Cat Adams - Demon Song

I noticed the fuel gauge was getting dangerously low. “Let’s stop for gas. I want to look at that horn closer.”

In a few minutes the digital numbers on the pump were spinning upward and Dawna and I were admiring a shell that had survived for over a thousand years. I collect shells, so I can be a little jaded about them. But this was truly magnificent. “Look at the colors . I’ve never seen a triton conch shell that looked like this.” Unlike king and queen conch shells, which are a creamy apricot and have jagged points and spikes, a triton conch is long and smooth, with dark spots. This one had not only dark dots and spots but also what looked like patterns of gold flakes and burgundy sand. I ran a slow finger along the etched figures that Adriana said were writing. They seemed familiar, but I couldn’t remember why. “It sort of makes sense one of the horns is a triton. They have an amazing sound.”

Dawna was likewise running almost reverent fingers along the curves. “There are all sorts of carvings and paintings of the sea god, whether you call him Triton or Poseidon, using one of these to call his people to battle. And this particular puppy can seal the rift, huh?”

I couldn’t resist. I pulled it gently from Adriana’s grip and put it to my lips. She shrugged. “I already tried that. No noise comes out. Even though they don’t feel magical, there must be some sort of spell to make it work.”

I took a slight breath and blew. A low, mournful sound erupted from the opening. I’ve always loved the sound a conch makes. But Dawna covered her ears like she was in pain and Adriana dropped her head into her hands. God, it wasn’t that bad. But apparently I was wrong, because the car’s windows started to vibrate. There was a loud pop and a crack appeared across the lower half of the windshield.

Oops.

Adriana pulled the horn away from me and stared alternately at me and it with mingled fear and amazement. Dawna was trying to recover her hearing by shaking each earlobe and opening her mouth wide.

“Um…”

The horn went to Adriana’s lips. I saw her cheeks puff out, and then … nothing. No sound. And I mean no sound. “I have to admit that’s a little odd.”

“Let me try.” Dawna held her hand over the seat confidently and Adriana passed the shell to her. I turned in my seat to watch, ready to throw my hands over my ears. But again, no sound issued from the horn. Dawna handed it back to me with an odd look on her face. “What are you, the chosen one or something?”

“God, I hope not. I can think of a thousand things I’d rather do than ever stand in front of that rift again.” Adriana gestured, Do it again . Once more I blew, just a tiny bit—and the horn sounded. The volume didn’t seem to be tied to the amount of air. That spoke of powerful magic. The windows shook again, but at least nothing shattered or cracked.

Fuck a duck. “Let me say for the record that there have got to be other people who can blow this horn, and if it takes the next three weeks, I’m going to find them.”

There was a long pause in the car. It was quiet enough to hear the gas nozzle click off. I handed the shell back to Adriana and opened the door.

“We can do little with only one horn, so rest easy for now.” I knew Adriana was trying, in her own way, to be thoughtful. But she could have left off the “for now” and I wouldn’t have minded.

While I was paying for the gas, I checked on Gran. She told me the bus had come and gone while she was in the church across the street and she hadn’t liked the look of the driver. She decided there was no reason why she couldn’t stay where she was and just ignore the parts of the service she didn’t believe. I couldn’t find any fault with that logic and was happy to learn that the priest there was a former member of a militant sect. He promised to keep his sword behind the pulpit for the whole service … just in case. I didn’t tell her about the horn. She’d only worry.

We spent the next hour driving quietly with the radio playing bubblegum rock. I wish I could say I was thinking lofty thoughts, but all I was really doing was trying to figure out some way out of this.

When we were about an hour from home, something occurred to me. I clicked off the radio and glanced at Adriana. I could feel the furrows in my forehead. “Do you think the other horn is the same way?”

She got a confused look on her face. “I don’t understand. What same way?”

But Dawna got it and I could see in the mirror the moment she realized what I was asking. “Omagawd. That one in your collection!” At Adriana’s look of puzzlement, she explained, “Celia collects seashells and has a bunch of conch shells. But there’s this one, a king conch—”

I interrupted, “That has never made a sound. Not for anyone. My grandpa gave it to me as my very first shell when I was about five and I’ve always been disappointed it’s silent.”

“Do you mean that it doesn’t blow a good tone or it’s silent—”

“It’s silent like this one, ” Dawna said with significance. “I never could figure out why you couldn’t even hear air come out.”

My voice sounded very small and scared, because I had just remembered why the inscription had seemed familiar: “There are carvings inside it, too. They looked like the kind of scratchings a kid might make. I’ve never had them checked out because I figured my grandpa had done it. He said he’d had the shell all his life.” And we both knew that his father had been Queen Lopaka’s brother—who probably had also been around during the fall of Atlantis.

My cousin’s voice was thoughtful: “In the first age, the Isle of Serenity was the home of only the female sirens. Hearty seafaring men were lured to the island for breeding and then were sent away. Male children either were given to the father or … well, only girls remained.”

Well, the sirens certainly weren’t the first society to favor a particular gender, and even though I didn’t like it, I couldn’t change the past. “So why would a male have one of the Millennium Horns?”

“That’s what I’m wondering. It was a long time before we realized what had happened at Atlantis. The queens knew because Eris sent them word of the crisis, but the general populace didn’t. It wasn’t until the sailors started to arrive with tales of destruction and great floods caused by tsunamis that we knew for certain that the rumors had been fact. Could it be that a sailor found the horn and took it to a male siren?”

“Were you born yet? What stories did you hear?”

Adriana shook her head. “I was born many hundreds of years later.” But that still made her several hundred years old. Yowzer.

“Maybe we need to not worry about how they got where they are and concentrate on why they’re still here at all . If Atlantis disappeared into the rift, shouldn’t the horns have gone with it?”

Adriana’s head was moving up and down like a bobblehead doll created by Tiffany and Max Factor. “I’ve asked that since this one was brought to me. Of course we already knew Stefania was trafficking with demons, so I wondered if perhaps it was a gift from them. I’ve also been concerned that the horns were a double-edged sword of a kind.”

“Ooh,” Dawna said from the backseat. “You mean that maybe the horn can open the rift instead of close it and maybe that’s why the wicked queen of the west had it?”

Oh, that would be bad.

“Indeed.” Adriana’s perfect nails were tapping a staccato on the tote. I flicked on the right turn signal and eased into the exit lane. We were getting nearer to finding the answers to a lot of questions. “There is every chance that the records I’ve found are wrong—changed after the memories of the queens were altered. I fear using the horn unless we have some authority.”