Escaping the Siren Prince

A Reason for Everything

Sirens.

A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she continued down the harbor.

Of course.

She should have guessed. Every culture that had lived beside the sea long enough eventually populated it with monsters. Sirens, mermaids, serpents, drowned sailors, ghost ships, gods that demanded tribute from fishermen. Humans had always been remarkably creative when forced to explain an environment they couldn't control.

Cora understood why.

The ocean was beautiful from the surface.

Underneath, it was enormous, violent, dark, and mostly unexplored.

Once, people filled that darkness with monsters.

Now they filled it with data.

Cora preferred data. Data could be measured, and more importantly, it could be explained.

At least, that was what she believed then.

By her third day on the island, Cora had been warned about the water six separate times.

The first warning had come from Marija, the sixty-something owner of the guesthouse where Cora was staying, who had delivered it with the same practical tone she used to explain the unreliable shower.

“Breakfast seven to ten. Front door sticks, so you pull hard. Hot water takes one minute. Towels in cabinet. No beach after sunset.”

Cora had been halfway through dropping her backpack onto the bed when she'd looked up.

“Sorry?”

“No beach after sunset.”

Marija had already moved on to demonstrating the window latch.

At the time, Cora had assumed it was a safety issue.

Then Ivo, a fisherman with forearms the size of tree branches, mentioned it when she asked where she should snorkel.

“The northern cove,” he told her. “Very clear. Go before afternoon if you want no people. You come back before sunset.”

The next day, a woman selling figs at the market overheard Cora asking someone about a footpath to another beach and interrupted the conversation to make certain Cora understood that she should return before dark.

By the sixth warning, it had stopped feeling like quaint local folklore.

What unsettled Cora wasn't what the villagers said.

It was what they did.

During daylight, the island seemed built around the sea. Children launched themselves from the harbor walls with shrieks of laughter while their parents watched from café tables. Fishing boats came and went throughout the morning. Teenagers gathered along the cliffs outside the village, daring one another into increasingly dangerous jumps. Older men sat beside the water repairing nets, and tourists floated offshore until their shoulders turned pink beneath the sun.

Then evening approached and everyone left.

Cora noticed it clearly on her second night.

She had spent the afternoon at the northern cove with a book she'd barely opened because the water was too beautiful to resist. As sunset approached, she remained stretched across a warm slab of limestone, watching the sky soften from blue to amber.

At some point, she realized she could no longer hear the children.

She sat up, and the beach was empty.

Not emptier. Empty.

Twenty minutes earlier, there had been families, couples, several teenagers, and two fishermen farther along the rocks.

Now there was no one left. The families had packed their bags and disappeared up the narrow path toward the village, the teenagers had abandoned the rocks, and even the fishermen had brought their boats back into the harbor. Cora pulled out her phone, expecting to find that she had lost track of time while reading, but the screen confirmed what the lingering light already told her. The sun had not even set.

She thought about it several times that night, turning the strange, almost coordinated departure over in her mind until curiosity finally outweighed her willingness to dismiss it as coincidence. The following evening, she returned to the harbor early enough to watch deliberately, this time keeping an eye on both the water and the clock.

Twenty-seven minutes before sunset, she counted eighteen people scattered along the nearest beach. Families lingered at the water's edge while children squeezed the last few minutes out of the day, and several swimmers still floated lazily beyond the shallows. Fifteen minutes later, only seven people remained. By the time the sun hovered just above the horizon, staining the Adriatic in long ribbons of amber and gold, Cora realized she was the only person still standing near the water.

Across the harbor, the last fishing boat had already returned, its ropes secured to the dock while its owner carried a plastic crate toward one of the houses above the waterfront. The transformation was so complete that Cora found herself searching for an explanation that didn't involve the collection of warnings she'd been hearing since her arrival.

There were plenty of reasonable possibilities, and she worked through them almost automatically. Perhaps the currents changed as evening approached, or reduced visibility made the rocky shoreline more dangerous than it appeared during the day. There could be submerged hazards she hadn't noticed, restrictions on nighttime boat traffic, or fishing practices that made swimming unsafe after dark. Any one of those explanations would have made sense.

What didn't make sense was why no one on the island seemed willing to give her one.

She had studied coastal systems for four years. She knew perfectly well that water conditions could change rapidly and that local knowledge was often more valuable than anything written in a guidebook. But none of those explanations accounted for the fact that no one would tell her what they were afraid of.

When she finally asked the bartender at Konoba Mare, the little tavern tucked beside the harbor, he laughed while polishing a wineglass.

“You Americans need reasons for everything.”

Cora rested her elbows on the bar. “Reasons are generally useful.”

“Here, sometimes we listen.”

“To what?”

“Our grandmothers.”

She laughed.

He didn't.

On her fourth evening, Marija caught Cora leaving the guesthouse in denim shorts, sandals, and a loose white shirt knotted over her swimsuit.

The older woman's gaze swept over Cora before settling on the canvas bag hanging from her shoulder. Her eyes narrowed when she spotted the corner of a beach towel protruding from the top.

“Where you go?”

“Dinner.”

Marija pointed at the towel. Apparently, a year of international travel had not improved her ability to lie under pressure.

“I might sit by the water.”

“Sit in village.”

“Marija.”

“Cora.”

The older woman said her name with such perfect maternal disapproval that Cora nearly laughed.

Instead, she sighed dramatically, climbed the stairs, removed the towel from her bag, and came back down.

Marija smiled.

Cora smiled.

Neither of them mentioned the black swimsuit Cora was already wearing beneath her clothes.

Three hours later, after considerably more rakija than she'd intended to drink, the villagers' warnings seemed much less persuasive.

Cora had planned on dinner and one glass of wine.

Then she'd met Lucy and Hannah, two British backpackers occupying the table beside hers, celebrating their recent engagement, which apparently required everyone who heard about it to participate in a toast.

One toast became another.

Someone ordered rakija.

Then another kind appeared involving honey.

By eleven thirty, Cora was warm, pleasantly buzzed, and listening to Hannah recount, with increasing dramatic embellishment, the story of how Lucy had proposed to her in Santorini two weeks earlier. According to Hannah, the moment had been impossibly romantic right up until Lucy nearly dropped the ring over the edge of a cliff.

“I did not nearly drop it,” Lucy protested from across the table.

“You fumbled it.”

“My hands were shaking. I was proposing to you.”

“Above the Aegean Sea.”

“It was a beautiful view.”

“It would have been a beautiful view of our engagement ring sinking into the Aegean Sea.”

Cora laughed as Lucy reached for the bottle of rakija. “And yet you still said yes.”

Hannah lifted her left hand, admiring the ring that caught the terrace lights. “Obviously. I love her. I just question her risk-assessment skills.”

Coming from the woman who had spent the last ten minutes trying to convince Cora to ignore an entire island's warnings and go swimming after midnight, that seemed debatable.

“You're leaving soon?” Lucy asked.

“Day after tomorrow.”

“Then you have to do something irresponsible before you go.”

Cora lifted her glass. “I believe this qualifies.”

“No. Swim.”

Cora laughed. “Absolutely not.”

“You said you've been curious.”

“I also said everyone on this island seems prepared to have me publicly executed if I touch the Adriatic after sunset.”

Hannah leaned across the table, eyes bright with alcohol and terrible ideas.

“Which is precisely why you have to.”

“That logic is appalling.”

“It's midnight. Logic has closed.”

Cora laughed again, but her eyes drifted toward the terrace.

Beyond the golden lights of the harbor, the Adriatic stretched into darkness.

She thought of the empty beach.

The old man's face.

When sun touches sea, you come out.

She should have gone back to the guesthouse.

Twenty minutes later, she was walking toward the northern cove.

By the time Cora reached the beach, Lucy and Hannah were no longer with her.

Hannah had decided halfway there that she desperately needed French Fries.

Cora had continued alone.

Now, standing at the edge of the deserted cove, she began to suspect that had been a mistake.

The place looked nothing like it had during the day.

Moonlight silvered the pale stones beneath her feet, while the cliffs surrounding the cove rose on either side in black, uneven walls. The pine trees above them shifted in the wind, their branches whispering against one another.

There were no lamps here.

No music from the village.

No voices.

Only the sea.

Cora slipped off her sandals and carried them across the stones until she reached the rocky outcrop where she'd spent part of the afternoon reading. She climbed onto it carefully and settled near the edge, drawing her knees toward her chest.

She wasn't going to swim.

She had consumed too much alcohol, she was alone, and regardless of whether she believed the villagers' stories, entering unfamiliar water at night while mildly intoxicated violated enough basic safety principles to make her former professors collectively rise from their beds in horror.

She had only wanted to see it.

To sit beside the forbidden water and prove that it was still just water.

The Adriatic moved gently below her.

Small waves reached the rocks and retreated with a soft rush, leaving the stone glistening beneath the moonlight.

Cora watched them.

Gradually, her breathing slowed.

The buzz from the alcohol had begun to fade during the walk, leaving behind a pleasant heaviness in her limbs and the first suggestion of tomorrow's headache.

Three weeks from now, she would be home.

The thought landed differently here.

For nearly a year, the world had opened in front of her every morning. She could wake up in one country and fall asleep in another. She could change plans because someone recommended an island she'd never heard of. She could sit beside strangers and become friends with them for a night, knowing they might never see one another again.

Soon, her life would have structure again.

A job.

An apartment.

Meetings.

Deadlines.

A calendar that told her where she was supposed to be.

She wanted that life. She did.

She wanted to build things that went into the deepest parts of the ocean. She wanted to work with brilliant people and solve difficult problems. She wanted to see something she'd designed disappear beneath the surface and know it was going somewhere no human could follow.

Still, she wondered how much of this version of herself would survive once the year ended.

The girl who changed flights on a whim.

The girl who accepted invitations from strangers.

The girl sitting beside a Croatian cove at midnight because an entire village had told her not to.

A breeze swept off the water.

It caught Cora's hair and tossed it across her face, long red strands briefly obscuring her vision. She pushed them back impatiently and closed her eyes.

For several seconds, she listened only to the water.

Then something changed.