Emerge (29 page)

It sure looks that way. He’s breathing, but he’s wracked by violent tremors.

“Clay!” This time, it comes out a sob. What am I supposed to do? A human doctor will have no idea how to help him, and a Mer medic won’t keep this quiet. I need to save Clay from dying, not risk the Foundation executing him for knowing too much. Besides, whatever Melusine’s given him, it reeks of ancient dark magic. Modern medics might not know any more about counteracting it than human doctors would. The seconds pass, and my panic rises. I can’t just sit here in the street while Clay’s life’s in danger.
Think!

I need someone who knows about ancient potions. There’s Melusine’s father, but he may have brewed this one. Who else is there?

Then I have an idea, and all I can do is hope it works. Clay is too heavy for me to lift, but I can’t leave him here. What if he’s picked up by an ambulance? If we were in the ocean, I could carry him easily. Here on land, I feel so helpless. I drag him as gently as I can behind a hydrangea bush.

He lies there in shadow. Eyes closed, face pained. I stroke his cheek. “I’ll be right back,” I promise. Then I run.

By the time I reach Caspian’s door, I’m panting and holding a stitch in my side. I’ve never run that fast. Tides, I wish his parents trusted human technology enough to buy him a cellphone.

It takes a long time—what feels like a thousand loud knocks and urgent doorbell rings—for Caspian to answer the door. He’s wet and wears only a pair of shorts, their drawstring hanging loose. He must have been in the grottos in his tail. His family rarely receives visitors up here.

“Lia? Are you all right?”

“Grab your car keys. Hurry!”

He asks a constant stream of questions while we drive, but I only tell him to go faster.

“This is residential. The speed limit’s twenty-five.” Caspian is as careful with driving regulations as he is with everything else.

I push down on his thigh, so his foot hits the gas and we speed up.

“Turn here!” I say, grabbing the wheel and spinning us around the corner. “Stop!”

He hits the brake hard. We both pitch forward, then smash back against the leather seats. Caspian looks up and down the seemingly empty street. “What is it?”

“C’mon.” I get out and lead him to the bush, breathing a sigh of relief when Clay’s still there. But my relief doesn’t last long; he’s even paler than before, and his breath is shallower. Caspian stands there, frozen in shock. “Casp, help me!”

He shakes himself out of it, and together we carry Clay to the car, laying him across the backseat. I get in with him, his head resting on my lap. “Melusine gave him some kind of potion. We need to get him back to your grandmother—now.”

This time, Caspian breaks every speed limit in the California handbook.

His parents are at his sister’s turtle shell harp recital, so we head straight down to his grandmother’s grotto. I transform into my tail so fast, my skirt rips. Caspian’s shorts meet a similar fate as he carries Clay at top speed toward his grandma. I expect her to look surprised, maybe even scandalized, when we burst into her private room late at night with a convulsing human.

Instead, she stays quiet, collected. She raises a hand, fingers gnarled with age, and beckons us farther into the room. She’s wrinkled and hunched with thin wisps of white hair. The garnet scales of her tail curl up slightly at the edges and have lost their sheen. But her pale blue eyes are sharp.

“MerMatron Zayle, this is a-a friend of mine. He’s been poisoned and I didn’t know who else to bring him to. I think he’s dying. Can you help him? Please?”
My words come out in a rush of Mermese.

She shifts her gaze to Caspian. He repeats the request, grandson to grandmother:
“Olee, please?”

She uses the same gnarled hand to gesture at a slab of rock protruding from one wall of her cavern-like room. It’s the only surface that’s elevated enough to stay dry. She must use it as a table because she clears away a few empty dishes right before Caspian lays Clay down. Clay’s still sallow, still sweating.

I hold my breath as she examines him. Caspian puts a hand on my shoulder in comfort but I barely feel it. Like I did, MerMatron Zayle takes Clay’s pulse and feels his heated skin. Unlike me, she uses two fingers and her thumb to open his slack jaw. She scrapes a fingertip across his tongue and sniffs at it. Is there potion left? Does she know what it is?

“Save a sample,”
Caspian says.

She nods. She hasn’t uttered a word, and she still says nothing as she abandons Clay and swims out of the cave. She’s not giving up, is she? I rush to swim after her, but Caspian stops me and she returns hefting a large copper chest that’s covered in verdigris and rattles when she sets it on the table. She opens the heavy lock with a long fishbone key and lifts the lid. Glass vials line the entire chest, each one filled with a murky liquid or dark powder.

They clang together when she pulls one out and pours indigo dust onto the finger she touched to Clay’s tongue. Her fingertip turns a sickly orange and she nods, as if this is what she suspected.

I can’t stay quiet any longer. Not while Clay lies a foot away, fighting for his life.
“What is it?”

“Susceptibility tonic,”
she answers.
“Partly.”

I look at her blankly.
“What’s susceptibility tonic?”

“I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it. It’s old. Older than I am, in fact.”
Her voice is quiet. Even in the echoey cave, I need to strain my ears to make sure I don’t miss a word. This becomes harder when she lifts various clinking vials from the chest and mixes their contents into an empty one.
“A susceptibility tonic is the closest Mer ever came to creating a love potion.”

“Melusine gave him a love potion?”
Caspian’s words drip with disgust
. “She tried to force him to love her? Sick.”

“Yeah, sick,”
I whisper.

“It doesn’t look like it worked so well,”
he comments, watching Clay’s prone form.

“It was well-mixed. It would have performed its office successfully,”
she finds my eyes with hers,
“if the boy weren’t already under another form of Mer magic.”

Oh, no. She knows.

“Another form of Mer magic?”
Caspian asks, the corners of his mouth turned down. “He’s human.
What other Mer magic could he have been exposed to?”

I brace myself. This is it. She’s going to tell him, and he’s going to hate me. She’ll probably tell my parents and the Foundation, too. I can’t begin to fathom their disappointment. Will they let Clay live? Will he even survive long enough for them to make that decision? Maybe Caspian’s grandmother will refuse to treat him now. I look at him lying there. I can’t let him die. Even if they lock me up or throw me into a warzone tomorrow, I can’t let him die tonight. When she accuses me, when Caspian yells at me, I’ll just have to convince them what I’ve done isn’t Clay’s fault.

She studies my face. Her lips purse. This woman who has known me all my life, who has taken me in her arms alongside her grandson and told me stories of her life Below, this woman looks at me like she doesn’t know me. Like I’m a criminal. I suppose I am.

“
What other Mer magic?
” Caspian repeats.

She stares at me for another long minute, her eyes hard. “
I will not speak of it.
”

“
What? Why not?
” Caspian asks.

Then I understand. She’s not staying silent for my sake. She hates me now. It’s written on her face, and it hits me in my stomach. No, she’s not helping me. She’s protecting herself. This woman’s entire life has been so scarred by the stain of sireny that she doesn’t dare speak the word aloud. She would never tell Caspian anything about Adrianna, and she won’t say anything about this sireny now. But will she involve herself enough to help Clay?

“Please!”
I beg.
“Please help him. He’s a victim.”

She turns her head away from me.

“Of course she’ll help him, if she can,”
Caspian says.
“Can you, Olee?”

Will you?
I wonder.

She raises a hand to Caspian’s cheek, his eyes wide with worry. He may not know Clay, but no one is more caring than Caspian. She must know he would never forgive her for letting an innocent die. She pats his cheek.

“What I can do is remove the susceptibility spell. Like most of our potions on land, this one was weak. I can mix an antidote.”

“Weak?”
I ask. But she doesn’t respond. She won’t be talking to me again.

“On land, potions ingredients from the sea can’t stay as fresh,”
Caspian says.
“Mr. Havelock explained it to me. They dry out on their own or they’re preserved, so all potions Above are weaker than they should be.
”

“Clever boy,”
his grandmother whispers. She swims back to her chest, and the rattling of glass again fills the room. She mixes ingredients that smell salty and acrid. “
This will take time.
”

“Does he have time?”

She doesn’t answer me.

“Olee, Lia asked if—”

“Hey, Casp,”
the last thing I need is for him to realize she’s spurning me and wonder why,
“I can’t leave Clay, but it’s getting late. I left my cell in the car. Can you call my parents and tell them we want to go on a swim now that it’s dark? Ask for their permission to bring me home after curfew.”

He nods and squeezes my shoulder before swimming out the mouth of the grotto. Caspian can be persuasive when he needs to be. Between his skills and my parents’ newfound eagerness for me to spend time with Mermen instead of a certain human boy, I don’t doubt they’ll say yes.

“It’s not what you think,”
I say to MerMatron Zayle now that we’re alone. Then again, maybe it’s exactly what she thinks. Whatever my reasons, I have sirened him. Either way, she doesn’t acknowledge me. But she’s making Clay’s anecdote, so I don’t care.

I close the distance between Clay and me, then take his clammy hand in mine. Caspian’s grandmother narrows her eyes but doesn’t say a word. Then it dawns on me: She’s afraid of me. When she looks at me, she sees a dangerous, cruel siren. I want to explain but she wouldn’t believe me. So instead, I focus on Clay. I stroke his hair, damp with perspiration, from his forehead. He’s groaning and his tremors haven’t abated. I understand why now. Melusine’s love potion is working inside him to bind him to her, but my siren spell is binding him to me. The two magics are warring within him, yanking him in different directions.

“Shh. It’ll be okay. You’ll be okay.” His groans continue. I doubt he can hear me, but I keep whispering comforting words to him anyway.

I’m still holding his hands and stroking him when Caspian returns. An expression flits over his face, something twisted, sad—but then he sets his jaw and it’s gone.
“Your parents hope we have fun. They said the moon is beautiful tonight.”

“Casp, I’m—”

Clay’s groans grow louder, more guttural. He writhes violently, his head snapping from one side to the other. I cup the back of it in my palm to keep him from knocking himself unconscious on the stone slab.

“What’s happening?”
Caspian asks in horror.

“His body is trying to expel the magics, but without an antidote this is impossible. He will die trying.”

Don’t die. Please don’t die.

I don’t risk saying the words out loud. Another command from me may just kill him right now, so I bite my lips to keep from pleading with him to live.

More rattling and pouring, scraping and mixing as MerMatron Zayle hurries her motions.

“Can I help?”
Caspian offers.
“Speed things up somehow?”

But she pushes past him. Pushes me aside on her way to Clay.

She uses a mother of pearl spoon to spread a thick, putrid smelling paste across his tongue. Is it coincidence or some component of the magic that the paste is the same coral color as Melusine’s tail?

For a moment, nothing happens.

Then, Clay’s eyes roll back in his head and he sputters, attempting to spit out the paste. Old, crooked fingers clamp his mouth shut, forcing his head back until he swallows.

His body spasms, and it’s worse than the convulsions of a moment ago. The spasms propel his body off the slab and slam him back down so hard I worry he’ll break a bone. I want to hold him, help him, but I’m afraid of making it worse.

He breaks out into a sweat again and loses all his remaining color.

Then he falls still.