Penelope lay as still as she could, but it feels like the earth is rolling under her, fast like a tire. Her stomach churns, and she clenched her jaw, counting louder in her head. 89, 88, 87, 86… It’s just another thing Siren has taught her, that ticking backwards and forwards between numbers keeps you from hurling your guts out.
She’s not even taking full breaths. Her ribs are crushed with the anxiety that she’s moving too much, because the dead silence feels like there’s an axe hanging above her. It’s going to swing down and cleave her right in half.
The expression ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’ is a definition of her terror. There’s nothing but the writhing of her heart in her chest and the echo of those screams in her head. Nothing but Siren’s touch still searing into her skin from where she had squeezed. For all she knows, they’re ghosts now. Maybe she’s even dead, and she doesn’t even know it.
Maybe she and Siren are bleeding out, and her soul is caught in limbo. She swallows at the lump in her throat, the pins in her stiff muscles sinking deeper.
The expression, ‘careful what you wish for’ comes next. As if her brain is a school teacher who’s ignoring that her students are under their desks, the ceiling coming down in football sized hunks. A shrill sound explodes into the night. Like a baby screaming, its cry melting and morphing into a police car’s howl. It stretches, rippling higher and higher and higher until Penelope seizes her pierced ears, her jaw wrenching open in a scream only knows is coming out from the burn in her throat.
The ground jumps under her, and Penelope can’t take it any longer. She erupts from the dirt and foiliage, face smeared in snot and sweat and dirt and tears, because she’s so scared she’s sure her heart is about to blow. The moment she’s up, she freezes. Her knees buckle, and she sinks back down.
The lake house didn’t just blow to pieces. It lurched out, snapping off its stilts as if it was diving down into the water. The roof gave way like a flower blooming in fast motion, and there was something there that didn’t fit.
Like trying to shove a corner puzzle piece into the center of a jigsaw, her brain pieced it together the best it could, outlining the part she could recognize.
She had seen one in her biology reviews this week under her tutor, Ms. Camers. Ms. Camers had been one of the people who screamed. Ms. Camers knew quite a lot, including who Penelope’s mother had been before the ‘car accident.’
Today, she had given her a locket for her birthday, one that had been retrieved from said ‘car accident.’
But this cat skull was different than the one she had held in her hand.
It looks big enough to turn the table and hold her entire body in its open mouth. Its empty socket held a tiny, spectral glow. An empty, green glow.
It's alive. Alive and clamped down on something holding it just as tightly.
Just before they hit the water’s skin, and the rest of the house came down to sink, she saw several people. They ‘popped’ up like the picture books she used to have as a kid, sailing and flapping in the wind. They moved too loosely, like kites made of jello, and the one rippling the highest had a head full of red hair just like Ms. Camers’—
She claps her hands over her eyes as hard as she can, crushing her already running lashes into her stinging eyes. Don’t look, Siren had said. Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look.
Don’t look don’t look don’t look—
Siren touched the girl’s hand, and as she knew she would, Penelope flinched wildly, scooting backwards across the dirt. She’s covered head to toe in dirt, her light hair dark with leaves and grit.
“Penelope,” she pants, and this time she manages to snag a finger. One with a scar on it, her thumb nail tracing it. Penelope’s eye appears between her other set of fingers, wider than the moon.
Siren’s well aware she’s soaked from the lake, Lucichop’s blood running a watered down strawberry color. He had gotten a nice hunk of skin from her upper chest, and lord knew she had quite a few things broken, but the second he had hit the water, he had been done for.
It was a cheap move, but for her first fight in quite some time, it was all she really had.
In other words, she looked like crap. Creepy crap, not at all guardian angel material. Penelope’s a smart girl, and Siren’s honestly waiting for her to call her on it already.
But the girl pulls herself into Siren’s drenched arms, the leather squelching, and the black hair plastered to her face sticks to her too.
“Siren?” she croaks, tucked under her jaw. Her hand comes up without hesitation, pressing to the tear in her sternum, and she doesn’t have the strength to push her away. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s not mostly not mine,” Siren grumbles, head bowing. “You okay?”
“They’re dead, aren’t they?” Penelope says. Siren nods, a sudden lack of words in her head. She had just watched a fellow demon drown. She had watched him drift down into the black oblivion below, the skin husks trailing behind and undulating like the fish that would soon be joining them.
But when she had broken surface, getting out of the chilled water was the only thing on her mind.
Maybe it was one of the biggest differences between them; demons cared in the midst of terrible things. Humans cared after. What there was after, Siren simply didn’t know.
“C’mon, we got to get you back.”
She got up, and that was when she was knocked off her feet, a searing flash of agony tearing through her chest. Her head cracks down on the ground below, the earth jostling the snapped ribs and ligaments.
“Siren!” Penelope screamed, but there were already arms wrapping around her, a SWAT militant gingerly lifting her away as if they were just rehearsing for a ballet.
Siren’s fingers clench the air, her mouth open in search for the breath that had been smacked clean from her lungs. In the fog of her head, countless soldiers swarmed, boots thundering, orders harsh and echoed.
Of course they come in after I’ve done everything. You lazy pricks. Her vision swims, and her head lolled, taking in the bear trap biting into her chest. Her blood oozed up from its steel teeth.
Not again, her brain wheezes- her prickling eyes trailed up the chain attached to it, tracing it all the way back to the gun that had harpooned it out. Another tactically armored brat griped it, keeping his distance even though they both knew it was over.
That chain was an ‘Enchaint (trademarked, 1892 by N.A.P- National Army of Peas, though she couldn’t help but feel it should be National Army of Puns, since they were so damned fond of them).’ And maybe at her peak they had done little to nothing.
But oh, how the mighty has fallen. They had used this last time in a panicked fluke, and now both parties were aware of the unexpected results the chemicals had on halos. It’s not like they had been designed for angels, after all.
Her head is starting to boil, a throb so disabling that every time it pulses, Siren wants to dig out her own eyes.
“Don’t you touch her!” Penelope’s voice cuts. “I order you!”
“We’ll explain shortly, your highness.”
But his head appears over her, white as a ghost’s, his weathered grey eyes under thinning rust colored hair.
“Demon Siren, you have broken your contract to keep away from the girl,” the one named Norman says. “Playing for her favors has done you none.”
“Then just kill me already,” she hisses, all fucks and shits thrown out the window. The agony is swelling, crushing her brain to the brim of her skull. Everything’s growing bleached, her left eye searing under a blare of white fire.
“Your punishment still stands,” Norman says. “What you did was unforgivable. We will wipe the Princess’s memory of every little sick act you pulled. We will keep you here. And on her eighteenth birthday, as we originally set, she will decide if you are fit enough to take the place of the Guardian Angel you killed. And with what you did to her parents…well, I will take great pleasure in granting you that wish, should her Lady deem me worthy.”
He reaches into his breast pocket, every motion blurred, and pulls out an egg. He doesn’t need to squeeze the sides of her jaw, because her mouth is already opened in a silent scream, vocal chords tangling around themselves.
“Good night, Siren,” he says before her vision is wiped out entirely.
And then, the world is black again.
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