Siren Queen(20)

November third dawned bright and terribly clear. I dressed in Donna Schafer’s red dress again, and in my fresh-polished heels, I waited outside for the car from Wolfe Studios. The dead were gone, I was still alive, and I had worn myself out being frightened and nervous over the last few months. There was nothing left to me but an aching calm.

The car that arrived for me was sleek and black, as funereal as it was grand. It felt like a joke when the man in the uniform opened the door for me, but I nodded regally at him before taking a seat inside.

Watching out the window of the car was as good as a motion picture itself. The mean, dark buildings of Hungarian Hill gave way to houses and stores that were taller and cleaner. We drove up into the hills, and the low buildings grew grander, became gleaming shops, and finally became that rarest of things, space, open space, enough space to think, to run if you wanted or to be alone.

There were a pair of silver wolves guarding the entrance to the studio. They gleamed in the light, and the gears that powered their long limbs and their powerful jaws moved just as smooth as life. The driver paused, opening the window to let one poke its broad head in. I heard it sniffing curiously even as the other gazed at me with blank mechanical menace. Then in tandem, they both went and lay down again, the geniuses inside that powered them growing cool once more with nothing to attack.

“Thank God,” the driver muttered. “Last month they tore the top off of a taxi.”

“Was the taxi trying to get in?” I asked, and the driver shrugged.

“Who the hell knows. Those two don’t need much of an excuse, that’s for sure.”

Wolfe Studios was a disappointment at first. Unlike the palatial homes and verdant parks we had passed, it looked no different than a set of warehouses piled on top of each other. Here and there, I saw people wheeling around trash cans and dragging along racks of equipment, and somewhere far in front of us I saw a flash of strange and silver light, but otherwise, it looked as dull and dusty as any other place I had ever been.

That doubt gnawed at my heart until that silver light returned, this time shooting straight up into the sky. It disappeared, invisible in the autumn sunlight, but it would gleam at night, and there would be a new name on the marquees, a new immortal where before there had been darkness.

People rushed out into the street to see, and the car ground to a snail’s pace.

A moment later, the crowd parted to reveal a slender white girl, her butter-gold hair dragged down her back and her dark blue eyes vivid with mascara and panic as she ran headlong through the onlookers. The shoulder of her Roman robe slouched down her arm, revealing her lacy bra strap underneath as well as some of the strapping that kept her breasts almost flat to her chest.

“Oh, oh, oh,” she cried, her mouth a dark cavern in the middle of her face, and instinctively, I knew that if anyone mortal touched her then, they would only burn.

She turned, and I could see the dark blood that spilled down her side. When they pulled the cloth away, they would find her skin miraculously healed.

“Who is that?” I asked, stunned, and the driver shook his head, as startled as I was.

“I should know,” he muttered. “For someone like that, for … I should know.”

He didn’t. No one did, not then, but they would.

She paused in front of the car, and despite my Atlantic cold, I shrank back. I had seen some of that incandescent glow before, scraps of it on the actresses with Jacko on Baker Street, the polished and tamed gleam of it on the picture screen. In person, it was blinding, something that could kill you.

Her wild eyes met mine. I couldn’t look away. I never wanted to. I had never wanted to worship before, but now I wanted to sink down, to pray, to give thanks and fear and love. My hand was on the door handle.

Before I could stumble out into her splendor, a pair of tall men approached her cautiously. One had a robe, and the other a carafe of water so cold that steam rose up from its wet sides.

There was a moment where we all verged on destruction, and then she allowed them to cover her. She sipped at the cold water, and she became human again, if she ever could be human again. They led her away, leaving a worshipful crowd behind her, but before she vanished, she looked back over her shoulder. Her eyes met mine, and there was the tug of a claim on my soul.

When she was gone, I pushed that claim away as hard as I could. I felt feverish, my body too warm, my teeth chattering together. It was as if there were a hook through my heart, and for now, she was letting the chain attached to that hook play out through her fingers. Someday, she would tug and I would come, and the idea horrified me and fascinated me all at once. For now, all I could do was try to rip that hook out, but I might as well have ripped out my heart.

“Something else again,” said the driver, shaking his head as he started to drive. “Maybe that’s good luck for you, though, huh?”

Or maybe that was all the luck to be had in the world for the day, and to hell with me. I had not been raised to think of luck as an infinite resource.

He drove me up to a building that looked a little grander than the rest, stepping out to open the door for me again. He said something kind, I think, but I couldn’t hear him. Instead I stood as straight as I could, and I walked in through the double doors.

There was a brisk-looking woman at the front guarded by two enormous security men, and she looked on me kindly enough.

“Oberlin Wolfe’s eight o’clock? You made it just in time. Take the elevator all the way to the top.”