Page 60 of Blood of the Sirens
“Merrick, we just want to speak with her,” Father pleaded with me. “Please. We aren’t like the other young mers, we—”
Why were they treating me like an invalid?
“Tie him up. Force him to tell us.”
“Desperate times call for desperate measures. She’s the only siren—”
“STOP!” I cried out, alarmed.
Hands came at me from all sides, pinning me down and grabbing onto my tail so I couldn’t move. I tried to writhe and twist away, but there were too many of them, and they all knew how to fight better than I did. Perhaps, I should have taken more of an interest in combat lessons when I was younger, instead of always focusing on my art.
Fists pummeled the side of my head, and knives slashed at my face. My arms were trapped at my side. My father made an enraged, sorrowful, keening sound, and dove at his friends. His spear flashed out of nowhere and dark blue blood swirled around me. The elders hissed in pain and suddenly my tail was free.
Did I still have a tail? Everything hurt. I couldn’t tell if the blood in the water was mine or from the others.
“GO! Get her away from here!” Father commanded.
I didn’t wait to be told twice.
I beat my tail as hard as I could and swam as fast as I could back to the siren shrine. Pain was secondary. The burning sensation in my face and head was secondary. The only thing that mattered was getting back to Jesse alive.
Don’t think about the trail of blood you’re leaving.
Just swim.
Don’t think about how your body burns in pain from too many places to count.
Just swim.
Just swim.
Swim.
TWENTY
Jesse
The old citywas odd and a bit tragic, but still cool. The buildings were made from some sort of mixture of coral, shells, and stone, and were mostly all intact from what I could tell after digging through the bioluminescent plants clinging to everything. A quick swim offered me an accurate picture of the town’s layout. Or what I supposed was a town. Since travel wasn’t limited to one ‘plane,’ there wasn’t a need for roads or meticulously straight rows. The buildings made a circle around each other, spiraling out from the largest, most ornate dwellings to the smaller, more sparse ones on the outside of the spiral.
Start with the biggest and baddest, obviously.
I swam into a large opening toward the top of the biggest building, shielding my eyes against the bioluminescence to try and orient my sight better to the darkness. Once past the outer layer of plants and algae, it was mostly dark with only some of the glow filtering into the structure.
Even though the building was tall, there weren’t ‘floors’ like human buildings. Small platforms jutted out from the walls, from where I was all the way down to the sandy bottom. Floating down slowly, I could see where it made sense. When you didn’t have gravity to worry about, space could be used horizontallyandvertically. Barnacles and coral covered every surface that didn’t have the glowing algae on it. If there were items left over from another time, the ocean had already taken care of reclaiming them. Strange lumps were everywhere on the walls and platforms, indistinguishable now from the structure itself.
I settled on the bottom, my tail kicking up sand in frenzied spirals. I stared at both for a moment, mesmerized.
You’ve got a freaking tail!It’s gorgeous!
Bunching unfamiliar muscles, I gave an enthusiastic THWACK.
“OW!”
Pain shot through my new tail as I thwacked a little too hard and banged it off a large mound of calcified coral. A large hunk of coral drifted to the sand, dislodged from the larger mound. Curious (but mostly wanting a distraction from my throbbing, painfully stupidity), I picked it up, studying it closely.
At first glance it just looked like another hunk of hard coral, grown over an object left alone for hundreds of years. But … not quite. Instead of being covered all over by coral, it was covered on both sides with clear spots down the middle—as if the coral grew around two separate objects and not one.
A hinge! It was a box of some kind!
