The Siren's Cry

by Jennifer Anne Kogler

  “I’ve got to admit, sweetheart,” Laffar rumbled, “that this wasn’t exactly the way I pictured it all going down, but I guess I should give you credit for the assist. Fortunately, Flarge has been following you from the get-go. Once I saw your little plan developing, I figured there was no reason for me to bother stealin’ the moon rock if you were gonna be doing it for me.”

  The thought that their brilliant plan had been useful to Haryle Laffar sickened Fern. After passing the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Laffar steered Fern to the right. They cut through a more heavily wooded area, with nicely manicured shrubs, trees, and spring flowers. To their right was the redbrick Smithsonian building known as the Castle. Laffar shoved Fern into the line of trees. She stumbled over a patch of ivy and fell to the ground. As she fell, she spotted Sam’s blond head in the grass. He was unconscious. Though it was dark, she made out Miles’s head. Candace and Lindsey sprawled next to him on the ground. Sam’s eyes were eerily open, as if he was dead. Fern stumbled to her feet and ran to him.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I was you!” Laffar cautioned. “You see, I’ve put 'em all into a Hermes trance, and if you jar him awake, he won’t ever come out of it.”

  Mr. Lin’s was the fifth body in the row. Next to the still bodies Fern spotted two bright green beasts. Their red chests were moving up and down rhythmically, as if they were sleeping. Laffar had probably brought the Quetzals along in case of an emergency, knowing their wails would attract unnecessary attention with the Capitol police on high alert after the incident at Air and Space. The Sirens’ yellow Mohawks distinguished them, even in the darkness under the trees. Fern checked to make sure the harmonica was still in her pocket.

  After looking around for a moment, Fern realized that this was the perfect place to hide in plain sight. Dense rows of trees and shrubs surrounded about five feet of space. Although pedestrians were unlikely at this hour, anyone using the walkways on either side would be unable to see anything between the plantings.

  Flarge emerged from the shadows. He was rotund, with a graying beard and yellow teeth. He wore an eye patch over his left eye.

  “Flarge,” Laffar said, “meet the famous Fern McAllister.” The man glared at Fern with visible hatred. Laffar, still next to Fern, lowered his head so that his mouth was less than an inch away from her ear.

  “Bet you’re wondering about that eye patch of Flarge’s, aren’t ya?” Laffar whispered so Flarge couldn’t hear. Though she’d become somewhat desensitized after her harrowing experiences, Fern could still smell the rot and tobacco on his breath. “Well, sweetheart, I pulled his eye out with my own two hands when Flarge lost track of you for a day because he wasn’t listenin’ to me. Guess what, though? He sure does listen to me now!” Laffar began to laugh maniacally in Fern’s ear.

  Laffar looked Fern over once more. He believed that Vlad’s real mistake had been trying to reason with the girl. His brother thought he could turn the girl against the Rollens so that she would join the Blouts. But Laffar knew better. No, he’d torture the girl a bit first before he used her blood and then disposed of her. He’d make her watch as he killed her friends.

  With all the potion ingredients now collected, Laffar would finally make himself immortal and kill the girl whose existence had been a menace since her birth. With the girl and the small boy gone, maybe they’d start calling them the Unusual Nine. He chuckled at his own joke. It didn’t really have the same ring to it, though, now did it? If Laffar got his way, it would soon be eight or seven in a declining sequence. His laughter tapered off.

  “It’s rock-handing-over time,” Laffar said, with his hand out, as Flarge loomed large over the bodies of her friends. Fern was running out of options.

  “I want to make sure they’re conscious and alive first.”

  Laffar considered Fern’s request.

  “Flarge,” Laffar said. “Wake up the little Normal girl. I know she won’t be going anywhere, and I’m not opposed to her watching.”

  Flarge bent over Candace’s limp body and muttered something into her ear. Fern’s heart skipped a beat when she saw Candace’s hand reach to rub her eyes. Groggily, she sat up in the grass.

  “Fern!” Candace exclaimed, her eyes lighting up at the sight of her awake friend.

  Flarge grabbed the girl’s head between his hairy arms and told her to be quiet or else.

  “She’s awake. Of course the trance did nothing to cure her annoying personality, but I’m no miracle worker. Now tell me where the rock is.”

  Fern hesitated a moment, trying to think.

  “Look, sweetheart, I can do a variety of things. I can start killing your friends here, or I can wake the Sirens up and put you to sleep and take the rock from you. I’m sure it’s somewhere on you.”

  “If you thought that, you would’ve already put me in a trance,” Fern replied. “You’re afraid that I’ve hidden it somewhere and if you knock me out, you’ll never be able to find it.”

  Laffar let a sly smile slip across his face. The girl was a worthy opponent. He stalked the five feet over to Candace and swept her up in his large arms.

  “You tell me where the rock is right now or I swear I’ll break her neck.”

  When she saw the genuine terror in Candace’s eyes, Fern gagged. She reached into the inside zipped pocket of her jacket and unzipped it. She felt the sharp triangular tip of the moon rock and grabbed it. Fern extended her arm and opened her hand.

  Laffar’s eyes flashed. He dropped Candace to the ground and stepped over her. He snatched the moon rock from Fern’s hand. A devilish, silver-toothed smile overtook his face. Running toward a tree in front of him, Laffar reached up and produced a golden goblet. As if he had no time to waste, he dropped the flat piece of lunar rock into the goblet. It made an Alka-Seltzer fizz as it dropped into the container.

  The goblet already contained the Quetzal feather, the Golden Spike, and the Hope Diamond. As soon as the moon rock was completely submerged, something began to happen within the goblet.

  Laffar peered inside the glass and his whole face became illuminated. A beam of unearthly light shot up from the golden cup.

  “It’s ready!” Laffar said. Finally, after decades of searching, he had completed the Everlasting Elixir. Now he must eliminate Fern as a potential threat to his plan. The Normal was less of a problem, but he’d remove the possibility of any interference by putting them both under the Hermes spell.

  “Flarge,” Laffar shouted, unable to contain his diabolical jubilation, “I’ll put the two girls out and you get blood from the boy. We’ll be able to use the fresh blood from the girl’s forehead.”

  Flarge lumbered toward Fern. She knew Laffar was about to put her in a Hermes trance and she panicked. If Laffar managed to perform the trance, she was sure she was dead.

  They all were.

  “Excuse me . . . Mr. Laffar.” Candace’s uneven voice drifted through the wooded area. “Before you mix the blood, I have information that you may want to hear.”

  Laffar held the beaming cup of light in both his hands. He lowered it a few inches. Flarge stopped and waited for further instructions.

  “Why would you have any information that I’d want to hear?”

  “Because you’re about to make a terrible mistake.”

  Fern was in shock. “What are you doing, Candace?” she yelled.

  “Shut up!” Laffar said, pointing to Fern. “You will let the girl speak or your brother will suffer the consequences.”

  Laffar was fairly certain the girl was playing some sort of game with him. But nevertheless a tiny, nagging doubt entered his thoughts.

  “Why would you help me?” Laffar asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Because I want you to promise that if I do help you, you’ll let me go,” Candace replied.

  Laffar looked at the wide-eyed girl. It was too bad he had to kill her . . . because he was about to teach her an important lesson. He was no longer surprised by the stupidity of Normals. They actually believed
that there was inherent goodness in people. Yet without fail, they quickly turned on one another as well. This young girl, Laffar thought, was willing to backstab her friend to save her own life.

  “If your information does prove useful, I promise to let you go,” Laffar said. It was hard for him not to laugh.

  Candace braced herself for the most important scientific speech of her lifetime.

  “The fact that you were waiting for us outside the museum tonight leads me to believe you’ve been gathering information about us,” Candace said, steadying her voice. “But we, Mr. Laffar, have also been gathering information about you. We know that you are holding in your hand the completed Everlasting Elixir. We also know that the Elixir, if mixed with an Unusual’s blood, will transfer the power of said Unusual to whoever drinks the potion.”

  “If I needed all this explained to me,” Laffar said, impatiently interrupting the girl, “I would have asked.”

  “Please let me finish, sir,” Candace said, mimicking the professorial tone her mother always used when addressing a room full of chauvinistic male doctors. “I believe from what I’ve witnessed tonight that you plan on mixing both the blood of Fern and the blood of Miles together with the potion in order to transfer their powers to you. But I also believe you have not studied blood the way my father, who is a certified hematologist, has. A hematologist, in case you don’t know, is a doctor whose specialty is blood. What you do not know about blood’s unique properties is that if you mix two unique specimens, they will blend together and lose their uniqueness. The blood ceases to exist on a molecular level in the way that it does when it is not combined with other specimens.”

  “What exactly are you getting at?” Laffar asked, beginning to understand the girl’s point.

  “If you want both Miles’s and Fern’s powers, you should not corrupt the potion with both of their blood samples at the same time. You will likely get neither person’s power this way. Instead, you should do one at a time.”

  Laffar scrutinized the girl. She certainly talked like a hematologist’s daughter.

  “Another thing you should realize, from a common-sense perspective, of course, is that you will most likely want to keep whoever’s blood you use first awake. I can’t imagine the drinking of the potion will go well, when it occurs, if the person has none of his or her powers available to transfer because you’ve put him or her in a trance.”

  Laffar began to seriously consider keeping the girl alive. Someone with half a brain could be useful. Flarge was good for brawn, but Laffar often wondered if he was the only one among his Blout unit who had any sense at all.

  “How have you figured all this out?” he asked, marveling at the young girl’s intellect.

  “Haven’t you heard? I am Candace Tutter, grade seven, and a genius,” Candace said, puffing out her chest. If she had to evaluate her scientific presentation, she would’ve given herself an A.

  “I’ll knock her out and wake the Unusual boy! We’ll kill them all at once after I’ve drunk the potion.” This time, Laffar only had to look deeply into Candace’s eyes and she was out once more. She slumped back down to the grass.

  Laffar moved down the line, rousing Miles from his Hermes trance.

  “Fern!” Miles said, seeing his friend for the first time since he’d teleported from the museum. Fern fervently wished he’d teleported to the hotel and not back outside to the museum entrance. She was sure, knowing Miles as she did, that he’d returned to make sure Candace, Sam, and Lindsey were all right. Now he was lying here in the weeds.

  “Let’s do him first,” Laffar said.

  “You try to teleport out of here and they are all dead,” Flarge said, grabbing Miles and carrying him over to Laffar. Laffar took a switchblade out of his back pocket in order to cut Miles and get some of his blood.

  Fern could’ve teleported at that moment. She was not being carefully watched. But she knew that as soon as Laffar noticed she was gone, he would certainly kill one of those who remained in retribution.

  “Wait!” Fern screamed.

  “What is it?” Laffar said, grabbing Fern’s ear.

  “Take my blood first!” she demanded, tears streaming down her face.

  “What’s this now?” Laffar asked, partially amused by the fact that he’d managed to turn the heroic Fern McAllister into a sniveling mess.

  “I don’t want my powers anymore. They’ve brought me nothing but horrible pain! I just want to be a Normal. I never asked for any of this. I can’t stand it a second longer.”

  Fern continued to plead with Laffar.

  “Please, I’m begging you. Just do it.”

  Laffar looked at Fern McAllister with disgust. She wasn’t a hero, she was a coward. She was also a disgrace to every Otherworldly—Rollen or Blout—alive. She was willing to hand over her powers without a fight? She wanted to give up the one thing that separated her from the chaff of mankind? It was revolting. But he didn’t want to hear her sniveling for the next few minutes while he dealt with the boy. Blood was still flowing from the wound on her forehead. He took his finger and wiped Fern’s blood with his fingertip.

  Then, rather unceremoniously, he dunked his finger into the golden goblet, which was still glowing with white light.

  Laffar raised the goblet to his red lips with both his hands.

  “Nooooooo!” Miles shrieked at the top of his lungs, sobbing. Flarge placed his hand over Miles’s mouth, preventing him from either moving or making more noise.

  Haryle Laffar looked at Fern, still alive, over the brim of the golden goblet. “No one trifles with a Laffar brother without paying the ultimate price,” he said, smiling as the white light made his silver tooth positively sparkle. “Night, sweetheart.”

  Laffar gulped the liquid of the potion down until all that remained in the cup was the moon rock, the Golden Spike, the feather, and the diamond.

  Almost instantly, he fell to his knees. Fern collapsed on the ground at the same time, as both man and girl cried out in unbearable pain.

  Chapter 30

  The Transfer

  Laffar hadn’t anticipated that the transfer of Fern’s powers would be such a painful process. Still, as he writhed on the ground, the pain slowly abating, he figured it was a small price to pay for immortality and the ability to teleport.

  Fern rocked to her feet. Her pain was diminishing as well. Flarge still restrained Miles.

  Laffar tried to stand, but he couldn’t. He felt so weak, he could barely move his arms. He was flat on his back, lying in the ivy under the first row of leafy trees.

  Flarge stood back, holding Miles, unsure of what to do next.

  “What have you done to me?” Laffar panted, unable to raise his voice above a whisper.

  “I’m afraid you’ve done it to yourself,” Fern said, leaning over Laffar’s body. “Don’t you recognize my eyes?”

  Laffar had no choice but to look directly into them.

  “Your brother said that I was the spitting image of my mother, Phoebe Merriam.” Anger boiled within Fern. “Vlad never told you that, did he? Otherwise you would have pieced it all together . . . and realized that the eyes you’ve been staring into belong to your own daughter.”

  “No,” Laffar whimpered. “It’s im-impossible.”

  “If you’d known that, I’m guessing you know enough about Otherworldlies to figure out that breaking one of the most sacred Otherworldly tenets—desecrating your own flesh and blood in any way—carries a severe consequence. An Otherworldly loses all his strength, and becomes as weak as he was on the day he was born. When you drank your own daughter’s blood, you violated the oldest rule in The Undead Sea Scroll.7”

  Laffar let out a pitiful whimper. Painstakingly bringing his hand to his mouth, Laffar began to whistle. Fern realized he was testing her theory, trying to see if he still had the power to summon the wails of the Sirens, thereby incapacitating her.

  But Fern was confident.

  Sam’s backup plan had worked.

 
; Laffar wouldn’t be able to control the Sirens any longer, now that he had lost his Hermes powers. It might even take him time to learn to walk again.

  The Sirens did awaken to the sound of Laffar’s weak whistle and stood upright, straightening their giant legs. Fern watched as the two large, beautiful creatures extended what looked to be enormous green wings. They began flapping furiously. Fern took out Preston’s gifted harmonica, bracing for the wails that she was sure were coming. Instead the Sirens lifted off the ground, rustling the trees and bushes much as a helicopter takeoff might.

  Soon the Sirens were hundreds of feet up, gliding through the air, their beautiful green bodies creating a luminous line across the District sky.

  Laffar had nowhere to look but up and began to mutter as he saw his prized Sirens fly off. They were no longer under his control.

  Fern picked up the knife that Laffar had dropped to the ground. For the briefest of moments, she considered driving the knife into Laffar’s chest. She would never have to worry about him again.

  But she wasn’t a killer like her father was. Instead she took the bolt cutters from her jacket and wiped them off and placed them next to Laffar, just out of reach. Turning around, she waved the knife at Flarge.

  “Let him go!” she said. Flarge released Miles, who darted next to Fern. Flarge looked at the two Unusuals standing together, a united front against the Blouts. Before Flarge’s eyes, the original promise of the Unusual Eleven was being realized. The prophecy was correct.