But no, everything was silent. Maybe, dimly, there was a kind of electrical buzz. “Yes?” Dorian asked curtly.
“Are you at home?” the girl’s voice inquired pointedly.
“Yeah. Who is—”
“Alone? Because I really need to talk to you without anybody interrupting.”
That seemed even weirder. Prickling chill brushed up Dorian’s back. “No one’s going to interrupt. What’s this about?”
“You used to be with Luce,” the girl pursued curiously. “Right? You were actually her boyfriend? In love with her, like you thought she was just so special?”
Nobody knew about that except for Zoe and Ben Ellison, and Dorian felt reasonably confident that neither of them would blab. Or, well, maybe some people in the government knew it too, but this girl sure wasn’t from the FBI. “How do you know about that?” Dorian demanded. There was a sudden fogginess in his head and he fought to clear it. “Who is this?”
The girl didn’t bother to answer his questions. “What did you see in her, anyway? She’s such a little freak, and she’s not even that pretty. Seriously? And she has hair like a boy. I can’t believe any guy would want to—”
“I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know what your goddamn problem is, but Luce is incredible. Just look at what she’s doing now!” Dorian growled—and suddenly he knew that he was making a mistake by letting the strange girl bait him into this conversation. He wasn’t thinking straight. Something was wrong here.
“I’m not really supposed to be getting into a big discussion with you,” the girl confided. “I’m just curious. I never understood why anybody thought Luce was anything. But actually I’m only supposed to—” He could hear her suck in a breath and there was a very slight sloshing noise.
Zoe and Ben were the only humans who knew about his relationship with Luce. But—
It was in his head before he knew what was happening. For a fraction of a second Dorian felt it even more than he heard it: an icy, crawling vapor that licked through his ear and then stroked slowly upward. Music, Dorian realized. The sensation was transmitted through a sharp soprano voice so cold and so powerful that it burned, wrapping up his thoughts and crippling them.
And, at the same time, carrying the promise. Dorian couldn’t have said exactly what was being promised, but he knew it was bright and thrilling and brutal. His skull was an immense black space full of rotating diamonds, every facet flashing eager signals at him. If he could only decipher the diamonds’ code in time, all power would be his, all strength . . .
Dorian was standing in the middle of the room with his phone pressed to his head, his body slowly spinning in sync with the diamonds. Any second now, he’d know exactly where the power was waiting for him—
And yet something inside him resisted. It was like there was a weight tugging in his chest working desperately to get his attention, right this moment, before it was too late. Telling him he knew what to do. Dorian squirmed irritably, wanting only to spin further into that brilliant music without any more interference. Then his eyes landed on the laptop screen. Right in the center a girl with short dark hair was screaming out in warning, her charcoal eyes wide and fervent.
Luce, Dorian thought in a strange burst of clarity. Her face broke through the freezing flash and darkness, broke through the singing that became a field of strobing lights. He did know what to do. He’d done it before, and it had saved his life.
Dorian felt his own voice in his chest as if it were a physical thing, some stubborn, heavy tool that he was grappling with both hands. His voice seemed to be caught somehow, and he strained to pull it up. And then, with a burst, he was singing.
Singing back to the mermaid on the telephone, her painfully lovely soprano battling with his rough sung shouts. Dorian echoed the pulsating, starry notes of her song as well as he could, fractured them, and then changed them into a song of his own. And with every note he sang, he could feel his voice seizing hers and tearing it out of his mind. He didn’t understand how the hell a mermaid could get hold of a phone, but he still recognized with absolutely lucidity what was happening.
An unknown mermaid had called him up, and she was working as hard as she could to murder him.
She didn’t know who she was messing with, did she? For a few moments she sang more loudly, trying to overwhelm him, and Dorian countered her, his voice battering its way up the scale into a horrible off-key yowl. This was actually starting to be fun.
The girl gave an abrupt gasping cry of frustration, and stopped singing. Dorian paused too. She wouldn’t catch him off-guard a second time.
“Stop doing that!” the mermaid barked.
Dorian laughed harshly at her, his mind still wild with the dregs of enchantment. His head felt like it was splitting open, but the pain wasn’t enough to erase his brutal delirium. He’d beaten death again, just the way he had when he’d first encountered Luce.
“You don’t understand!” the mermaid shrieked. Suddenly Dorian realized that she was genuinely panicked. “You don’t understand! I have to do it! I can’t just let you—” She started to sob.
And all at once Dorian knew who she was. He’d never met her, never heard her voice before this evening. But Luce had talked about her, and the sickening power-crazed exultation he’d felt from this particular mermaid’s enchantment revealed her essence, the very quick of her personality. Her song gave her away like a fingerprint. He knew her. Through and through.
“Hey, Anais,” Dorian said.
She immediately stopped crying with a shocked inhalation. For several seconds they were both completely silent apart from Dorian’s breathing.
“I know it’s you,” Dorian told her at last. But it still made no sense that she had a phone. And how did she get his number? “I recognize you. Where are you?”
“Did Luce teach you how to sing back at us like that?” Anais finally burst out furiously. “I bet she did. And now—God, if you don’t die, how am I going to explain—”
“Explain to who?” Dorian asked roughly. This wasn’t the first time a mermaid had wanted him dead. “Anais, who told you to do this? Tell me where you are!”
The sloshing noise came again—and it seemed to have a faint echoing quality, as if she was calling from an enclosed space. “I can’t talk about it,” Anais finally whimpered. “If you tell people he’ll kill me.”
He. A human, then? A human had made Anais do this? It was the craziest thing he’d ever heard. “Can you get out?” Dorian asked. “Anais? Who’s going to kill you? Are you locked up somewhere?”
She hesitated. “I don’t even know where this is. And I can’t talk about it! I told you that!” There was another pause. “Can you at least pretend to be dead? Like, hide so he doesn’t find out that I couldn’t do it? I tried!”
“No,” Dorian said shortly.
“But I told you! He’ll probably kill me for real! You have to die, or—”
“Tell him I’m doing just fine, whoever he is. And tell him I’m going to keep fighting back.”