SIX
Sisters
Gemma sat on the beach with the sun beating down on her, but it didn’t stifle the chill that ran through her. She’d been shivering all day, and wore layers outside, despite the heat.
Being this close to the ocean was the only thing that seemed to help at all. She sat with her knees pulled up to her chest a few feet from where the water splashed onto the shore, and for once, the watersong in her head was nearly silent.
The sirens were out in the ocean enjoying one of their daily swims, but Gemma refused to join them. Sawyer had gone out with them today, though, and she could hear him laughing along with the faint sound of Penn singing to him.
They were far enough out that she couldn’t see them that well, bobbing above the surface. The sirens kept disappearing underneath, preferring to swim deeper and farther than a human like Sawyer could go, and Gemma kept getting paranoid that they were going to drown him.
She didn’t know Sawyer that well, and she had a feeling she never really would. Thanks to the spell, he’d never really be able to be himself. But he seemed nice enough when she interacted with him, and he didn’t deserve to die.
So when he didn’t come up after a while, Gemma moved toward the water, but he surfaced just before she dove in, laughing and telling Penn how amazing she was. Gemma sighed, then sat back down in the sand.
To Sawyer, Gemma supposed, this all must seem rather magical. He saw them as beautiful mermaids, and their spell never let him question any further. They appeared to be what fantasies were made of, and he was completely enchanted with them. On the surface, it all seemed so beautiful and perfect, but Gemma knew about the dark underside.
While Penn and Lexi played far out in the ocean with Sawyer, who tried futilely to catch them, Thea made her way back to the beach. When she got in the shallows, Gemma could see the scales of her tail shimmering through the water.
Her own legs tingled at the memory of the scales, at the way it felt when her legs became a tail slicing through the cool ocean water. Her body craved the experience, but Gemma denied it.
Thea pulled her tail out of the water without checking to see if anyone might be around. Sawyer’s house was on a secluded beach, hidden away from the rest of the world, so the sirens were free to frolic in the open as much as they pleased.
As Thea’s scales shifted back into flesh, Gemma lowered her eyes and looked away. Thea wore a bikini top, but she was nude otherwise. She grabbed a sari that she’d left discarded on the sand and wrapped it around her waist as she walked over to where Gemma sat.
“You really are a bore,” Thea said, and sat down next to her, stretching out her long tanned legs on the sand and propping herself up on her elbows.
“This is a curse,” Gemma said matter-of-factly, and stared out at the waves. “So I’m treating it like one. I refuse to enjoy any part of it.”
“This curse is your life,” Thea said, looking at her seriously. “And you’re going to live a very long time. You might as well enjoy it.”
“What do you care if I enjoy it?” Gemma asked. “If I want to be miserable, what’s it matter to you?”
“You’re one of us,” Thea replied. “I’m going to be stuck with you for a very long time. And it’d be nice to have someone to talk to that isn’t an insufferable idiot.”
Gemma thought of something, and she turned to look at Thea. The wind blew her long red hair back, slowly drying it of the salty water.
“What about your sister Aglaope? How long were you stuck with her?” Gemma asked.
Thea visibly tensed up at the mere mention of her sister. The sirens hadn’t spoken much of her, but they’d said that Gemma was meant to replace Aglaope. When Gemma pressed to find out how Aglaope died or what had happened to her, the sirens hadn’t been very forthcoming.
Well, it hadn’t been the sirens so much as Penn. Whenever Gemma tried to find out more, Penn changed the subject or brushed her off. Thea had seemed much more open to talking about Aglaope, so while it was just the two of them, Gemma decided to use the opportunity.
“I wasn’t stuck with her,” Thea snapped. “And she’s really none of your business.”
“You just said that I’m one of you now,” Gemma countered. “If I really am, shouldn’t I know what it means to be a siren? That means knowing stuff about the past, about the sirens that came before me.”
“She lived for a very long time,” Thea said at last. “She was only two years younger than me, so she lived nearly as long as I have.”
“She was an original siren, wasn’t she?” Gemma asked. “Demeter turned her in the beginning, and she wasn’t a replacement the way Lexi and I are.”
“That’s right.” Thea took a deep breath and brushed sand off her bare knee. “Aggie was actually my full sister, unlike Penn, who is only our half sister.”
“You had the same father as Penn but different mothers?” Gemma asked.
“Yes, but our mothers were actually sisters,” Thea said with a wry smile. “It was all very incestuous back then. The gods often moved around, sleeping with each other’s siblings and children.”
Gemma wrinkled her nose. “That’s gross.”
“So it is,” Thea agreed. “But that’s how things were done.”
“And you just went along with it?” Gemma asked.
Thea thought about that for a moment, then nodded. “I tried to.”
“But Penn didn’t,” Gemma said, turning her attention back out to the water, where Penn and Lexi were still taunting Sawyer.
“Penn’s never really been a go-with-the-flow kind of girl.” Thea laughed, but it was a hollow, bitter sound.
“What about Aggie?” Gemma asked, using the same pet name that Thea had used for her. “What was she like?”
Something dark passed over Thea’s face, and any trace of a smile fell away. She lowered her eyes, staring off at nothing.
“Aggie was kind,” Thea said. Her voice was naturally huskier than the other sirens’, but it became deeper now as she spoke, heavy with sadness. “Penn says that made her weak, and maybe it did. But compassion is still something that ought to be admired.”
“So what happened?” Gemma asked. “Did Aggie die because she was nice?”
Thea stared out at the ocean, and her expression went dark again. “Aggie thought we’d lived long enough. We’d had more than our share of time on this earth, and we’d experienced more and seen more and enjoyed more than maybe any other being here.
“But all of that came with a cost,” Thea went on. “And Aggie thought that we’d caused far more than our fair share of death. She said that we had enough blood on our hands, and it was time for us to go.”
“Go?” Gemma asked.
“Yes,” Thea said. “Aggie proposed we stop eating and go off into the sea to swim together until our bodies gave up and we died.”
“She wanted you all to die together?” Gemma asked.
“Yes. That was her grand idea.” Thea took a deep breath, and when she spoke again, her voice was totally flat and emotionless. “So Penn killed her.”
Gemma waited a beat, thinking she’d misheard her. “She…” Gemma shook her head. “She just killed her?”
“There was no other choice, we didn’t want to die.” Thea spoke quickly now, all her words running together in one long string, and they lacked any conviction. “And we couldn’t let Aggie kill us, so it was us or her, and it was going to be her either way. We had no other choice.”
“How did Penn kill her?” Gemma asked, realizing she might have a chance to learn about a siren weakness. But Thea only shook her head.
“Just because I’m talking to you doesn’t mean I’m stupid,” Thea said. “I’m not going to tell you how to kill a siren.”
“What happened after Aggie died?” Gemma pressed.
“The timing was the worst part of it,” Thea said. “The full moon was coming, and we didn’t have another siren planned. And when we finally found one, she died. Penn had her eye on you, but we thought you were too young. Things get more complicated when you get involved with underage girls. Their parents and family tend to pursue them more.”
“So what happened to the other girl?” Gemma asked.
“Girls, actually,” Thea corrected her. “There were two of them before you. We found them in nearby towns and tried them out the same way we did you.”
“What do you mean?” Gemma asked.
“You remember,” Thea explained, waving her hand vaguely. “We brought them out to the cove, wrapped them in the gold shawl, and they drank from the flask.”
She did remember that, but not very clearly. The night she turned had been a blur. She’d been swimming out in Anthemusa Bay back in Capri, and as soon as she’d heard Lexi singing, everything seemed to stretch and distort.
The only thing she could remember with real clarity was the awful taste of the liquid in the flask. It had been thick, and burned going down her throat. And then she’d passed out, and in the morning she’d woken up on the rocks with a gauzy gold shawl wrapped around her.
Later, Penn had explained to her what the liquid had been—the blood of a siren, the blood of a mortal, and the blood of the ocean. That had been the mixture that had actually turned her into a siren, but until now she hadn’t questioned the purpose of the shawl.
“What’s the significance of the gold shawl?” Gemma asked.
“It was Persephone’s,” Thea said. “She was supposed to wear it in her wedding.”
Persephone was the reason for them becoming sirens. Thea, Penn, Aggie, and their friend Ligeia were supposed to be watching Persephone, but instead they were off swimming, singing, and flirting with men. Persephone was kidnapped, and her goddess mother, Demeter, cursed them in punishment for not protecting her.
“What that has to do with the ritual, I don’t really know,” Thea admitted. “It was all part of Demeter’s instructions, and we have to follow them.”
“So then what happens?” Gemma asked. “You wrap the girls in the shawl, give them the potion, then what?”
“We toss them into the ocean,” Thea replied simply. “The mixture is supposed to turn them into a siren, and that will protect them. If it doesn’t take, then the girls drown.”
“And you’d already drowned two girls before me?” Gemma asked, her heart hammering in her chest. “And you just tossed me into the water and hoped for the best?”
“Essentially, yes,” Thea said. “You were our final hope. When you washed up on shore, alive, we were all so relieved.”
“I nearly died!” Gemma said, indignant.
“Yes, but you didn’t.” Thea gave her a hard look, signaling her to stop the melodramatics. “And now you’re one of us. It all worked out the way it was supposed to.”
“But it almost didn’t,” Gemma said. “And I know that you all couldn’t care less about me or the other two girls you killed, but don’t you care at all about your own lives? If I had died, what would you have done?”
“I don’t know,” Thea snapped. “We would’ve found someone else.”
“With only a few days before the full moon?” Gemma shook her head skeptically. “I sincerely doubt that.”
“Then we would’ve died.” Thea threw up her hands, exasperated. “But none of us did.”
“Except for Aggie,” Gemma pointed out. “I don’t understand that, either. Why didn’t you wait until you found a replacement siren before you killed her?”
“I didn’t kill her,” Thea said pointedly. “It wasn’t my idea.”
A cloud moved in front of the sun, casting them in shadow. The breeze coming off the ocean suddenly felt cooler. Gemma couldn’t see Penn or Lexi or even Sawyer anymore, but she didn’t care.
“Penn couldn’t wait,” Thea said finally. “She couldn’t stand to be around Aggie anymore, and she just…” She trailed off and shook her head.
“Penn’s younger than you,” Gemma said. “Why do you let your kid sister tell you what to do?”
“I don’t—” Thea abruptly stopped midsentence, as if changing her mind about what she wanted to say. “There are many things you don’t understand. You’re too young. You haven’t lived long enough or made any real sacrifices. You’ve never had to take care of anybody, not even yourself.”
Penn, Lexi, and Sawyer suddenly surfaced, only ten or twenty feet from the shore. Sawyer was gasping for breath, but Penn and Lexi were completely silent.
“It’s getting chilly,” Thea said, and stood up. “I’m going in.”
Gemma watched over her shoulder as Thea walked toward the house. Her sari was whipping in the wind, and she’d wrapped her arms around herself.
“Maybe we should go in, too,” Sawyer suggested, and Gemma turned back to look at him. He was standing waist-deep in the water, the chiseled muscles of his torso visible above the waves.
“No,” Penn said without looking at him. Her black eyes were fixed on Thea, watching her figure retreat into the house. Penn’s voice was normally like silk, but it had a harshness to it as she chastised Sawyer. “I’m not done playing yet.”
“Sorry,” Sawyer said, sounding genuinely upset, and he moved toward her, like he meant to touch her as part of his apology. “We can play as long as you want.”
She turned back to glare at him. “I know that. I’m the one that makes the rules.”
Before he could say anything more, Penn turned and dove under the water. Sawyer immediately tried to give chase, splashing roughly through the waves after her.
“Gemma!” Lexi called to her with that familiar singsong tone to her voice.
The sun had broken through the clouds, and a sliver of light managed to find Lexi’s long golden locks, making them shine.
“Gemma,” Lexi repeated when Gemma didn’t answer. “Come swimming! Join us!”
Gemma simply shook her head no. Lexi let out a flirtatious giggle, then dove into the ocean, leaving Gemma alone on the beach.