Escaping the Siren Prince

Three More Days

Cora didn't wait around to ask the fisherman what he meant.

Mostly because there were two possible interpretations of she should be drowned, and she wasn't particularly interested in discovering which one he'd intended while standing alone on a quiet dock with two men who already knew considerably more about her than she knew about them.

She turned and walked.

Fast.

Not running, because running implied panic, and Cora Langley was not panicking.

She was simply moving with extreme purpose in the opposite direction.

Behind her, Luka called her name.

That increased her speed.

She made it out of the older section of the harbor and back onto the main promenade, where tourists were still eating gelato and taking photographs and behaving as though a fisherman hadn't just pointed at her like she'd crawled out of a grave.

Or the ocean after dark.

She didn't look back.

The walk to the guesthouse normally took fifteen minutes.

Cora made it in eleven and that included a single stop.

A tiny shop sat wedged between a bakery and a place selling handmade soaps, its front window crowded with postcards, ceramic fish, rosaries, jars of honey, and enough lavender-scented merchandise to perfume the entire street.

A woman looked up from behind the counter as Cora entered.

"Do you sell candles?"

The woman pointed toward a display near the back.

Cora bought three unscented ones.

She only needed one, but given the trajectory of her vacation so far, redundancy seemed prudent.

When she arrived back at the guesthouse, Marija's curtains shifted as Cora crossed the courtyard.

Cora pretended not to notice.

She unlocked her door, stepped inside, and locked it again.

Then, for good measure, she dragged the little wooden chair from beside the window and wedged it beneath the handle.

Cora stood there for a moment, staring at her improvised barricade.

"Completely normal vacation behavior."

She dropped her bag onto the table and pulled out her notebook.

The list she'd started that morning stared back at her.

THINGS I KNOW

Cora added another line.

8. Luka speaks a language I don't recognize.

Then:

9. An old fisherman saw me and said, "She should be drowned."

She stared at it.

After a moment, she added:

Possibly: "She should have drowned."

That distinction felt important.

One implied shock while the other implied murder, although neither option was particularly comforting.

Cora set down the pen.

She needed answers.

One answer, actually. She would settle for one.

What the hell was Luka Varek?

Because if she could answer that, maybe she could live with everything else.

Cora had spent enough time studying the ocean to know how much of it humanity still didn't understand. There were species no one had discovered, behaviors no one had documented, entire ecosystems existing in places humans had barely reached. The unknown didn't frighten her. The unknown was practically the foundation of marine science.

So if Luka was simply another unknown, something that existed outside the boundaries of what science had documented so far, she could accept that. She could put him into a category, even if that category was currently labeled What the f**k?, and let the rest follow.

The singing.

The tail.

The bioluminescence.

The fact that he'd been hundreds of feet from shore without a boat.

The fact that he'd breathed into her mouth underwater.

She didn't need to understand all of it.

She just needed to know what he was.

And then there was the considerably more troubling question of how she'd managed to breathe underwater too. But that was a problem for another day.

One impossible thing at a time.

Cora looked toward the window.

Beyond the glass, late afternoon sunlight painted the limestone walls of Vela Luka gold. Tomorrow afternoon she was supposed to be on a ferry leaving this island.

She'd already booked the ticket to take her back to Split. From there, she'd continue on to Zagreb, the two final stops before her flight home.

That had been the plan.

Cora liked plans.

Plans had schedules and confirmation numbers. Plans had departure times. Plans did not generally contain mythical sea predators with excellent cheekbones. Or smiles that completely transformed their otherwise perpetually intimidating faces.

Cora's mind supplied Luka's without permission. She'd thought about him and his smile an embarrassing number of times since leaving him at the harbor.

Along with the way he'd kept looking at her mouth.

That part had been considerably harder to stop thinking about.

Which was irritating, because whether Luka Varek wanted to kiss her should have ranked very low on her current list of concerns.

Somehow, it didn't.

Her phone sat beside the notebook.

All she had to do was stick to the itinerary.

Pack tonight. Take the ferry tomorrow.

Leave Vela Luka and Luka Varek and every increasingly bizarre thing that had happened since she'd arrived behind her.

Cora picked up her phone and opened the ferry reservation.

Her thumb hovered over the screen.

She thought about the fisherman.

She should be drowned.

She thought about Luka's face underwater.

His mouth against hers.

Cora closed her eyes.

"Shit."

She canceled the ticket and the confirmation appeared seconds later.

She stared at it, and then booked herself on a ferry three days later.

Three additional days. That was reasonable.

She wasn't staying because Luka had told her to leave, either. That would be petty.

Although the fact that he'd repeatedly ordered her to leave certainly wasn't helping his case.

She was staying because she had unanswered questions.

Although the fact that Luka had repeatedly ordered her to leave certainly wasn't helping his case.

Cora had always been a dog with a bone when something didn't make sense. It was the same reason she'd spent six hours in a university lab once because a sensor kept producing readings everyone else had dismissed as equipment error.

It hadn't been equipment error.

She'd found the problem.

Eventually.

Luka Varek was currently her malfunctioning sensor.

And she intended to figure out why.

Staying meant she needed somewhere to sleep for the next three nights.

Cora looked toward the chair she'd wedged beneath the door handle, reluctantly crossed the room, and pulled it free. She unlocked the door and stepped into the courtyard.

Marija was sitting at the small table outside the main house with a basket of green beans in front of her. She was snapping the ends off one by one and dropping them into a ceramic bowl, though her hands stopped the moment she saw Cora approaching.

"Cora."

There was something suspiciously cautious in the greeting.

"Hi." Cora stopped beside the table. "Quick question. Is the guesthouse available for another three nights?"

Marija stared at her.

Cora waited.

"No."

That was an insanely quick answer.

Cora glanced toward the guesthouse and then back at her. "No, it's booked?"

"No. You leave tomorrow."

"Technically, that wasn't my question."

Marija's mouth tightened. "Your ferry is tomorrow."

"It was." Cora gave her an apologetic smile. "I moved it."

The green bean in Marija's hand remained unsnapped.

"You moved it."

"Three days."

"Why you move it?"

Cora considered several possible answers, none of which seemed likely to improve the expression on Marija's face.

"I've decided I'm not quite finished with Vela Luka yet."

Marija set the bean down. "Luka said for you to leave."

There it was.

Cora folded her arms. "Luka isn't actually in charge of my travel itinerary."

"You listen to him."

"Let's say that I don't. I'm not."

"I am serious." Marija's voice lowered. "You ask questions. You follow him. You go places you should not go. Luka is patient with you, but patient is not permission."

Cora's eyebrows rose slightly.

"Permission?"

Marija sighed, apparently recognizing that she'd chosen the wrong word.

"You not understand this island. You not understand Luka or his family. They have been here very long time, Cora. Longer than people here remember. People here respect him for reason."

"Or they're afraid of him for a reason."

Marija's expression sharpened.

Cora thought of the fisherman gripping the edge of his boat, terror written across his weathered face.

She should be drowned.

"I'm not trying to make an enemy of Luka," Cora said. "But I'm also not getting on a ferry because a man I've known for four days keeps ordering me to."

"Make Luka very mad is not good."

"Then he should stop being so incredibly suspicious."

"Cora."

"Marija." She softened her tone, but not her position. "I like you. I like the guesthouse. I'd rather stay here than pack everything up and find somewhere else, and I'm happy to pay you for another three nights." She paused. "But I'm staying on the island either way. So you can either take the extra money, or I'll find somewhere else that will."

Marija studied her for a long moment.

Cora held her gaze.

Finally, the older woman muttered something in Croatian that Cora suspected wasn't particularly flattering.

"Three nights."

Cora smiled. "Perfect."

"Not say perfect."

"No, but you did say three nights."

Marija resumed snapping the beans with considerably more force than before. "You are very stubborn girl."

"I've been told."

"Three nights," Marija repeated. "You pay tonight."

"Deal."

Cora turned toward the guesthouse.

Behind her, Marija sighed.

"It is what they say, your funeral."

Cora stopped.

Considering how the rest of her day had gone, that particular choice of words felt less than ideal.

She glanced over her shoulder.

Marija was already snapping another bean as if she hadn't just said anything remotely concerning.

Cora decided not to ask.

She'd already collected enough ominous warnings for one day.

Cora walked back into the guesthouse, locked the door, and replaced the little wooden chair again. Then sat down and opened her laptop.

By nine that evening, she had eaten half a package of crackers, two granola bars she'd forgotten were in her suitcase, and enough internet conspiracy theories to permanently damage her search history.

She sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed with her laptop open.

Siren song mythology

The results were predictably unhelpful, offering Cora the same collection of stories she'd expected to find. Ancient Greece and Homer. Sailors lured to shipwrecks by beautiful voices. Death, usually in some dramatic and completely avoidable fashion.

Depending on the source, sirens were beautiful women, birdlike creatures, mermaids, spirits, monsters, or simply metaphors for temptation. Apparently, thousands of years of mythology hadn't managed to reach a consensus on even the basic anatomy.

Cora clicked through several more articles before changing tactics. She searched Croatian folklore and Adriatic legends, then broadened it to Dalmatian sea spirits and stories of supernatural singing. When none of those gave her anything useful, she abandoned mythology altogether and tried something more firmly rooted in her own world: hypnotic vocal frequencies.

That last search took her down a significantly more scientific rabbit hole involving auditory entrainment, psychoacoustics, infrasound and the neurological effects of rhythm.

None of it explained walking into the Adriatic Sea against her better judgment.

Cora leaned back against the headboard.

The first night, she'd heard the song and walked into the water. The second, she'd somehow made it all the way to the cove before waking, only for the singing to begin again once she was there.

She couldn't prove the song had gotten her out of bed that night. She couldn't even prove there had been a song before she'd woken.

But both incidents had happened after dark, both had drawn her toward the same stretch of water, and Luka had been connected to both.

She looked toward the door.

The door was still locked and the chair still wedged securely beneath the handle, but somehow that no longer felt like enough.

Cora glanced toward the small paper bag she'd brought back from town.

"Okay."

She climbed off the bed.

Ten minutes later, one of the candles sat inside a ceramic coffee cup she'd found in the kitchenette, softening in a shallow bath of hot water.

Cora watched it with her arms folded.

Was she about to put candle wax in her ears because she thought a siren might sing her out of bed?

Yes.

Apparently this was her life now.

Once the wax had softened enough to manipulate, she pinched off two small pieces and rolled them carefully between her fingers.

She hesitated.

"This is insane."

She put one in each ear.

The world immediately dulled.

Not silent.

But quieter.

Cora tested them, making sure they sat securely without pushing them too deep.

Then she climbed into bed.

Her phone read 11:48 p.m.

She set her phone on the nightstand and switched off the lamp. For some reason, her eyes went to the window before the room went dark.

She hadn't seen Luka since she'd run from the docks.

Which was good. Exactly what she'd wanted.

So there was absolutely no reason for her to wonder whether he'd tried to find her afterward.

She stared at the ceiling.

Nothing happened.

No singing.

No mysterious compulsion.

No waking barefoot on a beach.

Eventually, despite every reason she had not to, Cora fell asleep.