by Eve Langlais
You shouldn’t have done that.
“Stop it.” Xylo’s cold voice brooked no nonsense.
Good, because I wasn’t in the slightest bit entertained. It didn’t take a sheet of music to follow the score. I’d been duped.
Shame on me for doping myself with their food. Shame on them, though, for trussing me to a wall. Leather cuffs were wrapped around my wrists, the metal loops on them attached to chains.
Chained like an animal. It made me feel like one, too. A snarl left my lips as I yanked and tested the strength of the bonds.
Clang. Jingle. A tug of my arms didn’t move them much, just enough to make metal music. The discordant notes appealed to my mood.
I glared ahead of me. “So much for your hospitality,” I drawled as I glanced around. Surely, there was something that could help me. A button that would release my chains if I spit hard enough. A servant I could command to murder his mistress. A certain hunky Viking with an axe for my chains.
I didn’t even spot a sympathetic look.
“Count yourself lucky we didn’t kill you the moment you set foot on the island.” Xylo made no attempt to hide the sneer in her tone. She wore a blue cloak, the deep color a really nice contrast to her complexion and hair. Warm, too, I’d bet. I coveted it, hard. My pimpling skin was totally jealous.
Heck, I’d even settle for Cymba’s silken garment, the flowers on it vivid, the fabric sateen soft.
No one offered me even so much as a sock for my chilly toes.
Inhumane. “Isn’t there some Geneva convention that says you can’t torture me?”
“No torture. We just want answers.”
“I answered all your questions.”
“Not all of them. Only the ones your mind could recall,” Xylo replied with a snort.
A frown creased my brow. “Are you talking about the fact I don’t recall much of my early years? Excuse me if I was traumatized and forgot some stuff.”
“You are not excused. You should not exist!”
“Well, I do, so suck it up, oystercup. What do you want from me?”
“We have no use for you.” Not exactly the most promising words.
“Then let me go, and I’ll be on my way.” After I collected a certain barbarian. Speaking of whom… “What did you do with Jory?”
“Your concubine is safe. We have no quarrel with him.”
“Concubine?” We’d slept together. That made us… Fuck me, I didn’t know what that made us, but it didn’t matter. He was more than just a really good screw. “You’d better not have harmed him.” Or slept with him. Jealousy reared fast and green, and my voice purred dangerously.
Chella shivered.
“I told you to stop talking.” An ominous statement coupled with Xylo dropping her cloak. She wore very little clothing—and I mean little if you counted the feathers somehow sticking to her breasts. The older siren peered at me, her head cocked at a strange angle, her gaze inquisitive, her features sharp. Whoever wrote the legends mistaking sirens and mermaids as one species had obviously smoked some potent weed. There was no resemblance. These women belonged more to the avian world than the aquatic.
And despite not having beaks or talons, they oozed danger.
“I thought you said it wouldn’t wake.” Cymba’s lips pursed.
It?
“She shouldn’t have.” Chella glared at me as if I had personally offended her. I was more offended given I noticed the ball gag hanging from her hand.
“I’ll gag her,” Cymba volunteered.
“Should have done it before she woke,” rebuked Xylo.
“Afraid I can make you do the chicken dance?” My smirk was fierce.
“It can’t control us,” Xylo said with a curl of her lip.
“You might want to take that chance, I’m not.” Cymba tore the ball gag from Chella’s hand and stuffed it into my mouth.
So much for being friends. I’d make her sing soprano before I plucked out her eyes and shoved them into her mouth.
I wasn’t feeling very charitable at the moment and used violent thoughts to distract from the ball in my mouth. I sought not to think of how many others had worn it before me.
Gag. Literally.
It didn’t help that my panic sought to rise at having my voice, my only real weapon, taken from me.
Fuck it. I was allowed to be a little freaked out. I was tied to a wall and unable to even yell for help. My heart raced. Air huffed through my nose. My eyes widened with fright.
None of it changed anything.
The three sirens, covered in only their unbound hair and feathers over their X-rated bits, undulated in front of me. Their bodies moving in sinuous patterns, mesmerizing twists of naked flesh. I closed my eyes against it, but I couldn’t shut my ears to their voices. It proved easier than expected, the layer of their song rolling over me like a gentle wave that tickled but didn’t suck me under.
I could hear the song develop. Swell. Take on shape and power. It began as a low vibration in the air that tickled my exposed skin. Words, not of any language I knew, flowed at this point. Guttural, yet melodic. The trebling weight of them hung in the air, wavering and echoing. Magic pooled around, outlining the sirens in a glowing nimbus.
Fascinating. Even as a part of me understood I might be gazing upon my doom, I couldn’t help myself. Whatever they did, whatever tragedy they wrought for me, at least it was fucking beautiful.
Xylo stepped forward, her voice emerging at a different pitch than her sisters’. She stared at me, a black, unblinking gaze. I didn’t see myself reflected in their depths. Rather the flat orbs sucked me in. Without consciously hearing any kind of command, I was drawn into the vortex that comprised the spell.
I felt myself leaving my body, my soul if you will yanked out of the flesh and scattered into tiny pieces. For a moment, an eternity, I floated, no one, nowhere, seemingly lost and without purpose.
Who am I?
What am I?
I unraveled into nothingness.
A clap of ghostly thunder and everything stilled. All the parts of me slowed and waited as one little bit, the first bit of me, illuminated.
A spark of life. A rumble of vibrations. The sensation of being.
Birth.
My birth. My creation from nothingness. Motes of light joined the first one, binding to create shape, then thought. Impressions flashed by, the notion of movement as my forming cells were jostled for the first time. Sound, heard first as vibrations that became more distinct as time went on. The sensation of light and dark in my world bound only by sensation.
I rushed through these memories. It was easy because they were simple. To the point.
Then, an explosion of sensory perceptions when I opened my eyes and saw. As a forming fetus, I had no concept at the time of sight. Yet I remembered. The memories snowballed, and the story unfolded of my conception. A conception that was wholly about creation because I wasn’t born.
I was made.
In a freaking jar. A giant glass one, cylindrical in shape, filled with fluid. I floated in this medium for longer than a regular gestation. The recollections of my limbs, longer than a baby’s, propelling myself in fluid, careful of the cord attached to my midsection. I had feet, not a tail.
I also remembered by mother’s face. The dark skin of it pressed against glass, her palm wide beside it. Her lips moved, and while I didn’t hear a word, I knew she spoke to me. She used her fingers to communicate. As far as I was concerned, as the only person who saw me for me, she was my mother.
Just not my real mother, I came to realize.
When I was born, I emerged with a squall of indignation. The infant at the time didn’t understand the blood gushing from noses or spilling like tears. The baby didn’t know her cries of displeasure killed.
The doctors had a remedy for a baby who harmed when she cried. The collar around my neck, the same kind used with dogs, soon taught me to be quiet.
For the times even the collar couldn’t handl
e, Mama—who acted as my nanny—was allowed to soothe me. A deaf caretaker immune to a wailing child’s lost and sad cries.
She was a woman who loved me, but she was not my mother. No one ever spoke of the person who’d donated her egg to mad science. Did the donor ever know they’d used it to splice some DNA? I was a custom-made embryo. Little bit of this, little bit of that. At the time, when the grownups—AKA doctors—talked about me, they didn’t temper their language. A child didn’t understand them, but an adult seeing those memories did.
And still, the movie of my life rolled on, me a spectator appalled by the revelations.
How could I have forgotten Major Little? He checked in sometimes in person with Dr. Keterson, a big, blustery man with a red nose veined in purple. “When is she going to start showing signs of the graft?”
“We need results,” said his companion, a man in a business suit. He had no name. All I’d ever heard him addressed as was “sir.” I didn’t like Sir, and not just because of his beady eyes and the lingering stench of smoke clinging to his skin.
“Her voice—”
“Is like nails on a chalkboard. I know that. I’ve got no use for that. What about the other half you gave her?”
“According to the bloodwork, she’s got the genetics for the aquatic specimen—”
“Fucking call them what they are,” spat the major. “A mermaid and a siren. When am I going to see expected results?”
“We can’t know for sure if she will manifest the mermaid gene. This is untried science.”
“Untried, my ass. I know about that other camp of yours. The one that burned down. Are we going to have another problem?”
The doctor swallowed hard. “It wasn’t my fault. The subjects—”
“Escaped. That won’t happen here.”
Fast forward through a few years of being a guinea pig. Tossed in water and forced to hold my breath for as long as I could. A few times, the scientists had asked me to try breathing the liquid. The choking brought tears each time.
Mama got so mad when they did this. Mad, and yet she never stopped them. And, eventually, I had no choice. I breathed in the briny water and found my other side. After that, it was so simple to do, just throw me in water.
But having a tail and breathing for days underwater wasn’t enough for them. Neither was my voice. The major wanted more. “I need soldiers with super abilities, not a freaky sideshow,” he barked.
The scientists listened.
The tests began to hurt.
And Mama argued. Again. To men who didn’t listen.
But this time, she acted.
It felt as if time slowed as I relived the night everything changed for me. First, the lights went out, and the emergency white light came on in my room.
A small cell with glass walls so I could be observed. It had a nest of blankets and not much else. Mama entered the main room, her movements furtive, her expression agitated. She signed. “Time to leave.”
I eyed the cameras high up in the ceiling.
She snapped her fingers, drawing my attention. Her hands flew through the symbols. “Cameras not working. But not for long.”
Somehow, she’d managed to cause a power failure. She’d planned the escape perfectly. Got me out of that base—with only a few casualties that deserved it. Gave me a new life.
Being young, I forgot those horrible years in the lab. As we relaxed in our new reality, we fell into a new routine. One secret from the world because I was special. Mama only had to take me to a beach—where I could transform in the salty waters, away from prying eyes—to remind me of what I was: a mermaid. My tail a thing of agile beauty. Despite all the hiding, I never felt shame at what I was. My mother would exclaim, her hands signing rapidly in enthusiasm over how lucky I was. How special. So special, sometimes I heard her crying at night.
When we hit that moment where she died, I could see it with a cool detachment. Finally see that I’d done nothing wrong.
It wasn’t my fault that we were attacked. Yes, we were at the beach to placate my mermaid side, but what happened with the eels? A fluke. An accident.
Or so I thought until I saw something I’d never seen in my dreams. Something that made me realize I wasn’t to blame.
The mermaids were.
Because there was one there that day.
I saw it in my memories, which still sifted like tiny grains of sand through an hourglass. The mermaid floating and watching with cold detachment as the eels attacked Mama. Heard the waves rolling, their message clear.
Come to me.
Instead, in my grief, I screamed. And kept screaming until the tide went out and left me shivering on shore, a lone, living figure amidst death.
The sirens kept looking at my life, but I could ignore them now. I remembered what happened next. Fast-forwarding through the rest of my life proved less interesting. These parts I remembered. Even the shameful walk that night after the party in college, people snickering and pointing. When I found out who’d drawn that penis on my cheek in permanent marker, they dropped out. The tattooed word, Loser, on their forehead took quite a few sessions to remove, I heard. The video of him getting the work done would live on forever on the internet.
My siren power, while not always controllable or predictable, had a great sense of retaliation.
Remembering gave me answers to questions that had plagued me my entire life.
I am a freak. A misfit created in a test tube. No mother or father. Not a single hint of who they stole the sperm and egg from. Didn’t really matter. To that fertilized mix, they grafted alien DNA.
When the story of my life ended, here in this cell, there was silence.
If not for the gag, I would have probably uttered a rather smug, “Told you I was a siren.” Kind of.
I had no idea where the scientists had gotten the DNA from, but given the sirens’ talk of a missing sister, I could venture a guess.
Xylo eyed me with even more disgust than before. “You were created by humans.”
Lips pursed in disapproval, Chella shook her head. “And they call us monsters.”
Even Cymba appeared appalled. “What are we going to do?”
I awaited their verdict. They could no longer deny that I shared some heritage with them. If somewhat Frankenstein-ish.
Rather than fall on me with hugs and cries of “sister” or “niece,” Xylo turned her back and said, “Give the abomination to the mermaids when they arrive with the morning tide.”
Chapter 14
Meanwhile, back in his cell…
I need to find my wench.
Jory stretched, and the chain pulled taut with a metallic clang. A harder yank pulled it free of the wall. But he wasn’t done. He broke the chain holding him on the other side. Then took care of the manacles clinging to his wrists. Hands free, he glanced at his ankles. Also wearing jewelry. Not his, he might add.
Snap. It took only a second more to free his legs and fully extend himself. Then he took proper stock of his situation.
Last he recalled, he’d made love to Lana. Made her sing with pleasure. Then, he’d woken up in a cell. Not a very nice one. Damp stone, no bed, and the floor lichen-covered. A hole in the ground acted as a privy.
But the thing he disliked most? No Lana.
Where was she?
Freed from his manacles, he approached the door and gripped the bars inset in it. He pressed his face against the metal. “Wench? If you can hear me, say something.”
No reply, which meant nothing. Yet his gut tightened. Lana needed him. He knew it.
And this door stood in his way.
Fingers wrapped tightly around the bars, he heaved. At first, it resisted, but these were bars meant to hold humans. Not Jory.
With the cracking of wood and the groan of bars bending, he removed them from the cut-out. Now, he could fully put his head through and glance around.
A dark dungeon lit only by a few dangling bulbs strung on a loose wire. No Lana, but he knew who to bl
ame for this situation.
Double-crossing sirens.
Withdrawing, he shoved his arm out and found the bar across his door acting as a lock. How old-school.
Bang. It hit the floor, and he finally heard something. Feet clattering down steps.
Company. It would be rude not to meet them. Wasting no time, Jory stepped into the hallway outside his cell.
The first two guards to arrive, he knocked out, wasting no time with his punches. When he hit the staircase up to the next level, he encountered a third.
The man jabbed at him with a knife. Jory slapped it from his hand, grabbed him by the shirt, and lifted him.
“Where is she?”
“Who?” blubbered the man, grabbing at the fingers holding him aloft.
“Where is my wench?” Jory growled, feeling his temper throb. The battle lust filling him.
“The woman? The mistresses have her.”
Which still didn’t tell him enough. “Where?” Jory shook for the man for emphasis.
“The cliffs.”
“The cliffs?” The reply made no sense. “Why would they be at the cliffs?”
“For the dawning ceremony.”
Rather than ask what he meant, Jory tossed the man. He wasted time. If the sirens had taken Lana to the ocean’s edge, there had to be a reason. Given their actions thus far, he would wager that reason wasn’t a good one for his wench.
He sprinted up the spiraling stairs, feeling the adrenaline inside him growing. Emotions pulsed inside. Usually, he did a better job of keeping it under control. But seeing Lana in danger triggered something inside him.
Something dangerous—and usually dormant.
The door at the top of the stairs didn’t survive the brunt of his body hitting it. It exploded open, and he expected a barrage of spears, only there was no one there. Not a single soul in that small hallway guarding the path to the dungeons. No one in the vestibule, or the ringing courtyard outside the spire.
Where had everyone gone?
The cliffs?
The knot in his gut grew. He took long strides across the courtyard, then sprinted up the stairs leading out of the valley, only to stop dead at the crest. With a long-range view, he noted the purpling horizon. The stillness of the sea. The crowd of barely moving bodies congregated, an audience for the people standing by the cliff’s edge. Four bodies.