The painting, in Tarazed’s signature style, seemed to make the entire apartment an advertisement of the artist. Worse, like the other senseless work Tarazed produced, it must have cost a fortune, at least a quarter million dollars. “How did you afford it?” Izar asked, turning back to her.
“I didn’t. It was a gift.”
“From Tarazed—?” Just then, he heard a splatter like a waterfall, coming from her bedroom, whose door was closed.
Someone was in her shower.
Izar’s gaze ran with new understanding over Ascella’s slip, smoky eyes, and poppy lips. His insides felt as though they were being slowly extracted out of him with burning tongs. He’d been prepared to give Ascella the world, but she’d wanted it from another man.
Tarazed must be the man. Hence the gift of his artwork, which served to mark her penthouse, and her, as his territory.
Izar’s eyes glazed over, such that he seemed to be looking at Ascella from across a screen of bubbles over a pot of boiling water. She became no more than a blur of powder blue. He turned back to Tarazed’s painting. The black lines on the violet canvas shifted, as though the bruise were bleeding, festering, just like his heart.
He opened the gray tin that he’d discovered on his office desk. He’d brought it here to show it to her, to ask her to help him interpret its contents. His intention now changed, he extracted the half-shell and staggered into her bedroom.
He’d expected to see some evidence of Tarazed in the room, but not a scrap of clothing littered Ascella’s lily-white sheets. He crossed the room until he stood just outside her bathroom. He became dimly aware that his body was shaking as severely as though he was in the throes of an epileptic fit. Ascella was flapping about him, the sleeves of her robe swaying like the wings of a blue jay. Her mouth was moving—she was talking to him, perhaps trying to get through—but he couldn’t hear a word.
His hand felt warm and wet. Looking down mechanically in its direction, he saw droplets of red splattering the white floor tiles—he was clutching the half-shell so fiercely that he’d cut himself on its ragged edge. Tarazed’s blood would soon join his on the floor, except that it would be not a drip but a gush like a shower.
Pavonis wriggled and tossed, creating a powerful current that shoved Coralline back from the window. But she pushed through the swell, pulled open the pane of shutters, and leaned out. She placed one hand on his snout and, with her other hand, held her luciferin lantern nervously out over the reef garden in an effort to identity his assailant.
Tentacles of snakelocks and jewel anemones cast shifting shadows in the darkness. Spikes of green sea urchin and purple sea urchin looked twice as long and sharp as they ordinarily did, like needle-thin pens. A marble cone snail, with its white-spotted carapace, crawled slowly in search of a victim to poison with its single, harpoon-like tooth.
“I beg your pardon, Pavonis,” said a low, tremulous voice. “I was trying to reach the window, and my strand of grass must have rubbed you the wrong way.”
Coralline slipped out the window and lowered her lantern toward the voice. Her father’s muse, Altair, gazed up at her and Pavonis from among dense, bright-green tufts of turtle-grass, his tail coiled around one of them. His dorsal fin fanned as he ascended haltingly to the very peak of the tuft, his color darkening to orange. “I’ve never eavesdropped in my life,” he said, as though defending himself against an unstated accusation, “but I was unable to sleep and could not help overhearing your conversation about the Elixir Expedition.”
“Go to sleep, Minion,” Pavonis growled, “unless you want me to put you to sleep.”
Coralline stroked the side of Pavonis’s face. She knew he was embarrassed by his strong reaction, by the fact that a thirty-foot-long creature such as him had been so rattled by the movement of one the size of her hand.
Altair trembled but did not lower himself among the grasses. “It’s life-threatening to venture out into the unknown,” he said. “Think about your parents, Coralline. When they wake up in the morning, how do you think they’ll feel to find that not only is one of their children dying before them, but the other is quite possibly dying away from them—in some unknown place?”
Coralline flinched.
“She will come to no harm as long as I live,” Pavonis rumbled. With the wide shape of his head and eyes set to either side of it, the whale shark could not examine anything with both eyes, and so, as though to compensate, he fixed a particularly cold eye upon Altair.
The seahorse shrank, camouflaging partially. “And what if you die, like your friend Mako?”
Coralline gasped. If silence had not been advisable, in order to avoid waking her parents, Pavonis’s tail would have smashed against the wall of the house to wring out his wrath. “Minion, you’re a coward who’s never once left this coral reef,” Pavonis retorted. “Let’s go, Coralline.”
“But your father will never forgive me for letting you go, Coralline!” Altair implored.
Coralline vacillated, her tailfin flicking like a pendulum.
“Tell him you were asleep, Minion,” Pavonis suggested.
Altair’s dorsal fin ceased its fanning. “I’ve never lied in my life!” he sputtered.
“That’s your problem,” Pavonis said. “You face two choices at this moment. You can join us on our Elixir Expedition, or you can get out of our way.”
Altair’s tail loosened from around his tuft of turtle-grass. “Trochid rescued me when I was a baby seahorse,” he said, speaking to himself, “and so I owe him my life. I cannot let anything happen to his daughter.” His gaze climbing back to Coralline, he said in a barely audible voice, “I will join you on the Elixir Expedition.”
“When I said you can join us or get out of our way,” Pavonis hissed, his snout approaching Altair menacingly, “I obviously didn’t mean it. You’ll be of no use to us whatsoever.”
“What Pavonis means is that we greatly appreciate your desire to help,” Coralline said hurriedly, “but we’d hate to separate you from your lifelong home, especially at this . . . familial juncture in your life.” She glanced pointedly at his pregnant belly. “And your mate, Kuda, would miss you terribly.”
“Not as much as I would miss her. I regret only that I cannot say goodbye to her. She’s sleeping in another reef tonight, to care for a sick friend. But I know that, given our family values, she would understand.”
Coralline hadn’t wanted it to come to this, she hadn’t wanted to point out the obvious, but there was a glaring flaw with Altair’s plan to join the Elixir Expedition. Pavonis would point it out far less delicately, so her words tumbled out as a stream: “Because seahorses swim vertically, you’re among the very slowest swimmers in the ocean. As such, I don’t understand how you’ll accompany us.”
“Do you think we plan to travel not in leaps and bounds,” Pavonis sneered, “but finger widths?”
“I’ll slip in there,” Altair whispered, looking at Coralline’s satchel with the injured look of one squeezed of the last shreds of his dignity.
Coralline tried to think of any other reason Altair shouldn’t accompany them, but she couldn’t think of any. Shrugging at Pavonis, she helped the seahorse slide into an outer pocket of her satchel. Then, luciferin lantern in hand, she began weaving a path through the darkness.