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was the perfect place to keep her contained.
    “She looks so… sweet.” Chris shook his head, examining her through the window. “Are we sure she’s actually a monster?”
    “She had Kate convinced that she would tell us the secrets of the Universe if we crashed our boat into a cliff.” Blake crossed his arms, glaring at the siren. “She’s a monster, all right. She was in Kerberos because she sided with the Titans in the Second Rebellion. Don’t forget that while we’re questioning her.”
    “Speaking of,” Kate said, joining us and glancing at the siren. “How exactly are we going to question her?”
    “We’re going to go in there and use enough gray energy on her that she’s confused enough to answer our questions without a second thought,” Chris said. “Did the siren song mash up your brain or something? Because that was all part of our original plan.”
    “But when we came up with the plan, we weren’t counting on our hostage being a siren ,” Kate pointed out. “To get information from her, we need to be able to hear her. Which means talking to her without the earplugs and muffs on. Which means—”
    “We can’t talk to her without getting hypnotized by her song,” Danielle interrupted. “So all of this was for nothing.”
    We were silent as the reality of the situation sunk in. We’d done such a great job of capturing the siren. It was so easy… maybe too easy.
    But we’d gone through so much trouble to get her here. There had to be a solution to this problem.
    “Maybe it wasn’t all for nothing…” I said, an idea forming in my mind. “Kate, what about her song made it so hypnotizing? You said it was the tone and cadence of her voice, right?”
    “Yep.” Kate nodded. “We can’t let her talk to us. And we can’t ask her to write out her answers to our questions, because with her hands free, nothing would stop her from pulling off our earmuffs and forcing us to listen to her.”
    “So what should we do?” Blake asked, reaching for his gun. “Shoot her in the heart, and then wait for another monster to escape that we actually can question?”
    “We might not have to do that.” I eyed up his gun, relaxing when he let his hand fall away from it. “The siren’s voice is hypnotizing because of its tone and cadence—not because of what she’s saying. It’s the quality of her voice that makes people believe her. So… what if we took that away from her?”
    “How would we do that?” Danielle looked at me as if I were a complete idiot. “Unless you know a spell like the one Ursula used on Ariel in The Little Mermaid to take away her voice?”
    “Nothing that complicated.” I purposefully ignored how Danielle was making fun of me, since we all knew that real witches didn’t use spells. “But I have had the flu before. And as a singer, I know that the worst part about the flu is that it ruins my voice—sometimes for the entire month.”
    “And my brother has the flu right now…” Kate smiled, her eyes lighting up. “He’s so contagious that he spread it to everyone in my extended family who hadn’t gotten a flu shot. They’re calling him ‘Typhoid Steven.’”
    I looked through the glass at the siren, who was just beginning to stir, and said, “I think it’s safe to bet that they don’t give out flu shots in Kerberos.”

CHAPTER TEN
     
    It didn’t take Kate long to go to her house and come back with a plastic bag full of used tissues.
    “Gross.” I backed away when she got close with the bag, even though I’d had my flu shot.
    “I need to do this quick,” she said, putting on her earplugs and earmuffs. “I looked it up, and the flu virus will only remain active on these tissues for fifteen minutes. It took me five minutes to get here, so I have ten minutes to get that siren infected.”
    “ Five minutes?” Blake smirked. “Did you—the perfect rule-following student—speed?”
    Kate lifted the earmuff away from her ear. “What was that?” she