Salem Falls

Niall’s house was quaint, just as Siren had imagined it would be. Examining it from her convertible, she decided that it fit him very nicely. Small, white paint that looked fresh and clean, and a small porch swing. It was everything Niall was, with a beautiful garden, healthy and hearty.

Siren’s house looked so different, she thought, waiting. Niall was supposed to be finishing up something with his friend Evelyn, and though he had insisted she wait inside and get to know Evelyn- whom she wanted nothing to do with- she waited outside.

Niall had no idea that technically, Siren could not even step into his yard. After she had put the defensive spell around his home, it did not allow her in. It was a sting to her ego, to know that she couldn’t cross the barrier she put up to ward of dark magic. But she would never tell him that.

Tapping the steering wheel, she watched with narrowed eyes at the pretty girl walked out of Niall’s house, laughing at something he was saying. Jealous roared in Siren like a wild flame, but she swallowed it down, her eyes pinpointing on the girl as they walked down the steps.

Evelyn was everything that Siren wasn’t. She was a very pretty, delicate girl, kind beyond anything else. She was smart and she was gentle. Evelyn was a healer, Siren was a destroyer. And to her very core, it bothered Siren, to know that she could not even brush that sort of warmth.

Almost every day since she had met Niall, Siren was constantly digging her feet in the sand, trying to keep herself from being pulled forward into this light that had begun to call her. It was like there was someone or something begging her, imploring her to step away from the life of loneliness and darkness, and to step in the golden light of… well she didn’t know what it was. But she felt like something, somewhere out there didn’t want her to be Siren anymore. It wanted her to be Amelia, her given name, the same that sounded good.

She wasn’t sure who she wanted to be, anymore. All that she knew, was that she wanted to be with Niall. Somewhere between the annoying exchanges, the snappy comments and the thrill of breaking rules, she had grown feelings so strong for him that she was considering almost any possibility to be with him.

Evelyn looked at Siren with distaste as Niall parted ways with her, trotting over to the car. Siren gripped the wheel in agitation, glaring right back at the other girl. It was bad enough that the she had a place in Niall’s heart Siren never would, but it was worse knowing that Evelyn was right about Siren being unsafe for him.

“G’morning,” he chirruped, hopping over the door and into the leather seat like all the boys did in the movies. Siren rolled her eyes but smiled, especially when he leaned across the center console and pressed a kiss to her lips, making butterflies wake up in her stomach. “Anywhere in particular in mind?”

“Well, no, but from the sound of your voice you’ve got something up yourself,” she answered, putting the car in drive and taking off. They were going to lunch that day, somewhere in the next town over, since they could not very well do it in sight of everyone else. “Am I right, or am I right?”

“Right as rain.”

“You know, I don’t think you’re using that phrase correctly.”

He waved his hand, rolling his blue eyes. He was always getting phrases wrong, almost as if it were on purpose. Siren liked that about him. Niall never tried to say anything philosophical or make something sound intricate and meaningful. He simply said whatever was on his mind in the shortest form possible. Sometimes it came out making no sense at all, just a string of words thrown together. “I wish you would have come inside?”

“Why?” she asked, raising a brow. “So I could play nice with your walking band aid of a friend?”
He looked at her with a curious expression. “Walking band aid?”

Her lips curved into a simple slightly as she thought of her joke, lifting a shoulder in a shrug as she turned onto another road. “You’re all healers, aren’t you? Witch doctors- you’ve even got a song.” When Niall still looked confused, she rolled her eyes singing, “And then I told the witch doctor, he told me what to do, he told me ooh eeh ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang?”

He laughed extremely loudly then, making Siren shoot him a glare filled with daggers. She hated being laughed at, especially when she had been making a joke. He wasn’t laughing with her, but rather at her. “I know the song, I was just confused because you were making a joke.”

She knit her brows together and frown. “I make jokes all the time.”

“Yeah but not intentionally. Turn here.”

“Would you like to drive? I don’t like being bossed around and laughed at, especially if it’s by Professor Sprout.”

Rolling her eyes at one of her many Harry Potter allusions, he nodded and she pulled over. Niall hopped out the car and Siren simple slid over into the other seat, sighing and sliding in her seat, handing her feet off the side of the car. Niall slid in and took off, making her grimace and look at him. “What?” he laughed loudly, nicking her ray bans hanging from the folding mirror. He slid them on her face and she could not help but glower at the fact that they looked far better on him. “You drive this thing like an escaped convict.”

“Scratch my car and you’re paying for it, Ni.”

He grinned. “Right. Because it’s not like I can’t do magic or anything.”

*

“That was actually, amazingly delicious,” Siren admitted, walking out of the beach side diner with Niall. The place was very small and right off the boardwalk to a beach in the next town over. It had been a forty minute drive, but it was worth it, especially when Niall smiled and slipped his hand in hers. “I’m quite impressed.”

“Good,” he confirmed, leaning over and pressing his lips to her cheek. Despite priding herself in having a calm and collected demeanor, her cheeks flushed and she smiled at the ground, squeezing his hand. “My mother had taken me there once. She um…”

Siren looked up and examined him, his voice trailing off. It seemed he had been about to say something that he wasn’t sure of. It did not take much brain work to figure out what he had been planning on saying. Siren forced a smile. “Went there with my mother?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry I didn’t-"

“How did she die?” it was a question that she had wanted to know, since the day she got word of it. She had not cried, even at the age of eleven. When Harry’s mother had told her, informed her that her last living family member died, she had simply shrugged and continue to write spells. “I know my father was killed because of his own vices. Demons… they did not like my father.”

“Even though we’re mages,” Niall said slowly, stopping as they reached the car, “Sometimes there just isn’t a cure to things. Like cancer, even we can’t figure it out, the most severe types. And it was like that, in her case. She had lived with it since she was a little girl. Did you know that?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“She should have died long before. Magic only helped her for so long, and then it just, couldn’t do much anymore. She wasn’t in pain though. At least, that’s what my mother told me.”

“Your mother and mine, they were close?”

He nodded. “My mother has told me almost everything about your mom.” They were quiet for a little while, standing in front of her car, holding hands. The smell of the beach was on them, wrapping around them in a smooth blanket of salt and sand. “I sometimes wonder, if it was fate that brought you to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I know so many things about her, your mother. Maybe you were meant to find me one day, so I could tell you about the woman you never knew. I have memories of her, from when I was young.”

She smiled ruefully. “Or maybe it’s a cruel joke, that I should find someone who she was more of a mother too than her own daughter, that I should fall in love for a boy who has memories where I do not.”

Both of them froze. Siren went absolutely still and fought the urge to panic, realizing what she had said. She had said falling in love. She had not said those three dangerous words, ones she had only ever said to Lucie on an occasion of bonding, but she had been close to that phrasing. “I don’t think falling in love with you is someone’s way of a cruel joke.”

She looked at him and opened her mouth to say something but shook her head, swallowing down the words that had been haunting her for the past few months. The words that she still sure she wasn’t sure if she wanted to say, because she was not fully committed. “You driving home?”

The boy laughed. He had expected the change of topic to come, so he nodded, taking the keys from his pocket. Before walked to the drivers side, he kissed her on the head briefly, making her hesitate before going to her side. Random acts of affection always made her puzzled.

The car ride home went without consequence, the sound of the radio filling in the air. They rode with the top on, a storm brewing off the shore and heading towards Salem falls.

When they turned onto Niall’s street, Siren found herself being hurled forward, smacking into the dash board from her lack of seatbelt. When she sat up right, Niall was staring in shock and horror at his house and she looked up, her eyes flying wide.

In front of his house, a tall, shadowy figure stood, not human, but not… it just was not human. Siren clutched the side of the car as it took a step forward, and then something happened. From Niall’s garden, tiny, black creatures shot from the growth, running at the figure with full speed, attacking it with gnashing teeth.

Both of them watched in horror as the shadowy figure fell underneath the demonic attack dogs before it burs and fell into dust, the wind carrying it away. Niall was sheet white as the tiny black demons melted back into his plants, done protecting his home.

Siren felt sick.

“What the fuck was that?” he gasped finally, his eyes alarmed and every single muscle in his body clenched in fear and alarm.

But all Siren felt was guilt, and absolute anger that some dark energy had gone anywhere near Niall’s home. Niall was hers, and she would kill anything or anyone that went near it again. “Well shit, that worked.”

“What?” Niall reeled on her, making her grimace. She really couldn’t go back now. The cat was out of the bag and strutting around. “What do you mean ‘well that worked?!’”

She huffed, facing him and trying to put on a reasonable expression. “I may or may not have placed a ward on your house, just in case anything tried to harm you- don’t give me that look, dammit! It was the only way I knew how to protect you!”

“From what?!”

“From me! From anything like me that is bad, that could hurt you! You know humans are dying and someone is doing it! I’ll be damned if someone hurts you because they can or because someone wants to hurt me.”

He laughed without humor. “I guess I should be flattered but I’m not,” he growled, getting out of the car and slamming the door. She scrambled out after him, chasing his retreating figure. “I suppose you made a deal with the devil to protect me, didn’t you? Those things in my garden, they were dark magic.”

“Niall-"

“FIX IT, SIREN.”

Siren watched Niall storm away from her, only hesitating as we walked up the steps, glancing at his bushes. He never looked back at her, and she could still feel his anger roiling from where he was. She was just trying to help. So why did she feel like she was screwing everything up?

*

True to her word, hours later she was sitting in the woods, cross-legged and feeling helpless. Never had she felt so chagrinned or ashamed. She was also angry, and for the past hour, she had been deliberating whether she wanted to take the ward off his house or not.

But she still remembered how he yelled at her. The look in his eyes.

Rubbing her hands together, she ran her hand over the ground, sparks lighting and taking form into a flame, growing. When it was breathing and living, Siren began muttering the words in Latin, the fire turning different shades, the forest around her growing extremely hard, the air hard to breathe.

The flames turned purple and the air turned foul, and when she opened her eyes, she was peering into very angry, shadowy ones. She flinched backwards, and she could feel the raw anger in Azazel. I do not have to ask who this is he growled, voice making her shake slightly. I am done with my patience for you, mage.

“Well that’s good, because I’ve just come to release you of the protection on the house, that’s all.”

It was not efficient enough for you? she could hear the anger in her voice and she closed her eyes, knowing how pissed off he was. She had tested her luck too many times. Are you ungrateful, for what I’ve done?

“Not at all,” she whispered. “I’m very thankful, and it worked. I’ve just realized that I acted without thinking. I would like to make it right by releasing the promise. I will no longer call on you.”

Mages he spat, his voice raging. It made her flinch. I will release the curse. And if I could, I would kill you were you sat, mage. I’ve had it with your impudence.

“Siren?” Niall’s voice hit her ears and she wiped around, mouth flying open. The blonde boy was pushing through the bushes, stopping in his tracks when he hit the wall of dark magic. “Oh my god.”

“NIALL.” Her voice was shrill and panicked, too many fears tumbling down into her as she leapt up to her feet. Siren had many different protective spells on herself, but never would she had dreamed Niall would come looking for her, unprotected. “Leave.”

I have removed my servants from your home, mage. And for your insolence… well.

Cackling filled her ears as she reached Niall. She felt it before she saw it, the flash of magic that filled the air and the shock as Niall buckled at the knees, the breath leaving his lungs in a gasp, pain etched across his features. Siren’s heart was exploding in her chest as she got to her knees, grabbing him by the shoulders as his eyes rolled back.

“Niall!” he fell slack in her arms as the demon behind her laughed very loudly, leaving to return to the depths from whence he came. But she didn’t care, all she could do was shake uncontrollably, gripping Niall’s arms tightly, his body heavy and his breathing very shallow. “NIALL.”

Taking him in her arms, Siren did the only thing she knew how to do. She went over every single spell, every phrase and word she knew. But it wasn’t working. Licking her lips, she stood, taking off as fast as she could, dragging Niall, using magic to speed the process.

Tears streamed down her face and her entire body was quaking. She didn’t think, she didn’t say anything, she did not do anything but act. Her entire body was on autopilot and she was doing the only option she had left.

This had to work. She was praying that it would work, as she tripped up the steps, banging her hand extremely hard on the door, trying not to choke over her sobs. There was nothing more that she could do other than cry and hope. Because she had hurt him. She put Niall in harms way, and it was killing her.

When the door opened, Evelyn blinked in surprise, her eyes flitting in horror from Siren to Niall. “Please,” Siren whispered, her voice cracking. “I can’t help him.”