“And do you want to tell me why you made these bags, even knowing I never—”
“Yes, well, a good witch is always prepared.”
I rolled my eyes at her.
“Well, that is the most basic rule,” she defended.
I covered my face with my hands. “What if we call 911?”
“Won’t work. Her spell nixes any communication out or into this bar.”
“Mia, I can’t,” I groaned.
“Then your big mouth killed Vance.”
I peeked between my fingers to glare at her.
She shrugged. “You pick.”
Turning to Vance, I noticed his frustration. “So, what are we doing?” He waved his arms completly out of the loop. I sighed again. I crawled over and into his lap. I leaned over and kissed him. I really laid it on, too. Figured I might as well do it one last time.
His fingers dug into my waist, and I slid my legs outside his to join our bodies as fully as possible. One of his hands caught my chin and turned my face to deepen the kiss. Then his hand trailed down to circle my neck gently. I had the passing thought that in a few minutes his hand would not be so gentle if he got it around my neck. I pinched my eyes closed harder and dug my nails into his back making his teeth graze mine as our tongues danced.
He caught my hair and twisted my face away from his. “What is going on?”
“I am going to save your ass.”
He caught my lip in his teeth and tugged. “And how are you going to accomplish that noble feat?”
I shrugged and pulled out of his arms. “I thought I might sing a little karaoke and calm everyone down.”
“What? Are you nuts?”
“Yup. Things are really starting to stack up in favor of that, anyway.” I pulled away. Leaving him dazed, I half stood to take in the scene. People gone mad, complete melee. I dusted off my pant legs as Mia dropped the circle. It fell in pieces like sparkly confetti. I stepped out and away from Vance, who tried to catch my ankle and stop me. Mia put the circle back up, and I made it across the few feet separating me from the mike stand by the karaoke machine.
A man hid under the table there, and I pulled at his arm. Vance tried to cross the bar to get to me, and Mia struggled to keep him in the circle. I tugged harder at the man. “Put on a song!”
“Huh? What song?”
I sighed. “It really doesn’t matter.”
CHAPTER Seven
“Lady, this ain’t really a good time to sing a song.”
As I couldn’t really disagree with him, I ducked a flying…was that a potted geranium? Anyway, I ducked and yanked the guy’s arm. Dirt sprayed along with chunks of ceramic and plant matter, making me pretty sure it had, indeed, been a geranium, and I paused to brush it off. He shrugged, finally and pushed a button on the computer in front of him. Music filtered out from the speakers, and words appeared on the screen in front of me, Unchained Melody. I began to sing.
From my spot behind the mic, I could see Mia was pressing a bag into Vance’s hand. I closed my eyes again and sang. I let it out, that piece of me I usually kept buried, and it poured over my skin like hot wax.
Okay, I had a few takers. Those standing closest to the speakers stilled their movements and stared at me. Since I probably looked reasonably stupid—I mean, big barfight and stood there like a dope singing a slow, old song—it could have been a coincidence. However, the guy in charge of the music was on his knees and I was reasonably sure it wasn’t only to duck more potted plants.
They say siren song can drive a man mad. In the Odyssey, Circe warned them not to listen to the song as it would make the men drown just to try to reach the singers. While I wasn’t crooning the same ballad of siren’s back in the day, my voice—in theory—was still enough to make people crazy just to get to me. As no one was on a ship, this probably was a safe place for me to let ‘er rip. If Mia was right, no one else could get in and I had to distract everyone from Vance.
I closed my eyes and turned up whatever it is that I hide inside. I can’t really explain my power, other than describing it as a fist I usually have the control to keep closed. Normally I would open, following the same analogy, just one finger. To get the whole bar to listen, I was going to have to relax the entire fist.
What I tried not to panic about, standing there with all that in my head, was how one goes about closing the fist again. I never let that part of me have complete control. I imbibed alcohol and regular self control was shady. Closing the fist back up took more than regular self control.
But I was far more concerned with the immediate problem—saving Vance’s ass. So, I closed my eyes, tilted my head back and let loose.
Something grew like a ball of fire in my stomach. As I sang, it burned and cracked under my skin. It was a hunger. I was starving. It ached onto my voice, but even my voice wasn’t my own. Even to my own ears, I sounded all at once more beautiful and terrible than I ever had before. Tears crept out from my closed eyelids from the pain of the burning. All of my skin sizzled. If I didn’t stop, I would split and blister. I had to let the awful hunger out before it burned me alive.
Some sane part of me tried to hang on. I fell to my knees, the words of the song ripped from my lips and my very soul. As the power took over, it washed away any feeling in me but the need to pull everyone closer, closer.
Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea…
And I couldn’t hold control over the hunger anymore. I opened my eyes, and my hair flew behind me. My every pore seemed to open and to release the fire into the room. Able to stand again, I sensed it moving out like fingers to catch the people in the room. Now everyone’s attention was on me. They crawled over each other, scrabbling to get to me. The fingers tightened on them and a climbing, building desire, akin to an orgasm, grew in my gut. My mouth opened and more words burned my throat as I let them out.
I’ve hungered for your touch…
Suddenly I knew what I had to do. The singing of the sirens wasn’t just to make men go mad, but to feed the siren. Not on flesh, as humans fed, or on blood like Vance …but on something far less tangible. Light pulsed just over their skin of everyone I could see, light from the electricity that kept them alive. Best described as aura of glittering loveliness, each of the people in the bar glowed faintly.
Like a rainbow of gently pulsing lights and all of them fought to get to me. All of them wanted to feed the hunger. Who was I to turn them away? A part of me tried to stop—a voice in my head screaming, I didn’t want to feed on lights, I am human—but the voice was a dull murmur in the screaming starvation of my mind. My entire body ached, starved, needed and the lights were there for the taking.
As I continued to sing, I can only describe it as I opened my pores and let the light in. It washed over my burning skin like cool water. A few, the ones closest to me, fell and I stepped off the stage to touch them. The lights on them came off like sticky cotton candy to be absorbed by my skin.
All were still, only the music and my voice vibrating throughout the bar. I drew the fingers of power in and pulled the lights with it like sucking through a bendy straw. I left the people standing, kneeling, holding each other up for support. No one tried to get away, the web of my voice trapped them all. They are all food.
I drank from them. It filled me, making me whole, and I smiled as I sang. I felt alive for the first time, like up to that point I’d lived in black and white and hunger, and suddenly I’d found Oz—color, food, magic all in one sparkling guzzle of power. Whole finally, the joy too incredible to even describe.
Mia spoke next to me. “Okay, you fixed it. Stop now.”
I ignored her.
Vance tugged at Mia’s arm. “Stop what? What is she doing? No one is moving.”
I ignored him, too.
“Were you ever around one of the sirens?” She pulled at my arm. The movement made me drop the mic, but I no longer needed it. They all listened and gave to me anyway.
“No,” I heard him say.
&n
bsp; “This is what they do. Shit, she never did it like this before.”
“Did what?”
“The original sirens were sisters of Medusa...” she started to explain. Mia pulled me, but I just called everyone to follow me, and they did. I walked over one guy lying on the floor and he sighed, reveling in it. “She is a siren, you idiot. You drink blood. Sirens and vampires got along for a reason. They called sailors to their deaths, yes, and vamps drank their blood, but what was in it for the sirens?”
I looked at Vance as I sang. It was hard to think, everything less important because of the hunger which started to seem insatiable. But Vance was so bright, a rainbow all by himself. All the people in the bar were as bright as, say, candles. He was a florescent bulb. Power shimmered and waved off him, calling me. My attraction to him finally made sense—I wanted his light.
Vance picked me up, and I curled around him reaching for the bag he still held in one hand. The damned bag was the only reason he couldn’t hear me. I had to get rid of it. The bag had to go.
“Power from being aligned with the vampires?”
“No, Vance. Sirens drink auras. They suck living things dry and leave the husks of bodies for you guys. She is draining every person in this club as we speak.”
I looked toward her for the first time, but got distracted when I saw myself in the mirror behind her. My hair floated, waving behind my face as if I were under water. My skin glistened the ever-changing color of pearls. I could see the rainbow of power as it poured into me and yet hunger clawed at me.
Disregarding the image as unimportant, I met Mia’s eyes. “Except him.” My hand finally caught the bag.
“No!” Mia tried to grab my hand, but she was too late. The bag fell to the floor, useless.
And now I had me a vampire, too.
I n-e-e-ed your lo-o-v-e! I belted the lyric out. Someone in the back of the room screamed.
Vance’s eyes glowed, his expression enchanted. I watched the protection from the bag drop from him like a wall falling, then he covered my lips with his. The kiss, all teeth and need and fire, blasted through me. He caught my lip, bit down, and I tasted blood, but didn’t care. His control, which might have protected him from me, had shredded, and I could pull all of the lovely bright colors off him and into myself.
I drank him down in gulps—blue fire, a hundred watts of power—on my tongue and lips and everywhere he touched. The energy flowed into me. My skin tingled and my very bones shifted, realigning themselves. The burning of my skin began to ebb, the hunger abated, to allow me to focus on the joy, the completion of the lights dancing into my skin and mouth.
Somehow using his telepathic gift, he linked us. He was not fighting me in any way. Filled with my feelings of pleasure through the link, I could see his shocked as me at the ecstasy I experienced. The light around him was still being absorbed by me, at a much quicker rate than it was coming out of him, but I could tell he wasn’t paying any attention to it.
As I drained him of light, he sipped some power back through the blood on my lip. I felt laughter and joy bubbling up inside me, and he swallowed them both along with a purely sexual groan. He held a hundred humans worth of power, and I pulled on it all. Electricity poured over me and I wriggled in his arms, unable to keep still. I wanted more contact. If I could touch more of him, I could get more, faster.
He let me go, let my body slide down his, and I pushed him into a wall. I could feel him becoming weaker, but in his mind, he didn’t care. He gladly gave, and I drank more and more. His kiss was power and food for the hunger, and I drank it. I wanted to drink it all.
Some still functioning part of my brain heard Mia say, “Sorry, Janie.”
And then everything went dark.
CHAPTER Eight
The cold ground seeped through my jeans like they weren’t there as I fought to open my eyes. Snowflakes fell down on me like a spiraling galaxy of white stars and a neon sign waved in the wind. It read, Jefferson Diner.
I blinked. Why was I laying on the sidewalk in the snow under the Jefferson Diner sign? I mean, I felt great. Better than I’ve ever felt. I blinked as snowflakes landed on my eyelashes.I tried out standing and giggled. Standing? Shit, I bet I could fly.
I looked over at two other people nearby. A woman in a floaty skirt stood over man prone on the sidewalk a few feet from me. It took a minute for my brain to identify Mia. And then I knew that the man was Vance.
That was about the extent of what I remembered. I wondered what we were doing here, but looking up at the falling snow was more interesting than that question.
Vance got up, catching my attention again, and rubbed his head. “God, I feel weak.”
“It will wear off. Aura is self-regenerating, like blood.”
He blinked at her silently for a moment, then made a gesture with his hand. “She’s a siren?”
Mia nodded. “Yeah, but she is the only one.”
I moved my mouth around. I was having a hard time remembering exactly how to form words. I felt really, really good, but in the way that you feel really good after a long fever. It was a loopy kind of good.
“And she just—”
“Well, she sang and—”
“She fucking fed off me!” His screamed the words, and his hands went to fists.
“Yes, but—” Mia didn’t get to finish. With what can only be described as vampiric speed, he dove at me. He knocked me off my feet and snapped at my throat like a wild animal. He looked, minus the emaciated part, more like when I first met him. You know what they say about first impressions…
Instinctively, I held him off. I kicked out with my feet and threw him away from me. Apparently, I was stronger than I remembered because he landed a good five feet away. He stood and got ready to come at me again.
Mia tried to jump on him and hold him down. I yelled, remembering how to use my voice. “What in the hell are you doing?”
“You just tried to kill me!” He shoved at Mia’s hands to try and get to me.
“I did not! I just saved you!” I distinctly remembered saving him.
“By what? Eating me?” And he was free of Mia again and came at me.
This time, I braced my feet and pushed him off with my hands. He grazed one of my palms with his teeth before I again threw him away from me. Blood trickled out of my hand, and I balled it into a fist. He’d landed against the wall of Stutzman’s Newsstand, and the glass in the window cracked from the force of it.
He glared at me, rolled up his sleeves and prepared to come at me. Since I realized this was going to be a battle for my life, I bent at the knees and balled my other fist, too.
Then Mia waved her arms, and I was stuck like that.
“You idiots! So far tonight you wrecked my chances at getting any information as to why people are getting killed. Then—” She paced and waved her arms as she spoke. I managed to move my eyes enough to see that much, but the rest of me was cemented in place. A cramp formed in my leg where I had braced it. I couldn’t speak or move to do a damn thing about it. It was like freeze tag, but no one seemed inclined to unfreeze me.
I looked at Vance, also stuck in place. Caught mid-stride, only a muscle ticking in his jaw proved he’d not been turned to stone.
“You piss off Max and she casts some spell to make everyone attack us. So, I come up with a logical solution, which bombs because you are a drunken idiot—” She punctuated that statement by poking me in the chest. Then she rounded on Vance. “And you don’t put the bag in your pocket like I told you, so she gets a hold of it. Then,” she turned back to me. “You freaking drain him-which by the way, I could have stopped if you hadn’t bit her, epic fail—”
I moved my lips a little and tried to talk. It came out as, “Mmfph.”
“What?!” She threw her hands in the air, looking completely frustrated.
“Mmfphssss—” I tried again.
“I can’t understand you!”
I managed to raise a brow at her. Slowly.
When I got it up, she sighed. “Oh, you can’t talk.”
She waved her arm at me. I could move and I nearly fell back to the pavement. I gasped and rubbed my leg. “What did you hit me with?”
“Huh?” Her forehead creased and her brows dipped low in confusion.
“You hit me with something in the bar…?”
“Oh, a bowling trophy. It was the only thing available. Sorry.”
I sat on the sidewalk and blinked at her through snowflakes. “What in the hell happened in there? I mean, I know the whole siren thing was supposed to get stronger as I got older, but shit, Mia.”
“Yeah, I didn’t really expect that either.”
“Mmpphhhsshhh—” yelled Vance.
I looked at him and held back a smirk. Mia forgot he was there and went into comforting best friend mode. “You haven’t developed your ability, so you have no control over it when you do use it. I warned you years ago that with practice comes control.”
“Yeah, like either of us knew for sure.”
“Well, with my power it did, so it stood to reason—”
“Mia, I love you, but none of this stands to reason.”
She sighed and, behind her, Vance got louder. “Mmmphffffsszz!”
“I told you he would try to kill me.” I cursed myself for the wistfulness that crept into my voice.
Mia looked at Vance, too, facing him with her hands on her hips. “Vansickle Masterson, I will keep you in exactly that spot until the sun rises if you don’t agree to stop trying to kill my friend.” Mia had a good regal tone when she chose.
“Mmmffssss-s,” hissed Vance.
“She didn’t mean to,” she replied, as if she could decipher what the guttural hissing meant.
“Rrr-mm, sssssshhhh,” tried Vance.
“Sirens weren’t all bad, and besides, she isn’t even full siren. Her mom shagged one. Not her fault. She is half—”
Odd Stuff Page 11
