Diego is the same as when we left it a few months ago...warm, sunny and clear blue skies stretching for miles. I didn’t realize how much I’d miss the sky—the unending canvas of it, stretching out from the arms of the horizon, or the white tendrils of clouds drifting past and tinged in sunlight. Waterfell is beautiful in a different way, but nothing there can mimic the simple beauty of daylight.
Soren extends a glimmer outward and confirms that the beach is deserted. Shifting into human form feels strange, as if my body has forgotten how to do it, but of course it’s just muscle memory. My bones crack and dissolve inside me, condensing and reshaping into the form of delicate human bones. Oddly, it hurts a little this time and I’m enveloped by a suffocating sensation as if I’m being stretched infinitely and then reformed into something far too tight. I try to relax into it and not force the shift—forcing means broken or excruciatingly misshaped bones. Breathing deeply, I focus on the ridged planes of my face softening and reshaping into smooth contours of cheek and brow. Human skin stretches over the shimmering gold-green tissue as I wave a slender forearm in front of me. My eyes are the last things to change, the protective coating slipping over the large, brilliant irises of my species. The hazel-hued shield mimics the appearance of human eyes.
Soren is already halfway up the beach, her nude form camouflaged by a glimmer. Even though the beach is deserted, anyone watching would see only sand. I glance at Speio, who is just completing his transformation. I catch him right at the moment when his face is halfway between beast and human. I’m shocked by how grotesque he appears as the fangs in his gaping mouth shift into human teeth and the puckered scaly hide of his face burns a mottled green. For a second he reminds me of the hybrid we killed, and a sour feeling fills my stomach. Lo is a hybrid, too.
“What’s wrong?” Speio asks, shift complete, looking every inch like a tall, boyish seventeen-year-old with a shock of white-blond messy hair falling over one eye. His chest is lean and muscled, much the same as his Aquarathi one, but that’s where my scrutiny stops. As much as I love Speio and have seen him naked countless times, I have to draw the line somewhere.
“Nothing,” I say averting my eyes. “You just looked...weird.”
He shoots me a confused look. “You’ve seen me change a gazillion times.”
I shrug and wrap my arms around myself, the slick fuzzy feeling of my new skin slightly off-putting. “Seriously, it was nothing. I’m worked up about Lo and whether he’s getting ill because of his, you know, hybrid genes.”
“Could be,” Speio says with a forced grin. “Or could be anything. Maybe it’s a royal bonding thing we don’t know about. It’s going to be fine, Riss. Echlios will figure it out.”
But I can see in Speio’s eyes that he, too, thinks it’s because Lo is a hybrid. It’s the only explanation. Aquarathi don’t get sick—it’s the reason we were able to come to another planet and survive, thrive even—our immune systems are incredibly strong. So it stands to reason that Lo is sick because of his integrated human DNA...which means we have no idea in hell of how to help him.
Fighting my defeatist attitude, I enter my old room from the patio entrance off the pool deck and grab the robe hanging on the hook near the door. Echlios had the housekeepers come in to ready everything for our arrival, and the room looks exactly as I left it—my little mini pieces of Waterfell and home away from home. Glittering sea-glass ceiling, stained glass windows, walls painted in shimmering shades of blue...and one solemn auburn-haired best friend.
“Jenna,” I gasp, and throw myself into her arms. “What are you doing here? Did you talk to Echlios? Have you seen Lo? What happened?”
Jenna nods, hugging me even more tightly to her after my rapid-fire questions. She doesn’t answer immediately but pulls me over to the side of the bed and pats the spot next to her. I sit.
“Guess you didn’t think you’d be back to visit me so soon,” she says, her mouth twisting in a half smile. “Wish it was under better circumstances.”
“Soren says Echlios is with him at his house,” I blurt out. “She wants me to wait to talk to Echlios, but it feels like I’m going burst out of my skin.” I gesture at my human body. “Something doesn’t feel the same. Like I’m going to explode into nothing.”
“That’s just panic, Riss. It’s okay. Lo is fine,” she says gently. “At least he seems fine on the surface, except for the passing out. That started in the last few weeks. I mean...he was fine. Surfing, working, hanging out. Then all of a sudden, he wasn’t around. Sawyer tried calling him, and he was just holed up in his house. We thought he had the flu or something.” She pauses, her eyes shifting and becoming shadowed. “But then we found out about the memory loss.”
“The what?” I say in a shocked whisper. This is beyond bad. There’s no awful human-brain condition I’ve learned about that doesn’t start with some kind of degenerative memory loss—Alzheimer’s. Huntington’s. Dementia.
“After he collapsed on the beach a week ago, he had no memory of how he’d gotten there. I thought it was just a concussion from surfing or something, you know, so I didn’t think much of it.” She stops, watching me carefully. “We can talk tomorrow if that’s better.”
“No,” I say. “Please, Jenna. I want to talk now.”
Jenna takes my slack-fingered hand into hers and squeezes reassuringly. The light touch makes me want to snatch my hand away, because I know whatever she’s on the verge of saying is going to be bad. I take a deep breath. “Lo asked Sawyer about his mother. About Ehmora.”
“What do you mean? As in what exactly?”
“He asked him whether he’s seen her around lately.”
I can’t help it. My jaw drops open. Ehmora is dead. Lo killed her three months ago. “What did Sawyer say?”
“He asked him why, and then Lo told him that she’d gone on some business trip and he hadn’t seen her since. It was weird, Sawyer said, like totally out of the blue. Then he dropped the subject and they started talking about surfing as if he’d never even brought it up in the first place.”
“Sawyer doesn’t know about Ehmora, does he, Jenna?” I ask. Jenna would never give away what we are, not even to her boyfriend of three years, but I have to ask, anyway.
“Of course not. He just told me about it, and that’s when things started to click into place. I did some research on his symptoms—dehydration, disorientation, unconsciousness and memory loss—but none of the existing diseases seem to match them. And it’s not like we can take him to a hospital. They’d drag him to an underground, classified bunker in the blink of an eye.”
“That was quick thinking, by the way,” I say, remembering that she somehow convinced the paramedics that Lo didn’t need to be admitted. “The thing with the diabetic stuff.”
“It’s amazing they even believed me,” Jenna says. “It sounded so outlandish when I said it, but Lo was awake and nodding, so maybe they believed him.”
“It was a glimmer,” I murmur softly, nodding. It’s something small, but Lo using a glimmer gives me hope, because at least he still knows what he is. And because he’s a hybrid, holding on to his human form is far easier for him than it is us, so there’s no immediate risk of exposure. I suppress a small sigh of relief.
“A what?”
“Something that we can do,” I say. “Remember
