but the look on Lo’s face is priceless. His eyes are wide and he’s staring from Speio to each of us in turn.
“Really?” Lo asks just as Sawyer muffles a snort.
Speio and Sawyer convulse into gales of laughter. “No, dude. Not really.”
“Not that I would care either way,” Lo says, grinning good-naturedly at their teasing. “I mean, you’re a good-looking guy, and, well, I’m me. So naturally, I could see how you would be devastated.”
“There’s a spark of the old Lo.” Speio grins. “But yeah, not devastated.”
“Yeah, that would be Nerissa,” Sawyer blurts out, and Jenna kicks him in the shins. His eyes widen in delayed realization of his gaffe and he gapes, panicked, from me to Lo, his mouth opening and shutting like a fish. A part of me hopes that Lo didn’t hear, but of course, I don’t have that kind of luck.
“What?” he says. “Why would she be— Oh.”
“We dated briefly,” I say in as normal a voice as I can manage, despite my quickened pulse.
Lo’s eyes are liquid. “We dated?”
I’m saved from having to answer as a shrill voice interrupts us. “I’d hardly call throwing yourself at someone dating, but whatever. Nerissa never says no, if you know what I mean.”
As much as I want to stuff Cara into a tiny box for her catty comment, I’m grateful for not having to answer Lo’s husky, far-too-intimate question. Pushing back from the table, I grab my backpack and tray. I’ve had enough of this conversation, and I have no interest in rising to Cara’s baited words. Jenna, however, has no such compunction.
“You wish that were true, Cara,” Jenna says with an eye roll in Lo’s direction as she, too, stands and gathers her things. Her eyes are glittering like an avenging angel’s, leaping to my defense. “If you must know, Cara was the only one who couldn’t help flinging herself at you. If you don’t believe me, ask her what she went as last year to Junior Prom.”
“Shut up, Jenna,” Cara seethes.
But Jenna doesn’t wait for Lo to ask. “You were Neptune, and she was your slutty little sea snake.”
“I was an electric eel!” Cara screams shrilly.
“Eel, slutty sea snake. Same diff,” Jenna tosses over her shoulder, nearly shoving her chair into Cara. She’s about two inches shorter than Cara, but it doesn’t make a difference as she steps up a hairbreadth from Cara’s nose. “I’d be very careful if I were you,” she says to her softly. “When Lo regains his memory—and he will—you’re going to look quite the fool because you’re not his girlfriend. So remember that when you’re trying to rag on my friend. Nerissa may have the patience not to respond to your crap, but I don’t, so back the hell off.”
I swear that everyone’s collective jaw is on the floor, mine included, as Cara swings on her heel and storms off.
“You coming?” Jenna asks me in a casual voice as if she didn’t just flay my archnemesis alive in front of the entire cafeteria. “See you after school, hon,” she says to Sawyer, and bends to kiss his cheek.
“You are so hot right now,” he says.
“I know.”
“Thanks, I think,” I say to Jenna, following her into the hallway. I wave halfheartedly in the general vicinity of our table, not interested in seeing what anyone thinks of Jenna’s outburst—particularly Lo. Or Speio, for that matter. “What happened to your speech about forgiveness last year, and taking the high road with Cara?”
Jenna grins. “No one but me calls my best friend a tramp and gets away with it.” She sends me a sidelong glance. “Sorry, I couldn’t help it. I know you don’t like scenes, but with all the Lo stuff, I just kind of lost it.”
I smile. “No, it’s okay,” I say. It was oddly satisfying to see Cara looking like she was throwing up in her mouth. “But you know there’s going to be payback, right?”
“I’m not afraid of Cara,” Jenna says, wiggling her eyebrows. “Plus, I can feed her to my very own sea monster as a snack if she gets out of line.”
I snort out loud. “Remind me never to get on your bad side.”
A toothy grin. “See? I don’t have to have fins to be fearsome.”
I nod vigorously. “No. You definitely don’t. We’ll make an honorary Aquarathi of you yet.”
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
“Poisoned? What do you mean some kind of biological agent?” I’m nearly screaming the rapid-fire questions at Echlios. “And how would someone even get close enough to poison Lo? Was it Cano?”
“All we know is that it’s some kind of biotoxin,” Echlios says. “And we don’t know that it was Cano, although he is a strong possibility.”
I know it’s him—every instinct inside me says it’s him. Cano is still on the loose, and out there...trying to destabilize us. He’s the only one who would attack Lo with something like this, something this diabolic. He was the one to help Ehmora with her hybrids and to combine the DNA strands in the first place—and he’s the only one who would know about Lo. From what we’ve all learned last year, he is not to be underestimated, notwithstanding the fact that he’s a brilliant biologist. This has his signature all over it.
My body is shaking so hard it feels like my teeth are going to shatter inside my mouth. I can feel the dull knuckle of bones already protruding from my brow, see the freckle of fins appearing and disappearing down my cheek like a wave of reptilian skin in the mirror across the hall. I’m as weak at controlling the transformation impulse as I am at controlling the chaos in my head. My breath comes in shortened, desperate bursts, and I grab the edge of the wooden table in my fists. It crumbles to splinters at my touch.
“My queen...Nerissa, please calm down,” Echlios says, his eyes anxious.
“Don’t tell me to calm down,” I rage, my clothing popping as razor-sharp fins emerge along the length of my spine, ripping through my cotton shirt like butter. “You’re telling me that someone deliberately poisoned Lo. How?” Soren’s fingers reach across to mine, her calming energy sweeping across our human skins and sinking into me. Accepting her gesture, I breathe slow and deep. “How, Echlios?” I ask less forcefully this time.
“Injected or ingested, we presume,” Echlios says, resuming his seated position. I follow his lead and focus on keeping my breathing even. “But we have no way to be sure. We got lucky. The tests were inconclusive at first. The memory loss was just that—retrograde dissociative amnesia from the shock of what happened with his mother. But then Dr. Watson saw something and ordered more tests, this time checking for specific blood and neural toxicity. He saw some kind of odd discoloration in a group of cells near the memory center. He’d had a hunch that the memory loss didn’t seem fully consistent with dissociative amnesia—it appeared as if it were being aggravated by something else. A marine biotoxin of some sort.”
“What
