Azure (Drowning In You) (30 page)

“What’s wrong with him?” She rounded the woman to stand in front of her, blocking her exit. “What is it?”

“Who are you?” The doctor’s dark eyes held a hint of suspicion.

“I’m Olivia. A friend.” She resisted the need to shake the doctor until she told her what she wanted to know. “Please tell me what’s wrong with Kai.”

The doctor looked back at the bed, then at the door, as if she considered fleeing. “I don’t know,” she said, in her musical Greek accent. “He has a fever. He’s in pain. It’s not appendicitis, as I had feared. I thought that he hit rocks. In the sea.” She waved her hand in a vague gesture. “But no bruises. No wounds. No particular organ or bone hurts.”

Olivia shivered. “So what should we do?”

The doctor shook her head. “Keep fever down. Maybe it’s a chill or a virus.”

A chill or a virus
. Kai, who never got sick.

The matronly woman with the apron bustled inside, a bag of ice and wet rags in her hands. Olivia stood, feeling useless, as the woman wrapped ice in a cloth, placed it on Kai’s brow and wiped down his chest.

“If the fever doesn’t drop,” the doctor said, “put him in cold bath or shower. Give him aspirin and water. I will check on him later.” She spoke to the other woman in Greek for a moment, nodded at Olivia, and left.

Olivia watched the doctor go, her heart racing, and clutched the pebble at her throat.

“What did you do?” Panos was standing behind her. “Let me see.” He examined the pebble, scowling. “Stone broken.”

“I tried to smash it,” she said in a small voice, fear pressing on her shoulders. “You said I should break the spell. I tried.”

“No good.” Panos rubbed his chin. “This no good. I find professor.” He muttered something more she didn’t make out, and left.

Kai moaned and the matronly woman made a clacking sound with her tongue, wiping the water running down his face. His cheeks were flushed with fever and his chest rose and fell fast, his breathing shallow.

Olivia had a lump in her throat and couldn’t swallow. Tears burned behind her eyes. She couldn’t just sit and watch him suffer. She had to find a way to help him.

“Panos, wait.” She rushed out of the room and ran after him. “I’ll go with you.”

If she’d brought this on Kai, she had to discover how to fix it.

***

Professor Skein was indeed skinny and short with a receding hairline and tiny glasses perched on his snub nose. He looked like an aged child, although his deep voice dispelled that impression as soon as he greeted them at the door.

“Ho, Panos.” His face broke into a grin. “Welcome. Is everything all right?”

He ushered them into a messy living room with huge French windows and piles of books and notes on every surface. He cleared the sofa and went to call for coffee. He came back inside as Olivia and Panos were taking a seat, rubbing his hands together.

“So then,” he said, pushing some books aside and perching on the armchair across from them. “From Panos’s expression, I can tell something happened.” His grin fell. “Something bad, maybe?”

“Tell him,” Panos muttered, nudging her in the ribs. “Tell what you do.”

Feeling like a reprimanded child, she started to tell the professor what happened, when he clapped his hands and exclaimed.

“Oh my. A mermaid scale! May I see?”

Pressing her lips together, Olivia took off the pendant and handed it to him. The professor oohed and aahed, turning it over, moving closer to the French doors so he could examine it in the light.

Olivia stole a glance at Panos. His expression was dark and closed off.

“Did you find it like this?” the professor asked, returning to sit with them. “With this crack?”

So Olivia told him everything — how she’d thrown her ring into the sea and found the pebble, how the sea reacted to her angry words, how she’d seen scales that appeared and then vanished on Kai’s skin, how she’d been asked by Panos to break the spell and how she’d cracked the pebble. Told him about the towering wave that disappeared afterward. Everything.

It didn’t make her feel any better when she thought of Kai barely conscious back at the hotel.

“Excellent,” the professor said, which prompted a tirade in Greek from Panos. He stopped when the professor said something else in Greek and looked sheepish.

“What is it?” Olivia demanded.

“It’s excellent to have that much information,” Professor Skein said gravely. “I’m truly sorry for what has befallen Kyler, and I mean from the beginning. For the magic in his blood, for losing his family, for having to live with this curse. And for this new hardship. Although...” He stared down at the pebble in his hand. “I believe that this talisman is connected to Kyler. By smashing it, you affected him as well.”

Her eyes burned as she thought of how his body hurt without a mark, of the odd timing between cracking the stone and finding him on the beach. That couldn’t be. And still... “Oh god, I almost killed Kai, didn’t I?” Would she have killed him if she’d managed to break the stone to pieces? Her breath caught in her throat.

“Maybe the way you interpreted Panos’s words wasn’t entirely wrong.” The professor pushed his glasses up his nose. “Sometimes you have to break something to fix it.”

“Something?” she muttered. “We’re talking about Kai.” He wasn’t a dish you could just glue back together.

“It’s exciting to finally see it happen.” The professor stood and paced, waving the pebble in the air. “A ritual exchange. Gold for a favor. Alcohol and blood libations. One more sacrifice may be needed.”

“Sacrifice. For what?”

“To complete the ritual and give you the power to do what you want to do.” He stopped and turned toward her, frowning. “What do you want to do, exactly? You could ask for Kyler to be bound to the land, to a person, or to forget the sea completely.”

It was so weird to hear the professor use Kai’s given name, the one Kai never used. “I want to free Kai,” she mumbled, looking down at her hands. “I want him to be able to choose.”

“And if he chooses the sea?” The professor observed her keenly, and she also felt Panos’s eyes on her.

“Then that’s his decision. Right now he’s not allowed a choice. I want him to have it.”

The professor nodded, as if this conversation didn’t sound like a parody from one of the paranormal novels Olivia had been reading. But she was in too deep now to dismiss this curse or whatever it was.

“What happened, then?” Her hands twisted in her lap. “What’s wrong with Kai? How do we fix it?”

“You accepted a deal with the sea,” the professor said, sitting down and placing the pebble on the low coffee table. “Took the scale, gave the gold, and made a libation of alcohol. But instead of following the ritual as prescribed, you did nothing for a while. Then you gave blood by mistake and wasn’t prepared for the next step. And then you tried to break the stone, angering the sea. Respect is needed when dealing with the sea people.”

“The sea or the sea people? Can you make up your mind?” Olivia took a shuddering breath.

“The sea people belong to the sea. They don’t think like we do. They have one collective mind and act as a swarm. The sea magic directs them. Of course, they also have individual thoughts sometimes.” He chuckled. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have had children with humans over the centuries.”

“But why was Kai hurt? Why is this pebble connected to him?”

“Ah, this is a good question. This is just a thought, but...” The professor picked the pebble up again and offered it to her. “Maybe this is one of his fish scales.” He snorted when she gaped at him. “He’s merfolk. I thought we were clear about that. Half-breed, of course, so he’s not in his fish form all the time, but occasionally he must be.”

Kai. A merman. Scales and fins. Breathing under water.
“Why would I be given one of his scales?”

The professor shrugged. “Maybe the sea wants him to be free. Maybe it doesn’t know how, so it gave you a means to try.”

Olivia pondered this for a moment.

“Why her?” Panos asked.

Indeed, why her?

The professor clasped his hands together and leaned forward. “Well, it sounds like you started it by giving it gold. Gold laden with emotions, aren’t I right?”

Olivia winced.

“Maybe it sensed a need in you, a reciprocal need, a similarity between you and Kyler.”

A struggle with the past. A need to break its hold and move on. A need to trust and find someone who might understand.

“Or maybe it wasn’t just your need it saw. Maybe it saw in you what Kyler saw.”

“And what’s that?” she whispered.

“The ability to do something nobody else can. Maybe you’re the one who can break Kyler and put him together again.”

***

“Why here?” Olivia looked down at the
Navagio
Beach
distrustfully. She couldn’t help but remember how the sea had snatched her, the fear of almost drowning until Kai had pulled her out. And she couldn’t get the image of Kai facedown in the surf out of her head. “This isn’t where I found the scale.”

“But it’s where you found Kyler today.” The professor shrugged. “Maybe the sea is giving you a clue.”

“A clue to what?” she muttered darkly.

“You want to be by his side, don’t you?” the professor asked.

“Yes.” She wanted to return to Kai, take care of him.

“If his illness isn’t natural, the best you can do for him is to fix this before you go back to him.”