Bound by the Siren’s Coin

The Coin in the Spring

It could be worth thousands, she thought.

A bug-stained wooden sign near the entrance warned visitors not to swim into the darker sections of the run.

STRONG CURRENT. NATURAL CAVES. STAY WITHIN MARKED AREA.

Uma had seen the photos before coming to Florida—clear blue water, limestone shelves, cypress roots curling into the banks like wrinkly fingers—but the real thing still caught her off guard.

It was bright and inviting, like someone had cut a piece of sky out and dropped it into the earth.

The spring looked unreal in the late afternoon light. It resembled crystal glass tinged with green and blue hues.

Uma sat on the weathered dock with her sandals kicked off beside her. Around her, families laughed, children splashed, and a group of college girls took turns filming one another at the rope swing.

Spanish moss hung lazily overhead. Somewhere farther back on the trail, she could hear the squeak of bicycle tires and the hum of cicadas beginning to rise with the heat.

This was exactly why she had come to the springs, to feel an escape from her routine day to day.

The last year of her life had felt like a confined, clinical room with no windows.

She spent many nights falling asleep with her phone still in her hand and waking up with a familiar hollow ache in her chest. Her mother called it a phase, and that burnout is inevitable when you're succeeding at something.

Uma privately called it the feeling of becoming a ghost in her own life and a slave to spreadsheets.

So she had taken four days off, driven inland, rented a little cabin outside Orlando, and promised herself she would stop thinking so much.

At the springs, she stood up from the dock, and walked to the edge of it, peering into the water.

The limestone shelf below was visible in startling detail. Silver fish flickered through beams of light. The shallows were warm where the sun reached them, but the center of the spring held a colder blue, ancient and untouched.

There was something shining down there. At first she thought it was a bottle cap or a trick of sunlight against stone, but when she shifted, it flashed again—small, round, and unmistakably gold.

It could be worth thousands. She thought.

Uma glanced toward the families nearby. No one seemed to notice, so she took a breath and dove down.

The water closed over her with shocking clarity. The sounds above dissolved at once into a soft, suspended hush.

She kicked downward, long hair trailing behind her, and reached toward the glint caught in a crack of limestone near a tangle of roots.

It was a beautiful golden coin. Unmistakably old, eye catching and expensive looking.

Even underwater it glimmered. The coin was worn around the edges and there was a tiny hole punched near the top where a thin chain had been threaded through. A small red gem she couldn't identify was embedded in the middle.

The coin looked less like old money and more like something someone had once worn against their skin.

Only then did she see the way it had been fixed into the stone.

Uma wrapped her fingers around it and pulled when she did, the temperature dropped so fast it hurt.

Her lungs clenched and the sunlight seemed to dim.

For one impossible second she had the sickening sensation that the water beneath her moved and something brushed her wrist.

Then a man's voice, deep and distant as if carried through miles of sea, moved through her bones.

Crush it now.

Uma jerked hard enough to scrape her knee on the stone. A surge of panic hit her all at once. She kicked upward, the jagged coin still in her fist, chest burning now for real.

She broke the surface with a gasp.

The dock, the swimmers, the families and the rope swing—they were all still there.

But the noise had gone strange.

The laughter around the spring sounded muted, stretched thin, as though she were hearing it from underwater still. She shoved wet hair out of her face, coughing once, and looked toward the bank.

A man stood knee-deep in the water where no one had been standing a moment before.

He was young. Mid-twenties, maybe. Reddish brown hair tied back at his nape with a strip of weathered leather. He had broad shoulders and sun-browned skin beneath a salt-faded open collar shirt that looked old in a way costumes never quite managed. A knife hung at his belt, though the belt itself had half dissolved into shadow around the edges.

He looked solid until the light shifted through him. His eyes met hers at once and they held relief rather than confusion.

Uma forgot to breathe. He stared at the coin in her hand, then at her face, and something in his expression broke open with such raw, impossible feeling that it made her heart stutter.

When he spoke, his voice was low and roughened by an accent time had sanded into something softer.

“You took it from the stone.”

Uma could only stare at the glow his body he emitted.

A child shrieked with laughter somewhere to her left. Two women floated past on bright tubes, arguing about which sunscreen brands they're no longer buying.

Neither of them even glanced at them.

Her stomach dropped.

“No,” she said under her breath. “No, no, no.”

The man took one step closer through the water.

Ripples spread outward from his body, but the sunlight passed through him like glass.

“You can hear me,” he said.

Uma backed towards a tree so fast she nearly slipped. “Am I dead?”

A tired smile touched his mouth.

“I hope not,” he said. “But if you can see me, then something has gone very wrong.”

The Man in the Water

Uma got out of the spring shaking with the brittle, furious focus of someone refusing to have a breakdown in public. She pricked at her skin and said waved to other tourists, and they promptly returned hers with a friendly wave.

Everything felt normal.

She wrapped herself in a towel, shoved her feet into her sandals, and walked toward the trail with the coin tucked inside a hidden pocket in her swimsuit.

The man followed her.

Or rather, he appeared beside her in intervals—near the cypress knees, then beneath the shade of a palmetto, then leaning against the split-rail fence near the parking lot.

He was simply there, always within sight, as if the world refused to let him stray too far from her once she had taken the coin.

Uma reached her rental car and yanked open the driver’s side door. “Stop doing that.”

He stood on the other side of the hood, damp shirt shifting slightly in a breeze she could not feel.

“Doing what?”

“Following me.”

“This spring is my home.”

“You know what I mean.”

His gaze dropped to where the coin sat on her left waist. “You’re keeping it.”

Uma looked down.

She pulled out the coin with her hand.

The coin rested in her palm, warm now despite the spring. One face had been rubbed nearly smooth, but the other still held traces of a stamped crest and thin, curling letters she didn’t recognize. Spanish, maybe, possibly older.

It was stunning in an unsettling way.

“You should never have taken it from the stone,” the man said.

“What are you, a park ranger cosplaying as a pirate?” She then reached her arm out to touch his arm and sure enough her hand glided through as if nothing was there.

She gulped at the confirmation.

Uma flagged a nearby family and one of the older women in the group promptly walked over to the car. As soon as she walked over to where the man was she passed right through him.

“Do you need help with something, love?" The woman asked with a nurturing tone, completely oblivious to the man that stood besides her.

At the same time, the man continued to interact. His brows drew together slightly

“Cosplaying as a pirate? What are you talking about? What is this cosplaying?”

“You have a weird knife and you look like you walked out of a shipwreck.”

The older lady raised her eyebrows at Uma's words.

“Excuse me? I don't understand.”

Uma waved off the offended old woman with an apology, leaving her alone with the man once more.

Then, unexpectedly, he laughed.

It was brief, disbelieving, and so human that it made her chest tighten worse than if he’d stayed eerie. For a moment he looked less like an apparition and more like a man who’d forgotten himself.

“You’ve a fast tongue, love.” he said.

Uma leaned one hand on the open car door and swallowed hard. “You’re a ghost.”

“Sure, you can say that.” he said.

She looked around the parking lot. A middle-aged couple hauled a cooler from their SUV. A ranger drove slowly past in a green utility cart. Uma found it odd that no one noticed the dead man standing ten feet away from her in clothes that belonged three hundred years in the past.

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

The easy flicker of humor disappeared so quickly it might never have been there.

“I want you to understand what you’ve done,” he said. “That coin was sealed.”

Uma stared at him.

“Who are you?” she asked after a moment.

He straightened slightly, the reflex so ingrained it felt old-fashioned in a way she couldn’t name.

“Callan Kai,” he said. “Navigator aboard the Cutlass Wren.”

The name landed in her mind with immediate weight. It sounded like salt and gunpowder and old maps spread over a captain’s table.

Uma wet her lips. “Navigator.”

“A useful man to have until everyone starts dying.”

He glanced toward the direction of the spring. Even from here, through the trees, the water seemed to hold its own kind of light.

“This was not open country in my time,” he said. “There were only marsh, river, hammocks thick as walls, and water hidden under the green. Old Florida was not made for the careless and it swallowed men as easily as the sea.”

Something in his voice changed when he said it.

Uma looked back at the shimmering object in her hand.

“How did you end up there?”

Callan’s gaze lifted to hers. For the first time, he looked uncertain.

Then he said, “Sirens.”

Uma blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“You heard me.”

His mouth twitched again, faintly.

The sun moved lower through the trees, and the parking lot went briefly gold around the edges. A strange ache moved through her, sudden and disorienting, like the beginning of a fainting spell. The experience came with the smell of brine and a woman’s song rising over black water.

Uma caught the side mirror of the car.

Callan had gone very still.

“You felt that,” he said.

It wasn’t a question.

Uma slowly nodded.

His eyes dropped to the coin.

“Then it’s worse than I thought.”

The Navigator of the Cutlass Wren

Feeling nauseous, she promptly left the springs, and drove off to the cabin.

The last thing she wanted was to spend her vacation at the hospital.

At first, her instinct was to immediately return the coin to its place and end whatever portal she had opened with Callan, but her legs were too overworked to make the long dive.

She promised she would return it as soon as she had recovered her energy.

Uma approached the cabin. It was a small rental tucked behind a stand of trees off a quiet road, close enough to the springs to feel secluded but far enough from the tourist traffic to let the night sound like real Florida—insects and palm fronds whispering in heavy warm air.

The porch sagged slightly at one corner. The kitchen smelled faintly of old coffee and wood polish.

The moment Uma crossed the threshold, Callan appeared near the window like he belonged to the background.

He looked around the room with open curiosity.

“These dwellings have become very square.”

Uma dropped her keys onto the kitchen counter with more force than necessary.

“You’re adjusting weirdly well.”

“I’ve stirred before,” he said. “Briefly. But not like this.”

She turned. “What does that mean?”

“When that seal held, I was buried with it.”

A little cold shiver ran through her.

“You’re talking like you already know how this ends.”

He didn’t answer immediately. His gaze moved across the room—to the cheap lamp, the refrigerator and the framed tourist print of oranges hanging over the small table.

When he looked back at her, his face was composed again, but there was a seriousness in it she hadn’t noticed before.

“Enough to know this will end badly if you keep it,” he said.

Uma set the coin on the table between them.

“You said you stirred,” she said. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning I have been dead a very long while, and the coin is cursed enough to make that inconvenient for us both.”

There it was again—that dry, almost reluctant humor.

Uma sat across from him, still loopy and exhausted, and tried to decide whether exhaustion had finally pushed her into hallucination.

Then Uma said, “Tell me what happened.”

Callan looked down at the coin.

For a moment she thought he would refuse. Instead he reached toward it, fingers hovering just above the surface without touching, as though something prevented him from doing so.

“The Cutlass Wren ran goods where the coast grew thin and dangerous,” he said.

“Gold when we had it, silver when we stole it, spices, guns, rum, cloth. Whatever could be taken and carried. The ports were watched more heavily by then. So men moved inland when they were clever enough. Rivers, hidden inlets, springs if they knew the land well enough or had guides willing to sell it.”

Uma felt the truth of it humming underneath.

Florida in those days, as she recalled from history classes, were about Spanish claims, shifting flags, smugglers, pirates, privateers, and war.

“I kept the charts,” he continued.

“Depths, channels, storms. Stars when there were stars and instinct when there were none. A navigator is only loved until the ship is lost. Then everyone remembers they needed someone to blame.”

Uma rested her elbows on the table. “What happened?”

For the first time, a flash of anger crossed his face.

“We heard the infernal singing three nights north of the Keys,” Callan said. “Something that knew exactly what each of us most wanted to hear.”

Uma’s pulse picked up.

“What did you hear?”

He looked at her, and there was such terrible calm in his eyes that it hollowed her out.

“Home,” he said.

The word landed with frightening force.

Callan looked away first.

“The captain changed course before dawn. Said we would hide a portion of the haul inland until pursuit passed. We came by river and run, deeper into green water than any of us liked. Men disappear easily in Florida.”

His voice lowered.

“There was fighting and fear. The sort that makes stupid men cruel and miscalculating.”

“We found this spring at dusk. One of the crew said he heard singing under the water. Another swore he saw women below the stone.”

“The sirens,” Uma whispered.

Callan gave a small nod.

“I did not believe him. Then I heard it myself.”

Something moved behind his expression then.

“I took the treasure you hold from the captain’s share to throw it back,” he said.

“Gold draws out greed. I thought if I offered one piece, perhaps whatever followed us would be satisfied.”

Uma stared.

“It was foolish.”

His gaze caught hers and a sting of feeling rose unexpectedly in her throat.

“What happened after that?”

He looked toward the dark window, where her reflection and his almost overlapped.

“The men saw me take it and thought I meant to steal from them,” he said. “But by then nothing aboard the ship was right. The singing had already gotten into them.”

Uma stilled.

“It wasn’t just sound,” he said. “Their wretched magic pulled at you. Made you suspicious and angry, and convinced everyone beside you had decided to betray you.”

Uma felt a chill creep up her arms.

“Men who had sailed together for years turned on each other in the span of an hour,” he said.

Callan’s eyes dropped to the coin.

“I thought I understood what they wanted.”

Uma’s voice softened. “The gold.”

“Aye,” he said. “That’s what it does, it makes you think you can bargain your way out of it.”

“So I took the finest coin we had and went to throw it into the spring before I was betrayed by my own men. To them, I was throwing away fortune in the middle of madness,” he said.

“And the song made sure they believed it.”

Uma’s fingers tightened slightly around the coin.

“But it's a worse outcome I fear,” Callan added. “One of those wenches had already chosen me.”

The words landed heavier than anything else.

Uma swallowed. “Chosen you how?”

Callan’s expression tightened, something uneasy slipping through.

“I thought if I gave the coin, it would be enough to satisfy them,” he went on. “That whatever wanted us would take the gold and leave the rest.”

“But she didn’t want the gold. She wanted you,” Uma said.

Callan finally looked at her.

“Aye.”

The word barely held together.

“When I threw it,” he said, “I thought I was ending it. Absurd to think their cursed song wouldn't affect me.”

His gaze dropped to the coin in her hand.

“She used it instead.”

Uma’s chest tightened. “Used it how?”

“I presume as a tether,” he said.

His eyes flicked to the coin.

“After, I discovered that the men who survived the incident recorded people missing in droves,” he added.

“The fools of the modern day were trying to retrieve the coin. Each time they came, I stirred upon the earth again and watched the sirens claim them, one after another.”

Uma felt her grip tighten unconsciously.

“The ones who lived long enough to understand what they were dealing with stopped trying to take it,” he added.

“They sealed it instead.”

Her voice came out quieter now.

“And I pulled it out.”

“Yes,” he said, furrowing his eyebrows.

“You broke the seal.”

The Shape of the Curse

That night, Uma fell into a nightmare. She dreamed with the physical, suffocating certainty of being beneath a black surface while moon slivers broke in shards overhead.

The deck pitched under her bare feet and rope burned across her palms. Men shouted in accents she almost understood. Somewhere off the port side, voices sang and danced over the water—sweet at first, then guttural.

She turned and saw Callan on the deck of what she assumed was the Cutlass Wren.

His hands spread over a chart, mouth tight with concentration.

Then the scene glitched and transformed into dark trees, brackish water and light golden smeared across cypress trunks.

She found herself at the spring.

Men argued near the bank, guns drawn, fear turning them into violent fury. The coin was resting in the same spot she found it.

A woman’s voice swam upwards from below the limestone like a distorted lullaby.

And then she saw monstrous hands on him that dragged him to the bottom.

Uma woke with a violent gasp. Her cabin room was dark except for the sounds of the air conditioning and the spill of moonlight through the horizontal blinds. Her sheets were tangled around her ankles.

Callan hovered the foot of the bed.

“You drowned,” she whispered.

His face changed and he took one step forward.

“The coin is sharing too much,” he said.

Uma pushed herself upright, pressing a hand to her chest. “I saw it.”

She looked down at her hand. In sleep, she had somehow curled her fingers around the coin where it hung against her shirt.

“What exactly does it do?” she asked.

Callan was silent for a moment.

Then he said, “From what I understand, whoever holds it is intertwined with it, for as long as my signature remains.”

Uma slowly raised her eyes to his.

“So if I return it?”

“At first I thought that might be enough, because at one point in time it was the solution. But I'm afraid its different this time around.” he said.

Somewhere between the spring and this room, the impossible had become personal. Callan came closer, stopping beside the bed. He looked half made of bronze and gold, slightly translucent and every line of him rugged and softened at once.

“When it lay sealed in the limestone, I was finally buried with it,” he said. “But once you pulled it free, the old resting place broke, so throwing it back will not mend it.”

Uma stared at him.

“This coin was not meant to save me, I believe it was meant to keep something. I'd like to believe whatever plans the wicked siren had in mind failed. But once the seal broke, it chose an anchor.”

Uma’s mouth went dry. “Me.”

He nodded.

“So I'm dying too.”

“In a way.”

Then, more certain, “You’re dreaming my death.”

Fear moved through her in a cold, clean line.

“Callan.”

“The spring keeps what binds itself to it,” he said at last.

“The longer the coin stays away, the stronger the sound of the call.”

It comes through dreams first, then waking thoughts and then the water starts to feel more like home than land.”

Uma let out a thin laugh that held no humor at all. “What so I'll turn into a siren or something?”

“You’re taking this a lot better than I can possibly explain.”

Moments later, his expression dimmed.

“The red stone,” he said. “That is the heart of it all, the gold only carries it.”

Uma looked at the coin in her hand.

“What happens if the stone breaks?”

For the first time since she had met him, he looked truly afraid.

“Then the tether ends.”

“With you."

His voice, when it came, was low enough to ache.

“Naturally, Uma.”

The Siren’s Debt

By sunrise, she was worse. The water called to her all day. She spent more time in near the sink and in the shower. Everywhere the substance lived had become layered, as if another frequency waited under the world and only she could hear it now.

Callan stayed with her throughout the night.

He told her about old Florida before roads cut it apart, when inland springs were whispered over like holy sites or traps depending on who was speaking.

Spanish men had marked some waters on maps and left others blank on purpose.

Native paths wound through hammocks and pine flatwoods where foreigners vanished easily.

Pirates and smugglers used river mouths to transport goods, and that everyone stole from everyone.

He told her the Cutlass Wren had been fast and good in most weather, but ugly during rough weather. Because of that, on some nights the men sang badly on purpose because it felt better than listening to the ocean's song.

He told her no one should trust a beautiful sound on dark water. When she asked if he had someone waiting for him during his voyage, he looked at the window with such terrible stillness that she regretted it instantly.

“No,” he said. “Only the idea of one.”

That stayed with her.

“People think curses are always about hatred or resentment,” Callan murmured as they stood at the bank. “Most are not. Most begin as a vessel with nowhere proper to go.”

Uma looked at him and her fingers closed around the coin one last time.

“So putting it back won’t fix this,” she said.

Callan stood beside her in the morning light, half there and wholly present.

“Exactly.”

“Did anyone ever—”

She stopped.

He watched her.

Uma started again. “Did anyone ever keep it? Before me?”

For a long moment he said nothing.

Then: “A few.”

Her stomach turned.

“What happened?”

Callan looked toward the springs from the window.

“The sirens claimed them and each time the coin brought itself back to the bank. So it will return itself, eventually.”

He turned to her fully then, urgency breaking through every careful wall he’d kept around himself.

“That is why you must end it now. Not tomorrow and not after one more question. Now.”

Tears rose to her eyes so abruptly.

“This is insane,” she whispered. “I just met you yesterday.”

Callan’s mouth shifted like the truth hurt him.

“I left this world the moment my men turned on me.”

She stepped closer.

“I don’t want to do this,” she said.

His eyes closed briefly.

“You have to.”

Uma lifted her free hand.

Slowly, carefully, as if approaching a wild thing, she reached for his face, but her fingers passed through the conditioned air.

His hand came up and hovered over hers against his face, almost solid only for that moment, his thumb rough with a life he’d lived long before hers.

“Uma,” he said, and it was not her name this time so much as a surrender to it.

She laughed through the tears. “You ruined my vacation.”

A sound escaped him then—not quite a laugh, not quite grief.

“I'm sorry.”

They moved towards the back of the cabin.

Uma slammed the red stone against the limestone rocks.

After the first chuck, the blue center of the adjacent pond darkened by degrees until it looked less like depth and more like an opening.

Callan’s expression changed instantly.

“Back away.”

Uma did not move fast enough. She tried but the water had a louder voice.

Something trilled from below. Just one long, sweet note that passed through her body like relief.

Her foot slid toward the bank before she even knew she’d moved.

Callan appeared in front her at once.

“Do not listen to it,” he snapped.

The note rose into a melody.

Uma’s whole body went weak with longing so powerful it terrified her.

“Callan—”

“Look at me.”

She tried but the water had a louder voice.

Callan took her face in both hands, forcing her gaze to his, as much as he could as he could not touch her physical form. His outline flickered with strain, edges fraying like smoke in wind.

“Listen well,” he said, every word fierce now. “Whatever it promises you is a lie. You do not belong to the dead.”

Somewhere inside the song, she heard herself.

And then she looked at Callan.

Uma inhaled sharply, wrenched her gaze from the water, and looked down at the coin in her hand.

The gem glowed red at the center like a live ember, but it held a crack now from the first strike.

She spun toward the limestone ledge and struck the coin against it a second time.

The melody rose into something furious and inhuman.

On the third hit, it shattered.

The sound that followed was a pained wail and the song broke.

Her world rushed back all at once—frogs, wind, distant car tires, a child laughing somewhere far up the path.

The coin lost its luster and rusted almost instantly.

Callan staggered.

His hands slipped from her face.

“No,” Uma said.

He was already fading.

“Callan.”

He smiled at her then, and it was the saddest, sweetest thing she had ever seen.

“I heard home,” he said softly.

His form flickered.

Uma’s breath caught. He looked at her with a kind of peace that did not belong to the dead so much as to men who had finally stopped running.

“I think perhaps, it's not a place” he said, voice thinning now with distance, “it was always meant to be a person.”

The fading ceased.

Uma swallowed. “You’re still here.”

“Aye,” he said, almost disbelieving.

“The tether is gone,” Callan said slowly. “But whatever bound me to you… that wasn’t the same thing.”

He took a step forward.

“I thought…” he started, then stopped. “I thought I would be taken with it.”

“I heard home,” he repeated.

“But, it wasn’t the sea that was calling my name.”

The Spring After

Uma knew tourists would come tomorrow with snacks and floaties and cheap goggles. Someone would lose a sandal somewhere.

The more annoying crowd would complain the water was too cold.

They would continue to perpetuate the thought that Florida was weird and mean it affectionately.

The spring settled into itself as though nothing had happened.

And beneath all that, she knew that his world had existed.

Hidden channels, tales of adventure, and smugglers’ routes with pirate lore half true and half improved in the retelling.

Gold lost to scaly limestone and mangled roots.

A man named Callan Kai who had once charted it all.

Uma stood at the bank with her arms wrapped around herself and watched the black center of the spring hold its silence.

She did not hear any singing again.

“This place,” he said, “feels warmer than I remember.”

Uma nodded. “That’s because you’re not trapped in it anymore.”

“What happens now?” He asked.

Uma glanced toward the path, the parking lot, the world beyond the trees.

Then back at him.

The dock was busy. Children cannonballed into the larger banks. A sunburned man loudly explained to his family that pirates had definitely hidden treasure in springs “because why the hell not.” His teenage daughter rolled her eyes so hard.

“We figure it out,” she said.

You’ve reached the end of this story.

But not the end of the world it belongs to.

New stories appear regularly.

Stay curious.

© Petalstorm Press — Original Fiction
This story is part of the Petalstorm Press library.
Redistribution or reproduction without permission is prohibited.