Everything happens in seconds. Canosa perches on the edge of the cornice like a wingless bird, her arms spread wide for balance. She sits on her haunches, her hair hanging in loose strands, and her mouth opened wide. She hums a single low, droning belly note. It shifts the air down in a freezing shaft of wind. I crawl back toward the edge to look down, not daring to touch her. The couple has stopped. They turn their heads left and right, puzzled, looking at each other before glancing up. Other people pass them, unaware. Canosa's singing is focused directly on them, trailing down in an obscure column of fog. The whole scene reminds me of a frog catching a fly in mid-air, as if Canosa was about to shoot out her tongue and retract it with great speed, swallowing her prey in one go. Except Canosa's tongue is her song, in some weird language that's definitely not English, and the steam of two whisked-up souls is her fly.
"Why them? They didn't do anything wrong!" I whisper. I cringe, remembering my first accidental kill—that fishmonger in the public restroom. How am I better? I touch Canosa's shoulder again, but she shakes me off and snarls. I shrink away.
She sucks in their souls, her mouth gulping; her greedy eyes are rolled back to their white, and her neck veins bulge as her chest protrudes forward. I could tip her over and send her crashing fifty feet down, but it wouldn't kill her so I wonder why I even think this. Didn't she show me her hunting spot; shouldn't I be grateful? Or is it the siren in me, wanting to be mean for no reason at all?
Part of me admires how quickly she's snuffing out not one soul, but two, and in broad daylight! She's obviously a pro.
Her song pours from her mouth in one misty shaft, sounding like an ancient lullaby. I think perhaps she sings in Greek, her native language. I find myself listening with my mouth open. Fog thickens, rolling from her skin pores in coils and plumes, as the temperature drops ten degrees. The guy and girl below us stare up, their lips parted, their eyes glassy, their souls whooshing toward Canosa like intertwined ribbons.
Plop!
Both souls are gone. I can see their misty ends disappear into Canosa. She slurps them up, licks her lips, and leans over the edge to look. I lean with her.
The couple drops to the ground, still shrouded in fog. The girl's knee-length rain jacket opens up and spreads about her like a dusty cloud; her face is framed by blond hair, her eyes unmoving. She's gone. The guy is, too; his rain jacket is crumpled, his hand over hers, even in death. It looks as if they decided to lie flat on their backs and gaze up at the drifting clouds, guessing at their shapes and seeing if their guesses match.
"You...You killed them!" I hiss.
"Did you see it? Did you see how fast I was?" Canosa asks with obvious pride.
"I don't give a fuck how long it took you!" I curl my fingers, cutting them hard into my palms. "Why them? Why did you do that?"
"Hush!" she hisses in my face. "It's what sirens do. It's about time you learned, Ailen Bright." She pinches my cheek hard and it hurts.
Below us, a woman runs up to the dead couple and shrieks. Someone else runs up and calls for help. I ignore them, my attention on Canosa.
"You killed them. Some random people; you just went ahead and killed them," I keep repeating, as if to confirm the fact.
"Yes, I did," Canosa says calmly.
"You're not even sorry!"
"I'm not. I savor it, and you will too. They were looking way too happy for my taste," she hisses. "Why can they have what I can't? Tell me how that's fair. Besides, they were my favorite flavor...lemony." She licks her lips and smiles at me.
I gape at her, horror struck. "I...I'll never do this. I'd rather cease to exist in some forgotten corner of the ocean. Forget it!" I dash to escape, but she pins me down with a knee to my chest, her hands on my wrists. My bruised skull smacks the concrete again, and I yelp in pain.
"Oh, yes, you will. You've already killed, and you will kill again. And you will finish your part of the deal. After you're done, I might let you go." She smiles, her beauty melting from delicate to terrible. "I say I might, because I like your feistiness, silly girl. You'll make a marvelous siren." She says marvelous in a singing manner, so that it sounds more like maaaaahvelous.
"What if I don't want to? What if I've changed my mind? I don't have to kill people. I can go look for my mother on my own. I don't need you. I don't—"
"Shut up!" She slaps my face. Tears spring in my eyes, but I hold them back, angry. "You...will...kill!" Her thighs hold me in a cocoon, her hair hanging on both sides of my face like a torn, dirty curtain. "You want to do it, and you know it. I can hear the hunger tearing you apart." She places her right ear on my naked chest and listens. I hear an audible rumble coming from the void behind my ribs, sparked by a sudden urge driven by the souls under the bridge. I hate it.
The chaos of human unrest reaches us from fifty feet below. There are shuffles and a scuffle, cries and gasping, and people talking on their phones. One more noise reaches me through this jumble: the smooth motor revolutions of a Pershing 64, a luxurious water machine made by Ferretti, designed and engineered in Italy. Papa's yacht. Canosa, hearing it too, reads my fear and jeers.
"Your father's never late, is he? He always knows when to show up at just the right moment," she growls. Hatred oozes from her eyes and she clamps harder on my wrists, as if it's my fault.
"Does that mean that the girls failed to distract him?" Immediately, I see that it was the wrong thing for me to say. Wrath fills Canosa's face and I quickly scrunch my eyes closed, waiting for another blow.
I feel her breath on my ear. "First, you will kill your father. Then, you will kill your boyfriend before he becomes a full-fledged siren hunter, while he still has his poor little soul."
My eyes snap open.
"I left him alive for you so that you can have your fun, you ungrateful girl." She sits back up, still smiling while she holds me in her clutches.
I forget my fear. Rage boils up inside my throat, grinds against my teeth, and rolls out in a low hiss. "Leave Hunter out of this."
"Oh, look who's in love. Ailen Bright, an innocent little—"
"Shut up!" My voice cuts through the buzz of traffic and carries all the way across the canal. I don't care if Papa hears, or if his fancy Panerai watch detects our location. My heart thumps in my chest, my head pulsing with fury.
"Hush! Be quiet," Canosa snaps.
"That wasn't our deal. Hunter was not in our deal, so leave him alone." I visibly shake now. "Why are you doing this to me? What do you want? What?"
"I thought I told you. Don't you remember?" She taps my forehead. "I want your father dead."
"But what does Hunter have to do with it?" I'm nearly screaming as the image of his soul burning inside his chest pops into my mind. I know it's my doing. Pain twists my gut for having dragged him into this mess. "Please, leave him out of this." My concentration breaks under the pressure of intense grief and I begin wailing. Tears roll down both sides of my face, but I don't care. There's only one thing I can do now. One thing I have to do to make this process stop. Somehow, I must make Hunter hate me, convince him that he's no longer in love.
"I don't want him to end up like Papa, please. I want to stop it. I don't want him to become a siren hunter..." I trail off, sniffing like a baby.
"Then kill him. Kill him before it's too late. It's the only choice you've got. There is nothing else you can do; his soul has already ignited. I saw it," Canosa says in a dead voice. She's sitting over me like she did when she was her previous bronze self back in my bathroom—unmoving, uncaring, and immobile. "Back on the beach, I saw it. Faint smoke was coming out of his mouth when he looked at you. I heard it, too. His soul is wounded, it's burning. You know it is; you heard it. You must have."
And she's right. I remember running up the harbor steps when Papa was chasing me in his car. Hunter's Vivaldi soul sounded wrong then, as if it lost its luster and warmth. It felt like it was no longer sweet, as if the pain had started turning his soul...sour.
"Why do you care?" I manage through sobs.
"Because I don't want to see another siren go through my hell!" The pain from her outburst turns her face ashen.
"You couldn't kill him, could you? You let it go on for too long because you loved him. You...loved my father?" I say the last phrase under my breath, realizing that I can feel Canosa's pain and want to comfort her. Immediately after that, I hate her very guts. She's the reason my father married my mother; the reason why she's dead. No, I realize. It goes further; she's the reason he started looking for another woman in the first place. She's the reason he hates women and why he wanted a son and not a daughter.
"Yes," she says simply and quietly.
"Then finish the job and kill him yourself!" I yell, clinging to my anger like a crutch before it evaporates, before my courage leaves me. For the first time, a hint of fear crosses her face. It's quickly replaced with fury.
Canosa presses her knees into my chest so hard my ribs groan. She twists her hands and I hear my wrist bones crack. Excruciating pain shoots down my arms and through my ribcage. Just when I'm about to cry out, she lets go of my arms and presses both hands over my mouth. My bruised skull wraps the agony around my head in a steel belt that tightens and burns me.
"Let's be clear about who's the boss here, Ailen Bright, the girl who never listens; the stubborn, naïve, rude girl who thinks she knows better. So stubborn, she deserves to be tortured by 'sitting in the tub' to drive the message home," she bristles, snapping her teeth an inch away from my nose.
Dread prickles my skin. Somehow the simple expression of sitting in the tub sounds ominous. I wonder what she refers to. Perhaps seeing confusion in my eyes, Canosa leans into my face so close that every word is followed by the stink of her cold breath.
"It's an ancient torture," she explains. "You'd be placed in a wooden tub with milk and honey painted onto your face, to be devoured by flies, then maggots and worms; you'd be swimming in your own excrement, decaying alive. It's what they used to do to girls like you. It's how they used to try to kill sirens, only we didn't die. It's why humans deserve to die, for committing atrocities such as these. Do you understand?" She lets go of my mouth and sits back up, but I can't utter a sound.
Disgust fills me as heinous images flash through my head like snapshots of a camera. The gray expanse of Canosa's pleading eyes; the chockfull of hair spread around her head, matted and greasy; her sleek white arms tucked into the wooden tub; her face covered in honey, flies crowding around her eyes and nostrils. I shake my head and gag. There is no food in my stomach, but something stinky and bitter comes up anyway.
The siren in me wakes up and that sinister voice talks again. Get her off you, it says. Don't listen to her, get away from her! I try to wiggle free and, miraculously, Canosa lets me go. She stands and brushes off her hands on her hair as if she's touched something nasty, her lips pouting like an upset child.
"Who are you, really?" I ask. I prop myself on my elbows and sit up, ready to leave, yet held back by curiosity.
"I'm the Siren of Canosa. The real one, the killer kind. The psychopomp." She waves down to her kills on the pedestrian walkway that's now quiet, cordoned off by police. Only their professional chatter reaches us, the red and blue glare from police lights reflecting on the bridge's green latticework. Canosa emits a fake cackle, pitched a bit too high, and points at herself with her forefinger. "I guide the dead on their after-life journey, that's my job."
"Then aren't you supposed to go and guide those two?" I ask, motioning down.
She exhales a chill that crawls up my spine and leaves a sense of imminent dread. She steps closer to me, so cold that I shiver. "I like herding them in packs, so that I have more time for fun on this side, for my own pleasure." I realize there is so much I don't know about her; she must be ancient, even though she looks like a voluptuous twenty-something-year-old, forever young and pretty.
"How old are you?" I ask.
"Why don't you guess?" Her silvery blue eyes shimmer, but there's nothing there. I'm cold, but she's colder. I'm strong, but she's stronger. I shiver under her stare, thinking back to The Odyssey and trying to remember when Homer had written it. Something like 8th Century B.C., so that means...
"Three thousand years?" I ask.
"Do I really look that old?" She smirks, but it's bitter and I feel as though it's not funny to her.
I decide to try another angle. "No-no-no, it's not what I meant. You don't look old at all. You look young and beautiful, actually." I swallow. "I'm just curious, when did you turn into a siren?"
She simply looks at me.
"Who turned you?" I try, instead.
She doesn't answer, her arms crossed in front of her in a gesture that says, I will wait until you ask the right question or you will have to figure it out yourself. I pause and think really hard. A sense of dread wafts through me, filling my guts with icicles.
"Is it because you failed to save Persephone from Hades, and she became the queen of the underworld? He abducted her when you were supposed to protect her, and you were punished, right?" I rack my brain for all the Greek mythology I can remember. "Or is it because of Odysseus, because he didn't die from your song? He tricked you, so you threw yourself into the sea. At least, that's what I've read." I wait for some answer, but Canosa doesn't even bother to look at me. "You'll never tell me, will you?"
Silence.
"Whoever turned you," I say in a quiet voice, "you didn't want them to, did you?"
"Took you a while, Ailen Bright. I thought you were faster than this." Darkness oozes out of Canosa's eyes and drenches terror all over me.
Suddenly, it's not funny anymore. I want to hide again, forgetting everything that's happened. I feel weak, small, and helpless, sitting next to a monster that didn't want to be monster at first but has gotten used to it. Does this mean I'll turn out like this, mean and bitter? Goose bumps prickle my skin and my limbs feel numb. I hug my knees tighter and rest my head on them, turned, so that I can see Canosa. She stands straight as a ramrod with her arms still crossed in front of her, one foot slightly forward, and her floor-length hair draping her curvy figure. Her skin glistens slightly in the dimness of our recluse.
"Canosa? Want to know something? I didn't want to die," I whisper, more to myself than to her. "Now that I think about it, I wish I could take it all back."
Canosa looks at me silently, expressionless, as if waiting for me to continue.
I glance into the distance at nothing in particular; I focus on trusses and beams, on blue water, and the tree-lined bank. I smell fall and its dry, crinkling leaves. Cars cross the bridge above us. I hear a multitude of human souls, waiting to be eaten; one note in particular is akin to the sweet, sugary syrup of a living melody. It fills me with mad desire, trickling down the bridge's grate, drop by drop. I bite my lips until it feels as though they will burst, hunger rumbling and beating against my chest, my hands and feet tingling. I know who this soul belongs to. A baby. I hear the baby's babble in a stroller above us, her mother cooing as only mothers do, stern and loving at the same time. I understand with disgust that I want to suck it out, right this second, until the baby is dead.
I clasp my knees tighter, rocking from side to side to silence the pain.
Understanding flashes across Canosa's face. "Hungry?"
"Yes," I manage quietly, knowing that she won.
"I know you want dessert, it's tempting. But like a proper girl, you'll have to have your dinner first, yes?" She smiles, and I find myself smiling a little in return. "Any siren can snuff out a baby, but it takes practice to kill grown men. I'll teach you how to do it, and then we can have dessert. Yes?"
"Yeah, sure," I manage.
"Splendid! I know just the place." She grins. "Come on."
She stretches out her hand and I take it. Her fingers are freezing, almost brittle; if I squeeze them, they feel as if they'll crack. At the same time, holding her hand gives me comfort. It's so easy to trust her, so easy to let go and just fall into her words, to stop thinking, to be led, to rely on somebody else. To forget everything and give in.
Ailen Bright, a siren. That's who I am now.
She pulls me to my feet.
It's quiet, eerily quiet. I notice that it's dusk already. The sky grows darker by the minute, obscured with heavy gray clouds. I remember about my father, yet I no longer hear a trace of his boat's motor. I almost want to hear it, because it's what I expect. The unexpected silence makes me nervous, making me question whether he's planning something more sophisticated than a simple chase this time; deep inside, that sinister voice tells me I'm right. He must be planning some sort of a trap. No, I think, I'm just paranoid. What kind of a trap could it be? I put the thought out of my mind.
"Can I ask one more question?" I say.
"Yes?"
"Can a siren kill herself? You know, with a sonic gun?"
"You think I haven't tried?" The momentary sadness in her voice quickly turns to bitterness, almost toxic.
"So what, the gun only works in the hands of a siren hunter, is that it?" I feel my hope sink.
"Why do you think your dear friend, Hunter Crossby, has no gun?"
"Because his soul is still intact," I say slowly. "I get it now. So a siren can only die if her song has no effect on somebody?"
"Yes. But I don't want you to." Canosa looks at the sky as she says it and the setting sun breaks through the clouds, coloring her hair golden with its evening rays. She gazes at me, and I feel her eyes burrow into my head, into my chest, into all of me, pinning me, holding me on a hook. A waft of sea salt reaches us on a light breeze. It's evening. "You won't die, if that's what you're thinking. I know you won't. Not with your talent, no way. I won't allow it."
I'm just a revenge tool for you, just another way to get back at my father, I want to say, but I bite my tongue. She doesn't really care about me, after all. She cares about my talent, my potential ability to get rid of the siren hunter. So what? This is the best I've ever had. At least she cares about something of mine. It's not like I have much time left to find new friends, do I?
Because I now have a plan. I'll play along with Canosa to learn everything I can, and then I'm going to find a way to evaporate myself to stop Hunter from turning out like my father—soulless. I need to die. I will die at my own hands. I know who won't hear my song, who has never heard me, who will never hear me. It always works like a charm. Only, this time, I have to go all the way, have to mean it so that it works; I'll have to finish my song.
"What the hell, I'll do it. I'll kill for food. People are food, you're right." I force myself to smile in a sinister way, completing my lie. I look Canosa straight in the eyes, hoping she'll believe me, hoping I can suppress my hunger, or learn to outright ignore it. At the same time, I'm tempted to give in, to really be a siren. Tempted to sing and suck in souls and revel in their juicy substance, filling myself with warmth, sensing it travel through me, all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes, tingling. "You had to do this too, didn't you? Accept it?" I say, really meaning it.
She doesn't answer. Our eyes lock and, for a moment, a fleeting understanding hangs between us in a stroke of grief. She nods like she knows what I mean; I nod like I found a true friend. This is as close as I will ever have to a family. This is one of my sisters. Maybe I don't really love her, maybe she doesn't really love me, but we belong. At least for the time being.
Ailen Bright, you're a siren, admit it.
Perhaps because she can read my thoughts, or because I'm doing such a poor job of hiding them, Canosa's beautiful face suddenly alights with mischief and that bad girl aura, innocent and soft on the outside, hard as a rock and deadly inside. I grin back at her, oblivious to my nakedness from the waist up, hoping with all of my dead heart that I look exactly the same way, like a perfect bad girl. A true siren. A femme fatale, as Hunter said. A small part of me, tucked deeply inside my soulless chest, wishes he could see me now. Because I'm sure he'd give me a thumbs up and say, Dude, you look awesome! Or, What's up, brat, where you going? Or, Say hello to monkey boy! And he'd make his obnoxious gorilla noises. I smile through fresh tears, knowing that it's all I have left, and it won't give me pain for long—only as long as it takes me to find an end to this existence. In the meantime, I want to really try to feel what's it like to be a predator, to be a hunter.
"Happy Birthday, Ailen," Canosa says, and flashes me two rows of perfect teeth.
"Thank you," I respond, surprised.
This is the first time she calls me by my first name only, and it must mean a lot to her. It certainly means a lot to me. On top of it, she remembered it's my birthday today. Blood pulses in my veins; whatever is left of my trepidation and doubts vanishes in an instant.
I tip. I let go. It's such a relief not to fight myself anymore. I feel the hunger. It's strong, it overwhelms me. It makes me hear every single human soul that passes overhead in their cars, and every single one walking underneath us. A sweet orchestra of life. My mouth goes dry, my hands shake, and my chest grumbles.
"It's party time," she says, and squeezes my hand.
"Let's do it." I squeeze her hand back and banish all thoughts from my head except for one: If I die today, I'll die having fun.
We hold hands, step closer to the edge of the cornice, and leap into the air, twenty feet above the water.