Josephine's voice kills any man who hears it-except for the assassin sent to capture her for the king that's been chasing her all her life...but what happens when he decides he doesn't want to hand her over and keep her for himself instead?
...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"We are blessed with the fact that you have appeared to us in your full form, my Lord. I am Velda, Elder of Hefeta, and one of her six remaining grandchildren in the world."
The God's words in response were silenced, kept quiet near Velda's ears.
"Josephine," Oren called from behind me, breaking the Summoning circle as his beast like form took up my line of vision, and though I was more wary of him in this state, it wasn't due to his transformation, but rather the reminder of what he'd been able to do to me like this.
Kidnap me. Drug me. Chase me through a forest and plunge his claws through my back.
The blood loss had me stumbling, falling backwards into Oren's arms as the god's attention was elsewhere entirely, as if he couldn't believe what was happening around him.
Like the mortal world was too bright, too raucous, too loud for him to comprehend.
Like he'd been at peace this entire time, and we'd ripped him from that to pull him into our own personal kind of hell.
Oren's body towered over mine in a much more menacing way than it did before, and in the waning light of the dying fire and the dim light of a menacing moon, Oren's stature was so imposing that I almost took a step back in the remaining fear leftover from his initial kidnapping.
Almost.
But there was something concerned in his burning golden gaze that brandished a hint of warmth from him as it seeped into my body.
"What now?"
What now...that seemed to be the question on all the rest of the Siren's faces as we looked toward the god and Velda conversing, though she seemed to be the one doing most of the talking.
He mostly just gazed around distractedly, as if he hadn't been in this world in a very long time.
Oren's grumbling breaths, bedraggled as if they were too laborious to inhale and exhale, prompted my attention, each breath punctuated in the air by a curling cloud of steam similar in color to the smoke that poured from my mouth as I sang.
There was a pack slung across his shoulders, filled to the brim with looked like enough supplies for a multi-day trip.
"Going somewhere?"
There was a water skin in his oversized hand.
I went to reach for it but he jerked his hand backwards just as my body was beginning to feel the effects of the blood that I had just spilled for the sake of summoning a god who looked as if he didn't want to be here to begin with.
"Can I have some water please? I feel like I'm about to keel over," I said almost jokingly, though there was no room for humor in Oren's face.
"You could have died, Josephine. Summoning him—was it worth that?"
