I wasn't included in that "we"—the ousting of the Titans had been well before my time.
"Other subjects?" Reflexively, my tail tightened around the pole it gripped. "Mer? Or … other?" The pause in my question should have reminded him that I wasn't thrilled about his network of spies among the other shifters, but if it did, he chose to ignore it.
"Not mer."
"Other ocean shifters?" At his curt nod, I continued. "So on the word of spies you have placed among the shifters, you chose to send Skyla? Why? Why not wait for me to return?"
His steady stare finally clued me in.
"You didn't send Skyla because I was gone, did you? You waited until I was gone so you could send Skyla." My eyes grew wider and rounder, and the glow emanating from them changed from a comparatively calm shade of turquoise to the virulent yellow-green of rage. My hands shook and I clasped the edge of the seat under me to keep from reacting any further to the sea-lord's trickery.
"Tell me why," I finally said through clenched teeth.
Poseidon shrugged. "This," he said, waving one hand in a surprisingly elegant motion for someone as bulky as he was—at least for a mer. "You are too quick to anger, Kirka. Too likely to take action without waiting for all the information."
"That is utter seahorse-shit, and you know it."
His raised eyebrows only made my eyes glow more yellow. His own gaze stayed steady, their mer-glow a serene blue.
Lowering my voice, I hissed, "I have kept your secret for millennia, you fish-shifter fraud."
When he didn't answer, but simply stared at me steadily, I reeled in my anger, spooling it deep within me. I could cast it back out again later if necessary. Allowing my gills to flare out from behind my ears, where they were usually hidden by my dark hair, I took the mer equivalent of a deep breath, allowing the cooling water to swirl through me, oxygenating my blood and calming the swirling yellow ire of my magic, then back out, taking most of my remaining anger with it.
"Have you seen the human Skyla brought back to Atlantis?" I asked, my tone more accusing than I had anticipated.
A hint of a smile flickered across Poseidon's face as he inclined his head once in a nod, and my rage threatened to erupt again. I kept it tightly contained, though the king's glance at my tightening jaw suggested he saw more than I would have wished.
"I have not met the man as of yet," he said, "but yes, I have seen him from afar."
I frowned. "What is the benefit of having him here?"
Poseidon's blank stare didn't fool me. "You sent Skyla up top. You haven't ordered her to return the human to his original shape and take him home. You must have some reason for wanting him here. What is it?"
That almost-smile flickered across his face again. "Skyla and I simply discussed the fact that we would need an army if we were to defeat the Titans a second time—especially as I have no idea where the majority of my brother and sister gods are these days."
I closed my eyes, allowing the gentle sway of the water around me to soothe me before I spoke. "You are an old, lying bastard of a monster. It would serve you right to be wiped out by the Titans, for them to roam free across this world again."
"But?"
Bubbles streamed up and away from me as I blew out air from my lungs in a sigh, then closed them off again. "But I don't want to die." I glared at him, some of that anger seeping out from my tight control and coloring the light of my gaze.
"Yes," I finally said. "I will help you keep them locked away, if I can."
* * *
As I left Poseidon's palace, I passed Amphitrite on her way in. I presumed the god-king's consort had been at the temple with the younger initiates, working with the high priestess to teach them the Siren songs.
Good. Her presence here meant the temple would be unoccupied later when I went in to replenish my magic.
Yet another of Poseidon's secrets that he hadn't been able to keep from me.
The so-called goddess managed a tight, unfelt smile when she saw me. As the only other mer who knew Poseidon's secret, I was a threat, as far as Amphitrite was concerned.
I was surprised, therefore, when she paused to speak to me.
"Amphitrite," I said with a nod, working to keep my voice neutral and my eyes from glowing purple with the disdain I felt for her.
"He has convinced you to act as his emissary in this hunt?" she asked. No need to ask who he might be—for Amphitrite, there was never anyone other than Poseidon. For many years, she had worried that I might attempt a liaison with the only mer she had ever cared about other than herself.
It had taken some time for her to believe that I really had no designs on a mer who styled himself a god.
"If the Titans break free of their prison, they will destroy Atlantis," she warned.
"Along with most of the rest of the world." My tone was much drier than should be possible in an undersea city.
"I care little for the rest of it."
Isn't that the truth.
Amphitrite's eyes glowed a clear, untroubled white—the eyes of someone who cared about no one but herself. She and Poseidon belonged together. They deserved each other.
Putting on my most patient air, I said, "It's a scouting mission, Amphitrite. My only objective is to find out what is going on."
We both knew I would work to contain the Titans if I had to—and if I could. It was easier to maintain that fiction than try to discuss all the myriad ways this search could go awry.
"And where will you begin?" The queen-goddess's deep red braid floated behind her, its color a counterpoint to the almost teal of her fin. She was beautiful, and she knew it.
She also knew she was far too good to speak to me, as a general rule. This might be the longest conversation we had ever had without Poseidon mediating.
What the hell is going on?
Was this about my planned stop at the Temple? Was she trying to figure out my plans and stop them? Or to help me in the fight against the Titans?
Are you planning to help or hinder me, O bitch-queen-goddess of mine?
Her question was good, though. After I topped off my magical stores, where would I start?
"Athens," I said, before I had even consciously developed the plan. "Skyla stopped an incursion there. They almost broke through the containment walls. If it's a weak spot, I should work to shore it up."
"You're leaving Atlantis, then?" Her nostrils flared in a sneer, reflecting her well-known disdain of all mer-folk who chose to leave her domain.
"I am," I said shortly.
Her shoulders twitched in the tiniest slump of relief.
Wait. What was that?
Amphitrite preferred to keep all the Sirens under her direct control.
She wants me gone, to keep me away from something here in Atlantis.
Why could that be?
As far as I knew, Amphitrite's life revolved around Poseidon and the Temple.
If Amphitrite had any secrets I didn't already know, I would be surprised. Still, whatever was going on here bore watching.
Later. When I had more time.
Content that I wouldn't get too close to whatever it was she was hiding, Amphitrite said a perfunctory goodbye, and moved gracefully toward the quarters she shared with the king. Her fin and braid swished through the water in counterpoint to one another, and watched her retreat until the guards opened the doors for her, just in time to make sure she didn't have to break the rhythm of her motion in order to swim through regally.
She never looked back at me.
Yeah. I definitely need to keep an eye on that.
I didn't particularly like carrying everyone's heaviest secrets.
But more than that, I hated it when other mer held secrets I didn't know.
* * *
On the surface, the humans have some saying about curiosity killing a feline. Something like that, anyway. As a general rule, I'm a proponent of anything that destroys the terrifying be
asts—they're all razor claws and teeth and a horrifying affinity for fish-based food.
But not when the curiosity was mine.
Throughout the ages, I have heard whispers of my curse—usually, those comments refer to the spell I put on Odysseus's men.
I know better.
My actual curse is curiosity.
Or rather, the knowledge that so often comes of indulging that curiosity.
Because I cannot help but follow the connections among the mer, tracing the lies they tell and tracking the truths they hide, I know much more than I should.
I know that the mer-folk are not particularly special in this world. We are simply a particular evolutionary branch of the shifters that inhabit the entire globe. There are, of course, other shifters whose forms have taken on mythological status, but we are among the few who have chosen to actually believe in the myths about ourselves.
That's not all I know, however.
I also know that we are not actually of this world.
None of the shifters are.
Like the Titans before us, we came to this Earth through a tear in reality.
And like them, we could be sent back, imprisoned, sentenced to an eternity of banishment from this paradise.
There was little I wouldn't do to keep that from happening.
I guess I'm going to the surface.
Zale
Athens is beautiful. I saw why my parents spoke of Greece in tones of longing. They owned one of the best Greek restaurants in Dallas, always earning top ratings in the Zagat guide. But no matter how good their food was, they bemoaned its lack of authenticity.
"The food is only as good as the ingredients," my father would often complain, waving his hands in the air for emphasis. "We cannot get true Greek yogurt in Texas."
Mama would nod in sad agreement.
I knew what they meant, now. The food of my childhood was a pale imitation of what I found on every street-corner bistro in Athens.
And despite having spent my teen years avoiding all things Greek, I found myself fascinated by the history surrounding me throughout the city—not to mention looming over me in the form of the Parthenon, high on its rocky cliff.
Unfortunately, amazing food and overwhelming historical artifacts were about the only things I had discovered in Athens.
Clay was nowhere to be found. I had sorted through his belongings countless times, traced his steps and quizzed shopkeepers and restaurant owners and the kinds of street urchins who so often slipped by unnoticed, but noticing everything.
Two nights in a row, I found myself on the strange beach where Clay had disappeared, where his wallet and clothing had been found. Out in front of me, a hump of rock rose from the water, slick with ocean spray and glinting in the moonlight. Behind me, traffic whizzed by on a small (at least by Texas standards) highway.
There was nothing special about this beach. It wasn't particularly appealing. For that matter, I wasn't certain it was a public beach.
It had offered no insights.
The closest I had come to a clue was tracking down a taxi driver who had driven an American man meeting Clay's description and a woman from the Royal Athenian Hotel to the beach.
"The woman was odd," the taxi driver told me in Greek. "Small and thin, and her eyes were strange." He glanced around, as if worried that the other drivers in the stand, chain-smoking as they waited for their next fare, might overhear him.
"What about her eyes?" I prompted, when he seemed unwilling to continue.
"They glowed."
"You mean the light reflected off them?" For probably the second time in my life, I was thankful my parents had been adamant that I learn Greek—and even more glad that I'd been in Athens for two weeks already, brushing up on my Greek vocabulary.
"No," the man insisted. "Her eyes glowed in the dark. They were shining. The light was the color of the ocean."
And you had too much ouzo with your dinner that night, my friend.
I didn't voice the thought aloud, however.
Instead, I coaxed him to give a fuller description of the woman, and began retracing Clay's steps again, this time adding questions about his mysterious companion.
It seemed to me like a blond mountain of a man with a tendency toward sunburn would stand out in a Greek city. Athens was a tourist town, however, its inhabitants prone to evaluating visitors for their wealth—and willingness to part with it—then forgetting about them immediately thereafter.
At a sidewalk café across from the subway stop closest to the Parthenon, I found a waitress who thought she remembered the two of them, but only because there had been some sort of commotion when they arrived. Drunken tourists, she had initially assumed, but nothing had come of it.
She, too, mentioned the bright blue-green of the woman's eyes.
And that was it.
After that, the trail went completely cold.
No one had reported a woman of that description missing.
As far as I could tell, she hadn't rented a room in any of Clay's hotels—neither the ones in which he had actually stayed, nor the ones on his itinerary. She hadn't taken a taxi back from the beach the night she and Clay had gone out there. No one had seen her walking away from the beach, either with or without Clay.
No one had seen her since then, period.
My time in Greece was running short, and I had nothing concrete to show for it. If I went back to Texas with what I had now, my lieutenant would assume that, if he hadn't committed suicide, then Clay had taken off with some woman he met over here.
My gut still screamed at me that something much worse than either of those things had happened to my partner—but I couldn't have said what, exactly, might count as "worse than" killing himself. Being held prisoner and tortured by the Charalobos family, I guess. My Athenian contact said there had been no chatter suggesting anything like that, though, and it really wasn't the crime family's style. For that matter, they didn't seem terribly concerned about the police shooting of a member of the American branch of the family.
I was out of leads, and out of ideas.
For what felt like the millionth time, I had brought the case folder with all my notes about the case up to the hotel balcony to peruse while I ate breakfast—including real Greek yogurt, the kind my father would approve of, and a thick, dark, wonderful coffee that the Brits one table over were bemoaning as "too strong."
Bright sunlight sparkled off the glass doors leading into the buffet line, and a gentle breeze riffled the pages in my file—not enough to dislodge any papers, but enough to remind me to keep a hand on them.
I flipped through the folder, hoping something would spark a new idea.
Notes from the interview with the taxi driver. The cab company's call-out records. Maps of Athens. Business cards from everyone I knew or suspected Clay might have talked to. Plus every scrap of paper I had been able to cull from Clay's belongings. Hotel receipts. Airport restaurant receipts. More than a few notes of his own about the Charalobos family.
"Pardon me," one of the British women said, leaning over from her table toward me. "If you aren't using it, could I possibly borrow the sweetener?" She gestured at the square glass container full of pink and blue and yellow packets of artificial sweeteners.
"Sure." I preferred real sugar, anyway.
I lifted my hand away from the folder to pass the dish to her. She took it from me, and just then, a stronger wind than I had felt all morning swirled across the balcony. It lifted my folder almost off the table, and papers skittered across the table.
I slammed both arms down on top of the papers. Coffee sloshed out of my cup and onto the white tablecloth, but I didn't care, as long as none of my notes were lost. I missed one business card, though, and it skated face-down across the table and over the edge.
"Oh, my," said the woman, bending over and picking it up from the floor before it blew away.
The card she handed me was one I h
ad not seen before.
A quick glance around the floor of the outdoor dining area reassured me that it was the same card I had seen blow away from me.
The card itself was simple, black with white printing, though the logo on it was ornate, like the scrollwork at the top of a Corinthian column.
It was for a hotel—or, if the card was to be believed, The Hotel. Under the words was an address on a street I didn't recognize it. Across the bottom was a line in both Greek and English: We’re always here for our special guests.
What the hell is this?
The card was far too discreet to be anything too usual. It was clearly designed for people who already knew what they were going for.
Quickly, I pulled up the map app on my phone and ran the address. Not far from where I was now, but in the oldest part of the city, not far from the Agora, the ancient Athenian marketplace.
No business showed up in the program.
A brothel, maybe? An upscale gentleman's club?
Something even less savory?
Perhaps Clay had found something tying this place to the Charalobos family and gone to check it out.
Maybe his disappearance had nothing at all to do with the strange, ocean-eyed woman he'd been seen with. Or maybe she worked for the Charaloboses and was sent to bring him to them.
I shook my head to dispel the thoughts. It did no good to spin out theories before I had more solid information. My best move would be to check this place out.
How had I missed the card all this time? I'd been flipping through that folder for days on end. Where did Clay stash it, that it could stay hidden that long?
I turned to thank the woman for rescuing the card for me, only to discover she was gone.
Odd. I hadn't seen her leave.
Of course, I had been busy conjuring up scenarios to fit the card's appearance.
If I saw her again in the hotel—this hotel, my hotel—I would be sure to thank her. For now, though, I would concentrate on learning everything I could from the new clue she had handed me.
I needed to visit The Hotel.
Whatever it might be.
Kirka
I'm not particularly religious—certainly not by the standards of the mer, who believe Poseidon and Amphitrite are gods.
Siren's Curse (Hotel Paranormal) Page 2
