The Siren by KATHERINE JOHN (general ebook reader .txt) 📕

through the glass floor, which she must have forgotten to turn off. I blinked at her, disoriented.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

I closed my eyes, the vision still clear in my mind, Iris’s face grafted on to Felicity’s, so similar but for their coloring. I’d noticed a passing resemblance before but quickly dismissed it as my hazy, overactive imagination playing tricks on me. Now I tried to conjure up an image of Felicity without those bangs and the ever-present kohl liner around her eyes, picturing her tresses longer and blonder and her irises lighter…but my brain throbbed with the effort. Perhaps the differences were what made the imagined likeness so strong anyway.

“My head,” I managed. The agony of speaking released a shower of stars across my vision. I was soaked in sweat quickly cooling in the blasting air-conditioner, my heart sprinting like it was being chased. “What happened last night?”

“Tonight,” she corrected me, looking at the clock on the bedside table. “It’s four a.m.”

Mary Elizabeth uncurled from her post at the foot of the bed and gingerly approached, sniffing my clammy skin. The bungalow seemed to rock with the waves, churning in sync with my stomach.

Felicity must have been able to tell I was about to be sick because she jumped out of bed and rushed around to my side, where she grabbed the plastic garbage can next to the bed and held it up for me to retch in.

The retching did not make me feel better.

“Can you run me a bath?” I managed.

I stared at the wide woven blades of the motionless ceiling fan as she drew the bath, begging the room to stop spinning, the knife to stop stabbing.

Iris, here. So real I could reach out and touch her.

But she was long gone.

All of this unearthing of the past clearly wasn’t good for my psyche. But I had to keep it to myself. If anyone found out I was seeing ghosts, they’d throw me in the looney bin again. A health spa, they’d called it. Yeah, right. It might’ve cost an arm and a leg and had posh linens and a pool, but as far as I knew health spas didn’t come with shrinks, unlockable doors, and ninety-day sentences. I couldn’t go back there. I had to pull myself together.

The dreaded sense that something bad had happened lurked just out of reach in the shadows of my mind, but I was too weak to attempt to shine any light on it; I could taste the bile in my throat but lacked the strength to reach for the bottle of water on the bedside table. I focused on the sensation of Mary Elizabeth’s small, dry tongue licking my hand.

Felicity supported me from the bed to the bathroom sink, where I gurgled mouthwash and downed Tylenol with a glass of water before she peeled my sweat-soaked clothes from my aching body and helped me into the bath. The water was deliciously hot and full of bubbles that smelled of lavender. I sank into the silence beneath the water, holding my breath until I felt Felicity’s hand beneath my neck, pulling me up to sitting.

“Don’t drown on me,” she said.

I took a deep breath. The knife was still in my brain, but it no longer burned. “What happened to me?” I asked again.

“I don’t know,” she said. “One minute you were fine; then Kara found you slumped on the floor outside the bathroom.”

“Where?”

“Coco’s. You don’t remember?”

Coco’s. Right. It was murky, but I at least remembered being there. Everyone had been there. Damn. “Who saw me?”

She twisted her mouth into a frown. “I don’t know. I was outside when it happened.”

“Why did you leave me?”

“You were fine! It happened so fast. I’d gone for a short walk around the harbor with Jackson when Taylor called to say you were incoherent.”

Oh God. “Taylor was there?”

She nodded. I sank into the silence beneath the bubbles again, wishing I could stay there forever.

When I surfaced, Felicity was holding a fresh glass of water. I drank it obediently. “Was Madison there?” She shook her head, and I let out a sigh of relief. “Thank heavens. Who else was there?” I asked.

“Rick and Jackson. We took you away from the bar so no one would see, and I made you throw up.”

I groaned, imagining the scene. What they must think of me. “How?”

“I stuck my finger down your throat.”

So it was over. Surely I’d be fired now. I’d squandered my chance at redemption and would be punished, tossed back into the void. Worse: shamed.

I sank into the womb of the bath. I couldn’t face another round in the stockade. I wouldn’t survive another public stoning. It had taken every ounce of my strength to pull myself through these thirteen years. I’d lost my career, my love, my friends. All I had left was my little dog and the fleeting reprieve provided by pills and booze—nothing more than small Band-Aids holding back a river of blood. I wasn’t stupid. I knew the Band-Aids only made the wound worse in the long run, that I would eventually bleed out if things didn’t turn around for me someday. All that had kept me going was hope for that day. Without it, I was finished.

Felicity’s hand beneath my back. Air. And then she was lifting me out of the bath, wrapping me in a soft white robe, and guiding me to the bed.

June 28, 2019XRay OnlineBREAKING:

Stella Rivers Can’t Keep Her Act Together

Stella Rivers has been shooting The Siren with ex-husband, Cole Power, on the Caribbean island of Saint Genesius for only two weeks, and she appears to have already fallen off the wagon. Sources tell us a stipulation of her contract was that she remain sober for the duration of the shoot, but this morning a photo surfaced of her clearly inebriated and slumped against the wall of a local bar. Rumors of Power and Rivers rekindling their romance were swirling until a few days ago, when a