Elegy

TWENTY Bastian

After the incident, Penn refused to reply to any of Gemma’s text messages or phone calls. Gemma considered going out to the sirens’ house, and she’d even started talking to her dad about borrowing his truck to go up there.

Then Thea texted her, Penn & Liv getting into it. Better if you stay away for the night.

Is she getting rid of Liv? Gemma replied.

Unlikely, Thea sent back, and Gemma groaned inwardly.

I still want to talk to Penn.

She does not want to talk to you, Thea texted.

Can I talk to you? Will you call me? Gemma asked.

Liv & Penn going out to feed tomorrow. Come by in the afternoon. I’ll be alone.

That left Gemma impatiently waiting until the next afternoon.

Harper texted her to tell her about the newest developments with the scroll, and while Harper used lots of excited exclamation points, they didn’t seem that big to Gemma, who had already seen the words glow a bit with water. It sounded like the ink reacted even more strongly when mixed with Red Bull, so Harper had taken the scroll back to her room and tried spilling a few different liquids on it.

So far, Red Bull seemed to have the strongest effect, but water and orange juice both seemed to make it glow a bit. Milk apparently did nothing.

But other than glowing, nothing else happened. Harper concluded that further research was needed, but she was determined to get to the bottom of it. She asked if she could keep the scroll for a few more days, but Gemma didn’t like having it out of her sight for that long. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Harper, but she wanted to experiment with the scroll herself. Marcy offered to go pick the scroll up for her, and Harper agreed to return it.

She hadn’t told Harper of her suspicions about Daniel, mostly because she’d told him that she wouldn’t. That, and she wasn’t exactly sure what he was up to. She didn’t want to ruin his and Harper’s relationship over nothing.

Besides, Daniel was a good guy. He was Gemma’s friend, too. She decided that she just had to trust him.

When Gemma went to the sirens’ house the next day, she had to ride her bike. Her car was still sitting dead in the driveway, like an especially large paperweight. The trek up there wasn’t pleasant. The sirens lived on the other side of town at the top of a cliff, and Gemma had to ride her bike up a long, winding road through the loblolly pines.

Even with her extra siren strength, the ride uphill wasn’t exactly easy, and it probably didn’t help that she needed to feed soon. By the time she reached the chic cabin, Gemma was winded.

“You’re all sweaty,” Thea greeted when she opened the door.

“Thanks,” Gemma said dryly. “I rode my bike.”

Gemma surveyed the house as she came inside, and she was surprised to see that not much had changed since the big battle nearly two weeks ago. They’d done basic cleanup, like righting the fridge and furniture, but they hadn’t fixed or replaced anything. Even the windows were still broken out, with plastic taped over them.

“Don’t you have a car or something?” Thea asked her.

“It needs a new starter,” Gemma said, wiping the sweat from her brow. “Do you have any water or something?”

“There’s bottled water in the fridge.” Thea motioned to the kitchen, but she walked over to the living room. “I’d let you use my car, but Penn doesn’t think I need one.”

Gemma got the water and guzzled it down before going into the living room to join Thea. Thea had sprawled out, taking up most of the couch, so Gemma sat in a chair with its stuffing gone.

“What’s that about?” Gemma asked as she tried to get comfortable on the uneven cushion. “How come Penn is the only one allowed to drive?”

“I don’t know.” Thea let out an exasperated sigh. “She comes up with bullshit reasons, but the truth is that Penn just wants to have control all the time. She doesn’t want me driving away.”

“Where would a car take you that your wings and fins already couldn’t?” Gemma asked.

Thea laughed a little at that. “I didn’t say it was logical. It’s just a power play. Everything’s a power play with her.”

“I don’t understand how she can tolerate Liv,” Gemma said, bringing up her reason for today’s visit. “Liv’s the most out-of-control thing I’ve ever seen.”

“I don’t completely get it. I’ve tried reasoning with her, but…” Thea shook her head. “Penn doesn’t want to admit she was wrong about Liv, but more than that, I think she just can’t have two ‘bad’ sirens.”

“She’s already trying to find a replacement for me,” Gemma filled in what Thea hadn’t said. “She can’t be troubled to find one for Liv on top of that.”

“Pretty much.”

“I get that Penn hates me, and she’s planning to kill me, but objectively, I’m a lot less trouble than Liv.”

“You’re a different kind of trouble than Liv,” Thea said. “You undermine Penn in a different way. Liv may be extreme, but she’s an extreme version of Penn. They have a similar moral compass. So in Penn’s mind, if Liv could just tone her act down, they’d be totally simpatico.”

“And I may not terrorize the village or throw tantrums all the time, but Penn and I will never be on the same page,” Gemma surmised.

Thea slid back on the couch, so she was lying down. “And, secretly, I think she considers you my ally, and that pisses her off.”

“Why?” Gemma asked. “She doesn’t like you either?”

“No, I think Penn likes me about as much as Penn is capable of liking anyone. But she’s never really been close to anyone, not even when we were young. She always resented that I was close with Aggie and Gia.”

“Gia?”

“Ligea. Our other sister. The one before Lexi.”

“Lexi and Penn seemed kinda close for a while.” Gemma had thought that Penn and Lexi were the closest, especially when Gemma first became involved with the sirens, but obviously, they couldn’t have been that tight.

“Well, Penn tore off Lexi’s wing before she murdered her,” Thea said. “They were allies, maybe, but they weren’t close. I don’t think they ever really enjoyed each other’s company.”

“So you’re saying that Penn has never had any friends?” Gemma asked.

“Not really. Well…” Thea seemed to think, and it was a minute before she went on, almost hesitantly. “There was someone, once. Bastian.”

“Bastian?” Gemma asked.

“Well, Orpheus was his given name.”

A few months ago, that name would’ve meant next to nothing to Gemma, but after she’d spent so much time researching Greek mythology, she instantly knew it. He hadn’t exactly been a god, but he’d been an important figure, renowned for his musical abilities and poetry.

“The musical guy?” Gemma asked. “Didn’t he play like a harp or something?”

“A lyre,” Thea corrected her. “You haven’t heard anything until you’ve heard him play. It was said his songs would make the heavens weep, and it wasn’t an exaggeration. The gods were so pleased with his musical abilities, they granted him eternal life.”

“If he was immortal like you guys, did that mean your siren song worked on him?” Gemma asked.

“No, it didn’t. Penn couldn’t manipulate him. And as much as she loves control, she’s always been the most drawn to the people she has no power over.”

“That’s bizarre,” Gemma said, but it did explain Penn’s infatuation with Daniel.

“Usually, I’d say yes, but there was something about Bastian that you couldn’t ignore. He was gorgeous, but it was beyond that. Charismatic, intelligent, funny, and he had these eyes…” Thea stared off wistfully. “They were blue, but not any shade I’ve ever seen in nature.”

“So you were into him?” Gemma asked.

“He was Penn’s lover,” Thea deflected the question.

“But did she actually love him?”

“I’ve thought about it a lot since then, and I can’t honestly tell you. She believed she loved him, and maybe that’s close enough.”

“What happened with Bastian?” Gemma asked. “If he’s immortal, why isn’t she still with him?”

“Like I said, she couldn’t control him. And one night, he was just…” Thea lowered her eyes, and there was a long pause before she finished her sentence. “… gone.”

“I can’t imagine Penn taking that well.”

Thea snorted. “Hardly. This was nearly three hundred years ago now, and she’s mellowed since then. But at the time, Penn went absolutely insane. I know you think she’s bad now, but you have no idea.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was inconsolable, and for Penn, that means she went on a rampage.” Thea pushed herself up, so she was sitting. “The first hundred years after he was gone, it was a bloodbath. Penn killed anything and everything without remorse. In a fit of rage, she murdered our sister Gia.”

“She just murdered your sister Gia? For like no reason?” Gemma asked.

Thea ran her hand through her hair and looked away from Gemma. “She had her reasons, not that they completely made sense to the rest of us.”

“So why didn’t you stop her?”

“The only way I could’ve stopped her would have been to kill her, and I just…” Thea shrugged. “I couldn’t bring myself to do it. She’s my little sister.” Then she shook her head, as if that’s not what she wanted to say at all. “And I felt responsible.”

“Why?” Gemma asked.

“It’s hard to explain. Aggie kept hoping that with enough time and encouragement, Penn would stop. Aggie believed that if we just loved Penn and tried to show her kindness, eventually Penn would come around. But nothing we said or did mattered to her. I think that was actually the beginning of the end for Aggie.”

“What do you mean?”

“Aggie’d never been as cruel as Penn, or even me,” Thea elaborated. “She really wasn’t cut out for the siren life. But she made do with it, killing only when she needed to and making it as merciful as she could. But Penn became relentless, and Aggie couldn’t live with it anymore.”

“But you could?” Gemma asked her pointedly. “All that senseless murder didn’t mean anything to you?”

“It’s not the same. You see the world in terms of one human lifetime, and you don’t understand the fragility of everything. You’re all going to die. Everyone will die quickly and easily. Illness, accidents, wars. It’s amazing humans live as long as they do. But I will be here for another millennium. I won’t turn my back on my sister for something that will be gone in the blink of an eye.”

“But Aggie did,” Gemma said.

“She’d always cared for human life.” Thea’s voice softened, the way it did whenever she spoke of Aggie. “Too much really. You’ll disagree, but when you’ve seen as much death as we have—not even from our hands, but by the hands of time—it begins to wear on you. So Aggie began looking for a way out, which Penn was angry about. It finally came to a head this summer.”

“Penn started going off the rails three hundred years ago, and it just finally got to be too much this summer?” Gemma asked skeptically.

“Aggie tried to change Penn at first, and when she realized that wasn’t working, she tried to look for a more peaceable solution. Like breaking the curse.” Thea motioned to Gemma then. “When she couldn’t do that, she finally said that’s enough.”

“You mean she told Penn to stop?” Gemma asked.

“Yes. She actually suggested that we all swim out to sea and starve ourselves until we died. Naturally, Penn disagreed, so Aggie threatened to run off right before a full moon, so we wouldn’t have a chance to replace her, and we’d all die that way.

“But I don’t think she really meant it. She was just provoking Penn, so she’d kill her. Aggie wanted her life as a siren to be over, and death was the only way she knew out of it.”

“If you both hated the way Penn was running your lives, why didn’t you and Aggie just stand up to her and stop her?” Gemma asked. “I mean, if it had gotten to the point where you had to choose between Aggie and Penn, why wouldn’t you choose Aggie?”

“They’re both my sisters,” Thea reminded her. “Our parents basically abandoned us. I’m eight years older than Penn.”

This admission surprised Gemma. She knew that Thea was the eldest, but she hadn’t thought it was by that much, since both Thea and Penn appeared to be around eighteen or twenty years old.

But then she remembered Penn saying that she’d only been fourteen when she became a siren. The curse apparently just made them appear to be in their sexual prime, and Gemma supposed that she looked around the same age, too.

“Eight years doesn’t sound like that much, but when we were young, it was a lot, especially when our mothers weren’t around,” Thea said. “So I raised them both as my own. It’s like asking to choose which one of my children to save. I couldn’t do it.” She shook her head. “I didn’t choose.”

“But you did,” Gemma persisted. “You turned your back on Aggie. You let Penn kill her.”

Thea didn’t disagree. For a moment she said nothing and just stared down at the floor. She wiped quickly at her eyes, but not fast enough to stop a solitary tear from falling down her cheek.

When she did finally speak, her voice was thick. “I never thought she’d actually go through with it. They’d been fighting for a while, but I never thought that Penn could really do it. Not to Aggie.”

“When she did, when you realized what Penn was capable of, why didn’t you kill her then? Penn has killed two of your sisters,” Gemma said. “Three if you’re counting Lexi.”

“I never counted Lexi as my sister,” Thea muttered.

“You know Penn will just keep killing,” Gemma went on. “If I don’t stop her, she’s going to eventually kill me, and Liv, and … you.”

“If she does, I would deserve it,” Thea replied softly. Then she shook her head and took a deep breath, erasing the sadness from her expression. “Anyway … that’s how we ended up here.”

“You mean, with me?” Gemma asked.

“No, here in Capri.” Thea gestured around her. “It’s all part of Penn’s scheme for revenge.”

Gemma furrowed her brow. “I don’t follow.”

“She blamed Bastian’s absence on Demeter,” Thea explained. “It was because of the curse that he couldn’t love her, and that was Demeter’s fault.”

“Why didn’t she just try going after Bastian?” Gemma asked.

“She did, at first,” Thea said. “But the longer she went without finding him, the more enraged she became. And while some of that rage would splatter on the humans around her, she focused most of it on Demeter.”

“She’d been a siren for what?” Gemma tried to remember what they’d told her. “Like over two thousand years, right? And Penn just suddenly decides to get revenge on the woman who cursed her?”

“No, of course not,” Thea said. “Penn’s always hated Demeter, from the very moment she appointed us handmaidens to her daughter Persephone. But initially, Penn and Demeter and the other gods lived in peace. It wasn’t until hundreds of years later, after we’d been exiled from Greece along with the other immortals at the end of the Dark Ages, that Penn even considered killing Demeter.”

“Why were you exiled?” Gemma asked.

“‘Exiled’ isn’t exactly the right term, but that’s how it felt,” Thea clarified. “Humans just started getting wise to us. They were fearful or jealous, and they began killing gods and immortals. So it was just safer for all of us to start living underground, hiding our true selves.”

“And that pissed Penn off,” Gemma guessed.

Thea nodded. “Penn never wants to hide or control her whims, so she hated Demeter even though it wasn’t her fault the world was changing. We’d begun looking for Demeter, but we weren’t that serious. Penn loved being a siren.

“When the mood struck her, she’d ask around, but she usually got distracted before we got too far into looking for Demeter. So we had a few centuries of half-assed attempts at finding the hidden goddess between long strings of debauchery.” Thea paused. “And then Penn got sidetracked with Bastian.”

“Until he disappeared,” Gemma said.

“Exactly. But Penn was going batshit, killing everything that crossed her. Humans, gods, anyone that Penn felt like,” Thea said. “That’s when Penn really threw herself into finding Demeter, doing everything she could in unrelenting pursuit, but Demeter had gotten wind of Penn’s rampage. So she burrowed deep underground, and she hasn’t been seen in centuries.”

“Are you sure she’s even still alive?” Gemma asked.

Thea shrugged. “Clio told us she was.”

“Clio?”

“She was a muse we found a little over fifty years ago. Our aunt, technically,” Thea said. “But we’d never had a very strong familial bond with our own mothers, let alone any of their sisters. The muses wanted little to do with their children for the most part, and Clio was no exception.”

“Well, then how do you even know she was telling you the truth?” Gemma asked.

“We asked her at first, but then Penn tortured her to be certain,” Thea explained. “Unfortunately, she didn’t know where Demeter was, so Penn killed her.”

“You tortured and murdered her?” Gemma asked. “That seems pretty extreme.”

“Penn was desperate to know where Demeter is,” Thea said. “We would’ve gone to our own mothers, but they were long since dead. We’ve been scouring the earth since the 1700s, looking for muses who might know anything, but we’ve mostly only found their corpses. Clio was only the second muse we’d encountered alive in the past five hundred years.”

That explained what made Thalia so spooked in the journal. When she’d first met Bernie, she’d never mentioned the sirens at all. And then, suddenly, she’d become frightened and paranoid.

Thalia had briefly mentioned something, saying that she’d lost an old friend, but she hadn’t named the friend. She’d probably gotten word of her sister Clio’s murder at the sirens’ hands and assumed, rightly, that they were going to come after her next.

“So you came to Capri looking for Demeter,” Gemma said. Thanks to Thalia’s diary, she had already put most of the pieces together. But she hoped Thea would fill in the blanks.

“No, we came looking for another muse,” Thea said. “The very last one, and she was said to be here in Capri.”

“But she was already dead,” Gemma said.

Thea nodded bitterly. “That was our last hope.”

“What do you mean?” Gemma asked

“There aren’t many of us left. All the big immortals are long gone—Zeus, Aries, Medusa, Athena, you name it. They’re either dead or in hiding. Hades is around, but he hasn’t talked to anyone since … right after we became sirens. He doesn’t know anything.”

“Since everyone’s gone, you have nowhere else to look. No clues on how to find Demeter,” Gemma said, hoping she didn’t sound as disappointed as she felt. While she was happy that Penn had been unable to find a muse, Gemma had been hoping for some clue, some hint at anything that could help her.

“No.” Thea shook her head. “That’s why I told you the scroll is useless. Aggie tried everything to break the curse. And there are no more gods or goddess to help reverse it. We’re alone.”

“Is that why you gave me the scroll?” Gemma asked. “Because you didn’t think I’d be able to do anything?”

“No. I’ve just come to realize that my sister Aggie was right. We’ve had our time on this earth, and we’ve had more than our fair share of death.” Thea let out a deep breath and stared emptily at the wall. “But it seems my change of heart is just too little, too late.”