of him—and the thought of his blue-black eyes, so like the shadowy darkness of the ocean surrounding me—from my mind, but it’s like trying to separate my skin from my body. Every breath I inhale, he inhales with me. As if in response, the tug from before becomes more insistent, less painful now but still sharp. I can only hope that Echlios finds him safe.
Drifting deeper into the deep blue coldness, I don’t resist as the current drags my body with insistent force. I’m not afraid. I can handle the ocean at its worst, control it even, but I let it take me, enjoying the feel of not having to be strong for just a moment. I don’t care that I’ve lost sight of my two guards or that the dim lights of Waterfell have faded. There’s nothing around me but pitch-black murky gloom. I’m the deadliest predator out here, so it’s not like I have anything to fear—especially with Ehmora dead and her allies in hiding. Those Echlios hunted down either swore fealty to me or were executed.
Inexorably, my thoughts return to Lo, the son of the very one who tried to usurp my throne. Ehmora’s son. Sure, he killed her—for me—but our relationship is still delicate at best, and even at the core, a lifelong genetic bond wouldn’t be the only thing that would hold me to him. At first, being with Lo was an act of defiance and desperation on my part. I wanted to be close to someone, to forget for a while what I was and pretend to be a human girl. But that one moment cost me so much. I bonded myself to the son of my enemy.
“Planning to drift to China?”
The unexpected voice jerks me out of my thoughts. Speio, the son of Soren and Echlios, is both my oldest friend in the world and, without a doubt, the biggest thorn in my side. I eye him, watching the tense way he’s swimming toward me. His body is slender and pale gold like his mother’s, with luminous green fins spanning his entire length. While the look in his eyes isn’t exactly aggressive, the slow sideways motion of his body is. “Do you have any idea how far out you are?”
“No,” I say truthfully. “I lost track.”
Speio bares his teeth in borderline disrespect. “Everyone’s on high alert because of what happened. The least you can do is stay with your guards.”
“Since when do you care, Speio?”
Speio’s resentment toward me was no secret while we lived on land—after all, he was landlocked after Dvija and coming of age. Which, in his own words, was a punishment worse than death. His baser instincts made him stupidly trust Ehmora and basically hand-deliver me to her on a platter. While I forgave him for his temporary lunacy, trust is a harder thing to regain.
“I care if you get hurt. Or if Lo is hurt.”
I stare at him sharply. “What do you know about Lo?”
“I know more than you think,” he says. I’m too drained to rise to the bait, so instead I start the swim back to Waterfell, the water in my body guiding me there. Speio follows. “You sure you don’t want to know?”
“Know what, Speio?”
“I followed my father to La Jolla and I talked to Cara.”
Cara? My archnemesis whom he hooked up with before we left California?
“That’s weird. I thought you were done with the humans and you couldn’t wait to come back home,” I say.
Speio shoots me an exasperated stare. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want to keep myself in the loop, especially with the threat of hybrids running around.”
This time he has my attention. “What did you say?”
“You heard me. Hybrids,” he says. “What did you think, Riss? That they were just going to go away now that you’ve returned to your rightful place hidden in the deep? Ehmora’s minions still want to take over the world. All you’ve done by getting rid of one of their leaders is slow them down.”
I frown. “But Echlios says we haven’t seen any hybrids in weeks. And what does Cara have to do with any of that? She’s human. She doesn’t even know what we are.”
“That doesn’t mean more of them don’t exist,” Speio says. “We have to be careful. And Cara’s been hanging out with Lo this summer.” I try to ignore the stab of jealousy those words cause in the pit of my stomach, but it’s a losing battle. I can picture Cara’s toned form in a swimsuit and imagine exactly what hanging out with Lo means. Speio grins, obviously enjoying my discomfort.
I swipe a clawed forearm at him. “You are the worst friend in the world, you know that? So, what did Cara say? And what did you tell her, by the way? That you were just dropping in from the other side of the world?”
“Um, Lo’s bonded to you, Riss. It’s not like he’s going to go chasing after someone else,” he says with a knowing look at my suddenly savage tone. “Calm down. Cara just thinks I was visiting from Los Angeles. Plus, Lo has been a perfectly well-behaved boy, if you must know. No hookups, not even with Cara,” he clarifies with a very human-looking eye roll. “He’s been surfing and working at the Marine Center all summer.”
Even though I’m telling myself that I wasn’t worried about what Lo was doing, I can’t help the immediate relief that sweeps through me. I told him he had to find himself, and I didn’t put any rules around what that should be. Any normal boy would have taken that as permission to play the field and have fun. Then again, Lo isn’t any normal boy.
“Anyway...” Speio continues. Something flashes in his eyes before it’s hidden. I gesture at him to continue. “Cara mentioned that Lo’s been getting sick.”
“Sick? What kind of sick?”
“Kevin at the center said that he passed out a couple times over the past few weeks. He told them it was dehydration, but last week he passed out again in front of a bunch of people on the beach. They called 911.”
“Did they take him to a hospital?” I ask quickly, even though I know that it would have been all over the news and would have filtered to us in a heartbeat. I can see the headlines now—Alien Species Discovered. They Walk Among Us! San Diego would be the next Roswell, New Mexico.
“No, Jenna was there. She told the paramedics that he’s a diabetic and had low blood sugar. Don’t ask me how that girl proved it, but she did. Anyway, Cara said that Lo went home with Jenna. That was last week.”
“But I didn’t feel anything those other times,” I say. “Via the bond, I mean.”
“That’s what happened this morning?”
“Yes. It was bad, Speio, like I was being gutted from nose to tail. It was so strong I could barely handle it. It felt...wrong.”
Speio leans his body into mine in a comforting gesture. “He’ll be okay, Riss,” he says slowly with an uncertain look at me. “Look, I know things between us haven’t been great, and I know that’s my fault. I know you don’t trust me. But I care about you, and I care about Lo.”
“You hate Lo.”
“I don’t hate Lo,” Speio says as we swim past a row of unfamiliar underwater mountains. I must have drifted farther than I’d expected. “I thought that he was hiding something, and he was. But now, well, he’s a part of you...so that means he’s a part of us.” Speio stops, considering his words. “And if something happens to him, that’s going to be bad for everyone here, right?”
