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“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—
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“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.
