Waking Storms (15 page)

“I showed her your jacket.”
This
was what she had to tell him, Luce realized. He needed to understand. “You were right. She completely believed me that you were dead. She was even embarrassed to be asking me about it at all.”

“Good. We fooled the bitch.”

“She couldn’t stop crying. For hours. Dorian, she never even met you, but she couldn’t stop crying thinking about it, and I had to sit there and keep
lying
to her...”

Dorian’s eyes went wide and uncertain. He was too startled to answer her at first, but his quick breath fluttered on her mouth. “Why do you guys keep
doing
it, then? Killing people? Luce, I don’t want you to think I’m, like, rubbing it
in
...” He gave a sick, airy laugh. “But what the fuck?”

She had to face it, Luce realized. They’d just keep going in circles until she did. “You mean, why did we sink the ship your family was on? The
Dear Melissa?”

“Oh, for
example
...”

“My friend Miriam had just killed herself. The
Dear Melissa
ran into—” Luce tried think of a way to explain it. “It was Miriam’s funeral. “We were all singing for her, and then the ship was almost on top of us. And our law is that humans aren’t allowed to live after—”

“After they’ve heard you.” Dorian was biting his lip, and his hand had stopped stroking her face. It was almost completely dark now. The only lights were a few faint sparks of green phosphorescence where the water licked the shore, the dim luminosity of Luce’s skin.

“Yes.”

“It
still
doesn’t make any sense, though. I mean, who gave you that law to start with?”

As soon as he said it, Luce couldn’t understand why she’d never asked herself that question. “It’s supposed to be ... They told me it’s the same for all the mermaids in the world. That we all have the same laws.”

“But do you actually know where it came from? Like, who the boss is?” Dorian asked. Luce was flummoxed by the idea that there might actually
be
a boss. The mermaids were so free, the timahk so impersonal and strong. But, she realized, he had a point. The timahk must have come from somewhere. It must have a beginning, and she had no idea what that beginning might be. Dorian sat up abruptly and coaxed her head up onto his knee. “Luce, okay, this is going to sound crazy. But I have this theory, and I can’t stop wondering if maybe I’m onto something...”

“What
theory
?”

“I mean...” Dorian seemed embarrassed, but he pushed ahead. “What if you used to be human, and you just don’t know it? Because I realized there are all these things that don’t make sense, like you knowing how to read, but they would if ... like, if the mermaids are the ones who are really enchanted? If, okay, if somebody is
using
all of you.” Luce was glad that she was lying down. The words swam through her, bright and swarming and unmanageable. He was so close to the truth, but also so wrong...

“What makes you think I’m enchanted?”

“Well, I mean...” He was definitely embarrassed now. He looked away, deep blue shadows and the dim reflections of the water curling around his face. “It’s exactly like a story, right? The boy who falls in love with a mermaid?” Luce felt her heart start to race. What was he
saying?
“So in a story—if you were, like, under a spell...” Dorian suddenly stared down at her, his face wild with longing.

“What then?” It was awful, Luce thought, but maybe she couldn’t avoid telling him the whole thing much longer.

“Well, then it would be my job to break it, right? Like, kill whoever enchanted you?” Dorian looked so hopeful as he asked this that Luce ached inside.

“There’s a big problem with that.” Luce shuddered a little as she remembered that terrible night on the cliffs when her uncle had tried to rape her, then left her alone and howling. When the change had started to come over her, she knew, she
did
have a choice, even if she didn’t understand what that choice was going to mean.

“What
problem?”
Dorian was getting too excited, and Luce cringed. “You know who did it, don’t you? And you think he’s too, like, powerful for me to fight—”

“No! Dorian, it’s not
like
that!” They were gaping at each other, and Dorian’s hands squeezed her shoulders convulsively. “I
did
used to be human, Dorian. But the trouble is—

“But if you were human
before,
then—”

Luce cut him off. “But nobody enchanted me! Or maybe I did it. I enchanted
myself!”

Luce had never seen anyone look so completely astonished. Dorian gaped and seemed as if he was trying to say twenty things at once. Crosscurrents of emotion surged in his face, and his nails sank into her shoulder.

“Luce!” It was the best he could do.

“I didn’t know I was going to turn into a mermaid or anything. I didn’t know what was happening to me, but I still let it happen...”

“Oh my
God!”

“I didn’t want to tell you. That I was ever human. Because I knew you’d flip out...”

“But how can you be sure there’s nobody else behind it, Luce? Behind whatever did this to you? Because if there is then maybe we could...” Luce knew what he’d been about to say:
“Maybe we could turn you back.”
How could she tell him that she didn’t think she would want to turn human again, even if it were somehow possible? It was terrible to realize what he’d imagined: stabbing some wizard or demon, the enchantment vaporizing as it died and the mermaids all miraculously restored to human form. And in his daydreams she was so grateful to have legs again, to be rescued from her life in the sea...

To be stuck in foster care somewhere, to lose her freedom and her wildness. Even worse, to open her mouth and hear those thin, clacking squeaks humans called “singing” coming out of it.

Luce sat up and wrapped her arms around him, scattering soft kisses around his face. He was trying to be heroic, to risk death out of love for her. It was just a kind of heroism she didn’t want.

“Is it okay if you’re out late? Because I think I’d better tell you what happened, and it’s a really long story...”

“I don’t
care
about getting in trouble.” His breathing was labored, and Luce felt a tremor in his back. She desperately wished there was some way she could make it all easier for him.

Luce sighed. There were so many things she didn’t want him to know about, and she was going to have to start with some of the worst of them: her father’s death, her uncle’s beatings, and the attempted rape. Oddly, one of the things that worried her most was what he’d think of her father. Dorian gave the impression of being one of those kids from a big, elegant house, the kind with packed bookcases and a rose garden and art objects brought back from distant countries. And boys like that didn’t have anything to do with girls whose fathers were petty thieves, girls whose bedrooms were just a sleeping bag thrown in the back of a red van.

Maybe
that
was the real reason she hadn’t wanted to tell him the truth?

Luce kissed his mouth, and he tipped back to gaze at her with frantic eyes. Then she began at the beginning.

***

As hard as it was for Luce to tell him, it was even harder for Dorian to hear it. He wanted to hurt her uncle somehow, so Luce refused to tell him what town she’d lived in or what her last name had been. Dorian had too many emotions that he didn’t know what to do with, and Luce was afraid they’d goad him to do something crazy. As the story went on she felt him falling into it, as if they were both sharing the same dream. How she’d sunk her first ship completely by accident, how Catarina had found her and saved her life, the living magic of tall gray waves and ferocious music...

The rain died down until there was no sound beyond the sullen drip of water from the roots above, but still the story went on. He interrupted her a few times; he seemed especially interested in what Luce told him about the dark shimmer around each mermaid and how it revealed the private horrors that had turned each one of them from human girls. He asked her more than once about Catarina, who had always refused to let anyone look into the nightmare images of her own transformation. Something about the topic seemed to make him uncomfortable.

When she described how she had come to help Catarina with the sinking of the Coast Guard boat, Dorian made a rough, strangled noise, and snapped, “Are you saying you murdered people because of
peer pressure
?”

“Partly. But it was more like if they were going to die anyway, I didn’t want them to die with so much pain. Not when I could take it away just by singing...” It was hard to overcome the impulse to justify herself, but at the same time she didn’t want to sound like she was making excuses.

She told him about the coming of Anais, her own fights with Catarina, the terrible moments that had led up to Miriam’s death. Dorian became very still and so quiet that Luce was momentarily afraid he’d stopped breathing. Her own voice quieted, too, into a numbed chant. They both knew what was coming next, and Luce thought this might be the end for them. Dorian had said he was in love with her, but that didn’t mean he’d be able to forgive her once he knew the whole truth. Probably nobody in his position could forgive something so awful; probably she didn’t deserve that much generosity from anyone. Luce tried not to think about how he’d react, to keep the story coming as steadily as falling rain. It was his life, too, and he had a right to understand as much of it as possible.

She came to the first moment when she’d seen him, his bronze hair flicking in the golden dawn glow. She described it all: how he’d sung back to her and then she’d seen something sparkling in the air around him. Like a cloud of black mica or like tiny glittering insects...

“No,” Dorian said. His voice was cold.

“But you do. You have the indication, so I thought in a way you were one of us.”

“I’m
not
one of you. There wasn’t anything like—like with your uncle. There wasn’t anything that sick at all! My parents were really great people, Luce. Like, maybe you just
want
to believe they deserved it, but...”

But I’ve seen what they did,
Luce wanted to say.
You know I’ve seen the whole thing!
Then she noticed the way Dorian’s face was shutting down, closing like a door, and stopped herself just in time.

“I mean, I know all the other mermaids, like, even Anais, can just look over at me and see my uncle—everything he did. I was afraid at first that you’d be able to see it too...” Luce said it as gently as she could.

“I can’t see anything. I just know what you’ve told me.” He sounded very stiff, and he wasn’t looking at her anymore.

“But you know everything now, and you’re going to keep thinking about it—”

“I know because you
told
me. You didn’t have to. You could have made up a different story and I never would have known.”

Luce was quiet for a minute. She wanted Dorian to say that of
course
he was like her, that he was basically a merman stuck on land. But he couldn’t give her that, she realized. The idea hurt him too much. Just like Catarina, he couldn’t stand to have anyone know the truth.

“We don’t need to talk about it again, Dorian,” Luce said softly. He kissed her, and each kiss was as lush and slow and thrilling as a flower opening inside her skin.

She was amazed to find that he could touch her so tenderly—that he could stand to touch her at all, really—even now that he knew her story. Although whenever they paused for an instant, she noticed that he seemed to be having trouble meeting her eyes.

Maybe he did really love her, then, even though he knew he was supposed to hate her ... Dorian had even more reason to despise mermaids than the rest of humanity did. If he could truly forgive her for everything, even for his little sister who’d been left to decay at the bottom the sea...

If he could yield up his heart like this, it must mean that she was actually
forgivable,
and that all her fellow mermaids were, too.

Maybe other humans would also see the situation that way, someday. And maybe the mermaids could even forgive them in return.

His hands stroked through her hair like waves of possibility. Like hope.

The broken world might yet be whole again. She twisted closer, kissing him more deeply still, and softly bit his lower lip.

9

Little Ditties

Ben Ellison had been sitting in the waiting room for over an hour, sometimes pulling his briefcase onto his knees for no apparent reason and sometimes shoving it irritably to the floor. He’d had time to memorize the room’s stuffy, hard-edged mahogany furniture, the upholstery and wallpaper in various shades of drab mauve and pinkish tan. He’d also had time to take a piece of glossy white paper out of his briefcase and stare at it grimly before putting it away, only to reach for it again minutes later. He had it in his hand now. It was a drawing done in densely curving lines of thick black marker, and it showed a girl’s face in the sweep of a wave. A stroke of corkscrewing seafoam bowed just above her head and fell to either side of her shoulders like a mantle. The girl had short, jagged dark hair that fell in points across her broad forehead, and long, deep, expressive eyes. There was, Ben Ellison thought, a wrenching sense of solitude in that face, as well as a profound humanity. He knew perfectly well, though, that the face in the drawing didn’t belong to anything
human.
And that, he supposed, was why the image bothered him so much.

He’d looked at dozens of these drawings, sitting on the floor of the boy’s room, but he’d taken only one before he’d slipped the stack back into its hiding place. Now he wondered why he’d chosen a picture where no glimpse of the mermaid’s tail was visible. Did he want to forget that he was dealing with monsters and not with little girls?

“Agent Ellison?” He looked up at the slender receptionist in her crisp gray skirt and glossy blouse. “The Secretary of Defense is ready to see you.” As professional as she was, Ben Ellison noticed the half-concealed amusement in her face. She’d heard people talking about him, then: the high-ranked FBI operative—in charge of a special unit on maritime security, no less—who’d developed a ludicrous obsession with the idea that
mermaids
were routinely killing thousands of people worldwide and who’d somehow managed to persuade a contingent of other agents, and maybe even the Director, that he was right. He grimaced and stood up.