Siren Blood (3 page)

Chapter Three

Maj and Mer were getting bored waiting around in the cove. They took turns swimming around, but they couldn’t go far. They had a meeting with someone important. Their guest however was making them lounge around for so long that their hair was beginning to dry.

             
“When is he going to show?” Maj moaned.

“Demons are always late,” said
Mer, the more practical of the two.

Maj had taken to braiding her
hair to pass the time and now shook braids free. Her hair cascaded down to her belly button and the effect was beautiful, like a shimmering black waterfall.

“I wonder what he
wants,” Maj said.

Mer shrugged.
“Persephone said he had a great offer.”

“But what do we need him for, really? We’re doing just fine now.”

The two sisters were the survivors of the battle in Tetro. After their three sisters were killed, they escaped to Greece where Persephone resided on her own private island. While Mer and Maj had been saddened to leave Tetro’s tranquil waters and the yummy Italian men they had a hankering taste bud for, they had no choice. The Tetro men had given them quite a few bruises and that nasty wizard had actually succeeded in destroying some of them. Perhaps the wizard had taught all the men the spell like he did with the repellant spell and they couldn’t risk returning to find out.

Persephone had reprimanded them, telling them it was their fault that they couldn’t keep a low profile.
They weren’t careful enough; one human escapee had the power to destroy them all, and he almost did. There were more humans than there were sirens and Persephone was not about to help them create more if they were to behave so recklessly.

Maj and Mer
had learned their lesson and began to feed off the Greek men. They were an acquired taste, but soon, the sisters learned to enjoy their flesh almost as much as Italian men and for the past decade they were feeding more than ever, although Tetro men were still the most delicious. All they had to do was to target groups smaller than two and not get too greedy. They had to prove themselves to be smart and responsible in order to show Persephone that their tribe could expand.

When Maj’s hair was fully dry, she
dove back into the water and began to back stroke.

“What?
” she said. “Is the demon going to give us legs or something? I’m telling you that I refuse to give him my soul.”

“We don’t have souls,” said Mer. “At least not the kind that demons want.”

“Why shouldn’t he? Our souls are rare. He should be lucky to have us.”

Mer rolled her eyes. Sometimes her sister could be so dense.

“We’re lucky that he doesn’t.”

“I don’t know about that. Maybe it’s fun in hell. All the flesh of sinners that we could feed on.”

“When men are dead, they don’t have flesh anymore.”

“Oh. True.”

Mer sighed. “Plus. We’ll belong to the demon. Hell is supposed to be a horrible place.”

“Oh fine, miss know-it-all.
But you won’t know until you’ve been to hell.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t want
to risk an eternity just out of curiosity, do you?”

Maj thought about it. “Maybe.”

“Maybe you start calling yourself Pandora,” Mer remarked.

“Please do,” said Maj, not getting the reference. “That’s a lovely name.”

“We need to trust Persephone,” Mer said. “If we do well with this deal, whatever it is, she’ll help us
turn
.”

“Turn what?” Maj said. She’
d propped herself out of the water again to lounge beside her.

Mer
sighed again. Her little sister never did listen. “You know, like we talked about. We can turn human girls into one of us, expand our tribe, so we have more sisters.”

“And
more mouths to feed,” Maj said, making a face. “Why do that again?”

“Don’t you remember the good old days w
hen there were five of us? All the fun we had? We never got bored.”

Mer sighed in nostalgia.

“That’s because we didn’t have to go around striking deals with demons.” Maj was offended. “What? Are you bored with me already?”

“Frank
ly, I am sometimes. We need new blood around here. I can’t have the same conversations with you all the time.”

“Well
, you’re not so exciting all the time either,” Maj huffed. “Let’s see if this demon even shows. If he doesn’t come by sunrise, I’m going to break off and find a man to eat for breakfast.”

“You can’t do that!”

“Why?”

“Do you know how much trouble we’ll be in? Don’t you know how much power demons have? And what about Persephone? She’ll kill us.”

“Sometimes, you’re too serious about these sort of things.”

Mer turned away. There was no reasoning with Maj sometimes. She couldn’t wait to add more reasonable girls to the lineup. Maj was the youngest, and the most reckless.

“As long as this demon doesn’t smell like the other ones,” Maj said.

Once they had swam to a demon congregation
on a deserted island to spy on them for fun. The entire place reeked so much that they didn’t even reach the shore before turning away in disgust.

“Seriously,” Maj continue
d. “They smell so bad. Like human garbage set on fire. Or baby whales.”

“
It’s a million times worse than that,” Mer said. “I can’t even compare it to anything.”

“Let
’s just pray to God,” Maj joked, “that having one of them in this cove won’t make us want to hurl.”

As she said this, s
omething did begin to smell. It smelled like smoke. They looked around, but nothing was burning. A light fog invaded the cove.

“What’s going on?” Mer said.

“It must be him,” said Maj.

The fog
cleared, but it began to smell like rotten eggs. The sisters coughed and plugged their noses.

“Definitely him.”

Like lightning before thunder, the demon’s odor preceded his appearance. Suddenly there was a blazing fire near the opening of the cove and the sisters watched in awe.

From the red and orange flames, they made out a shadow. The outline was of a human, but when the f
lames subsided, the features of the demon began to emerge. Orange eyes stared out at them, unblinking, from a face the colour of dried blood. Deep wrinkles marked his cheeks and forehead. His nose was flat like a bull’s and he even had a nose ring. Smoke flared from his nostrils. He wore a long black cloak with a hundred tiny black buttons from neck to toe. His hands were shoved deep in his cloak pockets. A devilish grin spread on his face at the sight of the two sirens.

“At least
I don’t smell like dead fish,” he said in a low booming voice.

His orange eyes flashed and bore into Maj’s. She was so scared that she wanted to dive into the water and stay down there.

“I’m sorry,” Maj stammered. “I mean, demons don’t smell. Except nice - they smell nice!”

The demon let out a cruel laugh.

“We didn’t mean anything by it, really.” Mer kept her head down.

“Don’t you know
that a group of sniveling sirens smell worse than the entire human species?” the demon taunted.

Maj took offence to that “That is not –”

“Shut up, Maj,” Mer hushed. She turned to the demon. “Please. Can you tell us what you brought us here for? We’ll be interested in helping you.”

“Help
me? You mean you’re interested in me helping you. If we both get what we want, we’ll both be happy indeed.”

Maj and Mer nodded obediently. They sat up straight, stopped wagging their tails and listened closely.

“I heard
about what happened in Tetro, how your sisters were killed there.”

“Yes,” said Maj. “But that was a long time ago.”

The demon’s fire never extinguished. It blazed around him like an aura. He smiled even wider, the lines on his face expanding and revealing tinier lines that looked like stitches.

“Wouldn’t you like a bit of vengeance?”

              “On the wizard?” asked Maj.

             
“Oh, the wizard, the men, the women, the children. Everybody.”

             
“Why, of course,” Mer said.

“How?” Maj asked. “They know how to destroy us, and we can’t exactly go back on land without being seen.”

“Which is why you need me,” the demon said. “I’ll help you walk amongst the humans undetected. They won’t need to use the wizard’s spell on you if they recognize you as one of them.”

Maj made a face. “Walking on land is so hard. We’re not used to it. Are you going to give us legs?”

“No,” said the demons. “They’ll recognize your faces. You know well enough that Tetro is too small of a village and strangers would stand out.”

“Excuse my sister,” Mer said. “She’s a little slow.”

“Hey!” Maj said.

“That’s obvious,” said the demon. “I’m going to give you disguises. You’ll inhabit th
e souls of two human women who had recently died. I need for you to seduce two fishermen. Gio Salverini and his nephew Domenico Salverini.”

“What’s so special about them?” Maj asked.

“Just shut up, Maj!” Mer hushed.

The demon looked angry. “I have m
y reason and it’s none of your concern.”

His flames grew wider and Maj slid back in fear.

              Demons were a weird bunch who were always trolling for human souls to add to their collection. Maj never knew what they did with them and she’d always been curious to find out.

             
“I need their souls, and you want their delicious flesh,” he bellowed. “So stop with the questions and let’s come to a deal.”

             
The girls nodded obediently once again. One could never get so chummy with a demon, not even a little bit.

             
“I have rounded up two dead bodies, one from Tetro and the other from a nearby town. I’ll give you instructions on where the bodies can be found, and when you do find them, drink a bottle of this potion and you’ll be able to slip on their skin like a mink coat.”

             
He produced two small corked bottles of purple potion from the flames and laid them before the sirens.

             
“The younger of the two is called Adriana. She was murdered and everyone in town had been looking for her for months. Being a demon, I found her right away. She’s Domenico’s girlfriend and he would be absolutely thrilled to have her back. Whoever plays her can have fun with that one. The other woman died giving birth. I doubt that anyone in Tetro would recognize her. I need one of you to make a cover story about moving in town to escape from an abusive husband. Be a damsel in distress in order to seduce Gio. Poor, lonely Gio. He’d love the flesh of a real woman to hold for a change.”

“Would we have to sleep with them?” Maj made a face.

“No. But you do have to get them to marry you. That shouldn’t be hard, seeing the lengths men would go to for a seductive woman, and you’ve had centuries of practice in the art of seduction. It’s embedded in you. Frankly, I’d do something with you myself if I didn’t know what vile creatures you can turn into.”

The demon
winked at them. Then he produced two gold rings from the flames and laid them beside the potion bottles.

“The
men have to be wed to you for real in order for this to work. You can’t just shove the ring on them when they’re sleeping. Understand?”

“Yes,” Maj and Mer said.

The rings glowed. An inscription in Latin was engraved inside each ring that the sisters couldn’t understand, but they were too afraid to ask any more questions.

“As soon as the ring is on the groom
during the wedding ceremony, their soul is mine immediately. So do what you want with your groom and the other people after that as you please. But be sure to marry both men. I want two souls, understand? Don’t commit a massacre until the second man is wed.”

“Yes.”

“Now, any questions?”

             
Maj hesitated, but she was too curious not to ask.

             
“Wouldn’t the bodies be decomposing?”

             
“Not when you drink the potion. For the first few days, you might be inside a rotting corpse, but not before long you’ll be breathing life to them that they’ll look just as healthy as any other human.”

             
“Will we be legally wed to humans?” asked Mer. “Bound by the heavens?”

             
The demon laughed, utterly amused by the question.

             
“How could you be bound in our realm? It’s not as if you ever want to go to heaven, that boring place.”