Cassidy Jones and the Luminous (Cassidy Jones Adventures Book 4) (14 page)

“She lives!” he announced, throwing his arms up. “Come on in, dude,” he invited Jared. “She’s decent, or as decent as she’ll ever get.”

Jared walked in and smiled at me like I was the most beautiful creature to walk the face of the planet. “Glad you’re better. You had me worried.”

“Thanks. I’m just happy it wasn’t contagious.” I took a long drink. The water felt good on my parched throat.

“Only mutants can catch it,” Chazz explained, as though he knew it for a fact.

Dad grimaced. He didn’t like me being referred to as a mutant.

I pulled the now-half-empty bottle away from my mouth and asked, “Where are Gavin and Emery?”

“Gavin is on a phone call and Emery is in the lab,” Serena replied.

I nodded, took another drink, and wondered why Emery hadn’t checked up on me, too. Maybe he was totally grossed out by me.

“I’d like a blood sample,” Serena said.

I gulped down the last of the water. “Coming right up.” I hopped out of bed like I hadn’t been at death’s door a couple of hours ago—or
felt
like I was at death’s door, at least.

As we all walked into the hallway, we saw Gavin leaving the master bedroom. “How do you feel, Cassidy?” he asked.

“Great. Thanks.” I thought of asking whom he’d been talking to, but that was most likely top secret.

“Where are the workers?” I asked, suddenly remembering I hadn’t seen them when Emery had helped me out of Serena’s car earlier.

“Serena sent them home when Emery called. Apparently, Cristiano didn’t show up today. I’ll have to look into why.” Gavin said the last part more to himself than us.

We filed into the spare room. Emery glanced up from the microscope. Dabs of everything that had gone into my lunch were in a dozen or so petri dishes. He and Serena had been busy.

“You look chipper,” he remarked.

As though the word “chipper” was a bad omen, my stomach suddenly turned.

“It smells disgusting in here,” I complained, covering my nose. “I’ll hate turkey forever—and mayo, and yeast, and lettuce.”

“What’s wrong?” Emery asked, alarmed. He slid off the stool.

“The smell is making me nauseated.”

“Boys, open the windows,” Serena ordered.

“Where are you going, Cass?” Dad asked, grabbing hold of my shoulders.

“Lying down.”

As Dad assisted me to the exam table, Mom became frantic. “Are you sick? Serena, is she sick? You said she’d healed!”

“Elizabeth, please calm down. Emery, let’s get a blood sample.”

“Gotta go!” I broke free from Dad and flew across the room, knocking Gavin out of the way. I heard him tumble into the wall as I sped to the hall bathroom. By the time everyone had caught up with me, I was bent over the toilet, vomiting water.

“Why is she sick again?” Mom shrieked, gathering my hair to the back of my head.

Serena clamped her palm to my forehead. “She has a fever again.”

“She mentioned the turkey smell. Maybe she was still on the edge,” Gavin suggested.

Why did they all have to stand around watching me throw up?

“Privacy,” I shouted between heaves.

Everyone left but Serena, my parents, and Chazz, who patted my back and made comforting “
sh-sh-sh-sh
” sounds, like one would soothe a crying baby.

A minute or so later, I was finished.

“Can we go back to the lab?” Serena asked gently.

I nodded and got to my feet. I felt lousy, but not as bad as before.

Back in the spare room, I crawled onto the exam table. Gavin and the boys had cleared out the food samples and emptied the wastebaskets. Fresh air and a few squirts of a floral air freshener covered the vile smells. I could only faintly detect turkey.

Serena stuck the thermometer in my mouth and checked my pulse. Emery prepared a syringe. I stared blankly at the ceiling.

“My right eye stings,” I complained around the thermometer. “It feels like something’s in it.”

The thermometer beeped. Serena extracted it from my mouth. “It’s one hundred point six,” she reported. “Let’s have a look at your eye. Sit up.”

Serena peered into my eye. Her face went blank.

“What?” My hand rose to paw at it.

Serena clutched my wrist to stop me. “Emery, give me the ophthalmoscope.”

My parents anxiously crowded in.

“What is it?” Mom gasped, covering her mouth.

“What do you see?” I screamed. A shadow crossed over my eye. I screamed again.

Dad put a firm hand on my shoulder. “Stay still,” he ordered, staring into my eye. “Serena, it’s moving.”

I shuddered violently.
I
could feel
it
moving!

Emery shone the bright beam from the ophthalmoscope in my eyes. I blinked in response.

“It has passed through the tissue,” he said.

“What is it?” Dad asked. He was rattled, but no one was as shaken up as I was.

“A parasite of some sort,” Serena said.

“And it’s living in my eye?”

“Cassidy, do not panic. Your immune system will kill it before long,” Emery predicted.

“The parasite is probably searching for a way out,” Serena added.

“And that’s supposed to make me not panic?” I moaned and dropped my throbbing head into my hands. A parasite that’s large enough to be seen with the naked eye—just when I thought my day couldn’t get any worse. “
Annihilate
it, white blood cells, and don’t let it wiggle out my ear.”

Chazz whimpered at my appeal.

“Sweetie, are you thirsty?” Mom asked softly. I lifted my face to see the stress on hers. Barfing, eye worms—I certainly was a buzz-kill.

“Thanks,” I said dismally, reaching out for the bottle of Luminous.

“The water!” Revelation exploded on Emery’s face. He palmed his forehead. “That’s the same brand you had at lunch today.”

“Yeah.”

Mom pulled the bottle to her chest. “Are you suggesting that the parasite was in the water?”

Wow. That’s weird
, I thought. Mom’s strange reaction didn’t escape anyone in the room. She held the bottle to her chest as though she were protecting it.

“It’s the one food item we haven’t tested.” Serena held out her hand. “Elizabeth, the bottle.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous.” Mom relinquished the Luminous. “
I’m
not sick.”

“You are not Cassidy,” Serena pointed out as Emery laid out clean petri dishes on the table. “It is possible our immune system doesn’t recognize the parasite as an invader. Boys, please go home and bring back anymore of this—” Serena looked at the bottle, “—
Luminous
.” Her eyes skimmed over the nutrition facts. “Gavin, find out what you can about the company.”

“Patrick Grimm is the CEO and president,” Dad recalled from the interview. “I can help dig up more information. Serena, may I use your laptop?”

Nate, Jared, and Chazz left to fetch our remaining bottles of Luminous, and Gavin and Dad delved into learning more about Grimm and his company. Emery divided the contents of the water bottle into petri dishes, clearly upset with himself for overlooking the water. Serena examined my eyes again.

“I didn’t think of sending the water over,” Mom confessed, collapsing into a chair. “Why didn’t I thought of it?” she asked herself.

“Do you see that worm?” I asked Serena with a shiver.

She switched off the ophthalmoscope. “No. Let’s see what we find in the water.”

She joined Emery at the lab table, where he was adjusting the lens of his microscope over a petri dish.

“I didn’t think about the water, either,” I said, attempting to comfort Mom. “It’s bottled, so you’d think it would be safe. And it might be. We learned in science all the ways you can pick up parasites. I could have touched something—Emery! I just remembered—”

“Levy has been downing Luminous like it’s going out of style,” he finished for me. “As has Cristiano,” he added for me, too.

“Creeps me out when you do that,” I told him. “But, yeah, I was about to mention Cristiano, too.”

“Maybe he ingested this parasite and it made him sick?” Gavin thought out loud.

“He has been in a really good mood lately, just like you, Mom.”

Slumped in the chair, she stared at me wearily. Either she didn’t like the suggestion she could be host to a hideous worm, or resented the idea that she wasn’t normally in a good mood.

“Clear,” Serena announced and slid another petri dish under her microscope.

“Nothing here,” Emery said, also switching out petri dishes.

I could hear the boys coming up the Phillips’s front walk.

“I’m going to lie down,” I mumbled. “I still feel sick.”

I reclined on the exam table and shut my eyes. The boys entered the house. I did feel sick, but I also didn’t feel like talking anymore. It had been a long, miserable day.

“What’s wrong with Cass?” Nate whispered as they tromped into the room.

“She’s just resting,” Mom answered in the voice that sounded ten times more tired than I felt.

“Clear,” Serena announced. I heard her slide the next dish under the microscope.

“Patrick Grimm was military,” Gavin spoke up. “Served in Afghanistan before being discharged—I’ll look into that more, if need be. There are no tax records for him the two years following his discharge, until he took over the family business thirteen years ago—Grimm Estates. This was after his father, Christopher Grimm, a real-estate developer, passed away.”

“I’m reading about Grimm Estates now,” Dad said. “It’s a big outfit in Louisiana. Doesn’t specify Christopher Grimm’s cause of death, however.”

“Drowned,” Gavin told Dad.

“Nothing,” Emery reported about the water he had been examining. “Jared, please pass that flask.”

I slit my eyelids open and watched Emery empty the contents of a Luminous bottle into a tall glass flask. Jared opened another bottle and handed it to him. Emery poured it into the flask, too. As the liquids combined, whirling together, the water lit with a burst of light.

“Holy . . . !” Nate shouted.

I shot off the exam table. The quick movement caused vertigo. I slammed my palms against the tabletop, waiting for the spinning sensation to subside. Jared gripped my waist to steady me.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I bobbed my head, staring in awe at what appeared to be two lightning bugs swimming through the water. Is that what was digging around in my eye?

“What are they?” Gavin asked.

Serena brought her face to within inches of the flask. The flashes of light faded in and out at intervals, reflecting in her eyes.

“Bioluminescent parasitic organisms,” she replied, as though bioluminescent parasitic organisms were everyday occurrences.

Emery continued for her: “Parasites that can produce light, most likely by combining the substance luciferin and an enzyme called luciferase.”

“Why didn’t they glow until they were together?” Jared wanted to know.

I nodded. It was a good question.

“Some bioluminescent organisms start glowing when another of their species is nearby.” Emery pulled out a drawer in front of him. “Let’s test it.”

“They’re pretty,” Chazz declared, chin propped on the table’s edge, enchantment on his face as he smiled at the parasites. He clearly believed that we’d had the good fortune of trapping two magical water fairies, not nasty leeches that could chemically glow.

“Do you think they’re dangerous?” Dad asked Serena, his worried eyes flicking from Mom to Chazz.

Fear swooped down on me like a hawk, sinking razor-sharp talons into my heart as I made the connection. Mom had been drinking the stuff nonstop, and she had given Chazz at least two bottles.

Mom didn’t react to the question, or even seem to hear it. She was watching Emery pursue a parasite with a pipette.

“It’s too premature to determine,” Serena replied in her clinical tone. “We have to establish if the organisms are responsible for triggering Cassidy’s immune response—”

“It seems highly probable,” Dad said, cutting her off.

“These parasites may be harmless,” she reasoned.

Emery suctioned the parasite into the pipette. It illuminated the cylinder like a glow stick. The other organism darted around the flask as though aware his buddy was gone.

Emery extracted the pipette from the flask, and both parasites flickered and faded, as though their batteries had died. They became translucent again.

“Bizarre,” Nate uttered.

Emery held the cylinder up to the overhead light. “I can’t see it,” he said, moving the cylinder around, studying it. “Can you, Cassidy?”

I scanned the cylinder and shook my head, unnerved. “No one would even know they’re swallowing them.”

“You don’t—” Mom cleared the emotion from her throat and started again. “You don’t think someone intentionally contaminated the water, do you? They can’t be in
every
bottle.”

“Dad, please get a few more flasks?” Emery requested.

Gavin collected four flasks from a cabinet and set them before Emery and Serena, who poured bottles of Luminous into them. The water was clear in each flask, until a second bottle was added. As the liquids converged, two parasites exposed their presence, lighting up like sparks from a fireworks display.

“One parasite in each bottle,” Dad said, distraught. He rammed a hand through his golden hair, yanking it at the roots. “I don’t understand the motive.”

“A motive may become clear once we learn how these organisms affect the human body.” Serena looked at Mom. “Elizabeth, describe how you feel.”

“How I feel?” Mom looked like a lost child.

My throat tightened with rage.
What have these things done to her?

“Since you started drinking this Luminous water,” Serena clarified.

Dad put his arm around Mom’s shoulder. He pressed his lips together, hoping that would keep his internal battle from creeping onto his face, I supposed. It didn’t.

“I’ve experienced flare-ups of the Epstein-Barr virus for years,” Mom shared in a small voice. “It has been especially bad lately. I’m so fatigued that I can barely get out of bed sometimes.”

“Her muscles are sore, even to the touch,” Dad added.

Nate and I exchanged surprised looks. How could we not have known this about our own mother?