Four hundred years.
He told me he was turning eighteen.
And that’s when it occurs to me: It was never his ancestors who scorned the disfigured women. It was him. All along, it was him. He didn’t inherit his curse. He was personally cursed. He’s a sociopath. A complete and utter sociopath.
“Do you remember Kate?”
I swallow. Do I play his game? Keep this conversation going? “The girl you told me about at homecoming? The one you fell in love with?”
He nods. “I stumbled upon her one night, a hundred and fifty years ago.”
The story he told me. About a nix finding a siren . . . It was Erik and Kate, not two strangers a century and a half ago.
“My favorite river fed into the ocean where she swam.” He pauses. “She was beautiful. I fell in love with her within the month.”
I wait for the punch line I am sure is coming.
“But she didn’t love me. I broke her curse, and still she didn’t love me.” He looks off into the distance. “So I drowned her.”
My horror grows, along with the smile on his face. “And then I went back to the status quo. Drowning women in the river. The only thing that ever gave me satisfaction.
“But I got bored after a while, and then I got an idea. I find another siren, bring her to the water before her curse is broken . . . well, she’ll put up a real struggle. Sirens can hold their breath so much longer, it makes the whole fight more challenging. And I do enjoy a challenge.”
I step forward, hope he forgets Cole is standing in front of him. “What the hell was the point of all this then? Why feed me all these lies? Why get to know me? I’ve been to this lake every night. You could have killed me by now.”
To this, his grin widens. “You ever watch a cat kill a mouse? They don’t just go for the lethal blow. Not when it’s so much more fun to play with a victim. Killing is a sort of seduction, you know.”
“You’re disgusting.”
“Ah, and yet you nearly fell for me. Pity this all ends so soon. I would have so enjoyed hearing those three words before I drowned you.” He smirks. “You’re the eighth, you know. The number would be higher, except it takes so long to find your kind. You’re just not as common as one might think.”
He screws his mouth up to the side as if deep in thought, but it’s all part of his theatricalities. “The last one fell for me in thirty-nine days. I only gave myself three weeks with you, once I was sure you were a siren. Perhaps that was too greedy of me.”
It’s as if my toes have turned into roots and grown right into the bank of the lake. I can’t seem to move, not even an inch. I can’t believe I was so blindsided.
He frowns. “Which leads me to this,” he says, his hand sweeping across the lake. “Your time is up. And lucky for you, so is his. So you can have him after all, as long as you both shall live.” He says the last part as if it’s a marriage vow.
He reaches out and kicks Cole, sending him facedown into the mud. I jump forward to help, but Erik puts a hand up, and the look in his eyes is enough to stop me. Cole wriggles around, trying to get to his knees again, but his arms are bound so tightly he can’t get up. Erik seems to enjoy watching him squirm. “Don’t get me wrong, you’ve been fun at times. But you’re a little on the boring side. Too studious, too serious. The last siren, well, she was a partier. Drowned her sorrows, if you know what I mean.”
Erik waves both hands around maniacally, as the panic rises in my stomach. He’s hanging by a thread now, and I don’t have any plan for getting out of this mess. I turn to look at Cole again, desperation growing. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This isn’t why I brought him here. If only I’d known . . . “Just let him go, Erik. This is between me and you.”
Erik leans down and hauls Cole to his feet. Erik has at least three or four inches, not to mention twenty or thirty pounds, on Cole. If they go at it, Cole’s a dead man. That ugly, devilish smirk rises on Erik’s lips, and he takes a step away from me.
“See, that’s where you’re wrong. It is about Cole. This guy is so in love with you, he’ll probably love you in spite of all this, and then your curse is gone. So he’s gotta go, while you’re still a siren and still fun for me. I need you to be cursed, or haven’t you figured that out yet?”
Erik takes another step. Toward the lake.
“Stop,” I say, my voice as steady as I can manage. “This is stupid! You can’t just—”
And then he half throws, half shoves Cole, who flies into the water, headfirst. The water isn’t very deep that close to shore, but with his hands behind his back . . .
I scramble across the bank and throw myself into the water. I’m stopped when, midway between the land and the lake, I collide with Erik. His arms lock around me. The momentum sends the two of us back into the water.
And then something’s not right. We’re moving backward, almost floating, but I don’t feel Erik taking steps as he drags me into the water. I blink and look down, at where my legs meet the surface, and my heart jumps straight into my throat.
I never asked . . . never wondered what he looked like in the water. I assumed he’d look like me, with shimmery blue skin. But . . . it’s not like that at all. His legs have disappeared, replaced with scaled limbs. More like something on a dragon, a deep red.
His favorite color is red.
Except, they’re not like legs, either. They’re . . . like tentacles, long, winding, slithering around underneath the surface like a den of snakes. I get my hands up and put them against his chest, and then shove hard, and thanks to the water his grip loosens. I slide out. The second I have enough gap, I drop down, under the water, out of his grasp, and throw myself into a swim.
Cole could be underwater right now. Struggling for air . . . his lungs filling with the lake....
My head breaks through the surface, and I take in a ragged breath as the water trails rivers down my face, in my eyes. I blink several times, and with relief, I see Cole.
Just as I think I’m going to make it to shore—to where Cole is coughing and sputtering, wriggling out of the lake because his hands are still tied behind his back, Erik gets a hold of my ankle. I slide backward, under the surface and into the deeper area of the lake. I take a gasp of air a second before I go under.
I will my heart to slow, try to get the panic to ebb so that my oxygen will last longer, but all I can do is blink against the water. Red tentacles flare out all around me. Erik drags me deeper. This must be what it’s like when he finds a girl and drags her into the river.
This must be exactly what it’s like. He’s going to drown me.
I twist, struggling against his hold. But it does nothing. I claw at the bottom of the lake, trying to find something strong enough to hold on to, trying to keep him from dragging me deeper. My fingernails claw at the muddy bottom but come up empty.
This lake isn’t that big. But it’s big enough to drown in. My fingers slide across something, but it goes by so quickly I can’t figure out what it is. With a sudden burst of energy, I drag Erik back—just a foot—far enough that I find it again before he drags me even deeper.
A stick. A little thinner and a little longer than a baseball bat, by the feel of it. It’s getting hard to see with all the silt and dirt we’re stirring up. I grip it in two hands and then twist around and throw everything I have into swinging it, right at his face, and those glowing blue eyes that only just register what’s about to happen.
The water slows it down, but I still manage to crack him hard enough that his grip loosens. I hurtle myself forward, swimming faster than I ever have. When I get shallow enough, I surface, raking in big lungfuls of air.
Cole has somehow gotten the belt off and is stepping into the lake, as if he’s going to help me. As if he wouldn’t drown before he even understood what was happening. “Go! Run!”