27

Ringing

“We made the news!” Theo was already busy with his phone, scanning through the Internet results about their march barely over an hour after it was over. They were sitting in a dark café, all thrift-store chairs and tables plastered in collaged pictures cut from magazines. “Look, you can totally see us! I think you look better than I do, though. Why did I have to make that stupid face? You’re doing this killer noble-and-determined thing. Wait, I’ll go back in a minute, you can see . . . And—ooh, shit—it looks like some freakazoid shot some random mermaid’s head off right afterward. You don’t think the Twice Lost will decide to wipe out San Francisco, do you? To retaliate?”

Dorian’s heart slammed up in his chest, and he reached to snatch Theo’s phone, but his friend was too fast, jerking the phone far out of reach at the end of one ropy arm. “I made a point of saying that she was random, good sir. ‘Some random mermaid,’ I said quite clearly. So you’d know I wasn’t referring to that very not-random mermaid whom you’re going to such lengths to impress.”

Dorian relaxed but only slightly. “Luce is okay? But, Jesus, one of them shot . . . Was Luce there?”

“Kind of hard to tell.” Theo was back to watching tiny images scrolling on the phone’s screen, images made even tinier by the fact that he was still holding his phone as far from Dorian as he could. A taxidermy pheasant loomed from a bookcase behind him, its beak gaping as if it couldn’t believe what it was seeing. “Oh—wait, it looks like she was. You can see her in the background of this one. She’s screaming.” He pulled farther away, anticipating Dorian’s leap from his chair.

“Let me fucking see that already!”

“It looks like General Luce, screaming loudly. Surely you can take my word for that?” Theo groused even as he surrendered the phone.

A still photo on the screen showed a man in a trench coat aiming a gun at a mermaid who was looking away from him, her waves of vibrant chestnut hair startling against the pale gray water. She was looking in the direction of two crowds separated from each other by an expanse of sea: one gathering of humans and one of floating mermaids, both a short distance away. And there in the center of the mermaid crowd was Luce, her mouth wide and her face frantic and contorted as she shrieked in warning.

And he couldn’t hold her, couldn’t comfort her, couldn’t do anything to help . . .

“Hey,” Theo said. There was a sudden note of seriousness in his voice, maybe even of concern. “General Luce will probably hear about the march, since it was on TV? And then she’ll know there are people who want to help, and we’re not all rabid mer-bashing jerks, right? And that might make her feel a little better?”

“Maybe,” Dorian muttered. But the march he’d helped organize suddenly seemed pathetic, overshadowed by this outburst of violence. How could the support of a few distant humans make up for seeing one of her followers murdered that way?

“Hey, you want to text those girls we met? The hot one—wearing all the gothy shit?—said something about a party tonight. Want to go?” Theo nudged Dorian’s arm, trying to make him look up again.

“I can’t deal with a party.” For Dorian that image of Luce’s screaming face veiled the shadows. He needed to get home to his own computer, find out everything he could about the day’s events in San Francisco. “You go, okay?”

“I got the distinct impression they really wanted you to come, though. They were just talking to me because you seemed all like brooding and romantically unapproachable. You seriously need to give me lessons in that, dude. And they were all really into your T-shirt.” Theo eyed Dorian’s black shirt covetously. “Would you make another one for me?”

Privately Dorian thought that Theo was about as un-lost as they came. But whatever. “Oh—sure. Just get me the shirt you want and I’ll do the screen print.” He considered the idea for a second. “Maybe that’s what we should call the whole movement? Twice Lost Humans?”

“Oh!” Theo stared. “Yeah! That’s way better than whatever those other names were, like ‘Human-Mermaid Solidarity Front.’ Too freaking long.”

“Right.” Dorian shook himself and stood. “You go on to that party. I’m going back to the house. I want to do some work on the blog.”

“If I drive you it’s going to be way out of the way. She said they live way over in—”

“I’ll take the bus.” He wanted to be alone with his thoughts anyway.

“But we could just go to the party for, like, a couple hours? And you could work afterward?” Theo pleaded.

Dorian just shook his head and lifted one hand in a perfunctory goodbye before he stalked out of the café. The city was glazed in the moist heat of a midsummer evening. Slabs of deep blue air rested between the elegant brick row houses and vintage boutiques. Dorian caught himself staring into one window at the mannequins in their cowboy boots and quirky veiled hats, wondering how Luce would look—as a human, of course—wearing that midnight blue dress with the pearl embroidery around the neckline.

 

The tall narrow house where Dorian now lived with Theo and his mother was dark when he reached it. He was relieved by the opportunity for solitude. Maybe he could find out more about what Luce and all those other mermaids had been doing, hanging around so close to the humans onshore; maybe he could find videos that would reveal more of her reactions, more of her feelings. In that squeezing, jostling crowd there must have been several cameras pointed Luce’s way. Dorian sat on the bed and curled around his laptop, clicking eagerly.

At first he found mostly dross: a sappy tribute song for the Twice Lost that had gotten inexplicably popular, another song that made fun of the first song, some clips of various senators denouncing the mermaids at press conferences. But then he noticed “Twice Lost Mermaids Watch the News” in the sidebar. His hand shook a little as he started it.

It was a strange video. Whoever had shot it seemed fixated on Luce and the mermaids who were pressed around her. The camera never swerved from their faces or showed what it was they were looking at with such intensity. There was one corner of a laptop screen visible but it was facing away, toward the water. By turning up the volume as far as it would go Dorian could barely distinguish their voices, interspersed with the louder voices of the humans onshore and the babble of a news program. Someone was being interviewed, and after listening for just a few moments Dorian made out enough of what was being said to understand why the mermaids all looked so upset.

But—whoever that man was who kept droning on—what he was saying was plainly ridiculous. Luce had never been human, even though plenty of people remembered her as a regular schoolgirl? She’d murdered herself, stolen her own face? Nobody would believe that, would they? Then the stuff about Kathleen Lambert: old news as far as Dorian was concerned, though clearly it wasn’t old to Luce. He watched her raw dismay and craned to hear the faint notes of her voice. He could catch only a few blurry words.

Dorian couldn’t sit still any longer. He started pacing, his stomach tight, watching the screen from the corner of his vision. He was doing everything he could think of, but it wasn’t enough. Luce could still die any day. He stopped to stare out the window at the dark street, the trees like masses of congealed night, the lonely glowing rounds under the streetlamps.

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 recognize 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.”