Silent siren, p.19
Silent Siren, page 19
Pran’s other lieutenant was blonde, I remembered—yes, the scowling woman…
White.
On and on it went as we made our slow trek up the coast. Every time I could summon forth a potential target, all I received for my pains was a whiteout.
Finally, frustrated by my continued failure, I focused on Mouse, as if trying to reassure myself that I still had farsight. She quickly came into view: weary-eyed, sitting behind the wheel of their truck, driving along a dark stretch of two-lane road. Daniot slumped in the shotgun seat with his head pressed against the window. His eyes were closed, but the tautness in his features told me he was still in pain. Looking between their seats, I peered out the windshield but could see little beyond the faded paint on the asphalt and hulking shadows that might have been trees to either side. I couldn’t tell whether the runaways were still in Georgia, but as the speedometer’s needle hovered on sixty, they were running hard.
Mouse had to be exhausted, I thought. A long day at work on the island, the boat ride back to Brunswick, the shopping trip, and then an evening of interrogation—she had to have been awake for close to twenty-four hours, not counting her brief bout of potion-induced unconsciousness, and she was surely coasting on adrenaline and caffeine by then. I glanced toward the cupholders, expecting to find takeout coffee or big soda bottles within reach. Sure enough, there was a Styrofoam coffee cup in the driver’s-side holder, a gas station large, but the right holder contained only a black flip phone.
A phone.
The detectives had confiscated Mouse’s and Daniot’s phones before allowing them to leave so that they wouldn’t alert their friends if they had a sudden flare-up of conscience. Both had been carrying smartphones—inexpensive smartphones, sure, but standard models. The phone in the cupholder was a far cheaper device, and when I saw its box discarded in the floorboard by Daniot’s feet, I knew what had happened. The two had made a pitstop after leaving the hotel—hell, maybe at the Walmart across the road—and picked up a burner phone for the trip.
Had they called anyone? Did they know any phone numbers? I would have been hard-pressed to rattle off any but my family’s old landline and Aunt Lily’s digits, but had they committed their colleagues’ numbers to memory?
God, were we heading into an ambush?
A hard jolt shot me back into my body, and as my eyes readjusted to the dim predawn, I saw that Liogh was carrying us ashore. The wave that had picked us up dropped us on the beach’s short incline and receded, leaving us stranded and listing to port. Looking around, I saw nothing but marsh grasses and a few scraggly trees inland—certainly no sign of habitation. Was this the beach I’d watched Mouse walk? I scanned my surroundings for hints of familiarity, but I was too disoriented to make sense of anything but the sea at my back and the sand beneath us.
And then I saw it, only for an instant: the small, bright beam of a flashlight slicing through the shadows ahead. What the light signified, I couldn’t say. Perhaps one of the producers was an insomniac, just stepping outside for a breath of cold air…
Or perhaps we’d been spotted.
Before I could warn the others about the phone, Gentle Breeze vaulted over the side of the boat, and the rest of the agents quickly disembarked as Enva assisted Liogh down and steadied them. I started to fumble my way toward the side, and Yven grabbed my arms to help me off. Once my feet hit the sand, I sheepishly muttered, “Thanks.”
As close as we were, I could see his lips move, but no sound reached me. “Hold that thought—earplugs,” I whispered, then reached up to remove them.
Suddenly, Yven’s face went slack. I froze, startled by the shift, then looked around to find the rest of our party standing stock-still on the beach. Slowly, they turned inland, as if they were homing in on a signal…and that’s when I saw Kritsa.
He looked much like his DPP identification photo: about as tall as Yven and Liogh, but stockier than either of them, with a shock of white hair and skin the color of pale shadow. The finer details were lost to the night—I couldn’t have drawn his face with any degree of accuracy under those conditions—but I could make out a long-sleeved black T-shirt over desert camouflage pants. His feet, bare in the sand, ended in webbed toes. But I didn’t need to see gills to know I was in the presence of the missing siren—his mouth was open, and a force like a warm wave beat against me, deceptively soothing as it tried to lull me under.
Kritsa was singing. The bastard had hypnotized the others, who continued to stare at him with gaping mouths. I stood helpless beside Yven, frozen in my panic—I was no agent, I’d barely begun real training, and now, the people who knew what they were doing were out of the game. If the rest of the producers came down to the shore, they could pick us off like tin-can targets.
When Kritsa raised his right hand, I could just make out the shape of a pistol in his grip. Forget his buddies—he was going to take us out himself.
The fresh burst of terror that erupted within me at the sight of the gun broke through my paralysis. Though my mind still roiled with confusion and fear, my hands seemed to recall Emarae’s lessons, as a massive shield burst forth from my left palm like a bubble of bulletproof glass. Frantically concentrating on the shield to hold it together, I widened it enough to cover our group, then threw my shoulder into Yven. “Wake up!” I shouted at him. “Come on, help me!”
While I couldn’t hear Kritsa’s song, I felt the siren’s two beats of shocked silence, then braced myself against the resurgent melody. I screamed when I saw the flash of his gun’s muzzle aimed at my face, but my shield absorbed the blast, and the bullet fell harmlessly into the sand. Kritsa took aim and fired again, and I redoubled my efforts to wake Yven, all in vain.
In retrospect, I should have reached for my loaner gun and returned fire. That’s what a trained agent would have done, I suppose. But I wasn’t an agent—I was a twenty-six-year-old painter in way over my head, on a beach where I had no business being, and I knew that as soon as I tired and the shield fell, my companions would die.
Yven would die.
People do strange things when stressed, which is the only explanation I can offer for the course of action my frazzled brain decided upon: I’d drown Kritsa out. Maybe, some part of me rationalized, if I could be louder than the siren, then his hold on the others would weaken enough for them to fight back.
Of course, it’s difficult to think of a setlist when it’s still dark out on a desolate beach in late December, so my internal shuffle went in an odd direction.
“The boar’s head in hand bear I,” I belted, forcing power through my shaking arm and into the shield. “Bedecked with bays and rosemary!”
Kritsa gawked at me, perplexed, but doubled down on his own sonic onslaught.
“And I pray you, my masters, be merry, quot estis in convivio!”
As I sang—poorly, I’m sure—my fear shifted toward fury, and the sight of the siren’s open mouth only fueled my growing rage.
“CAPUT APRI DEFERO, REDDENS LAUDES DOMINO!” I bellowed, willing him to falter.
When Kritsa shifted his feet and took another shot at me, I launched into the second verse, still at a volume to make any music teacher wince: “THE BOAR’S HEAD, AS I UNDERSTAND, IS THE RAREST DISH IN ALL THIS LAND, WHICH THUS BEDECKED WITH A GAY GARLAND, LET US—”
A flash of light and a concussion to my right made me cry out, and my head spun in that direction as I expected to see one of Kritsa’s friends creeping up on us. Instead, I found Yven standing beside me, his eyes narrowed, his arms raised in a shooter’s stance. He fired again, and the siren’s song, which had weakened after the first shot, subsided instantly.
“Help me!” I begged.
Yven’s mouth formed a single word—stay—and with that, he marched up the beach, straight through my shield toward Kritsa. His aim, it seemed, had been true: Kritsa lay in the weeds, clutching his midsection and weakly kicking at the sand to propel himself to safety. Yven stood over him, pointing his gun at Kritsa’s face. Even with the distance and the dark, I could see his rage as he held our assailant at bay.
A few seconds later, Emarae sprinted up the beach, freeing a syringe from the holster on his belt as he ran. He dropped to one knee beside Kritsa and jabbed a needle into the siren’s shoulder. Kritsa’s struggles ceased almost immediately, and Emarae coaxed Yven away from their unconscious captive.
I yelped and whirled around when a heavy hand landed on my shoulder, then realized it was Pars at my side. Ripping out one of my earplugs, I caught my breath and stared up at him, hoping for someone to tell me what to do.
“Thank you, Red,” he murmured, and patted my outstretched arm. “You can let it go.”
He sounded shaky, which I chalked up to his rough brush with hypnosis, but I allowed my shield to fall apart and relaxed my arm.
“Stay behind me, all right?” he said, and started up the beach.
With Kritsa down, the producers had lost their best weapon. We’d come ashore quite near their hidden facility, and we walked through the edge of the spell hiding it from view almost as soon as we reached the top of the beach. A few of the sorcerers inside the building tried to fight back with pistols and the occasional fireball, but as Enva and Emarae shielded our group, Gentle Breeze lobbed half a dozen bottles of knock-out potion through the open windows. Her aim was nearly perfect—one broke against the outer wall, releasing its orange vapor to the wind—and the defense quickly failed. Only two of the sorcerers inside managed to make it to the door, and a seventh flung tube sent them into the muck like sacks of potatoes.
The potion was designed to be long-lasting, but the agents and Enva took no chances and began restraining the producers. Liogh, however, who had rudimentary medical training, grabbed a few healing potions to stabilize Kritsa, and when they asked for my help, I couldn’t very well say no.
As Liogh knelt by the bloody sand and worked on Kritsa’s twin gunshot wounds, they murmured, “Your aim is quite good. Not immediately lethal but debilitating—it’s a wonder you pulled off those shots in the moment. No one here would have blamed you if you’d aimed a little higher,” they added, giving me a meaningful look, “but I commend you for your restraint.”
“Thanks, but I didn’t shoot him,” I replied.
The detective frowned. “You didn’t?”
“No, I choked and put up a shield instead.”
“Also a wise move, but…” Liogh’s brow knit as they dribbled a potion over Kritsa’s torn flesh, a sort of liquid bandage. “I confess that I have a hole in my memory from shortly after we landed until I saw Yven advancing on Kritsa. What happened?”
“Your snoring saved us,” I said, chuckling as if I could distract myself from the realization of how close we’d come. “I still had my earplugs in when we landed. Just before we came ashore, I was checking on Mouse and Daniot, and one of them had bought a phone.”
Liogh muttered as they worked, and though I didn’t recognize the language, I didn’t need a direct translation.
“Maybe Kritsa was here all along, or maybe they alerted him in time. Anyway, he started singing right after we got off the boat. It worked on everyone except me—earplugs, right?” I added with a nervous laugh that, even to me, sounded like it was edging way too close to hysterics. “So I made a shield, and then I out-sang him.”
“You out-sang a siren?”
I nodded. “Guess so. I can be loud and obnoxious when I want to be, and since Yven was standing closest to me, I guess I was louder than Kritsa to him. He snapped out of it and shot the asshole.”
“In that case, I’ll need to take his gun for the ballistics review,” said Liogh. “He won’t be in trouble for shooting,” they hastily reassured me.
“I mean, Kritsa shot at me first…”
“I assumed as much.” Liogh shone their flashlight across the sand, catching the deformed bullets that had bounced off my shield. “We’ll call in a full team to process the scene. I think I speak for all of us here when I say we’re ready to go home.”
“So what happens now?”
“Now?” They stood and brushed the sand from their knees. “Well, we’re on a restricted island with several boatloads of unconscious arrestees, so that needs to be rectified first. We’ll secure the area as well as we can and give directions to whomever is sent after us, though I doubt they’ll be able to make it out here before nightfall.” Looking down at Kritsa, they muttered, “It wouldn’t have killed you to choose a more convenient hideaway, would it?”
We found Kritsa’s boat in the grass just outside the producers’ compound, but it was barely large enough for four. Instead, Liogh was once again roped into transportation duty. While the DPP crew documented the scene and cleaned up the visible blood, DOL took on the task of loading their prisoners into the larger boat and ferrying them to shore, then restraining them in the hidden holds of Pars’s and Gentle Breeze’s Jeeps.
By the time the rest of us made the trip back to the marina, the sun had risen, we’d switched to the motor, and Liogh was curled up on the back bench, catnapping. Yven stayed close to me, which I didn’t mind in the slightest. With the immediate emergency past and the neurochemical cocktail wearing off, I was drained and shivering, and he hugged me against the wind as we bounced over the morning chop.
Back on shore, we loaded up for the trip to Surrency. That time, I drove solo, though not by Yven’s choice. Emarae had switched vehicles to ride with Gentle Breeze in case the people in the hold of her vehicle began to wake, which left Pars without backup. Yven tried to get out of it—“Rose is exhausted, and she was shot at!” he protested—but Gentle Breeze pointed out that everyone in the group met those criteria and ordered him to ride along with Pars. I told Yven I’d be fine for a few hours, and after begging a stop for gas and coffee, I perked sufficiently to make the drive without falling asleep behind the wheel. Still, not even my familiar playlists could calm my scattered, racing thoughts of water and blood and Yven, enraged like I’d never seen him before.
Ten minutes past the gas station, he called me. “How are you holding up, Rosie?” he asked, sounding as weary as I felt.
“I’m okay,” I lied, then tried to sell it. “Really. Coffee’s magical.”
“Yeah, well, if that changes, let me know. I’m happy to drive.”
“You just like my station wagon,” I teased, trying to push the image of his drawn gun from my mind’s eye.
“I know you’re tired, and Pars is a big boy. Seriously, just call me if you want to switch off.”
He sounded like himself—calm, normal, responsible Yven—and in that moment, all I wanted was to hold on to him until I’d forgotten the way he’d looked under Kritsa’s spell. But he had a job to do, and since I was caught up in the whole messy enterprise, so did I.
“Y’all don’t have too much fun without me, now,” I told him, and drove hard with the rising sun in the rearview mirror.
CHAPTER 14
* * *
The order came down from the director while we were still en route to the portal. In light of the fatal poisoning that had happened to the last one of Silver’s producers who’d been interrogated and jailed at DPP, we were to take the incapacitated captives straight to DOL for processing.
DOL, like DPP, occupied the entirety of an office tower in downtown Beukal. But DPP’s building seemed plain by comparison to DOL’s shining glass spire, which rose a good thirty stories above the street. It descended a fair ways as well, I learned, as I leaned against my Subaru in the parking deck and watched a swarm of officers pull the unconscious producers from their hiding places and load them onto stretchers for transport to the lower basement levels. Though DOL had penal facilities around the Pactlands, they kept a bank of cells ready to use on the premises, reinforced against magical breakouts and well-guarded.
While the suspects slept off the knock-out potion, we were hustled up into the tower to the healers for examination. “It’s typical after a few days in the field,” Enva explained. “Here and at DPP. Just in case you unwittingly bring home something novel.”
“And don’t worry,” Gentle Breeze muttered, bending to my ear. “Pateme rigged it. No one is going to make any surprise discoveries during your checkup.”
When Enva showed me to my assigned examination room, I almost laughed. The healer leaning against the counter was a tall brunette in a purple lab coat with pretty green eyes and a wry smile. “Well, now,” she said as I closed the door behind me, “just who do I have to thank for the fact that I’ve been doing the single-mom thing for the last four days?”
“Hi, Canna,” I said through a yawn. “I didn’t draft Pars, I swear.”
“Sure. Hop up on the table,” she ordered, and I hoisted myself onto the padded bench. “How is my husband, anyway? Behaving himself?”
“Perfect gentleman.”
“Uh-huh. I see how it is. Don’t worry,” she said, prepping a syringe at the counter, “I’ll get the truth eventually. He’s a terrible liar.”
“What’s that for?” I asked, eyeing the needle.
She held up the syringe for my inspection. “What, this? Routine bloodwork, which is absolutely not going to come back showing a half elf in my office. Your information is going straight to Pateme ti’Tam, so I wouldn’t worry, were I you. Give me your arm.”
“Is this really necessary?” I mumbled.
“I’m a trained professional. Don’t be a baby, Rose.”
Within ten minutes, Canna had drawn my blood, conducted a brief but thorough physical, and watched me down a small vial of brown liquid that she swore would kill the common cold. “You look healthy to me,” she declared. “Severely under-slept, though. When did you last rest?”
I had to mull that over. “Uh…I got a few minutes on the boat…and a few minutes at the hotel…and I slept for a bit at the other hotel early yesterday, after Liogh got us out of Virginia…”
“No wonder your eyes are bloodshot. Are you on Happy Juice?”
I shuddered. “No way. The one I time I took it, I overdosed, and Yven had to inject me with the antidote.”
