She paused, as if knowing this was the answer to a question I’d been asking myself ever since Simon and I had become more than friends. I appreciated the chance to let it sink in. Because if what she said was true, Simon loved me—he really loved me. He didn’t just think he did because my abilities gave him no other choice.
Not that it mattered now.
“That’s why being with Simon feels different from being with Parker,” she continued after a moment. “He might fulfill you emotionally… but that’s all he can do.”
I closed my eyes, tried to still my spinning head. “And Charlotte? When she met my dad… ?”
“She was extremely weak. She needed to do something before her body failed her completely. But she resisted because she didn’t want to do what was required. She didn’t agree with it.” Willa sighed. “Your mother, Vanessa, would have rather let her own life go than interfere with someone else’s.”
“But she went through with it,” I said.
“Yes. Unfortunately, hers wasn’t the only life at stake. There are thousands of sirens living in small coastal communities all over the world. For better or worse, the Winter Harbor settlement is quite powerful, and its members take their standing extremely seriously. When it became known that Charlotte was throwing away the power she’d been given, there were threats. To her family, friends… everyone she knew. These communities are small enough that losing even one member severely alters the future population, and the other sirens took her refusal as a personal affront. Eventually, it was either use her abilities and affect one life, or die quietly while potentially hurting dozens.”
“So Dad just happened to walk in on the wrong day at the wrong time?”
“It’s hard to believe that that was all there was to it, but yes. He did.”
Hard to believe was putting it mildly. “But how did that work? He loved my mom—Jacqueline. I know he did. Isn’t being in love the one way a man can resist a siren?”
“For most men. But your mother… and you… come from extraordinary lineage.” Willa’s voice hitched on “extraordinary.”
“What do you mean?”
She stood, walked to the open windows, and breathed deeply. “You’re descendants of a small group of sirens based in northern Canada called the Nenuphars.”
Nenuphars. I remembered the name from the entry about Charlotte’s death in Raina’s scrapbook.
“And these… Nenuphars,” I said carefully, “what makes them so special?”
She turned toward me and leaned against the wall. “There are two ways a group builds collective power. The first is for its sirens to do what we’ve been talking about—use their abilities to make men love them. The second is to harness those feelings in the form of children.”
“The more men a group hypnotizes, and the more babies they have, the stronger they are as a whole?”
“Exactly. For hundreds of years, the Nenuphars have overcome a challenging geographical landscape and limited resources to succeed at both. As far as we know, no other group facing similar conditions has survived. The next oldest community after the Nenuphars is a tiny group in Scandinavia, and they’re younger by two hundred and fifty years.”
I struggled to make sense of this. “So I’m the result of some sort of weird natural selection?”
“In a way,” Willa said. “The Nenuphars’ increasing strength has been passed on over time, making each generation stronger than the one before.”
“And this relates to Charlotte and Dad how?”
She crossed the room and joined me on the couch. “When a man is targeted by a Nenuphar, he has no defense. Love might make him indifferent at first, but it doesn’t take much to win him over. The force is too powerful.”
My head filled suddenly with an image from last summer. “The Winter Harbor sirens… they killed a lot of people. A few months ago, the night the harbor froze, they gathered on the ocean floor and lured dozens of men underwater with the intention of killing them.” Willa’s face was blank as I spoke. If I had a specific question, I would have to ask it. “When you said the Nenuphars succeeded with men… does that mean they simply made the men fall in love with them? Or did they kill them, too?”
“To date,” she said, her face remaining expressionless, “the Nenuphars have taken the lives of thirteen thousand four hundred and twelve men. At their largest, the group had eleven members.”
“Sorry,” I gasped. “May I have—Do you have—”
Willa jumped up and left the room. Seconds later, she reappeared with a pitcher of blue-green liquid and a glass. It took three glasses for me to catch my breath. That didn’t make the words come any easier.
“Do you… ?” I started. “Have you… ?”
“Taken lives?” she finished. She waited for my nod, then took another minute to consider her response. “No. I’ve done everything I can to avoid it.”
I filled another glass. My hands trembled so much, water sloshed out of the pitcher and onto the table.
“It’s a lot to process, I know. And I’m so sorry you’ve gone so long without the truth.” Willa held out one hand, like she was going to brush my hair back from my forehead, but then seemed to think better of it and rested her hand in her lap. “But that’s why Charlotte did what she did. That’s why your father did what he did. Neither had a choice.”
I gulped down the glass of water before speaking again. “Why did she let him live? Why did she leave Winter Harbor a year later—and then give me away when he found her?”
“Despite her reasons for initiating a relationship with him, Charlotte cared about your father. She couldn’t do what was expected of her. So she let him go, and she let the other Winter Harbor sirens believe otherwise. Eventually, worried that they were growing suspicious and fearing they’d do something to you as punishment, she fled. When your father came all that way, she realized how much he cared about you—and how much safer you’d be with him and away from her. They didn’t know who he was, after all. They grew suspicious because her health started to fail again. That wouldn’t have happened—at least not so soon—if she’d taken his life.”
“And the bookstore? The fire?”
Willa paused. “It wasn’t an accident. Your mother thought having no connection to her was the best way to protect you.”
I raised my eyes to hers. “Is that why you never wanted to see me? Because you were a connection to her?”
“Yes. It’s also why I vowed a long time ago never to listen to your thoughts, the way all sirens can to some degree. Even though there were times, like last summer, that I so desperately wanted to check in and make sure you were all right. If I’d done that, in time you would’ve been opened up to mine… and that would’ve made everything even more complicated.”
I looked away, at the spotless coffee table, the empty book-shelves, the fireplace that looked like it had never seen a match.
After everything she’d just said, knowing the truth she’d been keeping to herself all these years, I couldn’t blame her for wanting to keep things simple.
“They’re back,” I said a moment later, my eyes landing on a piece of seaweed stuck to the side of the empty pitcher. “The Winter Harbor sirens. The ice has thawed… and now they’re back.”
“I know.” Her voice was quiet, steady.
“My friends and I… we’re the ones who stopped them last summer.” I looked at her, tears filling my eyes. “I think they’re coming for us.”
This time, she didn’t resist the urge. She reached forward, gathered me in both arms, and pulled me close. As my tears soaked her shoulder, she stroked my hair.
“You’re not alone anymore, Vanessa. They’re not going to hurt you—or anyone else—ever again.”
“How do you know?” I whispered.
“Because we’re going to do it right this time.” She hugged me tighter, rocked me gently back and forth. “We’re going to drown them.”
CHAPTER 25
“HOW ARE YOU feeling?”
> Paige looked up from the magazine she was reading. I started toward her, encouraged by the fact that she was awake and sitting up. She’d been home for two days after a weeklong stay in the hospital, and though she was improving physically, emotionally, it was hard to tell.
“Okay,” she said with a small smile. “Tired, but okay.”
“That’s progress.” I returned her smile and lowered myself to the edge of the bed. I hated what I was about to do but knew I had no choice. “Paige… I have to talk to you about something.”
“Me, too,” she said.
“Can I go first? Please?” We still hadn’t discussed what she’d tried to do, and I knew that’s what she wanted to explain. But I thought her explanation might change once she heard what I had to say. When she nodded, I continued. “You were right.”
“About what?”
My fingers grew moist around the rolled-up newspaper I held. “Do you remember a few weeks ago, when you thought you saw Raina and Zara? In the park during class?”
What little pink colored her face faded to white. “I remember imagining they were there, yes.”
“You weren’t imagining it.”
She looked down at the newspaper when I placed it on the blanket between us. Matthew Harrison’s stiff, smiling face had made the front page. “Is that… ? Is he… ?”
“The Bates recruiter from the café. Parker and I found him floating in the school pool the same afternoon you tried to transform.”
Her head snapped up. “What were you doing with Parker?” she asked sharply.
The question and tone were so unexpected it took me a second to respond. “Talking, taking a break from the whole college scene. We’re friends, sort of.”
“Parker doesn’t have friends who are girls. He has girls he hooks up with.”
The picture of us by the river. She must’ve seen it with the added caption. “Paige, Parker and I… it’s not what you’re thinking. I promise.”
She frowned but didn’t press. Instead, her gaze fell back to the paper. “This doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “He’s one guy. It could be a coincidence.”
“Except it’s not just one guy. They caused the BU bus crash, made Colin Cooper jump off a bridge, and killed the two divers who’d discovered them in the ice. Matthew was the only one who was found smiling because the siren who claimed him was finally strong enough to have that effect. The deaths leading up to his were practice, rehab.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
I tried to explain it the way Willa had explained it to me. “The sirens lost most of their power during the three months they were frozen. In order to grow stronger, they had to pursue again, which was a much more challenging task in their weakened states. To tip the odds in their favor, they started with men who had limited or no defense—those who couldn’t refuse them if they’d wanted to. That’s why Zara stepped in front of the bus and caused the accident, so they could prey upon the hurt and injured.”
“So these guys, lying in hospital beds, professed their love to a bunch of strange women?”
“The ones who made it to the hospital were lucky. The ones who ended up in the water, who weren’t found until their bodies washed up by the airport, they’re the ones the sirens went after. They were so close to death it didn’t take much to finish the job.”
Her face twisted. “And Colin Cooper?”
“His situation was more complicated.” I took a thin stack of printouts from beneath the newspaper. “But I think they found him on an online dating site and began corresponding with him once they learned of his association with Hawthorne. They wanted to make sure we heard about it. According to these e-mail exchanges, he had a history of depression and nearly overdosed once. For weeks the e-mails led up to a single meeting, which he thought went well, and in the next, the young siren ended the relationship, guessing he’d do something drastic in response. She was waiting for him in the river when he jumped.”
“How do you know—”
“I found the e-mails in Betty’s house.”
She stared at me, mouth open, eyes wide.
“I went there after you… after I found you in the bathtub. When Betty didn’t visit you in the hospital or even return my calls, I got worried. I thought something might have happened to her, and if it hadn’t, I wanted to talk to her about what you’d done.” I took her hand; it was limp, but she didn’t pull away. “I was worried about you, too.”
She shook her head. When she spoke, her voice wavered. “She said that they were dead, that she couldn’t hear them. She said she just wanted me to protect myself from others by becoming more like them, so that I could defend myself if ever I needed to again.”
“Paige,” I said quietly, squeezing her hand. “When I was up there, Oliver attacked me. He knocked me unconscious.”
“Oliver’s, like, a hundred years old. He couldn’t swat a mosquito without breaking a bone.”
“Then he’s somehow stronger under Betty’s spell.”
“Her spell?”
Willa and I weren’t sure about this part, but it was the best we could come up with without more evidence. “We think the sirens are somehow controlling Betty to act on their behalf. To get Oliver to care for them… to get you to become one of them.”
She held my eyes for a second before yanking her hand away, pushing aside the newspaper and e-mails, and picking up her magazine. “I appreciate your concern, Vanessa, I do. But the summer’s over. All of that? It’s over. You should move on.”
How I wished that were possible.
“I saw them,” I said. “I saw Zara, and at least a dozen others. They were in Betty’s basement, sleeping in wooden bins filled with ocean water… just like I was.”
In her hands, the magazine trembled. I focused on the cover as I spoke; if I looked at her, I wouldn’t get through it.
“You don’t want to transform, Paige,” I continued softly. “Believe me. You’ll be tired, and weak, and thirsty. All the time. You’ll have to drink constantly and bathe in salt water. Eventually, you’ll have to make guys like you just so you have enough energy to get through the day without passing out. Your life will change completely. Forever.”
There was a long pause. Outside, the brisk autumn wind whined, sending dead leaves flicking against the bedroom windows. I raised my eyes to Paige’s, but she still stared, not blinking, at the magazine.
“How do you know this?” she finally whispered.
Here it came. The truth I’d been hiding for three excruciatingly long months. Once I admitted it out loud, it would be real
in a way it hadn’t been before now.
But there was no use denying what could never be changed.
“Because I’m one of them,” I said.
She jumped just as the bedroom door flew open. Mom came in carrying a tray of sandwiches and ice water.
“I figured you might be too tired to come downstairs for dinner.” She placed the tray on the nightstand and took a thermometer from her sweater pocket. Paige didn’t seem to see it at first, but when Mom wagged it in front of her face, she opened her mouth obligingly. “I brought enough for you, too, Vanessa.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I actually have plans.”
They both looked at me. “Like a date?” Mom asked.
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