Salt & the Sisters: The Siren's Curse 3 (The Elemental Origins Series Book 9)

by A. L. Knorr

  “You thought she was in her salt-cycle.” My eyes narrowed a fraction. “But how did you know she’d left in the first place?”

  Jozef’s mouth closed, then opened. A thin sheen of sweat had appeared on his brow. “I hope you can forgive me, it was all done with the intention of helping Mira. I was there…” he trailed off, weakly.

  “You saw us that night?” I felt my eyes pop with incredulity. At first, I was horrified that such an intimate moment had been viewed by a stranger. It had been the most traumatic night of my life, and I’d had an audience? My cheeks flushed with heat at the thought of how I’d let everything go on the beach the night my mother had left, how I’d bawled like a baby, like a person whose heart was broken and would never heal.

  “I’m so sorry.” Jozef looked stricken. “It was a personal moment and I regret the intrusion, but I was trying so hard to reach Mira, to see if she was who I thought she was. And if she was, to see if I could trigger her memories. I followed you down to the beach that night. I’m sorry.”

  I closed my eyes and made an effort to steady my breathing. I had to remind myself that this was not Jozef the professional colleague at the salvage company, this was Jozef, my mother’s true love and soul mate. A confusion of emotions roiled together—embarrassment, outrage, the joy and incredulity that Jozef was here now, excitement for my mother to be reunited with him, indignation. I opened my eyes and he was studying my face, worry marring his dark eyes. I also realized it was only Jozef and me standing on the grass now.

  “Where did Emun go?” I asked.

  “Jozef?”

  We both whirled to face my mom where she stood at the top of the steps, her face was a blend of joy and shock. My heart gave a high leap at the sight of her. I’d never seen an expression on Mira’s face that rivaled anything like what I was seeing in this moment. It was like she was someone else. Like, right now, she was pure…

  “Bel?”

  Jozef realized it too, just from the sight of her.

  Mom thundered down the steps and ran across the lawn to where Jozef had swung his arms wide. She barreled into him and the two of them went down to their knees on the edge of the driveway.

  Watching them, my heart pounded and my eyes misted. Their faces were overflowing with emotion. They were both crying, and laughing, and talking, and hugging one another, and touching one another’s faces, and kissing.

  “It’s you,” Jozef breathed into her hair. “It’s really you, Bel. How can this be?”

  I took a few steps back and reluctantly turned my back on them and headed for the front porch. I didn’t want to leave Mom at such a critical moment, but I also felt like an intruder.

  I heard my mother murmuring, her voice thick with everything––happiness, sadness, regret, longing, joy.

  “I remember you. I remember it all now. I’m so sorry.”

  “You didn’t know me. It’s okay,” Jozef whispered.

  Emun and Antoni were peering through the glass of the windows beside the front door. Their faces were glued on the reunited lovers on the front lawn, still on their knees, still wrapped wholly up in one another. I waved at them and they disappeared from the windows. Stepping inside, I closed the door behind me, leaving my mom and Jozef to their private moment.

  Emun stood in the foyer under the chandelier, one hand thoughtfully on his chin, partially hiding a little smile. Antoni came to me and I stepped into his arms, grateful for a hug. My body was trembling.

  “We know a little bit what they feel like, don’t we?” he murmured into my hair.

  “A little,” I agreed. Antoni and I had never been separated by so many years, and neither one of us had ever suffered an amnesia as complete as the one my mother had; after all, she’d literally lived two different lives. Jozef was a lover from a previous lifetime. But love was love, and separation was separation.

  Several minutes passed and we waited quietly for Mom and Jozef to come into the house. It felt like a long time before we heard their footsteps on the stairs. The door opened and Mom came in, leading Jozef by the hand. She looked flushed and overjoyed, and her shirt was damp and there was still moisture on her face. Jozef looked both downright dazed and deliriously happy, like someone had blown by him at Mach speed and a big pile of money swirled around him.

  Emun was seated on the large staircase. Antoni and I stood in front of the archway into the parlor, his arm around me.

  There was a silence so pregnant with emotion that no one knew what to say.

  “So, we found Jozef,” I said, just to break the tension.

  Mom gave a sob-laugh and fresh siren tears poured over her cheeks. The water stain at the neck of her shirt slowly spread.

  I realized at that moment that I had never seen my mother so happy. Oh yes, she’d been happy with my father, Nathan, when she wasn’t suffering from the Dyás. But she had been Mira, then. The look in her eyes now, the smile, the full and open joy in her face had not simply been a rarity in my life, but an impossibility. In this moment, with Jozef’s hand in hers, somehow it completed the circularity of her journey. It was the last key in the last lock that allowed her to be who she really was, fully and completely.

  She was Sybellen and Mira, and she was happy.

  Four

  That evening after supper was over, the house was quiet, and the fire was lit in the front sitting room. Holding a mug of hot tea in my hands, I stared unseeing at the fire and blew at the steam meditatively. Antoni held a book open on his lap, flipping the pages slowly with one hand, his other arm over the back of the sofa behind me.

  “When do you think it’ll be safe to go upstairs?” Emun asked. He lay stretched out on the sofa, eyes closed and fingers laced over his chest.

  “You can go upstairs anytime,” I said with a laugh. “In case you haven’t noticed, this place is massive. You’re not going to disturb them.”

  “His room is next to Mira’s,” Antoni murmured without looking up from his book. “I don’t think he’s worried about disturbing them, so much as the other way around.”

  “Right.” Mom wouldn’t care who might hear her ‘reunion celebrations’ with her long-lost love, but Jozef might, and Emun would definitely want to skip out on any of that audio.

  Footsteps on the stairs lifted Antoni’s head from his book and my own gaze snapped from the fire to the doorway, where whoever was coming down was sure to appear in a moment.

  Emun still hadn’t opened his eyes. “Sounds like I might have the all-clear to go to bed. I don’t know about you guys, but with all the emotion and excitement of the last couple of days, I’m exhausted.”

  A moment later Lusi appeared, carrying the tablet.

  “It’s Lusi,” I told Emun.

  His eyes flew open and he popped upright to see for himself.

  Antoni set the book he’d been reading on the side table and I handed him my tea so he could put it on the coaster.

  “A breakthrough?” I asked, sliding forward with an excitement I tried to temper to avoid disappointment.

  “Maybe,” she replied, sitting next to Emun, who’d slid over to make room. “It’s a start, but I think you’ll have a lot of questions still.” She pulled a folded piece of legal paper with messy handwriting on it from the pocket of her hooded sweater.

  Emun peered at the page as she unfolded it. I got up and took the space next to Lusi. She shifted over toward Emun, who slid down a little too, although he didn’t move as far as she had, I noticed. They were touching at the hip and shoulder.

  Peering at the page, I realized I couldn’t make sense of anything she’d written down.

  “What language is that?”

  “It’s shorthand.” Emun saved Lusi from having to reply. “It’s English, it’s just a faster way of writing. Secretaries used to use it when taking notes at meetings.”

  “Can you read it?” Lusi asked Emun.

  He shook his head. “I never learned, I just know what it looks like. I didn’t think anyone used it anymore. It’s ve
ry mid-century of you.”

  She made a sound in her throat which I thought had to be a laugh. It was hard to tell.

  “If you mean mid-nineteenth century, then yes,” she responded with a smile. She looked at Antoni and then at me. “Did you want to call Sybellen down so she can be here for this?”

  “Uh…” Antoni seemed ready to respond but then looked at me for an answer instead. This was pretty important, but I was loath to interrupt her private time with Jozef.

  “Let’s start without her. You can give us a primer and we’ll catch her up when she comes down…or in the morning.”

  Lusi looked surprised. “Are you sure?”

  “She and Jozef need some time alone,” I replied shortly.

  “Okay. Well, this won’t take very long. There weren’t a lot of photos to study and what was there seems like a partial story, anyway.” She flattened the sheet out and referenced it from time to time as she talked.

  “The mosaic starts mid-legend and tells of a triton who found a large, six-sided rock. The rock was blue, and precious, that much is clear in the imagery, but the glyphs talk about it like it was more than precious, it was mystical.” She touched the gem in her ear.

  “We know for sure that’s true. Does it tell you how the triton knew that?” I asked.

  “Sort of,” Lusi went on. “It says he took this large column home––probably to Okeanos—with him and hid it in a cave. It stayed there for a long time. It doesn’t say how long, but we might be talking decades here, possibly centuries. Until eventually he decided he wanted to make a gift for a siren he’d fallen in love with. He broke the column and took a small piece with him to a jeweler, where he had it made into a ring.”

  “Let me guess.” Emun got to his feet and paced to the fireplace and halfway back. I’d learned that pacing was a favorite past-time of the thinking Emun. “After he gave it to his siren lover, they realized that it freed her from the salt curse and allowed them to be together without her having to endure any land cycles?”

  “Essentially, yes.”

  “Do you think he knew it would help her, or was it an accidental discovery?” Antoni asked, closing the book and setting it on the table beside the couch.

  “Don’t know,” Lusi replied, “and I don’t think it really matters for your purposes, does it?”

  I shook my head. “No, what I’m more interested in is where he found it, and how it ended up in a million tiny pieces under a magical dome in Okeanos.”

  Lusi cocked her head and looked at me. “I can answer one of those for you, but it’s not going to make you happy.”

  “Put us out of our misery, please.” Emun had stopped pacing and crossed his arms.

  “He found it in Atlantis, I know that from the glyphs. It was near a white stone temple and the stone was threaded with blue. There’s a symbol that looks like this.” She took a chewed-up stub of a pencil and doodled a simple ring of three concentric circles on the legal paper.

  Antoni threw his head back and groaned loudly.

  “What?” Lusi looked up at him, startled.

  “I’m so stupid. Of course it means Atlantis!”

  “Yeah, it’s simple in retrospect,” Lusi said, “but maybe not to the untrained eye.”

  “It looks like a bulls-eye,” I said.

  “Or a shockwave,” Emun offered.

  “Or it looks exactly the way Plato described Atlantis,” Antoni said with another groan.

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Antoni,” Lusi replied in a clipped tone.

  My guess was that patience wasn’t Lusi’s strongest point and she had more to say.

  She continued, “The other thing that’s important is that the columnar was a piece broken off of a much larger chunk.”

  “That was the blue blob at the broken end of the first tile!” Antoni nodded, his cheeks flushing with pink. “I thought it was a body of water.”

  “Nope, it has angular edges, just like the jagged edges of the column depicted in the mosaic.”

  I felt Emun’s gaze snap from Lusi to me. “Then that’s where we have to look.”

  I gave him a withering look which he read perfectly, for he voiced my exact thoughts aloud.

  “In the ruins of Atlantis.” His tone expressed fully just how impossible he knew this to be.

  “Yeah, the city that all of archaeology has failed to find and believes to be completely bogus,” Antoni added.

  “Pretty much,” Lusi said, putting the page on the table in front of her knees. “Sorry there was no more to it than that.”

  The room fell silent, broken only by the snaps and crackles of the dwindling fire and the thin buzz of electric lamps. A blanket of hopelessness enveloped Antoni, Emun, and me.

  I sat back against the couch with a sigh, rubbing my eyes. I suddenly felt so tired.

  “Don’t give up that easily.” Lusi’s voice came from beside me and I felt a light, comforting pat on my knee. “You’re young, you have a whole siren-lifetime ahead of you to find Atlantis and see if you can set things straight.”

  “What odds would you give us?” I opened my eyes to gaze at the strange siren beside me. Her words were encouraging, but even with hardly any voice at all I could hear her doubt.

  She shrugged.

  Emun wandered back to the couch and sort of collapsed into it, rather than sitting down. I guessed his pacing was done for the night.

  Two sets of footsteps on the stairs wasn’t enough to rouse any of us from our grim silence. We didn’t even turn around to greet Mira and Jozef when they walked in.

  “Wow.” My mom came into view on the right, standing between the fire and where Emun had just deflated. Jozef appeared a moment later just behind her. “Who died?”

  No one responded. The fire gave a pop.

  “Are you guys okay?” Jozef asked, stepping closer to my mom. His brows pinched together.

  “Well, no one died,” I replied finally. Someone had to put them out of their misery, and drop them into the misery of our dead-end.

  I told them what Lusi had learned. She spoke up a few times to clarify things. As we talked, Jozef’s eyes widened and he took a seat in the single chair a few feet from our couch. He seemed to sink into it slowly, dreamlike, and listen like his life depended upon him reciting back all he’d heard.

  When Lusi explained where the original, larger gem had been found, he seemed to come alive. He looked up at my mom and then back at me. I could see the whites of his eyes.

  Fascinated at the play of emotions and expression shifting and cavorting on Jozef’s features, I stopped telling the story and let Lusi finish.

  When she’d told the rest of it, the only face in the room that had any liveliness in it at all was Jozef’s.

  “If you don’t share whatever it is you know right now,” I said to him, watching his knees begin to bounce in an agitated way, “then I’m going to put a frog under your pillow tonight.”

  Jozef got to his feet, his face looking near to exploding with excitement. “You’re not going to believe what I have to tell you,” he began.

  “Try us,” I said.

  “I know the location of Atlantis,” said Jozef with a Cheshire-cat-like grin.

  Our response was almost comical, as jaws dropped. Then all of us started talking at once, questions tumbling over each other like an avalanche. Jozef held up his hands for calm.

  “All of you know my heritage. The reason I left Novak Salvage was that I received a letter informing me my father was ill.” Jozef summarized his activities of the past couple of months succinctly, ending with, “We have access to all of Claudius’s research.”

  Five

  The next morning saw us all up early to say goodbye to Lusi. She wished us luck, but it was pretty obvious that she didn’t really believe we had much chance of success. It was better that way, I thought, for her to not have high hopes. I wouldn’t have been keen on having the world’s siren population knowing what we were up to. If we failed, no one would know except for u
s.

  The rest of the morning was spent on the phone: to the office to free Antoni from work, to Ivan to prepare the plane, to Adam for a driver, and to Sera to inform her we would be away. But within hours our bags were packed and in a pile on the front porch.

  It was strange and exciting, preparing for this adventure. We outfitted ourselves with only a few changes of clothing. Jozef assured us that he had equipment for the kind of desert outing we were in for. Thinking of the desert made me think of Petra, where she’d had her elemental transformation. I wondered what she was up to now.

  I sent texts to Georjie and Saxony to let them know what we were up to. Georjie and I had talked on a weekly basis after she’d left Poland for Scotland, but Saxony had seemed so busy at Arcturus that she hardly had time to exchange texts. She promised she’d catch me up properly over her spring break.

  Adam pulled the largest of the Novak SUVs up in front of the house and he, Antoni, and Emun loaded the luggage into the back. Jozef came out with Mom a few moments later and we said goodbye to Sera and Adalbert, who had managed to return before we left.

  The vehicle had six seats in the back, three facing front and three facing back. Antoni and I settled in the seats with our backs to the driver’s cabin. Mom and Jozef sat side by side on the front facing bench seat and entwined their fingers. Emun stepped in and took the seat beside my mom.

  “Everything has happened so fast.” Jozef gazed at my mother as if still hardly daring to believe that she was in fact flesh and blood and not some ghost of his imagination.

  “There are still a few things I don’t understand,” I began, then laughed. “Okay, there’re a lot of things I don’t understand.” I was directing these words at Jozef. “You didn’t think my mom was here yesterday when you arrived.”

  “No, I was certain she wasn’t, in fact. I thought she’d be somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic by now, or farther.”

  “So, what was your original plan, then? Why did you come back to Gdansk?” Given that Jozef’s father had recently passed away, it would not have been a great time to leave home. Yet, here he was.