Siren Queen(48)

And there was Emmaline. She must have seen me wrap my arms around Greta, ready to face down Oberlin Wolfe for her sake. She must have seen Greta with her arm around me. She rode with them and had seen the tithe. Was I still welcome at her fire? I shut the questions away, too tired to deal with them. I squeezed Greta’s hand.

“Good,” I replied.



* * *



I struggled to remember that peace when November third came, and along with it, a summons to Oberlin Wolfe’s office, Greta and I together.

“Not me?” asked Lawrence, who was still getting his feet underneath him. There was a frailness to him that irritated me, especially when set next to Greta’s calm strength.

“You are dead to him,” Greta said, not unkindly. “Wait for us here.”

He looked pathetically relieved not to have to see Wolfe again, and I felt a sting of guilt over my impatience.

I dressed carefully in a green dress with my hair gathered at my nape with a faux gold clip. There were touches of gold at my collar and my throat, and I stepped into the highest heels I owned, because they were green snakeskin. I wanted to remind him of the siren movies, to make him think twice about whatever he might do, if it were possible to make a man like Wolfe think twice.

Greta dressed as if it were just another day, grabbing a shapeless lilac linen dress from the closet that made her look a little like a cafeteria worker. The lilac at least gave her some color in her cheeks, and she linked her arm into mine as we walked out.

It could have been a normal day, but just before we entered the offices, she turned to me.

“If he tries to hurt you or my baby, I will bend his spine into a wedding ring.”

She said the words calmly, but there was a nerviness to her I hadn’t sensed before. I squeezed her hand and let go. It felt like lightning was going to strike. On Halloween night, I had clung to Greta, defying Oberlin Wolfe to take her. She had clung to me in turn, and we had saved each other. Would I be as brave now, in the light of day? I already knew that being brave didn’t mean anything unless you were willing to do it again.

It was the same receptionist I had met before, but this time she didn’t make me wait. Instead she looked at me with eyes as hollow as empty tin cans and nodded.

“Mr. Wolfe is waiting.”

The moment we were in, Greta and I dove to either side as a bottle of ink came sailing through the air to crash against the closed door behind us. The glass exploded like a gunshot and black ink sprayed out. For a moment I saw a screaming face in the spill, but then it was just black again.

I turned to the front of the office, where Oberlin Wolfe stood, utterly still except for the rage that lit his inhuman eyes.

“You fucking bitches,” he snapped. “You fucking children.”

Greta watched him with her eyes narrowed but otherwise entirely composed, and I kept as quiet as I could. If all he wanted to do was to shout and throw things at us, I was content to stay silent and dodge.

Wolfe shook his head. There was something stiff and pained about his movements. The last time I was in this office, I thought he was recovering from a hangover. This time, it looked like he was trying to shake off something much worse.

“You know how much it costs to run this place? It’s money, and it’s sacrifice, and it’s blood…”

But never yours.

I didn’t know I had said it until Wolfe’s eyes locked on me. I wanted to cover my mouth with my hand, force those words back between my lips and swallow them. He stalked closer to me, and I couldn’t move, my weight pressing down into my painfully sharp heels.

“Oh it’s mine sometimes, Luli. I started this fucking place with blood and sacrifice, long before money got involved, and at the beginning, it was all mine.”

He got closer, and his hands came up. I wanted to move back, to run, but I couldn’t, couldn’t. He had given something up in those early days, whether he remembered it or not, but I could see the space it left in him, a hollowness where something else had come to live.

“You’re mine,” he said.

“Stop it. You do not want your price from her.”

Wolfe turned his head towards Greta, his hands still too close to me. As I would in a nightmare, I noted calmly that his fingertips were red and bloody; the nails on his left hand were gone altogether.

“I want it from you too, so just wait, Caroline.”

“No, I will not. I want to bargain.”

Almost reluctantly, Wolfe turned fully towards her, and I could have cried for relief. I wasn’t brave, and I knew that for sure now. All I could think was better her than me.

“What? What could you possibly have for…”

“I want to leave. I want to take my man with me. I want two tickets out of this place, and I want Luli clear of this mess.”

“And what will you give me for that, Caroline? I own your name, I brought you from Sodermalm on a holy rope. What have you got left?”

Greta looked cold as ice, or maybe it was just as if every soft part of her had gone deep inside to hide. She didn’t reach for her baby, but I saw with a twist of my stomach that she had a knife in her hand. Had she carried it all the way to the office without my noticing?

“I’ll give you something no one else can have. I will give you every movie ever made by Caroline Carlsson. Her great beauty, you want that, but more, you want no one else to have it, yes?”