Siren Song (2 page)

Chloe was up early the next morning, restless. Hair in a ponytail, she slipped on a plain tank top over her favorite pair of faded jeans, then climbed over the mountain of pizza boxes in the living room and grabbed her guitar. She considered finding some breakfast, or maybe starting her day with a cold beer from the fridge, but she was too jittery for that.

Settling on the chair by the screened-in porch, she strummed the first few notes of a new song she’d been working on. Soul-baring stuff that made her really uncomfortable. Of course, that’s what music was for, wasn’t it? Maybe it was time to stop hiding from her past. It wasn’t like it was secret. After she’d been rescued, it’d been all over the news….

Chloe and Sophia had been assigned to a checkpoint, part of an effort to respect Iraqi culture by making sure that only female soldiers searched Iraqi women and children. Their position had been overrun and they’d been taken captive. Closing her eyes, Chloe sang the first verse, remembering the chafing sand against her body as they pinned her and yanked her pants down. The burning humiliation when they laughed. Her gut-wrenching revulsion at the sweating men working over her. And the pulse-pounding terror when they put the barrel of a rifle in her mouth to make her stay still.

All the emotions came roiling up inside Chloe now, even the relief at having been rescued before those animals could turn their attention on Sophia. Chloe reminded herself that the important thing was that she’d survived it. Of course, then she’d been discharged. The military didn’t like to bring too much attention to these kinds of things. Chloe hadn’t wanted that kind of attention, either, and unable to stand all the questions, she took her guitar on the road and ended up here, sharing a rented house with Sophia when her tour of duty was up.

Chloe
liked
their old row house with its weathered siding and back porch. She liked Nap Town, too. Annapolis was quaint and colonial. There was plenty of water. About as opposite a place from Iraq as she could find. Except for the soldiers. Well,
sailors
, really; she didn’t usually mind them. At least until one of them threatened her. That’s right. Captain Alex Shore hadn’t just accused her of murder, he’d
threatened
her, and she’d had more than her share of threats for one lifetime….

Whispers at the back of his classroom stopped Alexandros’s hand, midstroke, at the chalkboard. He turned with a stern look, as he had no tolerance for tomfoolery. He was serious about passing on his knowledge of naval history—after all, he’d actually been there for most of it. Just as he was about to propose some form of discipline, the primal notes of a siren’s song shattered his concentration. The chalk in his hand fell away as the sound reverberated through him, sudden arousal threading through his muscles and sinews, luring him.

His students didn’t react. They couldn’t hear it. They might be servicemen, but they weren’t his true comrades. They weren’t tritons; he was alone in this fight. Right now, the power of the siren’s song was driving him mad. He struggled through the rest of the lesson, desperate for class to end, all the while cursing himself for having ever thought that the siren would be sensible enough to simply pack up and leave. How many times in his life was he going to make the mistake of giving a siren the benefit of the doubt?

Unlike ordinary men, he could resist the song of a siren, but he could also hear her from miles away. She had to go. He had to be rid of her. Annapolis simply wasn’t big enough for the both of them.

He followed her voice a few blocks from the Academy and the City Dock, where he found himself outside an old historic row house. He went around the alley in back, where the music was loudest, and the effect on him strongest. He hopped the fence. Chloe was just inside the open back door. Eyes shut, guitar over her knees and completely alone in the most disorderly living room he’d ever seen. Softball equipment spilled over the makeshift coffee table, bills and papers scattered and a stack of empty beer bottles lined one wall. Amid all this, her voice emerged as a haunted, scratchy sound of violation and struggle.

For a moment, just a moment, he could almost believe she really was just a talented musician. That there was some healing in her music. Then again, he’d been fooled before.

He pried open the porch door. As her fingers strummed the end of the tune, she opened her eyes, saw him standing there and jolted up out of her chair. “Holy shit, holy shit! How did you find me?”

The fear in her eyes almost made him feel sorry. But only almost. “Let’s just say I have a very keen sense of hearing.”

She raised her guitar like a weapon to fend him off. “So you break into my house? Are you some kind of psycho?”

She looked even sexier in her street clothes than she did up on stage. With her hair casually pulled back and those low-slung jeans showing tantalizing peeks at her jeweled belly button, she had a sweetness about her that made her that much more dangerous. How many men might fall prey to her even before she parted those pretty lips? He had to get rid of her, but how? No jail would hold her and he didn’t want to drown her; he’d long ago lost his right to play judge, jury and executioner. Sirens weren’t his concern anymore, he reminded himself. But he couldn’t coexist with her. “I told you to get out of town, Chloe.”

“You said I had twenty-four hours. It’s only been fifteen.”

She had him there. “So why aren’t you packing? Or can’t you find your suitcases in this clutter?”

She lifted her chin. “Look, tonight is a big night for me. I’m not leaving and you can’t make me.”

“You’re wrong about that,” he said, catching her by the ponytail and yanking her head back.

He regretted it the moment he did it, and not just because it earned him a well-deserved rib-cracking blow to his side with her guitar, but also because touching her again reminded him of how long it’d been since he’d touched
anyone
. He’d crawled ashore and taken up this guise because he had to be with other people, even if they weren’t his own. But this—the feel of her hair in his fist, and even the feel of skin to skin as she pummeled him to get free—it was too much to bear. He let her go.

“What’s
wrong
with you?” she cried. “Talk about
conduct
 
unbecoming—
“

The front door opened and her keyboardist and drummer stumbled in. They were both anemic-looking young men with tattoos. The drummer had track marks on his arms and was weaving a bit too much to be sober. Even so, Alexandros reckoned that neither of them would be much trouble. He reckoned wrong.

“Hey!” the keyboardist shouted. “Uncool, man.”

Meanwhile, the drummer’s face became a mask of rage. “Chloe, is this guy hassling you?”

Chloe never had a chance to answer because the drummer grabbed a bat from the heap of softball equipment and wielded it like a club. The drummer was in love with her. Rehearsing with her, day after day, her bandmates didn’t stand a chance. Not against her. Not against him, either, but Alexandros wasn’t looking to shed any blood.

The drummer swung the bat. Alexandros caught it in his fist, smashed it against the wall, and it splintered in half. Then he turned for the door, stopping only to say, “There’s a bus leaving in about four hours. Be on it, Chloe.”

Sophia walked in the door not long after and when she heard what happened, she was adamant. “We’re calling the police and telling them that this man is stalking you.”

“We can’t do that,” Chloe said, pulling at the frayed knee of her jeans. “If we call the police, we’ll spend hours giving our statements. They might even cancel tonight’s show!”

Chloe hadn’t worked this hard and sacrificed this much just to blow her one big chance. Her bandmates would never understand her powers, but they
did
understand that talent scouts didn’t come along every day. Outnumbered, Sophia agreed not to call the police, but she made sure they all knew how unhappy she was about it.

That night, backstage, Chloe was shaky. Jay was pacing back and forth, so strung out that she worried he would do something crazy. Meanwhile, Sophia started pouring shots. Chloe was really more of a beer kind of girl, but right now, she’d make do with any kind of alcohol. She downed one shot. Two. Three. Then accidentally smeared her lipstick because her hands were trembling. “Ugh!” Chloe smeared it off and tried again. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“I do,” Sophia said from her perch in Jay’s lap. “You’re letting some guy mess with your head. But you don’t have to be afraid. We’ll all be with you tonight. We’ve got your back!”

“C’mon, Chloe. Don’t be nervous. You look smokin’,” Jay said, looking her up and down. She’d never tried to use her powers on him to make him want her, but he did. She’d rebuffed him as gently as she could; it never seemed to work, and it made Chloe feel guilty.

But if Sophia noticed, she didn’t let on. “It’s all going to be fine, Chloe. You’re gonna
kill
out there.”

Five minutes later, Chloe hit the stage, microphone in hand. The lights blinded her a single moment before Jay’s sticks beat the air, centering her, helping her focus. Then Jay started drumming that backbeat, the first notes from her guitar wailed in the night and Chloe launched into her interpretation of Aerosmith’s “Dream On.”

After the first emotional verse, she had them. Somewhere in the audience was the talent scout and she felt…
powerful.
Onstage, every bad thing that had ever happened to her faded away. This was the magic of it. This was why she loved it. And she was giving the performance of her life. The audience knew the song. They knew the high, piercing note she had to hit, and she felt their anticipation build for it. Feeding off their energy, her legs pumped as she danced to the music, and she filled her lungs. If she missed this note, it’d be a complete disaster. But she wasn’t going to miss it. She was going to hit that note so hard and clear that it’d send shivers down their spines.

Alexandros braced for the high note. In the audience, he gripped the edge of the table, his fingernails digging in as Chloe’s voice rose, spiraling her way up the scale to impossible heights and then there it was. A perfect, powerful, sustained whistle at the top of the human register that shattered something inside him. His resistance to her was slipping and if he didn’t put a stop to this, he’d be the most dangerous prey she’d ever captured.

Well, he had a song of his own. A sound of home, a sound of the deep. One indrawn breath, one long exhale, and the blast of his sonic call pierced the air. The amp on stage blew, with a
pop pop pop!
Sparks flew like fireflies. At first, the audience thought this was part of the show, and they roared with excitement. Then Chloe’s mic cut out and both speakers screeched; it was clear that something had gone wrong. Chloe sputtered a few last notes in confusion, then opened her eyes, the spell of her song broken.

Sweet silence!
Alexandros almost sagged in relief.

Chloe cussed somebody out, then stormed backstage. In the chaos, Alexandros got up and slipped past security. He’d worn his uniform precisely because it intimidated people and no one challenged him. He found Chloe at the back entrance, leaning against the propped-open door, sucking in deep calming breaths of night air. The moment she saw him in the shadows, her eyes widened. “You! Seriously? Seriously!”

“I gave you twenty-four hours to get out of town. Time’s up.”

“What the hell did you just do to our equipment? You’re going to pay for that!”

He grabbed her. In spite of her military background, she was no physical match for him. It was her
voice
that was dangerous. So when her lips parted to scream, he clamped his hand over her mouth. She thrashed violently in his arms, but even in struggle, the touch of her skin was electric. The way her hair threaded between his fingers made him remember another woman that he’d like to forget. But now wasn’t the time for reminiscing or regrets.

He bent close to her ear, and let out a primordial sound, one with all the power of the ocean. The call of a triton could calm waves or call storms; no mortal could withstand it.

She must be drunk again. On some kind of bender. Because the last thing Chloe remembered was a sound by her ear that seemed to split her skull. Then she must have passed out. Now she was being carried. Squinting into the night, she caught glimpses of Main Street through the alleyway. The parked cars. The closed shops. Then she heard the lapping of water in the marina.

Solid arms holding her in an iron grip had to belong to a man. Her eyes focused and she saw that her stalker had her in his grip. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Taking you for a swim,” he grated out.

She didn’t believe him until they hit the water. Until she heard the splash and felt the chill of the harbor as it swallowed her up. She’d been captured once before and escaped with her life. But she felt in more desperate danger in these watery depths than she had in the sand. She came thrashing up out of the water, gasping for air, fighting against the drag of her wet clothes. She tried to scream that a madman was trying to drown her, but Alex’s powerful forearm closed over her throat. A moment later, she was underwater again, clawing at him in the inky blackness.

Swallowing water, she realized with perfect clarity that she was going to drown and went limp with terror. Good God, after everything she’d been through, she was going to die in the arms of some hostile stranger? Oh, hell no! Her teeth sank into his arm when she was suddenly buoyed by some sort of propulsion beneath her. As if she’d stepped on the back of a shark. No, faster than that.
Much
faster.

The next thing she knew, she was being propped up out of the water. Land? No. Something hard. Solid. A boat. A sailboat? She clung to the deck, gasping air into her lungs. The full moon illuminated her captor’s body as he hoisted himself out of the water. With his shirt sucked tight and wet against his chest, he was a veritable poster boy for the U.S. Navy, but she wished she had a knife to stab into those washboard abs; he was no officer, no gentleman, no
human
as far as she was concerned. He was something else. If she didn’t know better, she’d swear he’d turned himself into some kind of torpedo and sped her to this very spot. But men didn’t…couldn’t…”
What
is going on?”

“Relax,” he said. “You’re the lucky winner of an all-expense-paid cruise out of town.”

“You tried to drown me!”

“You’re in no danger of drowning. As long as I have hold of you, you can breathe water as if it were air. You’re safe.”

Chloe gave his comments all the consideration they deserved and then sputtered with near-hysterical laughter. So, this was what a nervous breakdown felt like! She’d finally cracked. It’d happened to other soldiers who had been through worse. She was imagining this whole thing. Including the feel of his arms as they closed around her. She was shivering, and he was wrapping a towel around her, and none of it made any sense. “O-o-okay, so I’m locked up in the nuthouse, and you’re the big burly orderly strapping me down in the padded room, right?”

“No.”

“Where am I,
really
? Because I’m hallucinating that I’m standing on a fucking
boat
in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay!”

“Stop it, Chloe.”

“No, seriously. Whatever meds you’ve got me on must be kicking my ass, so help me out. What are you? The psychiatrist?”

“I’m a triton,” he said, pulling up the anchor.

She paused. “Like the missile or the mermaid?”

“I’m not a
mermaid,
” he snapped. “I’m a
triton
. A soldier of the sea. And if it weren’t for your kind, I’d
still
be serving in the sea instead of living on land.”

This was doing nothing to convince her of her own sanity. “
My kind?
What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re a siren. Didn’t you know it? Didn’t you guess?”

A
siren.
The word screeched through her brain. She wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or offended. “You mean, like a sexy siren? Like, you think I’m attractive? Seductive? Alluring?”

“I mean that I think you’re dangerous, untrustworthy and monstrous.”

“Wait,
what?
”

“You’re Greek, aren’t you? With a name like Chloe Karras, I’d have thought you knew the old stories. Remember Poseidon? I used to be one of his sworn minions—“

“Never mind about
you
. What do you mean I’m a
siren
?”

“You’re a
war-forged
siren. What happened to you in Iraq changed you. Warped you—“

“Hey!” she said sharply, angrily. Just because anybody with an internet connection could apparently find out what happened to her didn’t mean she was about to let him use it to shame her. “
You
try being raped at gunpoint. See if it doesn’t make a new man of you.”

For the first time, his hard shell cracked. He looked down, abashed, then back up at her with a softer expression. “Chloe, what happened to you was horrible, unthinkable,
unforgivable.
Unfortunately, you don’t want
justice
for it. Like all sirens, one man hurt you, so now you want to take it out on the rest.”

Chloe shook her head and tears sprang to her eyes. It hadn’t been just one man, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.

When he started up the engine, she grabbed at the keys but he held them tight. His terrifying eyes fixed her in place as he said, “Realize that I’m only using the boat for your comfort, Chloe. I can drag you back into the water if you want.”

“
Screw you.
Just screw you. And that’s what you’re gonna be when the police catch up with you for kidnapping me.
Screwed.
”

“I’m not worried,” he said, turning on the motor. “You’ll turn up tomorrow morning in New York City. If you’re smart, you’ll stay there. If you’re not so smart, you’ll sound like a strung-out drug addict full of wild tales that nobody will believe.”

“I don’t do drugs,
fuck you very much,
and when I call the police, my friends will back up everything I say.”

Now he looked particularly smug. “I’ll swim back before you can even finish dialing. Nobody is going to believe that you were kidnapped by a triton.”

Chloe was out of arguments except for one. “You’re such a coward! You stand there talking about
justice,
but you think I kill people and all you want is to get me out of town? What a cop-out.”

Oh, that struck a nerve with him. In the moonlight, she saw him clench his jaw. “I’d like nothing more than to bring you to justice, Chloe. But that isn’t my duty anymore.”

“Not your duty? Then what’s with your uniform and shiny captain’s insignia?”

“That’s my mortal guise—
disguise,
if you will. I’m alone in this world until the end and I just want to be rid of you.”

“But I keep telling you! I didn’t kill those midshipmen.”

“I might believe you if I hadn’t heard a siren song the night they died. It nearly shook me out of bed but I was too late to save those young men. I can resist you, but those midshipmen didn’t stand a chance. You lured them to the water’s edge and made them jump in. Didn’t you?”

“No!”

“You said they got in a fight after one of your shows. So what happened? Did they flirt with you? You decided they had to pay for it with their lives?”

Chloe clenched her fists. “I didn’t do anything to them. They were aggressive with me and got into it with my drummer. Jay pummeled one of them pretty good, then they left the bar and I never saw them again.”

She was telling the truth, wasn’t she? So why did she hear the doubt in her own voice? She didn’t understand her powers and she didn’t know what being a siren really meant. Was it possible that by singing, by doing what she loved, she was killing people?

Alexandros stared at her, trying to read her thoughts. Could she genuinely be unaware of the harm she’d done? In thousands of years, he’d never heard of such a thing, but times had changed. Maybe in this modern mortal world, a siren could lose herself in her own song. How was he to know when everything else he’d relied upon was gone? The old immortals had lost most of their powers, and the divine creatures of the sea had retreated to the kingdom of the deep. The Sargasso. Poseidon’s Realm. Atlantis. Whatever its name, it was a place forever lost to him, and maybe he’d been taking out his bitterness on someone who didn’t deserve it. Instead of bullying Chloe, perhaps he should help her come to terms with—

Damn it.
What was it about sirens that always plucked at his old dry-rotted heartstrings?

He watched her shiver underneath her towel, staring off into the moonlit waves, as if she were really as innocent as she pretended to be. When she was singing, she was all but irresistible. Yet, even in silence, she was lovely. With her mascara smeared, her actual imperfections only made her more alluring. There was a kind of directness in her that he didn’t find in most women, much less murderous harpies of her ilk. He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the salt-and-brine scent of the open sea. This trip was going to take a while.

“What happened to your pink hair?” he asked.

“It washes out. I don’t like to do anything too permanent.”

“Yes,” he said, remembering her hard-partying lifestyle and wreck of a house. “You seem to revel in chaos.”

“Don’t think you know me. I used to be a shipshape kinda girl. Followed orders. Obeyed all the rules… I just wanted to serve my country. I really
was
that idealistic once, you know. I didn’t ask to get captured. And I didn’t ask for these powers.”

He glanced up to see that she was crying and his chest tightened with an emotion that he couldn’t name. “It’s an admirable thing to want to fight for your people.”

“What would you know about it? Didn’t you just tell me that you had no sense of duty anymore?”

He stiffened. No duty, no honor, no brotherhood of tritons. All of it gone. “You’re right.”

“So why
did
you join the Navy?” she asked.

“It seemed like the only thing I was qualified to do.” It had also seemed like the fastest way to end it all short of loading his service weapon and putting a bullet in his own head.

“Why can’t you go home…to, I dunno, wherever tritons live?”

“Because I failed in my duties.” Tension pounded at his temples. He didn’t think he wanted to talk about it, but he’d been living in exile so long that he wondered how it would feel to just admit the truth. “I was banished.”

“Harsh…”
Her face fell. “So you can’t even see your family? Do tritons have family?”

“Yes, they do, but I shamed mine long ago. Now, I’ve chosen Annapolis as my new home until I die.”

“And you’re like, what? Nap Town’s self-appointed defender against sexy singers?”

“You’re not just a sexy singer, Chloe, and you know it. You’re a siren.”

“Stop saying that!”

“I’m sorry, but it’s the truth.”

She shook her head, her voice throaty with emotion. “Why me?”

He wondered how best to explain it to her, but she stopped him before he could. “It seems like I’m always asking that.
Why me?
There were other female soldiers captured, you know, but I was the one they—“

“There’s no reason behind what happened to you. You can’t blame yourself.”

She gripped the end of her towel with trembling hands. “Well, I’ve tried to put it behind me, okay? I’ve refused to let it shape how I deal with everything. I’ve tried to embrace my
own
sexuality—do you have any idea how hard that is? But now I’m supposed to believe my powers of seduction are fatal…”

“I’m sorry, Chloe.”

“You’re
sorry?
” Now her tears turned to anger. She glared at him. “
Somebody
should be. Women like me not only get to be violated and tortured but end up
monsters
besides? That’s fair. Way to blame the victim!”

As a soldier of the sea who had seen more than his share of death and destruction, he’d have told her that life is unfair and the sooner she figured that out, the better off she’d be. But he took one look at her and couldn’t say it. “None of this is fair. War is an ugly thing and sometimes it turns men into monsters.
Literally.
”

She hung her head and was silent for a long time. “Did they suffer?”

“Who?”

“The midshipmen. If I hurt them—and I’m not saying that I did—would they have, you know, known they were going to die? Would they have been
scared?
”

She didn’t have to tell him that she was thinking about her own narrow escape from her captors. Her expression was haunted, her eyes half-closed. Alexandros imagined that she must have feared she’d never live through it. Now she seemed to wonder if she’d done to others what had been done to her. “They wouldn’t have been afraid, Chloe. A siren’s song is seductive. Pleasurable. They’d have gone willingly to their deaths. Although, drowning isn’t quick.”

“No. Just…no. I can’t believe that I’d ever do that to someone—even subconsciously. I don’t use my music to hurt people!”

“What about your drummer? You’re slowly driving him insane. He’s obviously resorted to drugs to get the fix that he can’t get from you. You can’t tell me that you haven’t noticed how unstable he’s become….”

She shuddered, then lowered her face into her hands, choking back a sob. Perhaps he’d misjudged her, and now he had no idea how to help her. When she was finally composed enough to speak, she asked, “So, what am I supposed to do now?”

“What do you mean?”

“Singing was always my dream.” She kicked at the life vest that was strapped onto the rail in frustration. “What am I supposed to do now that I can’t sing?”

He lifted an eyebrow. “You’re giving up singing?”

“Is there another option? I mean, if I’m killing people and don’t even know it, I can’t risk singing for an audience anymore.”

In all his many years, he’d never heard of a siren who was willing to give up her song. Chloe could be lying to him, but somehow he didn’t think so. Like him, she was trying to make her way in a world that would never believe, much less understand, her powers; and she was so young. She shouldn’t have to do it alone.