Elegy (Watersong #4)

by Amanda Hocking

  “They killed their own father?” Harper asked. “Why? After all this time?”

  “Because for the first time, Penn hurt, truly hurt, and she blamed him for it, for not protecting her,” Diana said. “She blamed me, too, and maybe he wouldn’t tell them where I was hiding. He never truly believed they would kill him. He wasn’t afraid of them, and that was his undoing.”

  “Nope.” Marcy shook her head. “I can’t move past that. He built Capri for Penn and her sisters?”

  “He wanted to set things right, but I knew that could never be,” Diana said. “Penn will never be anything but evil.”

  “So you granted her immortality and horrific powers,” Gemma said. “That seems reasonable and really fair to every other creature living on the earth.”

  “I don’t care if she destroys the entire planet, as long as she’s miserable,” Diana said.

  “But you lost your daughter!” Harper shouted, unable to hide her anger and frustration any longer. “You know how badly that hurts! And how many other people will have to lose their daughters because of something you created? I will have to lose my sister, my father his daughter, because of a vendetta that’s thousands of years old? Hasn’t there been enough bloodshed? Haven’t enough people hurt and died for Persephone yet?”

  “I understand your pain, but the horrible truth is that it will never be enough. No matter what hell Penn goes through, it will never bring my daughter back. So no, she hasn’t suffered enough.” A harsh acrimony stung Diana’s words. “She will never suffer enough.”

  “Why are you so focused on Penn?” Lydia asked. She’d been mostly content to let the others steer the conversation, but this, apparently, had been bothering her. “There were four girls who left Persephone alone that day, four girls you cursed.”

  “The other two are dead, and they were little more than collateral damage. Just as you are now.” Diana motioned to Gemma then. “In order for Penn and Thelxiepia to be truly punished, I had to take the others down with them.”

  “Thelkispediplipa?” Marcy asked, stumbling over the name. “That’s Thea, right?”

  “Thea?” Diana said, then nodded. “Unlike Penn, Thea did actually love. She cared deeply for her sisters, and seeing them suffer was her punishment. In truth, the worst of my wrath was saved for Thea.”

  “Why? She’s nowhere near as evil as Penn,” Gemma pointed out.

  “That is precisely why,” Diana said. “She knew that what she was doing was wrong. She even cared for Persephone, but not enough to keep her safe. Not enough to deny Penn her pleasures to protect my daughter. If Penn was rotten fruit, Thea was the one who watered the tree.”

  “All that it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” Lydia said softly, and Diana nodded again.

  “That’s why I sent Bastian to seduce Thea, too. But I told him to favor Penn, so that it would break Thea’s heart worst of all. I was hoping maybe she would stand up to her sister, fight for something she loved, but she never did.”

  “She never will,” Gemma whispered.

  After all she’d seen Penn do, Thea had done little more than step aside and watch it happen. Even when the sisters she claimed to love were murdered, Thea never acted to help them. She’d done nothing but obey until very recently.

  Thea had begun to help Gemma, and that was a tremendous act of betrayal against Penn and showed a change growing within her. By giving Gemma the scroll, Thea had proven that she was willing to die to stop Penn, and yet her only attempts at undermining Penn had involved sneaking around behind her back.

  It seemed that while Thea was on Gemma’s side, the only thing she truly feared in life wasn’t death but confronting Penn. She would do nearly whatever it took to help Gemma and break the curse, except for standing up to her sister.

  “So it seems,” Diana agreed.

  “Not to belabor the point, but Achelous really made our town for the sirens?” Marcy asked. “Then why don’t they spend all their time there? Why don’t they love it if it’s supposed to be some kind of siren paradise?”

  “Because they hate their father,” Gemma said.

  Marcy shook her head. “Then why did they come back?”

  “For me,” Diana said. “They were looking for the muse Thalia, hoping she would lead them to me.”

  “She’s going to kill you, you know,” Harper said pointedly, and she was so irritated and enraged, Gemma was afraid she might get up soon and slap Diana. “If we could find you, eventually Penn and Thea will, too. And they’ll kill you. You do understand that.”

  “I do. And I’ve made peace with it.” Diana looked out the window again. “Maybe I even welcome death. That’s why I’ve made my home so close to Capri. It’s far enough inland that Penn won’t readily travel here, but close enough that it really won’t make it that hard to find.” She breathed in deeply. “Forever is too long for anyone to live.”

  “If she kills you, you won’t even see your revenge exacted,” Gemma said. “If you won’t even be here to watch them suffer, then why not end this? Why not let it go?”

  “Or just let my sister go,” Harper interjected. “She’s not like them. She didn’t do anything to you or your daughter. Isn’t there a way that she can break free?”

  Diana shook her head. “No. The curse binds them all together. I’ve already told you that I won’t help you break the curse.”

  “But that’s only because you want to see Penn suffer.” An idea occurred to Gemma, and she licked her lips. “What if I killed Penn? Then would you tell me how to break it?”

  Still staring out the window, Diana said, “If you tried to kill Penn, then you wouldn’t need to break the curse.”

  “Why?” Gemma asked, and her heart pounded so loudly in her chest, she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to hear Diana’s reply over the sound of it. “What do you mean?”

  Diana didn’t say anything right away, then the bell above the front door of the store chimed loudly.

  “I think this visit has gone on quite long enough, and I now have customers to attend to.” Diana stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, you can show yourselves out.”

  Gemma jumped to her feet. “No, Diana, please. If I kill Penn, is the curse broken?”

  “I’ve already given you my answer,” Diana said as she continued toward the door.

  “Diana!” Harper shouted, and chased after her. “You can’t just leave it like this. You can’t just walk away!”

  “Harper.” Lydia grabbed Harper’s arm, stopping her from running out of the sitting room. “That’s enough. She’s helped as much as she’s going to.”

  “We could hold her hostage and make her tell us,” Marcy suggested from where she sat on the floor, still petting Thallo.

  “There’s nothing we have that could hold her if she didn’t want to be held, and that’s not how we do things,” Lydia said. “If she doesn’t want to help us, we can’t make her.”

  Diana had gone back into the store, but Gemma couldn’t just let it go. Not like that. She chased after her, and when Diana wouldn’t stop, she grabbed the billowy sleeve of her dress, forcing Diana to turn back to her.

  “No. It can’t end like this,” Gemma begged her, and she was near tears. “Demeter, please.”

  They were nearly hidden underneath the dangling flowers and vines from the potted plants above them, but from the corner of her eye, Gemma could see the new customers. They were still far enough away that they wouldn’t hear them, but they were coming closer.

  Diana stared down at her, her green eyes tired, but there was a new anger that flickered behind them. But Gemma refused to look away or let go of her, not until she got an answer.

  “One of the other girls, Aglaope, she came sniffing around. It must’ve been … five years back,” Diana said finally, apparently seeing that Gemma wouldn’t leave without something. “She never found me, but she got close enough when I heard that she’d been looking.

  “I’d always liked her,” she went on. “Sh
e was kind and loving, but in order for Thea to be punished, Aglaope had to be punished even worse. It pained me to hurt her like that, but her anguish was a means to an end, and oh, how she’d anguished under Penn’s cruel rule for thousands of years.

  “But when she came looking for me, looking for a way out, I ignored her. I liked her, pitied her, and she’d been tortured plenty, but her cries went unheeded. And if I wouldn’t help her, what makes you think I would help someone as insignificant as you?”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Renunciation

  All Gemma could think about was getting out to the water. Their flight home had been delayed for hours. It was well after five in the morning by the time they got home, and she had barely made it. Her migraine had gotten so bad, she’d thrown up twice on the way back.

  When they got back to Capri, instead of taking them home, she had Marcy drop her off at the bay. If she didn’t get into the water soon, Gemma was certain she would die. She felt even worse than when she’d been at Sawyer’s beach house and refused to eat, and her hair was falling out in clumps.

  Fortunately, it was still dark out, but the sky was beginning to lighten. To be safe, she steered clear of the beaches, which would be filling up with tourists much too soon. Instead, she went down to the rocky shore along the cypress trees, where the bay began to curve toward the cove.

  The jagged edges of the rocks jabbed through the thin bottoms of her flip-flops, but Gemma barely noticed. The watersong blotted out everything else. Stripping off her shorts, panties, and shirt, she stepped out into the water wearing only her bra.

  As soon as the saltwater hit her skin, splashing over her feet and ankles as she waded out into the depths of the bay, sweet relief rushed over her. The pain that had been so agonizing drifted away as her skin began to flutter, her flesh shifting into the smooth, iridescent scales of a fish.

  She dove out into the waves, swimming as fast as she could, pushing herself away from the land and deeper into the water, which had finally, mercifully, stopped calling for her.

  It was then, with her body feeling fresh and rejuvenated and without the song clogging up her thoughts, that Gemma was able to feel the full ramifications of her visit with Diana and how truly defeated she was.

  All the way back from Charleston, as a barely conscious Gemma had struggled not to throw up or sob, she’d heard Harper rambling on excitedly about all the things this could mean. They could kill Penn, and that would set Gemma free.

  Or they could figure out what to do with the ink. Harper was certain there must be a way to erase it or something, even though both she and Gemma had tried exposing it to every liquid imaginable without any success. Even through her sick haze, Gemma suspected that Harper was fooling herself. But her sister seemed so excited and happy, Gemma couldn’t bear to take it away.

  While Gemma had been curled up on the hard chairs of the airport, Lydia had been sitting next to her, typing on her tablet. Harper and Marcy had gone to get something to eat, but Gemma felt too nauseated to eat anything.

  “Dammit,” Lydia muttered. “I think she was lying.”

  Gemma turned a bit so she could look up at her. “Who was lying?”

  “Diana.”

  “What do you mean?” Gemma pushed herself up so she was sitting even though that made the room spin and tip to the side.

  “I’ve been messaging my friend, Kipling Pine. He’s the professor at Sundham that Harper talked to about the scroll,” Lydia explained. “He’s visiting a friend of his who’s a linguistics expert, and he’s superknowledgeable about dead languages.”

  “And that means Diana is lying?” Gemma asked.

  “Okay, before I tell you that, I need to explain how we translate the scroll.” Lydia turned in her seat to face her fully. “We think it’s ancient Cypriot, but it seems to be a more informal type and takes some liberties, and we need to try to translate that back into English, and that’s if we can even get it into Cypriot in the first place.”

  “You already told me some of this when I showed you the scroll the first time,” Gemma reminded her.

  “I know, but I really need to reiterate.” Her large eyes were gravely serious. “Even with me, Pine, and this other expert working on it, we will never have a one-hundred-percent-concrete translation. I mean, scholars still debate some of the translations in the Bible, and they’ve been working on that for hundreds of years.”

  “But you guys have translated some of the scroll, right?” Gemma asked. “That’s what this is about.”

  “They’ve come up with a partial cryptographic key—which is basically saying what symbol means what letter, and with that, they’re kind of guessing and going on intuition and their knowledge of Greek words to fill in the blanks. Pine’s finished a passage, and he just sent it to me, and…” Lydia sighed and looked back down at her tablet. “I’ll just read it to you.”

  “It starts with, ‘Four of them there must always be.’ And then, we think the next four words are names, but the translation is a bit rough. So what we think it says is, ‘Peisinoe, Thelxiepia, Aglaope, and Ligea/Begin the curse but do not need to be at the end/One can replace one by any mortal who is…’”

  Lydia frowned and shook her head before continuing. “Pine’s saying ‘granted’ here, but I’m not sure if that’s right. But ‘cursed’ doesn’t seem to fit either. But it ends with something about having ‘the power of the siren.’”

  “Let me see it.” Gemma leaned over the tablet, and she had to squint to read, since her vision had blurred so badly.

  Four of them there must always be

  Peisinoe, Thelxiepia, Aglaope, and Ligea

  Begin the curse but do not need to be at the end

  One can replace one by any mortal

  Granted with the power of the siren

  Gemma read it three times, but the watersong blocked out rational thought, and she couldn’t seem to process it.

  “What does all that mean?” she asked, looking up at Lydia.

  “That as long as there are four of them, it doesn’t matter who they are. Any of them can be replaced.” Lydia shook her head sadly. “Even Penn.”

  “So why would Diana say that?” Gemma rubbed her forehead and slouched in the seat. “She said if I killed Penn, the curse would be broken. Why would she lie about that? We were about to leave anyway.”

  “Maybe she didn’t lie,” Lydia said.

  “But with the scroll—”

  “No, I mean Diana said, ‘If you tried to kill Penn, then you wouldn’t need to break the curse,’” Lydia recited carefully. “Maybe she just meant that if you tried to kill Penn, you’d lose.”

  “Diana knows I’m young, I probably appeared weak, and she rightfully assumed that if I was capable of killing Penn, I already would have.” Gemma lay back down on the seats and squeezed her eyes shut. “So if I went up against Penn, she would kill me, and when I’m dead, I’m free of the curse.”

  “But that could be wrong,” Lydia said, trying to sound hopeful. “I mean, Pine’s still working on these translations. We’re not finished, and like I said, we could’ve misread them.”

  Now, as Gemma swam the cold depths of the ocean, the futility of it hit her hard. Diana/Demeter had been their last big hope, and she had been a bust. The big clue she’d given them had been nothing more than a taunt.

  The joy of being in the water had given way to a familiar desperation and an ever-growing hunger. Her practice transformations had the unfortunate side effect of making her hunger stronger, and the day away from Capri, battling the watersong, hadn’t helped either.

  It was September now, and the autumnal equinox was only weeks away. Gemma would have to feed soon, or she really risked losing control, especially if she wanted to keep practicing her transformations.

  She’d begun to suspect that part of the reason she’d been so crazed when she’d killed Jason Way was because she’d been starving. That’s why she had a better handle on the monster now, and probably why Liv seemed to hav
e a better grasp of morphing. Liv ate constantly, so she was never really hungry, and that probably made her better at control when she shifted in and out of the monster.

  As Gemma was swimming, plunging down in the darkness at the bottom of the ocean floor, frightening the fish and crabs lingering at the bottom, she felt something following her. A shadow stayed behind her, and Gemma sped up. The last thing she needed was to get in a fight with a shark this morning.

  But no matter how fast she went, the dark shape in the water stayed behind her. Gemma had swum out past the bay, but now she circled back, heading toward land. She didn’t glance back, but she felt it gaining on her. An electricity in the current, the subtle shifts of the approaching predator, spurred her on.

  The land was too far, but a large rock jutted out of the bay. Gemma raced toward it, and she pushed herself out of the water and gripped crevices in the stone. Her torso was completely above water, but her fish tail was submerged. It would be slippery, deadweight if she tried to haul herself out, and she finally looked back before beginning the climb up the rock.

  Penn surfaced from the water, laughing in a way that sounded like the cackling of a crow. “Oh, Gemma, you’re so funny when you’re scared.”

  Gemma relaxed, but she still hung on to the rock. “I thought you were a shark.”

  “You’re lucky I’m not,” Penn said as she floated next to her. “Or I’d be devouring you right now.”

  “Why were you following me?”

  “I wanted to find out how things went yesterday.” Her full lips were pressed into a blood-red thin smile. “How was your little adventure?”

  Gemma looked toward the shore and pushed her wet hair out of her face. The sky above them had really started to lighten, turning purple and pink in anticipation of the sunrise.

  “What are you talking about?” Gemma asked at last.

  “You went somewhere yesterday, somewhere away from the water.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We can feel it. We know whenever anyone gets too far away,” Penn said. “You could die, and I’ll have to come up with another replacement.”