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 is that?” Speio asks softly. “Something from the sea?”
“It’s an organic toxin that occurs organically in nature from certain types of oceanic algae blooms, like the red tide,” Echlios says. Speio and I exchange a glance. We’ve both surfed at night during the red tide in San Diego, when the phytoplankton bloom makes the water turn a psychedelic blue.
“We’ve never gotten sick from that,” Speio blurts out. “Or any of our friends.”
“That’s because our Aquarathi immune systems aren’t affected by this toxin, but even so, the tide isn’t necessarily caused by toxic algae. Some blooms are toxic, some aren’t.”
“So humans can get sick from it?” I ask.
“Sometimes. In rare cases, mammals and humans get infected from eating contaminated shellfish. In its natural form, it’s called domoic acid, and the normal side effects range from nausea to coma to death,” Echlios explains. The blood drains from my face. “However, in Lo’s case, it appears that it has been chemically altered, which is how we knew that he has been poisoned.”
“Altered? Why?”
“Because his Aquarathi DNA would find a way to combat the infection. They’ve somehow made it more resistant and human-centric at the same time. Meaning that it only targets the human cells and that it can’t be detected by his Aquarathi immune system.”
“That’s just perfect,” I mutter. “Trust Cano to come up with a marine toxin to weaken the hybrids he engineered in the first place to be sea creatures like us. It just seems wrong.” I can’t help shuddering.
“He’s clever,” Echlios says. “It’s the perfect fail-safe.”
Echlios is right. If something had gone wrong during their species-grafting experimentation, they would have needed something immediate to weaken the hybrids. Since human DNA is weaker than ours, it makes sense that they would have targeted the human cells. But I’d bet anything that Cano wanted to make the toxin as lethal as possible, not to use just as a fail-safe but as a weapon.
Snapping out my smart phone, I quickly run a search for domoic acid poisoning. According to the first website, it’s also called amnesic shellfish poisoning. I scan the immediate symptoms—vomiting, nausea, cramps—but I’m more interested in the neurological symptoms farther down, like dizziness, disorientation, short-term memory loss and seizures...the ones that could lead to comas and death. And then my gaze spans down farther and my breath hitches in my throat.
There is no cure.
The rush of fear nearly makes me double over, but I can’t afford to let it derail me. Nobody creates a poison without creating its remedy, especially for someone as valuable as Lo. Not even Cano would be that foolish...at least I hope he wouldn’t. With a fortifying breath, I process all of the information from Echlios and the website as clinically as I can, but I can’t seem to get my mind around one thing. I glance at Echlios, pocketing my phone.
“Even if it were Cano or Ehmora’s people, Lo was—is—her son, and the perfect hybrid specimen. Why would they want to hurt him?”
Echlios spreads his palms to the sky. “If it means getting you out of Waterfell, I can see that being an option. Ehmora viewed him as an expendable bargaining chip. Why wouldn’t they continue to do so? Bringing you here disrupts the courts and could create chaos.”
“Wait a second,” I muse. The vision of my dream, of Ehmora telling me she isn’t dead, hovers over me like a wet, dark cloud. Even from the grave, we can’t escape her influence. “You think Lo was poisoned to draw me back here?”
“It’s possible. In Waterfell, you are safe. It’s impenetrable.” Echlios shakes his head. “Here, it’s open and we are vulnerable in human form. They knew you’d have no choice but to come back for him once you felt him deteriorating.”
“Deteriorating? You mean from the amnesia?”
Echlios stares at me. “No. From his failing body.”
Of course. Lo’s dying. As if I could forget.
Soren clears her throat, the soft pulsing sound reminding me to breathe, despite the fact that my body has gone completely immobile after Echlios’s quiet words. “We also believe they—both Neriah and Cano—have been watching him, and that they still have