Gemma chewed the inside of her cheek and looked away from Penn. “Yep. He’s a very foxy guy. You’re one lucky lady, Penn.”

“You know luck has nothing to do with it,” Penn said, and slipped off the stool. “I make my own luck. I create my own destiny.”

She walked over to Gemma and stood right in front of her, but Gemma refused to look at her. She just stared down at Penn’s pedicured toes.

“If you ever want to join Sawyer and me, I understand,” Penn said, her voice turning low and sultry. “As a siren, you have all sorts of new urges, and they’re hard to contain. Sawyer would be happy to show you how to handle them, as long as I’m there to guide you.”

“What?” Gemma wrinkled her nose in disgust when she realized what Penn was talking about. “That’s a really weird offer, and also gross. Seriously. Ew, no.”

“You’re a prude now, and I don’t care,” Penn said, waving it off. “But the point is that if you ever touch Sawyer again when I’m not around, I’ll rip off your filthy little hands.”

Gemma looked up at her then, and saw that, though Penn had kept her tone sexy and almost cheerful, her eyes had shifted. They were no longer her usual black eyes but the odd yellow eyes of an eagle.

“You can’t have what isn’t yours,” Penn said, and Gemma could hear the monster under her words, the beast inside her growling. “Don’t touch things without my permission.”

Before, Gemma would’ve been afraid of this, and part of her knew she should be intimidated by Penn. She’d killed her own sister, so she would obviously think nothing of tearing off Gemma’s head. But Gemma didn’t care anymore. If she was going to live with Penn forever, she wasn’t going to kowtow to her. She’d rather end up dead than as Penn’s slave.

“Sawyer’s not yours, and he’s not a thing,” Gemma said. “Just because you have a spell over him doesn’t mean he’s not still a human being with feelings and thoughts of his own. You just won’t let him use them.”

Gemma had expected Penn to yell at her, but instead Penn threw back her head and laughed. When she’d finished, her eyes had gone back to normal.

“Oh, Gemma, that just shows how little you know about humans.” Penn turned back and walked toward the kitchen island, still giggling to herself.

TWENTY

Complications

They’d picked up Alex on their way out of town, not just because he would kill Harper if she went after Gemma without him, but because he might be useful.

Harper called her dad, leaving a message on his cell phone letting him know that she wouldn’t be home that night. She thought about telling him that she was going after Gemma, but if Harper wasn’t successful in finding her, that would only break Brian’s heart more.

They took Harper’s car on the road trip because Daniel didn’t have one and Alex’s car was so small. He sat in the backseat while Harper drove, and Daniel gave him the newspaper to read.

Both Alex and Harper couldn’t believe that they’d missed the article in the first place. Alex especially had been scouring the Internet for clues on Gemma, but he’d gotten bogged down with pointless e-mails. He felt obligated to follow every “lead” he got, but they all led nowhere.

Harper had probably missed it because she’d been out of sorts. After she’d woken up from that dream about Daniel that ended with Gemma saying, “Wake up,” she hadn’t been able to get into any kind of routine. Everything felt off, and she hadn’t done her usual search on the computer for the sirens.

Fortunately, while Harper and Alex had been relying on technology, Daniel had been looking the good old-fashioned way. He’d been going to Pearl’s every morning and buying a copy of each paper she had. And eventually it had paid off.

Unfortunately, the article hadn’t been very specific. The only real information they’d gotten from it was that a body had been found near a restaurant. Daniel had figured out what town it was, but that was still a fairly large area to search.

Harper didn’t even know where the sirens had been living when they were in Capri. She’d heard something once about them staying in a beach house that used to belong to the mayor, but she wasn’t sure if that was true.

Her worst fear wasn’t that they wouldn’t find Gemma. Or that the sirens would try to stop Harper from taking her. She would figure out how to fight them if she needed to. No, her biggest worry was that they would find Gemma, and she wouldn’t want to come back with them.

What would she do then? Gemma was sixteen and had new mythical powers. It wasn’t exactly like Harper could drag her home and force her to stay in her room. If Gemma wouldn’t come back with them on her own … then she wouldn’t come back.

As they drove on, Harper didn’t voice any of these fears, though. Alex probably shared some of her concerns, but he wasn’t talking about them, so she didn’t think she should, either.

Besides that, she had more important things to focus on—like figuring out exactly where they were going. The drive started out okay, but things quickly went downhill.

Before they’d even made it past the state line, they got stuck in traffic for nearly an hour because of an accident ahead of them on the highway.

Daniel tried to keep things upbeat, but Alex and Harper were too nerved up for it to really work. After several failed attempts at making conversation, he settled for tuning the radio to a classic rock station and air-drumming along to “Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin.