by Sonya Blake
Screaming, Kaia threw herself onto the siren’s back and bit down on the thick pad of muscle above his shoulder. She felt him throw a sharp elbow into her gut in response. Despite the pain, Kaia gripped his steel-gray hair and plunged her teeth deeper into his flesh. He hadn’t let go of Sam, but she’d make him. With one fierce lunge, she bit into his neck again and felt her needle-sharp teeth break the skin. She clamped down her jaw and pulled. Ripped. Flesh and tendon and blood spewed out of the siren’s throat as he let out a strangled cry. Kaia wanted more of him. Wanted to eat his heart straight out of his chest.
She was gripping his hair and yanking his head backward with sickening ease, ready to take more, when she noticed Sam’s body, floating upward. His limbs were slack, hanging down as his body arced toward the surface, his dark hair waving in the sea’s current.
“No,” she moaned, letting forth a stream of bubbles in the bloodied water as she let go of the siren, surrendering his body to the water and to two of his brethren, who now gathered him and pulled him into the deep.
The others were there then, grabbing her. They would rip her apart. They would kill her in retribution for what she had just done. Their voices surrounded her, wailing their grief and rage. And Sam was losing moments, the few moments that could mean the difference between life and death. It was exactly like the night they’d met, only this time she was even more afraid, even more helpless.
Kaia screamed as three more sirens began dragging her away from the surface, away from Sam. He would die, and she would be their prisoner. She couldn’t let that happen.
Spiraling her tail, she threw two of them away from her. They released their hold, and she darted for the third, grabbing the female by her hair as her companions lunged. Tommy was there suddenly, throwing them off her.
Another sharp scream burst through the water. Frances’s face was white with rage as she swam into the melee. She released another noise, this one a low, haunting howl that made Kaia shiver down to her bones and the fighting go quiet around them. Frances met her gaze, and Kaia burst away.
She found Sam tossing in the waves. The water tasted of his blood. He was heavy and cold as she pulled him onto the rocks.
“Sam,” she cried, brushing his hair from his face as she climbed on top of him. “Sam, please. Don’t go.”
She smacked his cheek, shook his shoulders. Pushed him onto his side, pounded his back, waiting to hear the retching gasp for air. Nothing.
Panic struck her as she pulled him toward her again to check for a pulse, for breathing. Nothing. She’d never been trained in CPR, but she’d seen it enough times to hope that she could do it right. She folded her hands over his sternum and pushed all her weight into the center of his chest, over and over and over, until she had nearly exhausted herself. Moving to his lips, she blew into him, once, twice, then resumed pushing on his chest.
“Oh, Sam, come on,” she cried, her voice breaking as she compressed his chest.
If he died, if he left her without the chance to tell him she loved him, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to live with herself. Yes, he had hurt her. Wounded her immensely. He had broken her open and poured himself inside, filled her with a feeling of life she had never known. And then stolen that away.
But she had believed him when he’d said that Violet had used her dark magick to lure him to her. The memory of his face when he had walked through the door the day after he’d left her stranded on Thursday Island—it had not been the look of a guilty man. It had been an expression of fear. Of confusion.
“Come on, Sam,” Kaia grunted, pushing into him again.
Tommy’s hands pulled her shoulders. His distant voice urged her to stop. It’s too late, he was saying. He’s gone.
“No!” Kaia screamed, pressing with all her weight into Sam’s chest.
She felt something break inside him. A gurgling sound, then water, rushing from his mouth as Tommy pushed him to his side. Kaia fell onto her bare bottom on the icy rocks as Sam coughed and retched.
Empty. That was how she felt. Purged of all sense of self by blood and fear and grief. Redeemed by the sound of Sam’s struggling body beside her.
*
She’d taken a life and she’d saved one, or at least that was what she was telling herself—even as she felt a dark chasm opening in her chest where her heart should be, even as her body trembled uncontrollably with shivers that rattled her bones.
“What was his name?” Kaia asked. “The siren that attacked Sam… Did I kill him?”
She sat on the edge of the couch, ears pricked for any sound from upstairs, where Sam was recovering in the big master bed with Tommy keeping watch. Frances sat on the chair across the blazing hearth, dressed in a pair of Kaia’s pajama pants and a loose tee, with a blanket drawn around her shoulders. Zoe, also dressed in borrowed clothes, bloody and brooding, stood behind Frances. Kaia didn’t trust her. Never would. There was something feral and cold in her eyes. Sharklike. Even now, while she was standing with bare feet on the hearthstone, wiggling her chilled, pink toes, anybody would see that she was simply not quite human.
After Kaia had resuscitated Sam, Frances had called off the rest of the sirens and, to Kaia’s surprise, followed them onto land, saying they needed to speak, not fight. That Kaia could agree with. Unfortunately, Frances had insisted on bringing Zoe with her.
“His name is Alexander,” Frances said, her voice soft and wooly, like she hadn’t used it in a long while. Was that an Irish brogue Kaia detected?
Alexander. Someone had given him that name. Someone who had loved him. And even if he had been ready to kill Sam, Kaia should have found another way, should have…
“He’s alive, for now—barely. Time will tell. You may be a killer yet, my girl.” Frances’s brilliant blue eyes were tired beneath the silvery fringe of her short hair. Zoe bared her teeth behind her. “Alexander is your father.” Frances pressed her delicate lips together as she examined Kaia, waiting for a reaction.
“No,” Kaia said weakly. She shook her head as a flash of panic raced over her skin. “Hank Foley is my father.”
“Hank Foley,” Frances began, pronouncing his name with great distaste, “took your mother in after she left us. She was already carrying you, Kaia, when she went to live on land with him.”
Kaia shook her head again, but couldn’t make any words come.
“It was because of you that my mother left,” Zoe put in, speaking for the first time. Her face contorted with bitterness as she glared down at Kaia.
“You talk?!” Kaia balked, all of her sudden grief transforming to anger at the sound of Zoe’s voice. “Why the hell didn’t you say something when you were spying on me from the woods, or when you broke into my house?”
Zoe eyed her with an emotionless, cold-blooded gaze. “Because I thought you weren’t to be trusted,” she said in her rasping, monotone voice. “And I was right.”
“Is… Alexander her father, too?” Kaia asked Frances, his name wounding her as she pronounced it. She bit back her tears, not wanting to show any weakness in front of the sirens. Zoe especially.
“No,” Frances replied. “Your mother had Zoe long before you came along. As I am sure Tommy has indicated to you already, time does not work in the same manner for us sirens when we are in the water.”
“Yeah, about that,” Kaia started, wanting to hold Frances accountable for keeping Tommy prisoner for some seventy-odd years, wanting to shift the focus away from the terrible thing she had just done.
“Don’t worry about me,” came Tommy’s soft voice from the hall. He walked into the living room, arms crossed over his chest. He met Frances’s eyes. “I’ll want to talk to you on my own, Frances, but later. Kaia has something to tell you that will affect the future of the clan.”
Kaia felt anxiety skitter through her as she thought of Sam alone upstairs.
Tommy, noticing her gazing toward the ceiling, said, “He’s fine. I got him a glass of water. His head’s stopped bleeding, I just checked.
All he needs now is rest, not some stranger standing in the door and making him jump every time the floorboards creak.”
Kaia still wasn’t happy about leaving Sam unattended with what was very likely a concussion. He had refused to go to the hospital.
“What is it you have to tell me, Kaia?” Frances asked, turning her glacial gaze to her.
“I want to negotiate terms,” Kaia said, forcing her voice not to tremble. The man she loved had nearly died without knowing she loved him. She felt like she was crumbling inside. And worse still, she had almost just killed a man with her bare teeth—a stranger, yes, but he was her biological father. And he might die yet. She might now never get to know him. She opened her mouth to speak further, but all that came out was a rattling sigh. There seemed to be no strength left in her. She had no right to ask for a negotiation.
“Go on,” Frances said.
Kaia forced herself to sit up straighter. “There’s an energy corporation,” she began hesitantly. “They want to—they’re going to build a wind farm in Wapomeq Bay.” Seeing the confusion on the sirens’ faces, she explained, “They’ll build massive turbines—windmills—six of them. Rooted in the ocean floor.”
“Why?” Zoe asked, white brows lowering over colorless eyes.
Kaia felt a flood of loathing just at the sound of her voice. If Zoe hadn’t been such an idiot and asshole and had simply spoken to Kaia from the start, maybe none of this would have happened.
“To harvest energy,” she replied, working to keep the anger out of her tone. “For electricity. The wind, it moves the turbines and they, well, I don’t know what the hell they do or how it works, but the point is they’re going to drag up the Davis because it’s sitting right where they want to build.”
“Kaia will stop them,” Tommy interjected, leaning forward from where he sat at the other end of the couch. “She’ll gather a group of people to stop the wind farm.”
“And in return?” Frances asked calmly, clasping her hands on her lap. Behind her, Zoe shifted her weight, clearly uncomfortable in her human form and just as wary of Kaia as Kaia was of her.
“I swim freely, and so does Tommy,” Kaia said, lifting her chin. “You don’t mess with us. Any of you.” She pointed her gaze at Zoe. “Besides, what you wanted from me—to have babies? Well, I can’t.” Actually, she could, but that would require a skilled doctor and a state-of-the-art laboratory. Before her surgery, she’d had eggs frozen in the hope that someday, if she met the right person, they might want to try doing the whole Petri dish thing. That seemed pretty remote now. Regardless, it wouldn’t work the way Frances wanted it to. “I had an operation years ago,” Kaia said. “They removed my ovaries. I can’t have a baby.”
Zoe scoffed and turned toward the fire.
“What?” Kaia said.
Frances glanced up at Zoe, then responded, “Zoe is also… infertile.”
Zoe turned and glanced over her shoulder. If Kaia wasn’t mistaken, she was looking at Tommy, who simply sat with his fists clasped between his knees, staring at the floor.
“Tommy told you, I am sure, that our numbers are dropping,” Frances said wearily. “There never were many of us sirens. Now, we are in danger of dying out altogether. There are others, other clans. But they are territorial, and far away besides. If we were to lose our home… I don’t know where we would go. Some of us are old. Too old to migrate. We will take your offer, Kaia.”
“Okay,” Kaia said in barely a whisper, too relieved to summon the full sound of her voice. “Thank you.”
Frances sat very still, her ice-blue eyes sparkling with what might have been the hint of a smile. Behind her, Zoe continued to pin Kaia with her cold stare.
“I… have questions,” Kaia breathed at last.
Frances gave a nod of acquiescence. Kaia figured that would be the only invitation she’d get. Summoning what little courage and wherewithal remained within her, she asked, “What really happened to my mom? My dad, Hank, he always told me it was an accident.”
Frances lifted her brows and drew in a long breath. “It was,” she said, on a sigh. “One of our number was merely trying to pull her into the water. Alexander, if you must know.” Frances paused and steadied herself, straightening her spine as the lines around her mouth deepened. “He never intended for her to… to snap her neck.”
Alexander was responsible for her death.
This fact gave Kaia some small relief, a sense of vindication for what she had just done.
France paused, her gaze shifting to the embers in the hearth before returning to Kaia. “We gave her a proper burial. I can take you to her.”
Lost, her father always used to say. When I lost your mother… He had never said When your mother died.
“Does my dad—does Hank Foley know the truth?” Kaia asked. “Did he know what she was? Does he know what I am?”
“No,” Frances replied, pursing her lips. “And it must remain that way.”
“Why did my mother want to leave the clan?” Kaia asked, sensing that she had to keep her questions rolling before Frances got fed up with dry land and returned to her home in the water.
“She wanted to raise you on land, away from us,” Zoe said with a sneer.
“There was once a time,” Frances cut in, “when our kind could pass more freely between realms. But men and their technology have made that nearly impossible now. They have made our very existence dangerous. Your mother yearned for the dual life that was in her blood. She wanted to know life on land.”
“She wanted you to be better than we are,” Zoe added. “Well, you aren’t.”
“She fell in love with a mortal. She loved Hank,” Frances said evenly, ignoring her granddaughter. “Fiona loved him well enough to risk everything, including her life.”
At the sound of her mother’s name, Kaia felt something crack open inside her heart, letting all the sorrow she’d been holding at bay pour in. She could have drowned in it, easily and without resistance, had it not been for the creaking of heavy footfalls on the stairs. Everyone collectively turned toward the hall, where Sam was coming down with one hand to his head. Kaia stood and went to him.
“What are you doing out of bed?” she asked, her voice a thin rasp.
He had dressed in the clothing she’d bought for Tommy. The jeans were too short and fell above his big, boney ankles. The t-shirt was pulled tight against the broad expanse of his chest, showing an inch of skin at his hip when he moved. It made him look silly and vulnerable, and Kaia wanted to throw herself against him and wrap her arms around his waist, but she stopped herself.
“Going home,” he said, with a dark glance to the three other sirens sitting in the living room. Frances and Tommy were quietly conversing. “I’ve gotta finish one of my paintings for my show tomorrow.”
“You should rest,” Kaia insisted.
“I should leave.” He shook his head and heaved a heavy sigh, not meeting her gaze no matter how she angled herself. “I want to go home,” was all he said, and padded into the kitchen, where the dryer was still going with his jacket and other articles inside it.
“None of that is dry yet,” Kaia told him, pushing the machine door closed and hitting the start button again. “Stay, Sam.”
She rested a hand on his arm, where his skin was still cool. Too cool. His face was already bruising around his eye and temple. The bandage on his forehead was thankfully still white, though.
“I want to go home,” he repeated. “I don’t want to be here. Do you… want to come with me?”
She pictured herself on the Angeline, crossing the bay where she had just been imprisoned, spending a night in the safety of Sam’s arms. Sam’s arms that had been around someone else, very recently.
“No,” Kaia replied.
He nodded. “Okay,” he said, simply, and humbly. “Just one more thing, then.”
“Yes?” Kaia half hoped he’d ask her again. She might just say yes this time.
“Did you see that painting I started… o
f you? The one where you’re, you know, in… bed?”
Kaia felt her cheeks flush and crossed her arms over her chest as she recalled the large oil painting of herself, drowsing face down in the early morning light, and the way it had made her feel to look at it—like the connection they had found together the previous night was nothing short of unbreakable. “Uh-huh,” she responded. “What about it?”
“How would you feel about me, ah”—Sam scratched his head—“putting it up at the gallery?”
Kaia paused a moment, tucking a curl behind her ear. On the one hand, she couldn’t believe the balls he had asking her if he could use it. On the other, she wouldn’t mind Violet Wilde seeing that one in particular.
“That’s fine,” she said. “Thanks for asking.”
Sam looked relieved. “And—and I just wanted to say, you’re still welcome to play at the gallery for my show, if you want to. If not I, ah, I understand.”
“I’ll have to think about it.” Kaia folded her arms around herself.
Sam nodded and, without another word, left the house. Before Kaia could process it all, Frances and Zoe appeared in the kitchen. Stark naked.
“We left the clothing in the other room,” Frances said with complete dignity as she proceeded toward the door. She paused and turned to Kaia, giving her a nod. “I’ll return soon, granddaughter,” she said. “I wish to know you, and for you to know me.”
“And you’ll… you’ll let me know what happens with Alexander?” Kaia croaked.
Frances paused. “You’ll know,” she said, like a threat.
Zoe only shot daggers with her gaze as she gave Kaia one last glare before following Frances out the door. Trembling, Kaia turned as Tommy came into the kitchen a moment later, eyes clearly searching the table for scraps of cold pizza and gummy-looking hot wings.
