TWENTY-ONE
New Hope
Gemma had probably woken up a thousand times that night. She tossed and turned horribly before finally giving up on sleep. It was still dark out, and based on the silence in the house, everybody else was still asleep.
It was a feeling inside her chest that she couldn’t shake. Like something was happening or something was coming. It reminded her of how she felt before going to bed on Christmas Eve, only mixed with nausea and a touch of dread.
To calm herself, she decided to go out for a swim. In reality, Gemma had been using night swims to self-medicate for years. It was the way she dealt with any kind of anxiety or unpleasant feelings. She’d tried to give it up when she became a siren, but that’d only made things worse.
Discarding her bikini bottoms on the shore, Gemma dove into the cold water, swimming out under the stars.
She tried to explain the feelings away. It was probably residual guilt from feeding the other day.
Thea had tried talking to her more about it, but there was no consolation for her. She knew what she’d done was wrong, and nothing anybody could say to her would change that.
But it was something she’d have to learn to live with. She couldn’t take it back, and whether she liked it or not, this was part of who she was now. It was part of how she stayed alive, and that was what she’d agreed to do to protect Alex and Harper.
All of the water in the ocean couldn’t wash the blood from her hands, but it did calm her slightly. She swam far away from shore, and then floated on her back, letting her tail flick through the water to steady her, and she stared up at the stars above her.
She tried to make out the constellations that Alex had shown her. The only ones she could really decipher were Orion and Cassiopeia. The sun was starting to rise, and soon the sky had gotten too light for her to see them anymore.
When the sky turned bright pink, Gemma decided to head back to shore. Sawyer seemed to get up rather early, and he might alert Penn if he noticed that Gemma was gone. She didn’t want to get in trouble with the sirens for swimming without telling Penn.
She swam back to shore languidly, relishing the water. As much as she hated everything else about being a siren, there was truly something magical and amazing about being able to swim like this.
Gemma had to remind herself to be grateful for it. She might have given up everything else, but she would always have the ocean.
She stayed close to the surface, bobbing up and down in the water like a dolphin. Once when she leapt out, she thought she heard someone call her name.
She stopped swimming and just treaded water, so her head and shoulders were above the waves. And then she saw him, a figure waving his arms on the beach and running out toward the ocean.
“Alex?” Gemma breathed.
Once she got over the shock of it, she dove in the water, swimming as quickly as she could. She needed to reach him before he yelled again or he might wake the sirens, if he hadn’t already. She didn’t understand how he’d gotten here or what he was doing, but she didn’t care. All she could think about was how much she missed him, and how she couldn’t wait to be in his arms again.
Alex had run out into the water, and he’d gone out deep enough for it to crash over his waist when Gemma finally reached him.
They didn’t even speak when she got to him. She pushed herself out of the water and threw her arms around him. She was cold from the water, and when his arms wrapped around her back, they felt hot against her skin.
He held her tight to him and kissed her more fiercely than he’d ever kissed her before. There was this panicked insistence to it, like he couldn’t kiss her deeply enough, and Gemma loved it. She put her hands on his neck, pulling him closer to her.
He was lifting her out of the water as they kissed, and her tail pressed against his legs and stomach. Gemma clung to him desperately, and she never wanted to let him go.
Eventually they had to stop so they could breathe, but Alex still held her close to him. He rested his forehead against hers, his eyes closed as he breathed her in.
“I missed you,” he murmured, and kissed her on the mouth again, more gently this time.
“I missed you, too,” she said, wanting to sob. She’d been so certain she’d never see him again, and now she was afraid that she’d never be able to let him go.
At that thought, she returned to kissing him frantically. In the back of her mind, she knew the sirens were nearby in the house, and Alex would have to leave very soon if she wanted him to live. So if she only had a few moments with him, she had to make them count.
His hand moved down, pressing against the smooth scales of her tail, which rose up to the small of her back. Nobody had ever touched her tail before, and the warm touch of his skin sent pleasurable shivers down to her fin.
“Wow.” Alex stopped kissing her so he could look down at the iridescent scales, which shimmered in the early morning light. “So … you really are a mermaid now?”
“Yeah.” Gemma laughed and looked him in the eyes. “I kinda am.”
“So you two are done making out now?” Harper asked, and Gemma looked over Alex’s shoulder to see Harper standing behind him. She’d been so excited about Alex that she hadn’t even noticed her sister there.
Harper had gone out far enough so the water was just lapping against her feet, and Daniel was standing a bit farther back on the shore, looking uncertainly from Gemma to the stark white house on the beach behind them.
“You have to go,” Gemma said. Seeing Harper and Daniel’s unease had snapped her out of her romantic notions, and she realized how dangerous this could get.
“Alex gets a kiss, and you tell me to get out of here?” Harper raised an eyebrow. “No way. We didn’t come all this way to leave you behind.”
“I appreciate that, and I’m glad to see you—all of you,” Gemma said. She’d pulled back from Alex enough to comfortably talk to Harper, but his arms remained around her. “I truly am. But you need to get out of here.”
“We’re not leaving without you,” Harper said. “I don’t care if I have to drag you out of here kicking and screaming or stab those horrible she-devils in the eyes, you are coming with me when I leave.”
“You have to go,” Gemma insisted.
“Gemma, I’m not leaving without you,” Alex said, and she turned to look at him, staring up into his deep brown eyes. “Last time you left, I was unconscious and couldn’t stop you. But this time I’m wide awake, and I’m not letting you go.”
“You don’t understand,” Gemma told him plaintively. “They’ll kill you if they find you here.”
“Then we should really get going,” Alex replied.
“No, I can’t go with you,” Gemma said. “They’ll come after me, and then they’ll hurt you and Harper and Daniel to punish me.”
“Gemma, you’re not listening to me,” Alex said. “I am not leaving you. So if you stay, I stay.”
“Alex!” Gemma wanted to push away from him, but his arms felt too good and too strong around her. “They won’t let us be together. If they see you, they will kill you.”
“Come with us,” Alex said. “Leave with us right now, and we’ll find a way to stop them.”
“I don’t know if there is a way to stop them,” Gemma admitted sourly.
“There’s a way to stop everything. We just have to figure it out,” Alex assured her.
“You don’t know what the sirens are like,” Gemma said, but her resistance was wearing down.
“Do you want to stay here?” Alex asked. “Do you want to be a siren?”
“No,” she said emphatically.
“Then let’s get out of here.” He lowered her into the water, and stepped back away from her, toward the shore. “We’ll find a way to get you free, but the first step is leaving here.”
She bit her lip and glanced up at the house. It was dangerous to leave, that was for sure, but it was also probably the only chance she had of ever figuring out how to break the curse. Penn sure as hell was never going to tell her how.
But maybe if Gemma worked with Harper and Alex, the three of them could figure out how to change things. It was the best chance she had to escape this life.
And based on the way both Harper and Alex were looking at her, Gemma wasn’t sure if there was anything she could say or do to get them to stop looking for her. She knew Alex was dead serious when he said he wouldn’t leave without her.
If she wanted to keep him alive and rid herself of the curse, the best way to do it would be to leave. And if she was going to leave, she ought to hurry and do it before the sirens woke up.
“Let’s go,” Gemma said, and Alex smiled widely at her. He pulled her close to him again, kissing her quickly. “But we really do need to hurry.”
Alex pulled her toward the shore, but when the water got shallow enough that her tail began to tingle, she stopped him.
“You need to go ahead and turn around,” Gemma said.
“What? Why?” Alex asked, alarmed.
“Because my tail doesn’t change into bikini bottoms when it turns back into legs,” Gemma told him.
“Oh.” Alex blushed slightly when he realized what she meant and quickly turned around.
“What’s going on?” Harper asked. She was standing just far enough away that she hadn’t heard Gemma’s explanation.
“Turn around,” Alex said, walking over to where Harper and Daniel were standing. “Gemma’s naked and needs to put on bottoms.”
“Oh, crap,” Daniel said, and immediately turned around.
Harper turned away from Gemma more slowly, as if she didn’t trust Gemma not to disappear in the waves while they had their backs turned. But Gemma had no plans to do that.
She pulled herself out of the water, willing her legs to speed up. The transformation from tail to legs had never seemed so slow. Since she’d decided to leave, she wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible.
Gemma actually stood up before her legs had completely shifted back. One of her feet was still more fin than foot, and she almost tumbled in the sand, but she caught herself. She rushed over to her bikini bottoms, and by the time she’d slipped into them, her legs were normal.
“Okay,” Gemma said, and ran over to where Alex was waiting. “We need to get out of here.”
Alex took Gemma’s hand, and the four of them ran through the sand. They had to go a ways down the beach to get around the boulders. The house was sandwiched right between the rocky outcroppings, so the quickest way to the front road was through the house, but they weren’t about to take that path.
Daniel had parked in the grass about a quarter mile from the house. When they finally reached the car, Harper popped open the trunk and pulled out an old hoodie for Gemma to toss on so she wasn’t running around in a bikini.
Gemma was standing behind the car as she slipped it over her head, and Harper stood beside her. As soon as she had it on, Harper grabbed Gemma and hugged her.
“I’m so glad you’re safe,” Harper said, hugging her so tightly it actually hurt.
“Thank you,” Gemma said, her voice strained because of the intensity of Harper’s hug.
Then Harper released her, and her eyes were grave as she stared at her. “If you ever run away like that again, you won’t need to worry about the sirens. Because I’ll be the one to kill you. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Gemma nodded meekly. “But in my defense, I did it to protect you.”
“I don’t care why you did it,” Harper said. “Don’t do it again.”
Harper went around the car and got in the driver’s seat, while Gemma hopped in back with Alex. She sat as close to him as she could, and he put his arm around her. As Harper sped off, Gemma settled back next to him, and she honestly couldn’t tell if she’d made the right decision by leaving with them or not.
“How did you find me?” Gemma asked.
“It was in the paper,” Daniel said.
“The paper?” Gemma arched an eyebrow.
Daniel handed the newspaper back to her and pointed to the article about the murdered boys. Gemma read it quickly, and when she got to the part about Jason Way, her heart pounded so hard she thought she might have a heart attack. She was afraid she might throw up or pass out.
Did they know that she’d done this? She tried to slow her breath and couldn’t even look at them. They couldn’t know. They wouldn’t have rescued her if they realized what a monster she was.
“We knew the way the body was torn open was the sirens’ trademark,” Alex explained when Gemma didn’t say anything. “And we thought if they were here, you were probably close by.”
“That was a good guess,” Gemma said. She forced a smile at him and tried to slow her earlier panic.
The one consolation she did have was that Thea had been right about attracting rapists. According to the paper, Jason Way had been a rapist. Gemma had actually theorized that before. If she hadn’t been able to turn into a man-eating beast, there was a good chance that Jason would’ve actually raped her.
That still didn’t make it okay, though. It wasn’t up to her to exact punishment on people, and killing him had been a bit more than self-defense.
But she didn’t want to think about that right now. She was with Alex and Harper after thinking she’d never be with them again, and she wanted to enjoy it while she had the chance.
“How did you know where I was?” Gemma asked, folding up the newspaper and shoving it aside. “At that exact house on that beach?”
“That was all Harper.” Alex motioned to her.
“How did you know?” Gemma asked her sister.
“I just knew,” Harper said, trying not to elaborate further. “I don’t know how to explain it more than that. I just knew you were there.”
The car ride went smooth and rather fast. Or maybe it just seemed that way to Gemma. Admittedly, she did spend a bit of time making out in the backseat with Alex, until Harper threatened to hose them both off.
Most of Gemma’s attention was focused on Alex, but while she was curled up next to him in the backseat, she watched Harper and Daniel interact. Daniel was trying to get Harper to relax and cheer up, and Harper tried to resist, but she ended up laughing with him more times than she’d have wanted to.
When they got back to Capri in the evening, Harper decided to drop Daniel off at his boat before heading to their house. She pulled up to the docks to let him out.
“Thanks,” Harper said, and she seemed to avoid looking directly at him. “For coming with and helping look for Gemma, and for everything, really.”
“Yeah, it was no problem,” Daniel said. He sat in the car for a moment, then opened the door. “Well. I’ll see you around.”
“Yep,” Harper said.
“’Bye, Daniel,” Alex added, and Daniel waved at him as he got out.
“Wait a sec,” Gemma told Harper, and then she hopped out after him. He was walking away, so she called after him, “Daniel. Hold up.”
“Yeah?” He turned back around to her.
Gemma threw her arms around his waist, hugging him. It took him a second to hug her back. It was short and slightly awkward, but she smiled up at him when she took a step back.
“I just wanted to thank you properly for helping me out and for being concerned and all that,” Gemma said.
“It’s really not a problem,” Daniel said, waving it off.
“And I wanted to thank you for Harper,” Gemma said.
“For Harper?”
“Yeah,” Gemma said. “She needs you more than she thinks she does, and I’m really glad that you can see that.”
“Uh…” Daniel looked like he didn’t know how to respond to that. “Um, you’re welcome?”
“Yeah, anyway.” Gemma waved at him as she stepped back. “See you later.”
She ran back to the car, and Harper asked her what that was about. Gemma just shrugged, and Harper drove them back home.