FOUR
Withdrawals
Gemma woke up in a cold sweat despite the heat. The glass door to the balcony was open, allowing the wind to blow in, billowing out the curtains and filling the room with the sweet scent of the ocean.
The unfamiliarity of the room only added to her panic, and she sat up quickly, her heart racing. She was gasping, breathing in the salty air in heavy gulps, and that helped a bit. Her head still pounded, and the watersong rang in her ears.
That was the worst part. Everything about the last few days was horrible, but the watersong made it impossible to think or rest. It haunted her dreams, keeping her awake in the night, and made it so she couldn’t even feel comfortable in her own skin.
She wanted to crawl right out of her body, but she couldn’t. She was trapped in it, trapped with that incessant music and those awful girls in this colorless house.
That was the best way to describe the beach house—colorless. Penn had picked it out, choosing the most luxurious property she could find on the ocean. Even Gemma had to admit that it was nice, very high-class and expansive, but it had to be the whitest place she’d ever seen.
The room she stayed in—the one that Penn had informed her would be “her” room—was entirely white. Not eggshell or ivory or off-white but pure, startling white. The walls, the curtains, the bedding. Even the artwork on the walls had a white frame, surrounding some kind of abstract painting in swirling shades of white and gray.
And the rest of the house was more of the same. What little color did manage to seep into the house was always pale gray or the occasional muted blue. It was almost unbearably pristine.
Gemma didn’t know how anyone could live like this, but the home owner wasn’t very helpful by way of answers. Not that Gemma had tried talking to him all that much. Penn and the other sirens had cast their spell on him, turning him into a mindless sycophant, and Gemma didn’t really have any urge to interact with that.
Besides, her mind was preoccupied. Not only did she have that awful watersong gnawing at her constantly, she felt like hell. It was like the worst flu she’d ever had. Her entire body ached, from her bones to her skin. Nausea would sweep over her in awful waves, and it was all she could do to keep from throwing up.
“I take it you didn’t sleep well,” Thea said, seeming to magically appear in the doorway to Gemma’s room. Her red hair hung loose around her face, blowing back in the breeze like she was the star of a music video.
“I slept fine,” Gemma lied. She threw off her blankets, which were drenched in sweat, and climbed out of bed.
Thea snorted. “I can tell.”
Gemma went over to her dresser—also white—and rummaged through the drawers for fresh clothes. She’d taken very few outfits with her when she left home, but Lexi had given her plenty of hand-me-downs.
The only thing she’d taken with her that really meant anything was a picture from home. It was of her, Harper, and their mom, taken shortly before the accident, when their mom still lived at home.
That picture—her one true possession—she kept in a drawer, buried beneath her new clothes. She’d left it in the frame, hoping that would protect it when she carried it in her book bag through the ocean, and it had, some, but the picture was all warped and wrinkled.
As she pulled out her clothes, she looked at it for a second, missing a family she knew she’d probably never see again, then hurried to cover it back up with clean panties and slammed the drawer shut.
“Did you want something?” Gemma asked. “Because I need to get changed.”
“So change,” Thea said, and didn’t move from her spot in the doorway.
“Can I get a little privacy?” Gemma asked.
Thea rolled her eyes. “You need to get over it. We’re all girls here.”
“Isn’t Sawyer running around?” Gemma asked.
“He’s somewhere,” Thea admitted, and looked away. She didn’t leave the room, exactly, but turned her back to Gemma. “I think Penn gave him some kind of task before she left.”
Gemma knew this was the best she could hope for, so she hurried to change into a clean dress and underwear.
“Penn left?” Gemma asked, not hiding the surprise in her voice.
“Yeah, Penn and Lexi went shopping,” Thea explained. “New house, new clothes. That’s their motto.”
“Why didn’t you go with them?” Gemma asked.
“I had to stay and babysit you and Sawyer.” Thea glanced over her shoulder, and when she saw that Gemma was dressed, she turned back around.
“I don’t need a babysitter,” Gemma said.
“Yeah, you do,” Thea said flatly. “You look like shit.”
“Thanks,” Gemma muttered.
She brushed past Thea and walked down the hall to the bathroom. Thea followed her, but Gemma hadn’t expected any different.
When she looked in the mirror above the vanity, Gemma realized that Thea hadn’t completely told the truth. While Gemma did look worse than she had the day before, and even worse than she had the day before that, she was still remarkably beautiful.
Her brown hair had golden highlights and soft waves, and even though she’d just woken up from a fitful sleep, it actually looked pretty good. She’d always been pretty, but since turning into a siren, she’d become radiantly gorgeous.
As a siren, she should’ve been a deep tan color that almost glowed. That glow was missing, and her skin had a weird ashen quality to it, yet even that managed to look lovely on her.
She grabbed a hair tie and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. Her hair was damp from sweat, and she didn’t like how it felt hanging around her face.
“You must feel like hell,” Thea commented.
Gemma could see Thea in the reflection of the mirror, standing behind her with her arms crossed over her chest. Gemma turned on the tap so she could splash cold water on her face.
“I feel fine,” she said without looking at Thea.
“We can hear you moaning in your sleep,” Thea told her.
There were only two things Gemma remembered clearly from her dreams: the watersong, and Alex.
She’d dreamt of the last day they’d spent together, kissing and talking and holding each other in his bed. But in her dreams, that day never ended, and she got to stay with him forever.
It had broken her heart to leave him, but she knew it was the best thing she could do for him. Whatever it was that she’d become, it would only bring him harm.
She’d made a promise to the sirens that if they spared him, if they left Alex and her sister Harper alone, then she’d go with them.
Gemma was determined to keep up her end of the pact. She’d do everything in her power to protect Alex and Harper. Even if that meant leaving them forever.
“I’m fine,” Gemma insisted once she found her voice, then turned off the faucet.
“Today’s, what? Wednesday?” Thea asked as Gemma dried her face with a towel. “So you’ve been a siren for … eight days now? Yeah. You need to eat something.”
“I’ve been eating,” Gemma said, but at the mention of food her stomach did a weird growling, and she pressed her hand over her belly as if she could silence it.
She’d been hungry before, but nothing had ever felt like this. This was primal, and it seemed to encompass her entire body.
When she’d been kissing Alex once before, she’d felt something similar, although slightly more intense. They’d been making out pretty hot and heavy, and then she’d “accidentally” bit him.
That had snapped her out of the strange hunger she’d felt with Alex, but she was unable to shake her current hunger. Fortunately, it was a lot milder, and she kept herself from biting Sawyer. But every day the watersong grew louder and her hunger grew stronger.
“Gemma, you know what I’m talking about,” Thea said, looking at her seriously. “What you’ve been eating can’t sustain—”
“I just need to eat more,” Gemma interrupted her.
She didn’t want to hear what Thea recommended she actually eat. Gemma already had an idea, but she wasn’t ready to hear it aloud, for someone to put into actual words what she would have to do in order to survive as this new monster.
Thea sighed loudly but didn’t argue with Gemma. “Suit yourself.”
“I will.” Gemma raised her chin defiantly, then walked past Thea out of the bathroom.
Thea trailed after her, into the hall and then down the winding marble staircase.
“You don’t need to follow me all day,” Gemma said, casting a look back over her shoulder at Thea. “I’m not going anywhere. I said I would do as you guys asked, and I will.”
“I wasn’t following you.” Thea bristled, sounding annoyed. “I’m going out for a swim.” She paused, her expression softening to something only moderately bitchy. “You can join me if you want.”
Nothing in the world sounded more tempting than going out to the ocean for a swim. Gemma was hot and sticky with sweat, and the watersong was beckoning her. But ever since they’d arrived at the beach house on Monday, Gemma hadn’t swum. She refused to do anything fun.
The sirens had killed people and nearly killed Alex and Harper, and now Gemma was a siren, too. She was the same evil that they were, and she shouldn’t derive any pleasure from this life. That was her punishment for living and allowing herself to become one of them.
Gemma shook her head. “I’m just going to get something to eat.”
They’d reached the bottom of the stairs, and Thea stopped, leaning on the banister, groaning. “You’re making this so much harder than it needs to be.”
“I’m doing the best I can,” Gemma said honestly.
“If you would just eat and swim, you’d feel so much better,” Thea said. “I know you’re all hung up on the eating thing, but if you’d just spend, like, an hour in the ocean, you’d feel a million times better.”
Gemma shook her head again. “Go swim. Don’t worry about me.”
“Whatever.” Thea threw her hands up in the air. “I’m done.”
Thea turned, heading out the back of the house to the beach. Gemma could see it through the windows, the crystal blue water splashing against the shore. She swallowed hard and looked away before she gave in to it.
She went to the kitchen to root around for something to eat, even though she knew none of the food would appeal to her.
The appliances were stainless steel and stood in sharp contrast to the stark white of the rest of the room. She’d just opened the fridge when the owner of the house, Sawyer, wandered into the kitchen.
“Oh,” Sawyer said when he saw her, looking sufficiently disappointed. “I thought it might be Thea.”
“She’s out swimming,” Gemma said. She grabbed an orange from the crisper, since it was the only thing that looked even mildly appetizing, then closed the fridge behind her. “You can probably join her if you want.”
He glanced to the back of the house toward the ocean. A longing filled his face, but it quickly shifted to conflicted regret.
“Nah.” Sawyer shook his head and ran his hand along the smooth gray-and-white granite of the island. “Penn told me to stay around the house, so I should do that.”
That explained the conflict. Penn, Thea, and Lexi had enraptured him with their song, so he wanted to be with them constantly. But he also didn’t want to disobey them. So if Penn told him to stay at the house, that overrode his urge to join Thea in the water.
Penn had even told her that when Sawyer was under direct orders from a siren, it wasn’t just impossible for him to disobey. If anything tried to stop him, he’d destroy it if he had to. The enchantment made him so fixated on his cause that it could even give him a superherolike strength. The way a mother could tap in to her adrenaline to lift a car off her baby, a person under a siren’s spell would do anything to do a siren’s bidding.
Gemma had refused to sing and enchant him, which was why Sawyer had almost no interest in her. It had been hard to fight the urge, though. As soon as the other sirens began singing, bespelling Sawyer with their melody, Gemma had the strongest impulse to join in with them. Her very being tried to compel her to sing, and eventually she’d had to cover her ears and cower in the corner, hiding away from the sirens and their song.
Once Sawyer was under their spell, he’d gladly invited the sirens to stay in his house for as long as they wanted, with free access to his credit cards, his cars, everything he owned. And from what Gemma had seen, he seemed to own quite a bit.
Sawyer himself was stunningly handsome. When they’d come upon the house, Gemma had expected the owner to be some rich old man. So when she saw him, looking as if he could be a male siren, she was shocked.
He was young, too, probably in his mid-twenties. His skin was deeply tanned from so much time spent on the beach, and it stood out sharply against his clothes. He wore a thin white shirt with the top few buttons undone, revealing the smooth contours of his chest. His hair was dark blond, and his eyes were a shade of blue that rivaled Lexi’s in beauty.
From what Gemma understood, it was only Sawyer’s good looks that kept him alive. Penn was rather taken with him, at least as much as Penn could be taken with anybody.
“So…” Gemma said, attempting to make conversation with Sawyer since they both stood awkwardly in the kitchen together. “Do you own this house?”
Sawyer raised an eyebrow and looked at her like she was stupid. “Yeah.”
“I mean, like, it’s your house and not your parents’ or something,” Gemma said as she peeled her orange. “Because you seem awfully young to own a house like this.”
“My grandfather died when I was nineteen and left me a third of his oil company,” Sawyer explained. “And I built this house when I was twenty-two.”
“You built this house?” Gemma asked, using a section of the orange to gesture around the room.
“Well, I didn’t build it with my own two hands,” Sawyer said, but he didn’t need to.
His nails were perfectly manicured, and although he hadn’t touched her, Gemma would guess that his hands were baby-soft. He didn’t look like he’d done a day’s work in his entire life.
“So what’s the deal with all the white?” Gemma asked.
“It’s pure and clean and fresh.” Sawyer smiled as he talked about it. “I wanted a house that was filled with light.”
“But don’t you get bored?” Gemma asked. “Don’t you ever want to look at something blue?”
Sawyer laughed a little and gestured at the windows behind him. “I have an entire ocean made of blue. I can see all the color I want.”
“Fair enough.”
She stared down at the peeled orange in her hands, almost willing herself to eat it. When she finally took a bite of a wedge, she instantly regretted it. Normally she loved the fruit, but now it tasted horrible, as if the juice were made of battery acid.
“Ugh.” She grimaced and tossed the orange in the garbage, unable to eat any more.
“Was there something wrong with it?” Sawyer asked, watching her shake her head in disgust.
“No, I don’t think so.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Do you want me to get you something else?” Sawyer offered, making a move toward the fridge.
“No, that’s okay. I don’t think I’m hungry after all.”
“Are you sure?” Sawyer asked. “Because I don’t have anything else to do, and I can make a pretty mean omelet.”
“That’s okay,” Gemma insisted, and started backing away from the kitchen. “I think I’m going to go lie down.”
“Okay,” Sawyer said, sounding disappointed.
He hadn’t been that excited to see her, but he still seemed sad to see her go. Gemma might not have the same kind of hold on him that Penn and the other girls had, but she was still a siren. Without even trying, she could still enchant a man.
She hurried away, practically jogging back up the stairs. Taking a bite of the orange had made her feel even worse than she’d felt before. As soon as she got to her room, she slammed the door shut, then leaned against it.
Her whole body was shaking, and taking in deep breaths of the salty air didn’t seem to help. She wiped the cold sweat from her brow, unsure how much longer she could do this. Eventually she’d have to feed.