Talking Dirty (Pax Arcana) Read Online Free PDF Page A

people have gotten sirens confused with mermaids, but here’s the thing: In the original stories, sirens were land creatures whose upper half was human and beautiful, while their lower half was all feathers and horribly destructive claws. These sirens—most famously in The Odyssey —would hide their lower halves behind rocks and cause ships to crash on the crags by singing beautiful songs that drove sailors mad with lust. Then the sirens would leap down among the wreckage and tear the sailors apart with their claws.
    Mermaids, on the other hand, were half-human, half-fish women, and merfolk were harmless for the most part. There are different tribes and cultures among the merfolk just like there are among humans, though, and occasionally mermaids would act as bait. They would show their naked human half to fishermen on the shore and pretend to be in trouble, and the fishermen would take a boat out to help the “drowning” mermaid, and then some opportunistic band of mer-sociopaths would swarm up out of the water and turn the boat over for fresh meat and shiny objects. There must have been a particularly vicious tribe or bandit culture among merfolk around the British isles, because in that region, mermaids were considered evil omens of death and destruction.
    Then the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen came along and wrote a story about a mermaid—a perfectly nice young woman, by the way—who traded her beautiful singing voice to a witch in exchange for the ability to come on shore, and somehow the mermaid and siren storytelling traditions got confused and mixed together until the two terms became virtually indistinguishable.
    But that’s a classic case of not getting stories straight. Sirens and mermaids? Apples and oranges. Chicken and fish.
    *  *  *
    The gold watch started moving on the fourth morning after we arrived. It appeared as a dot on a four-by-four-inch digital satellite map that was plugged into my truck’s power port and suction-cupped to my windshield. I wasn’t too worried about how the setup looked—there are still people whose GPS systems aren’t built into their phones or dashboard, though they are becoming rarer by the week.
    “Come on, Samuel,” I called out the pickup truck’s window. I packed up our tents every morning before the post office opened, so he was entertaining himself out in our strip of woods by doing something that caused snorting sounds. Which was odd, because he was in human form. I didn’t have to speak loudly though, and something in the tone of my voice must have triggered some hunter or defender’s instinct in Samuel, because he was there almost instantly even if he was covered in mud.
    “What were you doing?” I asked.
    “Smelling,” he said.
    “You sure were.” I wrinkled my nose, and as literal as Samuel was, he got that one. He laughed loudly. I don’t know if he was being theatrical or unselfconscious, but he laughed in a way that most people don’t, full out and almost pronouncing the laughs as words.
    “Come on and get in the truck.” I was smiling in spite of myself. “We’ve got to go.”
    I didn’t want to risk getting stopped for speeding, so it took at least ten minutes to get close enough to the vehicle transporting the gold pocket watch to get a good look. It was a red Jeep, new but covered with mud, and the black nylon fabric top could be unzipped or unsnapped but was still on despite the heat. All I could tell about the driver was that she was female, with long black hair and smooth brown shoulders.
    “Why are we—” Samuel started.
    “Be quiet!” I snapped, just like a frustrated parent in line at a supermarket, and Samuel lapsed into a sullen silence. As soon as I had the chance, I went ahead and turned off on a side street, then circled back to follow the Jeep out of its line of sight. “I told you not to talk about what we were doing, remember? We’re chasing something that can hear really well.”
    Actually, I didn’t