“I’ll be fine. Kill them.”

He rushed into battle while I slipped into Calliope’s room. I felt as though I’d stepped back into Cava’s castle. As in King Delphi’s throne room, gold adornments hung alongside pictures of the gods. She had a delicately carved dresser, desk, and bedframe made of dark wood. Silk blood-red sheets and thick blankets covered her bed. A gilded washstand, a pier glass, and chiffonier that looked like a set sat in a corner. It was all stunning but eclectic. Nothing really matched, making me wonder if these were pirated treasures of the slaughtered merchants built into her walls. Maybe Lorelei had tried to make this room resemble Calliope’s Mt. Olympus abode—although I had no idea what the homes there looked like. I checked every corner or crevice in case Calliope was hiding from the ruckus outside her room. But she wasn’t here.

Stepping back into the hallway, a flash of flesh whipped by. I caught the siren’s fist a heartbeat before she met my jawbone. Using the siren’s own momentum, I twisted her arm back over my shoulder and thrust down until I got the satisfying pop. She dropped to the floor, screaming, and I slammed my knee into her perfect nose, breaking it in a fine spray of blood.

“Stop playing with her,” Rylander called over his shoulder as he fought off two sirens. “Kill her.”

I rolled my eyes. Taking my dagger, I rammed it into her heart. “Happy?”

He grunted. The other two sirens now lay dead at his feet. We ran the length of the empty hall to the grand spiral staircase. Three sirens raced after us, two steps at a time.

I punched the first siren in the gut. She released a sharp hiss and collapsed, rolling back to the bottom of the stairs. My dagger lingered in the air, readying to meet the next opponent’s heart, when another siren sprung on me from behind. Where had she come from? Under her immense weight, I somersaulted, and we crashed into the third pursuer, landing in a tangled heap of limbs. My dagger skittered out of reach on the smooth tiled floor.

Scrambling toward my weapon, I felt a jerk at my heels. A siren’s poisonous claws scraped my boot, climbing up the laces to jab me with poison-coated claws through my trousers. The toxin would kill me within seconds. With my free leg I kicked her head. The first smack disoriented her, the second set me free. I crawled another few feet and got my fingers around the dagger’s hilt. One of the fallen sirens pinned my lower body, but I flipped under her and drove my blade into her chest. She fell off me, dead before she hit the ground.

“Watch out!” Rylander screamed from above.