Nothing will stop this bounty hunter from getting the siren's treasure. And the sirens. Just all of them.
—
The Mediterranean glittered like it was trying very hard to look innocent.
Sir Hunter did not trust it for a second.
He sat in the center of a bright orange inflatable boat, paws planted wide against the rubber floor, tail curled around himself to keep it dry, and a waterproof tablet clutched in both hands. A headset rested awkwardly over his tufted Eurasian lynx ears. Three rolled maps sat beside him. Two towels were folded within immediate reach. A third towel, the emergency towel, was sealed inside a plastic bag.
The sea rolled gently beneath the Greek sun.
Hunter glared at it.
“Stop moving,” he muttered.
At the edge of the boat, Darya Safira turned around in full diving gear and gave him a grin bright enough to shame the horizon.
“Talking to the ocean again?”
“Haaa... I really don't like being here.”
“In the middle of the ocean?”
“Yeah. Obviously.”
Darya laughed, checked the seal of her mask, and adjusted the compact camera rig strapped to her shoulder. The camera lens blinked red, connected to Hunter’s tablet. Through it, he would be able to see everything she saw once she dropped below the surface.
That was the plan, anyway.
Hunter had spent the last six months preparing this expedition. He had cross-referenced old maritime legends, translated fragments from ruined temple inscriptions, bribed three museum archivists with rare coffee, and made a risk assessment chart that Darya had immediately described as “adorable.”
Darya, meanwhile, had heard the words legendary treasure and cursed siren artifact and responded by buying new diving gloves.
Beneath them, somewhere among drowned marble and coral-choked ruins, rested the legendary Harp of the Siren.
Supposedly.
Hunter preferred the word supposedly. It left room for doubt. Doubt meant they might go home with nothing worse than sunburn and mild disappointment.
Darya preferred the word legendary. It made her eyes shine.
“Before you dive,” Hunter said, raising one claw, “I want to repeat several important points.”
Darya bounced lightly on her heels. “Love important points.”
“I want to repeat them, because I always get the feeling you just ignore those important points otherwise.”
“Oh come on, I love when you make them. It is charming.”
“It is not charming. It is survival. Anyway, point one: the Harp of the Siren is, according to at least four separate sources, cursed.”
“Gotcha. Do you know what kind of curse it is?”
“One of those sources was written by a man whose entire crew vanished after hearing music under the water.”
“That does sound pretty bad, I do agree.”
“Point two,” Hunter continued, “the artifact is associated with transformation, doom, shipwrecks, unexplained mass hallucinations, and the phrase ‘the sea remakes desire.’. So whatever you do, you have to be careful.”
Darya nodded her head.
“Understood. Thought I will say that that last one sounds poetic.”
“That last one sounds like a warning written by someone who had already watched something terrible happen.”
“Poetically.”
“Point three.” Hunter leaned forward. “Do not touch the harp until you find a way to safely transport it.”
Darya put a hand over her heart, solemn as a saint in a painting and twice as suspicious. “Hunter. My dear son. My tactical genius. My furry little voice of reason.”
“Do not call me furry little anything while I am holding the mission tablet.”
“I promise,” she said, “that I will exercise the utmost professional restraint.”
Hunter stared at her.
The sea lapped against the boat.
A gull cried somewhere overhead.
“You are going to touch it,” he said.
“I did not say that.”
“You said professional restraint in the same tone you use before jumping through windows.”
“In fairness, when I do that, I always do it in very dramatic ways.”
“Yeah. Because most of the times, those windows were closed.”
“And then they were open.”
Hunter pinched the bridge of his muzzle. “Please just… look first. Tell me what you see. Let me assess the mechanism. Let me read the inscriptions.”
Darya softened a little. She reached down and scratched gently between his ears, exactly where he pretended not to like it.
“I’ll be careful.”
Darya winked, stepped backward off the boat, and vanished into the sea with a clean splash.
Hunter flinched as droplets pattered over the edge of the boat.
One landed on his paw.
He looked down at it with betrayal in his eyes.
“Assault,” he whispered.
Then the tablet feed flickered to life.
Blue swallowed the screen.
Darya descended through shafts of sunlight, her movements smooth and confident. The water changed around her the deeper she went, bright turquoise giving way to a darker, richer blue. Fish flashed past in silver flickers. Below, half-buried in sand and time, rose the broken bones of an ancient ruin.
Even Hunter, against his better judgment, felt his ears lift.
The drowned temple was beautiful.
Marble columns leaned at impossible angles, draped in coral and waving ribbons of sea grass. Cracked statues stared upward through empty eyes. A fallen archway lay split across the ocean floor, its surface covered in faded carvings of waves, women, and ships with broken masts.
Darya’s voice crackled through his headset, slightly distorted by the underwater comm.
“Tell me this isn’t gorgeous.”
“It is gorgeous,” Hunter admitted. “Still...”
“Yeah, yeah. Stop worrying about it. It'll be fine. I'll be fiiiiiiiine.”
“Haaaa...” Hunter looked down at his notes. “Follow the eastern colonnade. There should be a collapsed sanctuary beyond it. According to the map fragment, the inner chamber is marked by three singing figures.”
Darya kicked forward.
The camera moved with her, passing over a mosaic half-hidden beneath sand. Hunter caught glimpses of blue tiles, gold glass, and red stone mouths open in song. Several fish darted away as Darya brushed sand aside.
“Found your singing figures,” she said.
The mosaic showed three mermaids seated around a harp. Their hair streamed in stylized waves. Sailors knelt before them, hands pressed to their ears, faces twisted in awe or terror. Between the figures, an inscription curved around a spiral shell.
Darya angled the camera.
Hunter leaned closer.
“Can you read it?” she asked.
“Give me a second.”
“Take two. I’m feeling generous today.”
Hunter translated under his breath. “The hand that wakes the string… the throat that follows the song… the heart that desires the sea…”
He went still.
Darya noticed immediately. “That was your serious silence.”
“It says the harp does not answer treasure hunters.”
“Rude.”
“It answers to the longing of tainted hearts.”
Darya hovered above the mosaic, bubbles curling from her mask. “That sounds less like a curse and more like an emotionally complicated instrument.”
“It says those who wake it are claimed by the trial.”
“Trial, eh? That implies a reward. You think I can take it?”
“Please, mom. Focus.”
“Gotcha, gotcha. Ill be careful. Anyway, where to next?”
Hunter’s ears flattened. “Move to the chamber. Do not touch anything on the way.”
“Hunter.”
“What?”
“I am underwater.”
“Yes?”
“Touching water is half of swimming.”
“Do not touch anything interesting looking for now.”
“Alrighty~ That I can do.”
Darya pressed onward.
The eastern colonnade narrowed into a corridor of toppled stone. A school of tiny fish scattered as she passed. The ruins became darker there, shielded from the sun by a leaning roof of marble slabs. At the far end, a circular door rose from the seabed, framed by coral and guarded by three carved figures.
A sailor covering his ears.
A mermaid holding a harp.
A crowned woman made of waves.
Hunter sat upright.
“There. Stop.”
Darya stopped.
“Look at the carvings closely. This is likely a symbolic lock. The order may matter.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Do not press anything.”
“I am listening.”
“No, you are hovering closer.”
“I listen best at close range when I can actually read the inscription as well.”
Hunter scanned his notes. “The inscription mentioned hand, throat, heart. Maybe sailor, harp, waves. Or perhaps silence, song, sea. We need to identify the sequence before—”
Darya pressed the wave-crowned figure.
The door groaned.
Hunter’s jaw dropped.
The circular stone split down the middle and rolled aside, releasing a bloom of trapped bubbles.
Darya lifted one finger. “In my defense—”
“No.”
“It worked.”
“Darya.”
“I know, I know. Professional restraint.”
She swam through the opening.
The chamber beyond was small, round, and strangely untouched by time. Pale stone formed a low pedestal at the center. Coral grew along the walls in delicate fans, but none had crossed into the circle around the pedestal. Even the sand seemed to stop short, as if the sea itself had refused to disturb what rested there.
The Harp of the Siren waited in silence.
It was smaller than Hunter had imagined. Not as grand or throne-sized. It could be carried in two hands. Its frame curved like pale coral and moonlit bone, elegant and delicate. Its strings shimmered like strands of captured water, impossible to focus on for more than a second. Light slid along them in soft pulses.
Darya drifted closer.
Hunter’s voice dropped.
“Mom.”
“I see it.”
“Do not touch it.”
“I am not touching it.”
Her gloved hand hovered inches from the harp.
Hunter could see her grin through the edge of the camera angle.
“Just one string.”
“No strings.”
“One tiny sound.”
“Zero tiny sounds.”
Darya’s fingertip brushed the nearest string.
The harp sang.
Underwater, the note was breathtaking.
It unfolded through the chamber like blue light becoming sound, clear and haunting, soft enough to be intimate and vast enough to make the ruins feel like they were remembering the sky. Fish paused in the cracks of the stone. Bubbles trembled in place. Even Darya went still, caught by the beauty of it.
Above the surface, Hunter’s tablet produced a shriek like a dying kettle being attacked by a violin.
“OW!”
Hunter nearly threw the tablet into the sea, which would have been emotionally satisfying for half a second and strategically disastrous for the rest of his life. He slapped the volume down with one paw while the headset screamed against his ears.
“Mom!” he yowled. “What part of cursed ancient artifact sounds safe to you?!”
Darya’s laugh bubbled through the feed.
“Oh, come on, that was beautiful.”
“To you! Up here it sounded like a gull fighting a trumpet inside a metal bucket!”
The harp pulsed again.
Darya’s fingers tightened around it.
Hunter froze.
“Darya?”
She did not answer immediately.
Her head tilted. Her shoulders relaxed. The camera feed drifted as if she had forgotten she was holding herself steady.
“Darya.”
“I…” Her voice was quiet. Wondering. “I think it wants me to sing.”
“No.”
“It really wants me to sing.”
“Absolutely not.”
“It would be rude not to.”
Darya opened her mouth.
Hunter braced.
The sound that came through the feed was difficult to describe, though Hunter’s mind made several desperate attempts. It was part song, part battle cry, part wounded seabird, and part evidence that rhythm had filed for divorce.
Several fish fled the chamber.
Hunter stared at the screen in horror.
“If that is what the harp wanted, then that harp has terrible taste,” he said.
Darya sang louder, which caused the harp to glow more.
That was the truly most confusing part. It reacted. It accepted this. Ancient magic, powerful enough to survive beneath the Mediterranean for centuries, heard Darya Safira assault the concept of melody and apparently decided, yes, this will do.
Blue-green light spilled from the strings. It circled Darya’s hands, curled around her wrists, and streamed into the water around her. Currents formed where none had been before, spiraling gently at first, then faster, wrapping her in ribbons of luminous sea.
Hunter’s pupils widened.
“Mom. Your legs are glowing.”
Darya looked down.
The glow had gathered around her thighs and knees, bright beneath the black fabric of her diving suit. The water pressed against her from all sides, warm and smooth and strangely deliberate.
“Huh,” she said between notes. “That’s new.”
“Stop singing.”
“I’m trying.”
“No you are not!”
Indeed, as if entraced by her own horrible screeching, Darya just continued to sing, which caused the current to tighten even further. And her legs to drift closer together.
At first it looked like simple movement, the kind caused by water and balance. Then her knees touched and did not separate. Her calves pressed close. Her ankles drew inward as if invisible silk had bound them.
Hunter leaned so close to the tablet his whiskers brushed the screen.
“Darya, your legs are becoming a single tail. Darya!? Mom!?”
The glow brightened but Darya did not respond to him this time.
Instead, she gasped, and for one sharp second the song broke. The harp answered by sending a pulse through the chamber. Her body arched. The camera swung upward, catching flashes of coral, stone, bubbles, and the edge of Darya’s grin.
There was no panic. Shock, yes. Alarm, briefly. But beneath it, there it was: the thrill. The impossible moment. The edge of danger opening into something no one had ever warned her about clearly enough to make her avoid it.
Her legs sealed together.
The seam began at her knees and ran downward in a slow, shimmering ripple. Fabric dissolved into scales. Muscle shifted beneath skin. Her calves smoothed into one powerful tapering shape, no longer two limbs trapped together but one new form, deliberate and strong. Her boots stretched, softened, and flattened as her feet lengthened inside them, then vanished beneath a bloom of color.
Scales spread down from her hips in waves.
They were not a single color. They caught the sea the way sunlit water did: deep sapphire at one angle, green-blue at another, with gold flickers along the edges like coins flashing beneath the tide. They rolled over her new lower body in overlapping patterns, sleek and bright, each scale settling into place as if the ocean had always known where it belonged.
Darya stared.
“Well,” she said, voice faintly breathless, “that is gorgeous.”
“You are turning into a mermaid.”
“I do seem to be handling it well.”
“You have been a mermaid for four seconds.”
“And already I am thriving.”
“You do not have a tail yet.”
The magic took that personally.
Her fused lower body stretched longer, drawing power from her hips down through the tapering length of her new tail. Her feet finished changing with a graceful, dramatic sweep. The last traces of her boots fanned outward, widening into a broad translucent fin edged in shimmering blue. Smaller fins fluttered along the sides near her hips, delicate but sharp, catching the current like silk banners.
Darya gave an experimental flick.
She shot forward so fast the camera blurred.
Hunter yelped.
Darya twisted through the water, startled into laughter and song again. The sound however came out clearer than before. Not perfect, not by a long shot. But smoother. Softer. Almost pleasant, if one had not suffered through the previous attempt. Which is something Hunter obviously noticed immediately.
“Your voice changed.”
Darya touched her throat. “For the better?”
He considered the diplomatic answer.
Then rejected it.
“From natural disaster to local inconvenience.”
“Ah. Well. I guess we can call that progress.”
The harp glowed again, but more softly now. The melody wrapped around Darya’s voice, guiding it, smoothing the roughest edges. Her mask loosened. Her regulator slipped free. Hunter saw it happen and stood up so quickly the boat wobbled under him.
“Do not breathe!”
Darya inhaled.
Water rushed into her mouth and throat.
For one second, her eyes went wide.
Hunter’s heart stopped.
Then gills fluttered open in faint, elegant slashes along the sides of her neck, almost hidden beneath drifting strands of hair. Darya blinked. Breathed again. The water moved through her as naturally as air.
She slowly smiled.
“Oh,” she said. “That is convenient.”
Hunter sank back onto the boat floor.
“I knew going on this expedition was a mistake...”
Darya turned in the water, no longer fighting buoyancy, no longer kicking with legs she did not have. Her new tail moved with easy confidence, powerful and sinuous. The diving suit had changed with her, reshaping into something sleek and dark over her upper body, leaving her arms free, her shoulders strong, and her new scales gleaming from the waist down. Her hair floated around her in a dark halo, touched by the harp’s blue-green light.
She looked, Hunter had to admit, magnificent.
This was exactly the problem.
Darya also realized it. She turned toward the camera, struck a pose in the middle of an ancient cursed chamber, and gave him the smile she usually reserved for cliffs, explosions, and women who were very bad ideas.
“Hunter~”
“Yes.”
“You like momma's new look?”
“Please don't talk like that on camera. You sound like an offbrand camgirl.”
Darya paused.
Then pouted.
“I was just going to say I rock this new look. Geez.”
“Haaa.”
At first Hunter was too buisy sighing that he did not realize anything had changed beyond the immediate, obvious catastrophe of his mother becoming half fish. Then movement only flickered at the edge of the camera feed.
Far beyond the doorway, in the blue shadows of the ruins, something moved.
Then another shape.
And another.
Graceful silhouettes slipped between columns. Long hair streamed behind them. Fins flashed silver, violet, pearl, gold. They approached with cautious elegance, drawn by the harp’s lingering melody and Darya’s newly tolerable singing.
Hunter felt every hair along his spine rise.
“Oh no,” he said.
Darya turned.
The first mermaid emerged from the corridor like a dream deciding to be dangerous.
She was tall, poised, and elegant, with a deep blue tail and hair the color of polished bronze drifting around her face. Her expression was calm, unreadable, and far too pretty for Darya’s continued ability to make good decisions.
Two more appeared behind her.
One had a pale green tail, bright eyes, and a curious smile already tugging at her lips. Another, sharp-featured and silver-scaled, watched the scene with the slow, dawning concern of someone witnessing a social disaster from too close a distance.
More hovered farther back, forming a loose half-circle in the water.
Hunter closed his eyes.
“Mission compromised,” he whispered.
Darya’s brain, which had survived curses, collapsing ruins, hostile smugglers, cliff jumps, and one regrettable evening involving a stolen ceremonial cannon, met the sight of actual beautiful mermaids and immediately abandoned its post.
Her posture changed.
It was instant.
One moment, she was an adventurer assessing a magical situation.
The next, she was arching her back, tilting her chin, letting her hair drift around her like she had personally invented underwater allure.
Hunter knew that pose.
He had seen that pose in taverns, casinos, hidden temples, royal banquets, and once during a hostage negotiation that had become significantly more complicated afterward.
“No,” he said into the microphone. “Mom. Don't...”
Darya however swept one hand through the water, tail curling beneath her in a glittering crescent.
“Ah,” she said, voice low and dramatic, “so the ocean finally sends its loveliest maidens to greet their new goddess mermaid personally.”
The mermaids stared.
The bronze-haired one blinked once.
The green-tailed one’s eyebrows rose.
The silver-scaled one looked down and slightly to the side, as if seeking strength from the seabed.
Hunter put his face in one paw.
“You were a mermaid for literally ten seconds.”
Darya ignored him entirely.
The poised mermaid folded her arms. “You are not our goddess.”
“Not yet,” Darya said smoothly.
Hunter made a sound like a kettle losing hope.
The green-tailed mermaid covered her mouth. It might have been laughter. It might have been secondhand embarrassment trying to escape.
The silver-scaled mermaid glanced at the others with a helpless look that said, Are we all seeing this?
They were.
Unfortunately, Darya saw their attention as encouragement.
She placed one hand over her heart and angled the harp in the other like a prop in a painting titled Woman Making Everything Worse.
“I am Darya Safira,” she declared. “Explorer. Treasure hunter. Newly crowned jewel of the deep. And if any of you need a guide to the mysteries of the surface world, I am prepared to offer extremely personal instruction.”
Several mermaids visibly stiffened.
One in the back slowly hid behind a column.
Hunter’s voice crackled through the chamber speaker. “She means maps.”
Darya smiled wider. “Among other things.”
“Maps,” Hunter repeated, louder.
The bronze-haired mermaid looked toward the small camera strapped to Darya’s shoulder. “Is that voice attached to you?”
Darya brightened at once. “That is my son, Sir Hunter. Strategist, scholar, tactical genius, professional worrier, and the only reason I have survived several of my best ideas.”
Hunter lowered his ears, but only slightly. “That is not inaccurate.”
“He is adorable when dry.”
“I am always dry by choice.”
“Now,” Darya said, her voice low and honeyed and far too proud of itself, “I understand that first impressions are important. And since the harp has clearly blessed me with a voice worthy of the sea…”
Hunter’s eyes widened.
“No.”
Darya lifted the harp.
Several mermaids stiffened.
“No no no,” Hunter said, sitting up straighter. “Mom. Please. Think about this.”
Darya smiled directly at the gathered mermaids.
“I shall sing for you.”
The silence that followed was immediate and profound.
Then Darya had already begun to sing.
...
To be fair, the harp helped.
That was the most generous thing Hunter could say about it.
The melody coming from the strings was beautiful, soft and shimmering, curling through the drowned chamber like moonlight sinking through waves. It wrapped around Darya’s voice and dragged it, by force if necessary, into something resembling music.
Resembling.
Darya sang with complete confidence. That was the problem. She had the stage presence of a woman serenading a balcony under the stars and the vocal instincts of someone wrestling a decorative goose.
The magic had improved her. It had absolutely improved her.
It had raised her from “everyone leave the area immediately” to “someone should gently take the microphone away.”
Unfortunately, Darya seemed to interpret this as an overwhelming success.
She floated backward, one hand across her chest, the other holding the harp as she sang to the entire group. Her tail swayed in an elegant rhythm. Her hair drifted around her face. Her eyes half-lidded with self-assured charm.
It was, visually, devastating.
Vocally, it was a hostage situation.
The mermaids endured it with admirable grace.
One of them kept her expression composed, though one eye twitched once with tragic dignity.
Another ones hands remained pressed over her mouth. Her eyes were bright with the effort of not making a sound.
The silver-tailed mermaid stared at a point somewhere over Darya’s shoulder, her face polite, still, and empty in the way people became when their souls temporarily stepped outside to get air.
Two mermaids in the back exchanged a look of such intense shared discomfort that Hunter felt it through the tablet.
Darya, tragically, noticed none of this.
She finished a line with a flourish, spun once in the water, and gave the girls a smoldering look.
Then winked.
Hunter lowered his face into one paw.
The song continued. The harp shimmered. The chamber glowed. And even the mermaids cringed.
Darya interpreted the entire atmosphere as romantic tension.
Finally, after one particularly dramatic note that the harp nearly managed to save, the green tailed one raised one hand.
“Darya Safira, that was your name, right?”
Darya stopped at once, delighted by the use of her full name. “Yes?”
The girls face was gentle and controlled. Heroic, in its way.
“Your enthusiasm honors the sea.” she declared. “And your confidence is… remarkable.”
Darya placed a hand over her heart. “Thank you. I try to be memorable.”
“You are.”
Several mermaids nodded with the hollow unity of survivors.
Thaleia took another careful breath.
“However, perhaps it would be best if you stopped singing for now.”
The words entered the water like a mercy.
Darya blinked.
Then blinked again.
For a moment, Hunter had hope.
It was small, fragile hope. The kind that had no business existing after all he had seen today. But there it was. Maybe Darya would understand. Maybe she would notice the collective social agony surrounding her. Maybe she would calmly set down the harp and engage with the trial like a functional adult.
Darya smiled. “So you are the one giving me the trial now?”
Hunter went still.
“No,” he said softly. “No, don’t connect those thoughts. This clearly isn't...”
Darya drifted closer to the brave green tailed girl, all shining scales and shameless confidence. “Because I should warn you, beautiful, I am single and absolutely ready for any trial any girl here wants to give me.”
The mermaids froze.
The entire temple seemed to freeze with them.
Hunter sighed and turned off the recording. Then started an entirely new one, because he knew that a lot of flirting was about to happen.
He was no longer sure when Darya would leave them behind. Judging by the way she looked at the gathered mermaids, it would not be soon. Judging by the way some of them had begun watching her with horrified curiosity, it might not even be entirely her decision.
Still, if he was trapped on a damp inflatable boat while his mother flirted with an underwater civilization, he might as well make enough money to fund the next expedition.
Hunter sighed into the microphone.
“Someone out there will buy this,” he said. “Probably.”
Below him, Darya smiled at a chamber full of cringing mermaids and prepared to make things worse.
Once again, the mission that went about as successful as you can expect a mission to go when Darya is involved.