SIREN (excerpt from Beasts and Roses)

From the moment my new feet touched the white sands of the shore of his kingdom, she was there. That other woman had already wormed her way into his heart, and so I suppose I was doomed from the beginning of my new life.

I didn’t dwell on this at the time, although I was surprised to see him with a companion. Every time I had watched him from afar he had been alone, utterly alone, as I felt without him.

I had to have him; had to be with him. It was tearing me apart from the inside out until I could neither eat nor rest. All my thoughts were of him. My grandmother was my only helper in my hour of need. Once upon a time she had been a powerful sorceress. Now the practice of magic was forbidden by my father, but my grandmother saw my pain and knew that it would not end.

“I don’t want to see you waste away, my dear,” she had told me. “I cannot bear it. Is there no way you can find happiness as you are now, here with us in the sea?”

I had seen no other way. No future happiness could exist without him. I told her as much in many more words and finally she had nodded and embraced me.

“Then let me give you a gift so that you will not die without tasting of his love, although I pity you, I truly do, for it will not be easy.”

“You will use your magic?” I had no idea if she still knew how, or what she could do to help me.

“Yes,” she gravely replied. “I may be banished for this, but I will help you. I will make a potion to change your form from that of our kind into his. Then you may walk freely upon the same land as he does, and be with him.”

“Be with him,” I had breathed, holding onto this like a lifeline. Then I remembered something about magic; the reason it had been banned. “At what cost to me?”

Grandmother looked at me with sad eyes. “You will not walk one step without feeling pain like the pain of knives on your human feet. Can you bear this?”

I was shocked, but nodded. I felt such pain in my heart every day. It would be nothing if I could be with him.

“Also, I will need something from you to make the potion. A sacrifice of sorts to complete its power. I must cut out your tongue. You will no longer be able to have speech.”

I had swallowed hard, but I could not turn back. “Very well.”

“There is one more thing, my child. If he does not love you, if he ever marries another, you will die the morning after his wedding, for the power of the potion is bound to his heart.”

I gasped then but said bravely, “He will love me. If he does not, then I do not wish to live anyways.”

“Oh, my dear,” my grandmother said with sorrow deep in her voice. “Knowing all this you truly cannot imagine a life without him?”

“No. I cannot.”

“Then let us make you a new life with him.”

She had made me the potion, cutting out my tongue with a precise and clean cut. A healing balm helped ease the pain, but nothing could prepare me for the pain of my transformation once I drank the potion.

After embracing my grandmother in farewell, I had followed her instructions and swam up to the surface, my tail pushing hard to leave the only world I had known behind me. Sitting on rocks near the shore of his kingdom, I had eagerly drunk the potion down and waited to become like him.