Siren Queen(29)
Instead, Greta’s hand on my arm kept me steady, and Emmaline only looked at me with a friendly smile.
“Hello,” she said. “Are you Greta’s girl?”
“She is her own,” Greta said with a shrug. It was, to me, a daft thing to say, but Greta’s language was like the way she moved, slow and strange, insisting on its own way. “Shall we stay?”
Emmaline paused, and I could have dropped into the abyss of that moment. Then she smiled and glanced around her circle.
“Make some room, Greta and … who are you, dear heart?”
“Luli Wei,” I said. The hesitation before I said it was gone. It was almost mine now. I heard my sister had become a Mary. You could go practically anywhere with a name like Mary, and I wondered if she had made the best of it like she had made the best of the little button-eyed dolls.
“Beautiful,” she said lightly. “Make some room for Greta and Luli. Shove over, will ya?”
She hadn’t been at Wolfe Studios much longer than I had been. Sometimes, the Minnesotan farm girl still came out. Her last name used to be Lundstedt, and perhaps that was why Greta knew her, some quirk of ancestry or cold reaching further than warmth ever could.
The circle opened like water for us, and re-formed with us a part of it. It was seamless in a way that seemed more magic than the wolves or the distant horns, and I sat on a cushion with Greta leaning against my side.
“Jillian was just telling us about how her meeting with Abelard went.”
The dark-haired girl sitting close to Emmaline’s knee laughed, shaking her close-cropped curls in calculated modesty. She pressed closer to Emmaline, and immediately I disliked her. I excused it with a dislike of lapdogs in general, but even then I knew the truth.
“Oh, well, I was terrified out of my wits, you know? One of the studio changelings told me that the chair you sit on in Mr. Abelard’s office was like a barber’s chair, and that he could flip it back so that whoop, you went down on your back with your legs up…”
Someone from the circle made a disbelieving noise, but before Emmaline’s sharp eye could search them out, one of the men spoke up. With his rough clothes and slight, scarred face, I knew he wasn’t an actor, and Evelyn Drake’s sly voice whispering about screwing below the line hovered traitorously in my mind.
“It’s true,” he said flatly. “And there are binds underneath it could keep a bull elephant down.”
The silence after that was sharp but not unsympathetic. Emmaline nodded at Jillian to continue.
“So the day before I went walking down to the south back lot where they were shooting Aegean Winds. I don’t know what I was doing, just walking because if I didn’t get out of the dorm, I would have gone crazy, you know? When I came by, they were on break, or at least that’s what they called it while Mr. Keene yelled his head off at Paul Wineland.”
A giggle went around the circle. Even I had heard about Paul Wineland’s famously slow manner of both speech and action. It dripped like honey on the screen, and he made bank for the studio, but it was like putting tinder to the torch when paired with Keene’s equally famous temper.
“I figured that if anyone asked what I was doing, I would say I had just dropped off some coffee for someone, but no one did, so I kept looking around. It was getting dark then, and they only had lights over Mr. Wineland. I guess I’m pretty lucky there was no cliff there or I might have slipped right over.”
Her giggle was nervous this time, and Emmaline placed a comforting hand on her head. Paul Wineland might have been known for his slow manner of talking, but Emmaline had a quality for stillness. She could wait out an age, and sooner than that, Jillian started talking again.
“So I’m walking along the coast, and before too long, it feels like the lights are a long way behind me, and I can hear the water crash below and feel the wind howling above.”
No one doubted her here. Strange things happen on set.
“And this woman is sitting on the rock, and she’s wrapped up in something purple and shimmery. She asks me for something to eat, because she’s so hungry, and I give her some cookies I was saving for later. She eats them, and then she says to me, ‘I can see you’re a girl with a problem.’
“Well, I am, and I tell her about Mr. Abelard, and she thinks for a minute before telling me to sit down next to her, because she’s got a plan.
“The next day, I go to Mr. Abelard like he says, and golly, but I’m sweating something fierce. I didn’t even have seven shirts like the lady on the rock told me to get. I had to borrow from my roommate and our friend in the hall. So I walk into his office, and it’s just like a forest in there. He’s got trees in pots, so many that they block the window, and in the back is a real fountain made of rock with the water cycling through and little golden fishies swimming in it. It’s so beautiful, and I’m sweating and scared and about to puke, but he just looks at me like he’s going to swallow me up in one bite.
“He starts to gesture at the chair, but then he stops and looks at me for a minute. He can’t figure out what’s wrong, but he just tells me, ‘Pretty girl, take off your shirt.’”
Jillian giggled again, her fingers knotting through her short hair and tugging. Again, Emmaline’s fingers soothed her, and she continued.
“So I do it, and while he’s still wondering why I’ve got a shirt on underneath, I tell him, ‘Mr. Abelard, take off your skin,’ just like the woman says. For a minute I thought he was going to have a heart attack, but he grits his teeth and picks up a knife from his desk. It was a weird thing, iron, and they don’t like iron, do they, Emmaline? Wasn’t that a strange thing for him to have?”