Gemma turned a bit so she could look up at her. “Who was lying?”

“Diana.”

“What do you mean?” Gemma pushed herself up so she was sitting even though that made the room spin and tip to the side.

“I’ve been messaging my friend, Kipling Pine. He’s the professor at Sundham that Harper talked to about the scroll,” Lydia explained. “He’s visiting a friend of his who’s a linguistics expert, and he’s superknowledgeable about dead languages.”

“And that means Diana is lying?” Gemma asked.

“Okay, before I tell you that, I need to explain how we translate the scroll.” Lydia turned in her seat to face her fully. “We think it’s ancient Cypriot, but it seems to be a more informal type and takes some liberties, and we need to try to translate that back into English, and that’s if we can even get it into Cypriot in the first place.”

“You already told me some of this when I showed you the scroll the first time,” Gemma reminded her.

“I know, but I really need to reiterate.” Her large eyes were gravely serious. “Even with me, Pine, and this other expert working on it, we will never have a one-hundred-percent-concrete translation. I mean, scholars still debate some of the translations in the Bible, and they’ve been working on that for hundreds of years.”

“But you guys have translated some of the scroll, right?” Gemma asked. “That’s what this is about.”

“They’ve come up with a partial cryptographic key—which is basically saying what symbol means what letter, and with that, they’re kind of guessing and going on intuition and their knowledge of Greek words to fill in the blanks. Pine’s finished a passage, and he just sent it to me, and…” Lydia sighed and looked back down at her tablet. “I’ll just read it to you.”

“It starts with, ‘Four of them there must always be.’ And then, we think the next four words are names, but the translation is a bit rough. So what we think it says is, ‘Peisinoe, Thelxiepia, Aglaope, and Ligea/Begin the curse but do not need to be at the end/One can replace one by any mortal who is…’”

Lydia frowned and shook her head before continuing. “Pine’s saying ‘granted’ here, but I’m not sure if that’s right. But ‘cursed’ doesn’t seem to fit either. But it ends with something about having ‘the power of the siren.’”

“Let me see it.” Gemma leaned over the tablet, and she had to squint to read, since her vision had blurred so badly.

Four of them there must always be

Peisinoe, Thelxiepia, Aglaope, and Ligea

Begin the curse but do not need to be at the end

One can replace one by any mortal

Granted with the power of the siren

Gemma read it three times, but the watersong blocked out rational thought, and she couldn’t seem to process it.

“What does all that mean?” she asked, looking up at Lydia.

“That as long as there are four of them, it doesn’t matter who they are. Any of them can be replaced.” Lydia shook her head sadly. “Even Penn.”

“So why would Diana say that?” Gemma rubbed her forehead and slouched in the seat. “She said if I killed Penn, the curse would be broken. Why would she lie about that? We were about to leave anyway.”

“Maybe she didn’t lie,” Lydia said.

“But with the scroll—”

“No, I mean Diana said, ‘If you tried to kill Penn, then you wouldn’t need to break the curse,’” Lydia recited carefully. “Maybe she just meant that if you tried to kill Penn, you’d lose.”

“Diana knows I’m young, I probably appeared weak, and she rightfully assumed that if I was capable of killing Penn, I already would have.” Gemma lay back down on the seats and squeezed her eyes shut. “So if I went up against Penn, she would kill me, and when I’m dead, I’m free of the curse.”

“But that could be wrong,” Lydia said, trying to sound hopeful. “I mean, Pine’s still working on these translations. We’re not finished, and like I said, we could’ve misread them.”

Now, as Gemma swam the cold depths of the ocean, the futility of it hit her hard. Diana/Demeter had been their last big hope, and she had been a bust. The big clue she’d given them had been nothing more than a taunt.

The joy of being in the water had given way to a familiar desperation and an ever-growing hunger. Her practice transformations had the unfortunate side effect of making her hunger stronger, and the day away from Capri, battling the watersong, hadn’t helped either.

It was September now, and the autumnal equinox was only weeks away. Gemma would have to feed soon, or she really risked losing control, especially if she wanted to keep practicing her transformations.

She’d begun to suspect that part of the reason she’d been so crazed when she’d killed Jason Way was because she’d been starving. That’s why she had a better handle on the monster now, and probably why Liv seemed to have a better grasp of morphing. Liv ate constantly, so she was never really hungry, and that probably made her better at control when she shifted in and out of the monster.

As Gemma was swimming, plunging down in the darkness at the bottom of the ocean floor, frightening the fish and crabs lingering at the bottom, she felt something following her. A shadow stayed behind her, and Gemma sped up. The last thing she needed was to get in a fight with a shark this morning.