As I looked over the side to the black water beneath us, an eerie feeling passed through me. The sirens had completely disappeared under the inky surface, but what was it that had startled them in the first place?
As I walked back to my cabin, my heart still pounding, I tried to keep in mind what Josh had said. He’d sounded pretty confident that they wouldn’t try and hurt us.
Before the dawn, I was to find out just how wrong he could be.
Sirens
“Come with me.”
An ethereal voice woke me from my slumber. As I drifted from my dreams, I came face to face with one of the sirens. Up close, she was even more beautiful than she had been on the rocks. Her title of beauty siren suited her well. She had perfect skin that looked like it had been dusted in fairy dust and her long hair had strands of real silver that glimmered in the pale light. She wore a powder blue dress, the exact same color as her eyes, although the light in her eyes could have been a real diamond, they sparkled so much.
“Come with me,” she repeated, not raising her voice. It was melodic and calming—the voice of an angel, and an angel is what she looked like with white feathered wings that she used to keep her upright as she had no legs, only a tail like a mermaid.
“You’d like that wouldn’t you?” she added, a smile on her perfect lips.
“I would,” I replied groggily. In my mind, I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing. Everything was hazy. I had the feeling that I was doing something I shouldn’t be doing, but the lilting tone of her voice lured me on.
It was almost a dreamlike trance that carried me out of my cabin and through the ship to the deck. Beside me, I was aware of other people congregating, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the siren in front of me. She was everything that was perfect and beautiful in the world, and nothing else could compare. Why would I want to look at anything else?
“Take my hand.” She held her hand out to me, and I did as she directed. One sharp tug later and we were both in the ocean. She’d pulled me right over the railing, and I didn’t even mind. I would go anywhere with her. Unlike when I was with the merfolk, I couldn’t breathe underwater. Not that it mattered. I was only submerged for a few seconds, and when I surfaced, I found myself in a strange room. The half I was in was filled with water, the other half had rocks on the floor. Upon these rocks sat more of the divine creatures, at least fifty of them, each more beautiful than the last. One of them ran over to help me out of the water. The creatures were all divine, but none looked like the others. Some had wings, some tails, some legs. All of them had the long silvery hair and diamond-like eyes.
“Let me help you,” she said graciously. She waved her hand and instantly I was warm and dry. I was given a seat on the rocks while I waited for the others to join us. Less than a minute after I’d entered the strange room, everyone from the ship had arrived. Josh, Seth, Astrid, Hayden, and the crew. I gave them each a brief nod as they entered, but it was difficult to take my eyes from the women that surrounded us. I managed to steal my eyes away for a second to take in the room around me. The high, vaulted ceiling had a couple of chandeliers hanging, and it was these that gave the room a warm flickering light. Portholes around the walls gave me a clue to what the room actually was.
“It’s a boat!” I shouted out in delight, “an upside-down boat!”
“You are very intelligent,” one of the women said, taking a handful of my hair in her hands, “and what beautiful hair you have.”
My heart swelled with pride at getting a compliment from these women. They were the most beautiful creatures I’d ever seen, and here they were saying they liked my hair. I beamed from ear to ear.
Erica, this isn’t real! I heard a voice say, but it didn’t come from one of the sirens, so I ignored it.
The siren who had brought me to this place climbed up onto a rock and spoke to all of us.
“Welcome to our home, esteemed guests. My sisters are going to hand out handcuffs which we have chosen specially. When you receive them, you will put them on your wrists and close them tight. It is nearly dawn, and so I’m afraid we must leave you. We will be back tonight with knives for you to cut yourselves with. We need your body parts.”
“They are so beautiful,” the one next to me said, stroking my skin. I giggled with excitement. The handcuffs seemed to take forever to get to me, and I was practically bouncing up and down with anticipation of putting them on.
Once we were all chained together and to the rocks, the sirens began to leave.
“Where are you going?” I asked in a panic. I knew I couldn’t get through a second without them near me. The leader walked over and kissed me lightly on the lips. “Fear not, we will be back, and then this evening, you and I will be joined for the rest of our lives.”
The thought of being joined to her was almost too much to bear. How could someone as lowly as I ever be one of these beauties?
“This is the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me,” Astrid said in a breathy voice once the sirens had left. The others nodded in agreement, each with a sappy expression on their face. They looked ridiculous. It was obvious that the sirens liked me the best. Hadn’t one of them kissed me after all?
“They want me. I was kissed,” I pointed out. “It’s my body they want, and I shall give it gladly.”
“They kissed all of us, you idiot,” the captain screamed at me. “I’ll give them anything they want. My body is their body.”
“I cannot wait to hand them my flesh,” added Seth.
Huh. As if they’d want that lump.
“Erica, please snap out of it. You’re under a spell.”
I felt the cold slap of a palm across my face. In front of me was a man with long black hair and a concerned expression on his face. At the back of my mind, I vaguely recognized him, but he was part of my past, and my future belonged with the sirens.
“Don’t mess with my skin!” I shot him shade as I brought my hand up to my cheek. I could feel the flame of pain and knew he’d reddened it. “The sirens need me to be pretty, or they won’t take my skin.”
The man shook his head. I could see tears in his eyes. “Can you hear yourself? You are talking about cutting your own skin off, mutilating your own body. Can’t you see that none of this is real?”
“This is the most real I’ve ever felt.” I don’t know why I was even talking to him, why I felt the need to explain. “I’d gladly pull my skin from my body now if they were here.”
“Erica, I love you.” He leaned forward and kissed me. Something inside me shifted, my mind whirled with emotions that I didn’t understand, and my heart pumped blood around my body so quickly that I thought I might faint. He pulled back and looked into my eyes. I could see the expectation in them, but I didn’t know what he wanted from me.
“Go away!” I screamed at him. “Leave me be.”
I’d never seen anyone look so panicked in all my life, but it was hardly my concern. I just knew I needed him to leave before the sirens came back. I didn’t want anything to spoil what was going to happen tonight.
“Please, Erica. It’s me. You know me. Tell me my name.” He kneeled before me, his top half out of the water and the tip of his tail still wet from the ocean water below me.
“No!” I lied. I did know him, but I couldn’t answer him. Something was stopping me. I felt confused, and all my thoughts were thick like mud.
“Tell me my name!” he screamed loudly. His voice echoed around the strange room filling my senses.
“Ari!” I screamed back, tears filling my eyes. “Your name is Ari.”
I could sense the others watching me. I knew I appeared weak now that I‘d given this stranger what he wanted.
“Leave me be, Ari. Go away.”
He slumped as I tried to kick him away from me. If the others told the siren that a stranger was trying to kidnap me, they might not want me anymore, and the thought of that was inconceivable.
“Kiss him,” Ari said his voice much softer n
ow. He pointed to the man beside me. I’d already forgotten his name, but I knew he was an enemy. They all were. This was a competition, and I needed to win. I needed to be the one that the siren wanted.
I looked at the strange man in front of me. Tears were running down his face.
“Why should I kiss him? I have no more desire to kiss him than I did you.”
I saw him wince at my words for which I was glad. Kicking him hadn’t hurt him, but telling him I hadn’t wanted to kiss him had been like a knife to the chest. Knowing this, gave me the upper hand. I gave a sly smile and raised my eyebrows waiting for his answer.
He leaned forward and whispered in my ear. “Your kiss will weaken him. He will fall in love with you, and the sirens will not want him anymore.”
I liked that. The less of these people there were, the better for me. I needed the sirens to want me more than the others. I couldn’t articulate why, but I knew that the sirens had to want me the most.
I turned to the man beside me and grabbed his face between my hands. Leaning forward quickly, I pressed my lips against his. No sooner had our mouths connected than I got a searing pain right through my chest. I held on, fighting the pain, but like swords through my flesh, it quickly consumed me. I fell back on the rocks, clutching my chest and tried to get my breath back.
All at once, everything made sense. The sirens had filled our minds with a spell designed to make us love them, to do anything for them.
“Erica!”
A face appeared above mine. A face I’d been dreaming about for weeks. His wet hair dripped around my face, but it was his falling tears that wet my face.
“It’s me,” I whispered. “I’m here.”
He leaned forward and kissed me, and unlike the kiss with the siren or the kiss with Josh, this was real. Nothing compared to it. Weeks away from him had been the loneliest time of my life, and I knew that nothing was worth being separated from him. Not blind dates with TV adventurers and not even a kingdom.
“What happened?” I could guess most of it. I’d felt his presence almost the whole way here, and the spell that the sirens had put on us was obvious now that I was no longer in the midst of it.
“I hoped kissing you would break you from the spell.”
“But I kissed Josh.” I turned to look at him. He was staring off into space with a glassy look in his eyes. “I can’t say I enjoyed it.” I turned back to Ari again, so glad to see him, to be near him.
“When you didn’t come to see me for weeks, I thought you’d given up on us. We weren’t officially dating so...”
“So you found yourself a girlfriend?”
He looked so ashamed, but I could hardly blame him. He was right that I didn’t see him for weeks. My life had been taken over with royal duties and getting out to the sea was impossible.
“Not quite. I very stupidly tried kissing a friend of mine in the hope I could exorcise my feelings for you. I figured that if you didn’t want me, I had to find a way to get on with my life.”
My heart was breaking in two as he spoke. I did want him. I’d always wanted him.
“What happened?” I didn’t tell him that I’d seen him with the girl. What was the point?
“When I kissed her, my insides felt like they were on fire. I’d never felt agony like it. To add insult to injury, the girl slapped me and told me she wasn’t interested in me like that.”
He laughed quietly and shook his head. “I was such an idiot, but that’s how I knew that if you kissed someone else, you’d feel the pain too. We are bonded to each other which means we can never be anyone else’s.”
I held his face in my hands, and despite the tears that were streaming down my face, I managed a smile. “It’s a good thing I like you then.”
He laughed again, but this time, I could see he meant it.
“I’m sorry for hurting you, but it was the only way.”
“It’s fine...It’s more than fine.” I pulled him closer and kissed him again. From that moment, I knew I’d never be apart from him again.
Enchanted
“We need to get everyone free,” I said, glancing around me. Now that the spell had been broken, the upside down ship was not the beautiful, enchanting place I’d taken it for. Now that I could see it through my own eyes, the wood was rotten, seaweed and algae covered the rocks, and the air was stale with the smell of rotten fish. Glancing to the side of me, I could see the others sitting there, blank expressions on their faces and smiles on their lips.
Ari swam off, disappearing under the water, coming back less than a minute later with a sharp rock in his hand.
“This might help get the manacles off.”
I stretched the chain between Josh and me tight and laid it flat on a rock. Ari brought his rock down with force time and time again as I pulled. It wasn’t helping that Josh was doing everything in his power to stop Ari from unchaining him. Ari was being kicked, hit, and spat on, and still, he continued.
“This is impossible,” I moaned after almost an hour of exertion. The rock had smashed, but the chain was steadfastly still together. Ari’s arms were covered in bruises from Josh’s feet, and he’d been too slow to dodge a blow to the face that had left him with a bloody lip.
“We can’t give up, because those things will be back tonight and they will take your body parts. The others might give theirs freely because of the spell, but don’t think that because you aren’t under their spell anymore, they won’t take parts of you. I give up now, and you’ll die. All of you will die.”
“The ship!” I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. There were bound to be some tools on the ship somewhere. “Check below decks and the bridge. See if you can find a saw or bolt cutters.”
Ari reached forward, kissed me quickly, and dove under the surface of the water. With a flick of his tail, he was gone. I waited ten minutes, watching the others. Shouting to them made no difference, so I sat silently. After an hour had passed, all hope had left me. It shouldn’t have taken so long. Even if he couldn’t find any tools, he would have come back and let me know. There was no doubt in my mind that he’d been captured. Pain had caused the spell to break on me, but I didn’t know how to cause that much pain on the others without damaging them. Josh sat next to me and was the only one in reach anyway. I figured if I could wake him up, maybe he could do the same to the others. I tried nipping his arm, but that only ended up with him slapping me in the face.
“Don’t bruise my skin. The sirens need it!” He yelled at me with tremendous anger in his expression, but then, he turned and began to stare out into space again. It was hopeless. Nothing I said to any of them made any difference, and time dragged on. With each minute that passed, any hope that we’d make it out alive left me. It wasn’t only our lives at stake. It was my mother lying in the palace infirmary, my grandfather, and the people of Havfrue. Not only had I failed in my mission, I’d failed spectacularly. As I looked at the people next to me, anger began to build. Josh who had come here to prove that sirens existed, Seth that had followed him. He didn’t even have his camera with him. He must have left it on the ship. For them, all this had come to nothing. The legend of the sirens would remain a legend, a myth. As for Astrid and Hayden, they’d not signed up for this. I’d dragged them along on this ridiculous adventure when they should have been having the happiest times of their lives. And Ari. He was near. I could feel him, but he’d not returned to the cave. Something had prevented him.
Ari?
I spoke to him in my mind, but there was no answer. Fear ran through me. He was alive, I knew that, but I could think of no reason for him not to answer me.
The pressure in my head due to anger was like a pressure cooker. All the pent-up emotion I’d been feeling for weeks was rising to the top. The royal duties, the media, the sickness, and now this. I opened my mouth and screamed. The noise echoed around inside the upturned boat causing the others to cover their ears from the noise. Weeks of anger and stress tumbled out of my mouth increas
ing in decibels but making me feel so much better. I emptied my lungs of air and shut my mouth as the echoes died down. It had done no good, not that I thought it would. The others were still glassy-eyed from the spell. We were all going to die and be used for body parts, not that I could understand why. Unlike the sea witch, these women were already perfect in every way.
As I was pondering such things, the surface of the water began to move. The disturbance was caused by two of the sirens who surfaced. I quickly sat straight and stared out ahead of me like the others.
“See, I told you they were all still here,” one of them snapped.
“I heard screaming, I’m telling you.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw the first one looking closely at Seth.
“Take me first,” he whimpered.
“You can have me. I have great skin,” yelled Josh who picked up the sharp stone that Ari had dropped earlier and began to hack away at the skin on his arm.
Blue Water (A Little Mermaid Reverse Fairytale Book 2) Page 12