“We’ll be filming for a few more weeks back in LA,” Shoshanna said. “It’s not over.”
“It is for Eamon,” Roxy pointed out. “His scenes are done.”
I pulled his arms a little tighter. “Should we skinny dip in the harbor?”
“Hell no. There’s a famous dolphin in that water. Fungie,” Eamon said. He shuddered. “Imagine running into him out there with all your bits out.”
“The Lord of the Rings cast got tattoos together,” Henrik supplied. Everyone stared at him. “What? They did.”
“Nerds and their tattoos,” I snarked.
“I’d do it,” Shoshanna said. Roxy agreed as well. And Eamon and Julian. “But what would we get? It’s too bad J. K. Rowling claimed the lightning bolt. That would have been cool.”
“Rowling drew quite a bit from Tolkien too,” Henrik said.
“No more Tolkien, Henrik,” Shoshanna said. “We’re Thornians. You’re one of us, whether you like it or not.”
“I ambar na-changed.” Henrik lifted a shot glass to his lips. “That’s Sindarin, one of the elf languages Tolkien created.”
Shoshanna stole his shot and drank it. “What’s the elvish translation for, ‘Thorne elves are better than Tolkien elves’?”
“Come to the dark side, Henrik,” Roxy said, smiling at Shoshanna. “We’ve got girls.”
“And some color,” Shoshanna said, high-fiving Julian.
“Look,” Henrik launched into a well-prepared speech, “we all have problematic favorites—”
“How about this for a tattoo?” I asked, pulling Eamon’s copy of Elementia out of his backpack. Everyone leaned in to look at the stylized elemental compass with a lightning bolt splitting it.
“Perfect,” Shoshanna said. “And edgy. I’ll put it on the other side of Kate.”
My grin faltered. “You guys should do it, but I can’t. I’m not eighteen until next December, and I just convinced my dad to give away my trust fund, so no way he’ll let me ink myself.”
Julian smiled. “Like hell would we do it without you, Iris.”
Eamon swung me around to face him. “You did what?”
“Tell you later,” I said. “For now, we can say I saved the day. Maybe.”
Cate whistled loud enough to grab everyone’s attention. She stood up on a chair, and I flashed back to seeing her like that on Inishmore. I waited for her speech, wondering what wisdom she would impart. She raised her glass high and seemed to make eye contact with everyone in the room before she spoke. Her gaze fell on me at the last.
“Sláinte.”
JOIN THE CAST AND CREW OF ELEMENTIA AT COMIC-CON AND WIN A CHANCE TO SEE THE SNEAK PREVIEW OF THE FILM WITH THE CAST!
SURPRISE! YOU GET AN EPILOGUE
Stories end in a rush.
One minute, Will and Lyra are in love on their bench. The next, they’re in separate worlds. One minute, the Pevensie kids are kings and queens. The next, they’re back through the wardrobe. One minute, the One Ring is lava-dissolving in Gollum’s hand, the next…well, that example doesn’t work. The Return of the King has like seven ending scenes, but for good reason.
When a story is that vast, it takes time to bring all the pieces back together.
Either way, I blinked in the pub on Dingle with my friends, and suddenly it was a year later—and I was signing autographs at the Elementia booth at the San Diego Comic-Con, a.k.a. Nerd Mecca.
I’d just spoken to my fourth Nolan cosplayer—which was pretty cruel considering Eamon wasn’t even on this continent until tomorrow. I checked the countdown on my watch. Twenty-three hours and twenty-two minutes until his plane landed.
The current fan standing before me was dressed in a remarkable Wonder Woman costume. “Are they giving Julian Young a tattoo up there?” she asked, peering behind me.
“Yep,” I said, scribbling my signature on an Elementia soundtrack CD for her. “All day you can come by and see us getting inked. Help us spread the word?”
Her mouth drooped as she watched a shirtless Julian lie back on a chair, getting a hip tattoo. What a show-off. He totally chose that spot so he could sit on the stage of our booth with his six-pack out—which was actually brilliant. He might even win the current pool about which one of us could run the most outrageous marketing ploy. We’d had to get creative over the past year, but it was working. For one thing, the boycott had vanished. The entire website disappeared one night as though it had never happened.
“Are you getting a tattoo as well?” Wonder Woman asked. I flashed my forearm where a white bandage covered my new ink.
“It must be nonstop fun to make movies,” she said.
“You’ve got the nonstop part right. The fun is…surprising.” I handed her CD back. “Make sure you get in line for the movie early. They’re only letting in the first five hundred people.”
“Thanks!” Wonder Woman moved down the line toward Shoshanna and then Cate. I took the twenty-second break between fans to stretch. We’d been at this for over an hour—and tonight we’d all be watching Elementia on a stage in front of the most hardcore Thornians.
I hope it goes well.
Shoshanna leaned over and talked behind her hand. She hated the publicity part of this job more than me. “I told Roxy she couldn’t come because then I’d be even more nervous, but now I don’t know what I was thinking. She should be here. Especially for the viewing tonight.”
“She should be here,” I agreed. “And look at you being cool about your girlfriend, as if it didn’t take you six months to ask her out.” Getting those two girls together had been like pushing a boulder uphill—Shoshanna being the boulder—although it had been fun.
“Yes, you’re wise, my long-distance-relationship guru,” she said. “Speaking of taking your time, what are you going to do with Eamon when you see him tomorrow?”
“None of your business.” I tweaked her nose, but my thoughts raced with ideas. Naked ideas. A whole trilogy of them.
Shoshanna looked back at Julian and then over the crowds on the main floor. “Iris, what if the preview is crap? What if they don’t like it and it
