Chapter Twenty-four

“Well, how was I supposed to know?” Ray said, settling into one of the seats behind us, and handing me some more napkins. “You oughta put a sign on the door. If the balcony’s rockin’, don’t come a knockin’—”

“This isn’t a hotel,” Louis-Cesare grated out. The mess was cleaned up, and the pullover was back in place, but the hair was still a tousled mess. I grinned at it. And then reached over and tousled it some more. He caught my sticky-with-cola wrist and placed a kiss on it. Ray snorted.

“That’s my point. There’s hotels all over the city. You two need to get a room—after the show, all right?”

“When’s the meeting?” I asked, deciding that I was as clean as I was going to get, despite the fact that the cola had made the jumpsuit cling in all the wrong places. I gave up dabbing at myself with dry napkins and stole some of his Bugles.

“Intermission. Curly said he’s got some stuff to do, but’ll meet us for drinks.”

“Curly?”

“The theatre owner. His real name’s Meredith, ’cause I guess his parents hated him. But he goes by Curly, even though he don’t have too many anymore.” He sat forward. “This oughta be good.”

“What ought to be good?” I asked, because they still hadn’t raised the curtain.

And then, almost as if they’d heard me, they did, pulling it not up but across, in one huge swish of red velvet. And I just sat there, a Bugle about to fall out of my suddenly slack mouth. Because that . . . wasn’t a stage.

“Okay, oh boy, okay,” Ray said, as I took in the sight of a wall of water. It spread over the entire area where the stage should have been, with the bottom disappearing behind the orchestra pit, and giving the impression that it went down a lot farther. With the top and sides hidden by the framework of curtains, it looked like a whole reef had somehow been transported into the theatre. It must have contained millions of gallons. It was huge.

Yet that wasn’t the weirdest thing about it.

I stared at the setup, which looked like nothing so much as a kid’s first aquarium, complete with a bunch of fake-looking plants, some colorful coral, a turreted, backless castle perched on a rocky outcropping, and some bubbles.

But that wasn’t the weirdest thing, either.

“Are those . . . What are those?” Louis-Cesare whispered, sitting forward in his seat.

I didn’t answer.

I thought it was kind of obvious.

“Huh, huh?” Ray elbowed me as something swirled up out of the darkness. “We’re gonna be freaking rich.”

Yeah, I thought blankly.

Yeah.

The music reached a crescendo, although it was almost drowned out by the audience. Which was on its feet, giving a standing ovation as the cast members arrived, despite the fact that nothing had happened yet. Sit down, I thought, annoyed that they were holding up the show.

Until I realized: I was hanging over the side of the box, trying to get a better view, even though I already had what was probably the best in the house.

And was suddenly even better, when one of the “showgirls” paused in the water not twelve feet away from my reaching hand.

For a moment, we just stared at each other.

There was no doubt what she was. But she didn’t look anything like the flirty neon cuties on the sign outside. She didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen.

“Hey. Hey, get back in here. You’re gonna fall,” Ray said.

I barely heard him.

The water was dark, or maybe it was just that the lights were pointed at the castle, where something I didn’t care about was going on. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t need it.

She made her own light.

Not like other fey I’d seen, who cast light shadows in our world, how thick and how bright depending on how powerful they were. But like she captured any light that came her way and sent it back in a scintillation of colors. They sparkled off the antenna-like filaments above her eyes, the delicate gills at her neck, and above all, the long, sinuous sweep of iridescent scales beginning just below her waist.

They were completely unlike Claire’s. Hers had been lustrous, but thick and hard, like battle armor carved out of semiprecious stones. These were soft and supple, a glide of colors rather than a single hue, the way water takes on the shade of the world around it. I honestly couldn’t have said what color she was.

The tail ended in a spreading, translucent, filmy fin, gossamer fine, like the bluish gray hair that ghosted out in the water around her. It was long, maybe two-thirds the length of her body, making her look like she was drifting in a cloud. It was beautiful. She was beautiful. . . .

“Dory?” That was Louis-Cesare, because I was up on the side of the box now. It was thick old wood, perfectly capable of supporting my weight. But he had a hand on my leg anyway, probably because of the thirty-foot drop.

Or maybe because I was acting crazy again.

Get down, I told myself, but I didn’t get down. I wanted to touch her. I needed to—

“Dory!”

His hand tightened on my calf because I’d reached the end of the box and was trying to go farther. But there was no way unless I learned to walk on thin air. I let out a cry of mixed frustration and longing, heard Ray asking Louis-Cesare what the hell was wrong with me, didn’t have an answer.

And then I didn’t need one, because part of me was able to close that gap, after all.

It was the weirdest sensation, like a film was being pulled off me. I could almost see it, extending out beyond my hand, a ripple in my vision, distorting the darkness. And reaching, reaching, reaching—

The creature beyond the glass or whatever it was seemed to see it, too, or to see something. Because she was pressed against the surface now, her very human hands spread wide across it, allowing me to see the faint weave of skin in between the fingers. Her eyes, likewise, were so human but so strange, larger, slanted, crystalline, with that same noncolor of the scattering of diamond-hued scales that edged them. She looked almost like a statue carved out of crystal, except that she lived and breathed, the gills on the sides of her neck fluttering excitedly because almost, almost—

“Dory!”

Louis-Cesare pulled me back, right before I would have taken a headfirst plunge into darkness, but he didn’t get all of me. Something went careening out into the theatre, flowing over the heads of an audience who never noticed, if they even could have, being too intent on the assault on the castle that some of the creatures were pantomiming. And then came curving back, through air and glass both, into dark water and luminous, crystal eyes.

Tell me.

And she did.

---

Darting out into the lobby, pushing through a ward over the stairs that crackled and hissed, going down, down, down, two stories, three, five. Out into a hallway with three doors, two normal ones on either side, and a metal submarine-type straight ahead. Some security guards in an office, through the door to the left, watching a row of TV monitors.

“What the hell is she doing?” one demanded.

Another man, leaning over his shoulder: “Dunno. Fucking vampires.”

“I think she’s a dhampir—”

“Same thing. They’re all crazy.” He made an annoyed sound. “Better call the boss.”

Getting tired; couldn’t hold free flight much longer. Luckily, two guards were leaving the office. I grabbed one lightly, just enough contact to steady me. Then we were through the metal door, and into a corridor that looked like it was literally on a submarine. There was a narrow strip down the middle of rubberized flooring, and large portholes on either side, looking out onto a huge holding tank.

“I don’t like it in here. It’s creepy,” my guard said. He was younger than the other, tall and thin with an obvious Adam’s apple that kept bobbing up and down.

And then stopped, arrested like his breath, at a flash of iridescent green outside one of the portholes.

It was gone in an instant, before I had time to more than glimpse it. Then it reappeared on the other side, hesitating long enough for the young guard to notice. Along with a glimpse of yellow, alien eyes.

He stumbled back, swallowing a cry, and the other guard grinned.

“Aw, it looks like Fairfax likes you.”

“F-fairfax?”

“One of the girls in the office named him. Means ‘beautiful hair,’ or some shit.” He shook his head. “Women.”

“Women,” the younger guard agreed, and laughed nervously.

And then screamed and jumped back when something slammed into the metal wall, right beside him.

“Relax, kid. He does that all the time. It’s why they don’t let him upstairs no more; wouldn’t keep on script. Just kept ramming the ward, like he was tryin’ to take it down.” The older guard grinned evilly. “Or maybe eat the audience.”

The younger man didn’t look like he thought that was funny.

“Could he do that?” he asked, staring around.

“Naw. Redundant system. Got a control upstairs as well as down. You’re safe enough.”

The older guard started working to get the door at the end of the hallway open, while the younger continued to stare around. But Fairfax was nowhere to be seen. After a moment, my guard visibly relaxed—

Until strange sounds started emanating from portholes up and down the corridor, making him jump. They were impossible to describe in any human tongue, because they weren’t made by a human tongue. Just strange, underwater sounds, loud and disorienting, causing the young guard to reach for weapons he couldn’t use.

“Would you calm the hell down?” the other guard demanded.

“Would you hurry up? I didn’t sign on for this!”

“You signed on for exactly this, and stop letting him get to you. It’ll only encourage him, and he’s bad enough as it is. Be on the pile already, if he wasn’t such a good breed—ah. Here we go.”

The door gave way, and we were through, into a medium-sized, dimly lit room with curved sides, one of which was made almost entirely out of glass. Or perhaps a transparent ward, considering what the pressure had to be down here. The other walls were piled high with wooden crates, to the ceiling in some cases, along with something on a table, desiccated and dry. A few brown, curled-up bits, like withered leaves, floated to the floor from the disturbance of our entry.

And then Fairfax reappeared out of the murky depths, to throw himself at the ward, battering it with his body so furiously that even the older guard flinched.

“See? I told you so!” That was a short, overweight man with shirtsleeves rolled up and sweat on his brow. I thought he might be the “Curly” my twin’s friend had mentioned. He was bald, but had a rim of little blond curls around his head that flipped up instead of down, making him look like he was wearing a hat without the hat.

There was another person with him, a man, judging by the height, but I couldn’t see him well. They were standing directly under a recessed light, which gilded Curly’s brim of golden curls and danced in his blue eyes, yet the shadows gathered around the other man so thickly that the light couldn’t penetrate. A mage, then, cloaking himself for some reason I didn’t understand. Surely everyone knew him here?

Curly, if that was who the other man was, certainly seemed to, and was vibrating with irritation. “You can’t just come in here and do things like this!” he snapped. “I know how they are, and how to handle them; you don’t!”

“It’s working so far.” The other man’s voice matched his appearance: low, with a deliberate rasp that hid its true inflection.

“Does that look like it’s working?” Curly demanded, pointing at Fairfax. The powerful tail was churning up the water, the humanoid torso was beating at the barrier with both hands, and the strange, alien eyes were staring, staring, staring—but not at any of us. But at . . .

The girl.

Because that was what was on the table, I realized: not a clump of browned, shriveled-up seaweed, as I’d first thought, but a child. A tiny thing, shorter than the table she lay on. And almost completely unlike the beautiful creature upstairs, who was suddenly animated, too.

I could see her dimly, through my twin’s eyes. As well as the scenes she was feeding us through the link. It was her child, and she was deathly afraid, her child, and they planned to—

I flinched, and almost lost my hold on the guard, pain searing through me as it did the female and Fairfax, the child’s father. They were punishing him for leading a revolt. For encouraging the others to refuse to play out the pantomimes set for them until their children were freed.

Instead, he was watching his own child wither in air breathable for his people, but in dryness that was toxic over time. The delicate membranes that made up their bodies could not afford to dry out. It would kill her; it was killing her.

“You’re too soft with them,” the other man said, and looked at the older guard. “Show him what defiance costs.”

The man hurried to the wall and slammed his fist down on a button. A high-pitched sound resonated through the room, barely audible to the guard I was riding, but Fairfax screamed, an almost human sound. And writhed in apparent agony on the other side of the ward.

“I said cut it out!” Curly snapped, and knocked the guard’s hand away. “You don’t take orders from him!”

The guard just stood there, looking nonplussed.

“What are you two doing in here, anyway?” Curly demanded.

“Uh, there’s a problem with the show.”

The older guard clicked his fingers at the younger one, who walked over and handed a tablet to Curly. It showed the security feed of my twin, along with the entire cast. Every one of whom was now clustered on her side of the stage, the murmuring audience forgotten. I watched the scene through the guard’s eyes, and then through my twin’s, who was staring into the desperate, pleading face of the mother.

She couldn’t understand her, I realized. There was a connection, but she didn’t know what to do with it. She knew the creatures wanted something, could feel it like a palpable thing, but she didn’t speak their language.

She didn’t realize; she didn’t need to.

I sent the mother images: the room with the watery window, Fairfax thrashing frantically against the glass, the girl on the table, shrunken and brown. And then emotions, which are the same in any language: despair, need, hope, question?

The mother didn’t nod; that gesture didn’t exist in her culture. But her hands were suddenly scrambling against the barrier, clawing at it as if she were trying to break through.

Images flashed across my mind. Girl, she showed me. Water, she showed me. Swim.

I tamped down my frustration. Yes, we needed to get her to water, but how?

“What the hell? What’s she doing?” Curly asked, staring at the tablet.

The older guard shrugged. “You know vampires. They’re all crazy—”

“Give it to me,” the taller man said, coming closer. I still couldn’t see him well, but there was something familiar about the voice. Something not from my mind, but from my twin’s. Something I couldn’t place, because he was yelling. “The Basarab girl! You fool!”

I quickly sent the creature an image of the ward over the tank, strong and thick. It hadn’t so much as wavered under Fairfax’s relentless attack, and the avatar I was riding was human. Even assuming he was a mage, and that I could force an assault, he didn’t have the power to break through. Wards like that were made to withstand a prolonged siege by numerous mages, and I could ride but one at a time.

How? I showed her an image of the wall breaking, over and over. How, how, how?

I felt the question fly through the link, saw the female’s excitement when she finally understood, heard the answer forming in her mind—

The tablet hit Curly on his bald head, sending him staggering back. The older guard just stood there, looking back and forth between the two men, obviously not sure what to do. And then not having to worry about it when the taller man grabbed him. “Kill her!”

“What?” Curly grabbed the guard, too, before the man could move, and whirled on his partner. “Are you crazy?”

“She’s a danger—”

“So is killing a senator under my roof! You have any idea how much hell that would rain down on me? And I need her—”

“She’s on the task force designed to shut you down!”

“So was Geminus! And she’s willing to deal. I have it on good authority—”

“She lied! I’ve dealt with this bitch before.” He turned to the guard. “Kill her! Take everyone you have—”

“Remember who pays your salary,” Curly snapped.

“If you need protection, you come to me,” the taller man said, bending over Curly menacingly. “We have a deal—”

“No!” The little fat man had clearly had enough. “I had a deal with Geminus. One I stupidly agreed to continue with that albino bastard, because he said he was in charge after the big guy’s death. But he kept screwing with the deal, and now you—who the hell are you?”

“The one in charge.”

“Not here! This is my place, and I don’t need you anymore. I made a deal for a new protector, and one better connected than you! I don’t need any—”

The tall man’s arm moved, as quick as a vampire’s, and the next second Curly was hitting the wall on the other side of the room, unconscious or worse.

The guards just stood there, their eyes huge.

“I said kill her!” the man hissed. “Or you’re next!”

They ran.