Siren's Storm

you wake up and find yourself surrounded by your own walls, sleeping in your own bed.

“What would you like?”

Will looked up, and his heart froze. It didn’t just stop, it felt cold and fragile, as if a single tap could break it. It’s her.

Luminous green eyes were trained on his face, and her black hair was tied in a knot at the back of her neck. She was wearing the standard dreary waitress uniform and had a pencil tucked behind her ear, but still, she seemed too beautiful to be real.

“Are you all right?” she asked in a voice that fogged his mind. Will knew that he had to say something, but he couldn’t find words. “A Coke,” he choked out finally.

She wrote that down. When she looked up again, her head tilted slightly. Does she recognize me, too?

The waitress glanced down at the table, and her expression changed. “Where did you get this?” she asked. Her voice was careful, her eyes guarded.

Will looked down at his hands, which were still holding the wooden flute. His mind felt like a scrambled radio signal-he couldn’t make sense of words. He didn’t know what to tell her. “It may have belonged to my dead brother”? “A cop gave it to me as a memento”? Finally his eyes landed on her name tag.

“Asia Marin,” Will said aloud.

Asia cocked her head again, as if she suspected that Will was pulling an elaborate joke-one she didn’t like much. “Do I know you?”

Will wasn’t sure how to answer that. Don’t you? he wanted to ask. I nearly ran you over, then tried to stop your suicide in the sea, remember?

“No,” Will said at last. “I, uh-the man in the antiques store next door sent me. He said that you’d sold him a flute like this one.”

Asia slipped into the seat across from Will’s. She took the flute from him with delicate fingers and studied the instrument. “Very similar, yes,” she admitted.

She was sitting so close that Will could practically feel her breath. He was stunned at how silken her voice was. It was something to wrap yourself in. “I’m no expert…” She looked at him, her eyes wary.

“This isn’t Antiques Roadshow,” Will told her. “Just-anything you can tell me. This flute’s a complete mystery.” He pretended to lean closer to have a look at the flute, but really, he just wanted to be closer to this gorgeous girl.

“Well… technically, this isn’t a flute. When it has holes like this, it’s called a recorder.” A slender finger indicated the rough-hewn holes. “I think this is probably European. And it’s old-as old as the one I had, maybe older. It could be four or five hundred years old. I think it’s pretty hard to date these things.”

“How did you get yours?” Will asked.

“It was a gift.”

“So why did you sell it?”

“I had no further use for it.” Asia’s eyes narrowed, as if Will had stepped to the edge of dangerous waters. “Are you asking about my flute or yours?”

“Sorry. Mine. What kind of wood is it?” Will asked.

Asia’s eyes met his. “Not wood,” she told him. “Bone.”

A tiny shiver went through him, as if the temperature in the diner had dropped ten degrees.

“Asia!” Angel bellowed from the kitchen. “Am I paying you to sit on your butt all day?”

“Oh, are we getting paid?” called out the nerd-punk waitress. Her old-lady customers cackled gleefully.

“I’d better go get your Coke,” Asia said. She placed the flute gently atop its cloth bag and stood up. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

Will just nodded, still partially dazed. Her beauty and her mellifluous voice had left him so dazzled that he’d completely forgotten to ask Asia where her flute had come from. He hadn’t managed to ask her why-or even if-she’d walked into the sea. I’ll ask her when she comes back, Will thought. But when his Coke arrived, it was the nerd-punk waitress who delivered it.

“Is Asia on break?” Will asked.

The waitress just gave him a look, as if she was used to guys asking about Asia. “Yeah,” she said, half wary, half bored.

Will drank his Coke, then looked at his watch. He had to get to the farm stand; it was time for his shift. He couldn’t wait for Asia forever.

Now that he’d found her, he’d just have to find her again later. At least she’s real.

That thought should have been more comforting than it was.

“Hey, toots, that old lady in the corner is snapping in your general direction.” Lisette’s arms were piled with lunch platters for table four, so she pursed her goth-painted lips in the direction of one of Gretchen’s booths. Lisette was in her mid-twenties, but she talked like someone from the 1960s. She wore horn-rimmed glasses over brown eyes rimmed in dark blue eye shadow. Her hair was an extremely unlikely shade of red reminiscent of Raggedy Ann, and today she had it spouting like a small fountain from the top of her head. She’d worked at Bella’s for three years and had her pet regulars, like the guys from the security company at table four. “I’ve seen that old witch in here before. You’d better get over there before she turns you into a frog, sweets.”

“Lisette, am I paying you to chat with Gretchen?” Angel O’Rourke-Bella’s short-order cook and manager- scowled, twitching his orange moustache into a frown. Gretchen liked to think of him as the Irish-Dominican version of Oscar the Grouch.

“Oh, go flip something, Angel,” Lisette shot back before taking off toward her table.

Gretchen slapped her sketch pad closed and looked over at the woman in the corner. She was heavyset, with hair that was a wild mess of gray frosted with three different shades of blond. Her face was like a wrinkled sheet spread over a fluffy featherbed, and her frowning lips were outlined in bright pink. Snap, snap, snap. Once she realized that she had Gretchen’s attention, the woman held up her coffee mug and tapped it with a hot-pink nail.

Gretchen hurried over.

“This coffee is cold.” The woman set it down primly on the paper placemat that sat on the gold-flecked Formica table.

Gretchen took the mug-surprisingly warm-from the woman’s hands.

“And it tastes old. You might want to brew up a fresh batch.” The woman looked down at the newspaper that was spread open across her table.

“This batch was brewed five minutes before I served it to you,” Gretchen protested.

Frosty the Hairstyle shot her a withering look. “Then you’d better get a new brand, because that stuff tastes like battery acid.”

Gretchen felt a flame of anger rise in her chest. She was just about to snap at the customer when she felt a cool hand, like a gentle splash of water, at her elbow.

“Everything okay here?” asked a silken voice. Asia’s steady gaze landed on the woman, who seemed to retreat a little, like a turtle into its shell. “Hello, Mrs. Cuthbert,” Asia purred. “How are you feeling today?”

There was something about Asia’s stillness that gave Gretchen a sense of vertigo, as if she were staring up at Asia from a great distance. And yet the other waitress wasn’t particularly tall. She was just very still. With her long dark hair pinned back in a bun and her fine features, she looked like a Greek statue.

“My knee is still bothering me,” Mrs. Cuthbert admitted. Her expression turned into a sulky pout. “I was up all night with it.”

Asia leaned over and whispered something into Mrs. Cuthbert’s ear-or maybe she didn’t. Gretchen didn’t see Asia’s lips move. But the old woman smiled slightly.

“Thank you, dear.” She glanced at Gretchen, but the claws had retracted from her eyes.

Wordlessly Asia took the mug and steered Gretchen-still tense from the expectation of a fight-away from the table.

When Gretchen looked back over her shoulder, she saw that Mrs. Cuthbert was gazing out the window. She was smiling faintly, her head swaying back and forth slightly, as if she were bending with a breeze that no one else could feel.