Siren's Song (17 page)

I carefully open the age-worn pages. An eye stares back at me, one eye and the side of a nose. Long dark lashes in charcoal hover just below an arched brow. The only color on the page is in the iris—pure chocolate brown, warm, with hints of gold. I swallow hard, knowing without looking that it matches my eye color perfectly. The charcoal has dissolved a bit but I can still make out the faint outline of a heart on the eyelid, between the lashes and the brow. I rub a finger over my own eyelid, where the tiny capillaries form an odd little heart exactly like the eye in the sketch.

I hold my breath as I turn the page. Lips. A little too full. A perfect white fence of teeth in between. I bite down on my lower lip and turn the page. A slender waist, nude, blending into the rounded side of a hip and butt cheek, down into a slender leg. The light that's captured with the shadow and white space on the picture gives the skin a soft, smooth look. The model's face is obscured, off the page, yet she's turned so that her left breast shows. My eyes run down her neck to a little smudge. I peer closely at it. It can't be. It really…can't…be.

Somewhere in the back of my consciousness I realize the water has stopped. I hear footfalls, the quick intake of breath. But I don't care. I study the smudge, moving my face close and then back to make out the shape of…wings.

I feel weak and realize I'm kneeling on the floor with the book in my lap.

“Jule.” Luke's deep voice is close, but I can't tear my gaze from the smudge, the little mark that sits low on my chest over my heart. Luke bends down and the fresh smell of soap and shampoo envelops me. A drop of water falls off him and onto the page. I quickly wipe it away, not wanting it to mar the sketch in any way. He tries to pull the book from my fingers, but I won't let go. I can't let go.

Luke says something softly, but it sounds like a curse. He lets me keep the book. I turn my stinging eyes to him and blink. “It's…a dragonfly.”

His lips are pursed tight like he's keeping all the secrets of the world locked inside. Secrets that involve me. “Answer me,” my voice rises. “That's the dragonfly-shaped birthmark I have on my chest.”

Luke runs a hand through his wet hair. It sticks out at angles, making him look sexier, standing there with only a towel around his hips. “Let me get dressed.” I turn back to the book. I hear a dresser open and slam and his door shut. But all I can do is hold the book. No embarrassment or worry about what his parents might think. Maybe I'm in shock.

I turn the page and my breath huffs out of me like I've been punched in the gut. My cupped hand goes to my mouth as I stare into my own face. The rendering is perfect, my long hair waving around my pixie face. My eyebrows just a bit on the wild side. My straight, thin nose that curves up at the end. Even the small scar on my chin that I got sledding when I was eight. I look sad in the picture. There's a shine in my eyes like tears are bubbling up. My teeth rest on my lower lip like it might be quivering. Sad but beautiful in its vulnerability.

I feel Luke kneel down next to me. “You asked me,” he pauses and my eyes turn to him, “how long I've been seventeen.” I just stare back. Of course I remember the question. I remember asking it as a joke, but holding my breath for his answer. My breath is caught again. His voice drops, but he keeps his clear, blue-black eyes on mine. “You didn't ask me how many
times
I've been seventeen.”

10

“If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.”
~Pearl S. Buck

My world drops out from beneath me. My pounding heart plummets and my butt hits the floor as I fall into a sitting position against Luke's bed. His hands are on my upper arms, steadying me.

“How? You…” My lips feel numb as I try to decide on a question. “How many times,”
swallow, breathe
, “
have
you been seventeen?”

Luke takes the brittle sketch book from my hands. He sits down next to me on the floor, both of us leaning against the bed, staring at the back of his closed bedroom door. “Last count puts this one at eleven.”

“Eleven,” I parrot back, not sure what that means. “You've been seventeen eleven times.”

I see him nod in my peripheral vision. Breathe in, breathe out, ignore the little sparkles floating in my line of sight. “Then you drew these pictures of me…”

He glances at the cover. “Over two hundred years ago.”

“Did…was I with you two hundred years ago?” It seems a reasonable question.

“These pictures are from dreams I have, I had, back then. The first time I ever physically met you was the day I moved in, two weeks ago.”

My mind runs in slow motion. Two hundred years, eleven lifetimes, dreams of me, vivid dreams.

“What does this have to do with Taylin and Matt?” I know they're involved, they must be.

Luke sighs. “I think I'd better start at the beginning.”

“There's a beginning?” I laugh, the edge of hysteria making it sound almost child-like. “Like a fairy tale. Once upon a time…” I flap my hand in the air. “Go ahead, once upon a time.”

He looks at me. “You're not the only one with questions.”

“Questions? About Taylin and Matt?”

“No, about you.”

“Me?” He nods. What the hell could he want to know about simple old Jule? It's ludicrous, the difference between the questions we have for each other. “Okay, my favorite color is purple, I open my presents on Christmas morning instead of Christmas Eve, I prefer hot chocolate to coffee, and I've only been seventeen once. Anything else?”

I stare into his deep-water eyes. His features are so close, the slight smile on his lips, the shadow of a beard he didn't bother to shave, the strength of his jaw. “Actually, yes, but that's a start.” His smile melts the ice holding me stiff and I take in a full breath. “Good,” his grin becomes lopsided. “Breathing is good.” Has he been watching me teeter on the edge of consciousness?

I take another full inhale and release it. “Okay, the beginning.” My voice is calmer. I wait.

Luke waits. I listen to him breathe. His shoulder sits against my own, warming me. His bare arms are tattoo-free. He rests his hand on my denim-covered thigh. “My name is Lucas Macleod and I was born, the first time,” he qualifies, “on the Isle of Skye, one of the western islands off of Scotland, around the year 1785. I'm not completely sure of the year.” Luke's voice slips a little into a Scottish-sounding accent. “Mathias, or Matt as you know him, was born about a year after me, followed by Taylin when I was five or so.”

“You are brothers and sister,” I murmur, more to myself than to him.

“Yes,” he says slowly, as if not wanting to startle me further. “Our parents died, our father first as he defended the land we'd farmed for generations against an Englishman who claimed the land was suddenly his. His name was Jacob, our first father, our real father. Mathias looks a lot like him.” Luke pauses and I don't say anything. After a moment he continues. “Our mother was Elspet. She tried to protect us after Father was killed, but the landowner had his men throw us from our home. We journeyed to Glasgow. Mother died that first winter of some illness that fresh food and warm, sanitary conditions would have prevented.”

I lay my hand on his where it sits, warming my leg. It still feels like some made-up story, but the sincerity in Luke's voice, the barely contained anger, makes it real.

“So we were on our own. I am the eldest, so I tried to find us an occupation that would bring in food at least. That's when I found Maximillian. Actually, he caught me as I tried to pick his pocket.” Luke shrugs. “I'd become pretty good at it, but Maximillian was…perceptive, powerful. He was wealthy, too, and looking for…followers. It seemed like a stroke of luck at first. He fed the three of us, took us to his large home in France, outside Paris, and all we had to do was learn.”

“You all speak French so well,” I murmur to myself, then look at the fall of damp hair over Luke's forehead as his gaze rests on our joined hands. “He was a teacher?”

“In a way. He was a dark magician or wizard, someone who studied the dark arts. In retrospect I think he was forming some type of army or trying to gather enough power to control something. There were others of us at his house, all teenagers, homeless, desperate. But the three of us caught on to the magic faster than the rest.” Luke shakes his head. “Taylin, Mathias, and I were the elite of his team within a year. He said we possessed innate magic.” He shrugs.

“Locks, you learned how to open locks.”

Luke lets out one small chuckle. “Aye, it's true that no un-enchanted mechanical lock can hold me. We all have our specialties. But he had us trying to harness large amounts of dark magic with bizarre rituals that were becoming darker and more dangerous. It worried his wife, Deidre.

“She was a beautiful woman with the heart and voice of an angel. She loved us, I think. I don't know, but she was kind, always looking out for us, protecting us, singing to us. And for the most part Maximillian listened to her. He loved her, was obsessed with her, really.” Luke cocks his head so I can see his dark eyes. “She was like our own mother after a few years.”

Luke clears his throat. “So, when the three of us found Maximillian one night in his workshop, covered in blood and chanting about eternal life, we were instantly worried about Deidre.” Luke scrubs his empty hand back and forth over his face. “I demanded to know where she was, but Maximillian was in some kind of altered state, chanting about the Siren's blood making people live lives over and over again forever.”

A cold flash of ice shivers up my back at the word “Siren.” Taylin called me that at the bonfire,
and
in Luke's note. I sit still, my gaze following the vague lines in my jeans. “Siren,” I whisper.

“He'd always called Deidre his Siren because of her voice and how it drew everyone to her. He called it her pure magic. I don't think he'd figured out how to use it, or else he hadn't turned dark enough yet to use the one person he loved. But there was so much blood on him, and he seemed so crazed that we assumed he'd hurt her, maybe killed her. Taylin ran off to see if Deidre was in their bedroom while Mathias and I tried to bring Maximillian out of his trance.”

Luke's hair stands up in haphazard spikes as he runs his fingers through it. “He became furious, incensed that we would stop his ritual. It all happened so fast, the timing was terrible. Maximillian had funneled so much black magic into himself, it was leaking out. He smelled of decay, burning flesh…” Luke trails off. I scoot closer so that my whole side lies against his.

“Taylin came back with Deidre, who rushed to Maximillian, putting herself between him and us, protecting us with her last breath. She sang, trying to pull her husband out of his madness, but he was too far gone. In fact, it seemed to make him more powerful, crushing, furious. He went berserk, hitting her with his fists and his magic as she shielded us.” Luke's voice goes flat. “It…killed her.
He
killed her. And he blamed us.”

“How could he blame you?”

Luke shrugs. “He felt we interfered, brought her down there when he was dangerous. After she died, it was like there was nothing holding him in the light. Maximillian sank, heart first, into the dark. His hate, especially for us, mushroomed out like some disease, transforming him into nothing but revenge incarnate.”

“What did he do?” My words are soft, timid, as if I'm watching the scene of a horror movie from between my fingers.

Luke laughs, a dark, sardonic chuckle. “He cursed us.” With that, Luke stands up. He paces to his closet; reaching onto the top shelf, he pulls down a red leather-bound book with a lock on it. With a whisper I hear the lock click open. “We wrote down everything we could remember of what he said,” he says, scanning the brittle, yellowed pages. “He'd been playing with such darkness, trying to create a way to be reborn again and again with Deidre so they'd live eternally on Earth together, since he didn't think there would be a place in heaven for them–well, himself, anyway. Hopefully Deidre has been there since that terrible day.”

“The curse makes you be reborn again and again? That… doesn't sound too bad.”

Luke laughs, but it's an icy mask of skewed mirth. I push up from the floor and sit on the edge of his bed. “He cursed us with more than just life after endless life. He cursed us with the absence of love, life after life.”

“Absence of love?”

“Since we took his love from him, he took love from us. We would live over and over again, but without any love. No love for our parents, no love for a friend, a pet, a spouse, no love for anything or anyone. Not even each other, anymore. Forever.”

“What do you mean, you can't love? Is it chemical?”

Luke flips through the book and a piece of thin paper falls out, a lab sheet. “Carolyn had me tested when I was little. Now there is technology to see what the magic did to us.” He smirks and passes the report to me. Numbers and brain chemical names like dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin are listed in rows. “They could have put me on antidepressants, since that's what the doctors thought was going on, but Carolyn resisted because of the possible side effects.”

“So you don't feel…” How do I explain love? “…an attachment or a want to be with anyone?”

“That is part of the curse.”

“But when Taylin saw you the first day of school—”

“Relief, perhaps a shadow of love, but not in the true form that we used to share.”

“Taylin said at the bonfire…” I trail off as the horror of what Luke is describing filters into my brain. I swallow and start again. “She said that you and Matt could live with respect, but she couldn't live without love.”

Luke nods slightly. “I think the curse is even harder on her. Even in the Bible God mentions that men need respect and women need love to prosper. Which is usually why Taylin is the first of us to die each time. By the time she reaches her late teens she can't handle it any longer.”