“But the music... Do you hear it? It’s...beguiling,” she marveled, not slowing down.
“Maren, look at me,” I ordered.
She glanced at me briefly, but it was enough for me to spot the daze in her gaze. Her pupils dilated, black eclipsing the blue. Her mouth parted, as if for a kiss. Her cheeks flushed.
I’d kill to have her look at me like that again and again, but I wasn’t the cause of her reaction this time. A slow, sensual melody curled through the evening breeze like a beckoning finger. Blending with a few other melodies from the faire, the song was subtle but powerful in its emotion.
A searching song.
Some idiot decided to sing a searching song in the crowd, and my darling butterfly was ready to fly to it like a moth to a flame.
The song was easy enough for me to resist, but humans must be exceptionally responsive to siren magic. Either that, or my precious butterfly turned out to be especially responsive to that particular song and to that particular voice, which I simply could not allow.
“Maren. Listen to me...” I sidestepped her, holding up my hands but forcing myself not to grab for her. “You don’t know who the singer is or where they are. What if they’re singing far in the ocean somewhere? You don’t want to swim to them, do you?”
Please say no.
Please...
“I’ll just take a look,” she brushed me off. “It’s such a beautiful song.”
It was lovely. The voice rang strong and rich with emotion. It could equally belong either to a man or a woman, somewhere between contralto and baritone, with the clear, silver quality that was certainly alluring.
Fucking demons of the Abyss, what was I supposed to do? How was I to stop her?
Panic rolled through me in a nauseating swell.
What if it wasn’t just appreciation of the music that led Maren, but a...soul call? What if the soul of the singer was speaking to my Maren, luring her, beguiling her, leading her away from me. And I couldn’t hold her.
Was I watching her find her soulmate? Because if so, she’d be forever lost to me.
The thought was like a punch to my chest that wretched my heart out.
She hastened between the merchants’ tents and stalls, effortlessly weaving through the light crowd of the market on her way to the beach.
Thankfully, sirens’ celebrations took place largely in the ocean, with the majority of attendants gathering in the water and only a fraction of the crowd mingling on land. So far, I had managed to avoid murdering any of my subjects. But with panic impeding my logic and coordination, the risk of that grew.
“Maren!” I bellowed in anguish, but she just tossed a reassuring smile over her shoulder at me, not slowing down in her run.
Desperate, I searched around for something, anything to get her attention. To stop her. Or at least to slow her down until I could get through to her.
A long string of large, colorful beads in one of the vendor stalls caught my eye.
“I need these,” I forced the words through my tightening throat.
The merchant inhaled in terror, his hands shaking at the sight of me. Hastily grabbing the beads from the display hook, he tossed them onto the counter as if they were made of hot coals instead of carved wood.
Only then I realized that I had nothing to pay the man with.
“Stop by Prince Arnon’s palace tomorrow morning,” I said. “Tell him I owe you a gold coin for these.”
“A g-gold coin? That’s very generous of you, Your Majesty.” The merchant nodded rapidly but still stepped back and away from the cart. He looked ready to give up the cart and all his wares just to see me gone.
A gold coin was way too much for a cord of wooden beads. But I’d pay many times over for anything that would help me keep Maren.
Stilling my breath, I made an effort to lift the cord by a single bead without touching the counter. The last thing I needed on this blasted excursion was to ruin this man’s livelihood by turning his cart to glass through no fault of his.
There was no way to predict with certainty what the curse would do to any particular object. It had turned my entire bed to glass, sheets, pillows, mattress and all. Yet it only killed the branches of the coral that I touched directly, not the entire reef, thank gods. Some items would turn solid, others remained porous or layered even after turning to glass.
