Confessions of a Siren Singer

Irene Radford

Description

The StormMother is unleashed, and she is angry.Tiamat, ancient goddess of chaos and creation has decided to clear the world of human infestation--but she needs help. Only her descendant Celia Fisher, a Siren, has the magical power to aid her.Celia is more interested in becoming a Broadway star than in her archaic Siren heritage. But when two fellow contestants in a reality TV competition drown during a freak thunderstorm and a werewolf threatens her-a Hunter from the International Guild of Demon and Vampire Hunters steps in.Determined to prevent old demons like the StormMother from wreaking havoc in today's world, the Guild sends Dylan McQuilleran to be Celia's bodyguard.Except Dylan has a problem. His last surgical and chemical augmentation has gone haywire, giving him blinding migraines. His cover story as head publicist for the TV competition keeps him close to Celia while the Guild finds a cure.But can he resist the lure of a Siren long enough to save her life-and his own?

Informations

• Publié par: Book View Cafe
• Date de parution: 05 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611389326
• Langue: English

Extrait

CONFESSIONS OF A SIREN SINGER
Artistic Demons #3
Irene Radford
bookviewcafe.com
Table of Contents
CONFESSIONS OF A SIREN SINGER
COPYRIGHT
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
DENOUEMENT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
OTHER BOOK VIEW CAFÉ TITLES BY IRENE RADFORD
ABOUT BOOK VIEW CAFÉ
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © 2021 Phyllis Irene Radford
All rights reserved, including the right to reproducethis book, or portion thereof, in any form.
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historicalevents, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names,characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination,and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead isentirely coincidental.
Published by Book View Café Publishing Cooperative
Publication Team:
Editors: Alma Alexander, Phyllis Irene Radford
Proofreader: Alma Alexander, Patricia Rice, and MayaBohnhoff
Formatter: Phyllis Irene Radford, Jennifer Stevenson
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PROLOGUE
I held my breath, one, two, three, and gentlypressed the false eyelash to my lid, felt the adhesive cling to the sensitiveskin, and…
A sneeze gathered. My face twitched. The lashslid to the inside, decorating my nose with spider legs.
“Storm coming,” my back-up singers said inunison.
My insides trembled from the warning. Icouldn’t hope to battle or control a big storm from the basement dressing roomof a small Las Vegas nightclub.
Brittney and Joycelyn knew that those wordswere as much a curse as a warning. We shared this dressing room as we sharedeverything, from hairbrushes to clothes to sensitivity to weather changes.
The girls were really my nieces but raisedwith me as if we were triplets.
The one thing we hadn’t shared was ourreaction to the recent plague vaccine. They’d breezed through the procedurelast month while I still had a red welt on my upper left arm.
The vaccine didn’t like my siren blood anymore than the plague did, but I couldn’t perform in public without proof ofvaccine. As we stepped onto the stage a black light would flash across us andthe light sensitive dye in the injections would flare briefly as proof to theaudience.
“Another storm, Celia?” Brittney wailed. “Sosoon?”
“That’s three times already this winter.”Joycelyn sighed deeply, heaving her ample bosom high above the constrictions ofher red spangled bodice. The men in our audience fully appreciated the momentswhen she needed a deeper breath. Sometimes they were rewarded. Mostly not. InLas Vegas, few cared. But they loved the anticipation.
“It’s winter. Even Las Vegas suffers from rainand wind upon occasion,” I replied, ripping the false lashes free of my noseand reapplying a few drops of glue. I needed to show my sisters calm in the faceof a storm, like I always did, not the quivering mass of gelatin that my bellyhad become.
This storm was something more than the usualclash of air masses over the desert in late February.
“It’s called a monsoon,” Joycelyn grumbled.She shivered too, like she had caught some of my own anxiety.
“I thought we’d moved to the desert so we’d beas far from the sea as possible.” Brittney looked longingly to her blue lacewoolen shawl on the rack with her street clothes.
Lately wind and rain, born of our great-grandmother,the StormMother, the goddess Tiamat of old, (we called her Mummy because thegenerations got confused and tangled) threw temper tantrums, that flooded thestreets too often.
Call it climate change if you must. We three,born of a siren, knew better.
During a storm, water calls to water even morethan usual.
Lake Mead, hundreds of thousands of gallons ofwater trapped behind a flimsy dam, lay to east of the city. I could feel itslonging to join the storm.
The itch at the tip of my nose crept upward. Iheld my breath to avert another sneeze. Gradually the itch dissipated. Anotherdeep breath and I was free of the storm portent.
A distant grumble rolled across the horizon.If lightning accompanied it, I couldn’t see or feel it in this windowless basementdressing room.
“Do we need to alert management to gear up fora power outage?” Brittney asked. “That one three weeks ago was a doozy.” Shestood before her own lighted mirror and added a tiny dusting of glitter powderto her cleavage.
I checked my own chest above the sparkling whitegown and the artful airbrushing that gave a visual suggestion that my own boobswere bigger than they were.
“Never hurts to be prepared,” I murmured.
“Two minutes, girls,” Gus the stage managercalled. “Places.”
I took a swig of water and gargled lightly. Mybackup singers did the same. We each warbled our favorite warm-upvocalizations. Thirty seconds later we marched out of the dressing room, downthe dimly lit cement corridor, up a set of stairs with a metal tube railingthat near froze my fingers. The inefficient air conditioning was aimed incorrectly,again, to chill the railing but not the stairwell.
As I turned at the landing to climb the lasthalf story, I felt like I walked into a wall of water. Not the soft, warmwelcome of a tropical sea. No, this was the cold, unrelenting push against humidityfrom a different location, a different coastline, and different climate.
My nose twitched again, so aggressively I was gladI wasn’t looking into a mirror. My sisters would have crossed themselves andquit this gig, if they saw my nose pull a Samantha witch wiggle. We were all ageneration, or more, removed from sea magic. Still I had the greater talent forit than the girls.
That coming storm was a big one and I waspretty sure it was going to hit directly overhead.
Time to pull out all the stops. We stood in aline, arms around each other’s waists, me in the middle, a unified trio,promising amazing harmonies.
“Plan B,” I whispered.
My girls looked at me with raised eyebrows. Thenthey nodded. “Just give us the pitch and the opening phrase and we’ll follow,”Brittney said.
I gave Mitch, our pianist, a two-handed Vulcansalute. He lifted his lip in a sneer. If I hadn’t worked closely with him for sixweeks, I might have interpreted his expression as one of disgust. Instead, Iknew he merely concentrated on a new placement of hands and calling up themuscle memory of a different set of chords and tones.
The curtain lifted before me. The black lightpanned across the stage highlighting our vaccination wounds. Then spotlightsblazed, blinding me to the audience. Just as well. I didn’t lust afterenchanting men to blindness of their own thoughts and actions.
The wind outside this nightclub whipped to anew frenzy. The storm sought me. I sent my mind wandering through the web ofwinds, seeking its source. The note vibrating at its core, stabbed my heart andweakened my limbs with loving languor. By force of will alone I matched thetone in a single high C#.
A piano note softly joined me, then itfollowed through with a third and a fifth below that. My girls joined thechord, each taking a lower note to support me. With their underpinning intact, Iburst forth with an ancient sea chanty I hadn’t dared to sing for ages. It hada million verses I could adapt to the circumstances.
Water calls to water.
In Las Vegas there wasn’t a lot of water tosupport the storm. It had to draw power from a different source. A source Iwould never acknowledge again. I had no compunction against stealing a merestorm from it.
What do you do with a drunken sailor? Tie him to the mast and let him sing to the mother…
I heard a chuckle in the back of the room, adeep masculine exhalation of mirth. “Never that much water in Vegas!” heproclaimed.
Lightning exploded outside. The buildingshook.
Hysterical cries as my audience cowered.
The lights flickered. A unified cry of dismay.
I pushed more force into my song, shiftingeasily from the perils of the sea to a song about roses blooming in the spring.The lights died. Candles in jars on each table flickered cheerily.
The calming scent of spring roses filled theroom and my senses.
Even I could not channel electricity throughbroken wires to feed hungry lightbulbs and voracious amplifiers. But I couldkeep the audience from fleeing in panic, stampeding each other, and letting thestorm win.
This battle was between me and the StormMotherherself.
Leave these people alone!
Mortals should die. Return to me , the wind keened overhead.
I shifted the song to a recollection of hotsummer days, swimming, surfing, loving in the sand.
The wind slackened in confusion. Mummy pulledit one way; I coaxed it another.
Mummy shook herself free of my spell. Thewindows rattled. A car alarm pierced the beauty of the tune I wove around myanxious audience. Emergency vehicle sirens ram