Siren Queen(67)

“What’s so great about being seen?” Tara demanded. “What’s so important about that?”

She might have had the words for it, but I didn’t. They locked up in my throat, about being invisible, about being alien and foreign and strange even in the place where I was born, and about the immortality that wove through my parents’ lives but ultimately would fail them. Their immortality belonged to other people, and I hated that. I couldn’t say that, so instead I simply struck.

“Don’t ask me that when you want to be seen so much yourself,” I said. “Did you know when you came west that you would be Lester Moore?”

Her head rocked back as if I had slapped her, and before she could respond, I spun away from her and stalked into the night. She followed me, because lost in the fires that could go on forever, what choice did she have? I didn’t make it easier for her, and I wove around the wayward ones who danced from fire to fire and the darker ones who didn’t dare enter into any kind of light at all.

“Dammit, wait,” Tara called from behind me, but I didn’t. Instead I walked so fast I was nearly running, kicking off my shoes and letting the asphalt turn my stockings to shreds. I barely felt it.

I wasn’t just running away from Tara as I dodged the lights and slid through the darkness between them. I was running away from my sister and what I had done to her, from Harry and how I couldn’t save him, even my mother, who I had left so very far behind without a real good-bye.

Running, I was reckless, especially with no safe haven I knew I could dash to if something dark and monstrous found me. Tara was even more vulnerable, though I knew in a vicious, vindictive way that nothing wanted her. That was wrong, I came to learn years later, but that night, I knew she had a kind of safety I lacked, even if it was coupled with something unfair and ugly.

I ducked around a silent cabal of sound engineers, conversing in the booms of bass drums, and I skirted Stephen Caine’s fire, which was roaring its last as he died of syphilis, no last great role to save him. Tara wrote a poem about seeing him that night, a ghastly, grave and dying splendor, but that was years in the future yet.

The problem with running is that eventually, either you stop or are stopped. In the weird magic and terrible logic of the fires, I might have run forever without seeing the same place twice, dragging Tara along behind me, but there was certainly a humor to it all. Eventually, I ran into the person I wanted to see the least.

I turned to see if Tara was gaining on me, and suddenly gravity slowed me to a stop, wrapping me in soft arms and the scent of aloewood. I didn’t quite crash into her, but my speed carried me forward and her back for a few paces before she steadied us both.

Emmaline was dressed all in white that night, a shimmering soft billow of silk that called to mind royal bedrooms and women who drowned weighted down by fabric. She didn’t sit in state reigning over her silvery fire, but by herself at a small brazier that smelled of burning cedar twigs, a half circle of stubby white candles around it.

“There you are,” she said tenderly, and when she brushed a lock of errant hair off my forehead, it felt as if no time had passed at all. Tara stumbled up just in time to see that, and she stood awkwardly on the borders of Emmaline’s fire, uncertain and cautious. Emmaline’s sweetness pulled at me like a sludge of tea and sugar, and it would have been so easy to fall back into her arms. She would have held me and kissed me, and that was the thought that pushed me back. The idea of kissing her frightened me, and I stepped away.

“I haven’t found your fire in two years,” I said stiffly. “Is this why? Did you stop holding court?”

She glanced at her single flame with a touch of amusement, shaking her head.

“No, not at all. Tonight I just wanted to be alone. Like Caroline, I suppose.”

“Greta,” I corrected, because at the very least, Emmaline should have known. She knew Greta even before I did, but she only shrugged, have it your own way.

“Will you come and sit with me?” Emmaline asked, gesturing to a small pile of cushions beyond the candles. Her gaze shut out Tara entirely, and even if I had been running away from Tara in a fit of temper, I bridled at that.

“Not if you want to be alone,” I said, mimicking her mimicking the excuse that Greta and I had made, and she frowned. She was less beautiful when she showed anything beyond a wistful sadness; perversely in that moment, it made me like her better.

“You’re being childish,” she declared, and then Tara stepped forward.

“I feel like I should introduce myself if no one’s going to bother,” she said with an ironic nod towards me. “I’m Tara Lubowski, pleased to meet you, Miss Sauvignon. I know you from set.”

Emmaline took Tara’s hand after a brief moment, insulting but not overly so. Tara’s look towards her was cool as well. She would have known what to do if Emmaline was wearing trousers, I think, but lovely girls in shimmering white silk still left her defenseless then.

“Oh, Lester Moore,” Emmaline said. “The girl doing the script for The Ghost of the Siren.”

“Just Lester Moore on the script,” Tara said gamely, and she allowed Emmaline to look her up and down in a mixture of dismay and amusement.

“You need to rein yourself in,” Emmaline said, turning to me and dismissing Tara completely. “You’re on thin ice as it is with Dewalt, and after Whalen, Harvey Rose is still around.”