by Sonya Blake
Using every ounce of her willpower, Violet squeezed her eyes closed and let her breath come in deep, ragged swells until tears stung her cheeks.
“Violet?” Kaia asked behind her. “Are you okay?”
“I bet Sam didn’t tell you about me, then, did he?” Violet asked, sniffling as she spun around. She wiped the tears from her face and forced a pained gasp.
Kaia’s mouth hung open. Her large, round eyes bored holes into Violet’s face.
“We’ve been seeing each other a few months now, and…” Violet let herself descend into a fit of sobs. She covered her face and heard the sound of Kaia standing from the stool. “He told me it wasn’t serious between us but I couldn’t help it, Kaia. I hoped.”
“Oh… I’m so sorry,” Kaia murmured, her unsteady footsteps hesitant on the floor.
“He’s at my house right now,” Violet said, uncovering her face. “We just—” She exploded into tears. “We just, you know. And two days ago he spent the whole day with me, making love. I bet you didn’t know that, either.”
“What?” Kaia gripped the edge of the table, her face turning pale.
Violet nodded and stepped closer. “He’s been lying to both of us.”
Kaia shook her head as her eyes, too, began to glisten. “No, that can’t be true. The things he said… the way he…”
Violet laughed bitterly and nodded. “Oh, I know all about it,” she said. “The things he’s made me do with him… the thing he’s made me want to do… he’s claimed me. Completely.”
“Me too,” Kaia said, her voice thin.
Violet put her hands on Kaia’s shoulders. “I think we should go confront him, together. He’s at my house, waiting for me to come back.”
But Kaia shook her head and began pulling away. “No,” she said. “That won’t help anything. I’m so sorry, Violet. I—I should go.”
“Wait!” Violet reached for her wrist. “I was going to pay you for the photoshoot. Just come over and I can write you a check.”
“No, it’s fine,” Kaia said, pulling away as the tears began to dry on her cheeks and a hardened, cold look came over her face. “I don’t want your money.”
“At least let me give you something.” Violet panicked, needing to give something to Kaia to bind her to herself, even just temporarily. She needed to maintain the connection they’d begun to ensure she’d have a window to use the Incanta Oblivio on Kaia later. It had to be something personal. Something Kaia would keep close. There—perfume. Violet took a vial of the precious wild rose perfume that had been her first creation. She handed it to Kaia.
“As a symbol of my forgiveness,” Violet said, going for a pleading tone. “Don’t blame yourself, Kaia. This is Sam’s fault, not yours.”
Kaia looked down at the vial in her hand and smiled sadly. She shook her head again and said, “I’m sorry.” She closed her fingers around the perfume and, with a ragged sigh, left.
Chapter Forty-Four
“Okay,” Kaia said to herself, grabbing handfuls of her hair as she turned around in the kitchen after getting back to the house on Foley’s Point and crying her guts out for the better part of an hour. She had tried calling Sam’s phone again. Straight to voicemail. She could barely believe that what Violet had said was true, yet it all added up: Sam’s unexplained absence two days ago, his avoidance of her calls today. He had said he was seeing someone but that it wasn’t serious. Kaia should’ve taken that as a red flag. She should have known.
“Stupid!” she yelled, and kicked the fridge. It was harder than her toe. “Dammit!”
She limped to the table and held her head in her hands.
What have I done?
She’d lured a man away from his partner and possibly killed a fellow siren—was she nothing more than a force of destruction? Was this all some kind of twisted karmic joke?
She pictured Violet confronting Sam at this very moment. Maybe she should have gone with her. Maybe—but no. Kaia was the other woman. The relationship between Sam and Violet, however depthless Sam had claimed it to be, had months of history to it compared to the five days Kaia had spent with him. She didn’t have a right to be at Violet’s house. Nor could she control what happened next between Violet and Sam. She couldn’t even say what she wanted the outcome to be, not now. Even if Sam were to choose her over Violet, Kaia wasn’t sure she’d want him.
But at least she could find out if her siren nemesis was alive or dead. At the very least, she could clear or condemn her conscience on that matter.
She opened the back door and braced herself against the biting wind and the sting of snow. Her footsteps crunched through snow and frosted grass as she trudged toward the rocks, toward the shore. She ought to bring the speargun, she knew, but that would only make the sirens see her as a threat.
She trembled as she undressed, leaving her clothes on the dry, thorny branches of a dormant rosebush. The ocean felt like a thousand shards of glass cutting her as she entered it and breathed it in, letting it consume and transform her. Gliding silently out toward the darkness beyond, she let her tail propel her onward, away from land, away from the known.
Part Three
Chapter Forty-Five
Violet returned to the cupola after what had seemed like an hour or two, bearing a tray with a jar of white flowers and a carafe made of double-walled glass and filled with steaming water. Entering without a word, she cast Sam a dark, accusatory look and sat on the floor in front of him.
“What’s this?” he asked as she dropped a handful of the dried flowers into the hot water.
The flowers, once wilted and withered, now began to bloom, revealing pale pink centers as they unfurled in the hot water. Violet watched intently, ignoring him.
“Hey, it’s friggin’ cold up here,” he said, and struggled against the rope binding him. “I’m hungry and I gotta piss.”
She pursed her lips together and held her hands over the steaming carafe, saying in a quiet voice, “In grief and darkness, pain and ruth, I bid thee, flower, tell me truth.”
“What?” Sam said. “What are you saying?”
“In grief and darkness, pain and ruth, I bid thee, flower, tell me truth.” Ignoring him completely, Violet quietly repeated her little poem.
Sam considered hurling himself over to one side and trying to break the carafe on the way. If he could get a shard of glass—but no. The glass was too thin. It wouldn’t cut through the thick vinyl rope that bound him.
“Violet, please.”
“In grief and darkness, pain and ruth, I bid thee, flower, tell me truth,” she went on, holding her open hands in the steam that rose from the carafe.
The steam had been white, normal as any steam from freshly boiled water. But now, as the flowers continued to bloom, it took on a subtle purple glow. At first, Sam thought he was seeing things.
He blinked and shook his head. Nope. Purple steam.
An odd scent filled the room, like a pungent, earthy flower, half-rotten. It filled Sam’s nostrils as Violet wafted her hands in the vivid steam, sending it out into the room. The eerie, purple mist spiraled around him, brushing his face with its warm, odorous touch. He couldn’t help but inhale it.
“In grief and darkness, pain and ruth, I bid thee, flower, tell me truth,” Violet said, again and again, till his head was filled with the words.
This was no ordinary flower or steam. There was something intoxicating in it. It gave him a spacey, relaxed feeling similar to weed, only there was also something darker in it, something dream-like and frightening. He felt himself plunged into that place between sleep and wakefulness, where his human imagination could hold him hostage and plague him with scene upon scene of the strange desires and fears that prowled his subconscious.
Sam drew in a deep breath and felt the room spinning.
It dawned on him: he’d been here before. Not just in this mind-state, but in this room. With Violet. Against his will. Tied to the chair, just like this. The recollection was strong, but rooted i
n a memory just beyond his grasp.
“Now,” Violet said, ending her chant. “Tell me the truth, Sam.”
He aimed his unsteady gaze on her, seeing her face in the center of a blurry, spinning vortex.
“What am I to you?” she asked.
Sam swallowed the strange, floral taste in his mouth. “Right now,” he said, slurring, “you’re a pain in my ass.”
Violet’s expression hardened by some kind of micro-degree that Sam perceived through the swirling purple mist.
“Sam Lowell, tell me true,” she said, “am I just another fling?”
Sam laughed. Something in this stuff made him giddy. “Yeah,” he answered. “Isn’t that all I was to you, Violet?”
“Yes,” she answered. Her eyes widened and she clapped a hand over her mouth, as if she had not answered of her own free will. Lowering her arched, black brows, she added, “But I want more, Sam. I want more from you.”
“And what is it that you want?” he asked, leaning back in his chair and balancing comfortably on the two back legs.
“I want you to love me, to worship me, to—” Violet shook her head and clamped her mouth shut. “I want you to be honest with me,” she said, through her teeth, against her will.
“I love Kaia,” he said. It was the truth, and he would have said it whether or not he was high on purple truth-smoke. “I want to spend the rest of my life loving her.”
Violet shook her head. Clearly this little experiment of hers wasn’t going as she had wished.
The idea suddenly came to Sam that if this smoke brought out the truth, he ought to use it to his advantage. “What did you mean when you said you’d lived as many lives as all the days in my life?” he asked.
“I’m a skinwalker.” The words came out of Violet’s mouth automatically. Her eyes went big again, expressing her distress at the sound of her own voice. Despite herself, she kept going. “I’m cursed to live again and again. In my first life, more than a thousand years ago, I was betrothed to a young lord. It was an arranged marriage, but as soon as I saw him, I loved him.” She blinked rapidly, her cheeks turning pale. Her fingers gripped the skirt of her dress. “On the night before our wedding, I left my bedchamber to find him. My father’s castle was large, and it was hard for me to find the room where my husband-to-be was sleeping, but eventually I did.
“I was careful to be quiet when I opened the door. I walked in and parted the bed curtains and there I saw him fornicating with my sister, their bodies tangled and sweating. His eyes were full of her. She was crying out his name.”
Tears streamed down Violet’s cheeks as she recounted this tale.
“The lord’s sword was leaning against the wall beside the bed,” Violet said, her voice trembling. “I drove it through both of them, then threw myself out the window, to the sea below.”
Violet went silent, her gaze far, far away, as though she were once again in her first life, living through her last moment.
“Then what?” Sam asked.
Her lips parted as she drew in a long, shaky inhalation of the intoxicating steam. “The lord’s mother was a witch, and a powerful one. It was she who cursed me to live forever, without ever finding true love.”
“Does that mean you’re reborn after you die?” Sam asked, intrigued. “How does that work?”
Violet shook her head and sniffled, swiping at her pink-tinged nostrils with the back of her wrist. “When the body dies, my consciousness goes on. I have to find a new body to inhabit. It’s easiest if it’s a body that is near death, passing through.”
“And in this life you have a twin,” Sam said, something tugging at his thoughts, telling him there was still more Violet hadn’t divulged. “Does Emory know what you are?”
Violet’s watery green gaze lifted to him. “I am her, too.”
A chill crawled down his back. Sam knew he needed to keep the questions coming while the magickal mist surrounded them; otherwise Violet would use it for her own purposes.
“How is that possible?” he asked her.
Violet lifted her shoulders. “I decided I wanted to be two people instead of one,” she said. “I thought I could accomplish more. Live more. Maybe figure out how to break my curse. When I entered the space between life and death after my last life, I found a set of twin girls who were caught there. They were three years old. Their parents were wealthy. The girls had been in a small plane flying out to the Orkney Islands to meet their parents, who’d been touring Scandinavia on their yacht. There was a storm and the plane crashed. It was perfect. I got two lives, and Kenneth and Margot Wilde got their daughters.”
An image flashed before Sam’s eyes: Emory and Violet dancing naked in the light of dozens of candles, lifting glasses of wine and calling out his name. Only it wasn’t his name.
Stay focused.
“Why me?” Sam asked.
But it was too late. Violet had stood and was backing out of the room, moving out of the cloud of steam.
“Why Kaia?” she asked, from a safe distance. “What’s so special about her?”
He held his breath, praying he could avoid answering. It came out of him anyway, like vomit. “She knows this secret I have, and I feel safe with her,” he said.
“Why do you feel so safe with her, Sam?”
“I trust Kaia because she’s like me”—he fought not to speak, not to give more away, but it was no use—“she’s a siren.”
Violet smirked. “I already suspected as much, but I am glad to hear you confirm it.”
The sound of her laughter faded down the stairs, muffled and diminishing as she closed the door and moved through the house, leaving Sam alone in the dissipating steam.
*
Violet returned a while later with a tray of food. She untied him and let him piss in an old-fashioned chamber pot. Sam wondered what her plan was for when he had to do more than urinate, but hoped that by the time that happened he’d be out of her house.
“Look, I don’t know what you’re hoping to accomplish by keeping me up here,” he said as he eagerly bit into a chunk of buttered bread dipped into the beef stew she’d brought him. “I’m sorry I hurt you, Violet, but you keeping me here isn’t going to change the circumstances.”
She had killed before. She had admitted it. Jealousy was like a rabid dog that had chased her through all her lives. He would have to tread carefully.
“I thought we were friends,” he said, honestly.
She sat atop the blackened old trunk, the only piece of furniture in the room besides the chair she had tied him to. Arms crossed, legs crossed, she rolled her eyes at him.
“I mean it,” he said.
“Yeah. Got that.” Violet scowled.
“Does my friendship mean nothing to you?” he asked. “Lovers come and go. But friends… friends stay forever.”
He thought he saw a glimmer of tenderness break her stony façade.
“I don’t want to stop being your friend, Violet.” He set down the half-eaten bowl of stew on the floor and began to stand. “This thing with me and Kaia, maybe it’ll just be temporary.” Now that he wasn’t under the influence of that horrible steam, he could lie.
Violet rolled her eyes again. “Oh, I’m sure it’s just temporary,” she said, and drummed her fingers on the sides of the trunk.
He took a step toward her. “Why’s that?” he asked.
“Well, see, I was with Kaia when I left the house earlier,” Violet said, a smug look on her face. “And she and I had a little heart-to-heart. Sisters before misters, you know, that kind of thing. She knows about us, Sam, you and me. She knows you’ve been playing us both. Lying to her and going behind her back to see me.”
“But—”
“I was kind before, making you forget. This time, I think I’ll let you remember.”
“Remember what?”
“Take off your clothes, Sam,” she said, in a loud, commanding voice.
Sam felt the sound of her voice hit him like a wave. Unbidden, his hands w
ent for the buttons of his shirt. Feet kicked out of boots. Next thing he knew, he was standing naked before her.
A smile crept over Violet’s lips. He heard footsteps behind him on the stairs leading up from the lower stories of the house and turned. Emory’s blonde head appeared out of the darkness of the stairwell, the smile on her face matching her twin’s perfectly.
“Come here, Sam,” Emory said. “Kiss me.”
And he did.
*
Night had fallen by the time Sam walked out of the Wilde mansion. He was covered in sweat and bone-tired, his legs and arms barely strong enough to carry him to his boat, but he made it to the Angeline and out of the harbor. He saw no lights in Kaia’s house as he passed by Foley’s Point. It was just as well. He couldn’t show his face to her now. Not after all he’d just done with the Wilde sisters.
He cut the motor in the middle of the bay, halfway between the harbor and Thursday Island.
He cursed and fell to his knees, letting himself curl into the fetal position on the deck. He let the swell rock him as he wept, the smell of Violet and Emory seeping from his skin. Violet was clearly a powerful witch, able to command him at will. God only knew what crazy spell she’d put on him to make him do that. Maybe it’d been something in the stew. After the steam of truth, he should’ve known better.
He slammed his fist into the deck, feeling the cleansing pain radiate up his wrist. After all that pleasure—pleasure he hadn’t merely endured, but, despite his will, enjoyed—he needed something to hang on to. He banged on the deck again, screaming.
Chapter Forty-Six
Two Weeks Later
“Hey, have you heard from Kaia Foley?” Sam asked Felicia Dunne as he stood at the counter of the hardware store. “She told me you two were friends.”
Felicia frowned as she picked up the lamp oil Sam was buying and scanned it into her register. “Yes, I thought so. Sweet girl. But nope, not a peep,” she said. “Seems odd to me she’d up and leave without saying goodbye. There’s that For Sale sign up at the end of the drive out to the point. News around town is that she put the house on the market and headed back south.”