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“But what about the time they first appeared? They attacked you, didn’t they?”
Luc shook his head. “My wounds weren’t from the sirens. My wounds were from Henrik.”
He held up his shirt, turning around for me to see his back. There was a red welt in his skin.
The holy stones.
“Spiritual defenses work on incarnates too,” he said, dropping his shirt and turning back to face me. “It’s a rather bothersome drawback.”
I leaned against the railing, processing the information. Luc was a siren. I knew it. Everything in me knew it was true. I couldn’t explain why or how.
“Where are the others?” I asked. “How will you reunite with them?”
“The Eros,” Luc said.
“What?”
Luc pointed to the star, squinting one eye with a smile.
“The Eros can be found under that star,” Luc said, “in the Den of Sirens. Our home, Esmeralda.”
CHAPTER 24—Surprises
It wasn’t hard to feign illness.
Luc’s words spun through my head all night, stealing all of my sleep, and I couldn’t bring myself out of bed to help him in the kitchen the next morning. My stomach knotted at the idea of seeing both him and Henrik after what had happened last night.
Adrian allowed me to stay in his room for the day, a wave of concern washing over his eyebrows as he checked my temperature.
“Should I have Henrik look at you?” he asked.
I shook my head forcefully. “Please don’t. It’s something of the…feminine nature.”
He held his hands up in surrender and took a step back. The lie was embarrassing, but the truth was insane.
“I won’t ask any more questions then,” he said.
He left the room, and I curled up under my blankets on the floor, wishing I could wake up to another reality. Being kidnapped was bad enough, but a siren? How could I be? I could accept Luc being a siren, but if I were a siren, I would know something like that, wouldn’t I? Wouldn’t I have some sort of clue?
And what was an incarnate? Did that mean I had died in a previous life only to live again in another body? That this body wasn’t mine?
I looked at my fingers and wiggled them. This was my body. It had to be. I had never known another body. If I was an incarnate, did that mean I had stolen a baby’s body?
A sudden chill ran through me. What a terrible idea.
But there was no denying what I had seen. Luc had controlled Henrik with his voice. The anger I saw in Henrik melted far too quickly for it to be natural. And not to mention the way that Luc interacted with the men on ship. No matterwhat trouble he got himself into with the crew or the captain, he always had that smile on his face, his voice sweet and melodic no matter the circumstances.
I saw the welt on his back. It was undoubtedly the shape of the stones Henrik kept on ship for the sirens.
Luc was definitely a siren. I accepted that. I wasn’t afraid of it either, even though I probably should have been. Luc, however, had been nothing but kind to me. He had also been through so much pain. He was dear to me, no matter who or what he was.
But so was Henrik. And if I was honest, so was Adrian. So were half the men on this ship.
Except Jacques. I really didn’t like him.
I sat up, remembering him. Luc was afraid of Jacques, but he never told me why. Was it something to do with the sirens? Something to do with the spiritual world? Or had they simply met before in another circumstance?
I didn’t have the strength to get out of bed and find out. But I knew one thing: Jacques and Luc had a secret between them.
