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My heart is thumping a million beats a minute. I want to be the one to go after her. Jake isn’t ready to go into the sea, find Miranda somewhere in the fucking ocean, and help her fight a siren that will hypnotize him long before he gets there. He doesn’t have as much combat training as I have. He doesn’t have as much mythological intelligence as I have. And then there’s the question of how Miranda will get the blood of someone she cares about on the knife—without that blood washing away. I grind my teeth the more my mind runs rampant. I don’t doubt whether any of them will return. But the situation includes too many variables, too many chances where this could go wrong, and even more where it could go wrong for Miranda, specifically.
Benjamin turns his almost black eyes to Jake, but his words help both of us to breath a bit more easily. “I know you don’t think you can do this, Jake. But you can. You’re Miranda’s mate. You’re the one who will be pulled the strongest. You’re the one she’ll fight for at any expense. It has to be you.”
“Where will you be, Benjamin?” I didn’t even know I wanted to ask the question until the words tumbled out of me.
He juts out his bottom jaw the way it did when he was tired and didn’t know what to say. “I’m too old for heroics, George. I’ll be here, helping you to stay out of it and think up a story to explain to the little ones, stepping in if the big two get too close to killing one another, and waiting to see my wife again.”
Jake nods. “Okay then. I don’t want to waste any more time. I’m going to go find Miranda.” He picks up the book and starts for the door we entered the house via earlier, but stops and turns back to us, flustered. “It might help if I go the way she and Rory did though, out the living room to the boardwalk.”
I give a curt nod, a wordless good luck. He maneuvers around throw blankets and pillows discarded on the floor in a sloppy game of the Floor is Lava and reaches the glass doors.
Before he opens the door, he stares at the blankets he just traversed and his face wilts. Without lifting his eyes from the floor, he says, “Promise me you’ll look after them, train them.” Jake locks me in a desperate gaze. “Promise me you’ll train them, George. They’ll be better students than me. I can’t leave them if I don’t know they’ll be safe.”
I stand there, frowning, eyebrows pulled together, shoulders rounded. Finally, I blink. I say, “Jake, you’ll be back in a few hours, tops. You’ll see. You and Miranda, you’re the team. You’ve got this. But I do like the idea of training the kids. Let’s hash that out more when you’re all back safe.” I end with a wink in a feeble attempt to lighten the mood.
He gives me a half-hearted smile, takes a deep breath and opens the door. The blast of cool sea air reaches Benjamin and I where we stand in the doorway by the kitchen. I have no choice but to trust him now.
Jake takes one last look at us, gives one last nod, and steps outside, sliding the door shut behind him.
In five strides, I quickly lock the glass door tightly behind him. I watch Jake walk from the deck to the boardwalk where he takes a left and heads north. After a few steps, he stops dead in his tracks and stares ahead. I can make out only a sliver of his face from here. It’s too dark to see any details, but I’m sure if I could, I would see his eyes glazed over.
He’s just been spelled.
Chapter 25
Miranda
No.It’snotsupposedto be Jake down here. It’s supposed to be George. I don’t want my husband to be the victim of a siren. I don’t want him to be a victim ever again. My heart is racing and the edges of my vision begin to blur. I instinctively grab for the bracelet, but it wouldn’t help even if I had brought it with me because all of my senses are dulled in the water anyway. I try to do the breathing but whatever it is I’m able to do down here thanks to Mazu’s kiss, it isn’t breathing as I know it on land. There is no air to pull into my lungs, to force my body into calm. There is no calm to be found. Jake is here, spelled by Beatrice, in danger once again, because of me.
That’s when I start to hear that fucking voice again.
“This is allyourfault!” The seething tone distorts the voice so much that I can’t make out who it belongs to. “This is all your fault. All of this. Everything happening to us right now.Youshould be nicer.Youshould know your place.Youshould keep your mouth shut.”
I clench my eyes closed against the voice, but I can’t shut out something that is inside my head. I see the old pop-up camper from my childhood. I’m standing beside a campfire long burned out and cold. Muffled angry voices reach me from inside: his yells and a slam as something hits a wall. I don’t know if it was part of him, part of her, something thrown… Her sobs get louder when he rips the door open and stumbles down the front step. He barely looks at me as he raises his hands and pushes the air between us away; he can’t be bothered to interact with such an inconvenience as me right now. Kicking the dry dirt up into a dusty cloud, he storms off into the night.
I walk toward the door and look into the camper, but I don’t see her. The voice speaks again, angry, spiteful, from somewhere deeper inside. Her hatred cuts through the darkness, repeating once more, “This is all your fault.”
Then my mother’s wails float out the door and punch me in the gut. I want to run to her, to comfort her, like I always have. But she blamesme. So instead, I stand there frozen, until the anger has melted into sadness. Her words eek out between sobs, “Why can’t you just be nicer to him? He wouldn’t want to leave if you were nicer to him.”
That voice inside my head has been my mother all this time. They made me hate the woods. They made me hate a lot of things about my childhood. They made me hate a lot of things about myself. But I’ve been working too long at loving myself, and surrounding myself with people like Jake and Eliza helped me to get there.
A new memory fills the field of vision in my mind’s eye. Jake and the kids waiting in line for the fun slide. Our family, enjoying each other, happy together. I am a good mom, a good wife, and a good Guardian. At this point in my life, I am surrounded by love—which is why I don’t have time for this shit. My friends need me, now.
At least I know I can rescue him, seeing as how I already have once, but George is a better fighter than I am. He was supposed to be an asset in this fight.
While I was lost in my own head, Mazu had somehow dragged me back to where we had been hiding out before. Beatrice already knows we’re here, but at least this nook affords us some privacy to talk. And a chance for Mazu to show me what she has in her hands.
“Jake was holding this, Guardian.” Mazu gets half my attention by pressing a cold book into my hands.
My eyes are unfocused, barely seeing. “Ouch!” The pain in my palms wakes me the rest of the way. The book I am holding has metal corners long since oxidized. The rusty points prick at my skin, which has softened from all the time submerged down here. The embossed front features a coat of arms, and an old-fashioned miniature sword is somehow fastened to the center. The blade is shiny and looks sharp, in direct contrast with the rusty, haggard book cover. I study the book for a few seconds before I speak, turning it over and over again in my hands. “I don’t understand. What good can a book be under water?”
Mazu puts her hands over mine and when I look into her face she is focused on the book. “This is the book of Nimue, The Lady of the Lake, a British myth. She is thought to be the one to have given Excalibur to King Arthur. She was a Lake Fairy, similar to Beatrice and I as a siren and mermaid of the sea.” Her eyes flash up to mine. “This book is so old that you have very little chance to read what is written inside, even if we were reading the book on land.”
My shoulders slump. “So what good is it to me? Why would Jake bring this?” I run my finger along the blade of what I now assume is a model of Excalibur. Although it looks dulled with age, to me it feels sharp, like it could actually cut me if my flesh was on the edge instead of the flat. So, not just for decoration, I guess.
Mazu smiles. “If you could read it, you would learn that the way to kill a siren is to stab her with a specific blade. This blade.” Her perfectly manicured finger taps the hilt of the tiny sword. “You see, Nimue had a bit of a siren problem herself once. Some of my sisters thought if they could move inland, to the lake, they could have better access to mankind. The Lady of the Lake wouldn’t hear of it.”
“So where is this blade now? A crest on a book isn’t going to help me much.” I look into her face and gasp as she raises her brow. “Wait,thisis the actual blade we need? But if I need to use this, how? The blade is part of the book. Also, it’s really small. How much damage can it do?”
