Page 8 of Song of Lorelei

Lorelei hid a smirk behind her hand and glanced over her shoulder to witness the scientist’s reaction.

His cheeks reddened. “Just do it,” he muttered under his breath.

“My word is not good?” Nireed growled, kicking out her foot. It didn’t connect with anyone or anything. Rather, the frustration behind the gesture struck Lorelei as the equivalent of a stamped foot. Only, considering that Nireed normally had fins, that movement must have translated into something like an irritated flick of the tail.

It took some coaxing, but in the spirit of “not wasting anymore time,” Nireed scrawled her name where needed, grumbling the entire time.

As much as Lorelei disliked making Nireed follow human bureaucracy and scientific protocol she didn’t agree with or understand, they couldn’t hand wave it, especially with the whole world watching their work. But most of all, for Lorelei, the need for Nireed to give informed consent went deeper to a selfish, guilt-ridden place, a place that kept her awake at night.

She took Nireed from the ocean and brought her to this nightmare on shore. She was responsible for any mistreatment or discomfort the siren suffered.

Not Lila. Not Killian, or Walt, or Will, or Jackie. Not even Dr. Asshole.

* * *

Sometimes the memory of Nireed’s aggressive consent to be studied made Lorelei feel better. Today it didn’t. Guilt gnawed and dug its claws in deep.

“Shorewalker?” Nireed poked Lorelei’s shoulder, startling her from the memory. “You are lost,” she said, her brow pinched.

Was the siren concerned for her?

Lorelei rubbed her eyes, trying to bring herself back to the present. She really needed to brew herself a cup of coffee. Or three. The tea she had on her drive to work just wasn’t cutting it. “Sorry. I was just remembering something. How’s your neck?” Lorelei pressed her thumb to her index and middle fingers near the base of her head, like the motion used to give injections. The sirens didn’t have a sign for “shots,” so Lorelei learned the one used in American Sign Language and showed it to Nireed. She had deemed it apt, and they’d used it ever since.

Nireed rotated her neck gingerly. “Not good, but not bad like before.”

Because the merfolk sickness was a brain virus, a mutated marine morbillivirus with aggressive rabies-like symptoms, treatment had to be delivered via intracerebroventricular injection to bypass the blood brain barrier. Unpleasant, but necessary, and Nireed took it with a lot of grace.

What Nireed and the other sirens called “the cure” was really a new, rarely funded experimental treatment. It wasn’t even a vaccine, but something the marine epidemiologists called a “virophage.” Basically, an injected virus that attacks another virus already living in the body. It didn’t kill the virus, but in theory, it weakened it to the point of being ineffective. And with the mermaid morbillivirus being generational, mutated, and less severe as it passed down the family line, a biological pivot to keep the host body alive longer, time had already done some of that work for them.

Lorelei begged Lila to test the different virophages on her, as well, to give Nireed a break, but the marine biologist refused—claiming Killian would kill her if she experimented on his fiancée.

That didn’t sit well.

Who would hold them all accountable if Nireed suffered adverse effects from the experimental treatment? While Lorelei knew Lila and her team did what they could to make Nireed comfortable in an intrusive research process, and that they would fight for her life if the tests ever went horribly awry, her good health fell second to the research.

Nireed wasn’t expendable, but they took risks with her.

Bile rose at the back of Lorelei’s throat for her own part to play in Nireed’s captivity.She swallowed, trying to ignore the knots pressing against the walls of her stomach. “I’m really sorry about that. Lila thinks they’re getting close. The one they tried before did some damage to the virus. We’re hoping the next will critically weaken it, and this will all be over soon.”

Nireed shrugged. “It will, or it won’t be. I’m doing this for my people, no matter what.”

“We didn’t give you a choice.”

Undine, the leader of the sirens, had offered Nireed up as collateral—her life to study in exchange for a possible “cure”—but it was Lorelei herself and the rest of the live capture team who accepted.

For one hazy moment, on that mermaid-finding expedition late last year, it had felt justified that the siren paid for her people’s crimes. The sirens had mercilessly devoured The Osprey crew, of which Lorelei had been a student member.

But remembering Undine describe the sickness that made them mad for human flesh and then watching Nireed shiver and cower on deck when she was left behind, Lorelei’s anger had ebbed. She knew firsthand how powerful that hunger could be. Even with her human-raised sensibilities, she wasn’t stronger than the sickness.

If she hadn’t revealed herself to Lila, asked for help, and found an alternative meat source to stave it off, Lorelei knew the madness would have consumed her. Of that she had no doubt. She had almost killed someone.

So no, Lorelei did not think Nireed deserved to live in a literal giant fishbowl for what could be the rest of her life. If anyone deserved it, it was Lorelei for putting Nireed there, paying for her own anonymity as a siren with another’s freedom.

“You never had the chance to refuse.” Her conscience demanded that she lay this brutal truth bare between them. Not doing so would be harboring a lie, and she couldn’t lie to Nireed or herself—not about this. It would infect her soul and fester from the inside out like a necrotic disease.It had already been eating away at her for so long.

Nireed shrugged, looking out the window at the sea.

The sun had begun to rise over the horizon, casting the grey morning sky with a red glow.

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