Siren Magic

by Lucia Ashta

  I opened my mouth to pull in air, but felt as if I were drowning, like all the humans who fell into the ocean never to emerge again.

  This was it.

  Goodbye, Mama. Goodbye, Liana. Maybe my love would reach them wherever they were. Mulunu claimed that I did have magic even if I rarely exhibited it, everything about me so different from the other merpeople of our clan.

  Then I accepted my death.

  And just as I did, a pop ripped through my dying gasps, so loud it left my ears ringing. I didn’t manage to register what was happening before Sailor Man was scrambling out of my way and allowing my head to drop toward the floor.

  Thanks for holding me into my death. Immediately afterward, I regretted that my final thought was sarcastic.

  You even manage to mess up death, Selene. Way to go.

  2

  A wave of fresh air entered my lungs, sending me gasping for a whole new reason. I swallowed the air greedily, noticing at the same time that my body was no longer in pain. As suddenly as the ward or whatever it was had attacked me, it fled.

  The power of a lightning bolt no longer ran through my body, though every bit of it ached from clenching. And the area beside my shoulder blades hurt.

  I tried to sit up, failed, but then felt hands on me again. I blinked my eyes open. The man before me wasn’t Sailor Man—Quinn, then. But he was blurry, as if I were waking from a deep slumber.

  I stared at him, and he stared at me.

  Finally, he asked, “Would you like me to help you sit up?” His voice was now gentle, free of his previous panic. His relief was scrawled across his eyes, the ones that caught me and didn’t let go, with as many colors flecked through their irises as my favorite seashells on the ocean floor.

  I was pretty relieved I hadn’t actually died too.

  “Do you feel well enough to sit?” he asked again, and I realized I’d allowed an awkward amount of time to pass while I stared at him, his features coming into focus. He was undeniably handsome—for a land person. His short hair was dark and disheveled, framing a pleasant, stubbled face; his lips were bright and plump as they smiled hesitantly at me.

  I’d very nearly died moments ago, so I suspected strange behavior, such as gawking, might be expected of me. How fortunate.

  I nodded, regretted the movement immediately, but he got the idea and helped push me up to sitting. I couldn’t sit on my own, so he leaned against a piece of wall next to the door, and half dragged me, half helped me scoot, so that I leaned against him.

  I sank into his firm chest like a boneless sea slug, unable to do much else. My entire body, limbs especially, was as loose as kelp.

  He was warm, and the heat of his body helped begin to return the heat to my own form, chilled and missing the constancy of the ocean water. His scent was unfamiliar as I’d never met him before, of course, but it was more than that; he smelled so very unlike anything in the sea. I found that I couldn’t identify the scents other than to find them pleasant and crisp. Whatever it was he smelled like, I enjoyed it.

  “Is this comfortable?” he asked while he swept hands around my body as if trying to decide whether to offer the comfort of his touch. Finally, he wrapped strong arms around the bare skin of my waist.

  “Yes,” I murmured, smart enough this time not to move my head to answer. I nestled into the warmth of his embrace.

  Sailor Man’s face swam into view. “Are y’all right, lass? You gave us a good fright there.”

  “I-I think I’m all right.” But truly, how was I to know? “I’m sore, but okay, I guess, though my shoulders still hurt.”

  Actually, now that alertness was returning, I realized my shoulders hurt quite a lot. Once more, I tried to reach for my back. My fingers touched something … strange … and I whirled around to get away from it. From Quinn, I presumed.

  My vision blurred and my head spun, but I scooted away from Quinn’s reach anyway, only to catch this something smack him across the face as he was unable to get out of the way in time.

  I went to lean on the door, discovered it still open, and started to fall, until Sailor Man caught me and dragged me awkwardly to lean against the open door.

  “You’ve got to stay still,” he said. “Ya’ll hurt yourself more or tear your wings.”

  I blinked stupidly at him, then at Quinn, who stared back at me with concern … but no shock. “Wh-what?” I said.

  “Your wings,” the gruff man repeated. “You’ll tear them if you keep thrashing about like this.”

  “My what?”

  “Do you think she’s deaf or something?” Quinn asked, and I shot him a scowl—or what I thought was a scowl, but could’ve been anything else in my current state.

  “I’m not deaf,” I snapped. “I just don’t have wings.” But of course, even as I said it I knew I must. There was only so far denial could get me. After all, I had touched something soft and fluffy back there.

  And it wasn’t Quinn, because I was staring straight at him and he looked completely normal for a human, though as beautiful as any of the mermen, and they prided themselves on their stunning looks. An arrogant bunch, they were.

  Quinn’s face dissolved into confusion, and then understanding, enough to make me wish I had some of that. “She doesn’t know,” he whispered, more in awe of the fact than their claim that I had wings.

  “How do ya not know you have wings, lass?” Sailor Man asked me, his eyes serious, scrunched together as if he were trying to figure out a complicated puzzle. I hoped he was trying to figure me out, because I could use the help.

  I opened my mouth to deny the obvious again, but I snapped it shut. Finally, I said, “I’ve never had wings before.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to, but before I could debate, I caught sight of feathery white wings, much like a bird’s, and snapped my head front and center, eyes bugging out of my head. “Ho,” I breathed, wondering if one could die of shock so soon after nearly dying by ward. “I, ah … I have wings.”

  Sailor Man and Quinn nodded.

  “I have wings,” I said again, trying the incredibly ludicrous statement out.

  I took another peek, this time at the other wing. Yep, it was there all right, fluffy, white, and long, just like the other one.

  I tried moving them. With only a thought directed at them, they opened wide just as I’d pictured them doing, brushing Sailor Man in the face and sweeping across the floor to extend out into the open threshold in the other direction.

  “It’s incredible,” he said, not bothering to move out of the way. “They’re so soft.” He reached a hand to touch the wing in front of his face and I quickly retracted them.

  Obviously my wings were a true part of me. I’d pulled them away without even thinking about it.

  I sat there, dumbfounded, though feeling a bit stronger now that lightning wasn’t striking me over and over. I scooted another half step back and leaned straighter against the door, the menacing wolf knocker looming above my head.

  “So you didn’t know you could shift, I take it?” Quinn said, his eyes trailing all across my wings and the rest of me, slowing down as they swept across my curves.

  I stared, my brain struggling to register what he was saying, and all that had happened since Mulunu flung me onto land.

  “When I asked you to shift, you didn’t,” he said.

  “I didn’t realize I could … shift. But … have I shifted?”

  Sailor Man chuckled. “I’d say so. What else would you call sprouting wings?”

  “Crazy.”

  He laughed, a deep, booming sound that lit up his eyes, making them seem less stormy than before. “You’re right on that one.”

  But Quinn didn’t even crack a smile. “You nearly died. Are you all right? I don’t understand what happened. Why did the ward affect her like that? Was it really the shift that kicked her out of its reach?”

  Quinn had started talking to me, but he was clearly speaking to Sailor Man now. I obviously had no answers. I wasn’t even s
ure if I was all right.

  “The ward shouldn’t have affected her like that, that’s for damn sure,” Sailor Man growled. “It’s supposed to only attack those with ill intentions. I doubt this lass would know an ill intention if it slapped her in the face. I’m getting that witch on the phone right now. She’ll have to answer to me for this.”

  I suspected I should have been intimidated by Sailor Man. He’d only grown gruffer since I’d entered his house. His thick sweater was bunched above his elbows revealing swaths of corded muscle winding around his forearms. More importantly, he’d invited me into his home and then his home had tried to kill me.

  But after Mulunu, I wasn’t as intimidated as I probably should have been. Everything about her was equal parts powerful and creepy. She could sap the life force of any sea creature in seconds, sucking it into the sea crystal that crowned her staff.

  “Quinn, you help her to the couch, get her something to drink. Whatever she needs. I’m getting us answers.” Sailor Man stalked from the entryway toward the interior of the house.

  Quinn nodded and started to rise.

  “I don’t like having someone in my house I know nothing about, and I like it less when she almost dies,” Sailor Man grumbled.

  Thanks for the sympathy. “Sorry to be a bother,” I said, and belatedly realized I was still too out of it to hide my resentment at finding rejection … yet again. Hey, on the up side, at least it seemed like my reluctant host hadn’t actually set out to kill me on purpose.

  Sailor Man stopped as he entered a larger, adjacent space and brought both hands to his hips. He turned to stare at me, but it was as if his attention wasn’t actually on me, as if his eyes were someplace far away. He waggled his jaw back and forth a couple of times, then said, “Mulunu is the one that bothered, not you.”

  I’d expected more from him, this stranger, even though I had no reason to. I was used to tamping down disappointment and I worked quickly to hide it.

  As soon as the old man left the room, Quinn was at my side. “Don’t worry about him. He grows on you over time.”

  “How long does that take?”

  He laughed, a wonderful sound that sent warmth gushing through my body. “A while. But you’ll eventually get used to him.”

  But would I be around long enough to get used to anyone?

  “Can you stand?” Quinn scanned the length of my body, concern etched on his handsome face. Again his gaze lingered as they skimmed my curves. A shiver ran through me that had nothing to do with the chill in the air.

  “I think I can stand,” I answered, and pulled my feet under me. “But my legs were wobbly to start with.”

  “Oh? How come?”

  “I’ve never had legs before either.”

  His eyes widened so that I could make out every multi-colored fleck. I stared as I took in what seemed like every one of my favorite colors of the ocean. “Oh,” he said. “You’re a...”

  “Yes, I’m a siren.” I said it like it was both a gift and a curse, because that’s exactly what it’d always been to me. “Kind of, I guess,” I added, with a glance to my wings. Wings.

  “We’ll get you figured out,” he said with confidence I lacked. “Let’s start with getting you to the couch.”

  Unlike Sailor Man, Quinn wore a short-sleeved t-shirt that drew tightly across ample muscles. When he wrapped an arm between my wings and around my waist, his skin seared against my bare flesh, instantly heating me again. Was this normal for the touch of a land person? If so, maybe there’d be good points to being stranded on land.

  I let him lead me away, careful of the wings attached to my back. Though they were large enough to skim my thighs as they hung from my shoulder blades, they were incredibly light. If not for the fact that I was totally weirded out by them, it would have been easy to forget they were there at all.

  Liana wasn’t going to believe this. Too bad I had no way to communicate with my best friend anymore.

  I shrugged away the pang of loss and shuffled to the couch in the strange, dark house that had tried to murder me.

  3

  Quinn led me to the couch—a large, dark blue overstuffed contraption that looked like it could swallow me whole—but even before I attempted to take a seat on it, I knew it wasn’t what I needed.

  “What is it?” he asked when I hesitated, running his hand alongside my waist up and down across my skin a few times.

  I temporarily forgot what I was supposed to be doing. His fresh scent, whatever it was, filled my nostrils and made me heady. He pressed his fingers more firmly against my flesh as if to prompt me, but it only made my brain freeze for a moment. “Uh, will you take me outdoors instead please? I’m not used to being inside a confined space.” The walls and ceiling were pressing in on me. I was finding it difficult to breathe normally.

  His face lit up in understanding and he changed directions. “Sure, I wouldn’t guess a siren would like to be inside after being used to all that ocean, huh?”

  “This is strange for me, that’s for sure.” The understatement of a lifetime. It was also kind of him to call me a siren and leave out the obvious point that I couldn’t be all that much of one while having wings.

  “There’s a spot outside where no one will be able to see us.”

  “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Quinn looked down at me; he was half a head taller than I. “Yes, well, we don’t want anyone getting sight of you right now, not until Uncle Irving has a chance to figure out what’s going on with you and why this Mulunu woman would send you to him.”

  “Right,” I said, mostly because I didn’t know what else to say. The reality was that even Mulunu probably didn’t know what to do about me. I’d been an enigma before. Now that wings had popped out of my back, I wasn’t sure what to call myself—beyond a freak, a thought that wouldn’t do me any good.

  Quinn led me toward a sliding glass door and escorted me out of it, his hot hand moving toward the small of my back, searing its outline onto my bare skin. He nudged me onto a shaded patio with an outdoor sofa that had seen better days. Its blue stripes had faded into the tones of an illuminated sky. I shuffled on awkward legs and plopped down as he said, “It’s a bit dirty from all the rain and leaves and stuff falling on it. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t care,” I said, already missing the heat of his hand on me. “I’m used to all the things in the ocean. This is much better than inside.” I finally sucked in a full breath of fresh air, grateful that my lungs were back to behaving normally. I kept forgetting for a few moments that I’d almost died, only to have the realization return all of a sudden, shocking me anew each time.

  “Are you cold?” he asked, his gaze blazing a tingling path where it roamed my body. “You’re not … wearing very much clothing.”

  I was wearing more than I did in the water, where merpeople had little use for clothes. This was my first time dressed in anything beyond a tail. “Mulunu dressed me with her magic when she sent me here.”

  “Hmm, well, apparently she doesn’t know how humans dress.”

  “Oh, is this bad? I’m so sorry.” I fidgeted on the outdoor couch. Was he offended because I was wearing too much, too little, or simply not the right clothes entirely?

  He smiled tightly. “Trust me, it’s definitely not bad. It’s the opposite of bad, actually. It’s just that a whole lot of your skin is on display.”

  “That’s a problem?”

  “Not for me, no. Not at all, not even a little bit.”

  I relaxed as his smile grew, revealing nice, bright teeth. “You’re not what I’m used to,” he said.

  I offered him a timid smile. I was as out of my element as a tail-less siren with wings could be. “You’re not what I’m used to either. All the boys I know have tails.” And none of them took so much interest in my body … or in me at all, other than to mock me when they had nothing better to do.

  He chuckled. “None of the girls I know have wings.”

  We sha
red a few moments of comfortable silence as I took in the lush forest that surrounded us on all sides. Tall trees towered around the house, protecting it as well as the sharp cliffs that sometimes enclosed the ocean. There was green and more rich green as far as the eyes could see. The air smelled pure and reminded me a bit of the scent Quinn put off. “I wouldn’t think anyone could see me out here,” I said.

  Tension replaced the easy space we shared. “Yes, well, it shouldn’t be possible. But there are those that go out of their way to make Uncle Irving’s business their own. I wouldn’t put it past any of them to be spying on the house right now, though there’s no real good perch to see this spot since the house shields it along with the trees.”

  But he suddenly didn’t seem all that sure. “Maybe we should go inside though…”

  “Do we have to?” I didn’t want to admit how much I needed some sense of familiarity. The woods weren’t familiar, but they were so much more so than the inside of Sailor Man’s—Irving’s—house. Trees edged the ocean in places.

  “I think we should.” His eyes narrowed as they roamed the forest around us.

  “I miss the ocean,” I blurted out, and then refused to meet his eyes. “I haven’t been gone that long and I already miss it.”

  “I imagine you would. It must be a very different life than the one on land.” He scooted a bit closer toward me across the scratchy cushions, nearly pressing his side against mine, stopping just short of doing so. “I’ll do my best to help you adjust … assuming you’ll stay here.” A hopeful tone infused his voice, almost as if he wanted me here with him. My heart pitter-pattered for a few moments, even though he was a land person and probably was only being kind to the strange, awkward girl.

  “Do you think I’ll be sent somewhere else?” I asked heavily. I’d barely met Quinn, but he was already becoming familiar, someone safe amid a whirling torrent of near-death and wings. I’d rather be in the ocean, of course, but if I had to be here, it would be easier if I could be with him.

  “I hope you won’t,” he said, and my heart gave another little skip.