Dark Water: A Siren Novel

by Tricia Rayburn

  “When I’ve heard sirens in the past,” I began carefully, “without intentionally listening for them, how did that happen?”

  “Like at the bottom of the lake? When you heard me speaking to you?”

  I nodded.

  “Sirens are born with the natural ability to silently communicate with one another. The difference between that and what I just described is that the dialogue needs to take place in person. We automatically tune into one another; our bodies sense commonalities even when we don’t. As long as a siren’s close enough that you can reach out and touch her, you should be able to speak to her without saying a single word out loud. Focus is still required on both parts—each needs to intend to speak to the other—but the effort needed is much less. And after an initial exchange, communication becomes even easier. Close proximity isn’t as necessary. That’s how you and I can speak silently from different rooms in the house.”

  This could explain how I’d just heard Paige say Raina’s name at the restaurant, and how I’d heard her whisper her unborn baby’s name the night of the Northern Lights Festival last summer. It also explained how I’d heard Zara on the bottom of the ocean at the base of Chione Cliffs, and at the lake last fall.

  There was one thing, however, that didn’t match up.

  “Last summer,” I said, “I heard Justine. Talking to me, after she was gone.”

  The corners of Charlotte’s mouth turned down. “I remember. You told me that last fall.”

  “But she wasn’t a siren … was she?”

  “No.”

  “So how was that possible?”

  Charlotte’s fingers moved lightly across the top of my hand. “It wasn’t,” she said. “At least not the way it seemed.”

  Outside, a wave crashed into the rocks below the house. Already on edge, I jumped.

  “This might be difficult to understand,” Charlotte continued, “and even harder to accept. Are you sure you want to know?”

  Heart thudding in my chest, I settled back down on the bed. “Yes. Please.”

  “The voice you heard, though it sounded identical to the one you’d heard every day for seventeen years, didn’t belong to your sister.” She paused, letting this sink in. “It belonged to you.”

  The thudding in my chest fell silent.

  “Justine seemed to speak to you in moments of distress, yes? When you were feeling particularly sad or scared or confused?”

  I thought back to last summer. I’d heard her my first day back in Winter Harbor after the funeral, when I pulled into the lake house driveway and thought I saw flashes of silver light behind me. She’d encouraged me to follow other silver light streaming from beneath Zara’s bedroom door, and to keep looking through Zara’s scrapbook of conquests and targets when I ached to throw it and run. She’d guided me toward Caleb when he was fleeing his pursuer’s hold. She’d reached out every time I needed her, just as she would’ve if she’d still been alive.

  Charlotte took my silence for agreement and continued.

  “Our bodies can act without instruction, as we know, and when you heard Justine, yours was doing two things unprompted. The first: it was manipulating your grief by making you hear a voice that wasn’t there. This could happen to anyone, siren or not, who has suffered a tragic loss.”

  “But she—the voice—knew things I didn’t. Like that Caleb was running down the road, toward a gas station. That helped me find him. If I was just talking to myself, how would I have known where to look?”

  “That’s the second thing your body was doing,” Charlotte said. “It was already tuning in to the sirens around you without your knowing, taking the information they provided, and sharing it with you via Justine’s voice so that you’d listen.”

  I shook my head, struggled to make sense of this. “So when I heard Justine say Caleb was running down the road … I was translating information my body picked up from Zara?”

  “Precisely. She and Caleb had been physically close just before he ran, correct? So they were still connected to some degree, and she could sense his whereabouts. Your body picked up on that. Unlike hearing the voice of someone you’ve loved and lost, only sirens have this ability.”

  I turned my head, looked out the window. Charlotte was right. This was hard to hear—and even harder to accept. This whole time, I didn’t know how it was possible, but I still liked believing that it was. I liked knowing Justine had still been with me for a time even when she no longer was physically.

  “You stopped hearing her after the Northern Lights Festival, right?” Charlotte asked gently. “After you’d faced your fear of jumping off the cliff and successfully stopped the sirens’ attack?”

  I hadn’t stopped them for long, it turned out, but the rest was true. Anytime I’d heard Justine since then, there was no question I was only remembering her speaking to me.

  “You transformed that night, and you no longer needed Justine to be the brave one,” Charlotte said. “Your body could sense on its own without tuning in to other sirens, and your mind was healing. You didn’t need her—”

  “Of course I did.” My head snapped back. “I’ll always need her.”

  Charlotte gave me a sad smile. “I wasn’t finished. I was going to say you didn’t need her in quite the same way.”

  I wanted to disagree but couldn’t.

  “There’s something else, Vanessa,” Charlotte said, a moment later. Her voice was soft, serious. “I don’t really know how to—”

  She was cut off by another coughing fit. This one started with a jolt and quickly grew stronger. I leapt from the bed and grabbed the pitcher of salt water from the bathroom. I tried to hold a glass to her mouth but her body writhed uncontrollably. Each time her lips neared the water, her lungs seemed to explode inside her chest, shoving her head back against the pillow.

  “Vanessa, what—?”

  I looked up. Dad stood in the open doorway, his eyes wide, locked on Charlotte.

  “Help!” I gripped her hand, lifted the glass again. “She’s choking and I can’t—I don’t know how to—”

  He was in the room in an instant. He sat on the bed next to her and put one arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him until his body shook as much as hers. He wrapped his other arm around her torso and held her as tightly as her coughing would allow. Her knuckles threatened to crack their thin covering of dry skin as her fingers dug into his leg.

  For a split second, I was taken aback by their contact. It was uncomfortable. Wrong, even.

  In the next, I encouraged more.

  “Take her hand.”

  Dad looked at me, confused.

  “Press it to your chest. Please!”

  He did as I asked. I took Charlotte’s other hand and leaned close.

  “Sing, Charlotte,” I said, my eyes meeting hers. “You have to sing. Just like you told me to.”

  The sound that came from her mouth was nothing like the one she’d made when mesmerizing the Frisbee player on the beach a few days ago. It was low. Loud. Garbled, like, as hard as it tried to get out, her body tried to keep it inside.

  It also didn’t work. Dad’s eyes were clear as he held on, completely unaffected.

  Eventually, when she was simply too exhausted to cough anymore, the fit faded. Dad stayed put, rocking her gently and brushing her hair back from her forehead. Wanting to give them space and needing my own, I sat on the window seat. We were quiet for several minutes. The only sounds were waves rolling onto the shore below, and Charlotte’s shallow, sporadic breaths.

  I was trying to decide whether to stay or go when Charlotte spoke.

  “That’s what I wanted to tell you, Vanessa,” she whispered. “It’s not enough.”

  I held my breath. “What do you mean?”

  Her head shifted slowly toward me. Her eyes met mine. When she spoke again, her voice filled my head, but her lips didn’t move.

  Sharing a life, she said, so only I could hear. It’s not enough. If you want to save your own … you must take
someone else’s.

  CHAPTER 20

  MY LEGS BURNED. My chest stung as my heart and lungs did double time. Sweat lined my brow and trickled down my temples.

  But I wasn’t tired. I refused to be tired.

  “We might want to save some energy for the trip back,” Simon called out behind me. “Are you sure you don’t need a break?”

  I shook my head, pushed harder, moved faster. I had no idea how long we’d been hiking or how much farther we had to go, and I didn’t care. In fact, the farther, the better. Because I was savoring every breath and muscle contraction. I was basking in the warmth of the sun and chill of the breeze. I was inhaling the sweet scents of trees, flowers, and dirt, and listening to the birds, bugs, and leaves. I was committing it all to memory without thinking about why.

  Because if I let my mind go there, my legs would buckle. My heart and lungs would stop. I’d die right then and there, on the trail.

  And compared to the alternatives, that option was too tempting to entertain.

  After Charlotte had dropped that bomb last night, I’d gone to my room without asking another question. That wasn’t because I didn’t have any—you can’t hear something like that and not have a million questions. It was because I didn’t want to know any more than I already did. The more I knew, the realer it became … and I wasn’t prepared to accept that.

  I’d stayed in my room, ignoring Dad’s knocks and even Paige’s phone call. Earlier in the night, I cornered Paige in the restaurant kitchen, after she’d fled the small stage, leaving the stuffed animal, and she’d confirmed the necklace around the toy whale’s neck had belonged to her mother. This was especially alarming because, according to Paige, Raina had been wearing the jewelry the night the harbor froze during the siren attack at the Northern Lights Festival last summer—and not when she’d gathered forces at the bottom of Lake Kantaka and attacked Simon and me last fall. Which meant she’d either lost it that first night, or it had been taken. Either way, whoever had delivered it to the restaurant knew more about Raina, those events, and us, than anyone outside our immediate circle should.

  Before I could wrap my mind around this, Paige had excused herself to attend to a party-related matter and said she’d call me later. But after my conversation with Charlotte, I didn’t want to talk about it—about any of it. All I wanted was to pretend like it wasn’t happening. So I let the call go to voice mail.

  To aid my denial, I got up extra early that morning, went for a long swim, and drove to Harbor Hike House. I arrived at the gear shop before it opened, and when the male manager finally unlocked the door, I warmed him up by asking for trail suggestions. Then I did what Charlotte had been unable to do with Dad hours earlier. The adrenaline rush was instant—and so strong, I almost cried in relief.

  But I didn’t. Because that would’ve been like admitting something was wrong.

  Simon’s text came as I was leaving the store. He’d gotten out of work and was free all day. We agreed to meet at the pier an hour later and drive to the trailhead together. We’d been climbing since.

  The sun shone directly overhead by the time the trees started to thin and the path level out. Soon there was enough room for Simon and me to walk side by side. He jogged up next to me and reached for my hand. His touch yanked me from my hiking hypnosis and slowed me down for the first time since my sneakers had hit dirt.

  We wandered around the summit without speaking. Eventually, we came to a large rock formation that rose up twenty feet from the ground. I kissed his hand before releasing it, then wedged my sneakers wherever they fit as I scaled the boulder base. The natural structure was solid, despite a few loose rocks that sent me sliding back twice, and I reached the top no more tired than I’d left the bottom.

  “Wow.” Simon came up behind me, swigged from a water bottle. “I’ve lived here all my life … and I’ve never seen Winter Harbor like this.”

  I hadn’t spent nearly as much time there, but I still understood. The top of the rock formation offered a perfect three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the town and outlying areas. Turning slowly, I saw Main Street and the harbor. Lake Kantaka. Camp Heroine. The lighthouse. The ocean.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “I didn’t even know this trail existed. And considering we’re the only ones on it, not many other people do, either. How’d you hear about it?”

  I hesitated. “The Hike House. Where I went this morning to get some of these.” I swung my backpack around, opened the front pocket, and took out a handful of trail-mix packets. The manager hadn’t seemed the least bit suspicious after I removed my palm from his chest, but I thought returning the favor by giving the store some business was only fair.

  Simon took a packet. “Funny, when you mentioned a picnic, this isn’t what I thought you had in mind.”

  He smiled, but I felt terrible instantly. “I’m sorry, I was in a rush when I left the house and didn’t think to take anything from there, and I’m kind of tired of Betty’s food, and Harbor Homefries doesn’t take debit cards, and the bank wasn’t open yet, and—”

  I stopped when he held up a large brown paper bag. I was so busy trying to be convincing, I didn’t notice him unzipping his backpack as I lied.

  “You brought food,” I said, my chest warming.

  “I figured we should do it right or not at all. And I thought you might be too tired after your late night at work to put something together, so I took it upon myself. I hope that’s okay.”

  I smiled. “It’s more than that. Thank you.”

  He lowered to a squat, took a blanket from his bag, and spread it across the rock. “It might be too soon for gratitude. Since I made most of it myself, the thought really could be the only thing that counts.”

  I sat across from him on the blanket and watched him take a thermal cooler from the paper bag.

  “I don’t think I’ve seen one of those since kindergarten,” I joked.

  “Yes, well. Mom said if I fed you cold pancakes, she’d never let me come home again.” He winked at me. “You were always her favorite.”

  My eyes smarted with tears. I was glad I remembered to bring sunglasses so he couldn’t see.

  We ate breakfast, which in addition to pancakes included eggs, bacon, fresh fruit, and tea. We didn’t talk much, and that was fine with me. Just as I’d savored every muscle contraction and heartbeat on the hike up, I now savored this time with Simon. It was so simple, so normal. The only way it could be better was if it never had to end.

  When we were done, we packed up our trash. Without discussing what to do next, he used his backpack as a pillow, stretched out on the blanket, and held out one arm. I lay next to him, resting my head on his chest.

  “So the party last night went well?” he asked, a few minutes later.

  I nodded, tried to sound casual. “We had a great turnout. Hopefully it’ll translate to more regular business.”

  “And the customers … they were okay? Nothing out of the ordinary happened?”

  I pictured the stuffed animal, Raina’s necklace. I didn’t want to keep anything from Simon and had vowed to talk to him about that today … but I’d made that promise to myself before my conversation with Charlotte.

  Would delaying the truth a few minutes more be so bad? In the end, wouldn’t we both be glad I had?

  I lifted my head, brought my mouth near his ear.

  “I’m not really in the mood to think about anything or anyone but you right now,” I whispered. “Would it be okay if we talked about last night, and everything else, a little later?”

  Simon’s mouth met mine in response. I smiled against his lips and slowly lifted myself up and over until I was lying on top of him. His hands slid down my back, under my tank top. I lifted his T-shirt, kissing his chest and stomach. He gently raised one knee between both of mine, and I shifted my legs until they hugged either side of his waist. Our kisses grew stronger, more urgent; soon our breaths came as quickly as our lips moved.

  “
We’re pretty exposed,” Simon said softly. “Maybe we should hike back down and continue this someplace more private?”

  “There’s no one here.” I kissed his ear, his neck. “And I don’t want to stop. Do you?”

  He shook his head, lifted his torso so we both sat up. I could feel his breath, warm and moist, through the thin cotton of my shirt. Wanting to feel it against my skin, I took off the tank top and tossed it to the side. I closed my eyes, wound my fingers through his hair as his mouth traveled across my shoulders, down my chest, toward my abdomen. His fingers followed, eventually lingering on the button of my shorts. I lifted my hips slightly toward his.

  He’d just unbuttoned my shorts when my cell phone rang inside my backpack.

  “Do you want to …?” he asked.

  “Not even a little.” I pressed my chest against his, took off his shirt as we lowered back to the blanket.

  The ringing stopped.

  A second later, it started again.

  “Are you sure—”

  “Positive.”

  The ringing stopped. Started again.

  “Sorry.” I sat up, reached for my backpack, and took out my phone. In addition to the missed calls, I had three new voice mails and seven new texts, but I silenced the ringer without checking whom they were from.

  I tossed the phone back in my bag and settled against Simon again. We were still kissing a few minutes later when his cell phone rang.

  “Do you want to …?” I asked.

  “Not even a little.”

  The phone stopped after two rings. Almost instantly, it rang twice more.

  Simon’s hands tensed. His lips slowed.

  “What?” I asked, just as the phone beeped. “What is it?”

  He stopped kissing me, looked over his shoulder at his bag. “Our signal.”

  I was lying on the blanket and lifted myself up on my elbows. “Whose signal? For what?”

  He turned back. His lips, which had just moved so easily against my own, pressed together. His eyebrows lowered. “Caleb’s and mine. For emergencies.”