything is still so surreal—the fact that Cano is dead and the fact that there’s no army of hybrids trying to kill me—that I can’t quite get my mind around it. A part of me feels like I’ll blink and wake up from a dream. But then I feel Neriah’s power inside me and I know it’s not a dream because she’s dead, too. Sitting on the floor of my tub, I rock back and forth, letting the scalding hot water fall on top of my shoulders, and I cry for all the ones we lost or left behind. Most of all, I cry for the mother I’ve never known and for the mother she tried to be, right there at the end.
A knock on the door startles me. It’s Lo. As I meet his liquid gaze, something in me settles. A calm floods my entire body as I feel his energy—and his love—flowing into me, and my sorrow recedes like an outgoing tide. I’m still sad but no longer hopeless. In that moment, I know that no matter what—no matter how broken I may feel—Lo will always be there to help piece me back together and to bring me back to him.
26
The Art of War
After the past few weeks, school is unexciting, which is fine by me. I’ll take seven scintillating periods of structured teenage education, where lunch is the epitome of excitement, over rogue hybrids on the loose any day. We’re back to pretending that we are regular kids who go to high school. Now that we don’t have to return to Waterfell, we’re going to stick around in La Jolla for Speio and me to finish our senior year.
Lo is recovering, albeit slowly. Although the serum stopped the effects of the biotoxin Cano engineered, it did too much damage for all the effects to be reversed. Although Echlios assures me that Lo’s Aquarathi side will repair the damaged cells, there’s no guarantee that Lo will ever be able to regain all of his memories. He still has gaps—areas that are shades of gray for him. But we’re working on it together...work that he assures me is necessary to his complete recovery. I fail to see how extended make-out sessions help repair broken neurons, but I’m not complaining.
There’s also been talk of starting another colony—a colony of exiles—somewhere in the South Pacific, maybe the Tonga Trench north of New Zealand. I’m pretty sure that if we decide to do that, no one in Waterfell will care. It wouldn’t be home, but it’d be something.
Speio pointed out that he’d be surprised if other exiles hadn’t done that already. “You could be the Exile Queen,” he said.
“Awesome, every girl’s dream,” I said. “Queen of the outcasts.”
>
“Well, it’s like the alpha wolves. If there are two of them, you make another pack. It’s werewolf law.”
I stared at him in disbelief, torn between giggling and wondering if he was being serious. “Where’d you learn that?”
“Sawyer told me,” he said. “It’s from Teen Wolf.”
Grinning, I shook my head. “Great, now we’re taking living advice from Sawyer and an MTV show.”
Jenna nearly died laughing when I told her what Speio had said. In his defense though, it isn’t that far off from what we’re probably going to do. I stash my books in my locker and head to the parking lot, instead of the cafeteria, where I’m meeting the others. We’re going to try to get in one more surf session before finals. Oh, and we’re totally ditching school to do it. Epic surf, Sawyer was saying.
I jam into the front seat of Lo’s truck between Cara and Carden on one side and Lo on the other. They seem to have hit it off, despite the one-year age difference. Carden’s technically enrolled as a transferring junior, but Cara doesn’t care. She’s already the envy of every female with a pulse at Dover.
“Seriously, why does every boy I’m ever interested in love to surf?”
I bite my tongue to keep from telling her that maybe she should try falling for human boys instead. “Um, ’cause we live in Southern California?” I say instead. “Anyway, we’ve got a foam board for you and Carden’s an excellent teacher.”
Carden grins. “She gets a kiss every time she pops up.”
“Eww, TMI,” I yell just as Cara throws her arms around him and kisses him right there. I elbow Lo. “Let’s go already before I start puking.”
“Aw, they’re cute as buttons,” Lo says.
“Just drive,” I tell him. I twist around to see that Sawyer and Jenna in his Jeep are right behind us, but I notice there’s no sign of Speio. “Isn’t Speio supposed to be riding with those guys? Did anyone tell him what time we were leaving? I haven’t seen him since English first period.”
Technically, I haven’t seen Speio all day and night. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen him for a couple of days at home, even though I’ve seen his face in school. He must have spent the last couple nights at Rian’s.
“I talked to him,” Lo says, pulling out of the lot. “He said he can’t make it.”
Surprised, I stare at Lo. “Since when is Speio not up for ditching school to surf?”
“I don’t know. He was with Rian, and she looked pissed.” Lo frowns. “They must have been having an argument, because Speio looked miserable, come to think of it. So when he said no, I kind of backed off, even though I was totally thinking it wasn’t like him to slack off his warden duties.” He shrugs. “I mean, where you go, he goes.”
“Maybe it’s different now, with everything being—” I glance over at Cara, but she’s not even on this planet right now “—resolved.” I pull out my brand-new cell phone. “I’ll text him.”
I try texting and calling Speio, but both calls go to voicemail and he doesn’t answer my texts. He’s probably with Rian, and the last thing I want to do is get caught in the middle of the two of them. I’ll try again later.
The waves at Trestles are indeed everything and more that Sawyer predicted they would be—beautifully shaped, overhead perfect sets coming in in groups of four. With ecstatic shrieks, we pull on our wet suits and run down to the beach, boards in hand.
“See you later, suckers!” Sawyer yells, hopping over the white water and paddling out.
“That’s my boyfriend.” Jenna sighs. “Waits for no one, not even me. Surfing will always be the other woman in our relationship.”
“What do you need a boy for?” I ask her. “To hold your hand? Come on, let’s show these boys what we girls are made of!” Jenna’s a capable surfer, although nowhere near Sawyer’s league, but that doesn’t mean she can’t hold her own out there. She grins and follows me into the water.
When we reach the lineup, both Sawyer and Lo have already caught waves. Jenna and I sit on our boards for a minute. I trail my hands in the water, and stare at Cara and Carden on the beach. He’s trying to teach her how to pop up on the board while it’s still on the sand, but they seem like they’re enjoying fooling around more than mastering surfing technique.
“They make a cute couple,” Jenna says, following my stare. “Although she’s more of an alien than he is.”
I laugh at her droll expression. “Cara’s okay.”
“Yeah, she is,” Jenna says quietly. “Out of everything that has happened this year, I think that’s the craziest. Who would ever have thought that you two could be friends again?” She grins at me. “I guess what they say is true.”
“What’s that?”
“That hot boys and kissing can fix almost everything.”
“Who says that?” I ask, giggling.
“Sawyer. He’s a master of the haiku, that one.” Jenna and I exchange a look and crack up.
“So, you ready to take on these monster waves?” I ask.
“You bet.”
We paddle for the same wave together, but I let Jenna take it. I’ll get the next one. Lying back on my board with the sun on my back and salt on my lips, I have to admit that getting back into the ocean feels great. And now that everyone’s safe, it’s even better. Watching my friends surf, I feel a sense of peace. As much as I miss Waterfell, spending today on the beach with them is the best feeling in the world, and worth so much more than any crown.
“Hey, babe,” Lo says, padding alongside me and placing a wet kiss on my mouth. “Mmm, you taste like French fries. So, you going to float out here all day or what? Or you need me to school you some?” Grinning mischievously, he knows exactly what to say to get a rise out of me.
“The only person who’ll need schooling is you, surfer boy,” I say, paddling furiously past him. “Last one in is a rotten egg.”
“You didn’t say go. That’s cheating!” I hear him say behind me, but I laugh and paddle hard.
I catch the wave easily, feeling the wind in my hair and the spray of water on my face. As I twist my hips, the board rips backward in a sharp cutback before gliding down the clear face of the wave. I trail my hands along the face and smile. A few cutbacks later, I see Lo hot on my heels, angling his board to dart past me. I have no idea how he managed to catch my wave. With a wicked grin, I summon my power and swell the wave beneath my board, gaining enough momentum for it to push me into shore.
“I win!” I yell as I streak past him.
Lo jumps off his board and tackles me so that we both fall into the knee-high surf. “Cheater,” he says before kissing me senseless. Good thing we can both breathe underwater or else we’d have a situation.
“Stop,” I tell him. “People are going to think we’re drowning or something.”
“Which people?” he says, trailing wet kisses down my neck. “All the others are halfway down the beach.”
“Those people,” I say, nodding to a group walking down the sand toward us. I blink. “Wait a second, that’s Speio.” I squint through the water in my eyes. “Who’s he with?”
“Looks like Rian.” Lo’s eyes narrow. “Wait a sec, is that Madame Dumois? From French class?”
Speio looks miserable as he approaches us. “Can I talk to you?”
“Sure.” Unleashing my board, I lay it on the sand and follow him a few steps away. “What’s up?” I toss an eye over my shoulder. “And what’s with Dumois? You’re not getting expelled or anything, are you?”
“No.” He looks at me, his eyes beseeching. “Nerissa, I want you to know that I didn’t mean for this to happen. I didn’t know, I swear to you.”
“Swear what, Speio?” I say. Instead of answering, he stares at the sand as if he can’t quite meet my eyes. “Spey, what’s going on?”
“I’ve bonded with someone,�
�� he blurts out.
That’s what he’s getting all bent out of shape about? “That’s awesome! Who is it?” I shriek, grinning. “When? Why didn’t you say anything? I’m so happy for you. That’s great news!”
“No. No, it’s not.”
The deadness in his voice makes me pause, the rest of his words sinking in along with a feeling that something doesn’t make sense. Why would he be here with Rian and Dumois of all people to tell me that he’s finally bonded? And why would he tell me here of all places? My eyes fall on Rian and Dumois, who are studying us from a few feet away, and my stomach free-falls to the ground. Are they hybrids?
“Who did you bond with Speio?” I ask slowly.
“Rian.”
Despite almost expecting the answer, I still feel a sense of suspended disbelief. “Is she a hybrid?”
“No,” he says.
“What? That makes no sense, Speio. You can’t bond with a human, and I’d know if she were Aquarathi.”
He swallows. “She’s no ordinary Aquarathi. She’s an Aquarathi queen.”
“Either I just heard you wrong or I’m imagining things. Did you just say she’s an Aquarathi queen?”
“Yes.” He grabs my hand and then drops it as if it’s on fire. “I didn’t know, Riss. I swear.”
Staring at where he touched my fingers, I realize that I can no longer sense him. I was so surprised to see him before that I didn’t realize that he didn’t make himself known to me...because he’s no longer bound to me. He’s bound to someone else. Rian—a girl who’s been on the edge of our circle at Dover all year, a girl who has been watching us, a girl who has secrets of her own—a girl who is the new Aquarathi queen of Waterfell.
Oceanborn Page 32
