Anais burst out singing her death song again, but this time the melody came out stumbling and distraught and sloppy. Dorian sang back, opposing her. It was easy now. He was almost bored, but he knew he had to keep her on the phone for as long as he could. He had to find out who was behind this.
Anais moaned, raspy and despairing. Then the line went dead.
Dorian immediately hit Redial. He heard the phone ringing three times, followed by a weird buzzing sound. “Anais?”
No response. He called a second time, but now her phone didn’t ring at all. There was no busy signal, no recording telling him to try his call again. There was simply nothing.
Kathleen Lambert, Dorian thought suddenly. She’d died far away from here. Dorian had never met her, never even heard her name until after she was dead. And yet he was sure that he’d touched Kathleen’s death from the inside: a slick, starry, horribly frozen chamber. He’d almost shared that death with her.
And maybe he wasn’t the only one. His legs wobbled and he sat down hard in the middle of the shiny wood floor. Maybe Anais had a list of names that she was crossing off, one by one. Nobody besides him knew how to fight off the enchantment of mermaid song. They wouldn’t stand a chance.
But maybe—and Dorian was already dialing, his heart jarring and his hands trembling with urgency—maybe she was making her next call right now, and—
“Dorian. I was planning to call you as soon as I was calm enough to talk. All I asked, all you had to do, was to keep a low profile, keep your head down and enjoy your very privileged life! That’s your job. And instead I see you on the television news? Marching to support the mermaids? What kind of willful, quixotic, suicidal provocation was that? I’ve worked so hard to protect you, and you spit on that with this . . . this infantile defiance!” Ben Ellison paused, out of breath.
Dorian had never felt so happy to be yelled at in his life. “She didn’t already get you! Listen, Mr. Ellison, if a strange girl calls you, she’s not actually a girl. You need to hang up right away, okay? Or if you don’t somehow you need to start singing back at her, or sing before she can even start, and maybe she’ll give up.”
“I can see that you might prefer to change the subject, Dorian. But really, you—”
“She just tried to murder me!” Dorian yelled. “Look, I’m calling to warn you, okay? A mermaid just called me up and started singing to me. I almost—let her get to me, but I’m okay now.” For an instant Dorian wondered if that was true. He still felt lightheaded, his thoughts slicked by a residue of song.
There was a shocked pause at the other end. “A mermaid called you, Dorian? Do I understand you correctly? You’re trying to convince me that a mermaid called you on the telephone?”
“It was Anais,” Dorian snapped. “Anais, the really evil one from Luce’s old tribe? I’m positive. I think she’s trapped somewhere, and somebody’s making her kill people. Like, as some kind of slave assassin.”
The silence this time went on for even longer. It had an airless quality, staggered by revelation. “Mr. Ellison?” Dorian asked.
“I haven’t been able to reach—” Ellison began, and stopped. He was wheezing audibly.
“We have to warn everyone. I can’t keep a low profile, okay? I mean, Anais might kill—I don’t know—anybody who’s put out a video or whatever, Luce’s dad or . . .”
“That’s who I can’t locate,” Ellison said grimly. Dorian rocked a little as he caught the implication of the words. “Andrew Korchak.”
28 Acts of Grace
The air was still surging with Luce’s scream as a gray-haired man in a dark business suit lunged at the killer from behind, flinging one arm around his throat and slamming the gun from his hand. It jumped into the air, a blurry blackish shape, and then clattered down the rocky embankment and into the bay.
Luce, Imani, and Yuan were pressing forward to reach the dying mermaid, but their tails were tangled and some of the girls in their way were too stunned to move and only screamed or gaped, their breath coming out like torn rags. By the time they managed to break free of the crowd the humans were already there, and for once the police didn’t stop people from clambering down into the water. The dead mermaid’s head slumped sideways, her wound a deep crimson crater surrounded by a drifting corolla of red-brown hair. Dark spatters of brain soiled her ivory cheek, and her green eyes were wide and empty.
To Luce’s amazement half a dozen humans were on top of the killer, pinning him face-down on the pavement. Many of them had been friendly enough, but it still astonished her that they would turn against one of their own kind for a mermaid’s sake.
Yuan cried out as the humans began to lift the mermaid from the water. “Luce, stop them!” But there such obvious tenderness in the way that old woman cradled the devastated head, such care in how those two tough-looking teenagers gathered the still-twitching tail in their arms.
“It’s okay, Yuan,” Luce said impulsively. “It’s too late to save her, and . . . they’re doing the right thing.”
“She belongs in the water! Even dead! Don’t let them take her!” Five people were now holding the mermaid at different points along her slim body, carefully climbing back ashore with her. Her scales already had that papery, faded look Luce had seen once before, and reddish flecks began to dance in the somnolent breeze. Someone spread a black coat on the asphalt. They laid the mermaid on top.
“They have to. It’s about . . . about their kind of justice, too.” Would the humans really punish that young man in the trench coat for what he’d done, or would they decide a mermaid’s life didn’t matter? After all, she’d admitted to killing in the past herself.
Then Luce heard humans crying out in dismay and amazement. The mermaid’s dull ruby-silver scales were curling up, fluttering, peeling away. Even as they peeled they were somehow disintegrating into a kind of speckled reddish smoke that shone slightly against the gray air. Then, like something emerging from a mist, Luce caught the shape of a foot with tightly curled toes . . .
And the body resting on that black coat wasn’t a dead mermaid any longer, but a dead human girl. The skin on her legs looked damp and smeary and long-unused, and her empty green eyes were suddenly less vivid. All around them humans had started gagging and sobbing and sinking to their knees.
Of course, Luce realized. She knew perfectly well what happened when a mermaid died—but the humans crowding the shore hadn’t known. Luce heard a yowl of despair so loud that it cut through the rest of the clamor and then saw that it had come from the killer, his head craned to see the dead girl as he struggled in the handcuffs one of the police must have clapped on him. His handsome face had turned crimson and blotchy. “Well. That’ll make it easier to convict him of murder,” a police officer announced morosely.
“Murder? It wasn’t murder! Murder means killing a fellow human being, not a thing!” the young man in the trench coat yelled back at him.
“A human corpse proves a human was killed, I’d say.”
The same gray-haired man who’d tackled the killer was tugging off his suit jacket. He kept his eyes carefully averted from the dead girl—out of respect for her nakedness, Luce realized—as he spread his jacket over her body. Hiding it from the crowd. From the absolute silence of the mermaids around her, Luce knew that they were touched by the same thing she was: the kind, dignified generosity of that gesture.