Tomorrow. Tomorrow I would go back to the railing at sunset. Tomorrow I would sing again.
Maybe, if I was very lucky, they would come back, too.
Chapter Four
VALE
I'd spent my entire life being wanted for my voice. Among sirens, a powerful song was the ultimate weapon. We could call ships to their doom, lure sailors into the water with nothing but a melody, make humans forget their fear and swim toward their own death with smiles on their faces. It was our gift. Our curse. Our purpose.
My voice was stronger than most. Strong enough that I'd been coveted since I was young—a prize to be won, a tool to be used, a possession to be claimed. The females in my clan had fought over me not because they wanted me, but because they wanted what I could do. What I could provide. What I could kill for them.
No one had ever asked me to sing just because they wanted to hear me. No one had ever cared about the creature behind the voice. I'd left my clan when I couldn't stand it anymore. The hungry looks, the demands, the way they touched me like I was an instrument to be played rather than a person to be known. I'd rather be alone than be owned.
Then I'd heard her sing.
We'd been following the ship for three days at that point. Three days of circling in the deep, watching the hull cut through the water above us, waiting for something to happen. Kaelan had insisted on patience, on observation, on learning what we could before we revealed ourselves.
I'd thought he was being paranoid. A human girl who gave gifts to sirens—interesting, yes, but surely not worth this level of caution. Surely not worth three days of watching and waiting while Riven grew more restless and Thane grew more curious and I grew more bored.
Then the sun began to set on the third evening, and she appeared at the railing. I felt her presence before I saw her, a shift in the water, a disturbance in the light filtering down from above. I looked up and there she was, small and fragile in her human way, settling onto a pile of rope near the stern of the ship.
She pulled something off her head and her hair tumbled free. I'd seen human females before. Had lured plenty of them to their deaths with my song. I'd never seen hair like hers. Long and thick, falling nearly to her hips in waves of copper and gold that caught the dying sunlight like it was made of fire. She shook her head and let the wind move through it, and something in my chest tightened at the sight.
Beautiful. She was beautiful in a way I hadn't expected, hadn't prepared for. Small, soft and utterly breakable, but beautiful. Then she started to sing. The sound drifted down through the water, distorted by the distance, muffled by the barrier between her world and mine. It shouldn't have reached me clearly. It shouldn't have reached me at all.
But it did.
Her voice was nothing like a siren's. It didn't have our power, our magic, our deadly allure. It was human, small and imperfect, wavering on the high notes, cracking slightly on the lowones. She didn't have centuries of practice or the supernatural resonance that thrummed in our throats.
She was just singing. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard because she wasn't trying to lure anyone. Wasn't performing for an audience, wasn't weaving magic into the melody, wasn't trying to trap or ensnare or kill. She was singing because something inside her needed to come out. Because she was lonely and sad and the music was the only way to say it.
The song was simple. A human melody, probably ancient by their standards, with words I could barely make out. But the emotion in it—the longing, the sorrow, thedesperate hope—that needed no translation.
I'm here, her song seemed to say.Is anyone listening? Does anyone care?
Yes, I wanted to answer.I'm listening. I care.But I couldn't. Couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't do anything but float there in the darkening water and let her voice wash over me.
Beside me, Thane made a soft sound. His amber eyes were fixed on the surface, on the silhouette of the girl with the fire-colored hair, and I could see the same wonder on his face that I felt in my chest. Riven had gone completely still. His usual restless energy had drained away, replaced by something I'd never seen in him before. He was listening—really listening—his golden eyes distant and strange.
Kaelan who never showed emotion, who kept himself locked away behind walls of ice and silence. His hand had gone to the pouch at his hip where he kept the pearl, and his dark eyes were fixed on the girl above with an intensity that bordered on worship. She'd done this to us. This small human female with her imperfect voice and her sad song. She'd stopped four apex predators in their tracks with nothing but loneliness and longing.
The song had six verses. She sang all of them, her voice growing stronger and then fading, swelling with emotion and then breaking with it. By the end, I could see tears on her cheeks—silver tracks in the dying light—and I wanted to surface, wanted to reach for her, wanted to wipe those tears away and tell her she would never have to be lonely again.
I stayed where I was. We all did. Frozen in the deep, caught in the spell of a song that had no magic in it except the magic of raw, honest feeling. When she finished, the silence was deafening.
"She's calling," I heard myself say. My voice sounded strange to my own ears—rough, broken. "Not like we do. Not to trap or to lure. She's just calling out." She doesn't expect anyone to answer, I didn't say. She's so used to being alone that she doesn't even hope for a response.
That was what broke me, I think. Not the beauty of her voice or the sadness of her song, but the resignation underneath it. She sang to the empty sea because she had no one else to sing to. She poured her heart into the water because there was nowhere else for it to go. I knew that feeling. Knew what it was like to have a voice that everyone wanted but no one truly heard. Knew the loneliness of being valued for what you could do instead of who you were.
She understood. This small human girl who gave gifts to monsters and sang to the empty sea—she understood what it felt like to be alone in a crowd, to be wanted but never known, to scream into the void and hear nothing but echoes.
"We have to show ourselves," I said. "She's calling to us. We can't just leave her singing to nothing."
"We shouldn't—" Riven started, but his voice lacked its usual conviction.
"She gave us a gift," I cut him off. "She initiated courtship. Whether she knew it or not, she started this. The least we cando is let her see us. Let her know she's not alone." Kaelan was silent for a long moment. I could see him weighing the risks, calculating the dangers, doing all the careful strategic thinking that made him our leader.
Then he nodded.
