Page 69 of Mama Si's Paradise

Then, “Mamayka, you’ve brought fresh blood.”

She spoke. The siren fucking spoke, and her voice was better than music and her wide eyes were like little worlds I wanted to get lost in, and she seemedin lovewith me already.

Fuck,I was in love with her, too!

My God, what a face. What a beautiful, unearthly, mesmerizing face she had…

“Spare us your charm, Sedelis,” Mama Si said and squeezed my hand tightly again.

The siren then looked away from me and to her.

The spell broke like a rubber band snapping inside my head, and I breathed again—I hadn’t been until now. I breathed and I saw the siren for what she truly was without whatever magic her eyes had put on me. I saw her grey skin and dirty looking hair and every inch of my skin had raised in goose bumps—what the actual fuck?!

Where did the impossibly beautiful creature with stars in her eyes go?How?!

“But I thought you wouldn’t have an offering to make this year. I thought the one you chose fe—” she started, and even her voice sounded a bit different now, too. Not nearly as alluring.

“You see me here, do you not?” Mama Si cut her off, sounding more irritated than I’d ever heard her before. “I made it. That’s all you need to know.”

The siren giggled and the sound of it was like an illusion, like a fantasy, like it was just an echo coming to us from far, far away. She turned those big blue eyes to me again, the color the exact same as the water, and she suddenly jumped.

She jumped up and dipped into the water, giving me just a glimpse of her body.

Her breasts were bare. Her pale skin merged into grey scales that started on the sides of her waist and met under her bellybutton, then covered every inch of the fishtail that made her bottom half. A big white fin started in the middle of her back, right over her backbone, and went down to the tip of that fishtail.

Mermaids are real,a voice in my head kept whispering, as ifthatwas the biggest surprise of the day, when I could see dragons flying in the sky and a fairy with tornwings on her back and a black cloud over the ocean that had become even bigger now that we were so close to it. So fucking big I couldn’t see the edges of it at all.

“What did she mean?” I asked when the siren disappeared. “Who was your last offering? What?—”

“She’s a siren, Fall Doll. They live to plant seeds of doubt and guilt and everything bad into the minds of their subjects,” Mama Si cut me off. “And make no mistake—we arealltheir subjects. It’s best to keep your mind protected from her kind.”

Was she fucking serious? “How?!” I breathed. “Mama Si, I can’t!” What the hell could I do against a fucking siren? “I can’t…I can’t do this—I can’t!”

She turned to me, eyes cold, smile vanished. “Control yourself, Autumn Hayes,” she ordered, and it was so strange to hear my name falling out of her lips like that. My full name.

A long breath left me, and a warm calm suddenly settled on my shoulders.

She was absolutely right—I was overreacting. I knew all of this, had spent every night petting glowing animals and playing a piano made of tree roots—this wasn’t new to me. In fact,thiswas the very reason I’d agreed to do this with Mama Si. This was the reason I’d craved this so badly—it was magic. Dragons and witches and mermaids—magic,and I was now part of it.

I would not back down. I would not turn my back on the most beautiful, terrifying, breathtaking thing I’d ever seen in my whole life, no matter how scary the darkness of the Whispering Woods looked.

Thiswas the rest of my life.

“There,” Mama Si whispered, holding my hand in both of hers. “It’s almost time, Fall Doll. All the offerings are here. Almost time.”

“Are they all human?” I asked, though I knew. Though it wasso painfully easy to see the difference between the Enchanted and the humans—just as easy as it was to see the difference between Mama Si and me.

“Of course. All are human. All willing offerings—just like you.”

Except none of those women looked as afraid I was.

The first one had long blonde hair, and she had her chin up and her shoulders back. That’s about all I could make out from the distance, as well as the black coat and the pointy hat of the woman standing next to her.A witch.An actual witch.

The others seemed just as confident, though too far away for me to see details, but they all looked ahead at the Whispering Woods like they could see beyond those shadows.

“They’re all women,” I whispered, not sure why that surprised me.

“Yes, they are,” Mama Si simply said.

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