Siren Queen(52)



“Tonight, I will be staying in. Edward Parr can go out with his Oriental antiquities and leave me out of it.”

My assistant sputtered and protested, but I turned away. They might have another Luli Wei, but they didn’t have another siren, and that meant I wasn’t going out to dinner with Edward Parr.

Three weeks later, we started filming on Siren’s Sea. The days were long, but it was clear we had another hit on our hands. I shot during the day, I gave interviews at night, and I cultivated a reputation for Eastern solitude. Stars went out if they shone too bright, I said, and I said it mysteriously enough that no one ever asked me what it meant.

At night I dreamed of Wolfe’s storage warehouses, triple locked and so deep some people said they never ended at all. I followed a thin voice I could barely hear, and when I moved aside a rack of sparkling gowns I found a nodder crouched down low, one that wore my face.

“My name is Luli Wei,” she said, and I reached up to feel stitches at my temples. I spared only a single moment for horror before I started to scratch at them frantically, tearing them out with my suddenly sharp fingernails, desperate to uncover the jagged scales underneath.





ACT THREE





I


“Cut!”

The entire scene froze for a moment, and then suddenly it was as if our wires had been sliced. Harry slumped against one of the foam-sculpted rocks, taking off his captain’s hat to wipe at his brow with a ridiculous paisley silk handkerchief, and Annette Walker slipped her hands out of the aluminum manacles, loudly declaring that she needed a cigarette. As for me, I dropped my arms and hung limp in the harness that lifted me two heads above either of them, my toes in the rubber tail a good two feet off the floor, and the tail itself coiled underneath.

Whalen Mannheim shot Annette an irritated look because getting her back into the studio usually took twice as long as the break, but he came to me, scowling at the tail.

“Sorry about that, Lu, the wires for the fins weren’t deploying at all. They were just flapping around.”

“Seriously? You’re making me miss the old tail,” I grumbled.

The old tail was less flexible than this current iteration, so stiff that I used to just rest flat on my face when I wasn’t actively shooting. The strain was bad enough that I spent most evenings with a hot water bottle balanced on my lower back, my mind a buzzing blank.

The new tail, pieced together by a brilliant girl in the costume shop, was twice as long but only half as heavy. A discreet series of latches were hidden under the frilled spine running along the back, letting the whole thing snap open and closed. No more Vaseline to grease me into the thing, and a clever system of wires helped the tail twitch convincingly along the ground. A dusting of mica gave it a bright shine that turned subtle in post-production, and after the first test photos came out, I was half in love with the way I looked in it. Red paint had been slopped over the rough surface of the rubber and then rubbed in with gold paint along the edges of the scales and fins. I felt more like a dragon than a snake or a siren, and every time I was strapped in, an elemental power rose up inside me.

Whalen and Braggo, the man who handled the prosthetics, decided that it would be more trouble than it was worth to pull me down out of the costume while they worked.

“Just hang around, huh, Lu?” said Whalen with a wink. He was too smart to give me an affectionate pat on the rear even through the rubber. The last time he tried, I threatened to bury a nearby prop harpoon in his foot. I heard him later on telling the gaffer that Oriental girls were very honor-bound and intent on preserving their virtue. I must have looked as if I were thinking about going over to do something really disastrous when Harry caught my eye.

“I tell them that in Catalonia, the afternoon siesta is a sacred tradition and required for excellent work,” he had said quietly.

“Is it?”

“Oh who knows, but it does leave me feeling refreshed and well rested in the middle of a long shoot, doesn’t it?”

Honor-bound or just plain murderous, either way, it meant that Whalen kept his hands to himself as he and Braggo fussed with the springs that mounted the fins. I was hardly needed for that, so I glanced over at Harry, who stared up at the rafters with wide-open eyes.

“Could you get Mr. Long a water and lime?”

The craft services girl running past nodded and pressed Harry’s favorite on-set drink into his hand, rousing him to sit and give her a polite thank-you. Instead of drinking it immediately, he wiped the condensation off of the glass with his handkerchief and pressed it against his face. He briefly went boneless at the pleasure of the cold, and then, remembering he was in public, stood and straightened in one motion. He made his way over to where I hung and in another world all their own, Whalen and Braggo clucked over my fins.

“Thank you for the refreshment, Miss Wei,” he said, saluting me with the glass. “I don’t think I quite noticed how poorly I was doing.”

“Long day, I suppose,” I said, but I watched him carefully, ready to hear more if he wanted to say.

“Seems like they are all long days lately,” he said. I wondered if he looked a little thin inside the bulk of the captain’s jacket. Over the course of seven films, he had received a few costume changes as well, going from the exotic mariner Captain Nemo to the great captain’s descendant, who accidentally freed his ancestor’s dire enemy during the Great War. The grandeur of the first movies suited him better than the Navy uniform did now, and he knew it as well.

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