Siren Queen(66)

“Red suits you,” she said, and I smiled as I looped my arm through hers.

“Suits and fedoras suit you,” I said. “Did you wear them back in Chicago as well?”

“Nope. In Chicago, it was all frocks, chignons, and cloches. I didn’t mind them, or at least, that’s what I told myself until I didn’t have to wear them anymore. Two days after I made it to LA, when I was living in this disgusting apartment with six other people, I bought a suit from a pawn shop and sold every dress I had with me, as well as my hair. Guess I minded more than I thought I did.”

“You must have been happy.”

She puffed a soft breath between her lips, shrugged.

“I was free. That’s better than happy. Happy came later. Are you?”

“I will be,” I said firmly. “Both.”

She didn’t ask me how I expected to achieve that, and there was a bone-weariness in my spine that made the idea of going back on set with Jacko Dewalt seem like a trek across the Mojave Desert. Emmaline kept a cool distance between us, and it surprised me how little I thought of her.

“You’d rather be proud than happy,” Tara said, squeezing my hand. When I looked slightly offended at her words, she reached up to tuck a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “It’s part of you. I don’t think you would fight it if you could.”

She was perhaps right, but then we had come to the edge of the fires, the small ones lit by people without names, by ghosts and by the scavengers. To my surprise, Tara moved closer to me, and she watched all around with a wary stare.

“They tell stories about the fires,” she muttered. “They say that they go on as long as they need to go on, and that you can walk in and never walk out.”

“I can take you back to the gate,” I offered, but she shook her head.

“No, I want to see. I think I might need to see.”

“If I can do it, you can?” I guessed, and she did laugh at that, shaking her head.

“I don’t have your pride, I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m curious, though, and my father said that if I could be curious instead of afraid, things would probably work out some kind of right.”

The fires were carefully tended that night. The early arrival of the Santa Anas made everyone nervous, and it was terrifying what an uncontrolled blaze might do to the studio, let alone the fragile people gathered there. It was strange when the studios were so much a world apart to be so touched by the outside world.

Over the last year, I had grown unafraid in the fires. I might not be able to find Emmaline’s any longer, but I was always welcome wherever Harry roamed, and unexpectedly, Helen Martel, Harry’s friend and Emmaline’s first mentor at Wolfe Studios, took me into her circle as well. Otherwise, I had learned to walk as I wished through the long night, hearing my name from every direction and knowing to ignore most of them.

Tara didn’t gape like the occasional townie brought past the wolves at the gate, but neither was she pleased to weave between the fires. When a pack of studio changelings ran by, their laughter sweet and high and close to terror, she swore before apologizing.

“Writers don’t have anything like this,” she said with a pallid smile. “It’s much lonelier when it’s just you and your typewriter, I suppose.”

“This is the loneliest place in the world,” I found myself saying, and when she would have asked me more, I pulled her forward.

To comfort Tara, I sat for a while at a quiet fire tended by some girls from the dorms. They weren’t the ones I had known, because those girls had moved on or blown away, but they were like them, and they were happy to let us stay for a while. I caught them sneaking speculative glances at me, wondering what had let me rise, whether it was just my skin and my eyes instead of something they could achieve for themselves.

“They’re jealous of you,” Tara said when we started walking again.

“Of course they are. I was jealous enough when I was in their place.”

“You weren’t there long,” Tara remarked, and I frowned at her.

“No one can be there long,” I explained. “There’s a window. You bloom brightly for a moment, and that’s when you can rise. If you don’t…” I shrugged. Failure hovered at the edge of my vision, but I learned that you never allowed it in, never brought it home to sit like some honored guest.

“No such thing for writers. We rise when we rise, and it doesn’t matter if we’re young or pretty,” she said, sounding completely sure of herself. She hadn’t written either of her great novels yet, or even the pulp that gained her a second life of fame from the strange children who craved all things odd and grotesque. I didn’t know if what she said was true or not; of course I had nothing to do with writers.

“I think you’re pretty,” I offered, and she gave me an impatient look.

“I don’t want to be pretty,” she said with a jerk of her head, “and it’s a damn good thing I know that because I never have been.”

She shook her head almost sadly.

“There are things that are more important than being pretty, you know,” she said, and anger rushed over me at her condescension. I dropped her hand and stood away from her, my fingers curling convulsively into claws.

“Don’t you think I know that?” I snapped. “Do you think we’re just little dolls made out of silk and hair? We work here, Tara, we bleed, and we suffer, and we cry all so that we can be seen…”