by Sarah Porter
Then—wait, what were they showing now? Dorian wheeled around. The mermaids sounded excited, and then Luce was speaking again, her voice raised in anger so that Dorian could suddenly hear every word: “He’s got no right to call himself that! Cala, it’s not sweet at all! It’s like he’s stealing our name!”
It took him an instant to understand what they were talking about. It became clearer with every sentence that followed, even with the mermaids’ voices coming through fragmented and murky.
Luce had seen him. She’d watched him marching on her behalf, fighting for her . . .
Furious or not, she had seen him.
Dorian’s nails were digging into his palms. His knees trembled, and he felt sick and wild and exhilarated. Even thousands of miles away he’d found a way to make her understand how much he missed her—whether she wanted to know that or not. It was as if he’d sent her the strangest love letter imaginable, a message cast out wildly into space, and against the most phenomenal odds she’d received it. With a sudden flash of vanity, Dorian remembered everything Theo said about how noble and determined he’d looked in that march. Good.
“You see now, Luce?” Dorian hissed out loud. “You see? You can be a general or whatever, but I’m with you, and I’m not going anywhere!”
He had no right to call himself Twice Lost? Dorian imagined arguing with Luce, pointing out that he’d been lost the first time when the mermaids killed his family—and the second time when he’d broken up with her. But he could only communicate with her in such awkward, indirect ways.
Well, then, he’d organize more protests, blog like crazy, put up a Twice Lost Humans page on every site he could—
His cell phone started ringing. Dorian’s first reaction was annoyance at the interruption—but what if it was something important? What if it was news about her?
“Hello?” His heart was pounding, and his tone came out strained and breathless.
“Is this, um, Dorian Hurst?” A shrill-sounding girl. Dorian was fairly sure the voice was new to him. Maybe it was one of those girls Theo said wanted to meet him so much? He half expected to catch the clamor of a party in the background: Theo calling out and music blaring and people giggling.
But no, everything was silent. Maybe, dimly, there was a kind of electrical buzz. “Yes?” Dorian asked curtly.
“Are you at home?” the girl’s voice inquired pointedly.
“Yeah. Who is—”
“Alone? Because I really need to talk to you without anybody interrupting.”
That seemed even weirder. Prickling chill brushed up Dorian’s back. “No one’s going to interrupt. What’s this about?”
“You used to be with Luce,” the girl pursued curiously. “Right? You were actually her boyfriend? In love with her, like you thought she was just so special?”
Nobody knew about that except for Zoe and Ben Ellison, and Dorian felt reasonably confident that neither of them would blab. Or, well, maybe some people in the government knew it too, but this girl sure wasn’t from the FBI. “How do you know about that?” Dorian demanded. There was a sudden fogginess in his head and he fought to clear it. “Who is this?”
The girl didn’t bother to answer his questions. “What did you see in her, anyway? She’s such a little freak, and she’s not even that pretty. Seriously? And she has hair like a boy. I can’t believe any guy would want to—”
“I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know what your goddamn problem is, but Luce is incredible. Just look at what she’s doing now!” Dorian growled—and suddenly he knew that he was making a mistake by letting the strange girl bait him into this conversation. He wasn’t thinking straight. Something was wrong here.
“I’m not really supposed to be getting into a big discussion with you,” the girl confided. “I’m just curious. I never understood why anybody thought Luce was anything. But actually I’m only supposed to—” He could hear her suck in a breath and there was a very slight sloshing noise.
Zoe and Ben were the only humans who knew about his relationship with Luce. But—
It was in his head before he knew what was happening. For a fraction of a second Dorian felt it even more than he heard it: an icy, crawling vapor that licked through his ear and then stroked slowly upward. Music, Dorian realized. The sensation was transmitted through a sharp soprano voice so cold and so powerful that it burned, wrapping up his thoughts and crippling them.
And, at the same time, carrying the promise. Dorian couldn’t have said exactly what was being promised, but he knew it was bright and thrilling and brutal. His skull was an immense black space full of rotating diamonds, every facet flashing eager signals at him. If he could only decipher the diamonds’ code in time, all power would be his, all strength . . .
Dorian was standing in the middle of the room with his phone pressed to his head, his body slowly spinning in sync with the diamonds. Any second now, he’d know exactly where the power was waiting for him—
And yet something inside him resisted. It was like there was a weight tugging in his chest working desperately to get his attention, right this moment, before it was too late. Telling him he knew what to do. Dorian squirmed irritably, wanting only to spin further into that brilliant music without any more interference. Then his eyes landed on the laptop screen. Right in the center a girl with short dark hair was screaming out in warning, her charcoal eyes wide and fervent.
Luce, Dorian thought in a strange burst of clarity. Her face broke through the freezing flash and darkness, broke through the singing that became a field of strobing lights. He did know what to do. He’d done it before, and it had saved his life.
Dorian felt his own voice in his chest as if it were a physical thing, some stubborn, heavy tool that he was grappling with both hands. His voice seemed to be caught somehow, and he strained to pull it up. And then, with a burst, he was singing.
Singing back to the mermaid on the telephone, her painfully lovely soprano battling with his rough sung shouts. Dorian echoed the pulsating, starry notes of her song as well as he could, fractured them, and then changed them into a song of his own. And with every note he sang, he could feel his voice seizing hers and tearing it out of his mind. He didn’t understand how the hell a mermaid could get hold of a phone, but he still recognized with absolutely lucidity what was happening.
An unknown mermaid had called him up, and she was working as hard as she could to murder him.
She didn’t know who she was messing with, did she? For a few moments she sang more loudly, trying to overwhelm him, and Dorian countered her, his voice battering its way up the scale into a horrible off-key yowl. This was actually starting to be fun.
The girl gave an abrupt gasping cry of frustration, and stopped singing. Dorian paused too. She wouldn’t catch him off-guard a second time.
“Stop doing that!” the mermaid barked.
Dorian laughed harshly at her, his mind still wild with the dregs of enchantment. His head felt like it was splitting open, but the pain wasn’t enough to erase his brutal delirium. He’d beaten death again, just the way he had when he’d first encountered Luce.
“You don’t understand!” the mermaid shrieked. Suddenly Dorian realized that she was genuinely panicked. “You don’t understand! I have to do it! I can’t just let you—” She started to sob.
And all at once Dorian knew who she was. He’d never met her, never heard her voice before this evening. But Luce had talked about her, and the sickening power-crazed exultation he’d felt from this particular mermaid’s enchantment revealed her essence, the very quick of her personality. Her song gave her away like a fingerprint. He knew her. Through and through.
“Hey, Anais,” Dorian said.
She immediately stopped crying with a shocked inhalation. For several seconds they were both completely silent apart from Dorian’s breathing.
“I know it’s you,” Dorian told her at last. But it still made no sense that she had a phone. And how did she get his number? “I recogniz
e you. Where are you?”
“Did Luce teach you how to sing back at us like that?” Anais finally burst out furiously. “I bet she did. And now—God, if you don’t die, how am I going to explain—”
“Explain to who?” Dorian asked roughly. This wasn’t the first time a mermaid had wanted him dead. “Anais, who told you to do this? Tell me where you are!”
The sloshing noise came again—and it seemed to have a faint echoing quality, as if she was calling from an enclosed space. “I can’t talk about it,” Anais finally whimpered. “If you tell people he’ll kill me.”
He. A human, then? A human had made Anais do this? It was the craziest thing he’d ever heard. “Can you get out?” Dorian asked. “Anais? Who’s going to kill you? Are you locked up somewhere?”
She hesitated. “I don’t even know where this is. And I can’t talk about it! I told you that!” There was another pause. “Can you at least pretend to be dead? Like, hide so he doesn’t find out that I couldn’t do it? I tried!”
“No,” Dorian said shortly.
“But I told you! He’ll probably kill me for real! You have to die, or—”
“Tell him I’m doing just fine, whoever he is. And tell him I’m going to keep fighting back.”
Anais burst out singing her death song again, but this time the melody came out stumbling and distraught and sloppy. Dorian sang back, opposing her. It was easy now. He was almost bored, but he knew he had to keep her on the phone for as long as he could. He had to find out who was behind this.
Anais moaned, raspy and despairing. Then the line went dead.
Dorian immediately hit Redial. He heard the phone ringing three times, followed by a weird buzzing sound. “Anais?”
No response. He called a second time, but now her phone didn’t ring at all. There was no busy signal, no recording telling him to try his call again. There was simply nothing.
Kathleen Lambert, Dorian thought suddenly. She’d died far away from here. Dorian had never met her, never even heard her name until after she was dead. And yet he was sure that he’d touched Kathleen’s death from the inside: a slick, starry, horribly frozen chamber. He’d almost shared that death with her.
And maybe he wasn’t the only one. His legs wobbled and he sat down hard in the middle of the shiny wood floor. Maybe Anais had a list of names that she was crossing off, one by one. Nobody besides him knew how to fight off the enchantment of mermaid song. They wouldn’t stand a chance.
But maybe—and Dorian was already dialing, his heart jarring and his hands trembling with urgency—maybe she was making her next call right now, and—
“Dorian. I was planning to call you as soon as I was calm enough to talk. All I asked, all you had to do, was to keep a low profile, keep your head down and enjoy your very privileged life! That’s your job. And instead I see you on the television news? Marching to support the mermaids? What kind of willful, quixotic, suicidal provocation was that? I’ve worked so hard to protect you, and you spit on that with this . . . this infantile defiance!” Ben Ellison paused, out of breath.
Dorian had never felt so happy to be yelled at in his life. “She didn’t already get you! Listen, Mr. Ellison, if a strange girl calls you, she’s not actually a girl. You need to hang up right away, okay? Or if you don’t somehow you need to start singing back at her, or sing before she can even start, and maybe she’ll give up.”
“I can see that you might prefer to change the subject, Dorian. But really, you—”
“She just tried to murder me!” Dorian yelled. “Look, I’m calling to warn you, okay? A mermaid just called me up and started singing to me. I almost—let her get to me, but I’m okay now.” For an instant Dorian wondered if that was true. He still felt lightheaded, his thoughts slicked by a residue of song.
There was a shocked pause at the other end. “A mermaid called you, Dorian? Do I understand you correctly? You’re trying to convince me that a mermaid called you on the telephone?”
“It was Anais,” Dorian snapped. “Anais, the really evil one from Luce’s old tribe? I’m positive. I think she’s trapped somewhere, and somebody’s making her kill people. Like, as some kind of slave assassin.”
The silence this time went on for even longer. It had an airless quality, staggered by revelation. “Mr. Ellison?” Dorian asked.
“I haven’t been able to reach—” Ellison began, and stopped. He was wheezing audibly.
“We have to warn everyone. I can’t keep a low profile, okay? I mean, Anais might kill—I don’t know—anybody who’s put out a video or whatever, Luce’s dad or . . .”
“That’s who I can’t locate,” Ellison said grimly. Dorian rocked a little as he caught the implication of the words. “Andrew Korchak.”
28
Acts of Grace
The air was still surging with Luce’s scream as a gray-haired man in a dark business suit lunged at the killer from behind, flinging one arm around his throat and slamming the gun from his hand. It jumped into the air, a blurry blackish shape, and then clattered down the rocky embankment and into the bay.
Luce, Imani, and Yuan were pressing forward to reach the dying mermaid, but their tails were tangled and some of the girls in their way were too stunned to move and only screamed or gaped, their breath coming out like torn rags. By the time they managed to break free of the crowd the humans were already there, and for once the police didn’t stop people from clambering down into the water. The dead mermaid’s head slumped sideways, her wound a deep crimson crater surrounded by a drifting corolla of red-brown hair. Dark spatters of brain soiled her ivory cheek, and her green eyes were wide and empty.
To Luce’s amazement half a dozen humans were on top of the killer, pinning him face-down on the pavement. Many of them had been friendly enough, but it still astonished her that they would turn against one of their own kind for a mermaid’s sake.
Yuan cried out as the humans began to lift the mermaid from the water. “Luce, stop them!” But there such obvious tenderness in the way that old woman cradled the devastated head, such care in how those two tough-looking teenagers gathered the still-twitching tail in their arms.
“It’s okay, Yuan,” Luce said impulsively. “It’s too late to save her, and . . . they’re doing the right thing.”
“She belongs in the water! Even dead! Don’t let them take her!” Five people were now holding the mermaid at different points along her slim body, carefully climbing back ashore with her. Her scales already had that papery, faded look Luce had seen once before, and reddish flecks began to dance in the somnolent breeze. Someone spread a black coat on the asphalt. They laid the mermaid on top.
“They have to. It’s about . . . about their kind of justice, too.” Would the humans really punish that young man in the trench coat for what he’d done, or would they decide a mermaid’s life didn’t matter? After all, she’d admitted to killing in the past herself.
Then Luce heard humans crying out in dismay and amazement. The mermaid’s dull ruby-silver scales were curling up, fluttering, peeling away. Even as they peeled they were somehow disintegrating into a kind of speckled reddish smoke that shone slightly against the gray air. Then, like something emerging from a mist, Luce caught the shape of a foot with tightly curled toes . . .
And the body resting on that black coat wasn’t a dead mermaid any longer, but a dead human girl. The skin on her legs looked damp and smeary and long-unused, and her empty green eyes were suddenly less vivid. All around them humans had started gagging and sobbing and sinking to their knees.
Of course, Luce realized. She knew perfectly well what happened when a mermaid died—but the humans crowding the shore hadn’t known. Luce heard a yowl of despair so loud that it cut through the rest of the clamor and then saw that it had come from the killer, his head craned to see the dead girl as he struggled in the handcuffs one of the police must have clapped on him. His handsome face had turned crimson and blotchy. “Well. That’ll make it easier to convict him of murder,” a p
olice officer announced morosely.
“Murder? It wasn’t murder! Murder means killing a fellow human being, not a thing!” the young man in the trench coat yelled back at him.
“A human corpse proves a human was killed, I’d say.”
The same gray-haired man who’d tackled the killer was tugging off his suit jacket. He kept his eyes carefully averted from the dead girl—out of respect for her nakedness, Luce realized—as he spread his jacket over her body. Hiding it from the crowd. From the absolute silence of the mermaids around her, Luce knew that they were touched by the same thing she was: the kind, dignified generosity of that gesture.
This was why humans were worth saving. No matter what evils they committed, they were also capable of such unexpected sympathy, such grace.
They were worth saving. Even if they had to be saved from themselves.
Luce noticed that Yuan was crying. “I thought they’d all just ogle her, paw at her,” Yuan whispered. “I thought they might do things to her body.”
Imani hadn’t spoken once throughout the whole awful event, but now she turned and leaned her head softly against Yuan’s tear-streaked face. There was a glint of something metal in the human crowd and Luce spun toward it, afraid that it was another gun. But no, it was just a camera. There seemed to be quite a few of them, actually.
“Doesn’t this show that Secretary Moreland was lying just now?” a woman asked. “On television?” No one answered her. The breeze dragged steadily across their faces, drying the tears of humans and mermaids alike.
“We have to get back to work. No matter how we all feel. It’s way after six; the singers from the last shift have been going for way too long,” Imani murmured the words even as tears were still welling in her midnight eyes.
“We’ll sing for her tonight, though,” Luce said gently. “All night. We’ll sing to the water as her . . . her . . .” she couldn’t remember the word at first. “Her elegy.”
Imani nodded. Wearily the mermaids slipped away from shore, heading out to take their places in the ranks under the bridge, while the mermaids who were finally off-duty streaked below them, their dimly phosphorescent skin glancing through green waves.