Devin shook his head. “Gerel is a dangerous enemy to have. She was one of the first to survive Chía’s working and kept more of her past-self than those who were sacrificed later on.”
“The were-jaguar clan found the battle mage who destroyed Thomas’ house. Kadu shipped his remains to Gerel directly.” Mira said a silent prayer of thanks for the protection of the weres. They could be so utterly charming, she often forgot how dangerous they were. But they had been designed to destroy mages, and vampires had once been mages.
“You’re popular with the clan for them to challenge a vampire ruler for you,” Devin remarked, raising his eyebrows.
“Thomas is popular with them,” she corrected. “I’m simply tolerated.”
“Perhaps Thomas is taking his mage back to Brazil,” Devin speculated.
Amy’s bedroom door opened and she walked through the living room into the kitchen, where they were seated. Devin poured Amy a cup of coffee, raising the milk and sugar in a silent question. Amy shook her head, sitting across from Mira at the table.
“I’m not going to call you Mom,” Amy announced.
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Mira responded briskly, matching Amy’s tone and demeanor. “Can you call me Mira?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll avoid calling you anything, like when I was a teenager and barely spoke to you.” A wisp of a sad smile hovered around Amy’s lips. Clearly their fraught relationship before Mira’s “death” had caused Amy some regret over her natural teenage rebelliousness.
“I think we should show you something,” Mira said. She had spent the hour before sunrise considering how to move them into a sense of normalcy, now that the possibility existed to have a true relationship.
“What?” Amy asked.
“I thought that I might show you how my appearance shifts, and then I thought we might take you to see some of the fae. I promised Cordelia I would help a group on a nearby preserve while I was in Boston.” After Amy’s scientific interrogation of siren nature last night, Mira thought a demonstration might appeal to Amy; she also hoped to bargain with the local fae in a way that could benefit her.
Amy liked the idea of trying out her mage sight to observe a magical working. She was feeling increasingly handicapped by her inability to make sense of what she was now perceiving. Until last night when she watched Devin struggle against the geas, she couldn’t discern any logic to her mage sight.
Watching him fight it, Amy could almost find a commonality in how the colors lashed around him. While the patterns and colors continued to change almost randomly, their movement had been similar. And when she had concentrated, she could hear the same sound each time he tried to respond to her questions: it was like a dentist’s drill grinding against her molars and reverberating in her jaw.
It could only help to observe another kind of magical working — especially one that didn’t cause someone the kind of pain Devin experienced last night. But visiting a fae preserve to observe magic would be even more foolhardy than flying to Arabia. “I would like to see a transformation, but I think I’ll have to pass on the fae preserve,” Amy responded after mulling it over for a moment.
“There are only a few dozen fae in the Blue Hills Preserve. Honestly, it’s probably more accurate to call this a werewolf preserve than a fae preserve at this point. Just a small community of forest folk and a leshy couple that Cordelia had been helping. I’m sure she didn’t tell you that she made a point of checking in on them when she visited you. I told Cordy that I’d visit when I came back to Boston.”
Mira’s explanation didn’t help Amy understand why she needed to go. “I have nothing against the fae, but I have no particular need or, honestly, any desire to meet them now. You sirens seem to take a lot of risks. I mean, Thomas goes skydiving, you and Cordelia visit the fae... While you all may think nothing of hanging out with them, to me, visiting a fae preserve seems like an unnecessary risk.”
Despite herself, Mira was nettled by Amy’s sanctimonious tone: she was one to talk about unnecessary risks, after undergoing experimental brain surgery!
Amy reached for her cup, but missed the handle by an inch: she was seeing double again. The morning sun was particularly tricky for her enhanced vision. “Your eyes are bothering you,” Mira said, standing up to close the blinds. The sunlight in the kitchen was reduced to a cheery glow instead of the intense brilliance of white countertops and cabinets on this cloudless day.
“You’re wise to be cautious around the fae,” Devin said. “They see the world differently, and their customs can make interactions more dangerous than most would believe.”
“I sense a but,” Amy said, with a smile of relief. Dimming the room had helped, and now she was able to re-focus to see only one image.
“But they will owe me and I would ask a favor of the forest folk,” Mira said.
“A favor?”
“An exchange of favors, really. The fae view gratitude and obligation as one and the same,” Mira replied. “So, while you share some of our genetic resistance to fae magick, their stronger, active spells will affect you. And I know you’re healing rapidly, but I wonder if you would consider speed healing.”
Amy was taken aback. “Ask a faerie to cast a spell on me?”
“The forest folk have a very natural kind of magick,” Devin explained. “It’s really just a boost to your own natural healing process. It doesn’t do anything different from what your own body would already do, given time. But forest folk, and in particular the moss folk, can heal in a moment something that would take your body significantly longer on its own. I understand that nerves take a long time to heal.”
“I am not going to walk into a fae preserve and put myself at their mercy,” Amy said in a tone that brooked no argument. This was beyond ridiculous.
“Amy, it really is safe. You’ve done this before and healed beautifully. The faerie healed in moments what would have taken weeks,” Mira said.
“What are you talking about? I’ve never been magicked,” Amy said, worried even as she said it that she was about to be proven wrong.
“It was our first summer in Ocracoke. You fell off the swing set at the park and broke your arm. Right at the beginning of the summer.”
“Of course I remember that. But there were no fae involved in my treatment: Dr. Mervine set my arm. I remember because that was what first made me want to be a doctor when I grew up.”
“Yes, Dr. Mervine was a great doctor. But after you saw him, I decided I didn’t want you to spend your first summer in a new town in a cast, unable to swim and play with the rest of the kids. So I exchanged favors with the will ‘o the wisps and moss folk of Alligator River. That’s why it healed so quickly.”
Amy sat in silence and thought back. She clearly remembered Dr. Mervine wrapping her arm in plaster, and the funny star tattoo on his hand that he said he’d gotten while in the navy. He’d distracted her with stories of his buddy who’d had his ex-girlfriend’s name tattooed on his arm and another one with a mermaid tattoo that covered his whole back.
Be careful not to make decisions when you’re twenty that you’ll regret when you’re forty, Dr. Mervine had warned. Amy remembered nodding solemnly. He had made an impression on her. But her recollection of getting her cast off was foggy. Too many things were turning out to be different than what she remembered. “I remember walking on a muddy road,” Amy said hesitantly.
“Yes. We couldn’t drive or bring any metal. So we took the boat — it was fiberglass, of course. And then we had to walk into the marsh.”
Amy recalled how hard it had been to walk. She’d been off-balance with her arm in a cast, and had worried she was going to fall into the mud. “There was a lady.” Amy tried to remember, but it was hazy. She concentrated on remembering the feel of her shoes being sucked into the mud. At the end of the path, there had been a lady dressed in a cloud. She had gotten totally wet when the lady approached, and had worried because she wasn’t supposed to get her cast wet.
She remembered her awe of the lady, enveloped in mist, with sparkles in her hair as droplets condensed on the dark strands, but didn’t drip away. It had been so still, with no wind or rustling of leaves to break the quiet. Then the lady’s hand slicing through her cast with a purple shell that was somehow sharp enough to cut through plaster, but didn’t touch her skin. The arid heat like a hair dryer blowing, but the mist didn’t dry up. And then she remembered seeing those eyes bulge through the cloud — and screaming.
“God, I still have nightmares about those eyes! Now I remember! How could you have taken me to that place?”
“I’m sorry, Amy. I thought it would be a grand adventure; you used to love hearing fairy tales, and I’d visited Danica before. She was delighted to create a fairy tale experience for you. It didn’t occur to me that you would be able to see through fae glamours. You were only a little girl, not even an active siren.
“And then you were so scared when the frog prince peeked out from behind her, you didn’t stop screaming until he left. I’m so sorry, Amy. Danica said she would soften your memories and make them less … real. Or perhaps more remote. I didn’t want you to have nightmares.” Mira said sadly.
Amy couldn’t even look at her mother. How could she have put her in such danger? The idea that fae illusions made a faerie somehow safe was absurd.
“We can only do our best.” Mira wished Amy understood. She had no idea Amy had been so affected by that one night. “I only wanted you to be happy. To settle into the new town. And you did have a great summer. You made so many friends before school started.”
“I can’t believe you thought it would be a good idea to take your five-year-old to visit a fae preserve! Seriously? And then you hid it from me? Had a faerie glamour me to make me forget the truth? I mean, I understand how the geas restricted you from telling me you were a siren. But this?” Amy shook her head. “I don’t like finding out now that I’ve had magick worked on me.
“You know, every time you fill out a questionnaire, you get asked about magick use? I’ve certified maybe fifty times that I’ve never been magicked. I would have thought you’d have mentioned it sometime. Maybe not when I was five, but when I was older? I mean, what else don’t I know about myself?” For the first time, Amy realized that even though the woman sitting across from her didn’t look at all like her mother, she had started thinking of her as Mom. That was perhaps more disconcerting than anything else.
Mira sighed. “I don’t know. It didn’t come up. Maybe I should have found a way to tell you. But I didn’t think of it as a big deal. Back then, we didn’t fill out all the forms you have nowadays. It was a disappointment for me, really. I had wanted it to be a special experience for us. After that night, you never wanted to hear another fairy tale again. But Amy, you’re older now. Can we try a do-over?”
They sat in silence for a moment, and a cloud must have passed over the sun, because the room dimmed further.
“I left my girls, you know.” Devin said. “It was safer that way, and I suppose my sister raised them well. But I missed them all the same. You make your choices and you move on from there. Like the fae say, ‘if you get bogged down in the past, you forget the present and lose your future.’”
“You told me you’re finished with all the necessary scans at the hospital. You’ve gotten the results, and you know that the grafts have taken hold, but it will take more time for them to heal completely. If all you really need is time for your body to finish healing, I know that the fae can speed that up.” Mira looked pointedly at Amy.
“It’s true.” Devin added his support for this idea. “And it would be even more risky to do nothing. Too much is happening, too quickly. It isn’t safe for you to remain at less than full health.”
Mira worried that she was springing too much on Amy too fast, but she wasn’t sure trickling the information out would be received any better. She needed to know about the prophesy. Mira took a deep breath and hoped Amy could handle one more disclosure.
“Amy, the reason we’re worried — why we’re even here with you now — is because we think you need to be protected. The Danjou have an Oracular prophesy regarding another mage war, and believe you’re pivotal to winning it.”
Amy was startled. “A mage war?”
After Mira finished explaining everything she knew about the prophesy, the numbness that had cocooned Amy since yesterday’s revelations dissolved.
“How dare you keep this from me! You’ve been here for a week, ‘monitoring the situation’ and didn’t see fit to tell me that we are on the brink of Armageddon and that my operation was somehow pivotal? You lie and lie and lie. And for what? The geas had nothing to do with this prophesy. You weren’t somehow prevented from telling me about the Oracle, were you? How could you lie like that!” Hot tears of anger rolled down Amy’s cheeks, and her hands shook.
“Amy, it’s not like that! I didn’t lie—”
“A lie of omission is the same as a lie!” Amy tossed one of her mother’s oft-used expressions back at her. “You should have said something the moment you arrived!”
“Like you would have believed me? Mary wouldn’t have even opened the door if I had started spouting gibberish about prophesies and oracles. She was suspicious enough that if she hadn’t been so worried about her auditions, I don’t think she’d ever have believed Thomas sent me.”
Amy shook her head, and wiped her eyes with a quick flick of her hand. The room had taken on a reddish haze, and her vision blurred with tears. A plume of yellow flame suddenly extended from the table in a wide arc, searing a hole in both the floor below and ceiling above. Startled, the three of them jumped out of their chairs and backed away from the table. The flames went out, leaving the dull smell of burnt plastic lingering behind.
“Ah … did I just do that?” Amy asked in a hushed voice, still husky with emotional residue.
“I think so,” Devin replied cautiously.
“I don’t know how I did it,” Amy whispered.
Mira swallowed. “I think your operation may have been more of a complete success than you expected.”
They stood for a moment as the smoke faded. It was as if none of them knew what to say next.
“Maybe we should visit the fae,” Devin said at last. “Your enclave mage isn’t here and the fae may have some advice. They use magick too.”
“And if they can’t help, I know a mage — one who actually knows Ted — Jonah, the guy I mentioned to you before—”
“Your spy,” Amy interrupted flatly.
“Yes,” Mira kept her voice expressionless. “Jonah may be able to help. But he’d have to fly out here, and he’s usually in the Danjou Enclave in California. The fae are closer.”
Amy knew she had rushed this operation, and this wasn’t the first time she’d experienced second thoughts since waking up. But now she was starting to wonder. The Danjou had received a prophesy about her before she’d even started high school, let alone graduated from medical school or developed the Bant Procedure. The Danjou had approached Eli about a joint vision restoration project. The Danjou had kept the DoD interested after every setback.
Ted had been so persuasive about her trying the surgery. Amy started to wonder whether he’d been sent to join Project Hathor just to orchestrate her operation. Perhaps he had manipulated her in some way? She had brushed aside Mary’s objections so easily. And at the time, Amy thought Graham’s eagerness to perform the operation had been due to his desire for professional recognition … but perhaps it had really been Ted’s influence that prevented Graham from putting forth any real objections.
Looking back, Amy wondered at how uncharacteristically impulsive she had been to
rush the operation, somehow burying her qualms under articulate and intricate arguments. Impulsivity was Cordelia’s weakness, not hers. But here she was. And instead of feeling thrilled at this new display of success, Amy felt the hard ache of fear in her stomach. She had been manipulated into making a terrible mistake.
She no longer cared about the success or failure of the project, her reputation, or anything else. She had practiced medicine for twenty-five years, and was now one of the most experienced, most skilled neurosurgeons in the entire country. Amy understood the risks of surgery and could recommend which were worth taking. But she utterly lacked any experience, training or guidance whatsoever with respect to magick. Now Amy wasn’t only worried that she might kill someone with her new sight; now she wondered if she’d been tricked into starting a Mage War.
The sirenic power of transformative fertility includes both (i) the ability to harvest sex drive as well as basic fertility from fertile donors, and (ii) the physical transformation of the siren into their donor’s fantasy partner. Sirens generally do not achieve the power of transformative fertility until they have at least three active siren descendants. While the power of transformative fertility requires more practice to control than basic fertility transfer, it is still more of an instinctual than a learned skill.
– Sirens: An Overview for the Newly-Transitioned, 3rd ed. (2015), by Mira Bant de Atlantic, p. 21.
Chapter 33
“Stay here for a moment,” Mira said when they walked into the church.
“This is a gift I can give them,” Mira had explained to Amy on the way there. “They struggle with lust like everyone else. I can remove that struggle and, in the process, use their lust to help another have a child. Before Thomas transitioned, it was harder to justify. I can’t quite say it’s God’s work. But now, it’s a lot easier to believe that I’m doing the right thing.”
Amy had thought Mira’s explanation of why she chose priests made a lot of sense. She had not pried too much into the mechanics of how sirens took and gave fertility. While both she and Mira had taken on a clinical, detached approach to their discussion yesterday, Mira stammered as she tried to explain the nuances. Devin had watched their discussion with a vague smirk on his face. He seemed to find Mira’s practically incoherent explanation of the quasi-sexual element in siren magick ridiculous and somewhat entertaining. At least his presence had helped Amy find the humor in the situation.
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