by H G Lynch
But, as Lia closed the gap between them, her soft, warm skin brushing his intimately, he was lost to the animal pleasure. And then, the spell was broken by the single thing in the world that could've snapped him out of it...
"Reid?"
That familiar, sweet voice pierced the veil of the music, releasing him from its enthralling grasp. He looked up and saw Ember standing by the water’s edge, her face twisted in hurt, fury and disgust. She looked like she might cry...or kill someone. Confusion swept through Reid. Until he looked down, and saw Lia clinging to him, her hazel eyes cold and fixed, glaring, on Ember. The music was still singing around him, but quietly now. And now, he could understand the words. It was no longer a half-heard foreign language, laced through chime-like melodies. Now, it was a dark song weeding through a bitter music, too high-pitched and soured with flawed notes.
Under the water, come now, come,
Follow the siren's song, deep below the surface,
Let it pull it you down, where you can frolic with the mermaids,
Let it hold you under, until you breathe no more, hold no purpose.
Dance with the siren, deep down where the fishes played,
Let her seduce you, taking you to her favorite place,
Then she'll bury you in her underwater bone yard.
The lyrics went on, shrill and eerie. Wicked and threatening. Reid covered his ears, stepping away from Liandra. For an instant, something dark, very dark, glinted in the punk girl's eyes. Then she turned away from him, and sank under the water, vanishing under the silvery surface. He tried to catch her arm, but all he got was a handful of pondweed. His head ached as he raised his gaze, reluctantly, to his wounded girlfriend on the shore. His stomach clenched with guilt, and horror at what he'd done. At what he'd almost done. What he'd wanted to do.
What made it all the worse was that, standing there, Ember looked utterly beautiful. Her golden hair blew around her in the wind, her pale skin touched with pink from the cold. Even from here, he could see the stubborn set of her jaw and the shimmer in her blue eyes that meant she was trying not to cry. Her shoulders were back and she was standing tall, but he could tell what it cost her just to look at him right now. It made him want to curl up and drown himself, made him feel sick to his stomach, sick with himself. He wanted to go to her, to explain to her that he hadn't been in control of his own actions, but he didn't. He didn't dare go near her. If she wanted, she could set him on fire from where she stood, and he knew better than to tempt her when she was hurt.
Instead, he stayed where he was, and watched her. "Ember..." His voice came out a whisper, a pained, hoarse whisper. He swallowed and tried again, hoping she wouldn't turn and walk away before he explained. Oh, of course she'd have every right to. To walk away and never speak to him again. He wasn't sure what he'd do if it came to that. Didn't want to think about it. "Ember, please, let me explain," he begged, forcing himself not to move toward her, to stay in the water. Surely, by now, she'd realized he was naked under this water, but it wouldn't help for her to see that. Not after Lia had just been here, pressed against him, herself wearing nothing but the water. Oh no, he'd be lucky if that didn't earn him an early cremation.
Ember didn't move either, simply stared at him with eyes that spoke of a world of hurt and betrayal. The worst thing was, though, the lack of surprise in her face. There was no surprise, no indication that she'd walked in on something completely unexpected. No, she looked like she'd suspected it all along. That hurt him more than he thought it would, her lack of faith in him.
"Then explain," Ember said, in a clear, cold voice. There was no emotion in it. Feeling his heart grinding out each aching beat, he willed her to understand.
"You were right. You were right all along, Ember. Liandra...she..." He was going about this all wrong, but he had no idea where to start. "I came here to check out the lake again, but there was this music. It got into my head and I-I couldn't resist it. It was so...beautiful. Haunting. It started controlling me, it told me to..." He stopped, because he could see it in Ember's eyes. The disgust, the disbelief. She thought he was lying, making excuses. Honestly, he didn't blame her. If he'd been where she was right now, he would have thought the same. It didn't make it any less painful, though.
"The magical music told you to get naked with Liandra? Really? What music, Reid! We're in the bloody middle of nowhere! There is no music! Maybe there never was!" Ember screamed, her eyes full of outrage.
Reid felt her words like blows to the gut.
"You know what, Reid? I'm not surprised you'd do something like this. I'm not. I guess it's just who you are, who you've always been. You didn't change for me, maybe I didn't want you to. But that was before I knew you were capable of this. Now..." Ember shook her head slowly, closing her eyes. Her hands were in fists at her sides, but Reid could see the flickering glow of flames trying to escape between her fingers. "No, I'm not surprised that you'd cheat on me, Reid. I'm just surprised you'd try to lie about it to me. To cower behind pathetic excuses. I thought that even you couldn't sink that low. I guess I was wrong." Ember’s voice shook. She opened her eyes, and Reid saw tears spill out, sliding down her face. With one last disappointed, sickened glance in his direction, she turned and left, vanishing into the shadows of the trees.
Chapter Eleven
** Ember **
Ember made it back to the dorms in half the time it had taken her to get to the lake. She was breathless, gasping, her throat and lungs on fire, and still it didn’t hurt nearly as much as the burning knot in her chest. Throwing herself up the stairs, she got to her room and ran inside, slammed the door hard behind her, and just stood there for a long, rattling moment. There was so much inside her, so much shaking hurt and piercing loss and stabbing betrayal and, most of all, bubbling, wild fury. All of it was too much, too powerful and it stunned her to stillness and silence for endless minutes, her heart beating harder and faster with each ticking of a second. She breathed hard, feeling like she ought to be frothing at the mouth, feeling like claws should be sprouting from her fingertips, feeling her fangs slashing gouges in her lower lip. The stinging pain and sharp, metallic taste of blood on her tongue snapped her out of her stand still and she looked around the room slowly through her lowered lashes.
And then she exploded. All the fury and hurt and misery inside her breaking loose in an insane, intense whirlwind of emotion and movement. She grabbed the nearest thing she could reach and wrapped her fingers tightly around it, then without looking at it, threw it as hard as she could at the wall. The perfume bottle smashed into thousands of little glass shards, spilling a stain of liquid down the wall. The sound of the smash gave her a feeling of sudden release, of exhilaration, and she reached for something else. She just briefly glimpsed the photo of her and Sherry in the pretty frame before it too collided with the wall, the frame snapping into two pieces and the glass front of it cracking. It felt so good she kept doing it.
Anything within reach went crashing into a wall or the floor; more perfume bottles, her hairbrush, a ceramic ornament of a teddy bear her brother had gotten her when she was twelve, a bottle half-full of coke which burst on impact with the edge of the dresser as she swung it down and sprayed her with viciously fizzing, sticky liquid. Even books got tossed, carelessly, to the floor and onto the bed, the pages falling open and wrinkling. Then she got tired of pulling them one-by-one from the shelf and swept her arm along the shelves, scattering the rest to the stained carpet with a heart-wrenching clatter of paper and dustcovers.
Soon, the raging inferno inside her met a flash point beyond mere fury, emotion crashing into magic, and the magic lit her palms to blazing flames that snaked quickly up her arms. The bright, hot fire, crackling and sizzling, wild and alive, was another shot of adrenaline, and she laughed madly at the sheer insanity of what she was doing. Then she grabbed hold of her poster on the wall and it caught fire, burning and peeling away from the wall until the pouting faces of Gerard Way and his band mates melted and
bubbled into unrecognizable blurs. The fire didn’t catch the wall or the bedspread or anything else, but Ember wished it would. She wanted things to burn, wanted to set the world on fire, and was just about to let the flames lick the torn curtains – she didn’t know how she’d ripped slashes in them, but she had somehow – when Sherry came in and gasped, drawing her attention away from her hunger for destruction.
Sherry’s eyes were wide, her hand raised to her mouth in horror, and a hiss slipped from between Ember’s parted lips. She hadn’t meant it to but the vampire in her was so firmly in control that it took a second for her realize that Sherry wasn’t someone to attack. It wasn’t bloodlust fueling her destruction this time, just anger and pain. So by the time Sherry found something to say, looking around at the wrecked mess of the room – nothing of Sherry’s so much as displaced, though Ember hadn’t consciously been leaving her friend’s things unharmed – Ember had calmed just enough to form sentences in reply.
“Oh my God, Ember, what…what did you do? What happened? God, it looks like something exploded in here.” Sherry gave a short, humorless laugh, fixing her eyes on the wild animal that was her best friend, “I guess something did explode. But why? What happened?”
Ember ran her tongue over the tips of her bloody fangs, the cuts in her lip already healed though she knew there had to be blood on her mouth and chin. Her hair was a tangled wreck, falling into her eyes, and the flames on her arms had vanished as soon as her concentration was broken but the half-burned shreds of her poster lying on her bed gave away just how angry she’d been. How angry she still was, was yet to be decided. She couldn’t process anything just yet, just feel. And what she felt was an urge to rip something apart and watch it burn and hear it scream…not something then, someone. Her eyes, glinting and dark, flickered over Sherry considering for a second, and then she remembered, Not prey. Not food. Not the one who pissed you off…this time.
When she spoke, her voice was a deep, rough hiss that made Sherry flinch and shrink back away from her. “Ssson of a bitch lied to me. Ssstupid, friggin’ bastard lied to me!” she screamed, “All thisss goddamn time, he’sss been ssscrewing that little bitch you call a friend! Liandra.” – The name sounded like a vicious curse, tasted like bile on her tongue and burned the roof of her mouth. She said it again for the bright agony of it, this time in a voice as dark and menacing as a black mambo, drawing out each letter into its own dark threat, “Liandra.”
At the mention of Lia, Sherry’s eyes narrowed abruptly and she took a step forward. “I get that you’re pissed, but don’t blame Lia for this. If something’s been going on between Lia and Reid, it’s Reid who’s in the wrong. He’s the one with the girlfriend so he’s the one who should’ve known better. He’s the one you should be angry with, not Lia. If Reid led her on, it’s not her fault,” Sherry said quietly, her voice low and compelling, as if she thought she was exactly right and just needed to rationalize it to Ember so she’d understand it.
Right then, hearing Sherry, hearing her best friend, defend the cow who’d been sleeping with her boyfriend…Ember very nearly lost control all over again. Her hands shook even as she curled them into fists, her nails digging into her palms until she smelled her own blood, bitter and hot with anger and betrayal.
With a ferocity inside her that nearly knocked her breathless, Ember growled. It was a sound so low it was hardly audible but while the frequency of it was almost below hearing range, the decibel level was plenty to make her ribs rattle and her bones jangle. Sherry felt it too, fear skittering across her features and her body language tensing further, but she tried not to let it show. Ember saw anyway. She could smell it on Sherry’s skin.
“You. Get. That I’m pissed? You get that I am pissed off that my boyfriend has been cheating on me with some punk-ass, man-stealing, two-faced bitch…but it isn’t her fault?” Her breathing was creeping faster as her voice got lower. She laughed breathlessly without humor, a sound as sharp and cold as ice. There was another flash of fear passed over Sherry’s face and Ember tried not to enjoy it too much.
“Sherry, you have no idea how…how…” She stopped, at a loss for words, and sucked in a deep breath that trembled with the force of her anger. She closed her eyes and focused on pushing down the red waves breaking over her. Keeping her eyes closed, she said, “Liandra has been gunning for Reid from day one, and just because you’re too” – Don’t say stupid, don’t go there – “…just because you’ve been fawning over her, too blind to see it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Behind everyone’s backs, she has been a complete bitch to me, she even admitted she wanted Reid right to my face, and now you have the nerve to tell me, my best friend has the nerve to tell me not to blame Liandra?” Red flashed behind her closed lids and she swallowed a snarl. Her fangs were pulsing agony, bloodlust rising with the drawn out fury. It was exhausting her, wearing her nerves thin, and with the vampire so close to the surface, bloodlust was inevitable.
“What will it take before you believe that Liandra is the siren? Either she’s the siren, or what I just saw – her melting into the lake – was one kick-ass magic trick. Go and ask my stupid, cheating ex-boyfriend! He’ll even tell you! And you know what? I don’t care if you believe me anymore, I really don’t, because Brandon and Perry will and they’ll help me kill the bitch! If I were you, I’d go say goodbye to Lia because she’s not going to be around for much longer.” And for the second time that day, Ember walked away from her best friend, now almost as angry with her as she was at Reid. If Brandon didn’t believe her, she was going to kill Lia herself. She didn’t how, but she’d do it, and then she’d get Hiro to take her to some remote island in the Pacific where she could hide and cry her eyes out for a few weeks.
*****
Unfortunately, she only made it half-way across the parking lot before she felt eyes on her. She growled under her breath and turned sharply, her eyes locating Reid almost immediately. He was standing in the shadow of the trees at the edge of the parking lot, staring warily out at her with his hands stuffed into his pockets. When her head snapped toward him, she saw him flinch, whether in surprise that she’d sensed him there or in fear that she was about to hurl fire at him, she wasn’t sure and she didn’t care. Angrily, she stamped over to him and, before he could open his mouth, she slapped him. Hard. It made a resounding smacking noise and his head jerked to the side. He didn’t yell or snarl or hiss at her for it; instead, he just stood there, looking down at her with sad, pained eyes. It was even more annoying. He had no right to look so upset, he was the one who’d been cheating on her, and now she was done with him. She was done. She could only take so much, and she’d reached her limit at last.
She glowered at him furiously, waiting for him to say something, to try and defend himself or give her more excuses, another pack of lies, but all he said was, “I’m sorry, Ember.” The despair in his voice was enough to drown in, and she couldn’t stand that look on his face. It made her want to hit him again and again until he got angry. She wanted to scream and shout. She wanted an earth-shattering argument, she wanted to blow up, and Reid was just standing there pitifully!
She snarled, “Sorry? You’re sorry? Do you mean you’re sorry for cheating on me or sorry that I found out? I can’t believe I ever thought you’d changed! I never wanted to fall in love with you, I resisted it for as long as I could, and then I finally let you in and…and I regret it. I never should have let my stupid female emotions get to me. I just get hurt and now I’m done. We’re done.”
*****
** Reid **
Reid felt like something inside him had burst and it was leaking burning acid into his body, eating away at his nerves and organs. He felt sicker than he’d ever felt. He must have heard Ember wrong, she hadn’t really just said what he thought she had – but, inside, he knew she’d said it and he knew she meant it. Somewhere deep inside, he’d known it was coming, known it was inevitable after what she’d seen at the lake, but he’d hoped he could talk to her, exp
lain, make her believe him, make her forgive him and take him back. She had every right to melt his face off and rip him apart, but her words were doing a sufficient job of tearing him to pieces.
His own voice came out quiet, despite the storm inside him. “Ember, please, don’t say that. Just talk to me for a minute.”
She gritted her teeth and hissed, her eyes glinting metallic blue. He could see her skin flushing pink with the heat of her magic building up inside her, but he stayed put. He didn’t care if she burned him. He’d let her if she wanted to. “I’m done talking to you, Reid. I’m…I’m just done. I’m tired of all this. I’m tired of fighting with you, I’m tired of feeling jealous and angry and worried.”
“Please, Emz, you’ve got to believe me, I didn’t cheat on you! Lia, she’s the siren! I swear, anything I did, I didn’t do it by choice! I was under her friggin’ spell, Emz!” He realized he was yelling and took a breath, leaning back as a thin, dangerous smirk curled Ember’s lips. Oh, that was a very bad sign.
She shook her head slowly. “I don’t believe you, Reid. I just can’t. I know Lia’s a siren, but I know you, I know who you used to be – who you are. It doesn’t take a siren song to get you to take your clothes off for a girl. When I think about it, I’m surprised you lasted this long. Or did you? Is this the first time, or have there been other girls you’ve just been better at hiding? It doesn’t matter. I’m through with you, Reid. After you told me that you kissed Lia, I was so, so angry. I couldn’t believe you’d betray me like that. I wanted to hate you and I couldn’t, I wanted to forgive you and I couldn’t—”
