The Twice Lost

the volume as far as it would go Dorian could barely distinguish their voices, interspersed with the louder voices of the humans onshore and the babble of a news program. Someone was being interviewed, and after listening for just a few moments Dorian made out enough of what was being said to understand why the mermaids all looked so upset.

But—whoever that man was who kept droning on—what he was saying was plainly ridiculous. Luce had never been human, even though plenty of people remembered her as a regular schoolgirl? She’d murdered herself, stolen her own face? Nobody would believe that, would they? Then the stuff about Kathleen Lambert: old news as far as Dorian was concerned, though clearly it wasn’t old to Luce. He watched her raw dismay and craned to hear the faint notes of her voice. He could catch only a few blurry words.

Dorian couldn’t sit still any longer. He started pacing, his stomach tight, watching the screen from the corner of his vision. He was doing everything he could think of, but it wasn’t enough. Luce could still die any day. He stopped to stare out the window at the dark street, the trees like masses of congealed night, the lonely glowing rounds under the streetlamps.

Then—wait, what were they showing now? Dorian wheeled around. The mermaids sounded excited, and then Luce was speaking again, her voice raised in anger so that Dorian could suddenly hear every word: “He’s got no right to call himself that! Cala, it’s not sweet at all! It’s like he’s stealing our name!”

It took him an instant to understand what they were talking about. It became clearer with every sentence that followed, even with the mermaids’ voices coming through fragmented and murky.

Luce had seen him. She’d watched him marching on her behalf, fighting for her . . .

Furious or not, she had seen him.

Dorian’s nails were digging into his palms. His knees trembled, and he felt sick and wild and exhilarated. Even thousands of miles away he’d found a way to make her understand how much he missed her—whether she wanted to know that or not. It was as if he’d sent her the strangest love letter imaginable, a message cast out wildly into space, and against the most phenomenal odds she’d received it. With a sudden flash of vanity, Dorian remembered everything Theo said about how noble and determined he’d looked in that march. Good.

“You see now, Luce?” Dorian hissed out loud. “You see? You can be a general or whatever, but I’m with you, and I’m not going anywhere!”

He had no right to call himself Twice Lost? Dorian imagined arguing with Luce, pointing out that he’d been lost the first time when the mermaids killed his family—and the second time when he’d broken up with her. But he could only communicate with her in such awkward, indirect ways.

Well, then, he’d organize more protests, blog like crazy, put up a Twice Lost Humans page on every site he could—

His cell phone started ringing. Dorian’s first reaction was annoyance at the interruption—but what if it was something important? What if it was news about her?

“Hello?” His heart was pounding, and his tone came out strained and breathless.

“Is this, um, Dorian Hurst?” A shrill-sounding girl. Dorian was fairly sure the voice was new to him. Maybe it was one of those girls Theo said wanted to meet him so much? He half expected to catch the clamor of a party in the background: Theo calling out and music blaring and people giggling.

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