Page 56 of The Eighth Isle

“Oh, what a mess!” she said, wiping her tears and shaking her fingers like they weredirty.

I looked at Grey again, and he was just as confused as I was.What the hell is happening?

“You may cheer up now. I told you—I can’t kill you if I try.” Syra pushed her long hair back and looked down at her dress to make sure it wasn’t dirty.

Just like that.

She did a one-eighty just like that—a completely different person. Someone who couldn’t have possibly been on theground, crying her heart out just two minutes ago. No fucking way was that the same person.

“Why not?” I said despite my better judgment, but I knew that it wasn’t over. I knew that, if we tried to make a run for it right now, she’d stop us.

“The question is,why would I,when you’ve given me everything I’ve ever wanted?” said Syra, finally happy with her dress and her face, and once again, she was glowing. Her eyes were no longer bloodshot, and she wasn’t shaking, but when she smiled like that, I realized her canines were pointier.

Sirens didn’t have fangs as long as vampires, but they developed very sharp canines when they were feeding—they needed them to tear into flesh. Right now, Syra looked about ready to eat us whole no matter what she said.

“You have given me everything that was taken from me, lovely. I won’t harm a hair on your head…yet.” That smile on her face. Even Mama Si couldn’t compare. “See, I took an oath once, when I was young and naive and in love. I promised Hansil that I would never kill him, never end the life of anyone who carried his blood in their veins, and I laid down my magic with that oath. It holds true, apparently, to this day.”

That bad feeling in my gut intensified with every word she spoke.

“I still couldn’t save him, though. Not when my own sisters betrayed me,” she continued, pacing slowly in a circle in front of us, staring at the ground as her dress and her hair flowed in an unearthly way, following her movements.

I squeezed Grey’s hand and his wing around my shoulder tightened.

“But it’s okay, I guess,” she said, raising her head to look at me again. “You,I think, are Ennaris’s way of apologizing to me for my bad fortune, lovely. The universe itself has responded to the unfairness that was done to me—my Hansil taken from myarms…” And she shook her head, like the thought made her both happy and sad.

“Hansil couldn’t stand to even look at you,” I spit because what the hell else could I do? Minutes ago, when she’d grabbed me with her magic and had squeezed me like that, I’d surrendered. I’d let go and I’d accepted my death because that had made sense. It had made perfect sense, but now? The way she was acting, the things she was saying turned my mind chaotic. I didn’t know what the hell to think yet.

“Oh, yes—I know my sisters told you that,” Syra said.

“They didn’t—I saw it myself in the Storyteller.” Not that it made any difference.

But she waved me off. “Storytellers are merely devices to tell someone else’s story. They tell you what a book contains, and whatever book you read about me, Fall, is a lie. My sisters have lied to the entire world. They never told anyone the real story.”

The real story.

Those three words that had been in the back of my mind since she first woke up and spoke to Sedelis.

“What’s the real story?” I asked—and I’d asked the sisters this, too, but they’d refused to tell me. In Romin’s office, I’d asked them, but they’d insisted there was no such thing.

There was. I’d known it since the first time I heard those words, and I knew it now.

Syra smiled. “The real story is that Hansil was in love with me just as much as I was in love with him,” she told us. “The real story is that my sisters were jealous of how much he adored me.”

I shook my head—no,I’d seen Hansil myself. I’d seen the way he’d screamed at her, called her a monster, told her he could never love her. I’dseen.

“Liar,” I said, even though Grey squeezed my hand to warn me—we did not want to piss her off right now, far from it. But I needed to understand what was happening. I needed to knowwhy I was alive, why she’d cried like that—why she was so damnhappynow. Ihadto know.

With her brows raised, Syra said, “Oh, am I now?” She shook her head and turned to me with her whole body. “How about this, then, lovely? How about you come tomyStoryteller this time?”

She brought her hand to her lips, kissed the tips of her fingers, and blew it toward me.

Never in a million years could I have guessed what came next.

Magic everywhere all at once, the same intensity as before, except this kind was different. This kind was…colder. Grey called my name, and his arms were around me, I thought, because my legs had let go. He was shaking me, but I couldn’t close my eyes. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe—I could do nothing at all but lie there, paralyzed, staring at the sky, until the sky changed. Until the magic, that cold magic that was now inside me, began to paint it with different colors.

Just like that, I was thrown back into the past again.

But this time the view of that beach was very different…

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