Siren Queen(42)

“Here’s the page, sir,” said Whalen Mannheim. “Whenever you are ready…”

He turned as if seeing me for the first time, and I like to think that it wasn’t just theatrical manners that made his mouth drop open a little. I was dressed in a deep red blouse and a black silk skirt. I stood easily in the tall heels I had borrowed from a girl in the dorm, finally learning to ignore the pain in my feet.

“Well, as I do live,” he said, and then to my surprise, he said something that I both recognized and didn’t. Mandarin, I realized after a moment, not my nearly forgotten Cantonese.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak…” I said, an edge of real apology in my tone.

“Oh, a shame,” he said warmly. “Beautiful language for a beautiful girl. Shall we begin, my dear?”

I felt an odd corkscrew twist of shame and embarrassment in my gut. I had worked so hard to be shed of everything from the laundry, and running into even a version of it here and now felt wrong, especially in the mouth of a man as well-loved and well-off as Harry Long. If he could speak it with only a wink at how exotic it was, why couldn’t I keep it too? Then Scottie Mannheim gave us the setting, and thoughts of Mandarin and Cantonese flew from my head.

If you’ve heard of me, you know the scene. Captain Nemo has lost everything at that point. His son has been taken by the waves, his ship is a mess of metal and glass at the bottom of the sea, and his crew lost to mutiny. He stands up in the grotto under the waves and looks around in heartbreak and dismay.

“It’s gone, it’s all gone,” he said, his voice trembling in fear and awe. His feelings are stark on his face, and they pull me closer, better than the hot water that streams from the undersea trenches, sweeter than the bright pop of roe between my teeth.

“How does it feel?” I asked him, drawing his gaze to where I crouched on the rock. I was small for my kind, my tail only ten feet long instead of the half mile my father boasted. Even my brothers could topple a fishing boat with nothing more than a swift shove. I was tiny in comparison.

“You’re Atlantean,” the captain said with shock, and the acknowledgment on his face was better than I had ever dreamed of. I had had plenty of time to dream as I recovered from the destruction of my home.

I slithered off the rock, pulling myself forward on my hands, never taking my eyes from him.

“I was,” I said harshly. “Atlantis is gone now, son of the land, gone after you battled with my father and my brothers, tearing down the gold towers and glass domes. The ten-thousand-year dream is ended because of you and your arrogance, your hate.”

“The gold towers that hid torture chambers. The domes where you kept humans like pets and zoo animals,” the captain said coldly. He couldn’t help taking a step back as I slithered a little closer. I was so unlike him as to be alien, something so wrong in his world that it hurt to look at me for very long.

“My father and my brothers made a mistake,” I said, looking up at him. Snakes were as low to the ground, but they knew themselves to be dangerous. “They thought you were beautiful animals, fit only for display, kept as darling companions to be spoiled.”

The captain opened his mouth to speak, but I hissed at him, loud and warning. It was a noise I didn’t even know I had in me until I made it.

“I will not make that mistake,” I said. “You are a plague that must be destroyed.”

I reared back, fangs bared …

“All right, that’s enough,” said Scottie Mannheim, and I blinked. It wasn’t an undersea grotto. It was an echoing room in Southern California, and I was pulling myself along on the ground as three white men watched me. I came to my feet smoothly, my face impassive but red. There was dust on my blouse and skirt; I would have to have them cleaned before I returned them to the girl I had borrowed them from.

“That was good,” Whalen muttered thoughtfully, but even as his brother murmured assent, Harry Long shook his head.

“Are you blind and deaf?” he demanded. “She scared the wits out of me. For a moment, I was certain she was going to rip out my very throat and drink my blood!”

He turned to me, and I was startled by the sincere pleasure in his gaze. He took both my hands in his, bringing them up for two dry kisses on my knuckles.

“Very well done, Miss Wei,” he said warmly.

“We still have a few more girls we want to see,” Scottie said, and Harry Long shot them an amused glance.

“Of course, Scottie. Of course, Whalen. But please believe me when I say that I know what a monster looks like, and Miss Wei has what it takes. I am certain that you have found your siren.”

I thumbed through the script cautiously, waiting for the moment the siren fell in love with the grizzled captain, but I found nothing. She was a monster straight through. She never stopped trying to kill the man who had destroyed her world and killed her family, not until a stray bullet aimed at her enormous sea serpent caught her in the chest. She died hissing with hate, and I smiled.

“That was a tough sell,” Scottie Mannheim told me with some pride three weeks later. “You know, it’s hard to get the commission on board with killing a lady, even a…”

He trailed off, too kind to say “Chinese,” but still dressed in the hideously long and heavy rubber tail they had to slick with Vaseline to get me into, I smiled.