Drink Deep - Chloe Neill [22]
We both looked at the lake in silence.
“I can feel my strength diminishing as I stand here,” he quietly added. “I’d guess it’s down to eighty percent? But damned if I know what to do about it.”
“And if we don’t fix this?” I asked him.
The look he gave back didn’t offer much hope. “I suppose it’s possible,” he quietly said, “that the nymphs’ magic would dissipate completely and they’d lose their connection to the water altogether. I assume I’ll get stronger the farther I get, but they can only go so far from the water for so long.”
Catcher had spoken quietly, but the nymphs must have heard him. There was more crying, and their grief was telling: Whatever had happened to the water, these girls weren’t responsible.
“Is this the complete universe of nymphs?” I asked Catcher, who did a quick visual count, then nodded.
“They’re all here.”
“None of these girls spelled the lake,” I said. “Not with this kind of sadness. I really think we can rule out the nymphs’ involvement.”
“I agree. Unfortunately, that also makes this lead a dead end,” Jonah said.
“Maybe not,” I suggested, then stepped forward. “Ladies, it’s clear you wouldn’t hurt the river or the lake.”
The singing stopped, replaced by a soft, satisfied humming.
“But something is going on out there. Someone has turned the lake into a magic vacuum. Maybe to hurt the lake. Maybe to hurt the city. Maybe to hurt you. If the River nymphs weren’t involved, do you know who might be?”
To a one, the nymphs stopped and looked at me, their eyes narrowed with malice.
“Lorelei,” said a blond nymph with serious self-assurance. “The siren.”
CHAPTER FOUR
CHICAGO GIVETH; CHICAGO TAKETH AWAY
So, it turns out each body of water had its own protector. There were spring nymphs and fountain nymphs, ocean nymphs and waterfall nymphs. And sirens, not nymphs, controlled the Great Lakes.
In Chicago, the River nymphs had control of the river and its boundaries. Lorelei, the Lake Michigan siren, controlled the ebb and flow of the lake. She was the only inhabitant of an otherwise deserted, woody, three-square-mile island in the middle of the water.
Most important, the nymphs hated her. They treated us to a screechy, twenty-minute-long lecture on her faults, an antiperfor-mance evaluation. I reduced the list to her biggest faults:
1. Lorelei made a pact with the devil (who lived on the island with her);
2. Lorelei was a purveyor of black magic, including made-to-order hexes and jinxes;
3. Lorelei ate babies (human and otherwise); and
4. Lorelei was an all-around, black-wearing, Goth-leaning, antisocial freak (frankly, just the kind of girl a bunch of cute, pretty, busty nymphs would hate).
I had a pretty clear mental image of Lorelei—helped along by having read way too many fairy tales and horror novels as a teenager—as a hunchbacked crone draped in shabby black fabric, standing above the lake in a position not unlike Alanna’s had been. Arms outstretched, craggy nose poised over cruelly twisted lips, offering up incantations to kill the lake for some reason we hadn’t yet determined.
But planting that image in my brain seemed to soothe the pretty girls, who were now hugging and adjusting their slips and wiping their tears away in a giant nymphy hug-fest.
Frankly, it was hard to keep the boys’ attention. A little throat-clearing did the trick.
“We could pay her a visit,” Jonah suggested.
To be honest, that idea didn’t thrill me. Unfortunately, this problem was bigger than my discomfort. The nymphs were getting weaker, and God only knew how the other sups were faring.
“It’s probably a good idea,” my grandfather said, “if there’s even a small chance it would make a difference. And I don’t recall there being any means of communication out there, so it’s not as if we could simply call her.” He looked at me, a question in his eyes.
I sighed. “Why me?”
“Because you’re a girl,” Catcher said.
It took me a moment to fathom a response. “Excuse me?”
“She’s a siren,” Catcher said. “Luring sailors