Sirensong (27 page)

Kimber and Keane gaped at me, and Ethan shook his head in disapproval. I figured since I’d gone that far, I might as well go the rest of the way.

“I don’t seem to be able to cast regular magic spells,” I continued, “but when I’m in danger I can do this spell that turns Fae into mortals. I’d never have survived the Bogle attack otherwise. A bunch of them almost caught me, and … and I turned them mortal.” The Bogles were monsters, and they’d been trying to kill me at the time, but I still shuddered with horror at the memory of what I had done. Monsters they might have been, but they were living beings.

“You turned them mortal,” Keane repeated flatly. I wasn’t sure he quite believed me, but whether he believed me or not, he was plenty mad that this was the first he was hearing about it. He shifted his gaze from me to Ethan. “And you knew about this. Don’t lie—you obviously weren’t surprised by what she said.” And yeah, Ethan knowing something he didn’t was not going to put Keane in his happy place.

“I knew,” Ethan admitted. “I’m the one who told her not to tell anyone, and if you care about her at all, you’ll keep your mouth shut and try to forget she said anything. People feel threatened enough by her powers as it is.”

Keane said something snarly in response, but I couldn’t hear it over the pounding of my heart when I risked a glance at Kimber’s face. Keane was mad at me for keeping such a big secret, but Kimber …

She’d handled learning the secret of my bargain with the Erlking pretty well, and she hadn’t punched me out when she learned about the mark, either. But this was apparently the camel’s last straw.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said in a furious undertone. “You’ve lied about so many things, why not one more?”

I flinched from the anger and hurt in her eyes. “Ethan is the only person who knew. I didn’t even tell my father.” I realized I was telling yet another lie, but this time it was by accident. I’d allowed myself to forget that the Erlking knew about my power, too. I was going to clarify, but Kimber didn’t give me a chance.

“You know what, Dana?” she cried, pushing to her feet so fast she almost fell over. “You can take your secrets and your lies and you can shove them! You and my brother are like peas in a pod, and you deserve each other.”

Kimber turned her back and scrambled up the bank of the stream, disappearing into the underbrush in an adrenaline-and-anger-fueled sprint. I wanted to follow her, but I doubted I could catch up to her, not with her Fae speed, and even if I did, there wasn’t anything I could say that she’d want to hear right now.

Keane looked back and forth between Ethan and me, and I could see he was torn between going after Kimber and staying to make sure Ethan didn’t try anything.

“Go after her,” I begged him. “She’s upset enough she could get into trouble.” Even with her good sense of direction, I was afraid she’d get herself lost in the woods if the energy from her rage kept her running long enough. Not to mention that there were people hunting us.

Keane glared at Ethan. “If anything happens to Dana while I’m gone, I will kill you. Understand?” He looked like he meant it, too.

“Got it,” Ethan said. “Now bring Kimber back so
I
don’t have to kill
you
.”

Keane gave him one more bone-chilling glare before clearing the bank in a ridiculously graceful leap and tearing off in the direction Kimber had gone.

I felt like crying, but that was a cop-out. I’d chosen to keep my secrets, even from the people who were supposed to be my best friends; it was time to face the consequences of my decisions.

Thanks to my mom, her drinking, and our constant moving from town to town, I’d learned that the only person I could ever fully trust was myself. I knew this wasn’t a good way to go about life, but time and time again, when I’d put my faith in my mom, the only constant in my life, she’d let me down. I’d let that turn me into a suspicious, secretive little bitch, and that wasn’t the kind of person I wanted to be. I should have trusted Kimber with the truth, and I didn’t know if I could ever make it up to her.

“I suck,” I said beneath my breath.

Ethan laughed, but it was a bitter, haunted laugh. “Maybe Kimber’s right and we deserve each other. Two natural-born liars.” He closed his eyes and thunked the back of his head against the wall of dirt and roots behind him.

“You were supposed to comfort me and tell me I don’t suck.” God, how pathetically needy I sounded.

Ethan opened his eyes and met my gaze. “I’m the one who told you to lie about it in the first place. And in case you didn’t get the mental telepathy message I was trying to send you, I wanted you to lie about it again just now. In other words,
I
suck, not you.”

I tried to run my hand through my hair in frustration, but it was a dirty, snarly mess. I had a mirror somewhere in my backpack, but I had no desire to see how hideous I looked right now.

“Maybe I should have lied again,” I said. I wouldn’t even have had to say anything. All I had to do was keep quiet and let the lie stand, and Kimber wouldn’t now be running blindly into the woods, hating my guts.

“And maybe you were right to tell the truth. It’s not like I have all the answers.”

I wrapped my arms around my legs and laid my chin on my knees, hurting, heartsick, and exhausted both mentally and physically. I had screwed up so many times, and it was mostly the people I cared about who suffered for it instead of me. That was just … wrong.

“Come here,” Ethan said, beckoning with a jerk of his chin. “I can’t give you a proper hug with my hands tied, but we can sort of pretend.”

Was he hoping to lure me into untying his hands?

I wanted to slap myself as soon as that thought crossed my nasty, suspicious mind. Two seconds ago, I was thinking about how I needed to trust people more.

Ethan nudged me with the tip of his shoe, which was all he could reach me with.

“Hey, it’s okay. I’m not offended that you don’t trust me right now. You know I may not be myself.”

“But you’re not feeling any insane urges to grab me and carry me off to the Erlking right now, right?”

One side of his mouth quirked up in a grin, though I didn’t think his expression would ever be quite as boyish as it had once been. “Nope. You’re mine, and I’m not sharing.”

Those words made me squirm, though they also brought a pleased blush to my cheeks. I would never really be his, not as long as my bargain with the Erlking lasted. I didn’t see any reason why the Erlking’s decision to hunt me would free me from our bargain.

I shouldn’t even have been
thinking
about that under the circumstances, but I couldn’t help it. Ethan was looking at me with a familiar hunger in his eyes, though I had to look about as appealing as moldy cheese and didn’t smell much better. Of course, Ethan was looking kind of rough himself, his hair all tangled, his clothes filthy, and that livid burn on his face constantly reminding me of the pain he must be in. My shoulder hurt like hell, but his mark had been bigger, so his burn was, too. I couldn’t imagine what it must feel like, and yet it didn’t stop him from looking at me like he wanted to get me into bed.

Knowing that Kimber and Keane would tell me I was being stupid if they were here, I scooted over until I was sitting right beside Ethan, then laid my head on his shoulder. The warmth of his body was comforting, but I desperately longed for the feel of his arms around me. I was severely tempted to untie his hands, but it was a temptation I managed to resist.

“Reach into my right front pocket,” he whispered.

I glanced up at his face and saw that he was serious, and that it wasn’t an attempt at flirtation. I frowned at him, having no idea why he wanted me to put my hand in his pocket. I hated having to be so suspicious of him, but it would be stupid of me not to think things through when I couldn’t be sure if the Erlking was influencing him.

“Hurry, before the others come back,” he urged.

Still, I hesitated, and even though Ethan understood my caution, there was a flash of annoyance in his eyes.

“I’m trying to give you back your brooch,” he said.

I gasped and reached for my own pocket, where I’d been keeping the Erlking’s brooch carefully hidden. The pocket was empty.

“The Erlking told me about it and made me take it from you before I tried to kidnap you,” Ethan explained. “I didn’t want to give it back to you while Kimber and Keane were around, because I knew you must be keeping it secret for a reason.”

There was no hint of accusation in his voice, and his casual acceptance of one more lie on my part almost brought me to tears. I couldn’t think of what to say—my reasons for keeping the brooch secret didn’t seem as good today as they had before—so I did as he asked and reached into his pocket. I tried not to think too much about just where I was putting my hand, but I couldn’t help but be aware of it as I felt around for the brooch, which of course was buried at the very bottom of the pocket.

Maybe if we’d been back in Avalon, alone and out of danger, I’d have found the courage to take advantage of our positions. Ethan was my boyfriend, after all, and though we could never go for the home run, we could certainly give the bases a try. It would be a dangerous game, because it was possible Ethan would let his hormones get the best of his common sense. I might not be the most experienced sixteen-year-old in the world, but I knew that boys’ brains sometimes resided in their pants. The only reason I was willing to risk even kissing him was that I trusted my own brain to stop us from going too far.

I was blushing again, but then my fingers found the brooch and I carefully pulled it out of Ethan’s pocket. I held it in the palm of my hand. It was a beautiful piece of jewelry, the metal gleaming silver that neither tarnished nor scratched, the stylized stag looking ready to leap off my hand at any moment.

“You don’t think the Erlking can track us through this, do you?” I asked. I had been so focused on the marks that I hadn’t even thought of that before, but the brooch was a rendering of the Erlking’s symbol.

“I don’t think so,” Ethan said. “Why would he need to track you through the brooch when he’d already put the mark on your shoulder?”

“Still,” I said, the words coming reluctantly, “maybe it would be best if I left it behind.”

“Don’t. If the Queen’s forces catch up with us, you need to be able to use the brooch to escape.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “I am
not
running away and leaving you guys to face the music.” Maybe I’d been right all along about keeping the brooch secret.

“You’d damn well better!” he responded with some heat. “
You’re
the person they hold responsible for the bomb.
You’re
the one they’ll execute. The rest of us might be seen as accessories, but the Queen won’t kill us. Especially not Kimber and me, considering we’re Unseelie and killing us might cause an incident.”

I knew enough about Fae politics to be doubtful. No, Titania might not execute Ethan and Kimber, but she’d be happy to hand them over to Mab, the Unseelie Queen, who might well execute them as a gesture of goodwill or something stupid like that.

But Ethan was right about one thing: if Titantia’s forces caught me, I was dead. And if Henry had anything to do with it, I’d be dead even before I was brought back to the palace for the Queen’s pleasure. Maybe no one would believe me if I started pointing fingers, but why would he risk it? How hard would it be for Henry to bribe or bully the search party into taking me dead or alive, with the emphasis on dead? I suspected not hard at all.

With a sigh of resignation, I slipped the brooch back into my own pocket. I hoped I wouldn’t need to use it.

Kimber and Keane were gone long enough that I began to worry about them. If they’d been gone even five minutes longer, I probably would have gone out in search of them, no matter how dangerous it was for someone with my sense of direction to go wandering around in the woods alone.

I sighed with relief when I heard their voices approaching, but when they jumped down into the hollow with Ethan and me, I sensed trouble was about to start. Again.

There was a distinctive red mark on Kimber’s neck, and the tiny buttons on the bodice of her sundress were mis-buttoned. As if that weren’t bad enough, Keane was looking unbearably smug, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to guess what he and Kimber had been up to for all the time they were gone. Maybe he’d thought he was “comforting” her.

Once upon a time, Keane had made it obvious—without ever saying it out loud—that he was interested in me. I had made it just as obvious that I didn’t share his interest, though I’d been flattered by it, and I’d felt little tugs of irrational jealousy when he’d started paying attention to Kimber. I wanted to be happy for Kimber, I really did. It was just that I couldn’t help suspecting Keane’s motives. Ethan had stolen his girlfriend when they were in high school, and Keane made no secret that he held a major grudge. Was it a coincidence that Keane had shown interest in me and then shifted his attention to Ethan’s sister when I didn’t respond?

If he wanted to get a rise out of Ethan, Keane succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. The moment Ethan caught sight of them and saw the hickey on Kimber’s neck, magic flooded our little hollow. I whirled on Ethan, rushing to cover his mouth before he could get a spell out.

I was too slow.

“Back!” Ethan yelled in the instant before my hand landed on his mouth.

Kimber then did something either very brave or very stupid. Maybe a little of both. She stepped between Ethan and Keane.

Ethan’s spell slammed into her, and Kimber screamed as she was lifted off her feet and propelled backward. She bounced off Keane, who tried to grab her but managed to catch an elbow in the face for his efforts, then crashed into the trunk of a large tree. Her back hit first, the impact hard enough to rattle the tree’s branches, and then the back of her head smacked the trunk and she fell limply to the ground.