“How?”
“I dropped in a unicorn’s horn. It didn’t glow. There’s nothing in the water that can hurt you.”
“Cheap but effective,” I said. Michael’s pants were so tight that they could have been painted on, and his shirt looked like silk. I frowned. “What’s that on his wrist?”
“Looks like a club ID band,” said Jeff. “You know, the ones that mark you as over twenty-one, so you can drink?”
“I don’t know, actually. I’ve never been to a bar when it wasn’t on official business.” I leaned over, checking the depth listing on the side of the pool. Three feet. Fair enough. Bracing my hand on the concrete, I slid my legs down into the water, until I was standing on the bottom of the pool. It was a warm morning. Good thing, too; the pool was unheated. I splashed toward Michael’s body, calling back, “Once this is done, tell cleanup we’re going to need his body removed from the pool, you got me? We don’t want him to start falling apart.”
“You’re wading with a corpse, Henry,” said Sloane with malevolent glee. “There’s dead man juice in that water.”
“I know,” I said. I reached the body and paused, murmuring a quiet, “I’m sorry,” before I turned him over. Michael was gone; he wouldn’t hear me. The gesture still made me feel a little better as I looked at his dead eyes staring up at the pre-dawn sky.
The diver had been correct: there was no mark on the body. I unbuttoned his waterlogged silk shirt, revealing an undamaged chest. He was uninjured—but not unmarred. The entire right side of his chest was covered in scars, thick ridges of white tissue that looked painful even now. I frowned as I reached up to touch his face, feeling behind his ear until I found the thin telltale scars left behind by plastic surgery.
“Jeff, go talk to the sister,” I said, taking a closer look at the line of Michael’s neck, the way his muscles fit together. The signs were subtle. They were still there. “Find out when he had reconstructive surgery, how extensive it was, and whether there was any damage to his vocal cords in the process.”
“I’m on it,” he said.
Sloane sat down on the diving board, leaning forward to look down into the water. “Knife’s here,” she said. “You going to swim down and get it now that you’re a mermaid, too?”
“Cleanup can do that,” I said. “We’re going to confirm that it belonged to his sister. That’s how this story goes. There’s just one factor that we’re missing.”
“What’s that?” she asked, giving me a speculative look.
“The Prince.” I started wading toward the pool ladder. I was going to need a towel before I got back into the car. “In the story, the mermaid receives the knife to enable them to kill their Prince before he can marry someone else. It doesn’t happen in the traditional narrative. The mermaid can’t bring herself to kill her true love, and goes back to the sea instead. But this time, we’ve got a man with no wounds and an awful lot of blood. So where’s the Prince?”
For once, Sloane didn’t have a smart-ass comment.
#
We beat Michael Christian’s body back to the Bureau, since we didn’t have to deal with wrestling him out of the pool—or with subduing his sister, who had become hysterical when two members of the cleanup crew walked past her with the stretcher. I guess she’d been holding out hope that he was somehow still alive up until that moment. My team and I had bailed as the police were finally rolling up the street. Let cleanup deal with the interface and paperwork. That was part of their job after all, and we had a potentially wounded Prince to find before he went and triggered someone else’s story.
Most Princes are like skeleton keys: they can open many doors. Left to roam, a fully active Prince could do more damage than any single furious fairy tale princess could have dreamed.
“I’ve got Dispatch monitoring the police bands and going through the admissions records from the local hospitals, looking for stabbing victims,” said Jeff, walking back into the bullpen with a pile of folders in his hands. “If our Prince is well enough to have sought medical care, we’ll find him.”
“If he’s a corpse, he won’t be calling his doctor,” said Sloane. “I’ve emailed my contacts at the local morgue, and on the body bits black market.”
“You make ‘I know people who can get you a human kidney for the right price’ sound so casual,” said Andy, looking away from his computer. “It’s not right.”
“Go fuck yourself,” said Sloane genially. She brought up a new browser window, the eBay logo splashed bright across the top of the page. Turning her back on the rest of us, she began surfing shoe listings.
That was actually comforting: if Sloane was shopping on company time again, at least something was normal. Unlike the story we were trying to unsnarl. “This isn’t right,” I said. “Mermaids either kill their Princes or themselves. They don’t do the murder-suicide thing. It would be a waste of narrative resources.”
“This one appears to have missed the memo,” said Jeff. He put his folders down on the edge of the nearest desk—which happened to be Sloane’s—and flipped open the top one. “I’ve pulled the files on every nascent Little Mermaid or compatible Prince that we’ve documented in the last two years. There will be holes, of course.”
“Of course,” I said grimly. Our monitoring systems have never been perfect—stories slip through the net all the time, camouflaged by their surroundings or just manifesting in unexpected ways. The difference between a four-ten and a seven-oh-nine is sometimes as small as the availability of spindles in the local environment. Tracking them sometimes bordered on impossible, and that was before Birdie screwed us all over by punching holes in all the recording systems.
Yet none of that explained why our latest Little Mermaid had elected to go murder-suicide on us—or whether he’d succeeded in killing his Prince.
“Hey Henry, listen to this,” said Andy, tapping his computer screen for emphasis before he read, “‘Local college student Michael Christian is seeking plastic surgery for his extensive scarring, following a gift from an unknown benefactor. Michael, who is the primary caregiver for his younger sister, Linda, was overcome by the generosity of this mysterious stranger’—it goes on to talk about the car crash they were in. There’s pictures, too. He looked pretty bad before things got patched up for him.”
“How long ago was that?” I asked.
“Looks like he went in for the first surgery a year ago.” Andy started typing again. “I’ll see if I can find anything on his post-surgical follow up.”
Sloane abruptly stood and crossed to my desk, yanking open the bottom left-hand drawer without saying a word to the rest of us. I blinked.
“Can I help you with something, Sloane?” I asked. “That’s the wrong desk. I don’t have your makeup kit.”
“You have Dr. Reynard’s files,” she said. Producing them, she dropped them on my keyboard and began sorting roughly through the thick manila folders, finally holding one up and triumphantly announcing, “Linda Christian. And look, he’s doodled little fish scales all over her name tag.”
“So you think he was tracking her as the potential Little Mermaid?” I stuck my hand out, motioning for her to give me the folder.
“We would have been, if we’d known about her,” said Sloane, slapping it into my palm. “With the narrative circling the house, she would have seemed like the logical target. As fucked-up as his face was, I’d have cued him as a Beast.”
I paused, understanding washing over me. “That’s how it got to him.”
Sloane frowned. “What?”
“That’s how the narrative got to him. Beasts and Mermaids are both defined by how much they long to be human.” I flipped open the file, scanning Dr. Reynard’s notes on Linda. “According to this, Linda was pretty well-adjusted. She liked to swim, she liked the freedom of movement she had in the water, but she was happy to be alive, and didn’t waste time wishing for things that she was never going to have. Based on her medical records, it would have taken a miracle for her to eve
r walk again.”
“So the narrative circled her as a potential Mermaid, couldn’t get through to her, and switched focus to her brother?” Jeff frowned. “Male Mermaids are common enough, but it still reads more as a Beauty and the Beast, or even a Frog Prince—”
“And yet we have the sister, the knife, the pool—all that’s missing is the stolen voice.”
“Actually, that’s not missing,” said Andy. He had pulled up another news article. This one showed the angelic face of the boy we’d found floating in the pool. “According to this, Michael’s plastic surgery was an incredible success, only there were complications. His throat got infected, and before anyone knew what was happening, the bacteria had eaten out his vocal cords. He was never going to speak again. Couldn’t make a sound.”
I winced, thinking of the freckled woman with the fast-moving hands who existed in the whiteout wood. She hadn’t been a Mermaid, but maybe she could have been, if the narrative’s aim had been just slightly different. “So the surgery that made him beautiful made him mute?”
Andy nodded. “Yeah. And if he thought of getting a new face as ‘becoming human,’ that would have fulfilled the narrative’s needs.”
“You don’t have to be attractive to be human,” said Jeff.
“Don’t worry, cobbler, Henry still thinks you’re pretty,” said Sloane, in an almost sing-song way.
I resisted the urge to throw a stapler at her head. “It’s what he thought that matters here. He thought he was becoming human. He lost his voice as part of the deal. Even if the narrative didn’t want him before all that happened, it wanted him afterward.”
“No,” said Sloane. We all turned to look at her. She shook her head, meeting my eyes as she repeated, “No. You’d be right if not for the whole ‘anonymous benefactor’ angle. Somebody paid for this. Somebody looked at this dude, who was fucked up sure, but lots of dudes are fucked up, and said ‘gosh, wouldn’t it be nice if he could fall into a story.’”
“You think Birdie was his benefactor,” I said.
Sloane nodded. “I do. She’s been here a long time, and Dispatch makes good money. Building this guy a new face was probably pretty expensive, but she’s a storytelling bitch who knows how to work the narrative.”
“That could explain the deviations,” said Jeff. “If he was meant to be a Beast, which is a very active role, but became a Mermaid, which is more reactive, he could have unconsciously combined aspects of the two stories.”
“Do stories normally mix like this?” asked Andy.
“No,” I said. “Birdie has managed to turn everything into a special case.”
“Gee, lucky us,” said Andy.
I made a small frustrated noise, trying to think. A lot of Beautys wound up on slabs in the Bureau morgue when their super-strong, super-abusive boyfriends hit them just a little too hard. That was another relatively recent development: the original Beast had been a monster on the outside and a gentleman on the inside. It was only in the last few decades that they’d turned violent. “The situation is weird, but it’s still what we’re dealing with, and none of this gets us any closer to our missing Prince.”
“Sure it does,” said Sloane. She stood. “The band on Michael’s wrist was for a club downtown called ‘La Maison Verte.’ Beauty and the Beast is a French story, and ‘verte’ means green, which also hits the ‘could have been a Frog Prince’ angle. I refuse to believe he went to a club that references the two stories he didn’t manifest and didn’t murder anybody while he was there.”
I blinked at her. “You recognized the club from the wristband? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because we didn’t need to go there yet, and because they’re closed at this time of day, so it’s not like there’s going to be a line,” she said mildly. “Maybe you should put on some pants.”
I was wearing black sweatpants with the Bureau logo on one hip, since my original pants were soaked with pool water and stuffed into a plastic bag in the trunk of my car. I reddened. “We’ll stop by my house before we go to the club,” I said. “It’ll give Jeff a chance to see the swamp mallow growing from my carpet before I yank it all out.”
“I love field trips,” said Andy.
This time, I threw the stapler.
#
The van seemed too conspicuous for where we were going, and so we were split into two cars: Jeff and me in mine, Andy and Sloane in Andy’s. Jeff sat with his hands folded in his lap, not touching anything during the drive. I gave him a sidelong look. His eyes were fixed firmly on the windshield. I thought about showing him the swamp mallows I’d photographed earlier, but this didn’t seem like the sort of problem that could be solved with flora. I sighed.
“Is there something on your mind, Jeff?” He hadn’t really spoken to me, or spent any time alone with me, since we’d gone up to the roof to send the message to Birdie. I should probably have noticed that sooner. In my defense, I’d been busy.
“Not that I’m prepared to discuss, but thank you for asking,” he said.
I blinked. “Wow. Did you mean for that to sound like ‘fuck off,’ or was that just a lucky side effect of timing?”
“What?” Jeff twisted in his seat, finally looking at me. “I would never tell you to fuck off. If I’ve seemed unprofessional—”
“Are you really going to play the ‘keeping it professional’ card? You’ve been looking at me differently for the last two weeks.”
“Maybe that’s because you are different, Henry,” he said, a note of self-loathing in his voice that was as blatant as it was surprising. “You activated your story. You didn’t even ask us if we were willing to look for another way first. You just…you just did it.”
“Ignoring the part where it’s my life and no one gets to say that I couldn’t activate my story if I wanted to, what other options did we have? You saw how quickly that bomb went off. We all would have died.”
“At least you would have died while you were still you.”
I stared at him—dangerous, since I was still driving, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Are you seriously implying that I am no longer myself because my story has gone active? Because if you are, please feel free to ask the Deputy Director for a new assignment. I’d hate to have to break in an archivist at this point in time, but it would be better than dealing with one who can’t trust my judgment.”
Jeff groaned. “That’s not…that came out wrong. I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t yourself anymore. I’m sorry.”
“Then what did you mean to imply?”
“I hated shoes when I was a kid.” The statement was abrupt enough that I just blinked at him. Jeff continued, “I was barefoot whenever I could be. During the summer I only put shoes on when I was going into the library—they didn’t let you go barefoot there. I know why I hated them. We couldn’t afford to buy me new shoes every time I grew, and so they always pinched and squeezed my feet. That didn’t change the hatred.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because when my story awoke, I blew my entire savings account on shoes. Men’s shoes, women’s shoes, vintage shoes, new shoes, it didn’t matter. I needed to own them all. I needed to fill my apartment. I was a hoarder with a very specific addiction, and it came on like a wave. The story had me. Do you understand? It changes you. You may feel like it doesn’t, but it does, and it’s never going to stop.”
I scowled at him before turning back to the road. “And here you were just saying that you didn’t think my story going active would turn me into someone else.”
“I’m still me. I was always a bookish, nerdy guy who liked to look things up for fun. But there are aspects of me that came in with the narrative, and they’re never going to go away.”
We had reached my house. I pulled up in front and killed the engine. “Wait here,” I said. “I’m going to get some pants I can wear in public, and then we’re going to deal with this story once and for all.”
“Henry—”
“Don
’t, Jeff.” I got out of the door, slamming the door behind myself. I didn’t look back to see whether he was watching me walk away. I didn’t really want to know.
#
Sloane and Jeff had exchanged places while I was inside putting on dry clothes, and she spent the ride to La Maison Verte spinning the dial on my radio like she was going to win some unnamed musical jackpot. More distractingly, she would stop on each station long enough to identify the song and sing along for a few bars before changing it again. By the time we reached the darkened facade of the Maison, I was starting to wonder whether there were any Snow White variants that included killing the Wicked Queen for being too annoying to be allowed to live.
I turned off the engine. “You been here before?” I asked.
“A few times,” Sloane said. “The owner sleeps in an apartment above the bar. He’s not supposed to, since this area isn’t zoned residential, but he does it anyway. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to see us.” She kicked her door open, pausing only long enough to say, “Jeff’s not wrong, you know. He’s just shit at explaining himself.” Then she was out of the car and heading for the club doors at a clip she shouldn’t have been able to maintain in her platform heels.
I groaned. “Great,” I muttered, undoing my seatbelt and following after her. “Now they’re ganging up on me.”
Sloane beat all the rest of us to the door. She was leaning on the doorbell when we trooped up to meet her, a smirk on her face. “You know, this asshole had me kicked out once because he decided that my ID had to be a fake. He was all ‘we can’t afford to have underage drinking in this establishment,’ and out onto the street I went.”
“Be fair, Sloane,” said Andy. “Your ID is fake. I mean, you’re one hell of a lot older than anything that has your picture on it will admit.”
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