Focus. Try.
I squeezed the Siren’s hand before I let it go. “I’ll get her.”
The sea’s surface was calm as I rose to face it. In the distance, the moonlight illuminated a sandbar that cut the lagoon off from the rest of the sea.
Find the hum in your stomach,I thought to myself as I walked toward the water’s edge. I’d been able to command that little vine; I could command the sea as well.
After all, it wasmine.
The water was to my ankles, seeping into my boots, when it shot straight to that chord in my middle. It hummed until it broke into a pulse, and then I was filled with that awful, sludgy power once more. It built up toward my throat, filling me, and then suddenly it was as if I could see the whole of the lagoon in my mind’s eye. I focused further and could feel the roll of the small waves on its surface. I could sense three bodies hanging in its depths.
Only one had a heartbeat.
Teeth clamped, I moved deeper into the water, homing my attention on the faint vibrations of that single beating heart rippling through it, and then, as Theodore had instructed, I commanded the power rolling through me to bring me the girl.
“Imogen.” Theodore’s voice boomed over the Siren’s whimpers. I whipped my head toward him. He looked murderous, handscovered in blood and sweat and sand, face carved with violent fear. His hands rested firmly on the Siren’s back as he worked to stop the bleeding. “Get out of the fucking water, or so help me, I will—”
“No.” My voice was quiet, but clear. “I can help.”
He shook his head, face bending with desperation. “Gods damn it,” he said through his teeth. “Quickly.”
The surface of the water began to ripple and roll. It had obeyed. It sped the girl toward me, but as I waited, the pulse in my chest began to burn like ripped skin. Like something was pulling against it. Fighting me. I gasped at the pain.
Theodore yelled my name from the shore.
I widened my stance as the body cutting through the water came closer. When, suddenly, it stopped. That ripping pain flared. I tried to command it to me once more, but it wouldn’t move. Something broke through the surface of the water, only feet away.
I couldn’t breathe.
Yelps and gasps and prayers erupted from the villagers on the sand.
A nekgya stood before me, holding the limp, adolescent girl in her arms. The girl’s body was slashed with oozing wounds. But her chest still rose and fell.
The thing holding her—the dead woman—had long, matted hair that had lumped into tentacle-like strands. They covered her chest and arms, curving through gray flesh like a thread through fabric. A small, violet urchin lived in one of her eye sockets, but the eye that remained watched me with familiar regard.
My voice quaked. “Give her to me.”
“There you are, dearest. I’ve waited so long.” The nekgya’s flat words came from its black-lipped mouth, but there was a second, identical voice that echoed the same words within my skull. The power in my chest blistered.
“What did you say?” Those words.I knew those words.
She moved toward me with hiccuping steps until she was close enough to set the girl into my outstretched arms. Her eye locked with mine. “There you are, dearest,” she repeated in a slow, awful voice. “I’ve waited so long.”
My shock had me stumbling backward through the water, clinging to the girl. Those were the same words I’d heard in my head when Evander had forced me into that tub.
The laugh that rasped from the dead woman was sterile and crackled like water was lodged in her chest. “Do not fear. You and I are one,” the nekgya said. “Bound with your given blood. Bound with the words. We cannot harm one another.”
“Bound to you?” I thought of the scars on my hand. Of all the blood I’d been forced to give over the years. Of the words—Nemea’s ritual prayer. A trickle of cold, complete horror ran down my body. “You’re Eusia.”
The nekgya didn’t answer.
Another body splashed through the surface of the water beside it, and I fell back another step. Her hair was fairer, the color of wet sand. The skin over her shoulders and ribs looked gelatinous, nearly transparent. Her large black eyes locked with mine.
“The bodies are reanimated by my power,” said the fairer nekgya in an identical voice to the first. In an identical voice to the one in my head. “And I am animated by yours, dear, generous girl. There you are. Just like your mother. I have waited so long.”
With fumbling steps, I walked out of the waves and onto the wet sand. The girl in my arms moaned, her head lolling over my forearm, but I could only stare after the two nekgya. They had turned to walk back into the lagoon. On either side of their spines sat two grotesque knots of flesh.
Wing stumps.
