with a fake chipper tone. “What are you doing?”
“Reading, what were you doing?”
She swings her arms at her sides. “Oh, just visiting our Viking.”
I peer over the pages of my book. “And?”
“Tight-lipped man.”
“Uh-huh.” I drop my book into my lap. “Why is your skirt all twisted?”
Nesrine looks down at it nonchalantly. “Too big.”
“Did big hands land on it?” I watch my sister’s brows furrow then relax. She knows I can read her, she’s not that stealthy when it comes to hiding things.
“I was just trying to help,” she offers with a shrug.
“At least you didn’t get strangled. He can’t stand me. The nice approach isn’t working.”
“I beg to differ.” Nesrine scoots my crossed ankles over so she can take a seat. “You just come off timid.”
“I drew blood,” I counter. “I ran a blade down his face.”
“That’s child’s play to a man like that.”
“I flung him off me yesterday.”
She crosses her slim legs. “It probably felt like a shove.”
“Whose side are you on?”
She pats my calf. “Yours, of course, I was just trying to help, as I said.” I open my book back up and stare at the pages.
“When is father coming by to visit?”
Nesrine picks at her skirt. “He hasn’t said, been busy with the advisors on how to move forward with the folklore.”
“The folklore don’t come over here.”
“No, but we’re being blamed for a lot of their killings.”
I tsk. “Who cares?”
“Father, apparently.” She lets out a sigh. “He doesn’t want us to come off as barbaric.”
“We lure men into the ocean by song, can you think of a better way to die? Besides we only do it when they come around our territory.”
Nesrine shrugs. “Not if your singing is coming within my ears.” I give her a small kick to her hip, which gets her to chuckle.
“Have you told him about the Viking?”
“No. It’d just cause more of a mess, besides we have this.”
“Atarah isn’t on board.”
“Atarah is one person,” my sister retorts. “And there’s seven of us.”
“She’ll get Brylee on her side for sure. Maybe Isolde and—”
Nesrine’s head snaps to me, brows furrowed. “Why are you worrying about this so much?”
“Because he’s in my home,” I stress. “Where did he come from, why is he here?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? Mother’s cuff.”
I shake my head. “No, they don’t—”
“Why wouldn’t they? Men talk, legends and myths are born. Vikings are land-hungry people, why wouldn’t they want it and Merindah?”
“Because it’s mine—I mean, ours.”
“You need off,” my sister conveys. “You’ve been here too long.” Her words are soft, but they’re hard against my chest.
I’m changing, I can feel it. My siren tendencies are dimming; the more time I spend on land, the more my body forgets.
Mind you, I’ve adapted a new superpower, if you will. Instead of being able to sing my victims into a daze, I can burn them. My skin ignites into a blaze, which was what the Blood Axe experienced the other day.
“We’ve already spoken about this,” I claim, pulling my knees to my chest. “There isn’t any—”
“And we’ll speak about it as many times as I feel fit.”
I send a glare in her direction. “There is no other way than to ask Taysa to take another thing from us. We’re not going to do that anymore.”
“There is another way.”
“Which is?”
“Kill her.”
“Are you mad?” I fully sit up, tossing my book to the side. “She’s been like a mother to us.”
“We’ll kill her,” she continues cooly. “And bottle her energy so the island remains ours.”
“You can’t kill someone who has helped us.”
“She’s not ignorant, Davina, she knows what she’s doing.”
“We all knew what we were doing,” I defend. “She warned us, we spent months driving her crazy with giving us a safe place to walk and run on.”
“I’m not fully convinced that she didn't know what would happen.”
“You’re just upset that I’m still here.”
“I am, but why can’t a witch find another way?”
I lift a shoulder. “I don’t know. Maybe there is no other way.”
“Keep your guard up,” Nesrine goes on, pulling her raven hair off one of her shoulders. “It’s the best advice I could ever give you.”
“I will, but you can’t blame Taysa for what I asked her to do.”
“Working on it,” she replies with a weak grin. A brief silence develops between us, and I know she thinks she should’ve been the one to offer up something else to let the rest of us go free and back into the ocean.
I’ve just always been faster than her.
“What do you think we should do with