“Well, I’m better than I used to be,” he says with a modest grin. “Hours of practicing. I’m determined to surf at Trestles one day.”
Choking back the immediate retort that he used to dominate at Trestles and every other expert break in San Diego, I remain silent. That’s different, too, I notice. Lo used to be arrogant and cocky. Now he’s all vanilla pudding and apple pie, like a Stepford version of himself. It’s not bad...I just miss the undertone of funny-boy snark. It kept me on my toes, and the witty comebacks had made Lo Lo. Maybe it’s selfish, but I have to know what’s in his head and whether any of the Lo I know and love is still in there somewhere deep down. I have to do the glimmer—it’s the only way to be sure.
“So, how was the Marine Center this summer?” I ask to get him talking. I see his surprised expression and add, “We worked there together last year.”
“Wow, we really did know each other well,” he says with a rueful smile. “Seriously, I feel like I can’t stop apologizing to you for not remembering any of this.”
“It’ll come back.”
“I hope so,” he says in earnest.
As Lo launches into some of the new ocean-conservancy initiatives he was overseeing at the center, I clear my head of everything but water and pull myself together once more. The glimmer stretches outward like a shimmering golden net and then connects with his. The pull of him is so seductive, so visceral, that I almost lose hold of the glimmer. What I’m doing is not exactly Sanctum. Instead I’m just trying to see if my Aquarathi side recognizes its mate within him. If Lo were himself, he’d naturally be able to feel me doing this and enjoy it as much as I do, but it’s obvious that he has no idea who I am...or what I am. For all intents and purposes, he’s just another person.
Only he’s not. He’s my mate.
And even in glimmer form, the act of being inside him is as intimate as being with him—even more so. I can barely breathe. Every inch of my skin feels electrified from the contact between us. The bond is still there, and strong. A thrill of brief relief flutters through me—he hasn’t forgotten me entirely, even if the human part of him has.
Lo is still talking and, slowly, I glimmer past the barrier of his thoughts, trying to see past the indistinct memories...to see anything that would give me a sliver of hope. But other than the instinctual recognition from the dormant glimmer within him, there’s nothing. There’s no indication that he knows me at all.
Water rushes in my ears and I snap back into myself with a jolt, realizing that Lo is shaking my shoulders.
“What?” I gasp.
“Nothing,” he says. “You looked like you were in a trance or something. Are you okay?”
“Fine. I must be tired, jet-lagged.”
“Oh, right, you flew a long ways.”
I nod, unable to speak, watching as Lo stands awkwardly with an odd expression on his face. He hesitates and then blurts out the question on the tip of his tongue. “Did you feel anything strange just before?”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Never mind.” He opens his mouth and closes it, and then laughs out loud at himself. “It was nothing. I felt a weird connection, like from my belly button, as if something was pushing me toward you.” He pauses, still looking awkward. “And then there was this bizarre glow stretching between us. You didn’t feel or see anything?”
I shake my head and swallow. “No.”
“Twilight Zone!” He shrugs with an embarrassed grin. “Maybe your jet lag is contagious, or maybe Bertha put crack in the lemonade.” The slight appearance of the old Lo takes me by surprise, and my pulse leaps. Maybe he’s not all gone. “Anyway, thanks again for stopping by. We should hang out before school. Maybe this weekend? Surfing Sunday?”
“I’d like that.” I stand, not wanting to prolong the agony by watching him leave to go meet Cara. “Thanks for...seeing me.”
“Sure thing. Catch you later, Nerissa.”
During the car ride home, I stay silent. But I can feel Echlios’s heavy stare, and I know I’m going to have to tell him what I saw with the glimmer. It’s not something I can keep to myself, not now when we have so much on the line. We pull into our driveway and I turn to face him.
“He doesn’t know me.”
Echlios frowns, sympathetic. “Did you see anything at all?”
“There’s no tumor or dementia, or anything like that from what I could sense, but you’re right about the amnesia. It’s definitely there.” I pause and assess what I felt. “No other kind of infection was present. But there was something else that caught my attention that didn’t quite fit, like really heightened brain activity on the human side.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I barely got a read from the Aquarathi side of him.” I raise terrified eyes to Echlios. “It’s like he doesn’t know what he is. At all.”
“You mean—”
I nod. “I think he thinks he’s human.”
The warm sun on the patio is definitely something I’ve missed. Jenna waves from the middle of the pool and I smile back, lifting a hand and watching the greenish-gold lights flicker down my forearm in response to the sun’s rays. There’s nothing quite comparable to sunlight, not even in the warm, jeweled depths of Waterfell. And while I miss my home, I’ve missed being here, too. And I missed my best friend. I’ll admit freely that Jenna is the only person keeping me from falling to bits.
What I discovered about Lo has kept me wide-awake every night. After all, how do you make sure that a hybrid Aquarathi human doesn’t go off the deep end if and when he starts exhibiting alien qualities? Not even the High Council could have anticipated this. It’s uncharted territory for us—not just because Lo is a hybrid, but because he’s a hybrid who thinks he’s a human—so all in all, the situation has potentially catastrophic consequences, simply because he puts our entire species at a greater risk of exposure.
For the moment, we agreed that Echlios would keep an eye on him at home, and I’d do the same at school, which means official reenrollment at Dover. That wasn’t part of the original plan. Readjusting will be tricky. I went from girl to alien queen in the span of four short months, and now I have to revert to who I was before. On top of that, going back to high school means seeing the boyfriend who isn’t really my boyfriend anymore on an excruciating daily basis. It’s going to be unbearable.
I sigh and say as much to Jenna. She swims to the side of the pool and props her chin on her forearms on the edge. She stares at me with a thoughtful expression, studying the flickering lights underneath my skin.
“Can’t you just mind-meld him into remembering you? You know, with that shimmer-glimmer thing you do?” she asks, nodding at my forearms.
“Not that easy,” I say. The lights on my arm die a swift death at the turn of the conversation. “I tried, and there was nothing there—nothing of me, anyway. It’s like any memory of us has been wiped out of his head completely.”
I gulp past the lump of misery in my throat. Apparently everything I learned during my previous human initiation cycle doesn’t apply to relationships. Turns out you can break someone’s heart...so much so that he eliminates everything about you just so he can cope.
Jenna hauls herself out of the pool and grabs a towel from the side table. “I did a little research on what you told me. Dissociative amnesia is pretty common after trauma, but the memories do come back