Siren Queen(56)
“No,” said the captain. “This will not continue. This is over. I kill you, you kill me, it all comes out to the same thing in the end, doesn’t it?”
He gently unwound the shivering girl’s arms from around his neck, giving her a long and regretful look. She was as fresh as a bouquet of waxy white flowers. The promise of a new life was perhaps the most difficult thing to pull away from, but he did it.
“Promise me you will not harm her,” the captain said. “Promise me that you will not seek your terrible revenge on her or any children she may bear.”
“And why would I promise such a thing?” I asked, tracing circles in the dirt.
“Because I surrender. I give myself to you, and when you spill my blood over the stones of your ancestral home, it will finally be over.”
“No…” whispered the girl, but neither monster nor man paid her any heed.
“I give you my word as a Knight of the Blood that she will not be harmed so long as she does not offer harm to me,” I said with gravity, and the captain nodded.
“Go from this place,” he said to the girl. “Go. Live a long and happy life, and know that I went to my death thinking of you fondly.”
The girl fell to her knees instead, but neither of us stopped to look at her. I reached for the captain, and with his head bowed, he came to me.
It was a risky scene for Whalen, but he had always been the more daring of the brothers, the one most inclined to tell the strange stories that only he could tell in flickers of color and light. People had followed the captain into story after story, and what he was doing here was a kind of murder. If it played out well, it would be the kind of murder that Harry would rise from like a phoenix, shedding sparks to light the way. Otherwise, ignominy, defeat, darkness, and a name that Oberlin Wolfe wouldn’t spit on, let alone bank.
As Harry stared me down, I could feel the brush of a dark and whispering wing across my face. My body tightened as if drawn on wires. It was like what I had felt when I saw Josephine Beaufort that day in the Comique, spilling her blood for a Romeo who would never rise again, not like she did. His eyes met mine steadily, and for the first time, the siren looked away.
He crossed the desert ground towards me, and I moved restlessly, almost afraid. His sword was still on the ground, but there was something subtly more dangerous about him now. As he came towards me, he lifted his arms, palms entreating the sky. Christlike, the theses and analyses written afterwards said. They love a puzzle that will never be solved, and Siren Queen, the way that Whalen envisioned it, would never come to pass. None of us knew it in that moment, but Whalen’s film was breathing its very last.
“All right, monster,” Harry said softly. “Come at me, then.”
I reared back, the wire rig pulling me up even higher, and five feet above any other cast or crew member, I saw the rolling smoke. For a frozen moment, my brain tried to tell me it was a solid mass of black rock that was rolling down the hill, but then I smelled the air and knew the truth.
“Fire!” I shouted instead of my line. “Fire!”
The production moved like a large animal composed of many small parts, each person rushing to secure their own responsibilities and nothing else, but all moving slow, too slow. I turned my head towards the man operating my crane only to see the last of him as he ducked into the crowd. I looked around wildly at the people rushing below me, and then again at the rolling black smoke. Now I could see the vivid orange of hungry flames as well, and the wind blew the harsh smell of singeing wood towards me.
With three years of vocal training, I should have screamed my head off. I could make them turn their heads and look at me just as much for a wildfire as I did for the death throes of a monster, but after my first cry of fire, my voice curled in my throat and refused to come. Instead, I twisted about, grasping for the wires attached to my harness and slicing my fingers on their taut strands. Something in my side tore, spilling dull agony to my hip as I spun slowly, so slowly in the air, trying to reach the harness that was buckled at my back.
“The latches!”
I looked down to see a girl from wardrobe, her arms draped over with heavy costumes dangling from their hangers. She must have worked with Harry or Annette because I didn’t recognize her at all.
“Not the wires, the latches!” she shouted again, gesturing at her thigh, and then someone shouted her name—Aguila—and she ran for the trucks.
It took me a moment to understand her words, and then grimly, I bent my body as much as I could, bringing the latches that lined the side of my tail up to my reaching fingers. My tail was lighter than it had been, but it still took two girls to move comfortably. My frantic fingers undid two out of the five before the tail dragged my legs down again, and I took a deep breath to steady my hands before trying again.
The third latch opened and the tail dropped again, but on the fourth, with a loud, unwilling squelch, the rubber peeled from my kicking legs by its own weight, falling dead to the sand underneath.
My teeth were clenched so tight my jaw ached and there was a tearing pain in my side, but I couldn’t stop. Instead, freed of the weight of the tail, I could work on the harness. I jerked the end of the belt so hard I gave myself bruises around my ribs, but then—so suddenly it wrenched my wrist—my weight tumbled free, sending me flailing to the ground. The distance was not so great, but I still might have shattered an ankle or worse if Harry hadn’t been there to catch me on the way down.