Page 76 of Found Objects

“Hah! Lover’s quarrel,” she spat. “As though I would ever take an elf to my bed.”

“Let’s get back to moving clothes,” I suggested.

“Why don’t you make a cheese and fake bacon quiche and that wonderful tomato soup. It’s cold outside, and I think that would be lovely.” Ondine yawned, and when she stretched, her hair went from blond to jet black, so dark that the highlights in it were midnight blue. She was also wearing flannel pajama bottoms, fuzzy slippers, and a baggy long-sleeved T-shirt all of a sudden. The only thing that remained the same was the messy bun.

“That’s amazing,” Cole told her.

She grunted, picked up a laundry basket with toiletries in it, draped some clothes on hangers over it, and headed for my bedroom. Or our bedroom, mine and Cole’s, now.

“Are you gonna eat?” I called after her.

“Of course I’m going to eat,” she snarled back.

Cole turned to me.

“She’s just hungry, which is weird because she doesn’t have to eat, but when she wants to, she gets like that.”

“I think she’s luminous.”

I grunted. “We’ll see how luminous you think she is when she eats everything in the house and forgets to tell you.”

“I can’t wait.” He gave me a blinding smile before following her.

I went to the kitchen and started pulling out everything I needed, excited to be cooking for Cole and Evan. I wanted to show the man that I could take care of him and his brother.

It was fun to listen to snippets of his conversation with Ondine as they came in and out of the bedroom, picking up and carrying things.

“Apparently, I know nothing about sirens,” he told her. “I thought they were mermaids who hung out on rocks near coastlines and tried to get sailors to steer their boats into reefs.”

“Sirens come in many different sizes and colors,” she teased him.

“I just thought they wanted to kill sailors.”

“I mean, some do that.” She shrugged. “But they also come onto the land and hunt down men who have committed atrocities out on the sea.”

“Really?” Cole sounded surprised, and then they were both gone again.

I was grating cheese when they came back out.

“So even if you can’t hear, a siren can still enthrall you?”

“Of course. Sirens rely on more than just audible seduction.”

“Why?”

“Being reliant on only one form of temptation would be careless,” she told him. “Simple song would have made my sisters obsolete.”

“Makes sense.”

“A siren may also lure with sight, touch, and smell. We are the most fearsome of creatures, though I’ve always found wolves to be most susceptible to song. Perhaps it’s the fact that you engage in your own that makes it so.”

She meant the howling.

“Could be,” Cole agreed, following her into the bedroom again.

I was slicing up plant-based bacon a bit later when Evan got up, stumbled over to the island, and took a seat.

“Feel better?”