“Cowards!” Becky howls. “Well, I won’t let you spring this on her uninformed. I’m going to tell her everything. All the things you should have, you damn snakes!”
“Becky! It’s not your place. She can’t survive here on her own,” Diablos growls. “She’s not like you.”
Hearing those words from a place I didn’t expect them hits hard and strips all the confidence away again.
I flinch. I am a monster. Of course, I’m not like Becky.
“She is exactly like me. She is me!” Becky howls, and I hear a thud of flesh meeting flesh.
“Becky, if you do that again-”
“You’ll what?” Frost says with icy disdain. I didn’t even hear him appear. “What will you do to my omega, Diablos? Honestly, I would love to hear it in detail.”
Diablos snarls.
“Mei cannot survive here. She was starving. I was constantly having to cover up her mistakes and fuckups. This world is not the place for her. She has to go back where she can survive.”
I can’t stay?
Becky growls low and deadly, but it’s full of pain. “That’s what everyone said about me, too! I was a foster kid who would never make it. I’d never be good enough. It doesn’t matter what they say, they’re wrong. She belongs here. I am queen. I DECIDE!”
“It’s different, you’re human,” Diablos dismisses. “And it's a done deal.”
“We’re omegas!” Becky roars, and the house vibrates with her rage. “Above everything, we are omegas!”
“He’s right,” I say bitterly. “I can’t exist on this planet without help. He is right, Becky. Thank you for trying,” I say in a small voice. “So, I have to go back? When?”
“Mei, no!” Reed moans.
I turn to him, but I feel so far away from them right now.
“Were you going to send me away?” I ask Reed quietly.
“We made a deal at the beginning, when we hated you. Five bad guys, and our wish would be that we could stay, and you would go back to Nightmare.”
The room is so quiet you could hear a claw flaking the paintwork.
“You want me to go back there?” My voice is tiny, and I can’t hide the hurt.
“No!” Brio says urgently. “We didn’t know, it was stupid, we can change it.”
“Deals with demons can’t be changed. They must be fulfilled. You didn’t say I could return here, did you?”
“We didn’t say you couldn’t either. What if you step foot there and come back?” Lirin suddenly says.
“I’m afraid the intention of the deal is the important part. You wanted her to be gone,” Diablos says.
“So, she goes?”
“Yes. If you get this wish and kill or sort out one more bad guy, then she goes to Nightmare, and you stay here, with legs, never to be Sirens again.”
The weight of that fills the air. The horror of that.
“You would give up who you are? You’d stop being Sirens?”
Leaf explodes and slams Ronit into the wall. The aggression is so violent and vicious that no one reacts.
“So, what happens if they don’t? If they fail to get five?” I ask quietly. I’m falling into the dark, and there’s no way out.
