The Blood of the Hydra (6 page)

“I thought that once she got the flu, she would look more normal,” Chris said. “But nope. She’s still totally hot.”

I rolled my eyes. “Too bad she’s an ancient monster who lures people to gruesome deaths.”

“Tell me about it,” Chris agreed. “So, what’s the plan from here?”

“We see if it worked,” Kate told him. “You’ll come into the room with me—you’ll be wearing earmuffs, and I won’t. I’ll chat with the siren. If her powers work on me, use your power over air to stop me from doing anything destructive to myself. I won’t be able to do much to fight back, since the room is empty of anything connected to the earth.”

“And if her powers
don’t
work on you, then the five of us can go in there and question her,” I said.

“Exactly.” Kate smiled. “Let’s hope that’s what happens. Because I
really
don’t feel like killing her and capturing another monster.”

Just like we’d hoped, now that the siren had the flu, her voice had no power over us. Which was how the five of us found ourselves gathered around her in the shooting range, with her bound to the chair again. And despite all of her sobbing and wailing, we refused to let her go.

“Why are you doing this to me?” she pleaded, struggling against the ropes. “I don’t know anything. Just set me free and I’ll go far away from here and leave you all alone. I promise.” She widened her eyes and looked at each of us, as if appearing all innocent would be enough to make us believe her.

Danielle sat down and leaned against the wall, trying to balance the tip of her knife on the ground. It kept falling to its side. “Your powers don’t work on us now,” she said, barely paying the siren any attention. “The faster you tell us what we want to know, the faster we’ll let you go.” This time when she let go of the knife, it stood straight, balanced on the tip. “Wow,” she said, staring at it with her mouth dropped open. “I didn’t actually expect that to work.”

“It only worked because I helped.” Chris laughed, and the knife floated towards him, the handle settling in his grip. “Now,” he said when he turned to the siren, the tip of the knife facing her. “I don’t want to use this on you, but I will if I have to.”

“Seriously?” The siren laughed, tossing her long hair behind her shoulders. But the laugh quickly turned into a cough, and she took a few wheezing breaths to collect herself. “You would never use that on me.”

Chris lowered the knife, which proved the siren’s point.

“He might not.” Blake grabbed the knife and stepped forward, towering over the siren. “But I will. We need answers, and since you tried to kill us when we were out on the ocean, we don’t owe you anything. Now, we’ll ask you nicely one more time—how are you and the others escaping Kerberos? And how do you come back after we kill you?”

“How could I possibly know?” she purred, fluttering her eyelashes at Blake. “I’m just a lowly siren. All I wanted was to return to the world to sing and relax near the water. You could join me, if it would please you. All you would have to do is let me go and come with me. We could be such wonderful company for each other, don’t you think?”

“It’s trying to play you.” I rushed forward to stand next to Blake, clenching my fists to control the heat coursing through my veins. “Don’t believe a thing it’s saying.”

“How sweet.” The siren smiled, still focused on Blake. “Is your girlfriend jealous?”

Blake smirked and flicked on his lighter, balancing a ball of fire on his palm. “What would I want with a life near the water?” he asked, the light reflecting dangerously in his eyes as he stepped closer to the siren. “Fire’s my element.”

Before he could get any closer to her, droplets of water formed above the fire and rained down on it, extinguishing it. “Let’s not show off too quickly,” Danielle said, her voice tight. “Give it a chance to talk on its own first.”

“Can you
please
stop calling me an ‘it?’” the siren hissed, her eyes narrowing in the first monstrous display we’d seen from her all day. “I have a name. Thelxepeia.”

Chris laughed, and the siren bristled at his reaction. “There’s no way we’ll be able to pronounce that,” he said. “So… we’ll just call you Tina. It’s close enough, right?”

Tina frowned and stuck her chin in the air, apparently not happy with her new nickname. Then she sneezed and rubbed her nose on her shoulder, ruining whatever snobbish effect she was going for. “Stupid mortals,” she said, sniffing again. “As if you’ll ever be able to get anything out of
me
.”

“I think it’s time to use that knife now,” Danielle said, reaching to grab it from Chris.

“Not so fast,” Kate jumped in. “We have other options.”

“Oh, yeah?” Danielle raised an eyebrow. “Such as what?”

“Gray energy.”

I did a double take, making sure it was
Kate
who had said those words. It was.

“Do you even know how to use gray energy?” I asked her. “I thought you were against using it.”

“I was,” she said. “But I’m also logical. We have a serious problem on our hands with the portal to Kerberos weakening, so we need to know how to use every possible weapon at our disposal—including gray energy. I’ve been practicing.”

“Impressive.” Danielle stood up and brushed imaginary dust off her leather pants. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“Then I guess you underestimated me.” Kate straightened her shoulders and leveled her gaze with Danielle’s. “Come on. Let’s get started.”

After an hour of forcing the siren—Tina—to drink water infused with gray energy, we had nothing to show for it but a confused, tired siren who
still
hadn’t given us answers to our questions. I was beginning to think that this was hopeless. But we hadn’t given up yet.

Danielle held Tina’s head as she tipped up the glass of water, forcing her to drink. “Now, let’s try this again,” she said, dropping her hand down to rest at the hilt of her sword. “How did you get through the portal from Kerberos, and how did Orthrus come back after we killed him?”

“I don’t know.” The siren yawned, her head lulling to the side. Danielle splashed the rest of the water in her face, and she jerked up, her eyes hooded as she looked around. “Where am I?” she slurred. “Why do I feel like I’ve been run over by a chariot?”

I stood up, sick of trying the same thing and getting nowhere. “This isn’t working,” I said. “All the gray energy is just making her confused. And even
if
she knows the answers, she won’t be able to tell them to us if she’s so out of it that she can’t remember how she got here.”

“Or maybe she’s just
pretending
she doesn’t remember anything, so that we’ll get all compassionate and stop questioning her,” Danielle said, holding up the empty glass. “I’m going to fill this back up so we can try again.”

“No.” Blake stepped in front of Danielle, blocking her path. “Nicole’s right.”

“Of course you’re on her side.” Danielle rolled her eyes. “Why am I not surprised?”

“It’s not about sides.” He stood strong, his eyes blazing with determination. “It’s about facts. Gray energy is what the Elders use to manipulate memories. We barely know what we’re doing with it—but we’re definitely messing with her memories, and it’s not helping. If anything, it’s making this worse. We need to try something else.”

“Like what?” Danielle asked.

“I can try using white energy to take away the gray energy we made her drink,” I said. “I’m not sure if it’ll work, but if it does, at least she’ll remember how she got here.”

“Good idea,” Blake said. “You think it’ll work on the siren the same way it did when you removed the gray energy that Danielle put into your tennis racket last month?”

“You
told
her about that?” Danielle’s mouth dropped open, and she stepped away from Blake. “I told you not to say anything.”

“And
you
promised that you would stop using gray energy, and then you turned around and used it on Nicole,” he said. “So let’s call it even.”

“Whatever.” She huffed and glared at me. “Just because you could remove gray energy from a tennis racket doesn’t mean you can remove it from a siren.”

“Maybe not.” I stepped closer to the siren, kneeling down so my gaze was level with hers. Despite her eyes being watery from the flu, they were an otherworldly, startling shade of sea green that made it clear she wasn’t human. She was so tired that she could barely keep them open. “Can one of you untie her hands?” I asked the others. “It’ll be easier to do this if my palms can connect with hers.”

Her lips quivered as Chris unbound her wrists, but she didn’t turn away from my gaze. “Why are you all doing this to me?” she asked again, her voice shaky and meek. “I swear I don’t know anything. Won’t you please let me go?”

“The gray energy confused you.” I reached forward and held onto both of her hands, so our palms met. “I’m going to use white energy to push away the gray energy clouding your thoughts. Then, if you answer our questions and we can prove that you were telling the truth, we’ll let you go. Deal?”

“And if I still don’t know the answers?” she asked.

Blake flicked on his lighter and passed a ball of fire back and forth in his hands. “If you know the answers after Nicole cleans the gray energy out of your system, then you should tell us everything you know,” he said. “If you do, then we’ll let you go. If you don’t…” He stared at the ball of fire, the flames growing higher, and let the threat hang in the air.

“Then you’ll burn me?” She laughed, but it was raspy, and broke up when she started coughing. “You don’t have it in you to hurt me. None of you do.”

Blake held her gaze and sent a few sparks flying onto her arm.

“Ow!” She flinched. “That hurt.”

He closed his fist, the fire disappearing within it. “It’ll hurt more if you don’t cooperate,” he warned.

Tina sniffed, rubbing the place on her arm that was already turning red where the sparks had burned her. I looked up at Blake and swallowed. Even though I knew he was doing this to benefit us, in that moment, I couldn’t help feeling slightly scared of him.

But then I thought about Orthrus, and about the hideous harpy that had tried to kill us last month in the cave. None of us had thought twice before attacking either of them. And while Tina might not have her power right now, she was still dangerous. How many innocent people had she lured to their deaths? She’d also sided with the Titans during the Second Rebellion. Meaning that she’d wanted to destroy the Olympian rulers and let the world slip into chaos.

As I took her hand back in mine, I reminded myself that while she might look like a china doll, she was still dangerous. I couldn’t let myself forget that.

“Will this hurt?” she asked me, her voice soft. “What you’re about to do?”

“No,” I said. “I’m a healer. But if you don’t give my friends and me the information that we need, I will not waste a bit of my energy to heal you after they finish with you.”

With that, I closed my eyes, my hands still wrapped around hers, and cleared my mind of everything but the white energy surrounding me. Last month, I had to focus really hard to absorb the energy and channel it, but now I did it on instinct. Warmth flooded my body as the white orbs of light rushed through my veins, and I directed it through my palms and into the siren, pushing the gray energy out of her body and back out into the Universe.

Once I could feel no more remnants of gray energy inside of her, I pulled my hands out of hers and stepped back. Her eyes were clearer now, less tired, and her skin flushed with renewed life.

I stood up to look down on her, even though at five feet four inches, I wasn’t exactly intimidating. “Do you remember anything now?” I asked.

“I remember how I got here.” She sneezed again, and now that her arms were free, she reached for a tissue and blew her nose. I never knew that such a loud sound could come out of such a tiny creature. “But I still don’t have the answers to your questions. So you might as well plunge that sword into my heart right now and put me out of my misery.”

“You would like that, wouldn’t you?” Danielle took a few steps forward, her hand on the hilt of her sword. “Because you know that if we do that, you’ll be able to come back.”

The siren just stared at her, saying nothing.

“Well?” Danielle prodded her.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re lying,” Kate said, so softly that it was eerie how confident she sounded. “You don’t want to die. And you’re used to using your voice to convince people that everything you say is true, so you’ve never had anyone doubt you. But I don’t believe you for one second.”

“Your loss, then.” The siren smiled, and I knew at once that Kate was right. Why did we think the siren might go along with us and answer our questions? She was thousands of years old. I couldn’t fathom how young we must seem to her.

If we wanted information, we weren’t going to get it by being nice.

I picked my bow off the floor, got into stance, and readied the arrow. “Blake?” I said, keeping my eyes on the siren. “Give me fire. I’ll make sure to aim anywhere
except
for her heart.”

He raised an eyebrow in question, as if asking if I was sure about this. But I didn’t budge. So he tossed a fireball at the arrow, lighting up the tip. The siren’s eyes were locked on mine, like she was daring me to go through with it. She must not think I would.