When Amanda first awoke she wasn’t sure where she was. But it wasn’t the first time in her life that had happened so she didn’t panic. At least she didn’t feel hungover. For a moment she just lay there looking up at the stars.

She glanced to her side and saw Sirius breathing deeply and lying there on top of most of the sheets, apart from one blanket that was on top of him. Wasn’t he cold with only the one blanket? Then the entire night came flooding back to her. The sirens, the cold, Sirius rescuing her, and if she wasn’t mistaken he had done it twice. The first time when he’d stopped her going in the water. She wasn’t sure how he had done that. And the second time by getting her warm. She knew the signs of hypothermia but her brain had gotten so addled from the effects of it that she hadn’t even registered how much danger she had been in.

She sat up and moved some of the extra blankets over Sirius. She was well and truly warmed up now. She didn’t need so many of them. She wasn’t sure what the time was, if it was morning or the middle of the night but she didn’t feel like getting up just yet. She lay back down and looked up at the stars again.

They weren’t real stars. They were those glow-in the dark stick on ones that kids sometimes plastered all over their ceilings to make them look like the night sky. They had the five points and everything but rather than being randomly scattered they’d been placed in specific patterns and Amanda knew just enough of the night sky to know that this ceiling had been designed to match it, or at least some of it, as much as could be fit in. She could see the southern cross and Orion’s belt, along with the rest of Orion. She remembered vaguely that one of the stars around that part of the sky was called Sirius, although she wasn’t sure which one.

Beside her, Sirius stirred softly in his sleep. She glanced over at him. He wasn’t wearing his coat, just a black tank top and his bare and muscled shoulders were sticking out the top of the sheets. On his back, poking out the edges of his shirt, she could just make out the tips of what looked like long-faded scars. She reached out a finger hesitantly to touch him and then drew it back before she reached him.

He shifted in his sleep and then seemed to mumble something. Amanda took out her earplugs, sat them on the nightstand by the bed, and then leaned in closer trying to hear if he was saying anything. His brows were furrowed and his breathing pace had increased.

“Don’t,” he mumbled.

Was he having a bad dream? Should she wake him.

“Don’t touch her.” His words were barely audible.

“Sirius?” she whispered.

“Please…”

Amanda reached out a hand and gently touched him on the shoulder. “Sirius?”

His reaction was instantaneous and almost violent. He bolted upright and then flattened himself against the back wall with a thud, hands up as if ready to fight. He looked around the room with wild eyes. When his gaze finally fell on Amanda, who had swiftly drawn her hand back in surprise, he breathed out an audible sigh of relief.

“Oh. Sorry,” he told her. He took out his own earplugs and put them on the other nightstand, next to a stack of books.

She eyed him carefully. “Bad dream?” she asked.

Another sigh, softer this time. “Something like that.”

She didn’t probe any further. He sounded too much like he just wanted to brush the incident off.

He glanced around the room once more. She watched him as he visibly relaxed. She also spent a moment eyeing his pecs. Without his jacket on she could see a lot more of his form than she usually could and it was pretty well-toned. The sort of physique body-builders had and well out of her league. She suddenly felt very self conscious sitting there under the sheets in nothing but her bra and panties. She pulled the sheets up closer to her chest.

“How are you feeling?” he asked her.

“Alive,” she replied with a half-cocked smile. “Thanks to you. If I’m not mistaken you saved my life last night, twice in fact.”

He shook his head. “I almost didn’t catch you. Shiv had issues with his own earplugs and…” He rubbed his face with his hands. “It was luck that was all. Shit!”

He stared down at his hands and she suddenly realised they were still all ripped up from the rope. Boldly, and forgetting she was only in a bra, she reached out and took his hand. She turned it over. It didn’t look as bad as the blood had made it look last night but it still looked like it hurt. “You should get Patchie to heal that,” she told him.

Sirius shook his head. “Nah, it’s not so bad, and I can feel my fingers again. Patchie’s only good for the really bad stuff, otherwise the side effects can be worse than the original injury.”

She glanced up at his face to check if he was just trying to be tough or not but she quickly noticed where he eyes were looking and then she remembered what she was wearing and that the sheets weren’t covering her lacy pink bra. She quickly yanked the sheets back up.

He met her eyes with a startled look and then glanced away quickly. A deep blush crept its way onto his cheeks. “I should go get you some clothes,” he remarked, still not meeting her eyes.

She smiled. His reaction made her feel just a little less self conscious. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen her standing with her boobs out back at the Corpse Isles anyway. “Yeah, thanks,” she agreed. She tried not to smile too much though. She should pretend like she hadn’t noticed him looking at her, even though she had. She didn’t want to embarrass him after all, no matter how cute he looked when he was blushing.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

He got up and started to walk toward the door but when he was halfway there she asked, “I thought women couldn’t hear the sirens?”

He stopped and glanced back toward her. For a moment he seemed a little distracted and then he shook his head. “Yeah, they can’t.”

“Then how come I can?”

“I don’t know.” He stood there frowning for a bit and then he added, “There are a lot of rumours about sirens, some true, some not so true… but the thing is, that one wasn’t just a rumour. I’ve been on ships with women before where sailors were leaping overboard left and right and the woman couldn’t hear a thing.”

“How many woman have you known who can’t hear them?”

Sirius shook his head. “I dunno, admittedly not that many, but at least five I think, maybe more. I don’t know. And I’ve only ever met one man who couldn’t hear them.”

“Oh?”

“But he was old. I just thought he’d learned some trick or he was just faking it and using magic some way, I dunno.”

“So I’m special?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

She grimaced and said sadly, “The kind of special that gets you nearly drowned in the night.”

“Well at least you know now,” he replied, giving her a sympathetic look.

She gave him a soft smile.

He replied in kind. Then he said. “I’ll go get your clothes.”

“Thank you.”

After he left Amanda lay back down again. His bed was nice, much comfier than the one in her cabin, and wider, enough to comfortably fit the two of them. She glanced over to the spot beside her where he had slept. There was still an imprint of his body in the bed and it made her smile. Near death experience or not she could remember what it had felt like to have his arms around her. It had been nice. But as she lay there waiting for him to return reality crept up on her. What was she doing? She was supposed to be here getting the pegasus back, not romancing the captain, and yet… why the hell not? She could do both. Get the pegasus back home and then what? Run away to sea? The thought filled her with a sense of adventure she hadn’t quite felt in a long time, not since way back when her and her friend had found that chest of magic. She had been content and happy back home but this, this felt like flying.

She still hadn’t told him about her powers but maybe she was playing that worry up in her own mind? After all, he had given her her lighter back. Maybe she should just tell him what she was. It wasn’t like she was a normal firestarter either. There was no risk that she’d set the place on fire in her sleep, at least no anymore, not since… not like other firestarters. She was controlled now and efficient and all she really had to do was prove it. Prove it in a way that they wouldn’t be afraid of her, which she had to admit was kind of difficult because to most people fire was scary. But she had time, time in which she also needed to think of a way to deal with Michael and his boss or his boss’s boss, however high up the chain went. And that was the biggest problem really. She had no idea who these people really were other than that Sirius and Shiv seemed afraid of them. How did you fight back against an unknown enemy? With fire? With subterfuge? With a magic trick?

Her gaze drifted over to where Sirius’s coat was draped over a chair. She thought of all the vials that had been inside. Unknown but potentially useful magic. Her father had always told her there were two things to keep in mind when doing business with other people, know their wants and know their fears but whatever way you looked at it it was all about knowing people. And there was a third thing too, know theyself. So what did she want? The pegasus, and Sirius? Both. And what did she fear? She glanced at her hands. ‘Fire,’ whispered a voice in the back of her mind but she shook her head at herself. Not any more. She had seen the worst of what it could do and she had survived. There was nothing she could fear from it anymore, except… she glanced at the door. Judgment, she realised. She feared their judgment, just like the witches of old. They had been burned at the stake. Amanda remembered that much from history class. Redheads in particular and children born to parents with different coloured hair or eyes than their own. All singled out as witches by the humans, many set alight before their first birthday. She supposed it made sense that firestarters were one of the most feared powers.

She glanced over at Sirius's coat again. So easy to grab, to search through, to find something useful. But also risky. It might help her save the pegasus from who really knew what fate but it could cost her the other things, both Sirius and the crew’s friendship, and earn her their judgment instead. Two for one. It was a bad gamble. No, if she was going to solve this problem she had to do it honestly. So she kept her hands to herself and tried to distract herself by looking at other things around the room. Namely the books on his bedside table.

She was surprised to see more astronomy books. How much information could there possibly be on the stars? Although as she glanced once more at the ceiling she supposed she shouldn’t really be that surprised. There were some older books too, classic adventure tales that Amanda recognised from her childhood, many of which had been written a century or two ago, but which were loved by people still and kept getting retold. She hadn’t read some of them in years though. There were also ones she didn’t recognise. So many books. Here were some more marine biology ones too.

She pulled one of the marine biology ones out. It was called, ‘Creatures of the Deep’ by A. J. Williams. It was a heavy book. She slid down in the middle of the bed, pulled her knees up and rested it so it lay back against her thighs. She flipped turned to the index and casually checked for the word ‘si-fon-oh-four’ or ‘si-phon-oh-phore’. She found an entry spelt ‘siphonophorae,’ which wasn’t quite as she had imagined it but it was close enough to what it had sounded like that it had to be the one. When she found the page she saw she was correct and she wondered at how on earth Sirius had even known how to pronounce it. She read a little about it and then saw mention of another creature she had never heard of, something called a barbeled dragonfish. It sounded cool so she turned to the page for it and was immediately presented with pictures of a scary looking eel.

“Eeugh,” she remarked aloud to no one in particular and then proceeded to read all about it. In a way all his books on fish weren’t that different from her pile of books on reptiles and it turned out the creatures of the sea could be just as cool as those of the desert.

She was so engrossed in the book that she didn’t realise Sirius had returned until he remarked, “What’s eeugh?”

“Oh, err, I was just reading your sea creatures book. The page on the siphonophorae and then that referenced something called the barbeled dragonfish so…” Holding the blankets over her chest as she moved she shifted upright so that he could see the page of the book she had been looking at.

“Ah, the barbled dragonfish. They’re quite neat aren’t they?”

“And creepy,” Amanda replied with a smile. Then she leaned forward and took the clothes he was holding out for her.

He turned away to give her some privacy. “Well, they’re deep swimmers so if you ever meet one face to face you probably have bigger problems.”

“How do they even find them if they’re so deep?” she wondered aloud as she pulled a shirt over her head.

“I don’t know.”

“I can’t imagine them diving that deep.”

“Technology?” Sirius suggested with a shrug. “I’ve heard the humans have some wacky stuff.”

“Mmm, hey what time is it? Do you know?” She slipped out of bed and pulled on some trousers and belt. He’d also brought her a waterproof jacket lined inside with fur. How cold was it where they were going?

He started to turn as if to look at her and then remembered himself. “A little after breakfast but not too late.”

“It’s alright, I’m dressed.”

“Up for some breakfast then?” He turned around and gave her a look over. She liked the way he looked at her.

“Famished,” she replied.