Both Devin and Mira had insisted she wear a white overrobe that looked a lot like pictures of what the sheiks in Arabia wore. Mira wore one too, but hers fit a bit looser than Amy’s. Devin explained that these acted in the same way as bullet-proof vests, except that there was no metal in them. In the dim light of her apartment, the robes seemed to be awash in a glow of colors: almost like a watercolor Monet with rainbow dots. But when they walked into the bright light, the psychedelic intensity increased again; the polarized sunglasses she put on dampened the saturation somewhat, but didn’t soften the edges of the color.
There weren’t many people in the sanctuary. Devin went in first, choosing an aisle seat in a middle pew, where he would have easy access to the front or back of the church. Mira gestured for Amy to follow her, but Amy caught her arm first. “Could you take off that robe? I want to see clearly, and I think it may interfere with my sight,” Amy whispered.
Mira glanced into the church and scanned the empty rows. “Okay. Hold it for me?” She unbuttoned it, and beneath was wearing a rather ugly, paisley-printed wrap dress.
Amy smirked a little and Mira shook her head. At least she knew it was an ugly dress, Amy thought. Mira handed the robe to Amy and walked to the front right of the church, Amy trailing behind. There were two elderly women and one man sitting in kind of a scattered row in the first few pews. A small room with frosted glass walls was situated to the right of the pews, and seemed oddly modern and out of place amidst the older architecture and age-darkened wood of the sanctuary.
In the wake of the abuse scandals that erupted out of Europe, traditional confessionals had been replaced with these glass boxes. They provided additional transparency and the pretense of privacy. But Amy missed the old ones. This new way of reconciliation, with the light of the confessional illuminating your silhouette to all those in the dark church around you, felt more like a public performance of penitence than true confession.
Mira and Amy sat silently a few rows behind the others waiting their turn for the priest. Amy wondered if she should say a prayer. She could certainly use the help. But the words didn’t come to her, and she simply sat while a numbness from the chill of the surrounding stonework and the hard wood of the pew beneath her seeped into her body. Numbness was the kind of relief she would have perhaps prayed for, if she could have formed the words.
In turn, each of the elderly parishioners made their way into the glass room, then gradually departed in a slow escape from the claustrophobic enclosure. When the last woman came out, blinking as she emerged into the dimmer light of the sanctuary, Amy and Mira rose and walked to the door. The level of light in the sanctuary had been easier for Amy’s still-blurred vision to handle, but the white light of the confessional gleamed in a shifting haze of brown, green and yellow that made it hard for her to see inside the room. The priest rose as they walked in. He was a young, Hispanic man, who seemed quite nonplussed by their entrance.
“I’m here to support my daughter,” Mira said. “She’s recovering from surgery and has blurred vision from time to time.” Mira handed Amy her open water bottle and moved closer to the priest. The priest fixated on Mira’s face, barely looking at Amy. Mira could see him struggle to tamp down his feelings. By now, she was used to it. She was glad that he didn’t curse her, as some did, thinking that she was an agent of Satan.
“Father, I have a gift for you,” Mira continued, her voice husky and compelling. “You look at me, and perhaps other women, and are torn apart by forbidden lust. I can see it on your face right now. But I can help eliminate that temptation from you. I can free you from all sexual desire so you can serve God without distraction, as Paul did. Will you let me help you?”
The priest opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again, as if he couldn’t bring himself to say anything. Mira watched his hands tremble a little and saw that he was sweating.
“Father, I swear I mean you no harm. I only want to help you. And I can help you if you’ll let me.” Mira wondered if any consent he might give while under her influence could be accepted as real.
She’d struggled with the morality of her justifications in the past. Ultimately, though, she decided that this was a gift, and gifts should be given. The priest had taken a vow of celibacy, and she had the unique ability to help him keep that vow. When Mira targeted a priest, she planned to drain him completely, taking not just his fertility, but also his ability to feel desire. And it was true that draining someone this completely was a much stronger form of magick. When transferred, the fertility combined with desire was far more likely to help the receiving faerie regain sufficient strength to procreate.
Mira crossed more closely to the priest and took his trembling hands. Amy tried opening and closing her eyes to try to make the double images collide into one. She wasn’t sure why Mira had chosen such a semi-public place to do this. The room was translucent to prevent the kind of untoward behavior that could happen in a private room — and this definitely felt like untoward behavior to Amy.
“Shh,” Mira whispered and the priest closed his eyes. “Just a chaste kiss and you will be free.”
Amy was very uncomfortable watching this moment. It felt way too intimate, and altogether wrong. She hadn’t attended church regularly since college, but it still felt almost sacrilegious to coopt a sacrament for this other purpose. But Amy forgot her discomfort quickly in her awe at seeing Mira’s magick unfold. The room’s brown and green haze was swallowed into their bodies as Mira leaned in and kissed the priest full on the mouth, her hands running beneath his loose sleeves to grasp his forearms. The colorful glow pulsed and intensified as if concentrated inside them.
In a second, the glow left the priest completely, pouring into Mira in a metallic copper-colored eruption of brilliance. Amy heard the sound of waves crashing so loudly, it was as if she were standing on the shore in a storm. Then the sound was gone, as if it had never been there, and the light that had enveloped Mira tamped down like the glow of a coal after the fire was banked. The room grew dry; Amy instinctively lifted the water bottle to drink, but saw that it was empty. Mira wobbled, then sat on the floor, obscured by a fine mist that slowly dissolved. After a moment, she stood up and turned back to face Amy. Amy gasped; she had become a completely different woman.
Mira moved away from the priest, who stayed frozen in place. It was almost as if he were in shock. Then his face slowly relaxed from the rictus of passion bordering on pain. Mira, too, grimaced with pain, then leaned down to pull off her shoes. Amy’s jaw hung open and Mira shut it gently as she walked past Amy to open the door.
“We have to go,” she whispered, and Amy noticed that it wasn’t only Mira’s face and body that had changed, but her voice as well. Mira was now taller than Amy, with dark tousled hair and café au lait skin. Thick eyebrows crowned large brown eyes in a heart-shaped face. But it was hard to focus on Mira’s face because her chest had grown into two almost perfectly round orbs, which strained against the fabric of the thin wrap dress. The dress’ ugly pattern now framed her substantial cleavage like curtains on a window, which seemed oddly appropriate to this new form.
When Amy didn’t move, Mira reached over and took the white robe from her, pulling it on. Then she took Amy’s hand and led her out the door. The metalic glow that roiled underneath Mira’s skin pulsed when she touched Amy, and that small sting helped jolt Amy back into the present moment and she began moving again.
Devin was standing right outside the door when they emerged. Mira let go of Amy’s hand and started buttoning the robe. “Ready?” he asked Mira quietly, and Mira nodded. Devin marked a swift pace as he led them down the side aisle.
“Are you just going to walk out barefoot?” Amy whispered, quickly catching up. She noticed that Mira’s toes were now manicured in the same shade of red as her suddenly-painted fingernails.
“I forgot to bring my bag into the church. I have a bigger pair of shoes in the car.” As she crossed the threshold, Mira instinctively dipped her index finger i
nto the font by the front of the church and crossed herself with the holy water as she walked outside.
The Taiga in northern Europe and North America is considered the cradle of fae civilization. Ruled by Nga and Num since before the First Mage War, roughly half of the world’s fae population remains there. Other large fae settlements exist in the rainforests of South America, the dense forests of India, and scattered forests within North America. The mage wars impacted fae migration even more so than they did human migration, with attempted fae migration into China and Africa halted by the First and Second Mage Wars, respectively. As detailed in Chapter 21, infra, the Third Mage War resulted in the resettlement of a sizable fae population in England. Since 1910, disaffected Taiga fae have been negotiating with the Cabal for dominion over the Daintree forest in Australia, but as of this publication date, have not yet reached an agreement.
–Sirens: An Overview for the Newly-Transitioned, 3rd Ed. (2015), by Mira Bant de Atlantic, p. 84.
Chapter 34
They were headed towards the Blue Hills Preserve, about an hour’s drive outside of Boston. It was one of the largest preserves in Massachusetts, with most of its 7,000 acres off limits to the general public and reserved for the fae. The Ponkapoag Pond was a popular campsite for kids in scouting programs, where human-fae contact was encouraged as a kind of cultural exchange. Otherwise, almost all of the old-growth forest was cordoned off.
The day was practically cloudless, and the brilliance of the sunlight caused Amy to wish she had brought a blindfold; even polarized sunglasses weren’t enough. She closed her eyes in the back of the limo and tried to clear her mind. The last time she had been in a limousine had been at Mary’s wedding. Even with Mary in her huge dress sitting on one seat, and Thomas and Cordelia sitting with her across, the limo hadn’t felt as cramped as it did today. Somehow, Devin and Mira seemed to take up more intangible space, even if they didn’t consume the same physical volume.
That said, Devin’s new form was significantly taller and more muscular than his last one. He looked like a cross between a model and a body-builder, with a deep tan and blond, shoulder-length hair, parted in the center. Amy thought perhaps he resembled the kind of man she’d seen on the covers of historical romance novels.
Devin had also obliged her with a demonstration before they left Boston. While Amy was about to get out of the car at the second church, a middle-aged woman passing by struck up a conversation with Devin, who was standing with Mira on the sidewalk. Devin had exchanged a quick glance with Mira, who had simply shrugged and handed him a gallon sized jug of water from her tote bag. Devin gestured for Amy to stay in the limo, then invited the woman to join them.
That transfer had been faster than Mira’s, and the colors Amy saw were different. Devin’s taking had been infused with orange and violet, with licks of canary yellow flickering in and out. She was closer to Devin during this transfer. So perhaps it was her proximity or maybe only because of the slightly dimmer light in the limo, but this time Amy was just able to make out a shining silver line, almost as thin and translucent as fishing line, that connected the siren to his mark. When Devin finished transforming, the line dissolved with the mist that had enveloped him.
Mira had visited one last priest before declaring they were ready. While sounds and the intensity of the participants’ reactions were similar, there hadn’t been any consistency to what Amy saw with her mage-sight when Mira worked her magick. The copper glow of the first church switched to purple and red flames in the second. But by watching for it, Amy could just make out the same fine line connecting Mira to the priest that time. Somehow, seeing that familiar sight gave Amy hope that she might actually be able to figure this out.
But it was hard. The patterns each of the three times had been different, and even the speed with which the colors had coalesced and brightened in the two sirens varied. The only thing that had remained the same in each of the three workings had been the sound of the ocean in the distance.
While Amy didn’t enjoy playing the voyeur, the melting of the sirens’ bodies into their new forms had been an extraordinary sight. Amy stared at Mira after each change, absorbing the totality of her transformation, and no longer had any doubt that the woman sitting across from her was her mother. Watching Mira change forms had perhaps been the tangible evidence Amy needed to accept that she wasn’t an orphan anymore.
As they drove deeper into the forest, the canopy provided enough shade so that Amy could open her eyes without feeling the nausea induced by her double vision. The road turned from pavement into gravel then dirt, a huge sign warned that they were approaching the Blue Hills Preserve. More hazard signs lined the road, each with a different symbol and all of which made Amy’s heart pound with fear. It was like they were driving into a war zone.
Even those fools who thought the fae were somehow benign should have been dissuaded from proceeding further when they saw the notices that this preserve was guarded by werewolves. Yet every year, a few teenagers chose to test the limits, resulting in at least one missing person and regular hyperbolic news reports regarding how the government turns a blind eye to the “danger among us.”
By now, everyone should know that venturing uninvited onto a fae preserve was foolhardy. Even if you didn’t pay attention to the news, the warning signs posted along the road were sufficiently disturbing that only the most desperate should be willing to risk traveling further in. While Amy knew the teenage brains were still developing the capacity for accurate risk assessments, she nevertheless had a hard time understanding how anyone would venture into the forbidden woods.
The driver pulled to a halt when they reached the plastic turnstile that blocked the final road into the fae area. Devin got out of the car to raise the barrier, and a camera mounted on a nearby pole swiveled to get a clearer view of them. Amy suspected a police chief somewhere was getting a team ready to collect their car if they didn’t return before dark.
As they slowly crept along the dirt road, Amy closed her eyes for a moment and tried to calm herself. She pictured her father as a guardian angel, hovering over the car, and tried to feel safe. For the first time in a long while, she didn’t conjure the image of Mom beside him. When Dad had died, she promised Amy that he would always watch over her, and even now, she held onto that promise. When she was eighteen, her vivid image of angelic protectors had expanded to include Mom. But now she didn’t need to imagine her mother as an angel.
“You told me you’d been watching over me,” Amy said.
“Not all the time, of course. But from time-to-time, yes.”
“Like when?” Amy asked, guardedly eager to hear more about how her mother had watched over her.
“Well, when you cured amblyopia, I spoke to Dr. Eisner to make sure he gave you the credit you deserved. I didn’t compel him to do more. You earned your success, and I only wanted to make sure it wasn’t taken from you, like it is with so many young doctors. And I worried about you and Mary being young professionals; I know how hard it is for women. I wanted to make sure you were respected and not harassed, so I made sure you were treated with respect. Things like that.”
Amy sat there reconsidering her relationships with her professors and mentors over the years. It was so odd. So hard to imagine. She’d written a letter in support of Dr. Olivan when he’d been accused by the Board of sexual misconduct. How much of her good relationship with him and all the others had been because of her mother’s intervention, and how much had been because they were really just good men and good friends? She thought about Eli. He had been such a supporter for so long; she had revered him. But what was real about that?
“You can compel any fertile man to do anything?” Amy asked.
“More or less. Siren powers of compulsion fade with time, of course. And the strength of the siren varies. Some sirens can’t compel a fertile man to act against his values or instincts, but others could compel him to kill himself and his entire family if they wanted to,” Mira answered, sounding m
uch like a professor.
“And you’re resistant to fae magick,” Amy said. It made sense in a way. Sirens had been created to aid the fae, and so were supposedly resistant to their illusions and bindings.
“To some degree. I don’t really know to what extent; I avoid testing it,” Mira replied. Most of what they knew about siren immunity was based on legends from the Third Mage War, so Mira tried not to rely on that talent too much.
They parked at the edge of a dirt trail that led into a very dark wood. It was like something out of a fairy tale, with overgrown ferns trailing down a rocky outcropping and tall trees with thick, mossy trunks. Amy got out of the limo, and squinted to make out the words on the yellow caution sign. The light was even dimmer in the preserve and she was happy to finally see only one unified image again.
“No Entry,” Amy read the sign aloud. There was a depiction of a snarling wolf below the letters. She shuddered.
“We have an open invitation,” Mira said as she came around the front of the car. “Take my hand as we cross the threshold and you shouldn’t trigger anything.”
“I’m going to take point,” Devin said as Mira let the way into the heart of the preserve.
They walked onto the trail and climbed up the incline through the darkness stretching between the trees. The trees lining the path were so close that the branches on either side formed an overlapping canopy that hid the sky. Devin had explained in the car that the Blue Hills Preserve was a larger preservation than most. This meant that there would be a significant number of fae illusions and protections, especially over the points of entry.
Sirens Unbound Page 36