The Blood of the Hydra (5 page)

“Are you sure about this?” I asked her. “We know where the tourists crashed their boat. We could just check out the area, and I bet we would find the siren there.”

“I’m more than sure,” she said, her jaw set. “I want to hear the siren song. Plus, she might have gone somewhere else, and this is the most efficient way to find out if she’s still here or not. So, which one of you wants to lock me up?”

“I’ll do it,” I said, cuffing her wrist to the nearest beam and placing the key in my pocket. “Why do you have these things, anyway?”

“They’re my mom’s,” she said. “Don’t ask.”

“Ooookay.” My eyes met Blake’s, and we both tried not to laugh. “Your mom wasn’t home when you went there to get them, right?”

“No,” Kate said. “My brother was the only one home. He has that flu that’s going around the middle school. He can’t stop sneezing and coughing. It’s gross.”

“My sister had that, too,” I said. “I tried to heal her, but it didn’t work.”

“So your power only works on physical injuries?” Blake asked.

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “I guess so.”

I stared out at the sea, not saying anything for a few seconds. Before trying to heal my sister, I’d imagined all the good I could do if I could cure sicknesses. All of the lives I could save. That dream had been crushed the minute I’d realized that my power didn’t work like that.

But there was still a lot of good I
could
do. And right now, that meant catching the siren.

“You all should put your earplugs in,” Kate instructed. “I know we’re not there yet, but we don’t know how far her voice carries. It’s best not to risk it.”

We put in the earplugs first, and then the earmuffs that we had for the shooting range. Since the combination of the two protected our ears from the sound of gunshots, we figured it would be enough to protect ourselves from the siren song. After all, in
The Odyssey
, Odysseus’s men had passed the sirens by plugging their ears with beeswax. This technology was
far
more advanced than that.

We couldn’t talk much, since we couldn’t hear, so I joined Chris and Danielle at the front of the boat, looking out as we soared over the water. Danielle had her elbows resting on the railing, her face lifted up, her hair blowing in the wind like she was a mermaid. Chris had his arms outstretched, like he was flying. They both looked like they belonged out there.

With the headphones blocking the wind, it was more peaceful than ever. I took a deep breath and lifted my face to the sky, inhaling the fresh, salty air. In this moment, it was so easy to pretend that we were five normal teens, skipping school to enjoy a day on a boat.

Then I saw a movement in the corner of my eye—a hand pounding on the window.

I turned around and saw Kate, her face contorted, screaming something as she used her free hand to bang on the glass. I couldn’t hear her, but she was yelling so hard that a vein popped out of her neck. She pointed at the steepest cliff, and while I wasn’t great at lip reading, it looked like she was begging us to go that way.

My eyes met Blake’s, and we nodded in agreement about what was going on—Kate must be hearing the siren song. Which meant that the siren was still here. It would have made sense for us to go straight for her, except for one problem—the direction that Kate was pointing led to a grouping of jagged rocks, the water crashing around them. Docking the boat there would be impossible. The rocks would shred it—and us—apart.

Instead, Blake steered the boat away from the cliff. Kate pounded harder on the window, yelling and pulling at her wrist that was cuffed to the beam. She pulled so hard that the metal cut into her skin, blood dripping down her hand and onto the floor. She kept screaming, and as we drew closer to the shore, she reached out with her other hand and held it out to the cliff. Her face scrunched with determination, and a few small rocks broke free from the cliff, crashing into the water.

She was trying to use her power.

I’d never seen the extent of Kate’s power, but I always had a feeling that hers could be the most dangerous of all of ours. After all, she could potentially cause earthquakes, or cave-ins, or landslides—she could create disaster on a mass scale. But Kate was the most peaceful of the five of, which was why I’d always suspected that she’d been given such a strong ability. She would never use her power to destroy.

But a Kate who was desperate to reach the siren? I couldn’t be so sure. We were far enough out in the water right now that she couldn’t do much damage—she was too far away from her element to control it—but Blake was bringing the boat closer and closer to the shore. We had to get Kate under control. If we didn’t… I didn’t want to know
what
she might do to get us to that cliff.

I grabbed the last earplugs and earmuffs from the bag, held them up to show Chris and Danielle, and pointed to Kate. They nodded and hurried over to her, grabbing her and holding her down. She yelled something I couldn’t hear and struggled against them, but it was no use. She was the smallest of us all, and she stood no chance against them. But that didn’t stop her from trying to fight.

I was wrestling the earplugs into her ears when suddenly, she stopped fighting us.

“What happened?” I asked, although my voice sounded muffled and strange—I could only hear it in my head. Kate moved her lips in reply, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. So she grabbed her phone with her free hand and typed something on it, showing it to me.

We’re out of range of the siren song. You can all take your earplugs out now.

I moved to remove my earmuffs, but stopped myself. “How do we know you’re not trying to trick us?” I asked. “What if you just want us to take off our earmuffs so we hear the siren and drive towards the cliff?”

She smiled and grabbed the extra earplugs from my hand—the ones I’d been trying to force into her ears. She put them in, covered them with the extra pair of muffs, and typed something else on her phone.

I was telling the truth—we’re out of range of the siren. But good job being cautious


I showed the others the messages, and we all removed our earmuffs and earplugs. Once sure that she was telling the truth about being out of range of the siren, I unlocked the cuff around Kate’s wrist and called on my power to heal the places where the metal had cut into her skin.

“For a moment there, I thought you would saw your hand off to get to that siren,” I said, checking her wrist and ensuring that it was completely healed. “What did she
say
to you?”

“Oh, just that she knew all of the secrets of the universe—everything from the past, present, and future—and that she was on our side on the war against the Titans and would share all of her knowledge with us if we met her at the bottom of the cliff.” Kate chuckled, as if it were ridiculous. “Telling you about it now, I know it was a lie. But something about the tone and cadence of her voice… I don’t know.” She shrugged and looked off into the distance. “It
made
me believe her.”

We neared the shore, and Blake steered the boat towards the closest dock. It belonged to one of the huge houses on the outskirts of town. Judging by how the house had no lights on, how the snow around it was untouched, and how their boat was covered up, I guessed the house belonged to one of the many retired couples who only stayed in Kinsley over the summer.

Blake tied up our boat, and we gathered our weapons, hopping onto the dock. “Are you glad you listened to the siren song?” I asked Kate. “Because you kind of… well, you freaked out back there. You tried to use your powers on us. If we hadn’t been so far out in the water, who knows what you would have done?”

“Except that we
were
out on the water, so I knew going into it that I wouldn’t be able to do anything to hurt you,” she said, sounding absolutely confident that she was right. “Barely anyone has ever heard the siren song and survived. If I hadn’t tried, I would have regretted it forever.”

Chris jumped off the boat, landing right next to us. “The two of you can chat about this later,” he said, securing his gun in his holster and looking up at the looming cliff. “Right now, we have a siren to catch.”

Compared to locating the siren, capturing her proved rather simple. We hiked up the trail to the top of the cliff, with our earplugs and earmuffs on. We surprised her by coming at her from behind, and before she knew we were there, Chris shot her with a tranquilizer bullet full of gray energy. She was on the ground in seconds. Lucky for us, the siren’s greatest weapon was her song—not her physical strength. In fact, with her porcelain skin, long wavy hair, tiny frame, and huge eyes, she looked more like a doll than an ancient monster. She was so petite that bringing her from the cliff to the training room in Darius’s basement was a breeze.

We only removed our earplugs and muffs once she was bound to a chair inside the shooting range and shut inside. The range had a soundproof glass window, so it was the perfect place to keep her contained.

“She looks so… sweet.” Chris shook his head, examining her through the window. “Are we sure she’s actually a monster?”

“She had Kate convinced that she would tell us the secrets of the Universe if we crashed our boat into a cliff.” Blake crossed his arms, glaring at the siren. “She’s a monster, all right. She was in Kerberos because she sided with the Titans in the Second Rebellion. Don’t forget that while we’re questioning her.”

“Speaking of,” Kate said, joining us and glancing at the siren. “How exactly
are
we going to question her?”

“We’re going to go in there and use enough gray energy on her that she’s confused enough to answer our questions without a second thought,” Chris said. “Did the siren song mash up your brain or something? Because that was all part of our original plan.”

“But when we came up with the plan, we weren’t counting on our hostage being a
siren
,” Kate pointed out. “To get information from her, we need to be able to hear her. Which means talking to her without the earplugs and muffs on. Which means—”

“We can’t talk to her without getting hypnotized by her song,” Danielle interrupted. “So all of this was for nothing.”

We were silent as the reality of the situation sunk in. We’d done such a great job of capturing the siren. It was so easy… maybe
too
easy.

But we’d gone through so much trouble to get her here. There had to be a solution to this problem.

“Maybe it wasn’t all for nothing…” I said, an idea forming in my mind. “Kate, what about her song made it so hypnotizing? You said it was the tone and cadence of her voice, right?”

“Yep.” Kate nodded. “We can’t let her talk to us. And we can’t ask her to write out her answers to our questions, because with her hands free, nothing would stop her from pulling off our earmuffs and forcing us to listen to her.”

“So what should we do?” Blake asked, reaching for his gun. “Shoot her in the heart, and then wait for another monster to escape that we actually
can
question?”

“We might not have to do that.” I eyed up his gun, relaxing when he let his hand fall away from it. “The siren’s voice is hypnotizing because of its tone and cadence—not because of what she’s saying. It’s the
quality
of her voice that makes people believe her. So… what if we took that away from her?”

“How would we do that?” Danielle looked at me as if I were a complete idiot. “Unless you know a spell like the one Ursula used on Ariel in
The Little Mermaid
to take away her voice?”

“Nothing that complicated.” I purposefully ignored how Danielle was making fun of me, since we all knew that real witches didn’t use spells. “But I
have
had the flu before. And as a singer, I know that the worst part about the flu is that it ruins my voice—sometimes for the entire month.”

“And my brother has the flu right now…” Kate smiled, her eyes lighting up. “He’s so contagious that he spread it to everyone in my extended family who hadn’t gotten a flu shot. They’re calling him ‘Typhoid Steven.’”

I looked through the glass at the siren, who was just beginning to stir, and said, “I think it’s safe to bet that they don’t give out flu shots in Kerberos.”

It didn’t take Kate long to go to her house and come back with a plastic bag full of used tissues.

“Gross.” I backed away when she got close with the bag, even though I’d had my flu shot.

“I need to do this quick,” she said, putting on her earplugs and earmuffs. “I looked it up, and the flu virus will only remain active on these tissues for fifteen minutes. It took me five minutes to get here, so I have ten minutes to get that siren infected.”

“
Five
minutes?” Blake smirked. “Did you—the perfect rule-following student—speed?”

Kate lifted the earmuff away from her ear. “What was that?” she asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, although the thought of Kate speeding
was
pretty amusing. “Go infect that siren.”

* * *

Two days later, the siren’s porcelain button nose had turned red from all of her sniffling and sneezing. We’d untied her from the chair, since she didn’t pose a physical threat, and she was lying on the floor, her arms splayed out around herself. She was so sick that she could barely eat the food we’d given to her, because she had to keep taking breaks to cough, sneeze, and blow her nose.