Siren's Curse (Hotel Paranormal) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Siren's Curse

  About The Hotel Paranormal Series

  About The Mythic Kiss Series

  Join the Shifter Shield Star Newsletter

  Join The Vampirarchy, Margo's Street Team

  About the Author

  SIREN'S CURSE

  Margo Bond Collins

  A Mythic Kiss Story

  The Hotel Paranormal Series

  www.thehotelparanormal.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Margo Bond Collins

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission of the author except where permitted by law.

  Published by Bathory Gate Press

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  * * *

  About The Hotel Paranormal Series

  The Hotel Paranormal is THE place for supernatural beings looking to get away from it all. Beings like werewolves, vampires, elves, sprites, djinn and more check in from all over the world for business and for pleasure -- and sometimes for both.

  Discover more at www.thehotelparanormal.com.

  About Siren's Curse

  When the Sirens of ancient Greece retreated to deeply sunken Atlantis, they never expected to return to the world above. But now that their old foes, the Titans, are pushing into this dimension, the mermaid-shifter Kirka must find new allies…and she knows just the place to start. Welcome to the Hotel Paranormal.

  Siren's Curse

  by Margo Bond Collins

  Zale

  Nothing here called to me.

  Pausing in the lighted entryway of the Hotel Poseidon in Piraeus, the port city that forms the southwest edge of Athens, Greece, I stared out at the dark streets. I hadn't been able to work out which direction would draw a sleepless tourist suffering from insomnia and guilt.

  Six weeks earlier, my partner Adam Clayton had disappeared from this city. He checked into the first hotel on his itinerary, stayed there for several days, checked into a second hotel, then went out for a walk one night, and never returned.

  It took this long to get my department to approve the funds for me to fly to Europe to try to track him down. The Athens police had been of little help, though their initial detective work gave me something to go on, at least. I was sure even that much help was in deference to my own Greek name—Zale Stavros. I hated to tell them that I had almost changed it when I turned eighteen, and that only my mother's incessant weeping for two full weeks after I had informed her of my intent to Americanize my name had stayed my hand when it came time to sign the paperwork.

  At any rate, I hadn't planned to find myself on this side of the ocean separating my parents from those traditions they both adored and had left. But here I was, sifting through weeks-old clues in an attempt to solve a case the local law enforcement had given up on.

  The Greek detectives had already sorted through all of Clay's belongings and logged it in as evidence, of a sort. I spent the first afternoon of my arrival going back through everything, trying to piece together the puzzle of his absence in my own room at the Hotel Poseidon. I had stared for hours at the contents of his suitcase, released to me out of professional courtesy only.

  Our lieutenant said Clay lost it and took off, maybe killed himself.

  I didn't believe that. He wouldn't commit suicide; he's not the type. We've worked suicide cases together, and I've heard him discuss how selfish it is.

  He might go AWOL, sure, but he's no idiot. He wouldn't leave everything behind, including his passport.

  On a beach a few miles away from this hotel—the first one Clay had inhabited, not the second—a group of college-age tourists had found a pile of ripped clothing, shredded, really, with a wallet still in the half-torn pocket of his jeans, along with a broken seashell.

  The kids had claimed the wallet was empty of money. Though I wasn't sure I believed that story, the Greek investigators took that as a sign that Clay had left on his own, grabbing the cash and abandoning his identity.

  I knew better.

  If Clay was dead, someone else had done him in.

  I had no idea why the broken seashell had been tucked into my partner's pocket. Part of me wanted to dismiss it as an anomaly, but I had learned a long time ago never to ignore a potential clue.

  Every cop instinct I had screamed at me that Clay had come to some bad end, but I had no proof beyond a pile of belongings that should have gone with him.

  The map on my smartphone showed several routes from the hotel to the beach where Clay's clothes had been found. This long after the fact, I doubted I would learn much from tracing his exact route, had I even been able to figure out what it had been. It might help me determine something about his state of mind, however.

  Somehow, the most direct, easiest route didn't quite feel right. The beach hadn't been in his notes, hadn't been written down in his small, blue notebook on the list of places he'd planned to visit.

  No, this felt like an impromptu destination, not a predetermined one.

  The least direct route, then. One that wound through some of the neighborhoods along tiny, meandering streets. I could follow one of the more obvious routes on my way back.

  Maybe it would give me some insight into what had happened.

  I stepped out into the night.

  * * *

  Three hours later, the darkened streets hadn't given me the flash of intuition I had hoped for.

  They had, however, given me more time to mull over the seemingly endless possibilities surrounding Clay's disappearance.

  I had half-expected to be contacted by the Charalobos family. Clay had come to Athens on some sort of weird-ass quest for forgiveness, or understanding, or some shit like that, after taking out one of their family members. The shoot had been good, but it bothered Clay more than it probably should have. The department psychologist thought the idea to visit Greece had some merit.

  The Charaloboses were high-ranking in the Greek version of the mob back in the States, but the Athens police suggested the family wasn't terribly important here.

  Entirely possible, of course, but for all I knew, they had a grip on the cops here. My parents, both lovers of their country of birth despite having left it long before I was born, would have said that the prominent Greek families definitely controlled the police.

  All I knew for certain was that I had nothing more to go on. Just a knowledge of my partner and a vague sense of unease that tugged at me almost continually, demanding I keep looking.

  The sooner I solve this, the sooner I can get out of here.

  Out of this entire country full of women like my mother and men like my father, a whole culture of people so very like the community in the Greek Orthodox church I had stopped attending at the same time I failed to change my name.

  If these Greek women passing by me knew they story, they, too, might place their hands on my shoulders to pin me in place and shed strategic tears to coerce me to do their bidding.

  I shuddered.

  Nope.

  No matter how lovely the sun-drenched city of Athens might be, I would be glad to get shut of the place and head back home to Dallas—another sun-drenched place, but a little less full of wailing Greek women.

  I can't leave until I learn what happened to Clay.

  I was sure of it, all the way down into my bones.

  I might be here forever.

 
Kirka

  The world of men is no place for mer.

  Sea-witch, they called me, and Siren. Maiden and monster.

  My song-sister Skyla claimed the love of Odysseus, but not his rage—the vengeance of a trickster scorned, who strikes with words as ruinous as any sword.

  That was my reward.

  He said I turned his men to swine.

  But his men, those soldier-sailors who put to sea with him, were swine already, fresh as they were from the sacking of Troy, the slaughter of its men and the rape of its women.

  If I sang them to their true form, it was justice, not horror.

  Still, he begged my guidance through the land of the dead and past the island of my song-sisters.

  He did not resist our allure.

  His men did not survive.

  So he spun his tale of my god Poseidon pursuing him across the seas, through misery and death, until he returned triumphant to his tiny island to massacre all who gainsaid him.

  He never could resist shouting his name as he raced away—I am not No Man. I am Odysseus. All who defy me are fiends.

  Thus it ever is in the world of men.

  I should have remembered.

  Man and mer should not mix.

  * * *

  That's what I tell everyone in Atlantis, anyway.

  We all tell the stories we want remembered.

  The gods know it's always more complicated than that.

  Still, I can never return to Greece without thinking, if only briefly, of Odysseus and the men I turned to pigs.

  Honestly? That was hysterical.

  I'm not here to contemplate the fun of transformative magic, though.

  I'm here to see what I can find out about the recent incursion of the Titans from their prison dimension into our realm.

  Here on land, everything is hard and bright and hot, and the world has changed even since the last time I surfaced. It's faster, for one thing, and people communicate with each other more quickly—if no more effectively—than ever before.

  It hasn't been that long since I came to the human world, either. Maybe twenty or thirty human years? Poseidon's decision to send Skyla, who hadn't been to the surface since Odysseus broke her heart, completely baffled me. I like to think that if I hadn't been on the other side of the ocean chatting with a shark-shifter (and oh, such an attractive one, too), our god—such as he is—would have sent me, and things wouldn't have gotten so mucked up.

  But I was gone, Skyla thought she was ready to risk the surface once again, and Poseidon was getting desperate.

  So of course Skyla transformed the first man she had sex with.

  Then she brought him back to Atlantis, against his wishes.

  The world of mer is no place for men, either.

  I said so to Skyla when she returned from the surface with her earthen male, her Clay, her Adam. He drifted nearby, his human bulk and muscles a clear contrast to our Atlantean men, with their sleek physiques and wide eyes.

  He had to work to move through the water and to keep himself still, and the muscles of his new tail rippled with effort.

  "I had no choice." Skyla's eyes glowed green in the depths, lighting the ocean around us. "Poseidon himself sent me. We need an army if the Titans are returning." She flicked her tailfin in suppressed emotion, her eyes darting to the side as if to evaluate her new companion's mood.

  Not that she had any need to do so. Anger emanated from him in ripples that charged the ocean water around him with energy.

  "And you're certain the Old Ones are pushing their way back through on the surface?" I didn't truly doubt her—she's not known for lies—but I wanted to hear her say it aloud again.

  "I am." Her words bubbled out and around me, tasting of truth and of fear.

  "Shit." At the sound of my curse, Clay's gaze twitched back to me, the surprise in his eyes a welcome change from the murderous glare he's been giving everyone since he arrived.

  "What?" I asked. "You think we're all as old-fashioned as Skyla?"

  He frowned, considering answering me, but he still hadn't adapted to the pressure differential from the surface to Atlantis, wasn't used to allowing his gills to take on the bulk of the breathing. He certainly hadn't figured out how to reliably move the air necessary for speaking out of the water and into his lungs.

  Though I hadn't been to the surface in several years, I remembered: that shit hurt until you got used to it.

  In the end, he simply shrugged, and looked away again.

  Someone was going to have to give that boy lessons in being mer. Not Skyla—he was far too angry with her for changing him to accept what she might teach him. I was about to hit up Poseidon for permission to go to the surface to gather intel.

  Glancing around the agora, the open-sea market and general assembly area where we had met, I quickly assessed the other mer-folk—tradesmen discussing business, students listening to tutors, children playing. The mermen wouldn't impress Clay, who was a peace officer in his surface life. It would take someone more like that shark-shifter I had befriended in my recent travels. The leader of his shoal, strong and muscular.

  That left Poseidon himself.

  The thought sent a stabbing pain through my stomach. A meeting between the two of them might not end well. What had the other Siren been thinking to bring him to Atlantis?

  This will not end well.

  No. Better leave Clay's education to Skyla. If she needed me to intervene, I would. Otherwise, I had better things to do.

  Like talk to my god myself.

  With a sigh, I turned my attention back to Skyla. "I will tell you what I learn from Poseidon."

  She nodded, only the slight flicking of her tail giving away her inner turmoil. "Be well, song-sister."

  So old-fashioned.

  "You, too, love." I leaned in close to embrace her, catching Clay's hard glare as he watched us.

  Definitely glad he's not my problem.

  I hoped he wouldn't turn into an issue for me.

  I was going to have plenty to deal with in the days to come without adding a pissed-off human to the mix.

  * * *

  Throughout the centuries, there have been times when even the other Sirens have called me witch—or something like it, anyway. Despite all the powers we have in common, there are degrees of control among us. Truth be told, Skyla was probably the least powerful of the Sirens—still more adept at using her magic than the average mermaid, but it had taken her decades to learn the first of the Siren songs.

  Sheer cowardice on my part led to me to leave Clay's initiation into the world of mer in Skyla's hands for the time being. Eventually, Poseidon would probably order me to train him.

  The top-siders have a saying about the responsibility that comes with power.

  In my case, what came with great power was terrible knowledge.

  What I know is this: Poseidon, great god of the ocean, is no god.

  For that matter, none of the mer-folk are what we claim to be. Or, rather, we are not what we think we are. We take great pride in our separation from the humans who walk on land, and are generally disdainful of the shifters who move from water to earth and back again. But we—human, sea-shifters, mer-folk, and all—are connected. Related. Cousins.

  Kissing cousins, when the opportunity arose. As far as I was concerned, anyway.

  I needed to find a chance to get back to that shark-shifter sometime soon.

  A sigh bubbled up from me as I made my way across the Agora, stopping to speak to a few mer I knew, but doing my best to duck past anyone who might want to engage in a long conversation.

  That was easier to do if I slipped outside the usual stream of traffic in the marketplace, weaving through the columns and up toward Poseidon's palace.

  The tall columns, covered in barnacles at the base, but swept clean toward the top, supported a grand hall where Poseidon held court. The hall, open to the ocean, was lit by glowing green and
blue lights of sea-fire, the first spell any self-respecting sea-witch learned to cast.

  Poseidon's great throne, made of shell and bone and living coral, swept up from the floor at the back of the hall, directly in front of a door leading into his private quarters, carved into the side of the enormous arc of rock that curved across the top of the mer-made structure.

  The court of the great lord of the sea was not currently in session. Two mermen, large by our standards but still more willowy than most human males, guarded the entrance to Poseidon's personal space. I ignored them as I brushed by. Poseidon and I had come to an understanding centuries ago: he didn't try to stop me from doing the things I considered important, and I didn't out his secret to the rest of the mer-folk. His guards knew better than to try to stop me.

  I waited to call out until the heavy stone door swung shut behind me. "You can quit hiding. I'm not going away until we talk about this."

  "I am not hiding." The ocean god sounded petulant.

  "Sure you're not."

  I heard his irritated sigh bubble through the water as he moved into the foyer where I waited. "I have been waiting here for you for quite some time."

  Without waiting for an invitation, I drifted through the arched doorway into the space designed to greet guests—not that Poseidon had many. I settled myself on a T-shaped perch, coiling my tail around the slender spire that attached it to the floor.

  "What do you know of the Titans breaking out of their holding dimensions?" I asked bluntly.

  At least the pseudo-god had the decency to wince. "Nothing more than Skyla has reported."

  I stared at him through narrowed eyes. "Nothing? Then why did you send her to the surface in the first place?"

  "Ah. That." He ran one hand through the gray hair that waved gently in the water in a halo around his head as he moved to take a seat directly across from me. "I had heard from some of my other subjects that there seemed to be breaches in the walls we set up around them."