Siren Queen(79)
I turned on the light, taking in the tightness around her eyes and the unhappy curve of her mouth.
“Which life would I be saving?” I asked. “I never wanted to be a Shanghai foundling with a Hungarian nobleman for a father, but I will be damned if I let them push me back into the laundry.”
“That’s the hell of it. You could be damned. You get that, don’t you?”
I did.
The end of Siren Queen was coming. My contract was almost up.
Was I big enough to disappear and hold the whole damn thing hostage for some leverage? Was I desperate enough to go to the crossroads and pledge myself to something worse than Wolfe? Everest and Aegis lurked at the edges of my vision. My contract kept me from being able to open my mouth or my eyes in the presence of their agents, but after, if I moved fast enough, if I was sly enough, if I survived, they could protect me.
The days stretched out, and my sleep grew as thin as paper.
* * *
“All right, and beg!”
That was Jacko, exacting a bit of revenge from a spot just beyond the camera’s eye. If I turned my head just a little, I could see his blockish face set in something like amusement and satisfaction. Behind him as always was Harvey Rose, calm to Jacko’s smug. It was disgusting how little it took to satisfy him, which should have comforted me, but instead it scraped me raw like ground glass.
“Please, by great Poseidon’s mercy, please…” I clung to the fabricated rock as if it could grant me some protection. The vast length of my tail lay some yards away, and I couldn’t look at the tarry stump that was left to me. It was a burning pain that was only shut out by my fear and panic as the descendant of the great killer of my kind advanced slowly towards me. Her face shone, too bright and beautiful to look at, and I shut my eyes tight.
“Please, let me go. Let me go, I swear, I will hide under a rock for a thousand years. I will eat seaweed and mud at the bottom of the ocean, and never lay eyes on a man again…”
Nemo’s daughter wavered for a moment, something foreign on her face. It was a quality my kind lacked. Before I would have said that it was weakness, but now I knew that the weakness was inside myself, something ugly that brought me low to crawl on my belly like a serpent.
My numbing fingers lost their grasp on the rock behind me, and with a graceless slither, I sprawled on the ground. I tasted sand and blood between my lips when I licked them, and I dragged myself backwards.
“Please, please. I will go away. I will never return.”
“Cut!”
He had waited until I was on the ground to call a halt to the scene. The half tail was less flexible than the full one, and there were no wires or hidden poles to maneuver it around me. It dragged behind me like the shorn appendage it was meant to be. My whole body ached, my shoulders and hands from hanging on to the rock, my lower back from trying to support it, and my abdominal muscles from rearing up in spite of it all.
I flopped to the ground, taking the tension off my upper body, but then I tensed to haul myself back up at least into a sitting position, watching Jacko’s approaching stride with exhaustion. It was the twelfth take, when he was famous for one and done.
He stood over me, shaking his head.
“CK, come on, you’re holding everything up, you sound like you got a stick up your ass. This girl is coming to kill you. She’s going to wipe you out. The siren’s terrified out of its mind. It’s fucking crazy with terror. You sound like you’re ordering something off a menu. Come on. Sell us on it.”
“I think it looks good,” said Tara from close by. I didn’t have the energy to turn my head and look at her, but I heard the tension in her voice. It sounded like she was ready to fight, but it wasn’t even a question as far as Jacko was concerned.
“Yeah, when I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it,” Jacko said, not even looking at her. “I’m talking to CK right now.”
I could feel the crew watching us, the ones that weren’t busying themselves with the set or the cameras. I didn’t think that I was imagining their sympathy for me, but I knew that that wouldn’t go very far either. They wanted to go home and rest, and right now, as Jacko was making quite plain, the fact that they couldn’t was my fault.
“Fix it,” Jacko said, revealed by only a small curl of satisfaction twitching at the corner of his mouth. “We’ll be here all night if we have to.”
He turned away to tend to something with the camera, and I nearly let myself flop face-first into the sand. Tara looked like she wanted to come closer, but I shook my head just a fraction at her, and unsmiling, she backed off. Instead it was Emmaline that came to me, sitting back on her heels so that we were nearly eye to eye.
“Want me to pitch a fit?”
I blinked.
“What?”
She smiled a little.
“I could, you know. Too cold, too hot, not enough salad on the craft services table, too much this, too little that. Jacko thinks I hate you, and it would get us all off set for at least a little while.”
“You don’t hate me?” I asked, and it came out smaller than I would have liked, almost meek. She looked surprised.
“I think you’re a hard person to like, honey, but I don’t hate you. Never could.”
That little bit of a Minnesota drawl in her voice made me believe it, and she started to draw back. Before she could, I reached for her, laying a fingertip on her wrist. I was so filthy with grit and sticky fake blood that I didn’t dare touch her more than that.