Teardrop (38 page)

Eureka’s chest tightened. “Once she told me never to cry.”

“It’s true we don’t know what would happen if you really cried. My family doesn’t want to take the chance of finding out. The wave on the bridge that day was meant for you, not
Diana.” He looked down, resting his chin against his chest. “I was supposed to ensure that you drowned. But I couldn’t. My family will never forgive me.”

“Why did you save me?” she whispered.

“You don’t know? I thought it was so obvious.”

Eureka lifted her shoulders, shook her head.

“Eureka, from the moment I was conscious, I have been trained to know everything about you—your weaknesses, your strengths, your fears, and your desires—all so that I could destroy you. One Seedbearer power is a kind of natural camouflage. We live among mortals, but they don’t really see us. We blend, we blur. No one remembers our faces unless we want them to. Can you imagine being invisible to everyone but your family?”

Eureka shook her head, though she’d often wished for invisibility.

“That’s why you never knew about me. I have watched you since you were born, but you never saw me until I wanted you to—the day I hit your car. I’ve been with you every day for the past seventeen years. I watched you learn to walk, to tie your shoes, to play the guitar”—he swallowed—“to kiss. I watched you get your ears pierced, fail your driver’s test, and win your first cross-country race.” Ander reached for her, held her close to him. “By the time Diana died, I was so desperately in love with you, I couldn’t handle it anymore. I drove into your car at that stop sign. I needed you to see me,
finally. Every moment of your life, I have fallen more deeply in love with you.”

Eureka flushed. What could she say to that? “I … well … uh—”

“You don’t have to respond,” Ander said. “Just know that even as I have begun to distrust everything I was raised to believe, there is one thing I am certain of.” He fit his hand in hers. “My devotion to you. It will never fade, Eureka. I swear it.”

Eureka was stunned. Her suspicious mind had been wrong about Ander—but her body’s instincts had been right. Her fingers reached around his neck, pulled his lips to hers. She tried to transmit the words she couldn’t find with a kiss.

“God.” Ander’s lip brushed hers. “It felt so good to say that aloud. For my whole life, I have felt alone.”

“You’re with me now.” She wanted to reassure him, but worry crept into her mind. “Are you still a Seedbearer? You turned against your family to protect me, but—”

“You could say I ran away,” he said. “But my family isn’t going to give up. They want you dead very badly. If you cry and Atlantis returns, they think it will mean the death of millions, the enslavement of humanity. The end of the world as we know it. They think it will be the demise of this world and the birth of a terrible new one. They think killing you is the only way to stop it.”

“And what do you think?”

“It might be true that you could raise Atlantis,” he said slowly, “but no one knows what that would mean.”

“The ending isn’t written yet,” Eureka said.
And everything might change with the last word
. She reached for the book to show Ander something that had been bothering her since the reading of Diana’s will. “What if the end has been written? These pages are missing from the text. Diana wouldn’t have torn them out. She wouldn’t even dog-ear a library book.”

Ander scratched his jaw. “There is one person who might help us. I’ve never met him. He was born a Seedbearer, but he defected from the family after Byblis was murdered. My family says he never got over her death.” He paused. “They say he was in love with her. His name is Solon.”

“How do we find him?”

“None of the Seedbearers have spoken to him in years. The last I heard, he was in Turkey.” He spun to face Eureka, eyes suddenly bright. “We could go there and track him down.”

Eureka laughed. “I doubt my Dad is going to let me up and go to Turkey.”

“They’ll have to come with us,” Ander said quickly. “All of your loved ones will. Otherwise my family would use your family to drag you back.”

Eureka stiffened. “You mean—”

He nodded. “They can justify killing a few in order to save many.”

“What about Brooks? If he comes back—”

“He isn’t coming back,” Ander said, “not in any way
you’d want to see him. We need to focus on getting you and your family to safety as soon as possible. Somewhere far from here.”

Eureka shook her head. “Dad and Rhoda would commit me again before they’d agree to leave town.”

“This isn’t a choice, Eureka. It’s the only way you’ll survive. And you have to survive.” Then he kissed her hard, holding her face in his hands, pressing his lips deeply into hers until she was breathless.

“Why do I have to survive?” Her eyes ached with exhaustion she could no longer deny. Ander noticed. He guided her to the bed, pulled back the covers, then laid her down and draped the blankets over her.

He knelt at her side and murmured into her good ear: “You have to survive because I won’t live in a world without you.”

29

W
hen Eureka awoke the next morning, dim, silvery light shone through her window. Rain drummed against the trees. She yearned to let the storm lull her back to sleep, but her left ear was ringing, reminding her of the strange melody Ander had conjured when he unsealed Diana’s locket.
The Book of Love
was cradled in her arms, spelling out the prophecy of her tears. She knew she had to get up, to face the things she’d learned the night before, but an ache in her heart held her head against her pillow.

Brooks was gone. According to Ander, who seemed to have been right about so much else, Eureka’s oldest friend wasn’t coming back.

A weight on the other side of her bed surprised her. It was Ander.

“Have you been here all night?” she asked.

“I’m not leaving you.”

She crawled across the bed toward him. She was still in her bathrobe. He wore his clothes from the night before. They couldn’t help smiling as their faces drew near each other. He kissed her forehead, then her lips.

She wanted to pull him down onto the bed, to hold and kiss him horizontally, to feel the weight of his body on hers, but after a few soft pecks, Ander rose and stood at the window. His arms were crossed behind his back. Eureka could picture the way he would have stood there all night, scanning the street for a Seedbearer silhouette.

What would he have done if one of them had come to her house? She remembered the silver case he’d pulled from his pocket that night. It had terrified his family.

“Ander—” She meant to ask what had been inside that box.

“It’s time to go,” he said.

Eureka groped for her phone to check the time. When she remembered it was lost, she imagined it ringing somewhere in the rain-swept Gulf, amid a silver school of fish, being answered by a mermaid. She rummaged through her nightstand for her plastic polka-dot Swatch watch. “It’s six in the morning. My family will still be asleep.”

“Wake them up.”

“And tell them what?”

“I’ll tell everyone the plan as soon as we’re together,” Ander said, still facing the window. “It’s better if there aren’t too many questions. We’ll need to move quickly.”

“If I’m going to do this,” Eureka said, “I need to know where we’re going.” She’d slid from the bed. Her hand rested on his sleeve. His bicep flexed against her touch.

He faced her and ran his fingers through her hair, drawing his nails softly along her scalp, the nape of her neck. She’d thought it was sexy when he ran his fingers through his own hair. This was even better.

“We are going to find Solon,” he said. “The lost Seedbearer.”

“I thought you said he was in Turkey.”

For a moment, Ander almost smiled, then his face went strangely blank. “Luckily I salvaged a boat yesterday. We sail as soon as your family is ready.”

Eureka watched him carefully. There was something in his gaze—satisfaction suppressed by … guilt. Her mouth felt dry as her mind made a dark connection. She didn’t know how she knew.

“Ariel?”
she whispered. Brooks’s boat. “How did you do that?”

“Don’t worry. It’s done.”

“I’m worried about Brooks, not his boat. Did you see him? Did you even look for him?”

Ander’s face tensed. His eyes flicked to the side. After a
moment, they returned to Eureka’s, released of their hostility. “There will come a time when you will know the entirety of Brooks’s true fate. For everyone’s sake, I hope that is a long way off. In the meantime, you must try to move on.”

Her eyes clouded over; she barely saw him standing before her. In that moment, she wanted more than anything to hear Brooks call her Cuttlefish.

“Eureka?” Ander touched her cheek. “Eureka?”

“No,” Eureka murmured. She was talking to herself. She stepped away from Ander. Her balance was off. She stumbled into her nightstand and back against the wall. She felt as cold and stiff as if she’d spent the night on an icecap in the middle of the Arctic Circle.

Eureka couldn’t deny the change in Brooks the past few weeks, the shockingly cruel and disloyal behavior she didn’t recognize. She tallied the number of conversations in which Brooks had probed for information about her emotions, her lack of crying. She thought of Ander’s immense and inexplicable hostility toward him from their first encounter—then she thought about the story of Byblis and the man she’d once been close to, the man whose body became possessed by the Atlantean king.

Ander didn’t want to say it, but the signs were all pointing toward yet another impossible reality.

“Atlas,” she whispered. “The whole time, he wasn’t Brooks. He was Atlas.”

Ander frowned but said nothing.

“Brooks isn’t dead.”

“No.” Ander sighed. “He isn’t dead.”

“He was possessed.” Eureka could barely get the words out.

“I know you cared for him. I would not wish Brooks’s fate on anyone. But it happened, and there’s nothing we can do. Atlas is too powerful. What is done is done.”

She hated the way Ander spoke in the past tense about Brooks. There had to be a way to save him. Now that she knew what had happened—that it had happened because of her—Eureka owed it to Brooks to get him back. She didn’t know how, only that she had to try.

“If I could just find him …” Her voice faltered.

“No.”
Ander’s sharpness stole Eureka’s breath. He glared into her eyes, searching them for signs of tears. When he didn’t find them, he seemed vastly relieved. He slipped the chain with the thunderstone and locket over Eureka’s head. “You are in danger, Eureka. Your family is in danger. If you trust me, I can protect you. That’s all we can afford to focus on right now. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said, halfheartedly, because there had to be a way.

“Good,” Ander said. “Now it’s time to tell your family.”

Eureka wore jeans, her running shoes, and a pale blue flannel shirt as she walked down the stairs holding Ander’s hand. Her purple school bag was draped over her shoulder,
The Book of Love
and Madame Blavatsky’s translation tucked inside. The den was dark. The clock on the cable box blinked 1:43. The storm must have made the power go out in the night.

As Eureka felt her way around the furniture, she heard the click of a door opening. Dad appeared in a sliver of lamplight in his bedroom doorway. His hair was wet, his shirt wrinkled and untucked. Eureka could smell his Irish Spring soap. He noticed the two dark forms in the shadows.

“Who’s there?” He moved quickly to turn on the light. “Eureka?”

“Dad—”

He stared at Ander. “Who is this? What’s he doing in our house?”

Ander’s cheeks had more color than Eureka had ever seen in them. He straightened his shoulders and ran his hands through his wavy hair twice. “Mr. Boudreaux, my name is Ander. I’m a … friend of Eureka’s.” He flashed her a small smile, as if, despite everything, he liked saying that.

She wanted to jump into his arms.

“Not at six in the morning you’re not,” Dad said. “Get out or I’m calling the police.”

“Dad, wait.” Eureka grabbed his arm the way she used to when she was little. “Don’t call the police. Please come and sit down. There’s something I have to tell you.”