After a century of living with the curse and dealing with its effects, I still didn’t know exactly what to expect every time I touched something new. I breathed with relief when only the bead I held in my fingers turned to glass, leaving the cord inside it unchanged.
“Thanks,” I tossed to the stunned merchant and rushed down to the beach to find my fleeting butterfly.
She was waist-deep in the surf already, pushing against the waves to keep going deeper into the ocean, led by the song.
“Maren!” I called to her, but she didn’t react this time at all, stolen from me by the enchanting voice of the singing siren.
Fuck that song and that voice.
I was a siren too. I had lost my song for decades, but I had found it again. I started singing again because of this woman. And I couldn’t let her go.
I wasn’t sure when my mouth opened or how the lyrics formed. I didn’t even know if it was an old song that I remembered or if a new one had just formed in my heart. But the song begged to be let out into the world, needing to be heard.
And I sang, my voice reaching far and wide to drown out the call of the other siren:
“Come to me, my darling,
Reach across the worlds to make our fates entwine,
Find me through the ocean storms,
Let your soul see mine.”
It was a searching song, I realized. In the feverish desperation of bringing Maren close to me, my mind chose thetype of song that lonely sirens sang to the ocean when calling for a mate.
And it worked.
Thank fucking gods, it worked.
Maren stumbled in the waves, as if hitting an invisible obstacle, then turned back to me, rubbing her eyes as though waking from a dream.
“Maren...” I exhaled.
The tension that had gripped my chest and clawed at my heart finally loosened.
“Come here, sweetheart,” I coaxed. “Come to me.”
Praised be the ocean and all that lived in it, she listened to me this time. She walked toward me, her chest rising and falling with deep breaths, her cheeks flushed, her eyes aglow with excitement, as if she had run a race and won.
“I thought you were right behind me,” she said. “Did you not want to hear the song?”
“I can hear it from here,” I gritted through clenched teeth.
The fucking singer hadn’t stopped. Their silver voice was still drifting over the waves, stretching toward the land like a snare. I spotted a group of sirens by one of the coral branches in the water farther in the ocean, and I would bet my shattered crown the voice was coming from there. But it didn’t matter anymore.
Winded but happy, Maren stumbled to me and sat in the sand at my feet.
“This place is a paradise for music lovers,” she said, hugging her knees. “So many beautiful voices.”
But it wasmyvoice that had finally freed her from the pull of another. At the moment, that was all that mattered.
I searched around for a place to sit down, then lowered my naked ass onto the closest rock instead of the sand. If there was one thing I’d learned in the past hundred years, it was that sandin any form created an extremely irritating sensation in body crevices unprotected by clothes.
“What was the song you just sang?” Maren asked, gazing out into the ocean with a dreamy expression. “I’ve never heard it from you before.”
“I believe I might’ve just composed it.”
She snapped her full attention to me. “Did you really? Are you a poet?”
