James Moriarty - The Devil's Descendant

Chapter 33

Sherlock paced around the tank where he could see, the other lights activating to reveal many more of the tanks filled with a siren in each. Each one of them glared at Sherlock, his stunning sharp features taking them all by surprise. They had never seen anyone so icy, they had seen James in the flesh once, and a fake one on several other occasions.

“More of them.” Aella gasped in shock, looking around to see all of the others. 

“These are your family, Aella. These are us. You need to become one of us,”
“Why? I have a life on land, your life is in the sea,”

“Not anymore. Not when she is around, she will be hunting us down.”

Aella was being listened to by everyone in the room, she needed peace and quiet to talk one on one with her sister. 

“Can you all go and find my dad, I need to sort this out, please,”

“Okay,” they all went away, realising that she needed some time to deal with this pain, the pain of having to let her sister know she was going to be killed. 

Taking the rifle in her hand, she displayed it in front of her sister who longed to hold the murderous weapon in her hands. 

“This has to be done, you need to know things before I can get you to help me,”

“What do you need help with? For so long you have not tried to come for me, Aella,”

“How do you expect me to find you, to find you in the middle of the vast expanse of sea I know barely anything about.” 

Aella paced around the rims of the tanks, her hands meeting the hands of all the other sirens who were being kept in the tanks, their eyes longing o be set free from this imprisonment.

“I know you, you are in love,” Aimee rose from her tank, grabbing hold of the bars above to get some oxygen instead of the water. “It’s been so long since I last saw you, you still look just like me.”

As she walked back around, she put her hand over the top of the tank, stroking the scale of her hands, the webs between her fingers, like the feet of a duck, or another kind of bird that goes in the water.

“Hunted…” Aella let her hand go from her sisters, bringing it to the outside of the tank. “You will be hunted.”

“What else did you expect? Unless she dies, there is no chance for me to be able to keep the rest of us safe, the world will know. We will be killed, hunted for. I expect that’s why you have the rifle,”

“No.” 

There was no reason for Aella to hunt Aimee’s kind, she was her sister, killing her siren family seemed out of the question.

“I want nothing to do with the hunt of your kind,”
“Our kind!” 

“Our kind. Yes. I forget that sometimes we belong to that kind, the siren family. Who did we get that from?”

“Our mother. How is she?”

Aella looked into her densely populated, emotionless eyes. “She is dead. She died a few months ago,”

“How did she die?” Aimee longed to know the answer, rapidly responding to her sister for she needed to know.

“A bomb,” pausing to take her time to phrase the incident, she brought her hand back up to the glass as a reassurance. “A bomb took her life away.”

“Who did it, Aella?” 

When Aella thought about what had happened, it only hit her that it was her father who killed her mother. There was no point in hiding it anymore, her father murdered her mother for no apparent reason. Other than the greed to get back at Mycroft Holmes, who was also dying. Telling her sister that Moriarty, their father, had killed their mother would only make her want to kill him even more. What was she supposed to do? Lie? Of course, there was no other way, unless there was something she wanted her father to die for.