by Jessa Lucas
“I couldn’t think about any part of my past without the stain of what I’d done recoloring it. I didn’t even have the balls to look them in the eye when I killed them, and now I keep wondering how I managed to move forward. The truth is, I didn’t. I won’t. You can never really live with yourself, not after doing something like that.”
A man of few words, Sy listened on in a respectful silence, his usual pace of breathing the only indication that he was still awake. “Why did you do it?” he finally asked.
“To be honest,” I said, “I don’t know why. I think part of me snapped. Maybe I actually believed the nightmares I’d had for years would stop tormenting me if the people behind them couldn’t make realities of my fears anymore. But the nightmares didn’t disappear. They just... adapted.”
“Men have justified killing for as long as they have known themselves capable of it.”
“I don’t want to justify death, Sy. I don’t want to be someone responsible for ending lives. But maybe that’s who I—” I cut myself off. I would not claim that. I would not say it out loud as if I’d accepted it as my truth. “There’s no integrity to running,” I finally said. “But I wasn’t brave in that life, and I’m not sure I am in this one either.”
“You were courageous in the life before the dream.”
I looked for Sy in the darkness. I tried to envision this women he’d known. Fancy and poised, she capered through my mind like a phantom I’d never see realized. I imagined her laugh, high and bell-like, and that when she wielded a blade she looked like a fucking ballerina. That Saylor definitely knew how to maneuver a good political lie. Maybe she’d even been good at something besides arson and telling men what to do. Something impossible, like applying liquid eyeliner.
I sighed quietly, expelling the image. She was the woman I could only assume Gilles would’ve recognized had she sat across the table from him. But she wasn’t the woman I was.
“It’s so weird that I’m never going back, Sy. That I’m supposed to believe it didn’t happen,” I whispered. “It seems impossible, to forget what I thought was real in order to believe that this is.”
“It was a nightmare in a seemingly endless night, Saylor. Night has ended. Daybreak is coming.”
“That’s such an eloquent way of dismissing all my feelings.”
He chuckled, and not able to help myself, I smiled at the sound.
“Jude,” I said, his name a strange whisper on my lips, “said that I probably dreamt in a loop. I will never be able to remember all the things that have happened in every iteration of my dream. Sometimes though, I think things come back. And what I find, over and over… sometimes I worry that I’m not good, Sy. That I really don’t have the slightest clue who I am at all.”
“I know who you are,” he said quietly.
“Then tell me.”
“Saylor.”
The sound of my name on his lips was a plead and an assurance and a vow. It was everything all at once. I swallowed, the strangest sensation falling over me. The seething fear in me steadied. His presence beside me became strangely captivating, and I realized suddenly how little I knew about Sy and much I wanted to. He alone called me by this name I’d needed for myself, to believe I could be new.
I nearly reached out to him but managed to restrain myself, tucking my hands underneath the pillow. Sy certainly hadn’t invited me into his bed with any suggestive intentions.
“You’re the daughter of a king,” he finished softly.
I let out a breathy laugh. “You can say that all you want, Sy, but it’s not that easy.”
“I used no such word.”
I exhaled on his face dramatically. Fine.
Sy was silent a moment, testing the wisdom of his next words before speaking them aloud. Finally he said, “Every canvas has its edge. Every dream has its end.”
“…Okay.”
“The Dream-Trotters,” Sy breathed, “even ones as powerful as the Grimms, have limits to their cunning, their creativity. They can only twist the truth. They cannot fabricate the nuances which make a thing real. Each individual’s mind must bridge the gaps with what the dreamer himself knows.”
“Herself,” I clarified.
“Herself,” he agreed wearily.
“So how the hell am I supposed to know the difference between what my mind did— what’s me— and what’s the Grimms?”
“Truth stands in the face of tests.”
“You know, the stupid proverbs sound really nice, Sy, but—”
“What is true will come to you again and again, Saylor,” he interrupted, voice thick with oncoming sleep. “You will not be able to escape it or forget it. It is in the world beyond this tower, but it is also here in these halls, in this very room. It cannot be trapped. It cannot be outrun.”
I scoffed under my breath. Obviously, half-asleep Sy was only going to be more of an irritable fortune cookie than conscious-and-long-suffering Sy.
“Act as though you taste victory, and victory shall follow,” he said quietly. “Promise me, Saylor. Promise that you will try to believe in who I say you are, not in who your fears claim you could be.”
Fear is a liar.
I considered a moment and then nodded against the pillow. “Just answer one last question for me, Sy?” I inhaled deeply, needing the blow of his toughest truth. “Who do you leave behind if I fail?”
“Stop speaking of failure, Saylor.”
This time when he said my name, I reached out and grabbed his hand. It wasn’t hope. It wasn’t even agenda. After a moment, he curled his fingers around mine, too. Our touch yielded nothing— no magical tingle, no spark of destiny, no glint of a dream.
He was just a man holding my hand and I was just a woman in need of comfort.
“Who?” I asked again softly, squeezing his hand in earnest.
He sighed softly, sleep tinging the edges of his answer. “I left no one behind.”
I didn’t have a good response to that. I couldn’t qualify the sorrow or the relief for such an answer, so I didn’t try.
The minutes slipped by in silence, our fingers bound, until his breathing steadied and I was once more alone. I studied the sharp planes of his sleeping face, captivated by its imperfection. Regal, for all its rugged masculinity. I wondered what strange combination of characteristics could create such a man.
A cloud drifted away from the moon and I smiled when I noticed in the silver light falling over him that there was a dusting of freckles over the bridge of his nose. I reached out to touch his cheek, then pulled my fingertips away at the last second.
There was no purpose to this. Sy didn’t even wake the faintest memory in me. Meanwhile Jude— Jude, who woke every disastrous inclination— hadn’t seemed to be my solution either.
I didn’t know how I was supposed to move forward. How was I even sure that my quest to seduce would yield an honest answer in me? My propensity for killing could’ve been one of those seeds planted by the Grimm brothers, or it could be a truth so deeply embedded in who I was that my brain had dutifully filled in the blanks.
Eleven days. Eleven days to save six lives.
Here, in the bed I shared with a man who spoke comfort in riddles, that truth finally broke me. Even as I shook the bed with desperate sobs, Sy didn’t stir. I clung to his hand, choking for breath against the pillow as I tried to push the image of Jude’s dead stare from my mind.
The tale is a lie; what it tells is the truth.
It was that very image— dead eyes— that woke me just before the scream caught in my throat. I gasped for air, seeing that it was still dark outside. Sy had shifted and our hands had fallen away from each other. I watched his outline breathe, then tore myself from the bed. I couldn’t stand the night any more. The silence, the dark. The questions tumbling around in my mind.
I soon found myself standing back in front of the one who seemed to give me some semblance of answers, even if they were masked by the likes of Dr. Seuss.
“It’s time
for some girl talk, Aiayla,” I said, slamming my hand against the glass as her shimmering form appeared.
“You must speak your mind, Princess, for you know a mind I cannot read. Pray tell your full inquiry and I shall gladly address your need.”
“Does a man’s rejection make a siren vicious?”
“Curious does it make me, this question, this thought. Speak from my own experience of such a thing I cannot.”
“Nothing about that is helpful.”
The Reflection frowned at me, an otherworldly aggression growing in her eyes. Her gaze narrowed dangerously on the palm I had pressed against the glass and I reluctantly removed it in light of her sharp look.
“Do not confuse me, my lady, with an encyclopedia or mindreader,” she warned, “for such a mistake as this would betray even the most clear-minded leader.”
After a hurried explanation of what happened with Jude, I watched the tentative eyes of the ethereal creature wander uncertainly. I folded my arms into one another. “Aiayla, it was like… like I was seduced by a rage inside of me.” I shook my head. “Could I really kill them?”
“Curiouser and curiouser do my questions become; a myth there once was from which such an idea could have come. I know not the tale myself nor if what it claims rings true, but of this dangerous legend… oh yes, my sister Onya knew.”
“It wouldn’t be out of the question then,” I reasoned aloud, trying not to let premature relief flood over me, “that the Grimms could’ve made a dream based on that story, especially if Valtronya believed it. But—”
A new devastation was gnawing at me, clear in the sound of my disappointment as I said, “If I’d truly loved him— if Jude had the potential to break this curse with me— that truth would’ve been powerful enough to stop me from hurting him.”
The Reflection’s frown deepened with her consideration. “I would think this to be true, though it makes my heart ache. Either in you a killer lives, or with Jude this curse you cannot break.”
I could hear the last, unspoken possibility between the cracks of the other two. My mind caught it and latched on, too tempted by its easy devastation. Because, of course, option three was that Jude had been the one, but the instinct in me to kill was greater than my ability to love.
“Is there any way to know for sure, Aiayla? Because I still have three more men to run this experiment on, and as nice as it is to let my carnal flags fly, I don’t think I can stomach seeing myself murder one of them again. In a dream or—”
A weight sunk in my stomach as the very real possibility of hurting one of my men outside the dream dawned on me. It was its own sort of nightmare, waking to a world where I was the monster who people I once cared for needed protection from. Maybe Valtronya’s ethics weren’t as cruel as they were necessary. Maybe she and I weren’t actually as different in our viciousness as the classic fairytales made us out to be.
“Do I think you dangerous, one who rages and kills?” Aiayla asked. “No, I do not, but I know not what your siren wills. Wily and potent are our innermost desires, possible it is that death refusal of her requires.”
My feet took me in mindless circles around the perimeter of the fountain as I chewed the inside of my cheek and tried to convince myself that I wasn’t a killer. It was a tough fact to dispute; I definitely murdered two men on Earth, probably repeatedly, and that’d been the doing of good ol’ run-of-the-mill Human Saylor— no spurned siren even required.
I kneaded my temples. “If my siren does have an aggressive streak deep inside her, could that manifest in real life?” I moved closer to the Reflection, watching her gleaming eyes carefully and trying to gauge whether or not a similar sort of beast existed in her. “If I seduce my watchmen and they reject me, how do I keep them safe from me?”
Seeing the distress on my face, Aiayla motioned to to fountain. “Dip your finger into the pool, child, and show me that which you saw. Perhaps in the dreamscape those wretched Grimms left a flaw.”
I crouched by the pool and slipped a finger into the water. It began to swirl and before I was quick enough to look away I caught a glimpse of Jude swaying on its surface. We were lying in the grass by the lake, and I was singing. The sound of my voice filled the room, haunting and clear. My heart lurched forward in agony, craving to join in with a harmony.
I opened my mouth… and then quickly clamped it shut. Wanting to sing the song of death? Not a good sign, Saylor.
But Aiayla hadn’t missed my brief lapse in judgement. “If you feel the spell of a song you should sing, for in song it is an unguarded self which you bring.”
Even with her permission, it felt like an idiotic thing to do. But the pressure of release had certainly built up in me, waiting. Waiting for music, for the life it gave me.
I opened my mouth. My voice hovered, tentative at first, and then it aligned, tuned to the harmony of a song from a dream. Everything was forgotten as I found myself overwhelmed by chorus and moonlight. At first, I didn’t notice the Reflection’s soft addition of her own voice.
“Kiss me,” I heard myself say. The words hadn’t sounded like that before, when they’d come from my own mouth. They were layered now, like two voices spewing from me at once, one saccharine and needy and the other... unearthly and malicious.
“I want you to kiss me, Jude.”
I closed my eyes, dipping my finger farther into the cool water and singing louder to drown out the scene. I refused to hear my voice command him that way, or to see Jude staring up at me through the pool like that.
Like he wasn’t about to die.
Like I wasn’t the one about to kill him.
Even my song couldn’t stifle the sound of Jude’s wheezing as he gasped for breath, and when my remembered voice stopped singing, I was acutely aware of the silence that followed as my voice hung in the air absent of its partner.
I pulled my finger from the fountain, the melody dragging to a close on my tongue. There were tears in my eyes, but they felt strangely disconnected from Jude and the self disgust I knew I should be feeling. They felt like they came from another chamber locked away inside me, one I couldn’t remember.
“Tell me you saw a sign,” I said as the surface of the water smoothed back into a dark mirror.
“My lady, my princess,” the Reflection said gravely, “no sign have I seen! Little clarity and much awe did I glean.”
“So it was me,” I whispered.
“This is not what I said, do not surrender yourself to dread. With much optimism did I hear that the song you sang is one most dear. First fashion it you did not in your slumber, for I heard it once on the vessel which carried you from Lithron… and now I do wonder…”
“What do you wonder, Aiayla?” I asked wearily. Sy might want me to hope, but hope was dangerous thing to rely on. I was afraid to hear the remnants of it in my voice.
“Only did I hear, of course— I did not see— when you fell into the deep sleep while we were at sea. This is the song you sang on the cursed harp you played, and after you sang it, your body they laid…” her voice trailed off with the rhyme.
“But it was the harp that was enchanted, right? Are you saying the song could be part of the curse, too?”
“How did you feel when you sang it, lady? Did it feel an evil spell? For our songs can sway unsuspecting ears, to heaven— or to hell.”
“It didn’t feel evil, not right now when I sang it. But,” I pondered aloud, “it made me sad. Like my heart...” I put my hand on my chest subconsciously as I tried to find the words to qualify where the song had gripped me. “My heart can remember some tragedy that my mind can’t.”
“In life this song ended with a moment so vile, perhaps your mind in slumber feels this very trial. Possible that this is the truth buried in the deep; possible that this is why you killed one in your sleep.”
I wanted to be convinced, but the weight of the song pressed against my ribcage, a sorrow fluttering in me like a butterfly disturbed by the sway of the branch beneath its wings.
So gentle a thing rattled by a shift in its foundation.
“Was it really that bad?” I whispered. “When the curse was triggered?”
The Reflection opened her mouth wide, speaking carefully. “Ask this you must of the men who witnessed that eve. To tell of the moment myself— I do not wish to deceive—”
“Great, so you’re not going to tell me anything.”
The Reflection smiled kindly as if she sympathized with me, no hint of that inhuman ferocity in her angular face. “Dear one, as I said, I did not see; what I learned of this night will not help to set you free.”
“I don’t think you realize how bad those guys are at answering my questions,” I grumbled.
Aiayla raised her eyebrows with a smirk, and I swore she was on the verge of letting out an exasperated, ‘men!’— after all, she’d endured the nuances of my watchmen’s personalities far longer than I had. Instead she said, “Their tongues may be tied in more ways than one, I am quite wary of all that Onya may have done.”
I hadn’t thought about a curse on me with an extra portion of more curses on them. I definitely wouldn’t put it past the bitch.
“Aiayla, if we all get stuck in the dream, will it keep looping like it did before?” It would definitely be terrible enduring the looped existence of a nightmare, questioning who I was and fighting real or fake instincts to save my men from myself over and over again... but maybe it was possible to do it better, if I went in prepared.
The Reflection stared out at me gravely from her ethereal cage of liquid light. “When come the eclipse: from where the dream ended— for those who manifested— their fates cannot be amended.”
Shit. Shit. Jude would be dead, and the others—
My heart barreled against my chest with nauseating momentum. I had to find out what happened to them if they’d made it in.
I dropped my head to my arms, closing my eyes. “Please tell me, Aiayla, that I at least loved one of these guys once upon a time. Tell me that I have a shot at breaking this thing.”
