There were plenty of theories to support their existence through the ages. Such as, they would beget heirs that would carry on the legacy using the same name. Some believed that this was reincarnation throughout history, and their souls were recycled into different bodies. I chose to believe that they were less deified than they wanted to believe and their mortal existence expired eventually. I believed this was a fantastic argument; there were just a few problems with it. Nobody alive had ever met, seen or heard of Nix’s father and he had never hinted at any interest in having children. He seemed to just have always been. And I had never seen him age in my life. He had always looked exactly like he did now for as long as I could remember.
The Fates were even more of a mystery. Not much was said about them out of fear that they would find out and cut your life short. So, were these women replaced generation after generation or had they always been this trinity?
I had no idea.
Either way, Nix responded to the title of Poseidon, god of the sea. “Isadora, we are so honored that you would bless us with your presence.”
She eyed him shrewdly. “Not you,” she said. “Her.” And her gnarled finger pointed at my chest.
“She’s broken,” the child said.
“No, Veda,” the red-haired woman chastised in a callous voice. “Not just broken. She’s shattered.”
I swallowed the bile that began to rise in my throat and sat on my hands. I had the strongest urge to slap each of them. I knew that wouldn’t be necessary, since they were the Fates and they should know my intentions without me ever having to act them out.
“Settle, Child,” Isadora scolded. “They speak truth not insult.” The two other women shared an amused look. Isadora kept on speaking with a lilting accent I couldn’t place. “We haven’t come to make enemies with you. We’ve come to discuss the future. This is a rare gift we offer you.”
I found my voice, along with some courage and said, “I do not accept it.” I took a deep breath and forced myself to use manners. “Thank you, anyway.”
The three of them laughed at my response, the sound tinkling like wind chimes in the stifled air around me. “You’ve heard of our methods?” the middle woman asked. “You do not wish to trade something for your fortune?”
“I’ve heard you ask for impossible tokens and that after you’ve made your trade, those receiving their fortunes wish they were dead instead.”
She didn’t miss a beat, “But is it because we have taken something from them? Or because their futures were too bleak for their weak hearts to handle?”
“Enid,” Isadora cut in once again. She looked up to me with a frown on her face. “What you say may be true, but we are not asking anything from you. This is a gift that we give freely.”
“Why?” You couldn’t blame me for having doubts. These women had the reputation of acting out spitefully and creating chaos. I wanted no part of this world and they represented this circle as much as anyone else.
“Because the god of the sea requests it,” Veda, the child, replied in a trance-like voice.
“Because you will bring in the new era,” Enid echoed.
“Because the Siren’s song sings louder than all the rest,” Isadora finished.
And then they stared at me as if waiting for me to respond.
Uh...
Nix plopped down into the desk chair and crossed his ankle over his leg. He let out a weary sigh and reached up to loosen his tie. Without bothering to spare us a glance, he stared out the window that looked down at a parking lot and said, “She won’t understand your riddles. Do the reading in words she can understand or fly back to the underworld from whence you came.”
The three of them turned their heads slowly at the exact same time and stared down Nix with the wrath of a Fury. Nix held up a hand and casually turned to Isadora.
“I do not forget who you are,” he spoke authoritatively. “So do not forget who I am. While you can perform neat tricks to tell me my future, I have the ability to cut yours short. Read the girl before I grow impatient.”
Enid’s fingernail cut through the end of his order as it scratched over the glass coffee table. The scraping sound made me hunch forward and put more pressure on my hands. I hated the sound of it. I hated that she wouldn’t stop.
“Orpheus rises,” Veda whispered.
Enid’s fingernail stopped immediately and Veda’s eyes relaxed into unseeing, empty pockets inside a bone-colored skull. Then she blinked back to life and stared directly at me. Again.
“Orpheus rises,” she repeated. “And he will singer louder than she can.”
I racked my brain for the myth of Orpheus and the Sirens. Only two men in the history of mankind were ever able to resist the murderous intentions of the original Sirens. At least according to the myths. Odysseus forced his men to put wax in their ears while he was tied to the stern of the ship and Jason hired Orpheus to sing out songs to cover the luring ballad of the first three of my kind. They were said to be beautiful bird-like women who would bait men to their island in order to eat them.
If they were on the verge of telling me my super-siren power was a new affinity for human flesh, or that my arms were about to transform into wings, I was so freaking out of here.
I had this very strong hope that the whole cannibalism thing had been exaggerated by ego and fear and bitter men. But if you’ve ever wondered where the phrase man-eater came from? Now you know. Now you know and wish you didn’t know.
Nix sat forward in his chair and rested his elbows on his knees, taking in every detail of the room and the three Fates with hawk-like eyes. “Orpheus?” he demanded. His face flashed with confusion before his eyebrows settled low over his dark eyes and his mouth pressed into a grim frown. “This is someone I know? Someone that will challenge me?”
“Someone that already has,” Enid confirmed.
Nix stood up and walked to the window. This was apparently his thing, to stare out windows. “Is she who I think she is?”
Isadora confirmed, “She is who you think she is. And she will be who you think she will be.”
“Who is Orpheus? Tell me so that I can take care of him.”
Instinct twisted at my gut. There was only one musician I knew that was unaffected by my curse. But I would never even think his name in this room.
Veda’s black eyes watched me with perked interest and I hated that she was following my train of thought. I let her know that; I put every ounce of my disgust and frustration into my mind and watched her flinch back from the force of it. I felt bad for a second for bullying a child but then she hissed at me, revealing elongated fangs that dripped down from her eye-teeth and I lost the remorseful feeling immediately.
“We cannot tell you before we are sure,” Enid told Nix. “We feel his body come to life and his resistance to the power she wields but his role has not yet made itself known. There are too many variables for us to choose a singular path.”
“Make an educated guess,” Nix demanded. He usually hid his accent with expert skill but as he grew more frustrated with the women in this room, his inflection overpowered his consonants and his words became coated with the ancient mark of a language that was no longer spoken- a language from before human languages.
“You forget to whom you speak,” Isadora snapped. Her hands fluttered at her sides and blue lightning snapped back and forth between her fingertips.
“No, wench of the gods, I do not.” The sky darkened behind Nix with his words and when he stepped forward thunder boomed behind him. The same blue lightning that danced at Isadora’s fingertips flashed in the sky behind Nix’s head and the lights flickered on and off in the room.
I sat paralyzed as the display of warring powers dueled in front of me. Enid and Veda stood up to join Isadora in a show of support, while my mother moved to stand behind me, whether to protect me or ask me to protect her I will never know.
“I can only tell you what we know,” Isadora spoke calmly, soothingly. “We have not seen
Orpheus in his true form, only that he has come and that he can block out the sound of her voice. We have also seen what you have seen. And we know that she is the one you seek. Her powers will be unparalleled, her beauty unmatched. But he seeks to take her from you. He seeks to keep her for himself.”
Well, that couldn’t be Ryder.
Now I was confused.
“I will take her back to Greece,” Nix decided. His eyes flickered to me for a moment and his frown deepened. The sky cleared behind him. As quickly as it darkened, it flashed back to sunny and bright. The purple clouds disappeared, the thunder quieted and the lightning receded. Nix’s ire came and went with the quickness of the thoughts in his head.
“What good will she be locked away?” Veda asked, moving on like nothing incredible had happened. The thought from someone so young surprised me at first but then I remembered the fangs and decided that even though she looked young, she was obviously more than she seemed.
“And what good will she be at all, if I lose her?” Nix snarled.
“She is more important than your plans, Poseidon.” Enid’s eerie eyes flashed with white light and her wild hair lifted and danced around her shoulders with an invisible power. I sat rooted in my seat, amazed at the mystical powers sizzling in the room. While I possessed my own subtle, otherworldly authority, I had never seen this kind of influence manifest before.
I had always held doubts to the reach of my circle and what we were truly capable of. It seemed we barely held more than just a little bit of forced control over the rest of humanity. But these moments left no doubts in my mind. This was real. Nix was real. The Fates were real.
I was real.
Nix took a menacing step forward. I had been at the receiving end of his plays for power before and I did not envy these women. “The rest of the Greeks have faded away, Harpy. There is only me. There is only my power.”
“And there is her,” Veda reminded him simply.
“But she too is mine.” And the statement might as well have been written in my own blood.
Isadora backed down to deliver the next blow. “That is a future that is not certain. There are still too many paths. Still too many strings.”
“Cut them all and leave only mine.”
Isadora’s face blanched with disgust. Her voice was a croaking whisper when she told him, “You would kill us all.”
Nix let out a defeated sigh and breathed slower. “If I take her to Greece with me?”
Enid braved, “That is not the path.”
“And what am I supposed to do while I wait for the path to reveal itself?” Nix asked with undisguised frustration.
“Wait,” Isadora said.
“And find Orpheus,” Veda told him.
His eyes turned to the child. “When I find him? Then what?”
Her steady gaze held his curious one and she instructed simply, “Kill him.”
Nix accepted this as the most logical answer and visibly relaxed. Now he had a mission. Now he had a goal. While my future still juggled around uncertainly, Nix’s was quite clear.
My head spun and my heart ached inside my chest. Who was Orpheus? Instinct whispered I already knew but my head reasoned it couldn’t be.
Still, my promise to keep Ryder as far from Nix as possible reaffirmed itself inside my soul and I cemented my resolve. I would never let Nix touch Ryder.
I would do whatever it took to keep Ryder safe. I would always do whatever it took.
No matter the cost.
“Is he my only threat?” Nix asked with a calculating gleam in his eye.
Isadora’s milky-white eyes turned to look me over. “Besides the girl, he is your biggest threat. But Olympus always waits in the wings.”
I pressed my lips together and shrugged casually. What did they expect? For me to want this? For me to be excited about the life Nix had planned out for me?
Not a chance in hell.
Enid and Veda turned to me at the exact same time, giving the gesture a highlight of creepy. I stilled my body so that I wouldn’t flinch while they all moved toward me as one unit.
Their eyes glazed over and the blue lightning reappeared, snapping back and forth among the three of them as if they were silver poles on the top of a tall building during a storm. The lightning stayed confined to their three bodies, but it lashed out riotously, whipping the air around them and crackling with ancient power.
All at once they spoke in unison. “Orpheus will destroy you the first chance he wins. And in your pain you will destroy everything. You will raze this world to ashes. You will set an unquenchable fire that will burn for generations to come. You will obliterate everything that you touch. Do not let Orpheus have what belongs to Poseidon. Or it will be the end of us all.”
The lightning started to fade and the glossy look began to dissolve from their expressions when Veda spoke up in her lilting little girl voice. “It will be the end of you.”
And then they were freed from their vision.
I stood up and wrapped my arms around my chest. They were obviously unhinged, but how could I ignore those words?
Obviously, I couldn’t.
“I trust you’ll return to where you came from,” Nix eyed them meaningfully.
“Until you need us again,” Enid quipped knowingly.
He seemed to stifle an impatient sigh. “If anything becomes clear, I expect to hear immediately.”
“And you will give us what we want next time.” For some reason Isadora’s eyes flickered to my mother and I felt an irrational pang of protective instinct.
Nix didn’t acknowledge her in any way. Instead, he held out a hand to me and waited patiently for me to take it. Eventually, I did, but only so we could leave as soon as possible. I was so over these crazies.
“Siren you go quietly. Are there not even tears to shed?” Enid taunted me. “We bestowed you with a rare gift. Never have the patrons been privy to such a conversation. And yet you feel no gratitude.”
My throat felt dry and scratchy from the information that swarmed in my head like a thousand bumble bees attacking. My body swayed with weakness and the overwhelming exhaustion that comes with knowing too much and not enough at the same time. Still, I found the spirit to respond to this horrid creature. “No, I do not feel grateful. You have the power to see everything and yet you twist it to fit only your will. I see what you are trying to do to me. How you’re trying to manipulate me and force me into believing your explanation of the future. I will not buy it. I will not believe it.”
Nix watched me with a masked expression that I couldn’t read and my mother put a hand around my forearm in order to tug me towards the door.
“Believe what you want, Siren,” Isadora stepped in. “But there are only so many ways to deceive someone who sees truth as clearly as you.”
“Sorry to disappoint,” I shrugged easily.
“That has yet to be seen.” And then she walked away.
Enid turned her attention to Isadora and they bent their heads together to have a serious conversation. The only one to turn back and give me more attention was Veda. With her tiny little fingers and a horrid expression on her face, she held up her pointer and middle finger and snipped them through the air like a pair of scissors. Then she threw her head back and let out a sadistic howl of evil laughter.
I quickened my pace and practically ran from the hotel room.
I had never been more terrified, more wary of the future. Who was Orpheus and was it possible to get us both out of here alive? Or was this one of the self-sacrificing moments when I would give everything up to protect him?
But if so… at what cost?
Chapter Five
What happened? Call me.
Are you alright?
Call me.
Seriously, Ivy… call me.
Did you disappear?
If I don’t hear from you in five minutes I’m calling the cops.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
….
Are you messing with me?
Please call me?
Ivy… please?
Ryder left me a mess of concerned texts on the phone I’d left behind. As soon as we walked through the door of the condo again, I sprinted for my room, knowing he would be worried. I typed back a quick reply that I was fine for the most part and that I was sorry to make him wait.
He didn’t immediately respond, so I took my phone back into the living room with me. My mother and Nix sat huddled together in a hushed conversation with their heads pressed together. They glanced up when I came back into the room and watched me carefully.
Nix straightened and stared at me from across the room. His long fingers went to his loosened tie and he began to fiddle with it in an effort to straighten it once again. “I have business tonight. I’m taking your mother with me.”
“Okay,” I shrugged.
“I know that I cannot trust you,” Nix started regretfully. “But I am asking you to let me trust you tonight.”
I just stared at him.
“Ivy, we’re concerned about this,” my mother spoke to me for the first time today. “We don’t want this to escalate. We want you to be safe.”
“You want to control me,” I argued.
Nix growled out a curse. “I don’t have time for this, Ivy. Stay here. Stay out of trouble. And keep your phone close.”
He ripped at his tie that was becoming a knotted mess in his frustrated fingers until he finally lost all patience and tore it off his neck. He popped open the top button on his white oxford next and leveled me with one more ferocious glare. My mother followed him to the door and with one last melancholy glance in my direction she disappeared after him.
I shook out my head and let the air decompress after their exit. Nobody had said a word after we left the Fates. Nix seemed tangled in his own thoughts and my mother shrank into the seat, oppressed by some fear I didn’t understand. I had my own problems to sort out, so I breathed in the silence and let them ignore me.
Orpheus.
Ryder.
Orpheus.
Ryder.
Could they be the same person? Could Ryder really destroy me?
The Fall (The Siren Series) Page 4