Siren Queen(55)

“Still. The world is ugly enough without my forcing more of it on you. Shall I call you a car, my dear? I find that I’m no longer fit for company, and I’m not sure I care to make the drive along the cliffs in my present mood.”

I nodded, and when the cab honked from the curb, he escorted me to the door. I could almost see a fluttering dark veil drop over his features, and it sent a cold shiver along my spine.

“Harry … please take care of yourself.” Even in my memory, it felt too little, heedless and uncaring. I meant it, but I also knew that he wouldn’t listen.

“You are great, and you are good, my dear,” he said, “and if Emmaline doesn’t have the sense to see that, then that is her misfortune.”

(“I wish I could have known him,” Jane said. “I wish I could have known both of you then.”

“You would have loved him.”

“I would have loved you both.”)

The cabdriver was thankfully silent all the way back to Rexford Avenue, and I stared out at the passing lights. If I pressed my face to the cool glass, I could see the stars gleaming high above, constellations and novas that shone for Hollywood alone. I could recite their names as if they were saints, and they were larger than anyone who had come before.

That night, however, when I thought of Harry avoiding his bed because it was too empty, contemplating alcohol or small blue pills or something more dire, it hardly felt like enough.





II


Even the studios had to bend before the Santa Anas.

Every year, the katabatic winds raced down from the highlands, dry and sere, sweeping the chaparral ahead of them and bowing them low.

The winds brought madness, of course, adding to the not inconsiderable amount that already hovered over the studios, but more than that, they brought fire, sheets of flame that ate away at the landscape and left it black.

During the Santa Anas, Wolfe, Everest, and Aegis would go together up to the mountains, where the winds were kindled. They were propitiating the true gods of the land with blood, tobacco, and chocolate, hoping that their courts would be spared. It worked, mostly, even if they came back from the mountains and then weren’t seen for several days after.

It was far too early for the Santa Anas. They should have been sleeping on the mountaintops still, and that was the only reason that Whalen Mannheim dragged us out to Santa Aidia to shoot.

Santa Aidia was already a ghost town, and before we went out there, Harvey Rose sent men to drive out the last stragglers. Homeless people, ghosts, and the odd coyote wearing a human skin were shooed out into the desert, and then the crew could come in to build up the remnants of a lost city over it all.

The desert town was meant to stand in for the ruin of Atlantis, the siren’s ancestral home. It was there that Captain Nemo and the siren would have their final confrontation, over the bones of her people. We shot before dawn and at dusk, because the heat of the day could kill us. Whenever I unlatched my tail, my legs emerged soaked in sweat and clammy all at once. Our trailers were hopeless, and above and below the line, we lay as if dead under the shade sails that the crew set up.

“Just another few days, and we’re back in town,” I said hopefully, but except for his lines, Harry never seemed to speak at all. They had announced his marriage to Lana Brooks, and out of some morbid fascination, I read the story in Variety. Supposedly they had met at the racetrack in La Jolla, Harry seeing to the racehorse he owned and Lana dragged along by overeager friends. She had bet on his horse. He had made her come collect her winnings personally, and then asked her to dinner.

It was terrible, as was the picture of them in the paper together. Lana looked as bright and brittle as glass, and on Harry, bare tolerance and panic was made to pass for casual European dissolution. Tongues were already wagging about the age difference, as Oberlin Wolfe surely meant for them to do, and there were bets made and taken about who would end up ruined. From the gleam in Lana Brooks’s eyes, I could tell she didn’t mean for it to be her.

My tail seemed to weigh a hundred pounds that day, and I could have cried when the wardrobe girls helped me buckle it on. At least it wasn’t heels, I told myself. I told myself that a lot. The harness dug into my skin, an itchy meridian around my ribs, but I lofted into the air as gracefully as a bird, hovering over Harry as Annette Walker clung to him, looking over her shoulder fearfully at me.

“I am weary to death of this,” the captain said, and every line of his last half century stood out in stark relief. “Fighting, running, killing … it destroys a man from the inside out.”

I twisted an esoteric pattern in the dust, my face implacable and cruel.

“What does that mean to me?” I asked. “My kind were born for viciousness, for the hunt and the kill. I have sworn to chase you forever, and so I will as long as you and I both live.”

I rose tall and proud, balanced perfectly on my tail. The trident in my hand glinted gold in the sun, a weapon that had been used by my ancestors to end lives. They were gone, but the trident and I remained.

The captain’s hand tightened on the archaic sword at his side. It had belonged to his ancestor, a man with whom he shared both a name and a face. For a moment, that warrior’s resolve tensed. It seemed as if battle must be joined. The ghosts behind us seemed to call for it, and then they went silent in shock.

The sword hit the sand with a soft thump.