Sirens Unbound

by Laura Engelhardt

  “Hello,” Mira said as he came closer. “This is my friend, Devin. You won’t hurt my friends,” she said, infusing her voice with a mild compulsion before the man could say or do anything.

  “Of course not,” the man said, bemused. This man was no pedophile, and his struggle against the impulses her siren pheromones triggered was apparent in his pained expression.

  “Don’t worry about how you feel,” Mira suggested gently. “This isn’t real. You know that this park contains a fae preserve deep within. The fae wear many different glamours.”

  The man calmed somewhat, but Mira could tell he was still unhappy. He seemed like just another middle-aged man with too many worries and too little ambition. But Mira’s compulsions sometimes affected people more strongly than she intended, and they could occasionally appear addled or high. So perhaps it was her own bad influence that made him seem so unappealingly blank. “What’s your name?” Mira asked.

  “I’m Pete. Peter O’Hara. What’s your name?” Pete asked.

  “My name is Mira. Do you have any children?”

  Devin was wisely silent while Mira screened her mark. While Mira’s compulsion would prevent Pete from attacking Devin, it was better for him to try to fade into the background. Devin was keeping one eye on Pete, while looking to see if there were any other passersby who might become a threat. They needed to get off the trail, but given the amount of mass she expected to need for her next transformation, Mira didn’t want to stray too far from the river’s support.

  “I have three. Two boys and a girl,” Pete said. “What are you doing here? Are you lost?”

  “I’m looking for something. Would you help me? We were going to look just over there.” Mira gestured towards the split-rail fence that lined the path. It was an odd place for a fence, given that it only ran twenty feet or so, and didn’t actually fence anything in or out. But tall marsh grasses were clumped in front of it, providing a small amount of cover in what was otherwise an overly exposed area.

  Devin stayed where he was, but Pete followed as Mira shuffled towards the fence in her ridiculous outfit. She would have taken off her flip-flops, but the ground was too cold. “Do you want any more children?” Mira asked, turning back to look at Pete.

  “Children?” Pete answered hazily. “No, three is enough for us.” He frowned.

  “Don’t worry,” Mira assured him. “Sometimes the fae can bestow blessings. Wouldn’t it be nice to make sure you didn’t have more children than you could care for? And make sure someone who truly, truly wants a child can have one?” Mira didn’t feel guilty for misleading Pete on her identity. He could be a latent siren, and any talk of sirens would simply sound like gibberish.

  Pete nodded his assent to her suggestion as she reached out to take his hand. She hadn’t been this small since she herself was a girl, and felt a flash of vertigo as she saw his hand close around what was obviously hers, but seemed too small to really belong to her. Mira led Pete behind the brush, then took his other hand, pulling him down to his knees.

  Mira’s heart was beating faster and she felt Pete’s pulse racing under her hands to match hers. She leaned forward to kiss him, stroking her hands up to grip his forearms, and pressing her arms and cheek against his. She needed physical contact to draw out the power of possibility that was his fertility. Not his actual life-force, but the potential to engender life. Was fertility transfer theft to feed the starving, or a kind of pre-murder? As always, Mira prayed God saw it as the former, and thus forgivable; noble, even. Pete’s body was pliable in her hands; she pressed against him, and willed it. Her sex quivered and she grew damp. She felt a salty mist on her face, heard the sound of distant bells tinkling in waves of minor chords.

  Pete gasped. It was a sharp pain, she had been told. A pain mixed with pleasure like an orgasm, but not. Something that overpowered the senses. Your nerves knew that something was happening, but something so strange and strong it couldn’t be categorized as either pleasure or pain. And then it was over. Her heart was pounding, Pete’s heart was pounding, and she slowly released him, inching several feet away, still on her knees and hidden by the marsh grass.

  She was glad to be wearing the shawl as Pete stared at her, his eyes glazed over, too shocked to move or speak. Mira panted slightly with the effort of just staying upright, but she was too unbalanced. Pete made no effort to move towards her as she slid bonelessly to the half-frozen ground.

  The change always hit Mira hard, and while it wasn’t a violent shift, as werewolf changes were portrayed in the movies, with breaking bones and general ick, it was more physical than the instantaneous transformation of a fae through glamour. Changes in mass were a difficult kind of magick to sustain, which was probably why Chía stuck with jaguars and wolves when constructing the weres. Ra’s sphinxes would probably have died out on their own in a few centuries if they hadn’t been exterminated first; to gain and loose hundreds of pounds in a change was simply too much to sustain.

  Typically, Mira’s own transformations required only a little more or a little less mass. This time was different. Instead of gaining five to ten pounds, now she needed significantly more. Such a massive change so close in time to her last transformation was making her nauseous. The air around Mira became as dry as the desert; this change might have killed her mark had they not been so close to the river. Pulling more than fifty pounds of water from the air alone would have been impossible, but the river’s proximity prevented her change from draining Pete of his water-weight, as well as his fertility.

  Mira’s dress had been loose before, which was a good thing. Her arms, legs and torso lengthened. Mira grimaced with the pain, though her expression was lost as her face and jaw blurred. She closed her eyes, and tried to keep her lips loose as she breathed through the moments until she felt her body become her own again. Reforming this time had taken more than a minute, and most of her shifts were complete in less than fifteen seconds. When she could breathe normally again, Mira extended her hand to Pete.

  “Help me up, I think I tripped. Stupid flip-flops. I should have worn more sensible shoes.” Mira’s voice had deepened to an alto, and her hand into the tan bronze of a white girl on summer vacation, instead of the translucent pallor and breathy coloratura of the pedophile’s fantasy.

  Pete helped her up. He was dazed by his own alteration and didn’t really recognize her. She picked up her shawl, now flecked with dirt and grass, and walked back to the pathway where Devin waited. Looking down, Mira was grateful that her chest had only grown only to about a 34E. She pulled a strand of hair forward: more a true blond than a dirty blond.

  Given Pete’s age, she was guessing a Christie Brinkley-kind of look, though she’d been surprised before. Sometimes boys had spent their formative years looking through their fathers’ naughty drawers, and she’d become a spitting image of Betty Grable and Patti Boyd on more than one occasion. She was relieved Pete hadn’t been fixated on porn. Sometimes the back-punishing weight of those breasts drove her to harvest fertility in an attempt to transform into a more practical body.

  “Is he still watching?” Mira asked as she reached Devin, who looked relieved when he saw her new appearance.

  “No. He’s checking his pockets.”

  “Maybe he thinks we were robbers. Well, I didn’t take anything tangible. He’ll have a crazy story to tell his wife when he gets home. Another legend of the fae won’t hurt. Let’s get out of here before he tries to talk to us.”

  Devin hoisted the scuba duffle they had brought with them and they walked rapidly back up the path, towards the bend from which Pete had emerged. The trail would lead further into the park, to the salt marshes where Cordelia had told her a nõiamoor lived.

  Cordelia visited Mary and Amy at least once a year. Whenever she visited the States, Cordy always made time for at least one trip out to the local fae preserves. Mira felt a sharp pang of pride in her daughter’s sense of duty. Mira didn’t even have to remind her to do it; it had become as normal for Cordel
ia as attending church was for Mary. Such a small act to command such a sense of achievement, but regardless, Mira felt she had done at least one thing right as a mother.

  While Cordelia’s fertility powers weren’t as developed as Mira’s, her visits were nevertheless eagerly received by the fae. When she wasn’t able to fully assist a faerie, Cordelia would often make arrangements for another siren to visit. Her extensive notes and recommendations about the various fae communities in and around Boston almost made up for the fact that she had stolen Thomas away to help her on her European sojourn. Typically, Mira would have cajoled Thomas into partnering with her on any extended trip to mundane society, but she had to admit that Devin was a good substitute.

  Devin hadn’t fought in the War of Succession, but Mira thought he would have been quite the hero had he been alive back then. He was suspicious where Mira was too trusting, and had somehow managed to maintain his weaponry skills through every transformation. No new body had any muscle-memory, and each had its own peculiar strengths and weaknesses. While it seemed to take Mira months to adapt (if she even did before her next transformation), Devin seemed to instantly find himself within his new skin.

  Massachusetts, and indeed most of North America, had scattered pockets of “wild spaces” inhabited by the second-wave of fae immigrants. Long after the Aos Sí lost their battle over the Taiga, and the Brazilian fae made their dramatic cross-Atlantic voyage, the second wave of European fae came to the New World. Indeed, many of the more solitary or anti-social fae had relocated to the nascent United States, trading their fading magick for their preserves.

  But sirens were always welcome.

  Mira knew when they had crossed the boundary separating the mundane park from the fae preserve when the morning sunlight faded into shadow, and the scent of loam filled the air. The salt marsh should have been bright in the early light; there were no trees to shade it. This was a rich land, but a land that would bear no fruit without them. They had barely entered the faerie’s domain when the half-consumed tree standing in the middle of the brackish water shimmered into a lavender lady.

  “Cordelia said her dam might come one day, and look you now! Mira Bant de Atlantic, as I live and breathe,” the nõiamoor sang out in a raspy voice. Her features were sharp, with a beak-like nose and deep-set gray eyes within her lavender face. Her arms resembled birch branches, with peels of lavender bark rolls curling like ruffles on sleeves that didn’t exist. The nõiamoor flexed her multi-jointed hand in greeting; her fingers were so long and thin they looked like spines affixed to her palms. Sirens had a natural resistance to fae magick; while that could be useful, sometimes Mira wished she only saw the same glory of their glamours that humans did.

  “We have indeed,” Mira said. “We keep our promises.”

  “As do I,” the nõiamoor said. “As do I.” But her tone rendered her assertion into an ominous threat, instead of a guarantee of good faith.

  “What do you seek, fae maid?” Devin asked formally.

  “Power, pleasure, pain,” the nõiamoor replied. “Not necessarily in that order.”

  “You are a hunter,” Mira accused. “Cordelia may have promised that I might one day visit, but not that I would aid you.”

  “Ahhhhh,” cried the nõiamoor in a sound that pierced the mist and sent a flock of starlings into a scattered flight.

  “You do not seek what we have to offer,” Devin said.

  “I do not seek a child, true,” said the nõiamoor. “But I need you still. I am but a shadow of my former self, unable to cross the marshes to visit the wood wives on the other side of the park.”

  “Perhaps that is for the best,” Mira said flatly, turning as if to leave.

  “NO, no,” the nõiamoor cried. “I do not hunt them!”

  “Is that a promise?” asked Devin.

  “I shall not hunt the wood wives do you grant me the strength to leave this marsh,” declared the nõiamoor.

  “What will you hunt?” asked Mira.

  “Animals. Only animals,” promised the nõiamoor slyly.

  “We are all animals. I will not help you hunt sentient beings,” Mira said.

  “What of trespassers? I must protect my home.” The nõiamoor sounded reasonable, but Mira suspected she would find a way around any promise.

  It was too bad nõiamoors were so skilled at glamours. Mira generally only visited fae seeking children. She and Marisol were gifted with a relatively strong power over fertility. It felt wasteful to squander it on a faerie who wanted nothing more than to venture further from her power center.

  “Trespassers to your current domain within its current borders are fair to hunt. But no others.” Devin’s new form spoke in a higher tenor than his last apparition, and Mira missed the harder resonance his last body would have given to his warning. Still, the compulsion coiled around his words whipped across the marsh to lash at the nõiamoor. While she wasn’t fertile, and thus immune to his power, Devin’s strength nonetheless echoed across the wetlands.

  “Trespassers to my current domain only,” the nõiamoor nodded.

  “We also need papers. Passports, driver’s licenses, and credit cards,” Mira said.

  “Done,” agreed the nõiamoor.

  With their bargain struck, the nõiamoor waded, or perhaps floated, out of the grassy water. She was smaller than Mira had expected — only tall enough to reach Mira’s chest. Mira reached out to lightly clasp her shoulders, which shone with a soft, pulsing glow. The faerie’s lavender skin was surprisingly soft, almost like rabbit fur, though it was hairless. The nõiamoor leaned in, and Mira kissed her full on the lips.

  The giving of power was less intoxicating than the taking of power, and Mira was better able to check her sensations. In less than a few seconds, she pulled back. Though Mira’s midsection still pulsed with stored power, the nõiamoor had no need of so much. It wouldn’t do to overpay this hunter for such a minor favor.

  This principle of magical symmetry also applies to constructs: no inherent power comes without a corresponding vulnerability. Sirenic influence on fertile persons is counterbalanced by the infertile’s immunity to their power. Sirenic strength over members of the opposite sex is balanced by the extreme hatred they engender in members of their same sex, and so forth. Sirens have no special physical powers, and you are as much at risk from disease and accidental death as you were before your transition. That said, sirens whose taking of fertility results in a transformation can self-heal otherwise mortal wounds through their bodily change.

  – Sirens: An Overview for the Newly-Transitioned, 3rd ed. (2015), by Mira Bant de Atlantic, p. 28.

  Chapter 11

  “Dr. Eisner?” Mira called out.

  Eli Eisner was trying unsuccessfully to hail a cab outside the Tosteson Medical Education Center. It was just after four in the afternoon, and since many cabbies switched shifts at four, there were few to be found. At Mira’s call, he dropped his hand and turned to find the source of the sound.

  Despite the fact that Mira stood against one of the pillars flanking the entrance and was almost hidden by the bustle of people going in and out of the center, Eli located her almost immediately. Mira may not have had Devin’s gift of compulsion, but her voice was strong enough to attract the attention of any man she wanted. Eisner hurried back to where Mira was standing.

  “Dr. Eisner,” Mira said, “I knew that must be you! It’s been a while since we spoke, but I’m so glad I ran into you.”

  “I-I am sure I would have remembered meeting you, miss,” Eli stammered, enraptured by the song he could feel running through her words.

  “I’m sure you meet so many people,” Mira said. “I can understand why you don’t remember me. We met in London at the World Congress for Neurology back in oh, maybe 2000 or 2001, I think. You’ve done such impressive work since then! I would love to hear more about what you’re working on now.”

  “I’m free right now,” Eli replied eagerly. “I don’t imagine you have time to sit down?”


  “Actually, I’m waiting for a friend of mine. But I am free for dinner if you don’t have plans.” Mira wove a mild compulsion through her speech, but it was almost unnecessary. Eli was already entranced by the artificial pheromones sparkling in her blood. He had been just as susceptible before when Mira had briefly engaged him to ensure he treated Amy fairly.

  “I would love to have dinner tonight,” Eli exclaimed. “I can get us into Menton; I know the owner. It’s a fabulous restaurant on the waterfront.”

  “Ah, but a quieter setting might be better for conversation. Perhaps something more intimate? I hope you won’t find me forward if I invite you to my apartment. It’s close by, and that way we can learn more about each other.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Mira saw Devin deftly catch the hand of a woman about to accost her. She would have to wrap up this meet-cute quickly.

  She barely focused on Eli’s stammered assent to her suggestion that he come by around seven. Mira whisked her business card from her coat pocket, freshly printed with her new address for just this purpose, handed it to the bemused Eli, and hurried off. She could feel the aging doctor staring after her, still caught in her lure. He was so besotted he hadn’t even asked her name or spared a moment to wonder how someone as seemingly young as she was could have met him before.

  She had almost reached the corner when Devin caught up with her. “Well that went well,” he murmured.

  “Thanks for stopping that woman.”

  “Thanks for getting us off the street so quickly.” Devin opened the door of their town car, which waited for them at the end of the block. While Eli’s assistant hadn’t been susceptible to Devin’s formidable power, he’d nonetheless been able to use his not inconsiderable amount of natural charm to wheedle the doctor’s schedule from her. Birth control was a double-edged sword; its elimination of fertility made it easier for Mira to get around solo, but harder for them as a siren team.