Siren Queen(12)

I danced, and I sang, and they all wanted me. There was no one more perfect than me.

I didn’t even sing, and I didn’t know how to dance. I swallowed.

“What happened?”

They wanted me too much, and so they decided that no one should have me. Oh, beware, beware of the wolf and the mountain and the oath.

“How do I get to see Oberlin Wolfe?” I asked, and it was probably just and fair after that that I got a slash of branches over my head and on my shoulders, driving me back to the sidewalk in a flurry of blows. I yelped, covering my head as I ran, and the grove, angered, lashed at me, still reaching for me even after I gained the pavement.

I spat out half a leaf, glaring at what was left of Daphne Grove. I wouldn’t be her, so I caught a ride back to Hungarian Hill.

I stayed away from the Comique for a while, bitter and afraid the ticket taker would laugh at the cuts on my cheek. I had no idea how to get any star to talk to me. There were powerful spells and watchful dogs to keep me off the studio lots, or I would have tried sneaking in, and the changelings, wild and nervy as they were, would as likely eat me as help me. In the end, I was stuck at home, where it finally occurred to me that even the great stars of Hollywood needed their clothes washed and pressed.

I thought I was clever when I offered to start running laundry out to my parents’ patrons, or at least, the rich white ones whose names impressed me on the ledger. My mother was suspicious of my newfound industry, and when she could, she made me take my sister with me, riding on the handlebars of the battered, rusty bicycle loaded down with ill-fitting panniers full of shirts and trousers.

“Stay out of my way,” I told her, and her she rolled her eyes.

“Like anyone wants to go deliver people’s underclothes. Just drop me off by the reservoir.”

“What are you doing by the reservoir?” I demanded, suddenly alert. “It’s dangerous, you’re going to get into trouble.”

She turned to wink at me.

“I won’t tell if you won’t.”

I bared my teeth at her, but I let her off where she asked, pedaling alone up a long street of houses that had once been something special. There was a haunted feeling here, and I left the bike propped up against the stucco wall, facing towards the street for an easy exit.

I rang the bell and listened as the church bell chimes echoed through the house. There was silence, and then there was a slow rustling step approaching, slippers sliding along the hardwood floors.

The door inched open, and I put on my best smile.

“Mr. Nikolic,” I said, and the old man who peered out from the cracked door glared at me.

“Niko-litch,” he ground out in a harsh and whispering voice. “It is Niko-litch.”

“I’m sorry. But I have your shirts from the laundry.”

“Ah, good. Give them here.”

I deliberately took a step back from the door, and his eye narrowed, the corner of his mouth I could see drawing down in the corner.

“You used to work for Wolfe Studios,” I said. “You used to be Count Zakharov.”

A snorting sound like a horse getting ready to rear.

“That name you get right. Of course.”

Now I was looking for the silvery quality of his skin and the ink black of his hair. Like Michel de Winter, the color had been leached from him by the old hungry cameras, but unlike de Winter, he didn’t have a house in the Palisades and the adulation of millions to make up for it. He was a poor old forgotten lothario on a haunted street, and I tightened my jaw.

“I watched you in Count Zakharov’s Last Ride. The one with Marvell Peyton.”

“So? Who cares now?”

I knew the answer: no one did.

“How did you do it?” I asked, holding his shirts so he could see them. They were a good bribe, crisp charcoal Egyptian cotton, the points of the collar as sharp as arrows and the French cuffs ironed to a nicety.

He sneered at me through the crack in the door.

“How do you think? I killed a thousand, I killed ten thousand—”

“—and God will look down and smile,” I said, finishing Count Zakharov’s most famous line for him.

“So you remember. So what? One more stupid foreign girl, what do you matter?”

My lip curled back from my teeth.

“One more stupid foreign man, what do you matter?” I snapped in return, and he showed me his teeth as well in something like a smile.

“We are both foreign and strange,” he said. “I suppose that means we must be friends.”

I didn’t want to be friends, but I stepped a little closer as he opened the door further. Now I could see that he wore some great old brocade robe edged with fur even in the smothering heat. The cameras were better now, I told myself. They had tamed them down, fed them better.

“Come here,” he said imperiously. “Give an old man his shirts.”

Peter Nikolic wasn’t old, though at the age of seventeen, nearly everyone over thirty seems to be. He would have been in his fifties that day, but he was already something forgotten and dismissed to his echoing house on his haunted street. There might easily be another half dozen like him, watching us from their own cracked doors and afraid of the sunlight.

I edged closer, and I cried out in shock as the door flew open and his hands landed on my shoulders. He was suddenly taller than he was a moment before, tall like the other Ukrainians who came to Hollywood to make their money on the silver screen before their accents excluded them from the talkies.