Chapter2

#Chapter2

Present

Aphrodite

/"Papa?/" I call out tentatively, walking into my father’s chambers. I glance around, confused when I don’t see him.

I want to ask him to go on a swim with me so I can be in my element for a while, and he doesn’t like me going out alone in the case I get caught in a storm and can’t out-swim it.

When he doesn’t respond I make the most rebellious decision in my two hundred and forty nine years of life. I decide to go out on my own.

I can prove to him that I don’t need him. That I don’t always need supervision while swimming. That I can go out on my own and be safe.

Swiftly hurrying out of the castle, I cast a brief glance around the beautiful island I call home. Being hidden in the Arctic Ocean, it almost always has at least a light dusting of snow on it. But now, in the dead of winter, I can only thank the gods for a Siren’s innate ability to preserve body temperature. We’d all be dead without it.

Smiling at some onlookers as I walk down the street leading to the ocean, I marvel at how technologically advanced we are. Humans thought they invented transportation first—they were wrong. Siren’s did everything first. We created ships that could travel at the speed of light just a few decades ago—not that we needed them, since we can swim quite fast on our own.

I suppose having a tail helps with that.

I think back to the first time I remember going for a swim. I was walking down this very street, hand in hand with my mother and father.

My mother.

The most sweet, kind, and caring being known to this earth. The gods decided we didn’t deserve her when she was caught under a shipwreck and killed. I was only 20 years old—still a baby by our standards.

Even now, being almost two and a half centuries old, I’m considered a child in comparison to the many millennia’s most others of my kind have lived.

I smile as the beach comes into sight, wishing I could see the sand under the snow.

As soon as I come up to the water, I feel the lower half of my body start tingling in preparation for the transformation.

Not wanting my legs to turn into a tail on land, which has unfortunately occurred a few times, I hurry into the water. My body doesn’t register the freezing cold like a human does—to me, the freezing water feels room temperature. Quickly discarding my skirt on the snow, shortly followed by my shirt. All female sirens wear something of a bikini instead of a bra in case we decide to go for a dip. The only difference between a human bikini and ours is that ours doesn’t slip or fall off. The material fits like a second skin—a material that we synthesized in the late 1800’s. My current bikini is silver—the same color as my eyes. Diving into the water I revel in the feeling of my legs changing into a tail. It feels like pleasant tingles that start at my feet and continue until my hipbone, and before I know it my legs are gone-replaced with my silver, slightly scaley tail.

I come up for a mouthful of air before resubmerging myself in the water.

Like fish, sirens can absorb oxygen from the water around us just fine—only needing to come up a few times a day for air, and that’s honestly just personal preference.

I get lost in the ocean, simply allowing myself to swim on and on. I’ll know the way home as long as I stay in the Atlantic, and even when a siren manages to swim out of bounds, we let the stars lead us home.

Losing track of time, I only slow down when I hear thunder and lightning far above me. Though I know I shouldn’t resurface, I can’t help myself. I’m dying to see the symphonies of light that Zeus creates whenever he feels like it. It only takes me a few minutes to resurface, and as soon as I do, my breath leaves me. The waves are crashing down around me, telling me that Poseidon is working alongside Zeus by creating massive waves, ranging from twenty to fifty feet. I narrowly avoid each one by diving a few dozen feet below surface before it crashes down.

As I resurface for the dozenth time, I’m frozen in place. At least a hundred lightning bolts decorate the sky at the same time, shocking me to the point of stillness.

Shocking me to the point where I don’t pay attention to the seventy foot wave that crashes into me, causing my body to limp.

My mind isn’t completely gone, but I know I must’ve snapped my spine because my tail won’t move. My arms will barely move as I’m forced beneath the surface, before the tide begins to have its way with me.

I know I’ll heal soon—sirens can heal even fatal injuries within a few hours. But a cracked spine won’t take the few minutes a cracked bone normally does, it’ll take at least an hour. An hour might be long enough for me to be swept out of the arctic and into the pacific with how far I strayed.

I panic internally, not wanting to crash on somebody's territory and stir trouble. If I crash on human land, I can compel them into doing what I want through song. But another tribe? Athens, the tribe that resides in the pacific? If I was a commoner, they would kill me for trespassing. Being the princess, they might torture me for the hell of it.

Falling deeper and deeper into the panic due to the fact that I can’t move, I barely noticed that I’ve washed up on a shore until it’s too late. Until I see him.

The face of the single person I am most afraid of.

Ares.