The Siren

“Did you ask to live?”

“I did,” I sputtered, wondering if she could read my mind or if everyone else had thought it, too. “Who are you?”

“I’m Marilyn,” she replied sweetly. “This is Aisling.” She pointed to a blond girl who gave me a small, warm smile. “And that is Nombeko.” Nombeko was as dark as the night sky and appeared to have nearly no hair at all. “We’re singers. Sirens. Servants to the Ocean,” Marilyn explained. “We help Her. We … feed Her.”

I squinted. “What would the ocean eat?”

Marilyn glanced in the direction of the sinking ship, and I followed her gaze. Almost all the voices were quiet now.

Oh.

“It is our duty, and soon it could be yours as well. If you give your time to Her, She will give you life. From this day forward, for the next hundred years, you won’t get sick or hurt, and you won’t grow a day older. When your time is up, you’ll get your voice back, your freedom back. You’ll get to live.”

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I don’t understand.”

The others smiled behind her, but their eyes looked sad. “No. It would be impossible to understand now,” Marilyn said. She ran her hand over my dripping hair, already treating me as if I was one of her own. “I assure you, none of us did. But you will.”

Carefully, I raised myself until I was fully upright, shocked to see that I was standing on water. There were still a few people afloat in the distance, struggling in the current as if they thought they might be able to save themselves.

“My mother is there,” I pleaded. Nombeko sighed, her eyes wistful.

Marilyn wrapped her arm around me, looking toward the wreckage. She whispered in my ear. “You have two choices: you may remain with us or you may join your mother. Join her. Not save her.”

I stayed silent, thinking. Was she telling me the truth? Could I choose to die?

“You said you’d give anything to live,” she reminded me. “Please mean it.”

I saw the hope in her eyes. She didn’t want me to go. Perhaps she’d seen enough death for one day.

I nodded. I’d stay.

She pulled me close and breathed into my ear. “Welcome to the sisterhood of sirens.”

I was whipped underwater, something cold forced into my veins. And, though it frightened me, it hardly hurt at all.

80 YEARS LATER (#uf00fb987-a2ff-569a-80e8-8a353270643b)

2 (#uf00fb987-a2ff-569a-80e8-8a353270643b)

“Why?” she asked, her face bloated from drowning.

I held up my hands, warning her not to come any closer, trying to tell her without words that I was deadly. But it was clear she wasn’t afraid. She was looking for revenge. And she would get it any way she could.

“Why?” she demanded again. Seaweed was wrapped around her leg, making a flat, wet sound as it dragged across the floor behind her.

The words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself. “I had to.”

She didn’t wince at my voice, just kept advancing. This was it. I would finally have to pay for what I had done.

“I had three children.”

I backed away, looking for an escape. “I didn’t know! I swear, I didn’t know anything!”

Finally, she stopped, just inches from me. I waited for her to beat me or strangle me, to find a way to avenge the life taken from her far too soon. But she merely stood there, her head cocked sideways as she took me in, eyes bulging and skin tinted blue.

Then she lunged.

I awoke with a gasp, swinging my arm at the empty air in front of me before I understood.

A dream. It was only a dream. I placed a hand on my chest, hoping to slow my heart. Instead of finding skin, my fingers pressed into the back of my scrapbook. I picked it up, looking at the carefully constructed pages filled with clipped news articles. Served me right for working on it before sleeping.

I had just finished my page on Kerry Straus before falling asleep. She was one of the last people I needed to find from our most recent sinking. Two more to go, then I’d have information on every one of those lost souls. The Arcatia might be my first complete ship.

Looking down at Kerry’s page, I took in the bright eyes from the photo on her memorial website, a shabby thing no doubt created by her widower husband between trying to serve up something more creative than spaghetti for his three motherless children and the endless routine of his day job. Kerry had a look of promise to her, an air of expectation hanging around her like a glow.

I took that from her. I stole it and fed it to the Ocean.

“At least you had a family,” I told her photo. “At least there was someone to cry for you when you were gone.” I wished I could explain to her how a full life cut short was better than an empty life that dragged on. I closed the book and set it in my trunk with the others, one for each shipwreck. There were only a handful of people who could possibly understand how I felt, and I wasn’t always sure that they did.

With a heavy sigh, I made my way to the living room, where Elizabeth’s and Miaka’s voices were louder than I was comfortable with.

“Kahlen!” Elizabeth greeted. I tried to be inconspicuous as I checked to make sure all the windows were closed. They knew how important it was that no one could hear us, but they were never as cautious as I would have liked. “Miaka’s just come up with another idea for her future.”

I shifted my focus to Miaka. Tiny and dark in every way except for her spirit, she’d won me over in the first minutes I knew her.

“Do tell,” I replied as I settled into the corner chair.

Miaka grinned widely at me. “I was thinking about buying a gallery.”

“Really?” My eyebrows raised in surprise. “So owning instead of creating, huh?”

“I don’t think you could ever actually stop painting,” Elizabeth said thoughtfully.

I nodded. “You’re too talented.”

Miaka had been selling her art online for years. Even now, mid-conversation, she was tapping away on her phone, and I felt certain another big sale was in the works. The fact that any of us owned a phone was almost ridiculous—as if we had anyone to call—but she liked staying plugged in to the world.

“Being in charge of something seems like fun, you know?”

“I do,” I said. “Ownership sounds incredibly appealing.”

“Exactly!” Miaka typed and spoke at the same time. “Responsibility, individuality. It’s all missing now, so maybe I can make up for it later.”

I was about to say that we had plenty of responsibilities, but Elizabeth spoke up first.

“I had a new idea, too,” she trilled.

“Tell us.” Miaka set down her phone and climbed onto her as if they were puppies.