With Liv’s hand clamped around her neck, Harper was pinned to the wall. Liv’s fingers were surprisingly long, and her grip was inescapable. Harper could barely breathe and clawed vainly at Liv’s arm.

“Liv,” Harper croaked out as she continued to struggle.

“Don’t ever mess with me, Harper,” Liv commanded in a low growl. “If you ever threaten or talk down to me again, I will totes destroy you, you dumb bitch.”

She let go of Harper then and stepped back. Harper gasped for breath and rubbed her neck. Her throat burned, and she bent over coughing.

“What the hell, Liv?” Harper asked between coughs. She was still hunched over and looked up at Liv. “I wasn’t threatening you! I was saying that if you want to stay in school, you have to go to class.”

A wide smile spread across Liv’s face. “You’re right. If I want to stay, I’d have to go to class. But I don’t want to stay. And I don’t care what anybody says or thinks. I’m not going to live with a shrew like you any longer than I have to. I’m out of here.”

Liv slipped on her shoes, grabbed her purse, and left the room, humming a tune under her breath as she did. Harper couldn’t place the song, but she was certain she’d heard it before.

TWO

Night Call

It was the same dream she’d been having every night since Lexi had been killed. Gemma was out in the ocean. The water was cold, and the waves crashed around her, crushing her.

It was the night Penn had given Gemma the potion to change her into a siren and then tossed her into the ocean wrapped in Persephone’s shawl. Gemma felt like a fish in a net, trying to claw her way out of it before she drowned.

Then she felt the change happening, the siren monster taking hold somewhere deep inside her, filling her with an angry hunger. But her body didn’t shift. Her legs wouldn’t turn into fins, and she couldn’t fight her way to the surface.

Her wings broke painfully through her back and tore through the fabric, freeing Gemma. But they flapped uselessly underwater, and just when Gemma was certain she would drown, she surfaced. The relief at being able to breathe again was short-lived, though.

The dream then shifted, and instead of the night she’d become a siren, she was now in the rainstorm from last week, treading water in the crashing waves below the cliff outside the sirens’ house.

Lexi’s decapitated head was flying at her, the strings of blond hair flowing out behind it. But Lexi was still alive, her eyes wide and aware of everything, and she screamed at Gemma through the razor-sharp teeth that filled her mouth.

That’s when Gemma would wake up, cold sweat on her brow and gasping for breath. She sat up in her bed, hoping that she’d be able to calm herself down enough to go back to sleep again, but she never did.

It wasn’t that she’d liked Lexi a lot. It was how powerless and trapped Gemma had felt. In that moment, when she had been at the bottom of the cliff while Lexi was fighting with Daniel at the top, she’d never felt so weak or afraid.

Gemma refused to let herself feel that way again. From now on, she had to be in complete control of her siren powers, and not the other way around.

A loud knocking at the front door disrupted her thoughts and made her jump. Gemma grabbed her cell phone from her bedside table, checking to see that it was after midnight, and she didn’t have any missed calls or text messages.

She waited a few seconds to see if the knocking continued, and when it did, she leapt out of bed. Her dad had work in the morning, and she didn’t want to wake him.

“Took you long enough,” Penn said when Gemma opened the door.

“Shh. My dad will hear you.” Gemma glanced back toward the stairs behind her. The lights upstairs were still off, so it was a safe bet that he hadn’t heard anything.

Penn shrugged. “So?”

“So, let’s go outside and talk.” Gemma stepped out into the night, closing the door quietly behind her. It would be easier to just go outside than try to explain common decency and consideration for other people to Penn.

It was a new moon, so aside from the dim stars, the sky was completely black. Gemma hadn’t turned on the outside light, so at first, she could only make out the dark shapes of three girls standing outside her house.

Then she felt a shift in her eyes, and her pupils expanded. The siren senses had kicked in automatically, changing her eyes into ones like an owl’s, so she could see clearly in the darkness.

Penn stood directly in front of her, but Thea and another girl stood a few feet back. The new girl had blond hair and wide eyes, and there was something familiar about her, but Gemma didn’t stare at her long enough to figure out what it was.

The only thing that really mattered was that there was another girl, and what the implications of that were.

“What do you want?” Gemma asked.

“I wanted to introduce you to your new best friend.” Penn stepped to the side, so she could gesture back at the girl behind her.

“Hi.” The girl smiled and waggled her fingers at Gemma, causing Thea to scoff and turn away in disgust.

“Who the hell is that?” Gemma asked Penn.

“Don’t you remember?” The new girl stepped away from Thea and moved closer to Penn, so Gemma would be able to get a better look at her. “I’m Liv. I was your sister’s roommate at college.”

“Until she decided to drop out today and come live with us,” Thea muttered. She stared out into the night, managing to look both bored and irritated in a way that only she could.