Chapter 16 Cooper
Cooper
My brain scrambles like a plate of eggs—hissing, spitting, and overcooked in panic. The wind howls as her putrid voice fills the air. I tug my earmuffs tight, the faux fur scratching my skin as I watch Reed tumble towards her den. He looks like he’s sleepwalking straight into a grave.
Bet none of the men you’ve killed before were wearing earmuffs, huh? You psycho siren bitch.
The thought is the only thing keeping me tethered to sanity as my breaths puff in the air. I slow down, trying to stay quiet, crouching low into the snow until it seeps through my pants and chills my knees. My veins are so full of adrenaline, the cold doesn’t bother me.
She hasn’t moved—just standing there motionless in the cave entrance haloed by the dim glow of a fire behind her. She’s too still, like a marble statue. Even with the distance, I can feel it—the rottenness. It rolls off of her like sweetened sulfur, a nauseating scent that makes my stomach twist.
My pulse kicks up. Okay, Cooper, think. What would Reed do if you were in a chokehold of some supernatural being?
The answer is simple, overpower them with brute strength along with strategic positioning. Maybe involving a scalpel and a moral justification.
Except I don’t have a scalpel, the closet thing I have to a weapon is my flashlight and the ability to chat someone’s ear off. I unzip my pack with hands that feel foreign to me. Notebook. Pencil. The other half of the blueberry muffin. And a rope that Reed threw in.
“Just in case,” I remember him saying with an infuriating wink.
In case of what? I mentally anguish at his absent, entranced form. In case I need to lasso a siren? Play jump rope with death?
I grit my teeth. The rope feels alien in my hands. I was never a boy scout that sold cookies or practiced knots in my free time. I was a weird kid, but not that kind of weird.
How did I end up here? In Alaska, trying to save the strangest love interest of my life from a vicious siren. If only Ava were here, she'd give me the proper advice from one of her fan-fics on how to take this bitch down.
The muffin is not going to help. I take a single, defiant bite of the frozen, crumbly disaster and then hurl it into a snowbank. It's a pathetic gesture, but it feels good.
Rage, hot and sudden, boils up in my chest, burning away the last of my panic. Oh, hell no. You don't get to have him.
Forget strategy. Forget finesse. This calls for good, old-fashioned, Midwestern desperation.
I lunge forward from the snowbank, a desperate prayer rattling in my skull that God has a seriously dark sense of humor and is on my side today. My boots skid across the icy top of the snow, but momentum carries me forward. I’m not aiming for the siren. I’m aiming for him.
I slam into Reed’s back with a grunt, wrapping my arms around his waist in a tackle that would make a football coach proud. We go down in a tangle of limbs, plowing a fresh furrow into the snow.
Reed’s lips move. The spell has shattered.
Reed gasps, a raw, sucking sound like a man breaking the surface after nearly drowning.
His body transforms from eerily placed to ramped up tension in a heartbeat.
He shoves me off, his eyes wide with fury and disorientation for a second before they lock onto me, blazing with a ferocious, terrifying clarity.
“What the—” he stammers.
“No time!” I yelp, scrambling to my feet, making sure my earmuffs are tight.
The Siren’s face contorts, her sickly-sweet, haunting melody twisting into a screech of pure rage that makes the trees shiver. She takes a step forward, her claws rising in the air.
Her bellowing screech strikes me through my earmuffs, shaking my teeth. It’s the sound of raspy nails on a thousand chalkboards, all being scratched by furious demons.
Reed has his hands on his ears, blocking her spell.
He has a hungry glaze in his eyes—the one that says the doctor is sleeping and the predator is on the loose.
He grabs the rope from my hands, swinging it in the air like some outer space cowboy.
“Alright sweetheart,” he says, his voice a rumble that makes my heart flutter. “Let’s dance.”
She hisses in response, the sound slithering down my spine, as he makes the first move, somersaulting forward. He rises and circles the rope in the air, like he’s summoning strength from the heavens.
She steps forward, her pale tongue out.
He whips the rope in the air, the sound cracking through the silence around us. But she’s faster than she looks. She ducks around him, her body moving with an unnatural, liquid grace. Her long, pale tongue darts out again, in a grotesque, flickering gesture that almost grazes his cheek.
“Disgusting,” he groans, using the opportunity to lasso her legs, and is met with a scream of pure, undiluted fury. The sound is so raw it shakes the pines at the edge of the clearing. She stumbles, her liquid grace turning into a frantic scramble as the rope tightens around her ankles.
Reed yanks hard and she crashes tongue-first into the snow with a satisfying thump. However, she’s not going down without a struggle. She twists onto her back, her black eyes burning with hatred and malevolence. Her tongue darts out again, forming a single, guttural note that makes my teeth ache.
Reed flinches, his grip on the rope loosening for a split second. It’s almost enough for her to slither free.
“Cooper—!” Reed begins, but my feet are already pounding the snow.
I don’t have a plan. I just have a profound, gut-wrenching desire to shut her up. I lunge for the rope, avoiding her flickering tongue as she tries to get in my face. I grab the loose end, and with an ungodly amount of strength, I pull it taut around her arms. Again and again.
She screeches even louder, an avalanche kicking off in the distance.
“Reed, the flashlight!” I say, as he hurries toward my pack, my ears burning from her hell-bending fury.
He hands me the flashlight as my ears quake, I shove it in her furious mouth, her black eyes lighting up in fit. “Take that! Now you are stuffed like a supernatural turkey!” I shout, mostly for my own satisfaction.
“You didn’t tell me we were dealing with an actual Siren,” I mutter at him, my chest trembling with a strange mix of anger and pleasure.
Reed cracks a wild smirk. “You didn’t ask, sweetheart.
” He finished the knot with a savage tug, pulling it so hard the rope creaks.
The Siren’s furious screams are now completely muffled by the cold, hard metal of the flashlight wedged deep in her mouth.
Her body thrashes against the bindings, a terrifying, barbaric energy with no outlet.
We both step back, panting, our breath frosting in the suddenly quiet air. The only sounds are the breeze, the distant avalanche her scream triggered, and the muffled, metallic thumps as her teeth struggle against the foreign object in her mouth.
I look down at my hands, raw and rope-burned, then at Reed. His hair is a dark, raging mess, a scratch bleeds on his cheek, and his eyes are alive with a feral, triumphant light. A hysterical giggle bubbles up my throat.
“I just… shoved a flashlight in a Siren’s mouth,” I say, the reality of it hitting me. “To think I could be studying pharmacodynamics right now.”
Reed reaches out, his grip firm on my shoulder through the parka. “And you passed with flying colors.” His thumb caresses my neck, a shock of warmth in the freezing air. “Now unless you want round two of tumbling with the Siren or to get wiped out by an avalanche, we need to move.”
“What should we do with her?” I ask, the metallic clinks vibrating in the air.
“What do you think we should do with her?” Reed asks, eyes burning with curiosity.
“Should we burn her in her cave?”
“Tempting,” Reed purrs, his gaze flickering toward the cave’s mouth. “Nothing like a shrieking bonfire.”
The Siren thrashes again, a muffled shriek of pure hatred vibrating around the flashlight. I watch her, this creature of myth and murder, now reduced to a writhing bundle of rage and nylon rope.
“Cooper, grab her legs.”
I move without hesitation, my hands closing in around her ankles. Her skin is unnaturally cold, like granite countertops. She twitches her feet violently, but my grip is strengthened by adrenaline and pride.
“Good grasp,” Reed says, his voice sending thrills of joy through me.
He grabs her under the arms and on the count of three, we heave her into the air.
She’s heavier than she looks, a dense, writhing bundle of murder.
Her screams continue as muffled, angry vibrations as we trudge through the deep snow.
The cave mouth is mere feet away, the scent of decay and soiled flesh greeting us. As we enter, dozens of skulls smile at us, perfectly arranged in a semicircle around a shy fire reduced to embers. They stare at us with empty sockets, a grisly audience to the Siren’s final performance.
For a moment, the three of us are frozen in a macabre scene: us, the skulls, and her, the star of this bone-strewn theater.
Then Reed lets out a low, respectful whistle. “Well, she had quite a proficiency in racking up numbers. I’ll give her that. On three, we’ll toss her into this pitiful fire.”
He counts out, and after three long seconds, we toss her frozen, wriggling being into the fire, screeches lighting up the night as her victims get to watch her final demise.
The moment her body hits the embers, the cave erupts. As if the flames are feeding on the malice of her soul. It explodes, a roaring, vengeful pillar of heat and light that licks the cavern ceiling.
Her last screech is swallowed by the inferno’s roar, a final, fleeting sound before she becomes a writhing silhouette within the flames. The skulls, her silent patrons, seem to glow within their empty sockets now filled with a flickering, orange judgement.
A tear streams down Reed’s cheek.
“What’s wrong?" I ask him, my brain genuinely concerned, as I’ve never seen this man shed a tear after three homicides.