Ecklon swam over to Coralline, wrapped his hands around her waist, and pulled her into his room through the window. His hands lingered over her tailbone, his fingers loose and light. He was wearing a stiff, deep-green waistcoat with a high collar encrusted with translucent-green olivine stones. Coralline’s arms draped around his neck, her fingers strumming through his hair. She saw her face in his silver-gray eyes and tried to concentrate on her reflection, but it melted and vanished as fast as a sea pen. She should not be drinking so much, she thought, as she took another sip.
Turning her head slowly, she looked about his bedroom—in two weeks, it would be their bedroom. His floor was laid not of the usual dull gray gabbro stone, nor even the more fine-grained basalt, but limestone. White and smooth, streaked gently with pale gray, it formed a sharp contrast to the black shale exterior of the Mansion. A large, bright rug sprawled in the center of the room, its pile filaments carrying the red, blue, and yellow tones of a flame angelfish. Beside the rug stood a bed, twice the size of Coralline’s, its posts pointing as pinnacles toward the ceiling. Its frame was slate but not the traditional gray slate used for furniture—rather, a rare, handsome green slate. A sky-blue blanket with shimmering golden threads lay upon the bed.
She could get used to life in the Mansion.
There was a nonchalance she noticed in Ecklon’s manner, an indifference to the opulence around him, as though no matter the superiority of his surroundings, they could not be superior to him.
“Who exactly did you think I was with, Cora?” Ecklon asked.
“No one,” she said, looking away.
“Rosette?”
Her gaze darted to his. It seemed to provide him his answer, for he threw his head back and laughed, dimples carving triangles in his cheeks. Coralline tried to cling to her hapless sense of indignation, but she found herself smiling at him. “I’m sorry,” she said sheepishly.
“I’m sorry, too. I should have been with you instead of Sinistrum. But he requested to speak with me urgently.”
“What about?”
“He’d promised me he’d tenure me when I solved my next case. I solved it last night—a poisoning by the acid kelp, desmarestia.” Ecklon’s eyes glittered so brightly that Coralline had the illusion of looking at twin stars. “Sinistrum tenured me today! I now have a lifetime position with Urchin Interrogations. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Coralline’s fingers stilled in his hair. Pavonis had been right in saying that marrying Ecklon would mean marrying Urchin Grove. Just when she’d become somewhat unmoored to the village, through her firing, he’d become especially moored to it, through his tenure.
“What’s the matter, Cora? I thought you’d be happy for me—for us.”
“I am. . . .” she said, studying the array of olivine stones studding his collar.
“Talk to me.” He tilted her chin up with a hand, such that she had no choice but to meet his eyes.
“What if we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives in Urchin Grove?”
He blinked. “Our families live here. We want for nothing here. Why would we ever leave?”
“To see more of the world.”
“Urchin Grove is our world.”
“I guess you’re right. . . .”
Coralline rested her cheek against his waistcoat, so he could not see her face. The village of her birth would be the village of her death—surely, there were worse things in life than that. Earlier she’d longed to tell him about her dismissal, but she could not tell him now, not when he was celebrating his tenure. Here he was, the superlative detective of Urchin Grove, marrying a mermaid fired from her very first job.
A blue-striped grunt fish snorted as it passed outside the window. Coralline’s head rose from Ecklon’s chest, her eyes pursuing its path.
“We should go see our guests,” Ecklon said, sighing.
Coralline nodded, though there was nothing she wished to do less. As she and Ecklon swam over the rug, its kaleidoscopic colors fractured into a thousand fragments, then assembled again just as swiftly—the parasol wine was really muddling her mind. Hand in hand, she and Ecklon emerged from the window, swerved around the rear of the Mansion, and swam into the garden.
All eyes turned to them, and a crowd started to form. People looked at her differently when she was with him than without him, Coralline noticed, their gazes carrying more respect.
A figure hurtled toward the front of the crowd. Her corset formed a wisp of low-cut sapphire blue, minimalist both at the top and bottom, for it culminated at her ribs, revealing an enviably slender waist. With her sapphire bodice and flaming hair, Rosette Delesse formed a stunning vision. Batting her eyelashes at Ecklon, she wrapped her arms around him. A long moment passed, and whispers started among the guests, and Coralline cleared her throat loudly, before Rosette managed to untangle herself from him. Turning to Coralline, she asked with a smirk, “How’s work?”
Coralline gulped. From Rosette’s tone, it was clear Rosette knew of her firing, but how could she possibly know?
From the window of The Conventional Cure, she must have seen Coralline leaving The Irregular Remedy in tears, and she must have guessed the reason for it. How humiliating—at Coralline’s own engagement party, Rosette must have told many guests about the firing, perhaps fabricating colorful rumors as well.
Just then, Coralline overheard one mermaid say to another, “Do you think it’s true Coralline got fired for stealing carapace?” Her companion whispered back, “Oh, I thought she stabbed a patient who was having a heart attack.”
Coralline felt her cheeks burning. Fortunately, Ecklon did not seem to have heard the two mermaids, for he was looking politely between her and Rosette. This was not how Coralline wanted him to find out. He did not yet know; she hoped her parents, and his parents, didn’t either.
Abalone arrived in front of Coralline, displacing Rosette, who left grudgingly. But Coralline’s relief at her mother’s arrival was short-lived. Grasping Coralline’s wrists, Abalone hissed, “I’ve been looking everywhere for Naiadum and I don’t see him. You promised you’d find him. Where is he?”
“I’m sorry. I forgot to look for him.” In her haste to escape Rhodomela (whom she could not see at the moment), then her snooping on Ecklon, Coralline had neglected to search for Naiadum. She scanned the throng now for a tawny tail, but the darting of her eyes made her as dizzy as though she were spinning in circles. Where could her little brother possibly be?
Coralline looked up. A tornado of large silver cod were descending so rapidly from the surface that the lateral line along their sides looked like single arrows. Above them, along the waves, a band of blackness seemed to be settling. Because of the band’s position, far behind and above everyone, she seemed to be the only one to see it, but she must be wrong, she had to be imagining it, it had to be a lingering effect of the parasol wine, for she’d never seen a band of blackness before.
Coralline looked down. A yellowtail flounder buried itself in the sediment until no more than two of its rusty red spots remained visible. Half a dozen hogchokers smaller than a finger settled into the sands until their tiny, dark-brown forms were fully covered.
Something was wrong. Very wrong.
Coralline looked up again. The black was a growing blanket, rippling menacingly close. She should point and scream. Her lips parted, but her tongue remained glued to the roof of her mouth. What if she was wrong? Wouldn’t she look foolish then? Wouldn’t everyone know she was drunk?
“BLACK POISON!” a voice yelled. Coralline could not see Rhodomela—she must be at the hem of the crowd—but the voice was distinctively hers.