Siren Queen(32)

“Don’t be such a bitch, she said she was sincere.”

“I’ll bet she was, but I don’t write lines like that not to see people do the stupid thing.”)

I thought I could drown in the sweetness of her voice. From where I sat, I swayed closer to her, and then I stood up. With a grumble of protest, Greta rolled away and looked up at me with some irritation, but I ignored her. I couldn’t help it.

“Of course I will,” I said. I sounded confident. “You wanted it, and you should have it.”

Emmaline’s lips parted, and it threw fire deep in my body. She couldn’t help what she was, and I couldn’t help what I was. We were stories that should never have met, or stories that only existed because we met. I still don’t know.

“Please,” she said. Only that, and I turned away from the fire, breaking the circle.

I walked into the darkness, and then I realized that Greta was walking with me. I looked at her in surprise. She sighed.

“I told you I do not want to be alone tonight,” she grumbled.

After a moment, I took her hand, still walking.

“I don’t either,” I admitted, and she laughed a little.





V


It would be easy to think that the studio directors, lords of the court, kept their offices in towers hovering high over the tumult. Oberlin Wolfe did, but there was no one like Oberlin Wolfe.

Ronald Abelard instead kept house in the east courtyard, along with Emerson Lankin and the Mannheim brothers. They were bigger business than Jacko Dewalt, and they kept their own counsel. Though they liked to give out otherwise, they were all human, and they fought those humble beginnings with cypress moss, a garden plot full of spiky foreboding plants, and a fountain that featured a crucified Jesus in bronze. As the famous society writer Dottie Wendt said a few years later, too Bosch for words.

It was not a long walk to the east courtyard in the daylight, but the way was longer in the dark. I had at least grown used to the ache of high heels now, and Greta kicked hers off, swinging them in her free hand as we walked.

The fires were behind us. The darkness was absolute save for the sodium lights high above.

“Do you know what you are doing?” she asked gravely, and I shrugged. I knew what I had to do. I had to bring flowers to Emmaline, love-comes-home for her head and her hand. What happened before that, I wasn’t sure about. I had a bit of knowledge about picking locks with a sliver of metal or plastic, and if necessary I was narrow enough to slip into places that most never imagined. The bridge to Emmaline crowned in flowers that I had given her was shaky, but I told myself it would hold my weight. I might not have actually believed that story, but I needed to at least pretend that I did to get to the end of it.

Greta sighed again, shaking her head. She looked more like a sacrifice than I was comfortable with in her cocoon of shimmering silk. Her hair was falling down out of its pins, and if it were not for the pale resolve on her face, she might be one more girl drunk and debauched in the Friday fires.

“I want you to go back,” I said, stopping under the relative safety of a lamp. “You don’t need to be involved in this.”

She arched an eyebrow at me, perfect scorn and affection in equal measures.

“Are you going to go back?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t say that I had already stolen my sister’s name, I didn’t know what I would be if I took more from Greta, who thought she had lost everything. Instinctively I understood that there was always something more to lose.

“Then we are going.”

We walked into the darkness again. There’s nothing so absolute as the absence of artificial light, and the distant sounds that we heard made that darkness even heavier. Once we heard the horns of the hunt, and we both hid behind a dumpster, waiting for them to go by. There was the roar of the engines, a mad baying that seemed too shrill to be that of a dog pack, and a laugh that filled the world. We huddled behind the dumpster, pressing ourselves against the brick until it was silent and we could move again.

A little after that, we stopped short because we heard a sob a short distance off, feminine and despairing.

“Are you all right?” Greta called, and the sob cut off short.

“P-please…” The sob came again. “Please…”

The sound was so desolate that I started towards it, but Greta pulled me back with a shake of her head.

“What is it? What has been done to you?” she asked.

“Please … I need help, please…”

“Explain,” Greta demanded, and I blinked at the harsh note in her voice.

“Please…”

She shook her head, taking my hand more firmly.

“Come on,” she said, and she walked on.

“What was that?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder. My stomach turned at the desperation in that voice, but the farther we walked from it, the easier it got.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “She wanted us to go into the dark, but she would not say why. Too many things like that where I come from, and they lead to death. Death in the mountains, death in the swamp, but it is all death alike.”

Sooner rather than later, we came to the east courtyard, where we both breathed a sigh of relief. There was something overblown about the Gothic dreariness of the courtyard, lit from all around by bulbs with a dim violet filter. It was a story compared to the reality of the darkness between the fires, but I reminded myself that stories could still hurt and kill. The gate was shut but not locked, and we walked in as easily as if we had appointments.