Song of Wishrock Harbor (The Invisible Entente Book 2)

by Krista Walsh

  “What is that sound?” Percy asked.

  “You hear it, too?” Gabe passed a hand over his lenses to clear the building snow. “I thought it was the wind.”

  “It sounds like…someone singing. Move closer, maybe we can make it out.”

  Gabe’s mouth went dry, and he stopped. His numbed mind struggled to put a name to the creature crooning the wordless harmony, the sound of it both familiar and blood-chilling. Although the word escaped him, he knew terror was an appropriate response. “This isn’t good.”

  The sound of his heartbeat harmonized with the aria. Despite the wind and snow, his skin flushed, sweat trickling down his back. The desire to see what was behind the curtain of sleet kept him in place, even as his rational mind screamed at him to turn away. To flee while he could.

  “Gabe, get closer,” said Percy, and he sounded impatient, frustrated.

  Gabe didn’t move.

  The figure, on the other hand, did. It took three slow, swaying steps toward him, and as it approached, the song grew louder.

  The wind fell silent and the snow softened. Through its lacy veil, a woman stepped into view, her long white dress covered in sashes and ribbons that blew around her as though she and the storm were one. Her skin was alabaster perfection — Gabe couldn’t spot a single flaw on the porcelain smoothness of her neck or her pale cheek. White hair hung over her shoulders to her waist, blowing behind her in the same rhythmic pattern as her dress.

  Although she stood on the ice, she moved as though she were still underwater, the wind shifting her like a current.

  The white irises of her open eyes gazed on him as her pale lips released the sweet melody that brought tears to his eyes and made his legs tremble.

  He wanted to go to her. He wanted to take her in his arms and promise to give her everything she wished for. His heart ached, bordering on real pain, and he knew it could only be eased if he rested his head against her breast and listened to her song for an eternity.

  Stop.

  Gabe jerked away as the magic in his blood shocked him back to reality. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t second guess. As quickly as his cramped, frozen hands would move, he opened a rift and threw himself into his apartment.

  5

  The moment Gabe’s feet hit the floorboards, he sealed the rift and sank against his front door. His chest heaved, and his heartbeat thudded in his ears with the rhythm of a drum solo. He clutched his sweater and tugged it away from his throat, working to get more air out of the cold draft coming through the window.

  When the whistle of the wind blowing through the gap reminded him too much of the vixen’s song, he lurched over to the window, yanked in the hose for the generator, and slammed it shut.

  He leaned his weight on the sill, his arms trembling, and stared into the storm. As he scanned what he could make out of the streets below, a strange paranoia settled over him. He felt certain he’d see the woman in white gliding toward his building, unhappy that she’d been denied her latest victim. He stared until his eyes burned, but nothing moved down the street except the ever-encroaching snowbanks.

  “What the hell, man?” Percy shouted, and Gabe winced at the sharp volume in his ear. He realized Percy had been yammering at him for a while, but he hadn’t been listening. “I wanted to listen to her and get a look at what she was. Her readings were through the charts. I was picking up all kinds of data, and the more she sang… I didn’t make out any words, but there didn’t need to be any. I knew exactly what she was saying — so much loss and sorrow. Have you ever heard anything like it?”

  “No, I haven’t,” said Gabe. He staggered away from the windowsill, dropped down on the futon, and grabbed the beer he’d opened that morning. His hand shook as he brought the can to his lips, and the contents dribbled down his chin. He wiped the wetness away with the back of his sleeve. “And if we’re lucky, we never will again.”

  “How can you say that?” Percy asked. Gabe pictured him throwing his arms in the air. “We discovered something incredible today. Don’t you want to find out more about it?”

  “I have to say I really don’t.” Gabe finished the can and tossed it into the recycling bin stuck between his futon and the kitchen table. His gaze roved toward the fridge as he considered getting another one or ten, but he held back. He had to think things through, and being muddleheaded wouldn’t help, no matter how much he wished he could drown out what he’d just experienced.

  “What is wrong with you?” Percy demanded.

  “What’s wrong with me? You’re the one raving like a besotted teenager. Cool down and study your reaction for a minute. One more second spent listening to her and you would have killed yourself trying to squeeze into the cables of your computer to get to her. She’s a siren, Percy.”

  Her crystalline notes lingered in Gabe’s mind, soothing his frustration at his friend’s blindness, lulling him into apathy. He forced himself to stay angry, the steady heat burning away the magic of her blissful melody.

  A moment’s silence on the line, then Percy spoke again. His frustration was gone, replaced by academic interest.

  “A siren? As in the creatures out of The Odyssey?”

  “Exactly those.” Gabe shoved his fingers under his sunglasses to rub his eyes, then trailed them down his cheeks to cover his chin.

  Percy puffed out a breath. “How is she killing these guys? How is she bringing them back to shore? She didn’t look strong enough to lug them around on her own. None of the victims were small.”

  Gabe twitched his fingers outward. “It’d be stupid to underestimate her strength. Sirens feed on energy, and the more they feed, the more powerful they get. Not only the strength of their song, but physically as well. I’d bet that after seven prime dinners, she was able to toss those men to shore like ragdolls. These women use their song to lure men to the water, although, from what I understand, they like to use their power more for show than survival.”

  “So the women of New Haven can rest easy, because they won’t be summoned for their own polar swim?”

  “Not necessarily. If she’s the same as any other soul-sucker, she can turn her allure on whoever — or whatever — she wants. In the siren’s case, it’s just a matter of changing the harmony of her song. So far, I guess she prefers her meals to come with a helping of Y chromosomes.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that we’re dealing with the classic beautiful woman of ancient myth who suns herself on the rocks and lures men to their drowning deaths just for the fun of it?”

  “As a weekend adventure, yes,” Gabe agreed. “Only there’s no sun here, is there? No rocks.”

  Percy hmphed. When he spoke again, he sounded more like the rational, level-headed man Gabe had come to know. “On the contrary, she was drinking up heat faster than the ice could produce it. Because even ice gives off heat when it’s melting. But around her, there was none. What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Gabe admitted.

  “Shit,” Percy whispered. There was a pause on the line and then he asked, “How come you didn’t fall for it?”

  Gabe rose off the futon and paced between his living room and the kitchen, skirting around the boxes along the wall that he still hadn’t unpacked from his move to the apartment nine years ago.

  “Her song is an illusion,” he explained, nudging one box out of his path with his foot. “If there’s one thing the Fae are good at, it’s working with illusions. She got her claws in me, all right, but not deep enough to win me over.”

  The brief moment her song had worked on him was bad enough, though. Depending on how he decided to move forward with this case, he would have to be very careful she didn’t wear him down. If he were going to die in a woman’s arms, he’d prefer it to be a woman of his choice. And somewhere warm.

  As though reading his thoughts, Percy asked, “So what are you going to do next?”

  Gabe cracked his knuckles. Choices battled in his mind, a furious tug of war. “I could choose to do nothing.
Consider the job done.”

  “You can’t be serious. You’d leave it at that?”

  Gabe sank onto the futon and pulled his comforter over his lap. “I could,” he said, with more firmness than he felt. “My client asked me to find out what killed her husband. I did. In terms of finances, that sets me up for a couple of months. With hardly any time spent and no expenses at all.”

  And then I’d never have to step foot near that river again.

  Percy fell silent, and Gabe took the opportunity to stare around his empty apartment, trying to find some grounding in the quagmire of his thoughts. A draft wafted around the ill-fitting panes of his closed window, the cold air turning from purple to blue in Percy’s thermal imaging software as it wended through the room.

  He closed his eyes, and the siren’s face flashed behind his eyelids, her pure whiteness sucking all color out of his memories. His brain tingled as her image wormed its way through the hills and plateaus of his gray matter, manipulating them, twisting them until he swore her song was calling to him from outside his door.

  He gripped the comforter at his side and squeezed his eyes tighter. A bead of sweat trickled down his neck.

  Life could return to normal again. He could leave the siren in the hands of the two detectives he’d overheard on the docks. He could shove his memories of Rick into his subconscious where they usually played and pretend that the last twenty-four hours hadn’t happened. One day gone in exchange for years of sanity and sleeping without hands grabbing at him in his dreams.

  But would I really sleep all that well, knowing what I’d left out there to torment the city?

  He buried his head in his hands.

  In his ear, Percy laughed. “I can’t even see you right now, but I know what’s going through your head. You don’t plan to sit this one out at all, do you?”

  “What are you now? My conscience?” Gabe growled. He reached for the headset, prepared to chuck it across the room to prevent his friend from invading his thoughts, then froze with his hand in mid-air, arrested by the view of red waves from the heat of his skin mixing with the blue zigzags of supernatural energy.

  “You don’t need to lie to me,” said Percy. “You know you’ll need my help.”

  The similarity between what Gabe had seen coming off the siren and what was emanating from his own body reminded him that both he and the siren were special inhabitants the same world — the human world, which Gabe had set out to watch over. After his run-in with Jermaine, who’d tried to tear out Gabe’s eyes for his own selfish purposes, Gabe had promised himself he’d never stand by and let an otherworldly being take advantage of the innocent or ignorant again.

  He couldn’t leave this siren in the hands of the mundane cops, no matter how many new nightmares he might acquire along the way as he worked to bring her down.

  No more doubts, no more questions, he told himself. I’ve gone back and forth too much on this. If I want to get it done, I need to focus.

  The decision created a center of calm in the front of his mind that spread out through the rest of his body, settling in his stomach and easing the tension around his mouth. He drew his shoulders back, and the muscles beneath his shoulder blades relaxed.

  He could be stepping into the worst decision of his life, but now that he’d made up his mind not to let his past stand in his way, his confidence was rising. At least he would be able to face the siren on equal ground.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I will need help.”

  His thoughts returned to the detectives at the crime scene. They’d known about his world. If he went to them and explained what he’d learned, maybe he would have their support in capturing the siren.

  But then he’d have to give up his own secret and potentially put himself at risk guarding their backs if they went after her.

  From the cops, his thoughts moved to Daphne. The sorceress would be a handy addition to the team, but would she know enough about sirens to offer solid help? Throwing magic at the problem carried the possibility of making the situation worse, not better. If the siren switched her song and got into Daphne’s head, there was no limit to the damage she could do to the city.

  “So where will you start?” Percy had gone into excited puppy mode, and Gabe hoped he wouldn’t ignore the seriousness of their situation in his eagerness to delve into a new area of research. “Why do you think she’s shown up now, and why is she coming up from under the water? How do you think she’s connected to the storm? Because obviously she has to be, right? No creature can absorb that much heat and not have an effect on the environment around her. Is that sort of meteorological power usual in a siren?”

  Each question pounded like a hammer on an anvil in Gabe’s head. A creeping pain rose behind his right eye and took up residence like an unwelcome neighbor.

  “I have no idea.” He stretched out on the futon and brought the side of his fist down on his forehead. He stared into the stippled ceiling and created patterns out of the shadows. At first they took the form of Vera’s beautiful face, with her high cheekbones and long, graceful nose, her serious mouth set in a neutral expression.

  He could always call her for help. Her demigoddess blood obviously made her immune to different forms of magic, and her strength outmatched even Gabe’s. On the other hand, asking for her help would mean speaking with her, and that idea set his insides shaking. What if she had no interest in helping and turned him down? He didn’t think his ego would be able to recover, and right now, he needed all the confidence he could manage.

  His mind swept her away and replaced her with the more deadly beauty of the siren on the ice, her every feature perfect.

  But her perfection was a lie — a false promise to the men she lured to her side. She offered them eternity and gave them seconds.

  Just like someone else he’d met once upon a time in that small, magically sealed room.

  Allegra Rossi’s thick brown hair and gold-flecked eyes rose in his vision. What better way to find out information about a demon that feasted on the souls of the opposite sex than to question one of her kin?

  Gabe’s eyebrows crept upward, and he sat up.

  “I don’t know the answer to any of those questions,” he said, “but I know someone who might.”

  ***

  Since he didn’t know exactly where he was going, he rifted into the alley behind his favorite pizzeria in the downtown core. After a quick check to make sure no one else was crazy enough to be out on a night like this, he stepped through, then closed the rift and made his way into the sheltered street. Here, the snow only reached as high as mid-calf, which made walking easier than it had been outside his office building.

  On the street itself, a few people joined him in a late afternoon jaunt through the inclement weather, including one mad fool on a bicycle. The younger man whipped along the dips created by the plow’s latest endeavor to clear the route for emergency vehicles, the spokes and frame of his bike packed with slush and snow. Gabe gave him another three blocks before he wouldn’t be able to maneuver the wheels at all.

  Humans.

  He brought his collar up around his neck and plodded down the dark street toward a high-rise condo a few blocks away. Every step increased his wonder about his decision and made him consider turning back. Allegra Rossi was hardly the first person he wanted to spend a snowy evening with — her temper was volatile, her beauty dangerous, and her respect for human life nil, and yet she stood as his best hope.

  He just hoped he’d be able to frame his argument in a way that highlighted the advantage to herself if she helped. She hadn’t seemed the sort to do anything for anyone else.

  Even as he debated the wisdom of his choice, he appreciated that the circumstances allowed him to call on her at all. When he’d met Allegra, she’d been vocal about never settling down. Her incubus brother, Antony, had done so and made it work, but she’d believed it would be harder for a succubus to do the same. She’d built a career around traveling the globe, working as
an advertising and fashion model.

  If she’d held true to that belief, she wouldn’t have been available to ask for help.

  Fortunately for him, she’d given it all up a few months ago to buy a condo in New Haven of all places. Far from her ideal city, based on her comments and attitude sitting around Jermaine’s table. He guessed she’d opted to settle here to fill the vacancy her brother’s death had created in the city’s supernatural sphere. She’d even taken over Antony’s apartment.

  He’d found out almost as soon as she moved in, having made the decision to keep track of all the people he’d been trapped with in that dark and crowded room. The others had decided they wanted nothing more to do with him or the “invisible entente” Jermaine had created, but Gabe had taken a different stance. He’d seen what people on the wrong track could do, and he believed it would be smarter for them to band together to help the world where they could.

  Despite their reluctance or disinterest, he considered them allies in his war against those wanting to use their skills and abilities to hurt people. None of the seven beings Jermaine had trapped together were innocent — except, perhaps, for the human high schooler, who had been caught up due to her desire to help a stranger in need — but he believed the six survivors were capable of rising above their reservations to do the right thing.

  His father would have been amazed that his son had grown into such an optimist. A complete turnaround from his childhood philosophy of “every man for himself because what has anyone ever done for me?”

  Gabe jogged across the street toward the entrance of the condo building. The security doors were open — yet another casualty of the power failure — so he checked for Allegra’s name on the directory, then passed into the lobby.

  The entrance was empty and dark. His boots squeaked against the marble tiles and then halted as he bumped into the leather couch in the center of the room. He glided his fingers over the material and reached in front of him for the wall. The emergency pot lights were on, but they were dim, and with his sunglasses on he could barely make out the glow leading him to the stairwell.