A little Siren (Not Quite the Fairy Tale #2)

by May Sage

  Chapter 1: The Wave.

  There was a good chance the woman would end up killing his son.

  This wasn't representative of the reaction Sebastian usually generated: the kid had already mastered the art of charming ladies. When the reddish brown curls, the big smile and the little lisp weren't working, he played the dimples – and played them well, too.

  However, the woman hadn't so much as smiled in the three hours since they'd boarded the ship. In fact, he'd caught a sigh or two here and there.

  It was understandable. Sebastian had been virtually glued to her sides – when she'd gone to the toilets, he'd followed her and waited in front of the door. He just talked and talked, and talked her ears off, completely undeterred by her lack of response.

  This also was a new development. Seb had the attention span, the curiosity and the energy of a puppy. On their way in, he'd been fascinated by the propellers, the anchors, the safety boats, the crew, the rope, the noises, the fresh air. Trailing him had been bloody exhausting.

  Now, he seemed perfectly content to stay next to the stranger.

  “I hope you don't mind?” Erik had asked.

  It was one of these awkward phrases parents had to dish out on a regular basis, along with “he didn't mean it” and “ever so sorry.”

  As Seb was actually giving him some sort of respite for once, Erik had displayed all of his charms in an attempt to keep the woman cooperative. He'd taken a page out of Seb's book and made good use of his own set of dimples, but all in vain: she only shrugged, without gracing him with so much as a glance.

  Courtesy dictated that, after that unenthusiastic response, he should take his troublesome kid and bugger off to another deck – god knew that beast of a ship had enough of them – but damn, he deserved to sit down and relax for five minutes; so he'd just taken a seat on the next chair and left them to it.

  The woman was lounging on her chaise, eyes closed, and barely moved. She wasn't even there to tan: she wore glasses, a large, dark straw hat shaded most of her face and her loose jumpsuit covered her legs.

  This probably was the very definition of being a bum. Erik wished he could switch the rest of the world off like that: she was at peace and even Seb's chatter failed to disrupt it.

  At lunchtime, a server approached and Erik took it as a clue to finally release her from Seb, but his intrusion wasn't requested or required.

  She asked for a sophisticated salad and completely destroyed its soul by demanding that they’d remove the seafood but then, before he'd had the chance to convince the kid to come and see what he had to say, she'd turned to Seb and curtly told him: “order.”

  Seb asked for cheesy chips and a burger, no veggies. She snorted, turning to the waiter:

  “Do attempt to hide greens somewhere in there, would you? Lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes would do. Also, bring some water, please.”

  Erik looked at her, stunned by a strange mixture of anger, gratitude, relief, longing and pain.

  He had servants to lessen his workload; right this minute, there were two guards and an assistant in his peripheral vision. At home, there also was a flock of carers who saw to Seb's needs.

  Yet, it had always been him who did the admonishing, the coaxing, the parenting, because Prince Sebastian the third, son of King Erik of Denker, just didn't take orders from anyone else.

  The child said nothing about the salad and – when it arrived – drank his water.

  Was it what it felt like? Having someone else who could carry some of the responsibility? If so, he started to understand why his entourage was pushing him to consider marrying.

  Anger and pain gradually left, as though they'd been sucked away from his mind. It was strange. Usually, when he happened to think of anything of the sort – anything that reminding him that he was alone – it didn't fade for days and after, he had to deal with worse: the emptiness.

  But poof, the negative feelings were gone.

  It left him with everything else and, as a consequence, he actually looked at a woman for the first time in close to six years.

  She seemed pretty, but he couldn't really tell: what her wide sunglasses didn't hide, her hat concealed. She had a heart-shaped face, a nice mouth, and the loose, casual fit of her clothes didn't hide her pleasing frame.

  To the generic attributes, he added something he couldn't place; something alluring, wild and exciting. It almost wasn't physical, until it became so.

  The longing morphed into something very different; something he'd failed to grasp since Seb’s mother had butted in and out of his life.

  Her meal arrived and made things worse. While the word salad had suggested something rather anticlimactic, her plate was decadent and full of exotic things he would never have voluntarily submitted himself to, but to her, they were obviously delicious: she didn't eat, she devoured her meal, voraciously.

  Food was obviously something she enjoyed, because she moaned once.

  Great. Now he was hard as a rock in front of his damn son.

  He was still processing the fact that he was actually thinking about sex when the weather changed – dramatically – as it often did while in the ocean. It went from a cloudless sunny day to a dark, threatening storm in the space of an instant, but large cruisers such as the Siren were built for this: the waves were impressive, yet they barely felt them.

  The woman lifted her head and seemed to listen – to what, he couldn't tell – before turning his way and addressing him for the first time.

  “You should go inside now.”

  What a voice. He'd previously registered that it had sounded agreeable, but someone now, it was almost a caress, an intimacy that should be solely confined between four soundproofed walls.

  He didn't get it at first.

  He wouldn't get it until the end of the nightmare.

  •

  Unsurprisingly, he didn't listen.

  She decided that she shouldn't care. He deserved to suffer the wrath of the oceans; most men did, even those who looked like that.

  Silvia’s two brothers had competed for the title of Sexiest Man on Gaia four years in a row; she was accustomed to beauty, but all the same, he’d caught and retained her attention from the moment she’d seen his tall, golden frame.

  The three day shadow sprinkled on his chiseled jaw, the lips and the depth of the amber eyes would have made a weaker woman squirm. Damn, those shoulders. She had to force her eyes away from his slim fit shirt.

  Let’s face it, he had to be an asshole.

  Telling and repeating that to herself was helping. She was almost resolved to let him stay on the deck, but then, Sebastian pulled at her jumpsuit and asked her why she was still wearing her glasses; it wasn't sunny.

  Right. That might have been the reason why her little mantra had completely failed to hit the mark. She was hardly the mothering kind, but damn if that kid wasn't endearing.

  Silvia opened her mouth to formulate a clearer warning and closed it, because then – sooner than expected – it started.

  Someone rang a bell inside and alarms resounded; a member of the crew – displaying the calm and dignity one should retain in this situation – came out, safety vests in hands, shaking from head to toes and screaming warnings at the top of his voice, while pointing at the rear of the ship.

  Silvia didn't bother turning around. She'd felt the wave two minutes and seventeen seconds ago, well before their radars or their eyes could have detected one movement.

  It was big. It was about five times the height of the ship. This sort of waves were either created by tectonic movements or by a very pissed off nymph.

  Silvia would have put her money on the latter option
.

  Some continents had taken to planes, but Europa was a portal to the other realm and fays flew above it when they wished to do so; the airs weren't safe, which meant that humans generally traveled by water. While steam-powered cruisers did very little damage to the environment, they only represented a tiny percentage of the means used to charter people and merchandise around.

  No, mortals preferred fuel and when it became useless, they dumped it in the ocean.

  What did they expect?

  Thankfully for humanity, unfortunately on behalf of the seas, Nymphs were very limited; their powers were constricted to their territories, but entering their space did put humans at their mercy.

  Silvia cursed; it hadn’t been part of the plan. When she’d heard that a new cruise company was opening a picturesque route on a ship they’d called The Siren, she’d jumped on it, expecting one week of pure bliss.

  Very naive of her; water generally had a plan of its own.

  The panic around her only lasted the space of a few instants; then, there was silence and death.

  Silvia didn't stick around to see it.

  The child's hand, she'd gripped – so firmly she wondered if she could have broken a few of his fingers – but the father, they lost.

  The coast was over two miles away; changing form – adopting the graceful tentacles her legs turned into when she wished it – she'd swam, gliding through the water at a speed she wouldn't have thought herself capable of.

  There must have been more de Luz in her that she'd previously acknowledged, because there was no way anything other than the power of the four winds could have broken through the currents with so much force.

  Throwing the kid on land, she'd barely taken the time to see that, indeed, he was still breathing, before jumping back.

  Children weren't supposed to grow up without their parents. She knew the feeling, and it wasn't a nice one.

  Of course, her case was very different. Her mother hadn't drowned: she'd willfully left her. Her father was still around, he just didn't care about anything, or anyone, save for himself.

  But Sebastian had a father who cared, who didn't stop looking at him with wonder, pride and unconditional love – even when the little bugger was doing his best to embarrass him in front of a stranger.

  He was going to have him back if she could do anything about it.

  Back at the scene, there was an absolute, irrefutable chaos. Not everyone was dead yet, but those who weren't would be, soon. The storm still raged; blocks of metal and electrified devices finished off the poor mortals who hadn't succumbed to the elements.

  A hundred, a thousand merfolks might have made a difference, but she was one little siren, and there was nothing she could do.

  She didn't know how she spotted him. In the crowd, his tall frame and his sculptural, tanned stature had stood out, but amongst the torrents and the sea of broken flesh, he should have been indistinguishable.

  He wasn't.

  Her gaze was almost instantly drawn to a form, some distance away, right at the heart of the storm; half propped on a wooden pallet, he was still alive, but there wasn’t much fight left in him. He wouldn't hold onto it for long.

  That's when a smart, rational woman would have recalled that she had a certain standing in these waters. She might have attempted to impose her will against the nymph's and tried to calm this madness.

  Instead, taken by an incomprehensible urgency, a sense of need bordering on panic, she dived.

  Three days later.

  “We find you guilty.”

  Ah, ah, and ah.

  They found her conveniently present, while their power had failed to reach the actual perpetrator of the crime.

  Silvia shrugged.

  The thing was, ridiculous as that poor excuse for a trial had been, it didn't matter in the least. The merfolks of Atlantis couldn't do much against her. She was Alenian, and the two nations had an agreement: her fate would be decided by her people – which, in her case, meant that she'd get a "very naughty, don't do it again."

  Being the irrelevant child of King Leopold did have some perks, occasionally.

  “Playing with powers you fail to comprehend has cost the life of over three thousand people and yet, you smile?”

  No; she smiled because they were morons and there wasn't anything else to do against stupidity.

  “You believe we have no power against you, Sea Witch. You're right, we don't. So long as you never again enter our borders. Silvia Undine, you are hereby banished from the Dark Ocean. Should you so much as touch our waters, we will take the one thing that will prevent you from causing anymore harm: your voice.”

  Chapter 2: Happiness.

  Three years later.

  Silvia was going to puke; again.

  In the past, it had been a rare occurrence around Dane and Sandro: her half-brothers were miserable sods. Or they used to be, at least.

  She’d liked it that way, it made her feel useful.

  Feeding of negative emotions could be perceived as a lewd, lowly job, but she had learnt to see it differently: those she sucked off – for lack of better term – were left happier for it.

  Now though, Dane was delighted and she wasn't sure how to deal with that.

  Her first cause of ambivalence was the girl herself. It was evident that Ella Tremaine knew what she was doing: from the message she’d sent during her selection process, to the grand entrance staged on her first day, she'd done her very best to stand out.

  Silvia wasn't buying the act.

  For one, there was the little detail that the woman was a freaking Archduchess – a Cinder, to top it all off, which made her something like seventh in line for the throne – and was hiding it. That alone guaranteed that she was playing the game; the only issue was that she was winning it.

  Silvia considered bringing it up, but bit her lip. Dane’s entire aura stank of freaking happiness: he wasn't going to listen to a word of it and in the end, she would end up shouldering the blame.

  Just for a change.

  Talking to Sandro wasn't an option either. He'd long stopped trusting her, believing the merfolks’ tales rather than her words.

  She'd tried to take it for what it was, though.

  It didn't matter what she did or said, what she was was always going to make people uneasy.

  The merfolks around Europa were descendants of Poseidon, if one believes the legend, whereas her blood came from an older source, Oceanus.

  Mythology asides, the facts were that two distinct kinds of aquatic humanlike shape-shifters existed. First, there was the merfolks, who lived in clans and reproduced like bunnies, and then, the sirens, solitary creatures tied to the seas.

  The sirens weren't exactly what one would call popular; however, be that as it may, Silvia hadn't ever anticipated to be rejected by a member of her own family.

  She'd never been close to Sandro, but damn, it hurt.

  So much so that she'd considered leaving; actually, she'd all but made her mind up, until Dane had announced his bomb about fishing for a wife in three days.

  She'd help him find a decent girl and then, she was gone.

  •

  “She didn’t save us.”

  Seb's voice was confident, final. There was no arguing that fact with him.

  Never mind that he'd been five-year-old at the time, that three years had passed since, and that neither of them had actually properly seen their savior's face.

  Erik sighed, brushing his hair off his forehead. It was getting long – again. A quick look at his reflection through Seb's window revealed that his facial hair was out of control, too.

  Damn.

  Time completely eluded him, these days. Without Sebastian's birthdays, he wasn't sure he would have been able to recall what year they were at. His life was just that boring and monotonous.

  “Why are they saying that?”

  “Because Vanessa found us and gave us water. She helped us a lot.”

  Seb only rolled his e
yes; the first village had been a two hours walk. They would have made it with or without her.

  “She isn’t her.”

  “I'm not looking for her,” Erik lied.

  She was exactly whom he had been looking for; or rather, he was hoping to find the feelings she'd awaken, a strange mixture of hope, exhilaration, shyness and, yes, lust. The last one was easy enough to come by, now, but the rest? It was all hers.

  Erik had messed up once – in epic proportions. He'd been young when he got the girl, and he'd handled it badly.

  Seb's mother, Ariena, hadn't been of his world; he'd found her bathing in a secluded creek at the borders, just between Denker and Atlantis.

  One look was enough to tell what she was: Denker was a big island, but an island all the same, and everyone was familiar with sea creatures.

  Selkies, Kelpies, Necks Each-Uisges, Afancs, Melusines, Knuckers, Merfolks, Sirens – there even was talk of a Kraken; not one Denkerian lived without encountering one, at the very least.

  Most of the time, it was Mermaids. They had a little thing about charming humans; word was that mermen weren’t all that in the sacks.

  Ariena had had flaming red hair, the biggest green eyes, and she'd sang to herself so beautifully; most mermaids did, but Erik had heard his fair share – he'd even been invited to Atlantian banquets back when the politics between the two nations hadn't been on the awkward side of things – and she topped them all by a mile.

  One look at her half naked well endowed bust and he'd done what any twenty-year-old might have been tempted to do. A couple of times.

  Six months later – as, he was to learn, mermaid had a short gestation period – she’d walked straight through the palace walls, a mini Erik in her arms.

  A lot can happen in six months.

  Erik had been surprised and rather annoyed when he failed to reach her; he'd thought they'd gotten along quite nicely.