“Are you working for her?” Emmett repeated. “Or she approached you, and then you decided to go after Theo for your own reasons?”
The siren looked back and forth between Pippa and Emmett, only sparing the quickest of glances at Theo. For a moment, Theo thought she looked almost guilty, but then her face was stoic again. She seemed to think for a moment and then sighed heavily.
“Cliodhna approached me and asked me about fetching Theo for her as a bounty. The reward was good. It’s not personal.”
Her voice was clipped and short. Theo tried to understand what she wasn’t saying. He got the sense she wasn’t telling the truth.
She did try to capture you with a siren song, so maybe you aren’t the best judge of her character right now.
“You only did it for the bounty?” Pippa pressed, also looking equally unconvinced of the siren’s motives.
“What’s your name?” Emmett walked into the water and started looking for his axe, finding it and hoisting it over his shoulder. His tone was colloquial, as if he were the good cop to Pippa’s bad cop.
The siren looked like she wasn’t going to answer, but after nearly a minute of silence, she nodded in submission.
“Lyra.”
“Lyra,” Emmett repeated the name. He sat down in the sand and started looking over his axe meticulously, studying it for any new scratches or chips. “And you did this for money?”
“I’ve never known sirens to be bounty hunters.” Pippa raised an eyebrow as she looked down at Lyra. “I’ve also never known sirens to care at all about money.”
Lyra looked nonchalant. “Maybe she wasn’t offering me money. There are other things to motivate someone.”
“What did she offer you?” Emmett pressed.
Theo found himself with an undeniable urge to defend Lyra from their line of questioning, but he continued to assume he was under the aftereffects of the siren song.
Lyra took her time to answer once again, her voice shaky.
“There are things she could offer me that no land dweller could understand.” Lyra’s lips pressed together in a thin line, and it was clear she wasn’t going to elaborate any further.
“That’s fair enough.” Emmett nodded. Theo was impressed; Emmett seemed to have an innate sense of when to push Lyra and when to back off.
“So, for your own reasons, you decided to work for Cliodhna,” Emmett continued. “We can’t allow you to get in the way of our transporting Theo to the Minch. Do we have to incapacitate you in some way, or do you think we can agree?”
“Emmett!” Pippa turned around and stared at him, her eyebrows flying upward. “There’s no way we could trust her.”
“If she doesn’t have a personal vendetta against Theo, I don’t see why we can’t buy allegiances as easily as Cliodhna does.”
“He’s not wrong,” Theo chimed in to support Emmett without fully understanding what he was saying.
Emmett and Pippa looked at Theo with a confusing stare, then they turned their attention to Lyra.
“I don’t like it.” Pippa glared at the siren, whose face remained stoic and passive.
“Is that even something you’re interested in?” Emmett crossed his arms over his chest as he looked towards Lyra.
“I would be more amenable to a discussion if your mate would get off of me.” Lyra cast another haunty look at Pippa. “And I could shift.”
Pippa said nothing but made an angry grunting sound, looking over her shoulder at Emmett. Emmett motioned for Pippa to get off of Lyra, and she obliged, but not without one last glare at the siren.
Once Lyra was no longer pinned to the sand, she was immediately obscured by a soft cloud of blue magic.
“She’s disappearing!” Theo shouted. He was horribly bereft at the idea of her vanishing without a trace. Several confusing emotions were running through Theo’s head, and he assumed all of them had to do with being under the siren’s song.
“No, she’s not.” Emmett shook his head. “Watch.”
Theo watched as the magic hiding Lyra started to spin around her. Without warning, two feet popped out, and the clouds started to disappear as quickly as they’d come. Lyra hadshifted from an image of a storybook siren and now looked like a fae female. She was covered in a short, blue shift dress. Lyra stretched her limbs out, managing to look as delicate as a cat, and sprang to her feet.
