Mandy Hubbard - Ripple

And why did he bring Sienna here? To destroy my life completely? Is he panicking because I pushed him away?

I take a few more steps, so that I’m fully on the shore. I should be embarrassed, demand some clothes, but I’m too angry. How could Erik do this? Is he that desperate to separate me from everyone else? Does he think if he isolates me somehow, he’ll win?

“What do you think you’re doing?” My voice was supposed to be angry, demanding, but it comes out pathetic and shaky.

“Ensuring I get what I deserve.” He’s standing there as if he owns the lake, his shoulders squared, his smirk cocky.

He looks nothing like the guy I’ve spent the last few weeks with. Nothing like him.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means I worked very hard to make this all happen, and I’m not going to let you simply throw it away.”

“What are you?” Sienna bounds forward. Her pink slippers sink into the mud as her hair floats out around her in the breeze left over from the storm. She’s inches from me. Her hands ball up and release, flex again, and I brace myself for the punch to the nose I’m sure is coming.

But it doesn’t. I blink. Sienna seems to be in shock, not sure what to say to me or why she’s saying it. Just that she doesn’t understand any of this.

“Did you drive here?” I ask.

She blinks.

I glance over at Erik, who is struggling to keep Cole under control now that he is no longer tied up. I’m not sure how he managed to untie him from the tree and yet still keep his hands bound behind his back. I lower my voice. “Did. You. Drive. Here.” Every word is perfectly articulated, low enough that I don’t think Erik can hear.

Sienna, bless her soul, nods.

“Leave. Please, if you’ve ever trusted me a day in your life, leave. And I swear to you, I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. Everything. Including the truth about Steven. But you have to go.”

Erik knows what I’m doing now, steps forward as if to stop me, his smirk turned into a frown. He didn’t count on this. On Sienna listening to me for a second, once she saw who I was. On Sienna actually having a mind of her own.

I stare into her eyes for a long moment. They look so much like Steven’s, it’s hard not to look away as the pain snakes around my heart. And then . . . she spins around. Runs. Her blonde hair streams behind her as she leaps over a log, breaks into a sprint as the sticks in her path snap under her weight.

A tiny piece of me relaxes. And then I turn to Erik, surprised that he let her go. “You need to leave. This isn’t right and you know it. You’ll never get what you want this way.”

“You don’t even know what I want.” He looks pleased, which sends a shiver of fear down my spine. There’s such a weird gleam of satisfaction in his eyes, like the cat that has the canary.

I grit my teeth. “This isn’t something you can force me into. You want me to give you forever, and I can’t even give you a day. It’ll never work. Just let me go. Let him go.”

He just laughs. “You don’t get it, do you? I don’t want forever. I never did,” he says, giving Cole a little shove. “I was never going to fall in love with you. Yes, love can break your curse, but I don’t give a damn about your bloody curse.”

He pauses, takes in my expression, and grins wider. “See, I’m not cursed to be a nix. Unless you think a horse is cursed to be a horse. I am a nix. Forever and always, a creature of the river. It’s not so bad, really. I get to control people. Drown them when I feel like it.” That creepy smile envelops his face. “And I feel like it fairly often.”

Cole’s eyes flare wider. He’s just realized he’s in danger. That Erik is capable of more than either of us ever realized. He starts to take a step away from Erik, toward me, but Erik is too fast for him. He grabs the back of Cole’s shirt and yanks him.

I’m frozen, blindsided by the harsh reality of who Erik is, by the fact that I stupidly trusted everything he told me. I was too desperate for it all to be true.

“Is anything you said true? Is your mom even a siren?”

The smirk returns as he shakes his head, and then it grows into an ugly, arrogant smile, as if he just came into possession of the world and is about to wave it in front of me before yanking it away. He reaches out and shoves Cole so abruptly that Cole falls to his knees. Because he’s still shackled, he doesn’t put his hands out to catch himself, just falls facedown.

I step forward again, shivering from fear, not quite sure if I should leap forward and launch myself at Erik, or if there’s some more logical way out of this.

Erik turns his attention from Cole to me. Something foreign glitters in his eyes. “You were easier than the other sirens. The guilt of killing made you desperate to believe there was a way out. All I had to do was paint a pretty picture, and you were mine.”

I don’t blink, don’t move. Every muscle in my body seems to go slack at once, as if my entire body wants to give out. I stare at him, the lake water still lapping at my ankles. His devilish smirk grows until he looks possessed.

“At this point, you’re supposed to ask why. Why you. Why a siren.” He pauses. “It’s because humans are so easy to kill. A pretty face like mine, and they fall for anything. They practically walk into the river, and all I have to do is smile. You’ve killed one, you’ve killed a thousand. And in four hundred years, I’ve killed at least that many.”

Four hundred years.

He told me he was turning eighteen.

And that’s when it occurs to me: It was never his ancestors who scorned the disfigured women. It was him. All along, it was him. He didn’t inherit his curse. He was personally cursed. He’s a sociopath. A complete and utter sociopath.

“Do you remember Kate?”

I swallow. Do I play his game? Keep this conversation going? “The girl you told me about at homecoming? The one you fell in love with?”

He nods. “I stumbled upon her one night, a hundred and fifty years ago.”

The story he told me. About a nix finding a siren . . . It was Erik and Kate, not two strangers a century and a half ago.

“My favorite river fed into the ocean where she swam.” He pauses. “She was beautiful. I fell in love with her within the month.”

I wait for the punch line I am sure is coming.

“But she didn’t love me. I broke her curse, and still she didn’t love me.” He looks off into the distance. “So I drowned her.”

My horror grows, along with the smile on his face. “And then I went back to the status quo. Drowning women in the river. The only thing that ever gave me satisfaction.

“But I got bored after a while, and then I got an idea. I find another siren, bring her to the water before her curse is broken . . . well, she’ll put up a real struggle. Sirens can hold their breath so much longer, it makes the whole fight more challenging. And I do enjoy a challenge.”

I step forward, hope he forgets Cole is standing in front of him. “What the hell was the point of all this then? Why feed me all these lies? Why get to know me? I’ve been to this lake every night. You could have killed me by now.”

To this, his grin widens. “You ever watch a cat kill a mouse? They don’t just go for the lethal blow. Not when it’s so much more fun to play with a victim. Killing is a sort of seduction, you know.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“Ah, and yet you nearly fell for me. Pity this all ends so soon. I would have so enjoyed hearing those three words before I drowned you.” He smirks. “You’re the eighth, you know. The number would be higher, except it takes so long to find your kind. You’re just not as common as one might think.”