The panic was so intense, Harper sat up straight in bed. She was covered in a cold sweat, and she put a hand to her heart. Something inside her had been severed.
“No,” she whispered.
Daniel, still groggy with sleep, sat up slowly. “What? What’s going on?”
“Something’s wrong. Something’s happened to Gemma.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
She pressed her hand more firmly to her chest, as if that would make the feeling change. “I can feel it. Something’s wrong.”
“Call her,” Daniel suggested.
She reached over and grabbed the phone, but Gemma never answered. That was about what she’d expected, though.
Harper dove out of bed and grabbed her jeans off the floor. “I have to go.”
“Go where?” He got out of bed much more slowly than she did, though it was clear he was trying to move fast. “Harper. Wait.”
She folded her arms across her chest, hugging herself as Daniel hurried to put on his jeans and a T-shirt.
“I can’t feel her,” Harper told him plaintively.
“What?”
“It’s like she’s not there anymore.”
Daniel pursed his lips, but he didn’t say anything. Something about that frightened her, that he didn’t try to comfort her or convince her that everything would be okay. Instead, he just picked up the pace, and when they went down the path to his boat, they were both running.
His boat took a minute to start, but this seemed to aggravate Daniel as much as it did Harper. He kicked it and cursed under his breath, then The Dirty Gull finally chugged into life.
The ride across the bay had never seemed to take so long. The early-morning sun was blinding as it reflected off the water, but Harper kept her eyes fixed on the shore.
When Daniel docked the boat, she jumped off. She started to run toward the parking lot for her car, but then she stopped and changed her mind.
“This way.” She pointed toward the beach just as Daniel reached her.
“What? Why?”
“We need to go this way,” she insisted, and started jogging down the path to the beach.
“How do you know if you can’t feel her?” Daniel asked as he ran after her.
“There’s something, but it’s not the same.”
On the beach, her feet slipped in the sand, but she didn’t let that slow her down. She could see a lone figure, sitting in the sand far away from them. As she got closer, she started to realize that the figure was Alex, and that he was totally alone, staring out at the waves.
“Alex!” Harper shouted, and by the time she reached him, she was screaming. “Alex! Where’s Gemma?” He got to his feet, looking confused, and she grabbed him by his T-shirt. “Where is she?”
“There!” Alex pointed out to the bay, sounding totally baffled by her intensity.
“Where?” Harper asked, but all she needed to do was turn her head.
Gemma was several yards away, in the water. “I’m right here.”
“Oh, my god, Gemma.” Harper ran into the water, not caring if she soaked her clothes, and hugged Gemma, crushing her to her. “I thought you were dead.”
“I’m not dead,” Gemma said, laughing and hugging her back. “I’m just not a siren anymore.”
Harper pulled back to look at her, but she kept her hands on Gemma’s shoulders, as if she would disappear if she let go. “You already weren’t.”
“No, I was before. I lied. But now I’m really not.”
“How do you know?” Harper narrowed her eyes.
“I’m in the ocean, and I have legs.”
The water came up to Gemma’s hips, and she pulled up her dress, revealing her normal legs. No fins, no scales. And then Harper really looked at her and realized that Gemma looked different. Her eyes were still the color of burned honey, but they were less sparkly. She was still beautiful, but she appeared younger—less like a model on a magazine cover and more like a normal, teenage girl.
That explained the feeling of being severed from her sister. There’d always been a strange bond, but when Gemma had become a siren, it grew more intense, which was how she’d been able to find her in Sawyer’s house when she ran off.
But now, without the paranormal element amplifying it, the bond had returned to its normal state, and she could barely feel it.
“How?” Harper asked in disbelief. “What’d you do?”
“We were so close, Harper,” Gemma said with a wide grin. “The blood of the siren, the blood of the mortal, the blood of the sea—that’s how to wash away the curse, and how I became a siren. But we were missing one thing.” She pointed back to where Alex stood on the beach, and Harper noticed the golden shawl shimmering in the sand next to him.
“That’s the golden shawl we found you wrapped in the night after you became a siren,” Harper remembered, then looked back at Gemma as the shawl’s importance dawned on her. “That was the golden fleece that Pine was talking about.”