Siren's Song

by Heather McCollum

  “I’ll wait and give you a ride,” Carly volunteers. “Do you think it was—?”

  “Shut it,” Taylin hisses.

  I look at the crowd, silent, listening. Matt looks to me. “Be careful,” is all he says and turns. Carly follows him like a puppy. To his credit, he slows to match her pace.

  Taylin gives me a ride home. Five minutes of thick silence swells through the small hatchback before I crack and tap her radio on. I expect heavy metal, ridiculously loud and angry, but anything is better than thinking. Instead, a classical station fills the car with a rapid and emotion-packed performance on a piano. I look sideways at Taylin, who frowns despite a soft blush and punches the off button. Okay–no radio.

  “So, you think it was Luke who trashed Matt’s car?” I say.

  “Not too many people can punch windows out and rip a car roof off.”

  I tug at my bottom lip with my teeth. “Are you all that strong, you and Matt?”

  She laughs. “I wish. No, Luke’s so strong because the curse is growing stronger in him.”

  My stomach tightens. “So if he loses control, he’ll be able to kill me easily.”

  Taylin doesn’t answer. She pulls into my driveway and parks next to my mom’s car. Taylin and I walk in. Mica jumps around me and Taylin scratches her head. “I used to love animals,” she says as she smiles at Mica.

  “And now you don’t.”

  “It’s weird. They still look cute or beautiful, but I don’t have the need to touch them, for me, anyway. I still do, though, for them.”

  “So…you play your part for animals but not your parents.” I can’t help but feel sorry for the two who got stuck with her.

  Taylin straightens slowly, her fierce frown back in place. “I’ve seen enough therapists to have any type of psychological discussion you’d like to have. But right now, we’re trying to save your life, not fail at fixing mine.”

  “Right,” I point my finger at her, thumb up like a pistol, “sorry.” I pour a glass of apple juice for me. “Want a drink?”

  “Got any Glenburgie single malt Scotch Whisky?” She pauses, then chuckles. “Water’s fine.”

  I hand her a tall glass. “You were born two hundred years ago?”

  Taylin nods and guzzles the cold water. “We didn’t have water like this back in 1800.”

  “Was it warm and dirty back then?” I pull two apples out of the fridge and wash them.

  She laughs. “In cities like Paris, but in the highland mountains we lived on sparkling, fresh spring water.” She stares down into the empty glass. “Not a chlorine molecule to be found. Don’t think I’ll ever taste that again.”

  “You could go back to Scotland,” I suggest as I fight the urge to defend my water. She’s probably right, of course, but Taylin has a way of twisting everything just a bit to piss people off. “If you take care of yourself and graduate, you could go back there and drink all the water or whisky you want.”

  She huffs. “Haven’t you ever heard the phrase, ‘there’s no going back’? We’ve spent a few lives in Britain, but modern civilization has polluted most places.”

  “Do you all meet up once you become teenagers?” I ask and sit down.

  She nods and bites into the apple. “Sooner, usually. Never this late before. Mathias and I were worried that something had happened to Lucas.”

  “How did you die in the last life?” I wonder if it’s rude to ask someone how they died. Like it’s personal, or something.

  She lets out a tired sigh. “I had leukemia. Definitely not my preferred way to go.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “I’m sorry.” She shrugs. “Were you the first last time, you know, to die?”

  She shakes her head. “Lucas was the first to die last time.”

  Just the thought of Luke dying tightens my stomach. I set my apple down, no longer hungry. “How?” I whisper.

  “Sniper, I think,” she says between munches. “His dad was military, so Luke joined the Navy Seals, some elite group. Kept him away and in the action most of the time. Perfect for someone who has no reason to live, someone who craves respect and wants to make something of his torturous life.”

  I swallow around the sad lump. “That’s…horrible. We so need to break this curse.” I shake my head.

  “Hey, I’m all for that.” She shrugs again. “We focused on that our first three or four lives, but none of our magic, even combined, was able to break it or even weaken it.”

  “Maybe you could start by writing down for me exactly what Maximillian said about the curse. What you remember of his exact words and anything after that.”

  “Not much after he cast the spell, since he had his guards kill us.”

  “What? How?”

  “Lucas didn’t go into that, huh?”

  “Um, I was in information overload.”

  Taylin ran her fingertip around the glass rim. “Yeah, the bloody bastard was dying, used up his life casting the curse, but he worried about leaving his daughter. She was a quiet, timid thing. Hardly spoke. I guess he thought we’d take our revenge out on her, so he had us murdered immediately.”

  “How?” I was drawn to the details as if watching a car wreck.

  “Short swords. They all carried them. The ones who didn’t possessed innate magic of their own.”

  “And they just…stabbed you?”

  Taylin nods. “It hurt.”

  “God.”

  “Never met him,” she quips. “We were reborn the following October thirty-first. By the time we were old enough to remember and find our way back to Maximillian’s and each other, like, fifteen years later, his daughter was long gone, tucked away somewhere. We thought she might have some answers. We didn’t really know what had been done to us.”

  “The curse—you didn’t know?”

  “Well, it happened fast. We tried to remember all of it, but it took us a couple lives to figure out how horrible the curse really was…is.”

  I pull out a notebook and turn to a clean page. “Write down everything you three have remembered. Maybe a set of fresh eyes will see something.”

  The crunch of tires in the pebbled drive makes me glance up. Carly’s car parks next to Taylin’s. I don’t see Luke.

  Matt bursts inside. “He had to pick my car to rip apart! Lucas, get yer bloody arse out here! I don’t care how bloody strong you are, I’m kicking yer—”

  “He’s not here,” Taylin cuts in, but doesn’t look up from the paper.

  “Damn!” Matt strides across the kitchen and throws himself into a chair.

  Carly follows with a wry grin. “Maybe it’s best he’s not here until you calm down.”

  “What?” Matt thumps his hand on the wooden table, making my glass jump. “You don’t think he can defend himself against me? Damn–he kicked my car apart from the inside and yarked in it!”

  I frown. “Why did he puke? He wasn’t sick earlier today.” We’d sat together through our classes, much to the entertainment of the gossip lovers. I’d gotten some brief satisfaction from Rachel Manx’s sour lemon face when Luke held my hand on the way out of gym.

  Matt takes a gulp from Taylin’s water before she snatches it back. “My guess is Tay’s cookies.” He wipes the back of his hand across his wet mouth.

  “My cookies?”

  “Yeah,” Matt answers. “I ate two; when Jule started singing, my stomach turned sour. I almost had to run to the privy.”

  Carly stares at Matt. “Privy?”

  “Toilet,” I answer. “They talk more…Old English when they aren’t at school.”

  Carly nods and forms a little “o” with her mouth.

  “Hmm…no one besides us seemed sick,” Taylin says.

  I give a glass of water to Matt and pop a Diet Coke for Carly. “Maybe because they aren’t cursed.” Matt’s brows pinch. “You three don’t respond to my singing like others, so maybe the cookies work differently in you, too. If the nettle powder affects
the cerebellum, maybe that affects the stomach.”

  “The cerebellum,” Carly chimes in, “controls balance.” We all look at her. “Pre-med, remember? So yes, affecting the cerebellum could have stimulated your orientation of movement, giving you vertigo and nausea.”

  “I was a little dizzy,” Taylin admits. “I guess it may have been when Jule was singing. I just thought it was my natural reaction to her perfection,” she says sarcastically. I ignore it because my mind, as usual these days, filters everything through Luke.

  “And you made him eat twelve,” I whisper.

  “And your singing affects Lucas much more than us,” Matt adds. “Damn. He was probably trying to get out of there and started barfing in my car.”

  “Barfing?” Carly leans into me. “Very Old English.” I crack a smile. Leave it to Carly to make me grin when all hell has broken loose.

  “I drove him to school today,” Matt says, “because of the rain this morning. But why did he have to destroy my car?” he whines.

  Taylin shrugs. “Maybe once the cookies were out of his system, he lost control of himself.”

  I choke a little on the water I just sipped. I hack while Carly thumps my back. Note to self—thumping someone who’s coughing is SO not helpful and just frickin’ annoying. I step away from Carly and concentrate on breathing. “Should…we…go after him? I mean, he should be safe now.”

  “He knows where we are,” Matt says. “He’s probably showering or something before coming over. I would. Maybe he’s out buying me another car.” Matt looks at me. “Got anything stronger than water?”

  “She’s a bit short of whisky,” Taylin quips.

  I set four different types of soda in front of him, along with a bag of Cheetos. He grabs a handful of the artificial orange snacks.

  “Alright,” Taylin holds out the notebook. “I wrote down everything I remember of Maximillian’s spell, along with the angry words he threw around. Want to add anything?” She hands the notepad to Matt. He scribbles a few words here and there while Taylin nods over his hand.

  “Pierce the dragon’s eye?” Taylin questions. “I thought he said dragon thigh.”

  “And how would that make sense?” Matt asks. “Why would anyone pierce a dragon’s thigh?”

  “Well, a dragon’s eye doesn’t exist, either,” Taylin grumps, crossing her arms over her black Alien Sex Fiend Band T-shirt. “And there was no ‘s’ to make it possessive.”

  “The man was spouting insanity,” Matt argues. “So he forgot to make it possessive. I still think piercing a dragon’s eye makes more sense than piercing a dragon’s thigh.”

  I glance at Taylin’s notes.

  You tricked me. You made me…she’s dead. You killed her! All three of you are responsible. We were to live together forever. You bloody, worthless bastards!

  “A curse to chain you three together.

  Vengeance, Lucifer’s lair on Earth, loveless torture through your eternities.

  Until the dragon thigh is pierced and the Siren’s blood is spilled or the last of my blood breathes no more.”

  Incoherent yelling, cursing, crackling.

  “Crackling?” I look up.

  Matt glances at the notes. “Some sort of electrical discharge, probably due to the huge amounts of dark magic he was holding at the time. He’d planned to perform a ritual that night. A spell that would make him and Deidre live and die over and over again together.”

  “Personally,” Taylin says, “I think that would have been hell for Deidre. Perhaps dying and moving on, hopefully away from her overbearing, foul-hearted bastard of a husband, was what she’d have preferred, anyway. I would have.”

  “You would have preferred to die after one short life than to live many lives?” Carly asks.

  Taylin looks right at Carly. “One short life where I could feel love, to a thousand lives of hellish loneliness and emotional torture? I’d have chosen Deidre’s fate over mine in a heartbeat.”

  “Yet,” I stare at Taylin from my spot against the counter, “you condemn Luke to that same existence, even when he has a chance to love, die, and move on.”

  She shrugs nonchalantly. “I’m pretty selfish.”

  “Plus,” Matt adds, “to die and move on, he’d have to kill you.”

  “Which is not an option.” Luke’s deep voice strums a line of awareness through me, spiking my pulse into a race. He steps from the living room into the kitchen. Mica jumps up on his knees. He scratches her head but stares at me. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “Instead, he’ll just torture and rip apart poor defenseless cars,” Matt says, tipping his chair back to look at Luke. “Dude?” he whines.

  I regain enough control to push away from the counter and step up to Luke. I raise my hand to his cheek to brush away some of the damp, dark hair. He smells fresh-fromthe-shower fantastic.

  Luke stands perfectly stone-still. His breathing stops.

  “What happened?” I ask and lower my hand because it seems to hurt him. I hide the pain in my own eyes by looking down. He has stared, for ten other lifetimes, at my sadness in his pictures. He doesn’t need to see it reanimated in front of him now.

  “I lost control.” His voice is flat. He shifts to the side so that we don’t touch directly. “The cookies seemed to help for the first few notes. The rage was smothered, as if a heavy blanket covered it.”

  “You heard her across the school?” Carly asks.

  I look up and catch Luke’s nod. “It seems to be about a five-mile radius,” he says. “I test it each day I leave school when drama starts.”

  “Five-mile radius,” Taylin says and jots it down on the notepad. “Cookies worked for a few seconds.” She looks up at him. “Maybe I need to make them stronger.”

  “No!” Matt and Luke say at the same time. Luke grabs a root beer off the table and pops the can. “When Jule continued to sing, I suddenly felt like I was going to vomit. It was pretty…intense. I barely got out of the classroom and then the school before I started heaving.”

  “Someone must have seen you,” Carly points out.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Matt says, “I’m not sanctioning any investigation.”

  “What about your parents?” I ask, though my eyes are still searching Luke’s stiff form.

  “I’ll come up with something,” Matt answers. He doesn’t seem too concerned.

  “So, you got into Matt’s car,” I prod. “Then what?”

  Luke walks over to Matt and lays a heavy hand on his brother’s shoulder. “I hurled, sorry, man. Once the cookies were out of me, I sort of lost it.”

  “Your control?” Matt asks, but he’s already nodding.

  “I tried to stay in the car. I couldn’t trust myself not to tear back into the school.” Luke’s face is pinched, eyes narrow, lips a thin, tight line. His gaze finds mine. “If I did anything to…harm you in any way, I…it would be unbearable,” he says with fire bundled up inside a whisper.

  “I think that’s the point,” Taylin says. She turns in her chair. “Maximillian wants to torture us forever, until we end it with one final anguish in life, an anguish which may then just condemn us to hell afterwards.”

  The five of us stand in silence, scattered about the room. I listen to the stark tick of the clock above the back door.

  “You won’t go to hell,” I finally say, breaking the deep freeze. Matt downs the rest of his soda. Luke flexes his arms overhead, as if forcing the tension out of his body. Is it possible that he’s growing even larger? His muscles bulk up under his thin, long-sleeved gray cotton shirt. God, he is chiseled. Any male model–well, any male–would probably risk hell to get that toned.

  Luke looks at me. “You don’t know that.”

  “You don’t, either. But from my point of view, if you were to kill me, it would be on Maximillian’s soul, not yours. It’s his curse pulling your strings, not you.”

  “Either way, killing you is not an option,” Luke grinds out.

  “I’m not saying it is
.” Strange, how I can talk about my own brutal murder so calmly? “I’m just saying, if…there’s an accident and you…lose your cookies again,” Matt laughs at my pun, but no one else does, “and you hurt me, it’s not your fault.”

  “It will be my fault for not being able to control myself, not doing the right thing in getting as far away from you as I can.”

  “Westerland is more than five miles away,” Matt points out.

  I frown at him. “But he still lives right down the street. You think I can go the next year without singing in my own house?”

  “I could work on a spell to make you mute,” Taylin says. She looks excited.

  “Uh…no, thanks.”

  “We’ll keep it in mind if we don’t come up with anything else.”

  I look back at the notepad, deciphering Taylin’s slanted scrawl.

  Life after life, devoid of that essential part of existence, love.

  No love, only longing, only emptiness, only sadness, daily pain through your lives until you find your one true love, your Siren who calls to you. You will love then, fully, fiercely until the curse grows unfettered, breaking through mortal restraint. Until you pierce the dragon thigh–Matt’s scribbled “Dragon’s eye” above it–and spill the blood of your own Siren. Only then, as you feel the pain I feel, will you be free to love and die a natural death.

  “Did he say ‘natural’?” Luke asks as he leans over my shoulder to read Taylin’s paper. His closeness pricks along my body, waking my awareness like an electric charge, sparking me with a rush of adrenaline and heat. “I thought he said ‘mortal death.’ And ‘dragon thigh’?”

  “See!” Matt stabs the paper with a finger. “I think it was dragon’s eye. Makes more sense.”

  Luke frowns at the paper. “I…don’t…know. I remember dragon. I guess I’ve only ever envisioned a dragon. Probably because Maximillian always had that swirling dragon motif around his books and things.”

  “The ones on your arms?” I ask. Luke’s gaze snaps to his arms, but they are covered by the shirt.

  He nods and rolls up his sleeves. Faint shadows of the encircling dragons mark his upper arms. “They’re getting darker, even when you aren’t singing,” he murmurs.