Siren Queen(28)
“You can’t keep her safe, you know,” the girl said in English. Her voice rang like small bells, echoing and tinny.
“Of course I can’t, I know that,” I growled. “But she doesn’t need any more of that. Drink it yourself.”
Greta tugged my sleeve as I was staring the girl down.
“Come,” she said. “I want to see more of the fires.”
Her words were a bridge. A part of me didn’t want to cross them, wanted to run straight back to the dorm, or even, shamefully, back past the gates where the wolves Sinister and Dexter kept out those who were not supposed to enter, but never cared for who wanted to leave. In front of us was something dark and burning, the future I wanted more than I wanted to breathe, and I nodded.
“All right. Let’s go. But slowly, all right?”
Plenty of people have written about the Friday fires. When Perry and Amity Fitzwarren came west to trade their glamour for fairy gold, they danced through them like king and queen, untouchable until, of course, they weren’t. Even Amity couldn’t capture the way the flames looked more red than they should have, how the heat ebbed and flowed like the tide. There was always a full moon hanging over the lots on Friday night, outshining the one that hung in the sky for everyone else, and once I looked up to see a lunar face looking back at me, and laughing with a kind of cruel indifference.
We were too new and frail to rule one of the fires ourselves. They were courts in miniature, the fires where directors and actors could pretend to be Oberlin Wolfe himself. With Greta on my arm, we skirted the roistering fire of Alan Watt, in the prime of his career with his stunt horse Etta at his side. She wore a human form that night, her horse hide thrown over her shoulders like a cloak, but we could see the white around the dark of her eyes and knew she would kick if anyone came too close. James Kenfield languished at a low fire to hide the tremors in his hand and the deep lines that addiction had carved into his face. He reached for us, me or Greta or some ghost of an actress he had known a lifetime ago. We left him too, but not before a studio changeling crept hopefully close. I turned my head to see her grow taller and thinner, her features turning almost hawkish. Lorena Fairman, I thought, or maybe Shelley Du Lac. Ghost queen to a dying king, and it made me shake a little.
Greta felt the tremor go through me, and it was as if she forgot that I was the one who was meant to be looking after her. She stroked my arm and squeezed me close.
“Poor lamb,” she said, and she tipped up to plant a soft kiss on my forehead, bare since Oberlin Wolfe had stripped it of Maya Vos Santé’s kiss. “Let us find a safe harbor. We should not wander all through the night.”
Where? I might have asked her. We were in the heart of the fires now, and behind the beat of the drums, the horns sounded, brassy and cold. On Saturday morning, everyone would be back in silk pajamas, sipping mimosas by the side of turquoise pools that hid nothing in their depths, but it was not Saturday morning yet. It might not be Saturday morning for a long time.
Greta took the lead now, guiding me on a weaving path through the dark. More than once, I heard a voice call my name from the darkness and the flames. Once it was most likely Jacko, once it might have been Jane or Tara, calling through darkness and time. It could have been fame or fortune in the form of a director or an actor who liked the line of my body, the curve of my cheek. It could also have been something barbed and hungry, no predator like Oberlin Wolfe but something that made its way stealing scraps that no one would notice. Often, there’s no way to tell until you can count the teeth.
Greta led me right past those calls, her head turning neither to the right or the left. She knew her place. It wasn’t here, but she knew it, and that gave her a kind of strength.
I am still not sure if she had a destination in mind. As far as I could tell that night, she was only leading us deeper to a place where the darkness between the bonfires seemed to drag at us, close and stifling.
Just when I wanted to tug her back towards the edges, something shifted, and I heard a soft voice calling to us.
“Oh it’s Greta and her girl, come here, come here…”
The voice was bright and sweet, but there was a resonance to it that couldn’t be resisted, not then. Greta smiled with a strange kind of relief, and unerringly, she drew me forward.
This fire threw back a wall of heat, but still there was something cold to it. There were far more women gathered around it than men, and the men had a watchful, wary quality to them, like nothing I had quite seen revealed before. The people around this fire fell softly on each other like leaves drifted together on the ground, but there were sharp eyes on Greta and me, trying to see some marker that I couldn’t sense myself.
I looked up at the girl seated on a low couch covered with fine brocades, and I recognized her. I had last seen her stumbling in the lot, her star’s gleam obvious even in the November sky. She was naked then, and now she only wore a sheer white silk dress, scattered with glass beads to give it a hard shine.
Emmaline Sauvignon kept her own private and peculiar court around a fire that looked like a fallen star, and a distant drum that echoed my heart beat faster.
I moved haltingly towards her, eyes wide, and if she had called my name in that moment, showed me in any way at all that she recognized me, I would have fallen dead on the spot. Everyone who you have ever seen painted up on the screen thirty feet high, loving or laughing or hating or warring, every single one has this potential in them as well, a trick for being worshipped and a taste for the divine.