Siren Queen(68)

“I’m not sure you have anything to tell me,” I said shortly, but she tilted her head to one side.

“Are you certain?”

I started to say yes, but when I hesitated, she smiled.

“Come sit with me.”

I might have said no, but Tara moved past me, making me jump.

“Tara…”

“I can tell when I’m not welcome, and I’ll save Miss Sauvignon the trouble of pretending I am,” she said with a faint smile. “I’ll just have myself a smoke around that corner, shall I?”

Emmaline’s fire was built against the side of one of the sound stages. With the iron it contained, the structure was as good a touchstone as anyone was likely to get, and I nodded.

“Don’t … don’t stray, all right? It gets nasty around here on Friday.”

“I’d believe it,” Tara said with a nod at Emmaline. She disappeared around the corner, and Emmaline and I were alone.

I thought to demand she say what she wanted to say, but she took my hand, drawing me to sit down on the cushions by the candles. I balked when she wanted to draw her wispy shawl over my shoulders, and she sighed.

“I missed you so much,” she said, her eyes searching my face by firelight.

“You knew where I was,” I said shortly. “In the dorms, in the fires, on Rexford Avenue. You always knew. If you wanted me to find you, I would have found you.”

“I missed you,” she repeated. “That … doesn’t mean it was good for us to come together like we were.”

“You decided that, not me. I’m not going to have the same fight we had before.”

“I don’t want to fight at all. I want to be … well. Friends again.”

I studied her, watching the silver fires flicker across her face, washing out the ruddiness and enhancing her romantic pallor.

“We were never friends, Emmaline,” I said, realizing that that was true. We couldn’t be. She was something I wanted for myself, and then she was something I wanted to consume me like a fire. In the end, I wanted Greta safe more than I wanted her, and that was enough to end us.

If Emmaline was shocked by my blunt words, she did not flinch.

“Does that mean we can’t be friends now?”

“I … I don’t know.”

She could still make me feel like a tongue-tied girl from Hungarian Hill, and I couldn’t blame her for liking it.

“Be my friend,” she said, leaning her shoulder against mine. “I wasn’t lying when I said I missed you.”

“Are you going to be Tara’s friend too, or are you going to scratch her eyes out?”

Emmaline wrinkled her nose in distaste, looking more like a displeased cat than she could have intended.

“She’s bad news, sweetheart. You know that, don’t you?”

I shrugged, enjoying her disapproval in some strange way.

“I’m bad news, and you still want to be friends with me.”

“Not like she is!”

She said it loud enough that Tara must have heard, but Tara had probably heard worse in her time.

“Just like she is,” I insisted. “Like Harry Long, Helen Martel…”

“Stop baiting me,” Emmaline said sharply. “There’s a difference between Helen Martel, and … Lester Moore.”

“She’s not any more Lester Moore than you are Emmaline Sauvignon,” I snapped, but that was the difficulty, I saw right away.

“Of course I am,” Emmaline said, almost shocked. “And you’re Luli Wei. And she’s … obvious. There’s the trousers, and there are all sorts of rumors about her running around with communists and Jews and who knows what.”

Emmaline suddenly looked very sad, and when she put her arm around me, I let her.

“The world lets you get away with some things. Oberlin Wolfe does too. But darling, she’s too much, and you know it, don’t you?”

Too much, too strange, and I knew right away that she had a truth between her teeth. Like I knew earlier that pretty was a painted target that Tara lacked, I knew this too.

Instead of it making me sink back into Emmaline’s arms, however, I pulled away, standing up and shaking out my royal blue skirt.

“I was too much and too strange long before I came here, Emmaline.” I said it gently because in her own way, she was looking out for me. She was trying to keep me safe, even if incidentally it kept me hers and not Tara’s. “And after all, you decided I was too risky two years ago.”

Emmaline sprang to her feet, hands clenched. I stepped back in surprise.

“Stop it! I’m not some kind of villain!”

“No, you’re not. You’re the heroine. I read the script same as you.”

She took a deep breath, letting her face smooth out to its normal loveliness. It was a shame that the studio would never tolerate Emmaline’s face screwed up in rage or pain; it could take the heart right out of you. I was almost relieved when she put it away because her real face could still hurt me so.

“All right,” she said. “So we can’t be lovers, and we can’t be friends. What should we be instead?”

“You’ll be the heroine, of course. And I’ll be the monster. And it’ll be a hit.”