wind. Now he knew that sound to be the song of the desert Sirens.
Athena had set him on his path but, as usual, had not even hinted at how he might overcome the Sirens. He assumed she trusted him to figure it out for himself-or, if his cleverness was unequal to the challenge, he could always rely on his native savagery and the Blades of Chaos.
Odysseus had stopped up the ears of his crew with beeswax, while he remained chained to the mast of his ship. Kratos had nothing that would block the insistent, seductive sound. Even at this distance, he felt his heart quickening and his body responding to their call. If he succumbed, he would be their dinner.
As he walked along, Kratos clapped his hands over his ears, hoping to muffle their insidious song. That failed. He found himself walking faster, hunting through the sandstorm for the creatures, wanting them as he had never wanted another before.
The heavy flapping of wings caused him to look upward. Through the dust clouds he saw a harpy struggling to carry a dangling body in its claws. The monster veered and disappeared in the storm, but Kratos knew it took the body to the Sirens.
Once, on a battlefield outside Sparta, he had come across two Sirens and had ordered his men to fill them full of arrows. The Sirens had been dining on the dead of both sides, greedily gobbling up human flesh and smearing the blood all over themselves. Their death cries had cost him three expert archers. As the Sirens had died, they screeched at such a pitch that the men’s heads exploded. Kratos had ordered the Sirens’ carcasses to be carved into pieces so small that even crows would ignore them and then be flung to the four winds, so that the monsters’ shades would wander forever restless upon the earth.
He pressed his palms harder against his ears. The Sirens’ song grew ever more enticing. The wind slackened, and their evil song lifted and filled him with irresistible lust. Soon he stared across a sandy dune marked with wavy ripples from the wind. Beyond lay the ruins of an ancient temple-perhaps where the Sirens made their home.
And then he saw them: four tall, spectral creatures floating about the plaza before the ruined temple.
The Sirens’ seductive sound turned Kratos weak. Sheer sexual allure pulled him forward like a shade in Hades shuffling toward Charon’s boat. Every move he made was slow, unsteady, and increasingly uncoordinated. One of the Sirens had seen him now. Drawn by his mortal blood, she turned toward him, and her part in their song rose.
Kratos tried to draw his swords but found he could not. The Blades of Chaos were never meant for creatures so lovely. The Siren who’d seen him slithered down the slope, her face unbearably beautiful as she smiled. The sharp yellow teeth that rimmed her gaping maw didn’t bother him in the slightest. Lovely, she was so lovely, and she became more so as she neared.
“Come to me, lover. I want you as much as you want me.” Her voice carried the Siren’s song. Kratos knew the song for what it was-knew it sang the melody of his doom-but still he could not resist. With a mighty exertion of will, he forced one hand back to his shoulder, fingers brushing the hilt of one blade.
The Siren didn’t flinch. She knew well the power of her vile song. “There is no need, lover. Come to me and love me. I love you. I want to feel you in my embrace.”
His resistance faded as he went to the most beautiful woman in the world. His arms wrapped around her as he pulled her close. Kratos jerked as he felt a bite.
“A love bite, my dearest,” came her cooing words. “You like it. You want me to give you more, many more!”
He felt blood running down his chest from the neck wound, but he knew she loved him-and he desired her above all others.
Even above Aphrodite’s twin daughters. Even more than Lora and He pulled back, struggling in the warm embrace of a woman he treasured.
“No,” he said. “I can’t…” His ears filled with song, shrill at first and then so melodious that he wept. His lover sang for him. She sang a haunting song of love and desire. For him and him alone.
“Another love peck,” she said.
Again he recoiled as blood spewed from the other side of his neck.
Blood, blood spilled in battle, not in a lover’s tryst- He straightened his arms and shoved hard. The Siren let out a screech of pure rage, momentarily breaking the spell. Kratos saw the Siren for what she was, and then she sang to him. Sang a melody so lovely and beguiling he knew she wanted him above all others in the world.
But she is not my wife… my wife and daughter… Those memories hammered at Kratos’s mind even as he felt more love bites. The pain offset the pleasure. He had known pain, so much pain, and he concentrated on it. And his wife. And his daughter lying dead at his feet Again he pushed away, but this time he heard other voices.
“Share! You are greedy!”
“Hungry! We’re all hungry. You must give him to us!”
The voices turned strident, and the lovely, loving melody faded in his ears.
My wife! My daughter!
Kratos lifted his hand and felt energy flow. The Thunderbolt of Zeus built… but against his lover, his lovely, caring lover. He couldn’t. Not this way…
The cacophony of demands to dine on his flesh grew as the Siren’s song diminished. Kratos reached down deep within, the visions-the nightmares-powering his determination. The thunderbolt erupted from his palm. A force greater than anything he had ever felt lifted him from his feet and threw him high into the air, spinning, turning, and tumbling. He crashed into the sand, dazed. When he looked up, he saw Sirens scattered about, lifeless.
He shook himself and stood, aware that he had destroyed only a few of the creatures with the power of Zeus. Three other Sirens rushed toward him. Kratos had never seen creatures so lovely or loving-but he did not fall under their spell. Within a moment he understood why.
The Sirens had begun to fight over him. His hand went to his neck and found fresh bite marks, all bleeding freely. His nightmarish vision had allowed him to break their spell to fight, and when he had blown them apart with Zeus’s lightning, the thunder had partially deafened him. He might not have the beeswax that Odysseus carried, but he had a makeshift method of temporarily blocking the Sirens’ call. His hearing was already returning, though-had he waited too long?
He raised his right hand again, but his body betrayed him. His hand trembled, rebellious flesh refusing to grasp the lightning. The Sirens soothed and cajoled him to relax, not to use his weapon. They loved him. He wanted them more than he’d ever wanted anything.
A final twist of his will curled his fingers into the proper form, but his weakened arm could no longer hold his hand upraised. It fell to his side, and the thunderbolt in his grip blasted the sand in front of him to glass. The thunderclap and shock wave staggered him. Two steps back, three. He launched another thunderbolt. Again came the blast-but this time he could barely hear it.
“Well, all right, then,” he did not hear himself say. He set out toward the desert monsters at a walk-with purpose but without haste. The Sirens drifted back from him, exchanging glances that seemed to cry, “How can this mortal resist our power?” Suddenly the Sirens were uncertain that Kratos was human at all. They howled at him, pitching their voices in various harmonics-one chord could set a man afire, another could blind him, still a third could cause his skull to explode like a chestnut in a bonfire.
Kratos kept walking. He didn’t even bother to draw the blades.
The Sirens spread out as though to encircle him. But Kratos had dealt with Sirens before-and these Sirens, to their misfortune, had never dealt with Kratos.
They had never seen Kratos move faster than a walk, and they had no idea just how swiftly those powerful legs could drive his massive body. He allowed them to close in around him until he judged they were near enough, then, in a blindingly swift uncoiling of his mighty thighs, he sprang at one of the Sirens the way a tiger pounces on a goat.
With one great hand, he seized the Siren’s long, flowing hair, while with the other he punched her in the chest so hard that her sternum and clavicles shattered and ripped the upper part of her spine out her back.
He wrenched off her head and swung it by its hair like a flail. The nearer of the remaining two took her sister’s head square in the face, hard enough to shatter every monstrous bone in her skull and drop her dead on the sand. The last Siren turned to flee, but Kratos whipped the remains of the first Siren’s head around his own and hurled it like a throwing hammer. The severed head struck the fleeing Siren between the shoulder blades, hard enough to shatter her spine. Splinters of bone shredded her lungs, which put a stop to her hideous keening cry.
