Siren.

She didn"t even flinch.

"You"ll have to do better than that," she laughed in his head.

She reached out and pulled him close to her, kissing him quickly on the mouth before pushing him away, and then delivering a hard kick to his forehead. Evan saw stars, and fell away from the two of them, as Bill yelled in his ear, "Evan, are you okay?"

"Yeah," Evan answered blurrily, as he sank to the floor.

Above him, Bill took the opportunity Evan had given him and stabbed hard at Ligeia with the speargun. When she turned back to face him, he swung his hand through the water to punch her, but the natural fighting motion of a man aboveground does not translate to a workable fighting motion below waves. Ligeia captured his fist in midswing and laughed in his head, twisting his arm away from her and toward himself. With a knee, she delivered a blow to his groin, and Bill gasped and contracted to a fetal ball as she connected, nearly dropping the speargun in the process. She grabbed onto him and pulled him closer, opening her mouth to follow the blood of her last bite, and enlarge the source. She was hungry, and Bill offered fresh meat and fear. Plenty of fear, and Sirens loved the taste of that. Fear and l.u.s.t were Ligeia"s favorite seasonings.

"You"re all the same," she told him, as her eyes widened, and her teeth grinned like a shark"s maw. "So c.o.c.ky you think you own the world, and you don"t even know the first thing about the world." She reached down to cup his groin and whispered, "You all think we want to suck one thing, but you"re dead wrong. I can tell you this: I will enjoy sucking your soul."

Then she leaned into his neck and encircled him with her arms; arms that were tight as cords of steel. This was a black widow of a woman, not one to let her prey walk away. She pressed her mouth to his rubber-sheathed neck and bit through the ragged wound she"d gouged there before. Bill brought his arms around to pound as hard as he could at her back but it did no good. He tried to bring the tip of the speargun around to catch her, but instead, she bit down hard on his neck and he dropped it, the black metal slipping quickly into the dark green of the waves to disappear on the bottom of the ship"s floor.

Evan didn"t miss it. He watched the speargun plummet, and pushed his way toward it as soon as he saw where it was likely to land. He couldn"t fight Ligeia hand to hand in his current state, but if he could get a finger in the right place on the gun, he could find a way to operate it.

As Bill screamed out in pain in his headphones, Evan scooped up the black metal of the gun as it touched the slick, dark wood of the ship"s floor, and hugged it to him as he positioned his fingers in a way that could operate the mechanism. Satisfied that he had the trigger ready, Evan kicked off the bottom and returned to the fray, this time ready to really help.

"Evan, this is no Ophelia," Bill groaned in his headset. "This b.i.t.c.h is mean." His friend coughed and gasped before adding, "I don"t know what you see in her."

A tear slipped from Evan"s eye at that, as he considered what Ligeia had done to his family, and now his friend. "I don"t know either," he answered. "I"m sorry."

"Don"t be sorry," came his answer. "Just stab the b.i.t.c.h!"

Evan kicked his way closer to the embracing couple, and saw the fog of Bill"s blood beginning to cloud the water around them.

Instead of swimming all the way up to her, Evan checked his ascent and positioned himself directly behind her, until the soft globes of her b.u.t.tocks were level with his eyes. Then he fumbled the speargun up until the point of its hook stared down the spot just between her shoulder blades. In his mask, Bill screamed again. Closing his eyes, refusing to watch the decimation of the woman he"d loved, Evan squeezed his finger against the trigger of the gun, and reeled backward at the kickback as the spear ejected. It slipped through the water and connected with a small plume of red against the cream between her shoulders.

As he tumbled in the dark water, the orange of his spotlight shone against the white skin of Ligeia"s back and Evan couldn"t help but see the silver steel of his spear protruding from the center of her back. Her arms lifted and reached behind, grasping for the thing that had bit her. As she did, Bill pushed away from her to freedom. Ligeia turned corkscrew in the water to see her attacker, and her eyes widened.

"You"re mine," her voice said in his head. "You will always be mine."

Evan shook his head as Ligeia drifted down, blood coloring the water in her wake. "No," he said. "I will always be mine."

He kicked away from her toward Bill, who left his own shadow behind in the water. "Are you okay?" he asked, as he pushed a shoulder into his friend"s wet suit.

"I"ll be better when we get away from her."

"I"ll second that," Evan agreed. He looked behind to see Ligeia settle to the muddy deck of the ruined ship, her body shuddering and kicking as she struggled to remove the spear from her back. "Let"s get out of here?"

Bill nodded, and then choked as he did so.

"Bad move," he gasped.

"Can you still swim?" Evan said.

"Yeah," Bill answered, but then added, "s.h.i.t."

"What"s the matter?"

"I don"t think we"re out of this yet."

Evan followed Bill"s gaze down to the deck of the ship and swore himself. Ligeia was gone.

"What the f.u.c.k, man. I hit her with a spear that would take down a shark."

"She"s more than a shark," Bill answered.

"She wasn"t when I knew her," Evan said.

"Women are deceiving," came the somnolent answer. Bill"s head started to slump, and Evan pushed at him with his twined fists.

"Come on, man," Evan begged. "Don"t lose it now."

Bill coughed. "It hurts."

"Let"s go home," Evan said. "But you"ve gotta stick with me. I can"t do this one on my own."

Bill groaned.

"I mean it," Evan insisted. "I can"t swim, remember?"

Bill coughed again. "You"re going to have to now," he said. "I don"t feel very good."

The sound in his headphones wasn"t good. Kind of like a gasp and an asthmatic wheeze combined with a cry.

"Come on," Evan urged, and kicked his feet. An overwhelming sense of desperation overcame him then. How could he save his friend when he himself couldn"t swim, and didn"t even have the use of his hands? But he knew, at the same time, that he had to try. He couldn"t let Bill die here, for him. This was Evan"s war, Evan"s mistake. His folly.

Evan kicked hard, using energy in lieu of skill to push the two of them through the hole in the ship and out into the bay. They had just made it through when he felt something touch his back. Evan turned away and looked into the sea-soft eyes of Ligeia. She locked into his gaze and in the back of his mind he heard her say, "We will always be together. You were meant to be mine."

He shook his head as she wrapped her arms around his.

"No," he insisted, and reached around her to feel the steel tip still protruding from her back. "No," he said. "You killed everything that I love. I could never be yours."

With that, he grabbed the haft of the spear and pulled it toward himself. He could feel it move within her, and Ligeia"s eyes widened as it made its way through her ribs and belly to exit her flesh. When Evan felt the tip of his own spear poking him in the stomach, he released her.

"Die," he said quietly, and pushed his feet off her chest as he held on to Bill and pressed them both toward the open water of the bay.

He looked back only once, to see Ligeia collapsed on the black wood of the old boat"s timbers as they swam out.

"Sarah," Bill said after they left the shadow of the boat, and Evan nodded, kicking as hard and fast as he could to aim them at the bay"s bottom, toward the place where he knew his wife"s body lay.

Sarah"s face looked peaceful in the false twilight beneath the waves, and Evan hesitated to even touch her. But then Bill whispered in the microphone to "pick her up" and he found that he couldn"t resist. He had to hold her one more time, even if they didn"t bring her to sh.o.r.e.

Evan slipped his arms into the mud beneath Sarah and pulled her close. She hung away from him, slack and unresponsive in death. But Evan pulled her tighter, trying to find some last magic of Sarah trapped in this dead flesh. This was the woman he had loved all these years. She had been his friend and lover and sparring partner. They had hated each other and loved each other in ways that n.o.body would ever understand. They had created Josh, and they had almost died in the loss of Josh.

And now...as he looked at the still-quiet features of her here, beneath the strange foggy current of Delilah Bay, Evan finally totally realized that he had lost her too. That mouth would never share coffee with him in the kitchen at five in the morning. She would never put on lipstick in the bathroom and leer at him to ask if she looked "like a s.l.u.t." She would never kiss his lips and then his nipples and then his c.o.c.k again, and her eyes would never look up at him from a position of submis-siveness and say, "I love you."

The million times that he had played her poorly slipped through his head and in a heartbeat he wept for them all and begged forgiveness. And then he slipped his roped arms over her head in a sling and held her to him, and struggled to lift her from the ocean floor before saying quietly in his microphone, "Bill, I"m going to need your help."

Somehow, Bill slipped his arms around the two of them, and with weak but experienced feet, he guided the three of them toward the shallow expanse of Delilah Bay, and eventually, when they were close, Evan was able to take over, and in the end it was the power of his feet that dragged the three to sh.o.r.e. Sometimes, it is the least likely who find that the only way is the way they would never consciously take.

Evan found his way, as he held on to the body of Sarah, and the gasping form of Bill. And as he pushed them toward sh.o.r.e, he thought once more of Josh, and of skipping stones on a quiet bay.

"Let me touch you now, forever." He whispered their old favorite song. "Just this one last time." He cried just a little as his head finally broke the water.

Epilogue.

Sarah had a lot of clothes. Evan had never appreciated exactly how many until she was gone. Unlike the way that she and he had dealt with Josh"s death, he decided on his first night home alone that he was not going to turn their house into a memorial to her. He knew better now, after the past year. A week after her funeral, Evan began to open Sarah"s dresser drawers and sort her things into boxes for the Vietnam Veterans or Salvation Army to come take and haul away. Better that someone benefit from her loss than that her clothes hang as food for moths in a closet. She would never wear them again, so why should he care about her clothes? This time, he was going to meet death with determination. A determination to let the past go.

Bill had been there at his side for her funeral. Thank G.o.d for that. Evan didn"t think he could have given a eulogy on his own, but Bill had been there, pushing him on, and saying his own words when Evan"s had failed him. Dr. Blanchard had been there too, with a look of confusion about her as much as sadness. When she told Evan "I"m sorry," she sounded as if she herself had killed Sarah.

It was a small funeral, because Sarah had had no sisters, really no family at all. So the packing was his to do, and his alone. He pulled a purple blouse from a drawer with random words strewn in false script across it and held it to his lips to kiss, and to smell the remnants of her scent. He"d miss that, he knew. But he couldn"t hold her here. That perfume would only turn to alcohol over the next few months, and he didn"t want to remember her that way. His memories of Sarah should always be of fresh smells and cheerful jokes and secret glances that led to kisses requited in so many places he squelched the train of thought. If he began to remember their time together, he"d never finish packing her drawers.

Sarah was gone.

Bill was recovering at home from his neck wounds. h.e.l.l, Darren had even given him a couple weeks off from the dock until he"d gotten strong enough so that he wasn"t inadvertently moaning every time he took a step and his st.i.tches shifted. The police had bought into his story of being the victim of a shark attack as he discovered the body of Evan"s recently ravaged wife and swam it to sh.o.r.e.

Evan knew better. He folded a turquoise shirt and a tear slipped down his face as he thought of the time Sarah had filled out that shirt and pressed herself against him through its thin fabric at a movie, and asked if he wanted to cop a feel.

At the time, in a public theater, he"d laughed her off, embarra.s.sed.

Now he wished he hadn"t.

But wishes don"t rescind reality. And the reality was, Sarah was gone.

Evan slipped the last of her clothing into a cardboard box, and drew a piece of packing tape over the gap to close it. Sealing the last of her life in a box.

"I miss you," he whispered at the cardboard. As the tears started, he dropped the tape gun, and left their bedroom for a while. When he returned, it was with a determination that only death can engender. One by one, he carried eight boxes of Sarah"s things to the garage, and stacked them there in a pile, ready to be taken away. After he was done, he went back in the house, turned off most of the lights, and then slipped out the back door. He didn"t bother to lock it when it closed. Somehow, he didn"t think it would matter.

Across town, Vicky Blanchard awoke with a start. Images of fish and swarming birds and a nude, shadowy woman swam in the fading light of the dream memory-a kaleidoscope of the bizarre. In the center of it all had been Evan, naked and dripping with the ocean, walking down an endless beach.

Shaking away the nonsensical vision, Vicky rolled over and closed her eyes again. She"d been especially worried about him and how he was dealing with the loss of Sarah, though he"d seemed to be holding up well at their last session. "He"s going to be fine," she told herself again and again, as she slipped back into an uneasy sleep.

Evan walked barefoot down the beach. The black of the horizon was a ghost in his vision that bled on forever. He looked away, and stared instead at the point where the ocean met the sand. The point where infinity touched now.

"Everything I loved is gone," Evan whispered to himself. "But here I am. Still. Why me?"

He walked in silence for a few minutes, and the cold dampness of the sand on his feet was as bracing as it was soothing. Here, at the lip of dusk and dawn, he could let his real emotions out. There was n.o.body here to see him break.

And it was in that moment, as he approached the point, that he finally realized what his true emotions of the past month had been. And where he was headed. Really.

He loved Sarah, he had. But...he had loved Ligeia too. A Siren. A deadly killer.

Evan stopped at the spot where he had first met the darkly mysterious nude woman from the bay, and looked out over the cold black water.

Where was she now? Had he really killed her? Was she dead, in the casket of an old ship, thanks to his own vengeance? Could someone like her even be murdered by someone like him?

He had never been a man of violence, but stabbing her through had felt right at the time, and when he thought of Josh and Sarah, his eyes filled with angry tears at what she"d stolen from him.

Yet, despite all that, his body responded at the very thought of her...he"d done nothing but dream of her these past few nights.

When he remembered the nights beneath the moon, his hips moving with hers, he couldn"t refute the love he"d felt for the strange woman who"d approached him every night clad only in her own skin. For the woman who had sung to him in tones that only a deaf-mute could ignore. Who had made him feel like a real man when she"d dragged him down to the beach and ultimately beneath the salty blanket of the waves. A man after a decade of hibernation.

He thought of her lips on his, and of Josh at twelve, skipping stones across the bay, and of him and Sarah in San Francisco, rediscovering what had made them them after so long. He thought of these three disparate things and desperately wanted them all back.

"Just this one last time," he whispered.

The ocean replied with a rush and a slow roar.

A tear slid down his cheek as he looked out at the edge of Gull"s Point and remembered the time that he had first met Ligeia there, embarra.s.sed at her nakedness, or so it seemed, when she dove back beneath the waves.

"Come back to me," he wished.

From somewhere beyond the point, at the place where the black sky met the darkest shadow of rock, a sound began to keen. A sound that spoke of wanting and need and desperation and hunger and desire. Maybe it was the answer to his song. Or the answer to his wish.

It sank and swam and rose and died. And resurrected again with a ray of unquenchable hope. Forever was now.

Evan began to walk toward the sound, oblivious to the water at his calves.

On the edge of the point, something vaguely human twisted toward the bay, and dove with a flash of silver scales and naked cream into the whitecaps nearby.

Abruptly, the sound of ethereal music stopped, but Evan did not.

"I"m coming," he said to the dark. "One last time."

And despite the fear that had driven him and defined him through all of his life, moments later, his head dipped beneath the waves and his eyes opened wide beneath the sea as he swam without fear to meet his destiny.

His l.u.s.t.

His bittersweet, deadly love.

His Siren.

Acknowledgments.

Memory, inspiration and imagination. Those are the three keys of a novel, and Siren was inspired by memories of mesmerizing music and my many visits to various beachfronts along the coast of California. The words formed far from the coast however, during my weekly writing nights in 2009 at Rizzo"s in Naperville, IL. Thanks to Erika and the rest of the gang there for always keeping my gla.s.s at least half full! Thanks also to Cocteau Twins, whose otherwordly, ethereal music provided the perfect backdrop for many hours of this novel"s writing when I worked at home.