Chapter 8 Sirena
My place was on the edge of town, and yes, it was partially underwritten by my father, who understood the unique constraints my power put on me. There was no way I could afford the top three floors of a building otherwise. But once I got off the elevator at my penthouse I could taste the safety.
I kicked off my shoes and walked over to the window, as everyone else’s thoughts drifted away, leaving me with just myself and distant honking from traffic below, like the cars were metallic geese clamoring for attention.
And not for the first time, I sank against the window and rested my forehead on its cool glass pane, closing my eyes—reminding myself of the only windows and doors that really mattered: mine.
Not all the ones that were pressing in against me at Nocturne.
I got some glimpses through them, though.
I was smart enough not to concentrate on them at the time—if I gave what was behind a door or window in my mind too much attention, there was always a danger it might fly open.
But some of their owners wanted to be seen so badly, and probably they were physically closer than the rest, so I felt echoes from them still.
I remembered a panoply of skin, of hair, of vines, and fluids, and so much want and need—like the two wolf-based therians who were sharing a much larger harpy.
She was braced on hands and claw-footed feet against their onslaught, their proud members swording in and out of her slick hole.
Her human lips shouted both compliments and obscenities as they howled in pleasure, as turned on by her as by the fact that they were jousting against each other inside her.
Or the buck waiting in some kind of rut-rack, looking like a forest god—I saw him as the women who were congregated at his feet did, tanned, tall, lightly furred, and gorgeous, with candles tied to his antlers, his chest bound to the wall behind him with a wide leather strap, while below it his erection strained.
I felt what it was like to be him, to be a creature in wild, agonizing heat, at the same time as I felt the wild hopes and hunger of the three human women at his feet who were working him, licking, sucking, and slurping, until he shivered and demanded, “More!” stomping a cloven hoof, making wax rain down on their naked skin.
I let myself bathe in the aftershocks of their emotions, before rocking away from the window, sad to find myself in my own simple skin: the girl who’d never gotten any.
Not because I hadn’t had opportunities—I was surrounded by monsters who’d risked my father’s ire daily on missions. Surely some of them would’ve slept with me.
No . . . it was because I was scared.
I’d had a thousand orgasms through other people, walking down heavily populated streets at night.
But I’d never had one from inside me.
Because to let that go—to be like that, to be as open to someone else as they were to me—would mean . . . I opened my eyes, shook my head, and stood to take my comb-crown off and get in the shower.
Nex hadn’t contacted me by the next morning, which I found incredibly suspect.
I picked up my phone before I got out of bed.
You mean you haven’t found anything? I texted.
Was waiting for you to come in, he responded the nanosecond I hit send.
I thumbed the voice message button as I lurched upright in my bed. “Is that good or bad?” We’d been practicing this for almost as long as he’d been “alive”—I wanted him to consider other people’s circumstances and not be so convinced he was right all the time.
“Neither,” he responded. “Was just curious to see the look on your face when I told you.”
I bit my lips into a line on my way to the bathroom—and saw the little scrap of spider silk still wound around my finger, like a trinket to remember.
When he said things like that . . . I had to take them at face value.
He was still learning.
He didn’t know that it sounded like he was actually interested in me—and not just in a mutually intellectual way.
Plus, age-wise, he was practically a child, for all that he had semi-godlike powers with electronics.
So I was glad he’d said it somewhere without external cameras. He didn’t need to witness me over-dissecting it like a lonely weirdo.
“Sirena?” he sent—and cheated, making my phone play without me. His voice came through muffled; I always planted my phone into a glass jar full of cotton balls when I was in the bathroom. Just because we sometimes had conversations while I was in the shower didn’t mean he needed to see me naked.
“I’m here. I’m getting dressed, shush—you’ve piqued my curiosity.
I hope you’re happy,” I said, diving in and out of my closet to pull on work-appropriate attire: a white button-down shirt, a black blazer, black slacks, black flats, and a black headband that had a crown installed in it for me.
My pendant was still on from the prior night, but its camera only faced forward.
As long as I changed away from a mirror, I was fine.
“Always,” he chimed as I freed my phone from its fluffy jail and picked up my bag for my commute.
A coffee delivery waited at the front desk for me the moment I stepped in: a half-caf vanilla latte, because I liked to titrate my caffeine intake over the course of the day. Nex had ordered it.
I didn’t know where he got the money for that, either, because I was sure my father wasn’t signing off on it.
But, just like in regards to many of Nex’s other quirks, I’d decided not to ask.
I rode the elevator up, and the door to his server room stood open down the hall.
“Okay,” I called as I came in. “Surely I’ve been on camera now for, what, eight minutes?” I looked at an imaginary watch on my wrist. “So technically you could’ve told me already,” I said with a pout, staring up at the ceiling.
“It’s complicated,” he said, his voice drawing me further into the room.
I followed it until I sat down in front of a screen.
The second I did, a video of a van driving in the dark started playing, and I watched it go down familiar city streets—until they weren’t so familiar anymore, and I knew that Nex was playing with the optics to make what was dark on screen visible. “How so?”
“I traced the components in Sophia’s tracker to a museum supply company, then followed their shipping manifests to see who’d purchased them, and eventually found this.”
The van parked, and whoever was driving and the front passenger got out, opened the back, and started herding women out of its interior, and into the building beside them.
“Oh no,” I said, as I felt my stomach drop.
“Quite. Human trafficking. And they’ve been tagged like fine art at museum exhibits.”
“What? Where—” I demanded, leaning forward, ready to shake the screen for answers.
“The two men don’t come up in my databases. I can only assume they’ve been afforded the same plastic surgery as the women they’re in charge of. I hacked into the warehouse of course and sent a drone to peer in through its windows—but it appears to be empty now.”
“How long ago was this footage from?”
“A month ago.”
“Was Sophia among them?” We knew what she looked like now at least.
“No.”
“Were there any other vans?”
“Not caught by this cam.”
“And what happened when you traced the money?”
“That’s where things got interesting,” he said, and I turned to glare at the nearest wall of electronics.
“Define that, and we’d better agree.”
“After a certain entry point into the system, it became untraceable.”
I blinked twice. “Like . . . to humans? Or to you?”
“Me,” he said, and his voice had a slight echo to it. “You’re familiar with the idea of an air gap, yes?”
I nodded. The term usually meant when something had been taken entirely off-line—like a mafioso’s second, actual bank book, written by hand and kept in a safe. A way to keep the numbers safe from other people, so that only the chosen few could see them.
“This is like that, combined with a cryptocurrency . . . but only for people locked in the same room. A whole economy separated from the rest of the world—it’s as if they’ve all agreed on a different fiat.”
“Which is?”
“Currently undetermined,” he said, and one of his server fans spun up thoughtfully behind me. “I’ve considered all the normal financial options and come up empty. Which leaves me with a rather odd set of alternatives.”
“Oh, God.” I sighed. “Like what?”
“Power? Fame? Access? Or more nebulously, redemption, or even perhaps rebirth. They are giving these people new faces, after all. I’ve spent most of the time since I last saw you researching cults and other sub-religious movements from the last century.”
My jaw slowly dropped. “Are you suggesting these women were here because they wanted to be?” I asked, gesturing at the screen.
“Perhaps at one point—under pressure or promise—yes.”
“And they let someone else erase them?”
“I find it to be an odd goal, yet many human hobbies seem to disagree.”
“So what then? What good is a blank human?”
“I can think of several use cases. Information exchange, chiefly. They would be the perfect porter, having no internal biases to sully the data. Or, assassins, although after meeting Sophia, that seems unlikely.” More of his fans turned off and on, as if in consternation.
“And I have to consider the fact that they may be held as breeding vessels.”