Page 1 of Siren Song

Prologue

Javier

Even though I have none of the magic, I feel the pull of the water. The siren blood inherited from my mother itches under my unremarkable human skin, and the waters where I was born call to me.

Normally, I jog the two-lane highway in the evening, but tonight, I veer off the main road onto the dirt drive.

There is no official name for this place. The sirens who live here call it the colony, while the local ‘Tecanos say: donde viven las mujeres fatales. Where the deadly women live. My human father’s mother, my abuela, a plump Yucatec’an who always wears her black hair pulled back in a long braid, told me the stories passed down to her.

Hundreds of years ago, women with shimmering tails and scales peeking out from their skin climbed out of the ocean. The Daughters of Parthenope, they had called themselves. They came from the arid, rocky coasts of a place called Olympius on the other side of the world, and wanted to make the sandy, tropical jungles of Yucatec’a their home.

The place where they settled was remote, separated from the Yucatec’an villages tucked throughout the jungle. But the sirens needed human men for mates. Generations of human men, unable to resist the conquest, kept answering the call from the Daughters of Parthenope. My father, a soft-spoken silver miner I barely know, was no exception.

The jungle opens up in front of me. At this time of day, the siren colony is uncharacteristically quiet. I check my watch—there is about five minutes until the evening meal is served at the dining hall. It is easy to imagine them all lining up, generations of long-legged, willowy women who spend their days training in the water.

I pass the stone-lined central pools. No one is there, but the water is never still. Their depths render the water a rich, intimidating, dark blue. Hours after training is done, the surface still ripples.

My eyes skip over the dormitories where the younger sirens sleep, and the smaller casitas where the older sirens live surround the central buildings. As always, my gaze lingers on the cabin where my mother lives, but the windows are dark.

I take the path skirting the edges of the colony. I would not come out here if it weren’t a mealtime. The cenotes—naturally occurring sinkholes that expose the pooling groundwater beneath the limestone bedrock—are scattered throughout the jungles of Yucatec’a and provide a refuge for the sirens. With their protective walls, they are one of the few places in the world where sirens can sing freely without risking their lives.

It was only three years ago that an older siren was swimming out along the Caribe Coast, confident she was far enough from shore, only to have a boat of fishermen come upon her. We were told her death was sudden, swift and ruthless, her body joining the bodies of the drowned men who had leapt into the ocean, called to her song.

My knees start to ache and I slow my pace as I follow the flat trail. Jogging is not as easy as it used to be—my belly, which has always been stubbornly soft, seems to get rounder each year.

Maybe this is life after thirty-five: becoming a little more brittle and soft with every passing day. I feel things differently in my body. A night of sleeping funny on my shoulder leaves me with a three day crick in my neck. My hips get painfully tight if I forget to stretch.

I do not mind. I have had a life full of incredible food and love and laughter. Even now, my simple concrete house sits on the lot behind my human grandmother’s home in Cuzamá. There isn’t much going on in Cuzamá, other than a fruit stand, a local soda where I pick up a bag of fresh carnitas after work some days, and the brightly painted plaster houses clustered around the dusty stretch of road. My boyfriend, Aapo, lives right down the road, close enough for me to take care of him, and to cook him dinner when we both finish work.

My abuela says fate brought me back to the colony. There is no logical reason why I returned to the place where my siren mother lived. She made her position regarding her male child clear when she allowed me to live and then promptly handed me off to my father.

It is a fate better than most male children born to sirens, who are typically left to drown after their underwater birth. Unlike our mothers and sisters, we carry none of the gifts—no transformations, no shimmering tail or fins, no grace in the water.

We are also free from the curse bestowed upon all sirens by the goddess Demeter, when sirens failed to protect her daughter, Persephone. Ever since, the compelling song of the siren has become their greatest weakness—if they are heard, they will be the ones to perish.

When I returned to the colony as a teenager, the sirens were confused. They had nothing to offer me—a plump human boy who had none of the innate talent needed to swim competitively. But the moment I saw the sirens dance in the water, there was nothing more I wanted than to somehow, some way, be a part of it.

It was mesmerising: the way their bodies moved in perfect unison, the colorful scales catching the sunlight like polished silver. The fins sprouting from their ears and the fine webbing between their fingers—they looked like creatures from another universe.

“Artistic swimming,” one of the sirens around my age explained. “The humans claim to have invented it, but we have been dancing like this since the time of the gods.”

I am still not sure how I went from a kid watching them dance in awe, to coaching the sirens in artistic swimming competitions. But fifteen years into this career, there is nothing else I can imagine doing with my life.

The trail curves and my breathing gets heavier. I pause long enough to take off my threadbare t-shirt, mopping the sweat from my chest and face. I tuck the shirt into the waistband of my running shorts before picking up my pace.

Suddenly, my feet tangle beneath me. I try to find my balance, but my body stumbles off the trail, crashing through the dry underbrush.

“What…?” I start, but it feels like a hand has reached into my chest and wrapped around my spine, yanking me forward. Branches scrape my skin, but the cuts and scratches are nothing because there is something in my head overpowering everything else.

Singing.

No.

The singing grows louder.

I try to dig my heels into the dirt, but I keep running forward. I will my hands to grab onto something, anything that might slow me down. They refuse to cooperate.

No. Please, no.