“So we give him a paper cut,” I offered, helpfully. They both glared at me. “Or you wave your arm around and undo it. Whatever...”
“Okay, here’s the deal. I am a
witch
. I do white magic. This is not white magic. I have no ability to do much of anything beyond putting us in this circle and hoping it doesn’t break.”
“Okay, so we stay in the circle until help comes.”
“
If
I can hold the circle until morning, which is somewhat unlikely in the first place, then we get to sit here and watch the sun come in those bay windows. Then we’ll get to watch a vampire fry.”
Hmm, not good.
“So what do we do?” Vance reached out as if to touch the sparkly globe.
“Don’t touch it!” Mia shrank back. “Unless you want them to come in here.” Chairs busted over the circle as if it were made of rock. Someone tried to hit it with a wine bottle, which shattered and then the liquid dripped down the outside of the circle.
Vance moved his hand back to his lap. “No, I’ll pass.”
“So what
do
we do?” I waved my arms.
Mia stared at me. I knew that look. “No way.”
“Janie, they are going after Vance.”
“So, we hide.”
“Janie, this is a
spell
. No one can get in or out of here until his blood is spilled. Someone is going to find a way in before help has a shot of getting in here.”
“How the hell do you know?”
She gave me a look.
“Mia Cunningham, if I do that,
he
will try to kill
me
.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“This is a terrible idea. Are you sure you can’t do some spell—”
She rolled her eyes at me. “If I did, do you think I would suggest that you do your thing?”
“What are you two talking about?” Vance looked back and forth between us.
I sighed. “If I do that, you and Vance are as screwed as everyone else in this bar. And, well, it’s
different
now, and—”
“Oh, that I can fix.” She rummaged in her purse.
“Fix what?” Vance seemed confused.
“Look, I made these up when I heard you were coming back to town. They are full of earth magic, which counters water magic.” Her eyebrows were raised expectantly, and she smiled proudly. She pulled out little velvet bags that plunked against each other. Shaking them made them rattle dully.
I took one and looked in it. It smelled nice, like pine trees and lavender. Not what I would expect to be a pleasant scent combination, but nice. There were rocks in there, too. Pulling the drawstring to close it again, I handed it back. “Regardless, even if your bags work, which you don’t know because you haven’t tested them, then Vance will try to kill me.”
“Why would I try to kill you? What are we talking about?” Vance’s forehead creased in a baffled expression, and I saw the bartender from earlier taking a lighter to the side of the circle. Some alcohol caught fire and burned off.
“And do you want to tell me why you made these bags, even knowing I never—”
“Yes, well, a good witch is always prepared.”
I rolled my eyes at her.
“Well, that
is
the most basic rule,” she defended.
I covered my face with my hands. “What if we call 911?”
“Won’t work. Her spell nixes any communication out or into this bar.”
“Mia, I can’t,” I groaned.
“Then your big mouth killed Vance.”
I peeked between my fingers to glare at her.
She shrugged. “You pick.”
Turning to Vance, I noticed his frustration. “So,
what
are we doing?” He waved his arms completly out of the loop. I sighed again. I crawled over and into his lap. I leaned over and kissed him. I really laid it on, too. Figured I might as well do it one last time.
His fingers dug into my waist, and I slid my legs outside his to join our bodies as fully as possible. One of his hands caught my chin and turned my face to deepen the kiss. Then his hand trailed down to circle my neck gently. I had the passing thought that in a few minutes his hand would not be so gentle if he got it around my neck. I pinched my eyes closed harder and dug my nails into his back making his teeth graze mine as our tongues danced.
He caught my hair and twisted my face away from his. “What is going on?”
“I am going to save your ass.”
He caught my lip in his teeth and tugged. “And how are you going to accomplish that noble feat?”
I shrugged and pulled out of his arms. “I thought I might sing a little karaoke and calm everyone down.”
“What? Are you nuts?”
“Yup. Things are really starting to stack up in favor of that, anyway.” I pulled away. Leaving him dazed, I half stood to take in the scene. People gone mad, complete melee. I dusted off my pant legs as Mia dropped the circle. It fell in pieces like sparkly confetti. I stepped out and away from Vance, who tried to catch my ankle and stop me. Mia put the circle back up, and I made it across the few feet separating me from the mike stand by the karaoke machine.
A man hid under the table there, and I pulled at his arm. Vance tried to cross the bar to get to me, and Mia struggled to keep him in the circle. I tugged harder at the man. “Put on a song!”
“Huh? What song?”
I sighed. “It really doesn’t matter.”
CHAPTER Seven
“Lady, this ain’t really a good time to sing a song.”
As I couldn’t really disagree with him, I ducked a flying…
was that a potted geranium?
Anyway, I ducked and yanked the guy’s arm. Dirt sprayed along with chunks of ceramic and plant matter, making me pretty sure it had, indeed, been a geranium, and I paused to brush it off. He shrugged, finally and pushed a button on the computer in front of him. Music filtered out from the speakers, and words appeared on the screen in front of me,
Unchained Melody
. I began to sing.
From my spot behind the mic, I could see Mia was pressing a bag into Vance’s hand. I closed my eyes again and sang. I let it out, that piece of me I usually kept buried, and it poured over my skin like hot wax.
Okay, I had a few takers. Those standing closest to the speakers stilled their movements and stared at me. Since I probably looked reasonably stupid—I mean, big barfight and stood there like a dope singing a slow, old song—it could have been a coincidence. However, the guy in charge of the music was on his knees and I was reasonably sure it wasn’t only to duck more potted plants.
They say siren song can drive a man mad. In the Odyssey, Circe warned them not to listen to the song as it would make the men drown just to try to reach the singers. While I wasn’t crooning the same ballad of siren’s back in the day, my voice—in theory—was still enough to make people crazy just to get to me. As no one was on a ship, this probably was a safe place for me to let ‘er rip. If Mia was right, no one else could get in and I had
to distract everyone from Vance.
I closed my eyes and turned up whatever it is that I hide inside. I can’t really explain my power, other than describing it as a fist I usually have the control to keep closed. Normally I would open, following the same analogy, just one finger. To get the whole bar to listen, I was going to have to relax the entire fist.
What I tried not to panic about, standing there with all that in my head, was how one goes about
closing
the fist again. I never let that part of me have complete control. I imbibed alcohol and
regular
self control was shady. Closing the fist back up took more than regular self control.
But I was far more concerned with the immediate problem—saving Vance’s ass. So, I closed my eyes, tilted my head back and let loose.
Something grew like a ball of fire in my stomach. As I sang, it burned and cracked under my skin. It was a hunger. I was starving. It ached onto my voice, but even my voice wasn’t my own. Even to my own ears, I sounded all at once more beautiful and terrible than I ever had before. Tears crept out from my closed eyelids from the pain of the burning. All of my skin sizzled. If I didn’t stop, I would split and blister. I had to let the awful hunger out before it burned me alive.
Some sane part of me tried to hang on. I fell to my knees, the words of the song ripped from my lips and my very soul. As the power took over, it washed away any feeling in me but the need to pull everyone closer, closer.
Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea…
And I couldn’t hold control over the hunger anymore. I opened my eyes, and my hair flew behind me. My every pore seemed to open and to release the fire into the room. Able to stand again, I sensed it moving out like fingers to catch the people in the room. Now
everyone’s
attention was on me. They crawled over each other, scrabbling to get to me. The fingers tightened on them and a climbing, building desire, akin to an orgasm, grew in my gut. My mouth opened and more words burned my throat as I let them out.
I’ve hungered for your touch…
Suddenly I knew what I had to do. The singing of the sirens wasn’t just to make men go mad, but to feed the siren. Not on flesh, as humans fed, or on blood like Vance …but on something far less tangible. Light pulsed just over their skin of everyone I could see, light from the electricity that kept them alive. Best described as aura of glittering loveliness, each of the people in the bar glowed faintly.
Like a rainbow of gently pulsing lights and all of them fought to get to me. All of them
wanted
to feed the hunger. Who was I to turn them away? A part of me tried to stop—a voice in my head screaming,
I didn’t want to feed on lights, I am human
—but the voice was a dull murmur in the screaming starvation of my mind. My entire body ached, starved, needed and the lights were there for the taking.
As I continued to sing, I can only describe it as I opened my pores and let the light in. It washed over my burning skin like cool water. A few, the ones closest to me, fell and I stepped off the stage to touch them. The lights on them came off like sticky cotton candy to be absorbed by my skin.
All were still, only the music and my voice vibrating throughout the bar. I drew the fingers of power in and pulled the lights with it like sucking through a bendy straw. I left the people standing, kneeling, holding each other up for support. No one tried to get away, the web of my voice trapped them all.
They are all food.
I drank from them. It filled me, making me whole, and I smiled as I sang. I felt alive for the first time, like up to that point I’d lived in black and white and hunger, and suddenly I’d found Oz—color, food, magic all in one sparkling guzzle of power. Whole finally, the joy too incredible to even describe.
Mia spoke next to me. “Okay, you fixed it. Stop now.”
I ignored her.
Vance tugged at Mia’s arm. “Stop what? What is she doing? No one is moving.”
I ignored him, too.
“Were you ever around one of the sirens?” She pulled at my arm. The movement made me drop the mic, but I no longer needed it. They all listened and gave to me anyway.
“No,” I heard him say.
“This is what they
do
. Shit, she never did it like this before.”
“Did what?”
“The original sirens were sisters of Medusa...” she started to explain. Mia pulled me, but I just called everyone to follow me, and they did. I walked over one guy lying on the floor and he sighed, reveling in it. “She is a siren, you idiot. You drink blood. Sirens and vampires got along for a reason. They called sailors to their deaths, yes, and vamps drank their blood, but what was in it for the sirens?”
I looked at Vance as I sang. It was hard to think, everything less important because of the hunger which started to seem insatiable. But Vance was so bright, a rainbow all by himself. All the people in the bar were as bright as, say, candles. He was a florescent bulb. Power shimmered and waved off him, calling me. My attraction to him finally made sense—I wanted his light.
Vance picked me up, and I curled around him reaching for the bag he still held in one hand. The damned bag was the only reason he couldn’t hear me. I had to get rid of it. The bag
had
to go.
“Power from being aligned with the vampires?”
“No, Vance. Sirens drink auras. They suck living things dry and leave the husks of bodies for you guys. She is draining every person in this club as we speak.”
I looked toward her for the first time, but got distracted when I saw myself in the mirror behind her. My hair floated, waving behind my face as if I were under water. My skin glistened the ever-changing color of pearls. I could see the rainbow of power as it poured into me and yet hunger clawed at me.
Disregarding the image as unimportant, I met Mia’s eyes. “Except him.” My hand finally caught the bag.
“No!” Mia tried to grab my hand, but she was too late. The bag fell to the floor, useless.
And now I had me a vampire, too.
I n-e-e-ed your lo-o-v-e!
I belted the lyric out. Someone in the back of the room screamed.
Vance’s eyes glowed, his expression enchanted. I watched the protection from the bag drop from him like a wall falling, then he covered my lips with his. The kiss, all teeth and need and fire, blasted through me. He caught my lip, bit down, and I tasted blood, but didn’t care. His control, which might have protected him from me, had shredded, and I could pull all of the lovely bright colors off him and into myself.
I drank him down in gulps—blue fire, a hundred watts of power—on my tongue and lips and everywhere he touched. The energy flowed into me. My skin tingled and my very bones shifted, realigning themselves. The burning of my skin began to ebb, the hunger abated, to allow me to focus on the joy, the completion of the lights dancing into my skin and mouth.