Lullaby (4 page)

“I’m fine,” Gemma insisted once she found her voice, then turned off the faucet.

“Today’s, what? Wednesday?” Thea asked as Gemma dried her face with a towel. “So you’ve been a siren for … eight days now? Yeah. You need to eat something.”

“I’ve been eating,” Gemma said, but at the mention of food her stomach did a weird growling, and she pressed her hand over her belly as if she could silence it.

She’d been hungry before, but nothing had ever felt like this. This was
primal
, and it seemed to encompass her entire body.

When she’d been kissing Alex once before, she’d felt something similar, although slightly more intense. They’d been making out pretty hot and heavy, and then she’d “accidentally” bit him.

That had snapped her out of the strange hunger she’d felt with Alex, but she was unable to shake her current hunger. Fortunately, it was a lot milder, and she kept herself from biting Sawyer. But every day the watersong grew louder and her hunger grew stronger.

“Gemma, you know what I’m talking about,” Thea said, looking at her seriously. “What you’ve been eating can’t sustain—”

“I just need to eat more,” Gemma interrupted her.

She didn’t want to hear what Thea recommended she actually eat. Gemma already had an idea, but she wasn’t ready to hear it aloud, for someone to put into actual words what she would have to do in order to survive as this new monster.

Thea sighed loudly but didn’t argue with Gemma. “Suit yourself.”

“I will.” Gemma raised her chin defiantly, then walked past Thea out of the bathroom.

Thea trailed after her, into the hall and then down the winding marble staircase.

“You don’t need to follow me all day,” Gemma said, casting a look back over her shoulder at Thea. “I’m not going anywhere. I said I would do as you guys asked, and I will.”

“I wasn’t following you.” Thea bristled, sounding annoyed. “I’m going out for a swim.” She paused, her expression softening to something only moderately bitchy. “You can join me if you want.”

Nothing in the world sounded more tempting than going out to the ocean for a swim. Gemma was hot and sticky with sweat, and the watersong was beckoning her. But ever since they’d arrived at the beach house on Monday, Gemma hadn’t swum. She refused to do anything fun.

The sirens had killed people and nearly killed Alex and Harper, and now Gemma was a siren, too. She was the same evil that they were, and she shouldn’t derive any pleasure from this life. That was her punishment for living and allowing herself to become one of them.

Gemma shook her head. “I’m just going to get something to eat.”

They’d reached the bottom of the stairs, and Thea stopped, leaning on the banister, groaning. “You’re making this so much harder than it needs to be.”

“I’m doing the best I can,” Gemma said honestly.

“If you would just eat and swim, you’d feel so much better,” Thea said. “I know you’re all hung up on the eating thing, but if you’d just spend, like, an hour in the ocean, you’d feel a million times better.”

Gemma shook her head again. “Go swim. Don’t worry about me.”

“Whatever.” Thea threw her hands up in the air. “I’m done.”

Thea turned, heading out the back of the house to the beach. Gemma could see it through the windows, the crystal blue water splashing against the shore. She swallowed hard and looked away before she gave in to it.

She went to the kitchen to root around for something to eat, even though she knew none of the food would appeal to her.

The appliances were stainless steel and stood in sharp contrast to the stark white of the rest of the room. She’d just opened the fridge when the owner of the house, Sawyer, wandered into the kitchen.

“Oh,” Sawyer said when he saw her, looking sufficiently disappointed. “I thought it might be Thea.”

“She’s out swimming,” Gemma said. She grabbed an orange from the crisper, since it was the only thing that looked even mildly appetizing, then closed the fridge behind her. “You can probably join her if you want.”

He glanced to the back of the house toward the ocean. A longing filled his face, but it quickly shifted to conflicted regret.

“Nah.” Sawyer shook his head and ran his hand along the smooth gray-and-white granite of the island. “Penn told me to stay around the house, so I should do that.”

That explained the conflict. Penn, Thea, and Lexi had enraptured him with their song, so he wanted to be with them constantly. But he also didn’t want to disobey them. So if Penn told him to stay at the house, that overrode his urge to join Thea in the water.

Penn had even told her that when Sawyer was under direct orders from a siren, it wasn’t just impossible for him to disobey. If anything tried to stop him, he’d destroy it if he had to. The enchantment made him so fixated on his cause that it could even give him a superherolike strength. The way a mother could tap in to her adrenaline to lift a car off her baby, a person under a siren’s spell would do anything to do a siren’s bidding.

Gemma had refused to sing and enchant him, which was why Sawyer had almost no interest in her. It had been hard to fight the urge, though. As soon as the other sirens began singing, bespelling Sawyer with their melody, Gemma had the strongest impulse to join in with them. Her very being tried to compel her to sing, and eventually she’d had to cover her ears and cower in the corner, hiding away from the sirens and their song.

Once Sawyer was under their spell, he’d gladly invited the sirens to stay in his house for as long as they wanted, with free access to his credit cards, his cars, everything he owned. And from what Gemma had seen, he seemed to own quite a bit.

Sawyer himself was stunningly handsome. When they’d come upon the house, Gemma had expected the owner to be some rich old man. So when she saw him, looking as if he could be a male siren, she was shocked.

He was young, too, probably in his mid-twenties. His skin was deeply tanned from so much time spent on the beach, and it stood out sharply against his clothes. He wore a thin white shirt with the top few buttons undone, revealing the smooth contours of his chest. His hair was dark blond, and his eyes were a shade of blue that rivaled Lexi’s in beauty.

From what Gemma understood, it was only Sawyer’s good looks that kept him alive. Penn was rather taken with him, at least as much as Penn could be taken with anybody.

“So…” Gemma said, attempting to make conversation with Sawyer since they both stood awkwardly in the kitchen together. “Do you own this house?”

Sawyer raised an eyebrow and looked at her like she was stupid. “Yeah.”

“I mean, like, it’s your house and not your parents’ or something,” Gemma said as she peeled her orange. “Because you seem awfully young to own a house like this.”

“My grandfather died when I was nineteen and left me a third of his oil company,” Sawyer explained. “And I built this house when I was twenty-two.”

“You built this house?” Gemma asked, using a section of the orange to gesture around the room.

“Well, I didn’t build it with my own two hands,” Sawyer said, but he didn’t need to.

His nails were perfectly manicured, and although he hadn’t touched her, Gemma would guess that his hands were baby-soft. He didn’t look like he’d done a day’s work in his entire life.

“So what’s the deal with all the white?” Gemma asked.

“It’s pure and clean and fresh.” Sawyer smiled as he talked about it. “I wanted a house that was filled with light.”

“But don’t you get bored?” Gemma asked. “Don’t you ever want to look at something blue?”

Sawyer laughed a little and gestured at the windows behind him. “I have an entire ocean made of blue. I can see all the color I want.”

“Fair enough.”

She stared down at the peeled orange in her hands, almost willing herself to eat it. When she finally took a bite of a wedge, she instantly regretted it. Normally she loved the fruit, but now it tasted horrible, as if the juice were made of battery acid.

“Ugh.” She grimaced and tossed the orange in the garbage, unable to eat any more.

“Was there something wrong with it?” Sawyer asked, watching her shake her head in disgust.

“No, I don’t think so.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Do you want me to get you something else?” Sawyer offered, making a move toward the fridge.

“No, that’s okay. I don’t think I’m hungry after all.”

“Are you sure?” Sawyer asked. “Because I don’t have anything else to do, and I can make a pretty mean omelet.”

“That’s okay,” Gemma insisted, and started backing away from the kitchen. “I think I’m going to go lie down.”

“Okay,” Sawyer said, sounding disappointed.

He hadn’t been that excited to see her, but he still seemed sad to see her go. Gemma might not have the same kind of hold on him that Penn and the other girls had, but she was still a siren. Without even trying, she could still enchant a man.

She hurried away, practically jogging back up the stairs. Taking a bite of the orange had made her feel even worse than she’d felt before. As soon as she got to her room, she slammed the door shut, then leaned against it.

Her whole body was shaking, and taking in deep breaths of the salty air didn’t seem to help. She wiped the cold sweat from her brow, unsure how much longer she could do this. Eventually she’d have to feed.

FIVE

Searching

Both Harper and Brian had really let the housework slide since Gemma had left. Their minds had been on other things, so the house was in disarray. Newspapers were strewn about the living room, and empty beer bottles covered the table next to Brian’s chair. In the small laundry room off the kitchen, a pile of dirty clothes was spilling out the door, but that had been building up since before Gemma left.

Eyeing their mess of a house, Harper chewed her lip. She didn’t want to clean, and it wasn’t out of laziness. It just felt sacrilegious somehow. Her sister was missing, and she had no right to resume her normal life as if something weren’t horribly wrong.

The problem was that Harper didn’t know where else to look, and real life didn’t stop just because Gemma was gone. The garbage still needed to be taken out. The lawn still needed to be mowed. And her father still needed to go to work.

Harper was supposed to be working today herself, but she’d only been able to convince Brian to leave by agreeing to stay home. In case Gemma came back or called, he insisted that somebody be at the house at all times.

After Brian had finally left for work that morning, Harper had waited nervously near the front door. He’d already missed two days this week and then showed up late today. She was afraid he might not have a job waiting for him. When he didn’t come back after an hour, she let out a sigh of relief and moved on.

The first half of the day she spent calling every missing children’s organization she could find. None of them put Gemma high on their list, because of her age and because she’d left willingly.

Once Harper had exhausted all the organizations, she sat by the phone at the kitchen table trying to think of other people to call or anywhere else to look. But she was coming up empty.

Harper and Gemma had lived their whole lives in Capri, and they didn’t have close ties with anybody outside it. Their grandparents were dead, and they had an aunt and a couple cousins who lived in Canada, but they didn’t really know them.

That was when Harper noticed the state of the house and decided to do something about it. There was really nothing else for her to do, at least not anything that could help her with Gemma or the sirens, and she had to put her nervous energy to work. She couldn’t just sit there staring at the phone all day, willing it to ring.

So she cleaned.

Harper started with the laundry, since it was overflowing, and then moved on to the living room. She threw away garbage, vacuumed, and dusted. In the kitchen she scrubbed the floors, cleaned out the fridge, and rearranged the pots and the pans in the cupboards.

Alex came over shortly after Harper decided to tackle the basement. Every Christmas, when they brought up the tree and the ornaments, Harper vowed to go through the old boxes and get rid of junk and organize the keepsakes. She finally decided that today would be the day.

“Harper?” Alex was upstairs calling her name, and, based on the creaking of his footsteps above her head, she guessed he was in the living room.

“I’m down here!” Harper shouted toward the basement steps, hoping he’d hear her.

She was sitting in an old lawn chair, which she’d had to steal from a very large daddy longlegs spider. Once the chair was clean of cobwebs, she’d sat down with an old box on her lap and started rummaging through it.

So far, the box’s contents appeared to be papers and projects from when Harper and Gemma were little. All of the papers had their mother’s writing on them, like
Harper—First Grade, Age 7
or
Gemma—Mother’s Day Card, Age 3
scrawled across the back.

That also explained why the box only contained items from until Harper was in third grade and Gemma was in first. That was the year when Nathalie had been in the car accident, and although Brian loved his daughters, he’d never been as good about keeping things as their mother had.

Harper pulled out a photo that was bent and faded with age. It had been glued onto a piece of pink construction paper cut into the shape of a lopsided heart. In sloppy cursive across the top, it said
My Family
in Gemma’s handwriting.

The photo showed the four of them, Brian, Nathalie, Harper, and Gemma, at the beach. Gemma and Harper were wearing matching bathing suits—purple, with white flowers and a ruffle around the bottom. Harper had nearly forgotten about that day, but it was eleven years ago.

They all looked so happy—even Gemma, who hadn’t wanted to come out of the water for the picture. Nathalie had had to bribe her with an ice-cream cone.

“Harper?” Alex said uncertainly from the top of the basement steps, pulling her from her thoughts.

“Yeah.” Harper put the picture back in the box, then set the box aside.

“Sorry, I just let myself in,” Alex said as he came down the steps. “I knocked, but you didn’t answer.”