Page 27 of Rise of the Siren Queen
This couldn’t be happening. Not to me. Not like this.
“What…” I said, my voice almost a whisper as I stared down at the impossible. “What did you do to me?” My gaze darted to her, searching for answers, for anything that could explain this nightmare.
Her expression softened, but her eyes held a sadness I hadn’t seen before. She didn’t flinch, didn’t look away from my confusion, my disbelief.
She knew.
She’d known this was coming.
“It wasn’t me,” she breathed, her voice steady. “Adrian, you’re… transitioning. Your hybrid nature is emerging.”
“Hybrid?” I choked out between gasps. My throat burned, my heart pounding so violently I thought it might burst.
My hands dropped from the tail as anger surged through me, the confusion twisting into something sharp, something that burned.
“This isn’t possible!” My anger bubbling to the surface, I shouted as I turned to face her fully.
“I’m human! I’ve always been human!” My voice cracked with frustration, with the absurdity of what I was saying, even though the evidence was right in front of me. “This…this is a mistake. It has to be.”
Her gaze didn’t waver, but I saw the pain in her eyes, the regret she tried to hide.
“I wish I could tell you it was,” she murmured, her voice soft but unyielding. “But it’s not. This is what you are. What you’ve always been, even if you didn’t know it.”
I stared at her, my heart beating wildly, every instinct I had screaming that this couldn’t be happening. That this was some crueljoke, a dream I’d wake up from any second now.
Another wave of searing pain coursed through my body.Hybrid. The concept seemed impossible, unreal. How could this be happening?
But as the minutes stretched on, as I looked down at the tail that now replaced my legs, reality crashed over me. I wasn’t dreaming. This wasn’t some nightmare I could shake off.
This was real.
The truth of it settled into my bones, heavy and cold. My chest tightened, the disbelief giving way to something else, fear. I didn’t know who I was anymore.
The pain finally subsided, leaving me breathless and shaking. “I’m a… monster?” I muttered. The words felling like a final blow, the last shred of normalcy crumbling around me.
Her eyes flashed, her brows knitting together, and I saw the shimmer of unshed tears threatening to spill over.
My chest tightened, a cold pang of regret twisting deep inside me. I cursed myself silently. The guilt settling over me like a weight too heavy to shake off. I never meant to hurt her, not like this, but it didn’t matter. The damage had been done, and I could see it in her expression.
Before I could force the words of apology past the lump in my throat, her voice sliced through the silence, steady, but there was something raw beneath it. A quiet strength, but with a tremor I couldn’t ignore. Something I couldn’t quite read, but it hit me harder than I expected.
“Half Triton, actually,” she said, her voice raw, cracking with a pain that made my chest ache. The words hung in the air, heavier than they should have been. “But that doesn’t change who you are, Adrian.”
Her tone, laced with hurt, stung more than the revelation itself.But I didn’t have time to process it. Instead, I let out a bitter laugh, hollow and sharp, like it didn’t belong in my chest.
“Doesn’t change who I am? Look at me!” I gestured to my tail, the twisted reminder of everything I’d lost in one night, of the things I still didn’t understand. “I don’t even know who I am anymore. How the hell did this happen?”
Her gaze dropped. But I couldn’t back down now, not when the questions shredded at me. Not when the confusion and frustration boiled over.
“I need answers!” The words were a growl, raw and unfiltered, slipping out before I could stop them. Even I felt the edge in my voice, a sound that startled me.
To her credit, she didn’t flinch, even though the sadness in her eyes didn’t disappear. It hit me harder than I expected, because I wasn’t angry at her. I was angry at everything else, at the mess I was in, at myself. But never her. I needed to get it together.
She took a breath, her voice softer when she spoke, and it threw me off balance. There was no hesitation, no walls in her words. It caught me by surprise, especially after the tension that had built between us.
“I will give you the answers I can,” she said, her voice steady, the calm that made me confirm she had known this was coming. “Your near-death experience activated your hybrid powers, and with that came the first shift. You turned into something like me… so to speak.”
Triton.
