You’re already too late.
She wasn’t sure how long she knelt there, body slumped in front of the doctor’s burning pyre, when a woman’s voice said, “Miss?” It was a firefighter, who helped Cairn to her feet. “Are you okay?” She held Cairn at arm’s length and examined her for burns. “Are you able to walk to the ambulance?”
Cairn said nothing. She just slowly raised her finger to point at the windmill.
The firefighter went pale when she spotted the body in the flames. She lifted her radio to her mouth. “10-45, 10-45! Get an engine to the windmill now!”
Back toward the mansion, someone yelled, “We’ve got a survivor!”
Cairn shrugged out of the woman’s grasp and sprinted across the yard. Relief coursed through her as she watched two more firefighters emerge from the fiery mansion, a limping Vulcan propped up between them. Soot streaked his face and skin, and the fire had incinerated patches of his clothing. While he was impervious to flame, he bled from a gash where falling debris had sliced open his thigh.
Cairn tried to get to him, but the first responders held her back as he was strapped to a stretcher and carried onto a waiting ambulance. “He’s my brother!” Cairn screamed finally so they’d let her ride with him to the hospital. In that moment, given how grateful she felt to see him breathing, it didn’t even feel like a lie.
As the ambulance careened through the streets to North Shore Medical Center, Vulcan suddenly seized Cairn by the wrist. His eyes were wild and confused, and she recognized the haze of someone emerging from a Nocturne trip. He started to cry as he brought his lips close to her ear.
“Cairn …” he moaned low enough so that the EMTs couldn’t hear. “I think I did this.” His body started to quake as he whispered:
“I burned her alive.”
Sable Noir, Part IV: The Atrocity
Nineteen Years Earlier
The six of them cautiously approached the cottage built into the slope of the volcano. Moss heavily blanketed the stone structure, and a plume of smoke rose from the chimney.
“Aether has been here recently,” Njörun whispered to Sedna as she directed her empath senses toward the wooden door. “But someone else is there too. I sense … anxiety. Fear. Hunger.”
Part of Sedna knew, right then and there, that this had all been a terrible mistake. From what had been recorded about Mami Wata’s previous reincarnations, Sedna knew the siren was one of the most dangerous deities to ever walk the earth. Only a few select gods had the power to control others with the sound of their voice, an ability far more dangerous than mastery of fire, or plant life, or dreams.
And none of the others had a voice with the range of Mami Wata.
From her origins in Africa to her introduction to the Caribbean and the newly colonized Americas, Mami Wata had left her mark on history time and time again. Some centuries she manifested as a nurturing protector of her people, others as a selfish, manipulative sociopath. Like every other god, she wasn’t inherently good or bad—each iteration, she was shaped by her environment and molded into the positive or negative force she’d ultimately become.
Somehow, this time, she’d found her way to an island in the middle of the South Atlantic.
Sedna motioned for the others to hang back. “Let me go in first. If the siren is in there, my powers will be the least dangerous if she uses her voice to manipulate me.”
Sedna walked the last few steps to the cottage. She took a deep breath, placed her hand on the door, then opened it.
She couldn’t have been less prepared for what she found on the other side.
At first glance, the dimly lit cottage appeared to be uninhabited. The interior was an unexpectedly cozy, welcoming space with ramshackle furnishings: a twin-sized cot in the corner, a desk, a bookshelf lined with a collection of classic literature. On a small dining table, half a cigar still smoked faintly in the ashtray. A shotgun hung decoratively above the fireplace, where a cauldron full of goat stew simmered on a small fire, filling the space with the delectable aroma of curry and garlic.
This didn’t feel like the lair of a vengeful god.
It felt like a home.
Something was off, though—not any one specific thing, but the sum of a few troubling details. Of the two handcrafted chairs at the dinner table, one was disproportionately higher than the other. And now that Sedna was closer to the bookcase, she noticed that the entire bottom shelf was filled with picture books.
Then she heard the cry.
Sedna stiffened.
The bassinet was tucked away in an alcove she’d missed on her way in. A brown-skinned baby of no more than four or five months old wriggled around in the blankets. As Sedna came into its view, the child’s squalling faded away and she gazed curiously up at the stranger looming over her cradle.
“No …” Sedna whispered. She vigorously shook her head. “No. No, no, no …”
The front door opened. Apparently, the others had grown impatient of waiting. “Did you give that sea witch a piece of your …?” Nagual’s question trailed off as they all saw Sedna standing over the bassinet.
Tane pointed at the baby. “Is that—?”
Sedna sighed. “I think so.”
Later on, she would read the journal that Baron Samedi had left behind. She would learn that Mami Wata had been born in Port Au Prince, Haiti, to mortal parents. Almost immediately, it was clear that she was no ordinary child.
This became abundantly clear after her cries spurred her parents to drive their car off a cliff.
Baron, a friend of the family, had recognized the siren for who she was. To protect the orphaned child—and everyone around her—he had absconded with her to Sable Noir, to raise her someplace remote where she would be of less danger to others, and to hide from those who might want to obtain her abilities for their own nefarious reasons.
Baron had just wanted to protect the child under his care, and they’d killed him for it.
There was a subtle shift in the mood of the room. Mami Wata seemed to sense the new arrivals. “She’s afraid,” Njörun said. “She senses danger.”
The child began to wail. But these were different than the cries she’d made a few minutes ago. Sedna winced as she felt the piercing sobs tug at the very threads of her free will, unraveling her synapses. She fought it, just barely keeping the siren’s call at bay.
The others weren’t so lucky. As she clasped her hands over her ears, she saw Tane move hypnotically toward the hearth and pluck the shotgun from its mountings. He inserted the barrel into his mouth.
Sedna flung herself forward and ripped the shotgun from between his lips right as he pulled the trigger. The blast blew a hole in the thatched roof. The deafening bang briefly muted the world around Sedna, replacing the baby’s cries and the commotion in the cottage with a high-pitched ringing. She looked around at the chaos.
Ra was frantically trying to pin down Nagual, who had been attempting to crawl into the fireplace. Njörun had pried a broken glass from Dr. Sibelius’s hand after he had stabbed himself repeatedly in the thigh.
And then, just like that, Mami Wata’s wails abated as the baby abruptly cried herself to sleep.
A stunned silence filled the room. They were all breathing heavily, frozen in place. Tane studied his own hands, then the smoking shotgun lying on the floor, trying to make sense of the self-destructive imperative that had seized him moments earlier.
Ra was the first to speak. He pointed furiously at the bassinet. “That thing”—he lowered his voice so as not to wake her—“has to die.”
“You can’t be serious,” Sedna replied. But she saw murder in Ra’s eyes. “That thing is a defenseless infant.”
“Defenseless?” Ra gestured to Sibelius, who was gripping a bleeding wound in his leg, then to Nagual, who had plunged his singed fingertips into a basin of water. “That creature ceased to be a child when she nearly killed half of us in one fell swoop.”
“She doesn’t know what she’s doing!” Sedna
protested. “She can’t help it.”
“Ra is right,” Njörun whispered.
Sedna turned to the dream goddess, mouth agape. She had come to expect rash, selfish decisions from the impulsive sun god, but Njörun was typically cautious and hyper-sensitive to the pain of others.
“What choice do we have?” Njörun continued. “If we leave her here, she’ll starve to death without someone to care for her. If we take her with us, she could send us all off a cliff like lemmings the next time she has a crying fit—and that would be the best-case scenario, because if we brought her back to the mainland, just think of the catastrophe she could cause.”
“She will cause,” added Nagual. He winced as he pulled his burned hands from the water. “We’ve all seen the vision Themis had into this child’s future. She is destined to bring death.”
“Then we’ll take her under our wing! We’ll teach her to use her abilities for good!” Sedna’s pleading gaze fell on Tane, who she considered to be the wisest and fairest of all of them. His close relationship with the forest had taught him to value life above all things. “Surely, you must agree with me. Tell them this is madness.”
Tane made eye contact for only a brief flicker. “I’m sorry, Sedna. There’s just too much risk involved. Deep down, I think we always knew this was what we were sent here to do—the details are just a little more grisly than we could have imagined.”
Sedna stepped in front of the bassinet. “If you think I’m going to let you—”
The sound of a shotgun cocking interrupted her. Dr. Sibelius had scooped it up off the floor and trained it on Sedna.
“Hey!” Tane started to protest.
Sibelius sidestepped him. Blood had soaked through his khakis where he’d stabbed himself in his delirium. “Enough arguing. Every minute we waste here, Aether gets further away.”
One look at the faces around the room told Sedna everything she needed to know. There was no getting around this.
They were all too afraid.
“Fine,” Sedna said finally. “But I should be the one to do it. I’m the goddess of the underworld—I’ll …” She lowered her head. “I’ll try to make the transition as easy and painless for her as possible.”
No one argued. And that was the true horror here: such strong conviction on what needed to happen, yet not one of them stepping up to do the dirty work themselves.
In the end, they agreed to follow Sedna back down the slope to the water. Mami Wata didn’t stir as Sedna carefully separated the bassinet’s carrier from the base, and she mercifully remained asleep the whole journey to the black sand beach. Ra kept one of his hands burning to light the way. He, in particular, seemed on high alert that the baby might wake from its slumber and induce some horrific act of bloodshed, or drop a 737 on their heads. The whole way, Tane and Nagual helped the wounded Dr. Sibelius limp down the hill.
Night had fully descended by the time they reached the beach, and the black sand sparkled under the moonlight. This far from the civilized world, thousands of stars were visible in the cloudless night sky, along with a vast swath of Milky Way dust.
Sedna motioned for the rest of them to hang back on the shore. Alone, she waded out into the Atlantic with the bassinet floating along beside her. Around her body, the water lit up with an ethereal blue glow as she disturbed the bioluminescent plankton endemic to the island’s shores. Under any other circumstances, the otherworldly beauty of it would have been breathtaking.
Sedna finally stopped when the water rose up to her waist. Colorful reef fish darted around her. It was deceptively peaceful out here.
The baby opened her eyes. She was calm this time, lulled into submission by the gentle rise and fall of the ocean—Mami Wata was a water spirit after all.
Sedna knew that the child’s mood could turn at the bat of an eye. She carefully lifted the blanket-swaddled bundle and pushed the bassinet away, letting it drift off over the waves.
“I’m sorry,” Sedna whispered to Mami Wata.
Then she plunged her under the water.
From shore, the others watched Sedna. The plankton glowed fiercely around her, as though they sensed the horrible deed happening in their midst. Sedna’s back quaked as she stood there for one minute, then two, until she was sure it was gone.
Finally, she let go and slogged back to the beach. The others had all demanded that this happen, yet when they saw Sedna emerge from the water empty-handed, a chill collectively settled over them. Only now did they fully process the rubicon they’d irrevocably passed, that life would always be just a little bit different when they returned to America.
Sedna was almost back to them when she stopped dead, the tide softly lapping around her feet. She had just noticed the little girl who’d silently appeared from the trees and was standing, unnoticed, behind the others.
Aether’s frightened gaze traveled from Sedna to the shallows where the awful deed had been carried out, and the speck of the bassinet still drifting away. How much had the girl seen?
“Aether …” Sedna said, holding up a hand.
Aether turned and sprinted back into the trees.
Dr. Sibelius immediately attempted to pursue her, but he only made it a few steps before he cried out in pain, his leg too maimed for running. At the same time, the watch on his wrist started to beep. “Oh no …” he whispered, gazing in horror at the timer.
“I’ll get her,” Sedna promised him.
“Wait.” He handed her the syringe from his satchel. “You need to inject her with this.”
“Why?” Sedna demanded. “What the hell is in this?”
Fear creased Dr. Sibelius’s face. All this time, Sedna had thought the scientist was afraid for his daughter’s safety as she braved the island alone. Now, she realized she’d had it all backward.
He was afraid of her.
“It’s a serum to suppress her powers,” he explained. “Please. You don’t understand what she’s capable of.”
Sedna snatched the syringe from him and took off. She didn’t trust Sibelius any farther than she could throw him, but something told her she needed to reach the girl before it was too late, one way or another.
Sedna plunged into the forest. After the day’s ordeal, the slopes felt like murder on her aching legs. Aether had gotten a head start, but Sedna caught a flash of blonde hair amidst the lush greenery, so she pushed herself through the thicket as fast as her body would tolerate.
She wouldn’t lose a second child tonight.
When the vegetation thinned out, Sedna emerged on a cliff wall that rose dramatically along the island’s southwest shore. The girl’s legs pumped fast as she sprinted perilously along the edge, but Sedna’s strides were longer and she was slowly gaining ground.
“Aether, stop!” Sedna called out through ragged breaths. “We’re not going to hurt you!”
But the girl wouldn’t slow.
They finally approached a rocky promontory, a dead end. Sedna felt a wave of relief—there was nowhere to go. And once she corralled the girl, without the doctor around, maybe Aether would confide in her about what was really going on with her father. Then she and the others could decide what to do about him.
Aether, too, seemed to realize she was trapped. She turned to face Sedna and backed up to the cliff’s edge.
Sedna held out a hand. “Aether, I don’t work for your father. You can trust me. Let’s step away from the cliff and then you can tell me what’s going on.”
Aether opened her mouth, and Sedna thought that for the first time on this journey, she might hear the girl’s voice.
Then Aether glanced down and caught the glint of the syringe clutched in Sedna’s hand.
Aether’s eyes narrowed, fear giving way to betrayal. Her body trembled and a dark aura formed around her. As the void expanded, its inky tendrils writhed outward, blotting out the stars beyond.
Sedna broke from the spell and rushed forward, one hand extending to grab the girl, and another poised to inject her.
Aether jerked away, but she took too big of a step back. The clifftop crumbled under her heel, and she flailed as she lost her balance.
Sedna dropped the syringe and reached out for the girl, hoping to catch her.
But Aether’s gaunt wrist eluded Sedna’s grasp, and with a cry, the girl slipped off the edge.
“No!” Sedna screamed.
She watched as Aether plummeted toward the jagged rocks in the surf below.
Then a fleeting smile flashed across Aether’s face.
The black cloud cocooned around her, then burst into a thousand particles of darkness.
When it cleared, Aether was gone, and Sedna found herself, impossibly, staring at just the docile lapping of the waves against the rocks.
Part Three
Whalesong
Daymares
Everything lay in ruins.
The inferno had incinerated seventy-five percent of the mansion and rendered the remainder uninhabitable. Themis’s body, once the fire department was able to raise a ladder to cut it down, had fused to the windmill blade.
The fire and its casualty made the news, but were overshadowed by a stranger local story:
That same night, a polar bear had menaced a town on the South Shore.
While still under the influence of Nocturne—and Phobetor’s nightmares—Nook had paddled down the coast and surfaced in the idyllic seaside town of Cohasset, where he proceeded to rampage through the streets, sending the residents fleeing for shelter. Miraculously, no one was injured, though Nook left a trail of splintered mailboxes, claw-marked house siding, and several missing house cats in his wake.
By the time the police responded, Nook had started to come down off the Nocturne and loped off into the town forest, which was the only thing that kept him from getting mowed down by a barrage of bullets.
In the end, a tattered yet once again human Nook turned himself into his captain and explained everything. The captain’s offer: they would release a statement that a polar bear had broken free on its way to an animal sanctuary, but had since been recaptured. In return, Nook would hand over his gun and badge, suspended indefinitely. Even without his nearly disastrous night terrorizing the South Shore, he was seen as a failure: the leader of a deity affairs task force that had failed to make any significant arrests, and the primary investigator on a major serial killer case who had let the perpetrator escape custody.
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