My lungs burn as the lack of air drains the oxygen from my brain. The siren bears their pointed teeth as they try to stab me with the arrow. I dodge it and reach for the knife in my belt, swinging it and catching the siren's face. They shriek, releasing their grip. I kick to the surface, gasping for air as I set my sights on the shore. Wind howls and whistles in my ears as the water splashes into my mouth and the current pulls me further from the shore. Exhaustion seeps into my muscles and I whimper, knowing I am about to drown.
"Elle!" a Convex lady on the bridge shouts. "I've sent for help! Hold tight!"
Panic surges through my bloodstream and I fight through the rippling waves, coughing and spluttering. Blood taints the water around me and the agony of the wound scorches through me like wildfire. I bite back the instinctive scream as my body floats further and further downstream, toward the walls.
"Elle!" Ruben's voice cuts through my heart. His dark head appears on the bridge in the distance.
I open my mouth to shout back when a hand clamps over my lips, shoving a powdery substance down my throat.
"Elle!" Ruben screams.
But the siren's nails dig into my flesh once again as they wrench me back into the velvety darkness. My muscles and eyes grow heavy, and I plummet into unconsciousness.
I awake to the rhythmic dripping of water and cold air curling around my skin. Darkness greets me like a blanket of night sky, boring into my eyes and ears, silent and thick. I sit up, feeling the slick stone beneath my palms. A deep, inhuman groan emanates around me, licking down my spine, as if it's calling to me. My swimming memories find a pocket of clarity and I stand, wondering if I have, in fact, arrived in the afterlife.
"Hello?" Pathetic, I know. As if the God of Death himself will respond with a cherry voice, telling me I only have to cross the river to make it to my final resting world.
No one responds, of course.
My clothes have somehow dried, yet I shiver. I reach out into the gloom, finding a jagged wall, another on my other side, but none to my front and back. In a tunnel. Could I be under the kingdom? I just need to find candlelight.
Gathering my wits, I fall into step, trudging, barefoot, through the tunnel. I reach for my daggers but realise the siren stripped me of my weapons. Each of my breaths sounds like the wind. My hand trembles at the fear, the trapped feeling, but I keep moving forward until a pinprick of light emerges in the distance. I quicken my pace. As the light grows, it splashes onto the rock walls around me, revealing the green and blue moss coating the cracks and reaching in sea-coloured tendrils across the stony floor. A low hum permeates the distant tunnel, growing louder, like a war cry, over a dozen voices murmuring the same note, and it makes me shudder. Finally, I emerge from the tunnel into a chasm, the rocky ground descending like nature's stairs.
Flames jump and twirl on torches buried into the rock, showing me the path down into the depths. My tangled curls sheen in the dancing light. The further I go down, a more bluish shade of light taints the surrounding rocks, moving and shimmering like rippling water from a sinking pebble.
Finally, I see it. The path gives way to a bowl-like chasm, with carved stairs on either side. Shadowed figures stand at the bottom of the chasm, staring at the enormous window of blue shooting up past the rocky ceiling. My knees shake. Is that the lake?
"There she is!" a voice says that sends a chill down my spine.
"It's Elle Fallon," another says.
"She can help us with Theseus," says another.
Each figure grips a torch, the flames gilding their faces. The sirens, in human form.
A little girl with reddish hair trots up to me. "Will you help bring my father home?" she asks in a squeaky voice, grabbing my hand.
My heart turns into a brittle mess. But a woman pulls the girl back. "Not now, Ana," she says, waggling her finger at the girl.
The woman, a tall, slim lady with dark skin and a wound across her cheek, sizes me up and down. "You finally woke up. I didn't give you that much powder. But I suppose you are only human. Easily succumbed to our magic."
"Where am I?" My voice trembles.
"You do not get to ask questions, girl," she says through bared teeth.
"Ruben and Edward will find me." I roll my shoulders back, trying to appear larger than I am.
She lets out a crude laugh. "I am not afraid of two brothers who can hardly stand one another. Unlikely, they can string a plan together to find you without one knocking the other out. I have seen how they are together."
"Where am I?" I ask again, earning a harsh slap across the cheek.
"I said do not ask questions." Her voice bounces off the chasm walls like drums. She bristles, tilting her chin to the side. "We are in the lake, of course."
"The lake." The words tumble from my mouth. "That's impossible."
"Not when you are a siren. Not when our very existence is impossible. Creatures have fish, half human, who can reincarnate."
The chasm trembles. Pebbles and rocks rattle as a groan swallows us whole. The long limbs of a creature emerge from the murky blue, the tentacles flailing with calm and peace. The shadowteeth's purple body glides past the wall above us, clicking and singing, her eye meeting mine for a beat.
"I can't believe this place exists," I breathe, a smile tugging at my mouth despite the fear keeping me rigid.
"The shadowteeth knew I was about to talk about her," the woman says, shaking her head with an amused smirk. "We need you to get her blood, Elle Fallon."
I blink, taking a step backward.
"We need it for her father," she continues, tilting her head at the little girl. "I believe you have met him. Theseus."
I almost laugh. Of course, it's Theseus.
"As a half-siren, he was born with some abilities. But not all, including swimming underwater. He needs it to reunite with us in the home of his ancestors." She gestured to the surrounding chasm.
"Wait, you can only reach this by swimming?"
"Yes. It's under the lake."
The shadowteeth groans in the distance. "You want her blood, I say, jerking my head to the water wall. "And you need to pair it with a siren scale."
She arches her perfect brow. "You know your siren lore."
"Somewhat. I've spent a lot of time in the palace library."
Her lips press together, unimpressed. "So, will you?"
"Bring my dad home!" Ana says.
I glare at the woman. "Why can't you do it? Don't you swim?"
She sucks in a harsh breath and clenches her jaw. "The shadowteeth and sirens do not get along."
"Don't you share the same waters?"
"Not quite. She gets the lake. We have the rivers unless we're diving to the tunnel in the lake."
"The tunnel?"
"The tunnel that connects our home to the lake, through the wall."
I heave a sigh, spotting my knives fastened to her belt. Anger ignites in my gut. "Sorry," I say. "I won't help you get the shadowteeth blood. The last thing my kingdom needs is Theseus with shadowteeth blood."
She lets out a braying laugh, the sound slamming into the stone walls. "As if we don't know where Ruben and Edward live. And your two other friends. Don't think I won't order Theseus to kill them. He's been waiting for the moment since your encounter in the forest."
I roll my eyes. "If I get the shadowteeth blood, you will let me return to the walls."
She shrugs. "I don't care what you do afterward. We just want the blood."
"Fine," I say, pointing to her waist. "I'm going to need my knives back."
She gestured for me to fall into step alongside her. We move across the vast chasm, along the face of the blue water wall, and up the carved stairs on the opposite side of the rock.
"So, who are you?" I ask, casting her a wary side-eye.
She throws me a sinister smirk. "I'm Hera. A hundred years old yet have never felt so youthful."
My mind spins. "A hundred years." The awe laces my voice like blood spreading through the water. "You must remember the early days of the kingdom."
"I do. All the Lords who ruled. None of them had a lick of compassion or empathy." We turn into a long hallway lined with torches, the flames jumping across the across. "Would you believe me if I said I knew your mother?"
I stop in my track, my muscles becoming nothing more than stone and my face granite as I glare at her. "Do not play with me."
"It is true," Hera says as we reach the end of the tunnel, and she points to a hole in the wall. A long narrower tunnel that leads to the blue light, to the lake. "I met her when she was pregnant with you."
"How?" My heart pounds and my surroundings spin and sway.
"A story for another time." She inclines her head to the narrow tunnel. "Ready? I'll need to knock you out to get through the water."
"How did you know my mother?" I press, voice demanding despite the quiver in my hands and lips.
She glares at me. "If you must know, while she was pregnant with you, she consumed shadowteeth blood. Our sources believe it's the reason you were immune to the drown."
Hera clamps her hand over my mouth and leaps into the tunnel. Oblivion drags me under before I can scream my string of profanities.