The Twice Lost

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.”

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