by Eve Langlais
But only one really interested him.
Amidst the sirens, who only wore feathers and not much else, Lana stood wearing nothing but her hair. Her arms were pulled behind her back, hands obviously tied. Only the ends of her tresses lifted in the light sea breeze, the bulk of it tethered by a strap leading to something in her mouth.
They’d gagged her, taking away her power.
Unsporting of them.
He flexed a fist, and it crackled with lightning. Jory had this thing about fighting fair. When he battled against regular warriors, he relied on regular powers. But the sirens weren’t regular beings. They counted on the magic of their song.
They weren’t the only ones with magic.
A bolt of lightning flashed in the distance.
As Jory strode forward, not bothering to hide, more streaks of pure electricity danced in the sky.
Jory drew his sword—no he didn’t carry a hammer. Nor did he have a brother called Thor or an adopted one named Loki. They named the dog Loki.
He cracked his knuckles, his fighting skills a gift from his Valkyrie mother. Lightning continued to crackle, a gift from his father. But Odin wasn’t the only god known for jagged bolts.
“We have no quarrel with the son of Zeus.” Xylo stepped forward and held out her finger. “You may leave.”
“I’ll leave with Lana.” He kept walking, twirling his sword. A rare one forged by the dwarves in the lost dimension. Which was technically not that lost anymore now that Limbo had become a waystation again.
“That is not possible. The abomination must remain.”
Abomination? The word struck him wrong. “I’m going to have to insist.” No way was he going anywhere without Lana.
The siren sang a note then, a commanding boomed word. “Freeze.”
The smile he bestowed made her features blanch. “Tone deaf.” And god-touched, which meant their song didn’t affect him.
Without their song, the sirens couldn’t stop him.
The sky began shifting from purple to pink with hints of orange as the sun rose. A moan erupted from the crowd of gathered sailors, and a quick glance showed them making themselves prostate against the ground.
“We have to hurry,” hissed Chella. “The sun is rising. They’ll be coming.”
“Who’s coming?” He hastened his pace, still yards from the sirens.
Hands gripped Lana, and though she struggled, she could do nothing to stop the three determined sirens.
He had a moment to glimpse her wide eyes, then she was flying, tossed over the edge.
Without a chance. Bound and gagged, she’d drown.
Forget fighting. He ran for the edge, a roar erupting from his lips. Wings burst from his back as the other side of his heritage came into play.
He tossed lightning to clear his path, hearing one of the sirens cry out as he singed her. The other leapt out of his way.
But it took too long. He need to move faster.
He didn’t slow as he reached the edge of the cliff. He jumped off, wings extending, angling into an immediate dive. Just in time to see Lana hit the water far below.
The sea swallowed her. The sky rumbled as he went berserk.
Chapter 15
I should have been freaking out. Who gets tossed from a cliff, trussed like turkey dinner, into a crashing set of waves on rocks and doesn’t lose her mind a little bit?
Oddly enough, I didn’t panic.
So much had finally become clear. Who I was. What I was. The sirens didn’t toss me because they were sadistic bitches—though they totally were, by the way—they tossed me out of fear.
They. Feared. Me.
A heady revelation that didn’t slow my descent. I do think, though, that I might have hallucinated a bit before I hit the water because I could have sworn I saw Conan jump off the cliff and dive at me—with wings. Since when was my meathead part bird?
No time to wonder about it. I hit the water hard and immediately sank like a rock. Which I will admit was much better than smashing into rocks, right? To keep things positive, a la Claire, I kept my panic at bay by reminding myself that if there were a contest for sinking rocks, I currently had the lead. Still, with my hands trussed and my mouth gagged, I found myself at a disadvantage. Especially since I’d only taken in a nose full of air before submerging.
Into water.
Lots of it. And the deeper I went, the darker things got.
It might help if I could swim. I wiggled in the water, my arms especially, hoping the liquid would loosen the ropes binding them. If anything, it made it worse, the knots getting tighter as they expanded like sponges.
Then, as if I didn’t have enough shit to deal with, they arrived. Forget hearing ominous music or trumpeting horns. In the ocean, you heard via the currents. The turbulence fluttered past my skin, warning me.
Not that it did much good. I could do nothing to stop the mermaids from arriving. All around me, they circled. The only good news being that the force of their passage caused me to sit in a bobbing vortex, my sinking halted. However, I wouldn’t say my situation improved given I was the minnow bait amidst a voracious school of mermaids—who, given the teeth on some, obviously had daddies that weren’t exactly of the Flipper variety.
The sarcastic sadist in me wondered if I would die being eaten, or would I drown first?
The answer arrived a moment later as my lungs complained. They spasmed and ached. They wanted oxygen.
I did, too.
A few bubbles emerged from my nostrils. It didn’t really help. I needed to breathe. The gag in my mouth might keep the water from coming in, but I’d still drown.
Drown if I couldn’t remember how to breathe. I’d done it before. I had the memories now. So what if I’d not done it since I was a kid.
I’m a mermaid. Mermaids couldn’t drown.
I closed my eyes to everything around me. Closed off myself and concentrated on one thing.
Breathe.
The human side of me panicked. No. Don’t. You’ll drown.
Breathe.
Someone. Save me.
If I could only make it to the surface.
But I’d waited too long. I’d never make it in time.
Breathe.
Letting go of human instinct was the hardest part. Forcing myself to inhale water through my nose? More difficult than it sounded. The ocean burned. Yet I did it. Let the fluid fill my nostrils and enter my lungs.
The choking proved instantaneous, the expulsions brutally strong, strong enough the strap on the ball in my mouth snapped. Yay for me, mouth free! Boo, though, I still couldn’t breathe. Writhing in the water, my panic was abetted by the dark, cold eyes that watched and did nothing in the vortex around me.
My lungs stopped heaving. My mouth quit gasping for air that wasn’t there, and my mind began to turn dark at the edges.
Then I heard it. A vibration in the water. A discordant noise that lacked rhyme or reason, yet I recognized it.
Singing.
I floated on my back and looked up, way up through the water weighing me down. At first, everything appeared blurry as if seen through a distorting lens, but then I blinked, blinked and kept my lids closed. Except my eyelids were clear, and I could see. The top of the cliff loomed much farther overhead than I’d expected. But I saw clearly.
The shapes atop it. Three undulating forms. Naked but for tufts of feathers. They sang for an audience of one. Conan danced amongst them, lightning flashing from his fingertips, a single figure—with great big wings. A man who tried to take flight, only a chain was hooked around his leg. They’d tethered him.
The sailors on shore reeled in the chain, dragging him down so they might attack.
The cowards went after him, a half dozen at a time. Conan, teetering on the edge of the cliff grabbed hold of a man and swung him around, knocking down others. If I weren’t busy drowning, I would have enjoyed a bucket of popcorn to watch. What I didn’t like was that damned singing. The vibration of it irritated
my gills.
I froze. Gills?
Sure enough, when I’d stopped thinking about it, it happened. Not only did I breathe fine now but my bottom also twitched and undulated with the current.
Hello, tail, my old friend.
The transformation did nothing for my hands, though, nor did it remove the deadly shine in the mermaids’ eyes.
I shot to the surface, ass wiggling, my body arrowing upwards as fast as I could damn well go. It seemed like my smartest move. After all, Jory was there. He’d help me. Save me.
The very thought was what slowed me. This wasn’t Jory’s fight.
It was mine.
As I slowed, I realized I had to stop running—or swimming. Time to face my fears, and my past.
I’d stood against the armies of Heaven and Hell. I could do this. I could save myself.
My life depended on it.
A commotion overhead saw me peeking. A sailor had been tossed into the water, the dagger in his chest sizzling.
With fire.
Jory’s blade. Had he seen me in the water and sent—
Didn’t matter. I could use it. I angled towards the sinking body, capturing the heated blade with the rope tying my wrists. I hissed through my gills, blowing bubbles with the flutter of skin. The heated blade didn’t just burn at the rope, it singed my skin, too.
But I managed to free my hands. Amazing the boost of confidence it gave, which in retrospect was odd. My biggest weapon was my voice.
However, how could I sing in the water with no air?
I’d better figure it out because a mermaid darted at me, hands outstretched, teeth bared. Only one layer, but still kind of pointy. I evaded her grasp and shoved her. Much of the force behind the blow lost to the dense water.
Only then did it occur to me I should have grabbed the dagger. However, it and the body had kept sinking. Too far below now to make a difference.
Another body swam in close. I grabbed the mermaid by the arms, surprised by the wiry strength under the spongy flesh.
We grappled, one on one, but I had to wonder how long that would last. I remained one misfit against a school of angry fish. It was only a matter of time before they overwhelmed me.
Sure enough, something grabbed hold of my hair and pulled. Now, anyone who has hair of any kind knows that fucking hurts.
A sound emerged from me, I couldn’t have said how I did it, but it was sharp, piercing, and if it had words, it might have sounded like, Fucking bitch, let me go.
Apparently, the mermaid trying to render me bald understood because the pressure on my scalp instantly eased. Even the one thrashing in my grip stilled.
The water churned, but less with intent and more with a message passed among them.
“She commands us.”
“Is she the one?”
“Look.”
Look at what? I saw nothing around me but the milling bodies of mermaids, and yet it proved obvious they’d found something of interest.
Me.
More specifically, I noticed their gaze on my tail. What about it?
I finally took a moment to truly observe it. It had changed since my time as a child when it had glittered iridescent green. No longer.
Nor was my coloring anything like the mermaids’. Where they all shone in shades of green and blue, my tail bloomed in a mosaic of color heavily hinting of gold, a shimmering sheath that glinted in the water.
The current stilled until only one phrase kept repeating.
“Ask her. Ask her.”
Ask me what?
One of the mermaids darted close, her hair a long, gnarly mass, bleached by time. Her mouth opened and shut, her eyes didn’t blink. Not a word escaped her, and yet on the current, I heard her speak. Heard her say.
“Where is he?”
Human habit meant I tried to speak a reply. It came out as “blurg, gurg, goo.”
“Are you his daughter?”
That made me freeze. Whose daughter did they think I was?
I was then bombarded by questions, each one riding its own watery swell.
“Where is he?”
“What have you done with him?”
“Bring back our god.”
It took a few attempts, but I managed a feeble reply of my own. “Who is your god?”
“Neptune.”
He was missing, and because we shared the same-colored tail, they thought I knew something about it.
Chapter 16
Lana was still missing, and the infernal sirens remained out of reach, throwing their damned serfs at him. Bloody bastards getting in his way. It didn’t help that rage made a mockery of his usual prowess. The lightning he aimed just never seemed to hit, which meant he couldn’t kill the sirens who’d tossed Lana over the cliff.
Thus, imagine his irritation when he heard a voice say, “You can’t kill them.”
Tossing another sailor off the cliff, Jory didn’t even turn to reply. He knew who that voice belonged to. Odin, the man who was more of a father than the missing Zeus. “I can too kill them. I just need to get rid of their army first.” Another sailor went to feed the fish, clearing a path to Chella.
A path blocked by Odin’s rather wide frame. “You’re in my way,” Jory growled, leaning first left, then right.
“I mean it, Jory. You can’t kill the sirens.”
“Why not? They bloody well killed my wench.”
“She’s not dead.” Odin’s claim penetrated Jory’s rage, and he finally looked at Odin. The centuries had been kind, giving him the distinguished look of a man who’d aged well, his silver hair cut short, his beard trimmed close to the jaw. The suit he wore very unlike the tales of old. Modern Odin cut a fine figure when he left Valhalla.
“If she’s not dead, then I want to see her.”
“She is rather occupied at the moment. Chatting with the mermaids.”
“The same ones who tried to cause her demise?” Jory’s wench had enemies on all sides, and here he was, stopping to chat with the man who raised him when his mother went off to war—which meant, often.
“That was a misunderstanding. They don’t actually want to kill her.”
Jory arched a brow. “They sent a kraken.”
“Who has since quit his job. Apparently, they didn’t warn him that he might lose limbs when they asked him to take down that plane.”
“Why are you here?” Jory leaned on his sword and held in a sigh as he waited for his adoptive father to get to the point. Meanwhile, the sirens had ceased their infernal squawking and huddled together, watching him with Odin.
“To stop you from making a mistake. You can’t kill them. They are the last three living sirens.”
“Not for long.”
“I forbid you.” Odin’s voice boomed as he uttered the command.
Having been the recipient of parental discipline before, Jory found it easy to ignore. “Get out of the way. This doesn’t concern you.”
“Listen to the boy, Odin. We’re not afraid of him.” The words were crooned by Xylo.
Whereas Jory felt nothing, Odin’s eyes glazed. Randy ol’ fool.
Jory might have said something else. Something clever; however, a noise interrupted. Like a whale singing underwater. The strange melody drew their attention to the sea at the bottom of the cliff.
Previously, the water tossed all around making visibility difficult. Now, amidst the churning, appeared a wavering circle of calm, so calm and clear that he could see into it. See a form floating, arms extended, green hair floating around her in a halo.
Lana. A smile burst free.
The noise came from her as she sang. Not in a human voice like the sirens, yet there was no doubting her song. Bit by bit, the sea quelled.
In the clarity left behind, everyone saw the mermaids in the water, swaying in time to the music, the sharks at their backs gently rocking, too.
Lana kept rising, her hands breaking the surface, then her face with a sudden explosion of sound that caused the surface of t
he ocean to erupt. Droplets of water rose in a dense cloud, obscuring all for a moment.
When they dropped in a rainfall, absorbed back into the sea, the water appeared empty. The mermaids gone. Sharks, too.
The only thing left was a naked woman clambering onto the rocks and waving. “I need a towel!”
“Hold on.” Jory gave no thought to stepping off the edge and dropping down. At the last moment, his wings snapped out and caught his plummeting weight. He bent his knees as he landed.
Lana eyed him. “You’re shirtless.”
“I am.” He might have made his pecs dance.
She pursed her lips. “You forgot a towel.”
“Perhaps I can provide assistance.”
Odin, a leer on his lips, appeared and held out his shirt. Which left him bare-chested. For an old guy, he kept fit.
Jory frowned. “Go away, old man.”
“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” Odin kept his gaze on Lana, who’d shrugged on the shirt. The hem went almost to her knees. Although she was now covered, Jory didn’t like seeing her in some other man’s clothes.
“I’m Lana.”
“Lana who?”
“Lana the Misfit.” She held out her hand. “Pleased to meet you…”
A hint of a smile hinted on his lips. “Odin. God.”
“He was just leaving.” Jory inserted himself.
“But things are getting so interesting.”
“Odin!” Jory growled, and lightning crackled.
“Just like your father,” grumbled the old god. Odin cut a symbol in the air and stepped through the portal he created to Valhalla.
Not that Jory watched him go. He swept Lana into his arms and hugged her. In his exuberance, he might have flapped his wings.
“Um, Conan. Are you flying?”
“Yes.”
“With wings?”
“Totally.”
“And I’m just finding out about this now because?”
He grinned down at her. “I was keeping it a surprise.”
“Any more surprises?”
“My father is Zeus.”