Reg gave Julian a sudden, unexpected yank downward, and his face collided with the hard side of the pool. Julian yelped unintentionally at the blast of pain that radiated out from his nose.
She’d broken it. He was sure it was broken; it wasn’t the first time he had sustained a broken bone.
That little girl had broken his face! It was unforgivable.
Blood ran down his face and into the water, sending out little tendrils of red, stretching out into the water until they dissipated.
Julian lost control of the situation, trying to grab his smashed nose, trying to free himself from Reg’s teeth, shocked and in pain and no longer able to fight against her effectively. Reg rose up to her feet and grabbed his other arm, the one that she didn’t still have her teeth sunk into. With a hand under his armpit, she boosted him up and over the edge of the pool. He slid gracefully into the water and she finally released her clenched jaw.
Julian’s body sagged with relief. The mortal struggle was over. He was going to be okay.
Chapter Forty-One
Reg’s memory became clearer, while Julian’s faded. Overwhelmed with pain and with the relief of her releasing his arm, his recollections became blurred. He floated in the water, which was exactly the right temperature. He felt comfortable there with Reg. Everything would be okay. She would take care of everything.
Reg’s hands moved over him, clumsy as she tried to follow the directions her instincts dictated. Her calming venom was already in his bloodstream. Her hands traced over his body uncertainly, and she pushed him under the water, watching his face, wary that he could be trying to trick her by simply appearing to be compliant. But he didn’t struggle. Either the blow to the face or her hold over him had taken down all of his defenses.
The knot of hunger grew in her stomach. She put her face in the water and drew it into her mouth. Although his blood was very diluted by the water, she could still sense it. She’d heard sharks could sense just a drop of blood a mile away. She probably could too.
She lowered her face toward Julian’s throat.
“Regina.”
Reg paused. She turned her face to see Uncle Harrison standing beside the pool, looking down at her with an expression she couldn’t quite fathom. She cocked her head at him.
“Why are you here now?”
“You needed me.”
Reg shook her head. She had taken care of the situation without him. She hadn’t needed him after all. She looked back down at Julian, his body floating just a few inches off of the bottom of the pool, eyes clouded, still bleeding from both his nose and his arm.
“I don’t need you.”
“Reg. You don’t want to do this. Give him to me.”
Reg bit her lip and pouted. “No, I don’t want to.”
“He was damaging you and you stopped him. Now it is over.”
“No.”
Harrison reached to take Julian out of the water. Reg pulled Julian away from him, snapping her teeth at Harrison in warning.
Harrison allowed a small smile. “It’s okay, little one. You are safe. But you are too young to do this. You need to wait until you are an adult and know your mind.”
“I’m grown enough.”
He shook his head. “It’s an instinctive reaction. You are not old enough.” He again reached for Reg’s prey. She snapped at him again, but he made a pocket of thicker air around him that she couldn’t get through, and he was able to reach in and pull Julian out of the water without Reg being able to reach him.
Chapter Forty-Two
Reg withdrew from Julian’s memories and stared at him.
He stared back, her powerful hold on him gradually fading and the shock of their shared memories overcoming them both.
Sarah was watching closely. “What is it? Did you remember?”
Reg nodded slowly. She looked at Julian, then tore her eyes away from him to look at Sarah. “He was… it must have been the combination of the water and his blood that made me…” She shrugged, not wanting to put it into words. She hated this part of herself, the dark instinct buried within her that resurfaced at unexpected moments. “I… had him in the water. Harrison took him away. Said that I was too young to… have him.”
“You’re probably both lucky that he did.”
“Yeah.” Reg licked her lips. They were dry and salty. “I had called Harrison… but I wasn’t happy when he came and stole my prey.” She released Julian. Sarah was right. Once the instinct started to fade, she was glad that she hadn’t followed through on the temptation. She didn’t know a lot about sirens. Not enough, clearly. But she sensed that if she gave in once and had her fill of human blood, she would never be able to go back. Her only hope of retaining her humanity was to resist the instincts.
Julian took a step back from Reg and then two. “He didn’t warn me off because I could harm you,” he said slowly. “It was because of what you could do to me.”
Reg nodded. She, too, had misunderstood Harrison’s reference. She hadn’t remembered what had happened way back then. She thought that Harrison had saved her from Julian, when it was the opposite way around.
She looked at Kybele, who didn’t seem the least bit surprised by what had just happened. “Who are you?”
“I am Kybele, Mother of the earth—”
“You are not. Kybele hasn’t walked the earth for millennia,” Reg repeated Sarah’s words, “...Uncle Harrison.”
Kybele smiled at Reg, her smile beatific. Then she was gone and Harrison stood in her place, twirling the ends of his mustache and giving her a rakish look.
“I don’t understand how all of this works,” Reg said slowly. “Are you also Kybele, or did you just dress up as her?”
Harrison pressed his hands together. “Indeed.”
Reg made an impatient noise and tried to figure out another way to ask him. A way to make him spill the beans. But she should know Harrison well enough to understand that he would never give her a straight answer to something she really wanted to know. It would always be a riddle of some kind.
“Why did you decide to stop me from… taking Julian that day?” Reg asked. “Why were you concerned about him?”
“My only concern was you, Sirens who are awakened too early tend to have… sanity issues. And you would be active in your mother’s territory. She would try to kill you.”
“But my mother was dead.”
“Not in this timeline,” he reminded her.
“But the first time—didn’t the same thing happen the first time? Or did you only change things in this time? Maybe it didn’t even happen before.” But all of Reg’s memories were of the former timeline, and that meant Harrison had appeared and saved Julian in that timestream too.
Reg rubbed her temples. Her head was pounding and making her nauseated, like she was hung over. Siren hangover. Overindulging in salt water and exhausting herself chasing down her prey.
“I hope this doesn’t mean… that you’ll always consider me your prey,” Julian said slowly.
“No,” Reg assured him. But she wasn’t sure if that were true. When the hunger hit, would her primitive siren brain always go back to the moment she had lost Julian? She hoped not.
Julian rubbed his eyes, looking a little like a child who had just gotten out of bed. Still trying to sort everything out and to think about where he was and what he should be doing. He started to smile.
Reg didn’t like that. His smiles had never boded well for her before.
“What?”
“I had an encounter with a siren,” Julian said self-importantly. “I had a face-to-face, life-and-death struggle with a real siren.”
Reg laughed and nodded. “Yep. You did.”
“When I was just a teenager. It’s no wonder I decided to go into Magical Investigations and ended up investigating endangered magical species.”
“I guess it was only natural. Your destiny.”
“I always knew there was something special about you, Reg Rawlins. I just never knew
what it was.”
He knew there was something special about her? He had tormented her, had tried to kill her. If she had been anything but a siren, he would have succeeded. Now he was all happy about it.
Reg shook her head.
Chapter Forty-Three
One of the other cloaked men met Julian’s eyes and jerked his head in Reg’s direction. Reg didn’t suppose they were her welcoming committee. Julian had brought in reinforcements to arrest her. He was done with asking questions and was now ready to lay down the law.
Julian looked over at Reg, rubbing the back of his neck. “Are you ready to tell me what happened in the Everglades?”
Reg shook her head. “I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”
“It is my business,” he said emphatically. “That’s exactly what I do. That’s my job. I’m here to find out the truth of what happened in the swamp. And of course... I was curious to see you again, to find out what you’re really all about.”
“You wanted to arrest me. To make an example of me and… I don’t know… bind me for a hundred years for what you thought I did.”
“I couldn’t figure it all out, to begin with,” Julian admitted, speaking slowly. “I didn’t understand the burned ropes. I knew you used magic to defeat Tybalt. Maybe you didn’t strike the death blow unless you shifted into a panther, but I knew you were involved.”
Reg stirred uneasily. He hadn’t known to begin with? She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it. It wasn’t good news for her if he had put everything together.
“I remembered some of the stuff from when we were kids. How things happened when you were upset. Lights blowing or other equipment failing. Sometimes moving things telekinetically. I didn’t think that I was doing it, but I couldn’t prove that I wasn’t, either, because it was always when the two of us were together.”
Reg shrugged. She had looked through his memories. They were clearer than hers, for the most part, but they didn’t prove her abilities.
“But one time… I do remember a fire,” Julian said.
“That could have been an electrical short. It could have sparked and started a fire.”
“I thought maybe that was the case. Until I met Davyn.”
And Davyn was a firecaster. He was Reg’s firecasting mentor. She knew she should have talked to him. Explained that he couldn’t say anything that would lead Julian to the conclusion that Reg was a firecaster herself. It would come too close to proving what had happened in the Everglades that night.
“He told you?”
“Let’s say… I got it out of him in a private moment.” Julian smiled proudly.
“You’re despicable,” Reg snapped. “I can’t believe you would use him like that. He really liked you.”
“And I like him,” Julian said, shrugging. “Without that connection, I never would have figured it out.”
“When he finds out that the only reason you were spending time with him was to find out details about me, he’s going to be devastated.” Reg didn’t actually know whether Davyn would be devastated or just disappointed. But he was not going to be happy to learn that the warlock he had a crush on had only been trying to get information out of him.
“He already knows that,” Julian pointed out. “I told him from the start that I was here for an investigation.”
“And that you were investigating me?”
“Well… no, I probably didn’t tell him that.”
“Of course not, or he wouldn’t have told you about me.”
“He didn’t tell me about you. He only told me about himself. We were talking about childhood experiences, growing up with powers in a community where no one else had any, the difficulty of that.”
“Davyn grew up in the magical community, didn’t he?” Reg was surprised. She’d always assumed that, like Sarah or Letticia, Davyn had been around for many years, growing up in a home where he was trained in magic.
“Not in the beginning, no. He was lucky enough not to be taken into custody by Child Services for being a fire setter. Instead, his abilities were discovered by a teacher who was a practitioner and he was apprenticed to an experienced firecaster.”
“Lucky for him.”
Julian nodded. “So when we exchanged stories about our childhoods and what it was like growing up in homes where our powers weren’t understood, I learned that he was a firecaster. And then I knew that his relationship with you had to be that of a mentor.”
Reg said nothing. He hadn’t asked a question.
“We knew from the necropsy that the goblin had extensive burning on his chest and upper torso.” He waited for Reg to react. “A human would never have survived that kind of blast injury.”
“I guess swamp goblins are tougher.”
“They are. It’s not easy to kill a goblin. That’s not the reason they are endangered.”
“They’ve probably killed each other off, like the sirens.”
He shrugged. “So you were the initial cause of his death. The injury that disabled him.”
“Disabled?” Reg repeated in astonishment. “He wasn’t disabled! He was still…”
She bit her lip, trying to silence herself. She had promised herself that she wasn’t going to tell Julian anything about what had happened in the swamp, but he was tricky. A better investigator than she had given him credit for.
Tybalt had still chased her, fought her, and tried to kill her even after she had blasted him with a fireball. He had seemed unconquerable. If she had been left to her own devices, it would have been her body they found out there instead of Tybalt’s. Only they never would have discovered her body because he would have consumed her and placed her bones, or at least her skull, in his vault with the dozens of other human skulls she had seen.
As far as Magical Investigations was concerned, humans were disposable. Goblins were not.
“And then there was the panther.” Julian’s eyes were alive with interest. “I still don’t know how much you had to do with the panther attack. Maybe you aren’t a skinwalker, maybe there isn’t even such a thing in existence, but I still think you had something to do with the panther attack. An animal wouldn’t have just attacked him without provocation. If goblins were the usual prey of panthers in the Everglades, there would be no goblins left. But they’ve co-existed there for hundreds of years.”
“Maybe they’re like wolves and go after the weak and injured. Maybe it was just because he was injured that the panther attacked him.” Reg shrugged and shook her head. “I wouldn’t know.”
“You were there. I have no doubt of that.”
“But you can’t prove it. You can’t prove any of this.”
“I don’t need to prove it. Just show enough evidence to persuade a reasonable person as to what likely happened.”
“Seriously? How can that be the standard? You punish people who just might have committed a crime against your precious creatures? How is that just?”
“We are careful. We have a very low rate of false conviction.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” Reg complained. She eyed the two henchmen Julian had brought with him, who were just waiting for his signal to take her into custody.
“Well, as it turns out, there’s no point in me pursuing this investigation any farther.”
Reg had to play Julian’s words back in her head several times before she was sure that he had said what she thought he had. “You’re not looking into it any farther?”
“There’s no point in it.”
“Because you’ve already decided that I did it.”
“Well, yes.”
Reg’s stomach clenched. She held her breath and tried to find her center. She had known it was too dangerous to come back. That Julian was too close to knowing the whole truth. But she had come back to the cottage. Mrs. Agnes had persuaded her to go into the water as a test to see if she was really a siren. It was Reg’s own fault that she had let herself be talked into something, and that she hadn’t had the willpow
er to resist a return to Black Sands to hunt for her lost prey.
Reg looked at Sarah, trying to divine whether she would be willing to help Reg or to cover her retreat if she were able to run. Sarah looked back at her without any concern. Maybe she had already talked to someone else in Magical Investigations who had assured her that nothing would happen to Reg. But something was going to happen to Reg. Julian had already made the decision.
Julian was looking at Reg expectantly.
Expecting what? For her to give up and surrender herself into his custody? That wasn’t going to happen.
“I can’t do anything to you,” Julian pointed out. “You’re a siren. You’re endangered. We have no recourse if one endangered magical species kills another or contributes to the death of another. I can’t do anything to restrict your movements or your ability to find a mate and raise offspring.”
Reg stared at Julian, trying to convince herself that Julian was telling the truth. They weren’t going to do anything about her contributing to Tybalt’s death? Not even a reprimand?
“Sometimes we relocate individuals,” Julian said apologetically. “To somewhere they are more likely to be able to mate or reproduce. But you seem pretty stable here. As stable as sirens ever are. I don’t think Mrs. Agnes will be a problem, but if she hunts in your territory, we will probably relocate her rather than you. She is past her… uh… productive days.”
“You want me to produce baby sirens?”
Julian chuckled. “Well, yes. You’re not much good to us if you don’t reproduce.”
Reg rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I don’t know if I’ll ever have kids. It was never part of my plan.”
“Biological imperative is a funny thing. You might find yourself changing your mind in the future. A species that has to fight so hard for existence has to have a strong drive for reproduction.”
“My mom never wanted me. And sirens often kill their kids.”
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