Chapter 14: 14

"She's gone!  Someone, help me!  Please—she's gone!"

The Siren's begging turned hysterical as night fell upon the Siren community of Hefeta.

Oren's beastly cry rattled the night.

"Inala, Warrick, get Josephine back in Sabira's home. Protect her at all costs."

Blocking the scene of a Siren crying on the ground clutching a torn wisp of a white and golden robe in the grass beside the meat smoking building, Warrick turned to me with a grave seriousness robbing all his features of any light there might've been when he was clutching Erinna to his chest.

Warrick followed Olesia's order even as considering her elderly state I would've assumed her to be more at risk than me if danger was near, but when Warrick spotted the soldiers on the hill just as I did, he seemed to relax at the fact that the reinforcements were on their way to protect their Elder.

Inala clasped a rugged hand on my upper arm and didn't let go even as I protested.

Even as I pulled and tugged and tried to get one last glimpse at what was left of the girl who'd been stolen.

"Please help me! She's just a little girl! She's my little girl—dear Etana please please don't let her be residing in your world already! I pray to you Etana, Goddess of the Everworld, don't take my baby from me yet. Don't take her, it's too soon! She's too young!"

The Siren's wails turned to something resembling a song, and just as Warrick plugged his ears to hide from the force of the Siren song that would kill him, Erinna was there, placing cotton in his ears and tugging him forward into Sabira's doorway, out of earshot of the deadly song piercing the night.

Though she did not have the strange white milky smoke pouring out of her mouth like I did as of late when the song spilled out of me, the agony dripping off her song burned me just as much as my acidic cloud of demise that seemed to destroy anyone or anything in its path.

"Josephine, let's go. You need to get inside."

Except Inala's words weren't as fervent as they should've been.

Instead, I could tell she found herself wanting to join in on the song the woman in front of us was suffering out, her notes weaving a tale of a loss and heartbreak so potent I found myself falling forward on my hands and knees, the lilting pull of my very essence begging me to join her.

The men were already searching the thick copse of trees surrounding the mountains on all sides of the Siren community. They'd have had cotton in their ears for situations just like these.

I pushed forward through the crowds of Sirens standing about whispering and crying and hugging each other until I knelt before the woman lost in her trance that had barely reached a volume for the others to hear.

Olesia and the other Elders were nowhere to be found in the crowd of Sirens all gathered around a grieving mother who'd just lost her daughter somehow to what had to be the King of Valencia.

He'd already taken far too much from me already, and yet he was still taking, still searching, still testing his limits until soon those limits would snap and break.

Reaching out with my hands, I clasped them with the sobbing mother in her song trance and felt the connection as bright as if a strike of lightning had reached down an illuminated forked finger of power and jolted into my body at the very moment my body made contact with hers.

Her song flowed from her to me, and suddenly it wasn't my own torment seeping from my lips, but hers, and then Inala's hand found my shoulder as she leaned on my crouched form.

Her agony raced through me like a beacon of torture and misery, but again, it wasn't my own song of pain that flowed through my lips, but Inala's.

An ancient language of words all connected in a cohesive pillar of blinding golden light pulsed behind my eyelids as the sounds blurred together and this language bled from me as if I'd spoken it my entire life.

One by one, the Sirens nearby noticed the exchange, and once another touched Inala, her power and anguish soaked up into my skin and the song changed to a tune of a wife who couldn't bare children for her lover.

Again and again and again the trauma and plagues of pain inflicting these Sirens poured from my body instead of theirs as they all held on and witnessed their pound of flesh being taken by someone else.

And in their pain, I saw reflected my own.

Mirror tragedies, theirs and mine.

To be a woman in this world was nearly a death sentence, but with being a Siren as well, there was a target on our backs that they couldn't pinpoint.

They would try their hardest to destroy us and tear us down, but they could not escape our power, for we would hunt down each and every man that had ever wronged us and placed the worth of their torture upon them by our own hands.

And then on the outskirts of the circle, the Elders stood on in watch as the smoke finally seeped forth from my mouth when my song broke through the barrier of grief and turmoil.

Some of the Sirens gasped, but it did not burn them as it fell out of me in foggy wisp waves that drifted harmlessly over their skin.

But from my throat, I burned.

I grew dizzy, the pain scorching me from the inside out, but the song within me didn't stop as the smoke from my voice traveled down the meadows and over the ponds as big as lakes.

It didn't stop as it traversed hilly countrysides and over wildflowers whose colors had grown dim in the cloudy moonlit night.

My voice spoke the song of my father and Peter as it sought out something—something that I hadn't given it direction to do so.

Something alive and...scared.

The thing I was searching for was running from awful, evil men on her tail, desperate to catch her just as the king's men were desperate to catch me.

The Sirens around me held tightly onto my shoulders, my arms, my hands, my legs, my stomach, my face, anywhere they could touch me as my gift drew power and strength from them like little wells full of a golden reservoir of energy.

My gift was searching amongst the brambles of drooping trees with branches as sharp as needles whipping past the running, scared little thing.

There.

The men had her cornered.

Trembling, salty tears tracking down her cheeks, my mind's eye found her just as that beast roared out into the night and fell down upon the men, shredding one in half with its claws just as the murky mist of my gift became inhaled by the other two and they began to convulse.

To burn from the inside out.

Just like me.

My eyes rolled into the back of my head just as the girl took astride to the wind and barreled her way back down a rocky hill, and then—

"There she is!"

All at once, the hands that had been atop my body left me and I fell onto my back just as the last drop of mist and song left my mouth.

Inala's eyes were the last thing that I glimpsed before sweet, sweet darkness overtook me.

***

"I'll take it from here, Oren. She doesn't need to wake up in your bed roll."

"Like Everworld you will. Josephine is my responsibility. She is mine to watch over and take care of."

"And what gave you that idea? The fact that you kidnapped her instead of gently asking her to come with you to save her homeland so you could get this beastly curse removed? I'm sure she'd love to wake up to that cradling her."

A deep, low growl rumbled my chest, but the sound was comforting and warmth radiated from the chest behind me, so I only burrowed even deeper into it.

"You know you're going to have to let her go, she's our heir, and we'll need her when we summon—"

"Do not speak about these things in front of her. She might be sleeping, but we have no idea what her mind might catch. Nothing will happen, it will all be fine, Inala. I am watching over her tonight. There is nothing and no one who can take her from me when I am in this form. I will be her guardian at night."

"At least bring her over to Sabira's at dawn. She needs a good bath and some new clothing. I'm going to tend to Minna's daughter, see what I can glean from her about the incident. She needs to start right away tomorrow, even if what happened last night took too much out of her. These things keep happening—we needed Nicos five years ago. She has to be ready, and soon."

"She will be. I'll make sure of it."

"Oh, will you? And what about her wellbeing? What if it's too much for her to handle?"

"It won't be."

"And what if it is?"

Inala's voice turned into a hiss, something unlike the normal everyday cadence of her tone filled with mirth and rasp.

"Then we'll do what needs to be done, but I won't allow any harm to come to her."

"Until he comes, you mean?"

"I told you I have no choice in that decision, Inala. Now stop, she needs to rest, and this arguing might wake her. Go and make sure the little Siren is alright."

"She will be, thanks to Josephine. I still can't believe she did it. How in the Everworld she acquired these powers...it doesn't matter. All I know is that I'm positive we can't do it without her. We can't summon Nicos without that moonlight from her voice."

"I agree. She will be ready come the first Harvest moon. Until then, we need to do all that we can in order to prepare her. She can't be caught off guard by anything that happens."

"We will do all that we can. And that is all that we can do."

Inala must've left Oren's room or tent or wherever we were, because Oren's strong, muscular arm banded itself around my middle and I was lulled deeper into an intense sleep.

For once, I wasn't plagued by nightmares of Peter or my father.

Instead, I dreamt of an ancient god being raised from a slumber. A wolf in sheep's clothing.

The Wolf of North Winds.

The God of north wind and ice.

Nicos.

Except...

There was a dark glimmer in his eyes.

A blackness of shadow and death swirling within his ice blue irises.

And then he swept me up within his power and shackled me to a cage, forcing me to sing out my burning mist until the end of my time.

***

Author's Note:

What did you think of this chapter?

What do you think will happen next?

What do you want to happen next?

Until next time my lovely readers,

Kristen :)

***

The World of Irena: