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He laughed. It was the first time I had ever heard him truly laugh, and I didn’t understand why he was so tickled at the question.
“My dear, you don’t remember a thing at all,” he said, “but let me tell you a secret: this is the third time you’ve found us.”
***
The king and I walked around the hallways a little more, the paleness in his skin alarming me. There were deep shadows behind his eyes, and I knew that even though he was happy to see Luc and myself return to the den, he had still lost more sirens than he had gained. I insisted he rest—for whatever benefit it might have had to the king of the sirens—and Hugo and Vito took the king back to his room.
I wandered around, somewhat in the direction of my own room, the room for incarnates. Now that Luc was a siren again, I would be in the room alone, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.
Something fluttered overhead.
I looked up, just as Luc soared over me and landed only three feet in front of me. His physical form was thin before, but now it was classically masculine, his muscles rigid and defined like a statue of Hercules or a painting of a Roman gladiator. His wings expanded twice the length of his arms, yet he seemed completely in control of them as if he had owned them the entire time.
There was a shyness in his eyes, however; one I was not accustomed to seeing.
“You refused your wings?” he asked, his voice softer than normal.
I wrapped my arms around myself and nodded. “For now.”
“Will you ever…?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
He chewed his lip, looking around the room as if he were trying to find his words in the rafters.
“You don’t remember me then,” he said.
I cocked my head to the side. “What do you mean? I haven’t forgotten you.”
“No,” he said with a laugh. “I mean, from the life we had before.”
He held my gaze.
“We knew each other once, yes. And should you take your wings again, you will recognize me.”
If I knew the king at one time, did that also mean…?
“I wondered why I was instantly drawn to you the moment I saw you,” Luc said. “In all honesty, I thought it was love at first sight, since I had never experienced anything quite like it before. I often heard older people talking about how they met their true love and felt as if they knew each other for a lifetime.”
My heart fluttered at his words, and I couldn’t help but rub the goose bumps on my arms.
“When I realized you were a siren, I dismissed the love-at-first-sight notion,” Luc continued. “I decided it was because we were both from the same world, and that was why I was drawn to you. But now that I remember all my lives—every reincarnation I’ve ever had—I realize the truth.”
He hopped forward, a playful smile bursting across his face. The sudden change in emotions baffled me despite Luc’s consistent inconsistent nature. To add in more confusion, he swung his arms out wide and then wrapped me in a hug, his wings expanded out next to us.
“We were friends here, you and I,” he said in my ear. “From the time we were pure sirens, barely having a body to call our own.”
He leaned back to look at me, the stars practically dancing in his eyes.
“There were five of us: you and me, Liwei, Sophie, and Renaldo.” He pointed to the ceiling. “We used to play hide-and-seek in the upper catacombs. And we’d go to the surface and see who could skip rocks across the ocean furthest. Liwei’s record was 642 skips.”
His wings fluttered, and he held me close as our feet came off the ground. I gripped on to his arms.
“Luc…”
“I know you don’t remember any of this, Ast— um, Esmeralda,” he whispered. “But I wish you did. I wish you could remember what it was like to live together here…before we all chose our dark paths and were cursed for our sins.”
His lips flattened, and he pressed them together. My heart sank.
