Daniel tossed the phone on the passenger seat and sped up. Harper’s worst fear was coming true, and she hadn’t even been gone for a day.
He briefly considered that this might just be her paranoia flaring up, but he immediately dismissed it. Harper and Gemma had that weird psychic bond, and if she said that Gemma was in trouble, then Gemma probably was.
Whether or not the sirens were involved with what was happening with Gemma was another story. Daniel didn’t think Penn would go back on their deal, not when it was so close to happening. But she’d only promised that she wouldn’t hurt Gemma or Harper. That didn’t mean the other sirens wouldn’t.
He raced across town, ignoring speed limits and red lights whenever he could. When he started up the hill, things got a bit trickier. It was raining so hard the streets were flooded, and the wind had picked up. The car couldn’t get traction, and the storm nearly blew him off the road several times.
When he finally made it to the driveway of the sirens’ house, the car skidded in the mud and ended up getting stuck in the waterslogged grass under a tree. Daniel didn’t care, though. He just jumped out of the car and ran toward the house.
Before he even stepped inside, Daniel knew things weren’t good. One of the front windows had been smashed out, letting the rain pour inside, and he heard an unearthly roar—a sound he’d only heard once before, when Penn had been trying to kill him as the bird-monster.
“Gemma!” Daniel shouted and threw open the front door.
He’d never been inside the house before, so he had no real frame of reference, but it was obviously demolished. A couch had been upended, a coffee table snapped in half. Even the fridge had been pulled away from the wall and tipped on its side, with the food and beverages spilling out, looking like an eviscerated appliance.
Marcy was lying on her stomach, half hidden by the couch, and Daniel couldn’t tell if she was dead or merely unconscious. He didn’t have time to check on her or even to think about it, though, because there was a much bigger problem at hand.
Gemma was crouched down underneath the stairs, using them to shield her. She had a fire poker in one hand and held it pointed at the awful monster standing in front of her.
Lexi had her back to Daniel, her massive golden wings completely unfurled, so a large part of his view was obstructed. Her legs had grown much longer, so Lexi stood at least two feet taller than she had been before.
The smooth bronze skin of her legs had changed into blue-gray scales, and the knee jutted out backward. Her feet had clearly become those of a bird, her five toes converging into three, with long, sharp claws at the end of each one.
Her head had expanded and elongated as well, so her blond hair no longer covered her scalp evenly. It had become stringier and mangier, billowing out in thin wisps when the wind blew through the room.
The Lexi creature had heard him come inside, so she turned back to face him. Her large eyes were the yellow of a bird’s, and her mouth was overflowing with rows of jagged, pointy teeth. Her lips had peeled back around them to make room, and her jaw extended out farther than it had before.
Instead of saying anything, Lexi just threw back her head and laughed when she saw him. The sound came out more like a crow cawing than a human laugh, with a demonic undertone reverberating through it, and Daniel knew that that definitely could not be a good sign.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Reticence
Gemma had been holding off Lexi as best she could. That was hard to do when she refused to let herself shift into the monster, and Lexi had become a much larger, much stronger creature on a murderous rampage. Lexi had gotten a few good kicks in to Gemma’s stomach, and if she didn’t have siren healing powers, Gemma’d have been worried about internal bleeding. That’s why Gemma had hidden under the stairs—she clearly couldn’t fight her head-on.
“Just who I was hoping to see today,” Lexi told Daniel in her awful monster voice.
With Lexi’s back to her, Gemma stood up and drove the poker right into her shoulder. She wasn’t really sure where else would be a better place to stab her, since Alex had already proven that stabbing her through the heart did nothing.
Lexi roared in anger and grabbed the poker with her long, skinny fingers. Gemma slid out past her, running low to the floor to avoid Lexi’s wings as they flapped in rage.
“Daniel, run!” Gemma shouted, and she started to charge toward him.
Then she remembered Marcy, turned, and doubled back toward her. By the time she had turned around, Lexi had already gotten the poker free, and she threw it across the room. Daniel ducked, and it narrowly missed his head before it clattered against the wall.