"Josephine Reginn Raphelia—you are our only chance at summoning a god. That's why you were brought back to Hefeta—your home."
Olesia's words ricocheted around the room like a canon fired from Valencia.
Her eyes still held that unearthly shining yellow, her rigid posture that of a queen, though I'd never seen one up close.
"It's true, Josephine. When we tried five years ago, we almost did it, but when the dust settled, there was no God there."
"Why in all the Everworld would you want to summon a God?!"
My near shrieking voice forced a wince out of everyone in the room aside from Oren, Soraya and Olesia.
The Elder raised her hands before finding her gaze back to me.
"Look around you. All of this was invisible to your eye coming in from the sea, and it is invisible to anyone else coming from all sides—including on land. Yet—somehow, the King of Valencia was able to take away two of our three princesses. How do you think that happened, child?"
"I'm not sure, I've only been here a few hours. If it's invisible, it would've had to have been someone with powers of their own—"
I cut myself off before remembering the exact reason why the King of Valencia had hunted me so mercilessly across the countryside. Or, had that been my uncle?
I didn't have the mind capacity to wonder about my father's vengeful brother at the moment, though, as Olesia finished my thoughts for me.
"The King of Valencia is known for stealing those with peculiar powers in order to harness them for himself. He's been after Sirens to use as his own personal assassins since he came to power over a hundred years ago. We know he's not mortal—but we haven't a clue of his actual heritage. No one has seen his face in years. He's nothing but a ghost with soldiers who are able to seek and destroy at his command. We've depleted our power reserves. We can no longer fight back without sustaining losses."
"Elder Olesia, if I may?"
Warrick was a braver soul than I by interrupting Olesia like that, but she let him continue to speak, nonetheless.
"Ever since you were taken by your parents all those years ago, Josephine, more and more Sirens have been vanishing. We honestly believed your mother had been taken and you and your sister had perished somehow until we received word of two young women around the right ages with a bounty on their heads by the King of Valencia himself. That's how we knew that it was real and that you two were still out there somewhere, alive and well. We had to bring you home."
"Right. You had to bring me home to do some kind of magical ceremony that would have me slicing my arm open and performing old, dangerous magic to summon an actual God. I'm starting to feel as if being on the run would be a better fate than being left to the whims of an old god who feels no remorse or human empathy."
"Nicos is different than the others in the pantheon, Josephine."
Olesia stood and motioned to Sabira for something, and she seemed to know exactly what it was that the Elder wanted.
She disappeared behind a door that most likely led to her bedroom and we all sat in the sitting room with bated breath, inhaling the thick scent of the dwindling fire and leftover porridge.
"Will you please keep an open mind, Jo? No one here wants to hurt you, and you know I can't lie to you. We all only want what's best for you."
Inala's words were hardly a comfort, but considering the fact that I felt the same pull to be unable to lie to her as well, the facts about the blood claim we'd been bonded with rang true, so I relaxed a bit into my seat as Soraya sulked in a corner, her unseeing eyes seemingly more observant than if she weren't actually blind.
That pulsing power of relaxing energy surged behind me, and I made the mistake of turning behind me to look at Oren.
His eyes were already on me, molten amber and powerful currents of amplified torturous beauty hiding in their depths.
"And what do you make of all this? I suppose you're just along for the ride now that I'm here, right? Or did they only agree to help you with your curse if I agreed to doing this summoning ritual?"
Oren withdrew his energy and his comforting scent receded with it.
"I've done my part of the agreement."
"Then why are you still here?"
His gaze didn't drop mine, and suddenly the air in the home skyrocketed as the fire to mine and Oren's backs seemed to flare to life stronger than before, like some unknown entity were stoking it to roar and dance along to the tune of my dangerously quick heartbeat.
"The agreement might be fulfilled, but my duties are not."
"What duties? You owe me nothing."
He finally came forward, and what was once only one point of contact on my body became two as he placed another hand on the second shoulder and leaned down so that his mouth was flush with my ear.
"Maybe not, but I'm too involved now to not see this through."
"So I'm just some sort of moral obligation to you, is that it? What happened to those morals when you were busy drugging and kidnapping me?"
A whisper of his breath danced over the sensitive shell of my ear as he blew out a light chuckle, and his change in mood was enough to make my mind spin around and around in circles.
"Maybe I have some things to make up for, then."
Inala's derisive bark of laughter reached me just as Sabira came barreling back into the room with an old, bound book of blood red leather and a golden foil design in a circular pattern depicting the sun and moon along a linear path.
A tawny bird sat on one of the circles, while elsewhere a wolf howled on the design. There was the unmistakable drawing of grain, a pregnant woman, and so on and so forth until all of the old gods in the pantheon were depicted along the golden circle.
Oren jerked his body away from me as his eyes fell on the book.
"What is that?" I asked, clearly the only one in the room without any prior knowledge as to what book Sabira was holding.
She flipped her golden tresses behind her shoulder before raking her light eyes over the rough leather bound tightly in her hands.
"This is the Summoner. It is a tome with explicit directions on how to summon each and every god in the pantheon."
Sabira proudly held out the book, her small and dainty hands slightly shaking as she produced it to Olesia by falling down onto one knee in front of the Elder and holding the book above her head.
"You've done good this night being its keeper. Erinna and Warrick will take over watch of it tomorrow night. Josephine, come. This is the book of our ancestors. It is written in the old language that only the Elders and a select few in Hefeta know how to speak, but you will learn it in time if you are to ascend to the title."
I most definitely would not be ascending to any title.
If anything, I would simply hear out the entire story and plan that they had for me before making any rash decisions, but the thought of being a leader to people I didn't know and didn't share customs and traditions and memories with was daunting and unthinkable at best.
Maybe I'd let them talk themselves stupid, and if I didn't agree with everything they wanted me to do, I'd leave in the night.
Or maybe I'd stay until I learned to control the voice inside me that was begging to be let out already even despite my reserves being depleted after the attack in the mountain caves by the Yelbats.
"I know the old language, and I'm not going to be an Elder. I can teach you whenever you want Josephine. The Sirens all find it to be quite attractive, though, so Oren might need to stand close by unless you want to stay on my bedroll tonight," Yuni called out from across the room but his sister was swatting him in the ribs before I could tell him that I definitely didn't want to sleep on anyone's bedroll besides my own.
"Josephine should have the best training in the old language we have available. The duty will fall to Erinna and Sabira, if they agree."
Olesia's words fell upon the two Sirens who were more than eager to help me with learning an ancient language I'd only heard falling off the tongues of the people of the plains in Valencia who still practiced the old ways of worshiping the gods—through human sacrifice.
"This book holds the instructions on how to summon every god in the pantheon and—"
"Every god except for Kyan, you mean," Oren interrupted Olesia, mentioning the God of shadow and death that wasn't represented in the book nor the temples that adorned the outskirts of Hefeta.
"Exactly. He went against the gods, and they punished him for it. They outcast him, sent him to the Everworld, and the humans before us were forced to destroy his temple. So, of course, there would be no need for us to want to summon him. Now, since this book allows us to summon the gods, our best choice would be to summon Nicos, or his animal form, the Wolf of the North Wind. He could help us shift the power in our direction and protect us from the king."
"Why would a god become involved in the affairs of mortals, though? Isn't that the one thing they normally refuse to do? My sister always told me—"
"Nicos is different. He stood up for Hefeta when the other male gods forced themselves upon her. Even Kyan, supposedly the most powerful god in all the pantheon, stayed in the Everworld and did not help her. They brutalized our maker so badly that she could not have more than one child, so instead of birthing us all from her womb, she imbued a small amount of mortals with the powers of the Siren in order to strengthen the numbers of her creation. This is where our Elders come from, though—the direct descendants of the one child she was able to have are our Elders, not the mortals that she strengthened with powers.
"Women that normally couldn't protect themselves soon could sprout fins and tails in waters and use their lethal voice to kill the men who cared nothing for us besides our bodies and the children we could bear them. Once our numbers grew, she gathered us here, in our homeland named after her. If only her mother Nalini could have seen her, the Goddess would have been so proud."
I was reminded of the history lesson Oren had given me on the horseback ride through the mountains—the truth of who had really created the Sirens.
It had been Nalini, the Goddess of birds and wind, that gave birth to her daughter Hefeta.
But if her own daughter had been brutalized by the male gods of the pantheon, why had the goddesses stood silent?
Surely considering there were more of them than the males since Kyan had been banished to the Everworld they could have overpowered the male gods assaulting Nalini's daughter, a demigod in her own right...
Six goddesses and five gods, and only one of those gods had done something and stood up for Hefeta.
"So you see, Josephine, Nicos is the only god we could summon who might be empathetic to our cause, even if he cannot actually feel those emotions himself, perhaps he can understand the logic by standing with us just as he stood with Hefeta. Do you, yourself, feel that same empathy, that logic, in order to stay and help us summon Nicos to keep our common enemy in the King of Valencia from our doorstep? Will you help us?"
Olesia finished her speech to me as the room fell silent.
A question filled each and every face I grazed over with quiet eyes, deep contemplation warring over the logic inside of me that was telling me to allow them to help me harness the control I needed over my powers and get out.
But was that what I really wanted? A life on the run, constantly moving, in fear of my own shadow I cast behind me?
Just as I opened my mouth to answer her, an ear splitting scream cleaved the comfortable silence apart and every body in the room went rigid.
Warrick was up and out of the door first, Erinna following closely behind him with a tentative hand placed on his shoulder as he investigated for the source of the scream.
Inala grabbed my hand and tugged me up out of the chair before Oren could pull me into his own grasp, and my blood claimed Siren who had become my tentative friend threw her small, lithe body in front of me.
There was no sound in the palpable silence.
And then the sobbing began.
***
Author's Note:
What did you think of this chapter?
What do you think is happening?
Is Josephine staying, or leaving?
Are they summoning the god? Or a monster?
Let me know your thoughts!
Until next time my lovely readers,
Kristen :)
***
The World of Irena: