7

The Queen

It served her right for trusting a human, even once. Even after the big deal he’d made about wanting to see her again, even after that bewilderingly tender good-night kiss, Dorian hadn’t shown up the next evening. Luce had swum back and forth for over an hour between the beach and the cliffs where he’d sung before she finally accepted that he wasn’t going to come.

A few hours after he’d given her his parka she’d even fought down her aversion to going near human towns, just to bring the rowboat back. She’d towed the boat as far as the village’s main dock—it had taken her a while to find both oars, but to her surprise the boat’s hull was undamaged—and tied it to a straggling rope. Incredible as it seemed to her now in the cold blue light of a new day, she’d actually been worried that Dorian might get in trouble for stealing it. He must have seen what she’d done for him, Luce thought, but even so he didn’t care enough to keep his word to her.

There was only one explanation for his absence that seemed at all likely to her. It must be that he enjoyed playing with her emotions. Maybe this was his way of getting revenge. And to make matters worse Dana was going to show up sometime, and Luce would have to show her Dorian’s jacket and rattle off a whole series of lies straight in her old friend’s face. Luce had never felt so stupid before, so demeaned. Obviously Dana had been right. Obviously Dorian was treacherous and cold-hearted, and the smart thing would have been to drown him without caring at all. Luce couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in such a foul mood. The day seemed mockingly bright and beautiful, with an azure sky and satiny breezes, with water that thrummed to the distant, booming calls of whales, their pitch so deep that it made her scales vibrate.

She hadn’t been working enough on her singing, Luce decided. She’d let herself get distracted by some human boy instead. She couldn’t do anything about Dorian or about the fact that she’d acted like an idiot. But she could at least develop the one power that was absolutely hers.

She swam out into deeper waters. Even when she had practiced singing recently, Luce thought with disgust, she’d just been playing pretty little games, sculpting blobs of water in midair, making tiny pirouetting fountains and arches. Clearly it was time to get back to using the full force of her voice. Time to remind the waves who their queen really was...

The waves were rough and high, the currents so strong that she had to flick and dance her way between them, slicing back with her tail each time the water grasped at her. Did the sea really think it could push her around like that? Luce dove down and gathered her voice into a long, driving note, slamming it right back into the face of one especially fierce current. Her voice fused with the water. It became a creature of living sound. Luce held the current where it was for a moment, then her unwavering pitch pulsed higher, shoving the immense pressure of the flow back on itself. She blasted the note until it was almost a scream, and for an instant the water in front of her surged in crisscrossing directions. Just above her head Luce saw the surface of the sea starting to bulge in a glassy dome, a swelling tumor of sound. A few porpoises approached, stared at Luce and the misshapen water forced up by her high, pounding outcry, and then rushed off in fright. Luce didn’t care. The swell made by the two battling currents rose higher, and Luce was lifted inside it. For a few moments she hovered in tremulous space, gazing down through water like a huge curving window onto an unsettled sea.

Then the bulge erupted. Luce went flying up on an explosive jet of foam, surrounded by airborne waves that curved like wings. She twisted in space at least thirty feet above the surface, screaming now from pure exultation, and crashed back down so hard that it knocked all the air out of her. She fell through waves where the bubbles frothed in such dense clouds that all she could see was moving streams of whiteness, letting her tail spin. Her body rolled with no sense of direction. When Luce finally surfaced again her side stung from the impact, but she was laughing too hard to sing.

She’d raised the water before, used her voice to lift curling waves or straight towers of water. But she’d never controlled such a huge volume of water as that, never made the sea leap so high. If only Catarina could have seen it, or Dorian—

Ugh. Why did she have to spoil the exhilaration she felt by thinking of him now? Luce circled wildly in the murky sea until her body lashed the waves into a ring of froth. Vaguely she noticed the island where Dorian’s cruise ship had crashed looming up on her left. Normally the sight of it would have depressed her. Normally she would have worried about slipping into her old tribe’s territory, too. But today she didn’t care about any of that.

She was gasping from swimming so crazily. Luce made herself calm down enough to drift along the surface, pulling in deep inhalations. Seabirds with bright red feet spiraled in the air above her, as free in their breathing medium as she was in her fluid one. Luce wanted to try mastering that much water again, maybe raise it in a single high wall this time, but she couldn’t do that unless she had enough breath to sing with her strongest voice.

She really was getting too close to the old cave, though. She’d thought those were seals popping up for air fifty feet away from her, but now she realized that one had a mushy baby’s face and stick-up tufts of hair. There were a few larval mermaids mixed in with the seals, then, and larvae didn’t usually swim out this far unless they were tagging along after the older girls. Maybe she should slip back down the coast a bit.

“Samantha? You see that? Is that like a rotting porpoise or something?” The voice was chirpy and cold; it would have sounded completely emotionless if it weren’t just a bit too shrill. “I’d say we should drag it out of our territory. Except then we’d have to touch it.”

Anais and Samantha bobbed up and down in the waves, both pearl-skinned and almost shining with beauty, both lacquered with mist and the dizzy pale sunlight. Luce noticed that they were keeping their distance, though, and that Samantha couldn’t hide the apprehension in her sea green eyes. It made her want to laugh. “Hi, Anais. Hey, Samantha.” Luce wondered if they’d seen the wild burst of water carrying her up into the air. She smiled to herself. There was no reason not to be polite to the two blondes, not when she could send a vertical wave slashing up beneath them anytime she felt like it. “How’s everything been going?”

As Luce had expected, her friendly tone annoyed Anais more than any display of hostility could have done. Luce could feel the hardness of her own smile as she watched Anais’s sharp blue eyes start to flicker back in the direction of the tribe’s cave. Her golden hair rayed out around her, curling gorgeously with each loft of the water.

“Let’s just go,” Samantha muttered weakly, tugging at her queen’s arm. “Why should we even talk to her?” Anais ignored her.

“Oh, wait.” Anais made a show of suddenly recalling something, rolling her eyes upward. “Isn’t this thing some kind of trashy, broken-down mermaid? I know it’s kind of hard to believe, Samantha. But don’t you remember there was a mermaid with dark, ratty hair like that? We threw her out of the tribe. Remember?”

Luce felt a little ill, like there was something clammy and thick in her stomach. But what really surprised her was how little Anais’s words upset her. Mostly they seemed funny, in a disgusting kind of way. There she was, the perfect blond pseudo-queen, the heartless usurper, pretending that insults could change what they both knew perfectly well: the best singer was the rightful ruler. And while Anais might be very good, she wasn’t even close to equaling Luce. Catarina had said so before she’d vanished, and suddenly Luce found that she believed it absolutely.

“Threw her out?” Of course that wasn’t really what had happened, but still Samantha was being pretty slow on the uptake. She was clearly too nervous to think straight. “Anais, please! Let’s just get out of here before she tries something.”

Lazily Luce began to hum a little, stretching backwards on the waves. Even as she did it, Luce was aware that she was acting in a way her old self wouldn’t have recognized. Even when she’d been furiously angry before, she’d never been deliberately cruel, never enjoyed taunting someone. Now, though, the rising anxiety in Samantha’s gaping face filled her with hard sparks of delight. She wasn’t entirely comfortable with what she was doing, but she was too excited to stop. And anyway, didn’t these two deserve whatever they got?

Luce lifted her voice a bit higher, and a tiny wave no bigger than a sparrow edged up out of the sea. Luce caressed the delicate thing with a long, soft stroke of music until the wave was glass-thin and elegantly curved, a scimitar of water glinting in the sun. Samantha goggled in tense disbelief, and Anais tried to smirk. Dreamily Luce sent her voice in a sweeping trill, and the wave spun quickly around her once before it collapsed. One of the larvae splashed closer, twittering with joy, and pawed at the air where the wave had pranced a second before. The redheaded little thing warbled eagerly, trying to beg Luce to raise another wave.

“Anais? Oh, why did she have to come here? What does she want?” Samantha was practically squeaking. Luce laughed outright, but something about Samantha’s questions also sent a rush of sadness through her heart. Wasn’t all of this showing-off basically silly? What was the point of it?

It wasn’t like she even wanted to be queen. Not of a tribe like this one, anyway.

“I was wondering that, too, Samantha. After all, she knows we said we’d kill her if she ever showed up again.” Anais was trying to stare Luce down, but it wasn’t working. Samantha kept her eyes on Luce and jerked hard on Anais’s arm. “What, Samantha? Are you worried about her stupid little singing tricks? What’s she going to do?” Now Anais’s sneer looked more genuine. “Get you wet?”

Maybe she didn’t need a point, Luce thought. Maybe it was enough that they’d brutally attacked Catarina. Maybe it was enough that...

Suddenly Luce realized why she was playing around this way, trying to intimidate mermaids she didn’t even respect. It was all because she’d been foolish enough to believe a human’s kisses meant something. All at once Luce felt ashamed of herself, and she stared around at endless waves, the sunlight winking on all sides like a sarcastic audience.

“I’ll see you around,” Luce told them vaguely, and turned to leave.

A moment later a sharp squeal pierced the air at Luce’s back, followed by a kind of high-pitched chattering. Luce swung back around and saw that Anais had the redheaded larva gripped in both hands. Smiling straight at Luce, Anais flipped the thrashing little thing upside down and held it by its tail. She held it far enough under that, no matter how desperately the larva twisted its babyish torso, it couldn’t bring its head up into the air. The other larvae—there were three of them—clung to each other and stared, chirping out half-musical cries of alarm.

“I guess it’ll take too long to drown this thing, huh, Samantha?” Anais delivered the line with icy cheerfulness. “What does it take, like half an hour? I’ll get totally bored if I have to hold it that long.”

“Let it go,” Luce snapped. “What’s wrong with you, anyway?”

Of course that was exactly what Anais had been waiting for. Smiling her loveliest golden smile, she hoisted the larva slightly higher. Just high enough that a few inches of its stubby lilac fins protruded from the water, exposed to the soft breeze, the butter-colored sun. Even Samantha looked appalled. Her mouth hung open, but she didn’t say anything. The larva’s fins had started twitching.

“This way will be a lot faster, though. Hey, Samantha? How much of its tail has to dry out for this to work?”

The larva’s thin scream reverberated through the water. The vibrations shivered all over Luce’s fins, crawled over her like chilled fingers.

“Anais, please ...” Samantha was whimpering. “Luce will do something crazy.” Anais just lifted the larva slightly higher. Droplets bright with sunshine flew from its writhing tail.

Luce dove. The gray-green water was shaky with the larva’s screams, but even so Luce could hear Anais’s distorted voice: “See, Samantha? Luce can’t actually do anything. All she ever does is run away.” Anais’s sky blue tail with its overlay of pink iridescence flicked in the water above Luce’s head, and Luce tensed herself. Those awful pulsating screams made it hard to concentrate. For a moment Luce couldn’t find her voice, couldn’t gather power behind it. The first note she tried came out broken, scared, and the two blond mermaids heard it. Samantha’s shrill, relieved laughter mixed with the larva’s shrieks.

Luce closed her eyes, water all around her like cool, rippling space, and felt the deep hum of the darkness. The sea had its own voice, even far in the depths where the crash of waves became no more than a web of echoes. She had to listen to that voice and not the clamor of that poor little larva’s suffering. Luce felt something pulling into her body, a fathomless tide of whispers, a smooth upwelling harmony. And then she felt it begin to rise, right through the center of her chest.

It didn’t even feel like she was singing. Instead the sea sang through her. Why had she wanted to fight the water before? It was a new music, different, older and deeper than any song that had poured from her before, and as Luce surrendered to it the sound began to spin like a hurricane. Notes rose and whipped through space, gliding up and down the scale.

Dimly Luce heard the scream rolling on through the water. It didn’t sound the same as before, though. Luce looked up, still caught in the trance of that astonishing music, and saw the red-haired larva’s tiny silhouette as it threw itself across a glowing stretch of water. If the larva was free, though, where was the scream coming from?

A bright cone shape stabbed down through the green-shining waves just ahead of Luce. She couldn’t make sense of it at first, but then she realized what it was: a whirlpool made of merged voice and water propelled by the song endlessly tearing from her throat.

Anais was caught in it, flung around in desperate circles, her hands grappling empty space as she struggled to escape. The scream was hers. A few silver fishes spun with her, too stunned even to fight.

Luce gasped in astonishment, letting out a final burst of music. Then everything went utterly quiet. Luce couldn’t tell where the music that had filled her had gone, but the sudden silence left a hollow ache in her chest. The whirlpool fell apart, its force scattered in random swirls. Anais splashed a few feet in confusion and then flopped into Samantha’s arms.

Singing that way had wrenched all the air from Luce’s chest. She needed to breathe. As she surfaced, the first thing she saw was Samantha crying wildly, clutching Anais and stroking her golden hair.

“Is she okay?” Luce felt disturbed by the thought that her singing might have injured another mermaid, even if that mermaid was Anais. She should at least help Samantha pull Anais back to their cave.

“Just get away!” Samantha gagged the words through her sobs. “Luce, just get away from us! No one here wants you! Go back to whatever hole...” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Samantha! You know I had to do that. She was torturing that larva; I had to make her stop.” Somehow Luce hoped the other mermaid would see reason. Even Samantha knew that the timahk protected larvae, after all. She knew how wrong it was to hurt them.

“Anais is our queen, Luce!” Samantha yelled it in hysterics. Anais looked like she’d fainted, but Luce wouldn’t have been surprised to find she was faking it. “She can do whatever she wants! What do you even know about anything we do? We got rid of you and Catarina, and now—”

“Now you just torture larvae for fun?” Luce snarled the words, but even so she expected Samantha to get defensive, to say that Anais had just been freaking out, and nothing like that had ever happened before.

“No one cares about larvae! Luce, no one cares!”

Luce opened her mouth to protest, but then Samantha yelled something that shocked her into silence. “Anais has killed like four of them!”

***

Luce watched in numb silence as Samantha swam off, towing Anais in one arm. The queen’s golden head rested on Samantha’s shoulder. It reminded Luce of another time, when she’d pulled Catarina along the surface, away from the frenzied tribe.

Anais had started hilling larvae? It was so sick that Luce had trouble believing it, even after what she’d just witnessed. She drifted under the waves with a strange, hopeless pain in her heart. What had her old friends become if they allowed something like that to happen? Did they know what was going on?

If things were really so bad, it seemed obvious that she had a responsibility to challenge Anais. She should take over as queen and put a stop to the horror. But then, it wasn’t clear that Dana would support her anymore, not now that she’d learned Luce’s secret. Maybe no one would. Luce knew that Anais would never give up power without a battle. Luce would need the help of as many mermaids as possible, and who would even want her to be queen? Especially, who would want her enough to fight for her?

And even if Dana kept quiet, even if no one ever discovered that Luce had broken the timahk, Luce would never be able to erase the shame of what she’d done from her own heart. She’d know she had disgraced herself and that she was unworthy to rule. Knowing the truth, how could she possibly find the strength to confront Anais and her followers?

Luce found herself at a complete loss. The problem seemed insoluble. She swam back and forth through water banded with pale autumn sunlight; she stopped at random beaches, drifted on again. She kept swimming, sad and distracted, even as the day began to fail and the water dimmed. Strokes of reddish sunset filtered through the waves and curved around her arms. Sometimes she sang quietly to herself, caressing the sea’s profound voice with her own.

Caressing another voice: a voice that was coarse and desperate-sounding, coming from somewhere above the surface. Luce stopped where she was even as a huge school of small sinuous fish sleeked around her so thickly that all she could see was the weaving silver of their bodies. Dorian. How dare he think he could trick her again? He wasn’t singing Luce’s song this time, but something else: a human pop song, probably.

She wasn’t going to have anything to do with him, Luce told herself. Then she swam a bit closer to the shore. He sounded so upset, she thought, so unhappy. She barely felt the water sliding open around her head.

“Luce! I was afraid you were going to be too mad to come back! Wait, I’ll meet you at the beach, okay?” She caught just one quick glimpse of him, one flash of gold between the trees, before he was running. It was typical, Luce thought, that he was too full of himself to even give her a chance to say she didn’t want to see him again. Still, she dipped under and swirled toward the spot he’d mentioned before, the one tucked behind a boulder protruding steeply from the waves. Maybe, just maybe, he had something important to say to her? Even swimming slowly she’d been much faster than he was, and she waited with a nervous irritation, her tail curled against the pebble seafloor and her arms wrapped tight around her chest. The sky was a glassy violet sparked by the burning pallor of the stars.

Dorian broke through the branches, sliding so quickly that he fell onto his rear, and yanked off his shoes. Then, to Luce’s confusion, he splashed out to her and threw himself onto his knees, not caring how cold the water was or that his pants were getting soaked. But he didn’t kiss her. Instead he wrapped her head in both hands and pulled her cheek against his. She was saturated with the warmth of his skin, the sweetness of his touch, and all he did was hold her. His breath came rough in her ear as if he were struggling not to cry.

“Oh my God, Luce! I didn’t do it! I almost did, he almost talked me into it, and then I knew I couldn’t!”

She felt a single tear glide down where their faces pressed together and impulsively slipped her arms around him. All her fury at him was abruptly gone, but nothing he was saying made any sense.

“Dorian?” His fingers slid through her wet hair. “I don’t actually know what you’re talking about.” He tipped his head back a little and looked into her eyes.

“They took me to Anchorage. That’s why I wasn’t here last night. I didn’t have any choice, but at least...” He saw the confusion on her face. “Anchorage—that’s this human city, farther south—”

“I know what Anchorage is!” Now it was Dorian’s turn to look confused. “What I don’t understand is the part about someone taking you there. Why?”

“How can you? I mean, how can you know about—all this human stuff?” He gave a short laugh, and Luce didn’t answer. His wide ochre eyes stared at her; he still seemed half frantic, though he was starting to calm down. “Do you know about the FBI, too? They took me. I had to sit through getting questioned for two days, and I just got back.”

“What would the FBI want with you?” Luce asked. But even as the question was leaving her mouth, she already understood. “They were asking you about”—she could barely make herself say it, but then avoiding the words wouldn’t cancel out the truth of what her tribe had done, what she had done—“about the ship you were on?”

Just as she’d feared, his eyes hardened. He let her go and shuffled the few feet back out of the water, then sat facing her with his chin on his knees. Luce hid her breasts with her arms again. It felt awkward, and for once she wished she had some human clothing.

“About the Dear Melissa, yeah. Are you ever going to explain why the hell you did that? And they showed me a map with all the ships you guys have been sinking, too. You’re all totally out of control. And I still didn’t tell them anything! Luce, why?”

Luce wasn’t sure what the “why” applied to. Was he asking her to tell him why he hadn’t talked or why the mermaids destroyed ships? Both questions seemed like more than she could answer.

“I’m never going to hurt another human, Dorian. I really promise. At least, not unless they attack one of us first.”

“Maybe you won’t! Maybe. But your friends will, Luce! Like, can you promise me that the other mermaids won’t go around killing people? Because if you can’t—”

“I’m not even in the tribe anymore!” Luce felt desperate. “Dorian, I mean—Anais will even kill other mermaids. I just learned today, she’s been doing horrible things, and there’s no way I can stop her. So how am I supposed to promise that she won’t kill humans?”

“You said that name before.” Dorian thought for a second. He was breathing too hard from agitation. “So why shouldn’t I tell the FBI about this Anais if she’s the problem? Why shouldn’t I do whatever I can to stop them—your old tribe? I just didn’t want anything bad to happen to you. That was the only reason I kept my mouth shut, Luce! And even that might be because”—he looked at her with an awful, searching ache in his eyes—“because you did something to my mind. I don’t even know.”

Luce stared. “What do you think I did?”

“I don’t know.” Dorian suddenly seemed embarrassed. “They said something about—they said I’d been subjected to mind control. That was how the FBI guy put it. That guy Ben Ellison.” Luce looked down at the water swishing gently around her fins. It was a miserable thought, but maybe it made sense. After all, her song had forced dozens of humans to love her more than they’d ever loved anything in their lives. Even if Dorian was able to fight off her magic to some degree, still, maybe he only liked her because her singing had messed up his head. What other reason could he have?

After all, he seemed like someone who never would have noticed her when she was still human.

“I hope not! I mean, I really hope I didn’t do anything like that.” Her voice sounded pathetic even to her; she could hear the note of pain breaking through it. Luce began to wonder if she should just leave. Dorian was staring, his forehead creased with the effort to understand. “Dorian—I’ll go away, you don’t ever have to talk to me again—but if I did do something permanent to your mind it wasn’t on purpose!”

“How can you not know?”

“I mean, you sing back! You’re the only person who knows how to fight off getting enchanted by us. But people who’ve heard us sing aren’t ever supposed to live, and I don’t know, maybe that did something bad to you.”

“But you hope it didn’t? You hope you didn’t, like, do something to make me have—” Dorian broke off abruptly, raking his fingers through the stones. Even as he stared down Luce could see the struggle on his face. She watched him brace himself and gaze up at her again. “Something to make me have feelings for you?”

Luce felt like crying. “If I did, then that’s seriously depressing.”

“Why?”

“Because I only want you to like me if it’s real.” Luce was surprised she’d found the courage to say that. Being so honest with him soothed her heartache, and she didn’t feel on the edge of tears anymore.

“Because you like me?”

“Yes.” Luce considered for a second and then suddenly grinned at him. “Does that mean you used some kind of mind control on me?”

Dorian smiled back, and slid a little closer to her. “Totally. With my incredible singing. I fried all your neurons.”

Luce snorted. “Your singing sounds like somebody beating up a frog. Humans really shouldn’t even try.”

“Just because you’re magic doesn’t mean you have to be such a snob.” His voice was playful now, and he reached out to stroke her hair, then gently tugged her until her upper body tipped back onto the beach. “I used to sing in a band and everything.”

Even as he kissed her with melting softness, Luce was uncomfortably aware that they hadn’t actually resolved anything. He was still threatening to talk to the FBI, and she still had no idea what to do about Anais. She hadn’t yet tried to explain why the mermaids had destroyed the Dear Melissa, and Luce couldn’t help but realize how empty her reasons would sound to him. She hadn’t answered his questions about her knowledge of things on land, either. Somehow she felt an intense reluctance to let him know she’d once been human herself, but how could she avoid that forever? And it wasn’t even clear if his tenderness toward her was only a lingering effect of enchantment.

Dorian had the indication around him, the same dark shimmer as the mermaids, and she’d assumed that it helped protect him from their power. Luce hoped that his shimmering didn’t mean he could also see the sparkling around her. If he could, he’d be able to see that she’d been just as human as he was. Worse, if he just looked at her from the corners of his eyes, he might be able to see the events that had changed her.

His own cloudy shimmering proved that someone had once done something terrible to him: terrible enough to leave a lasting crack in his very identity as a human. So far, though, a kind of shyness or politeness had kept Luce from looking to see what that heartbreak was. But as his lips flowed on hers like a velvet wave Luce stole a single sideways glance. She couldn’t stifle a cry at what she saw there. A younger Dorian lay pretending to be asleep, straining to control his terrified breathing, while his mother—

“Luce?” Dorian pulled away slightly. “Did I hurt you?”

“I’m okay,” Luce whispered back. She slipped one hand up and lightly brushed his cheeks. “You don’t have to stop.” She wanted to kiss him until she forgot everything else: her own overwhelming problems, yes, but also the cruelty that made being human insupportable for so many others like her.

She wasn’t nearly as sorry now that Dorian’s parents were dead.