“You met me outside an active incursion because you wanted to talk about your hair. Don’t try telling me I brought it up—you only put it in ponytails when you want us to ask if you’ve had a haircut recently. Why are you stalling?”
Sloane hesitated. That put my back up further. Sloane
never
hesitated. Finally she said, “The girl in the wheelchair isn’t our target.”
I blinked. Until Sloane said it, I hadn’t even realized I was making that assumption. It was a natural one, though. Fully half of the Little Mermaids we encountered were people who had been injured in an accident of some kind, and who wanted to walk again almost as much as they wanted to find true love. “She’s not?”
“He came home to drown,” said Sloane bleakly. She met my eyes for only a moment before looking back toward the little suburban house with its sheltering ring of unmarked black cars. There were more vehicles here than would have been needed for simple team transport. That alone should have tipped me off about our target being dead: cleanup was already on the scene. “He took the knife into the water with him. I guess he figured the chlorine would wash the blood away.”
That caught my attention. “Blood?”
Sloane nodded. “His clothes were covered in it. And here’s the upsetting part: none of it’s his.”
“Oh,” I said faintly.
As if the rest of it weren’t upsetting enough already.
Little Mermaids are a relatively recent addition to the Index: technically, they’re not listed in the ATI, since the version used by mundane scholars only looks at true folk tales and motifs, not stories whose authors have been identified and listed in the public record. Maybe we shouldn’t list the voiceless girls and boys either, but our job is hard enough without splitting our best defense into multiple rulebooks. Everything goes into our official Index—the Thumbelinas and the Peter Pans, the Match Girls and the Captain Hooks. And the Little Mermaids. Always the damn Little Mermaids.
Like so many stories, the Little Mermaid narrative requires multiple players: the Mermaid, the Prince, the Sea Witch, and the sibling or siblings who can provide a murder weapon. I walked past Andy and the crying girl in the wheelchair, keeping my eyes fixed firmly on the front door to prevent her getting too good a look at me. She was already upset. Seeing someone who looked like a modern-day interpretation of Death walking into her house wasn’t going to help.
Jeff was in the living room directing a group of cleanup staffers when Sloane and I came through the door. He turned toward the sound of our footsteps, and offered a genial nod. “Agent Marchen, Agent Winters.”
Professionalism: right. He probably suspected at least one of the cleanup crew’s members to be reporting our activities back to Headquarters, and he wasn’t likely to be wrong about that. “What’s the situation?”
“Michael Christian, age twenty-four, deceased,” said Jeff. “He was found floating face down in the pool by his younger sister, Linda, who called the police. Dispatch had been monitoring a narrative spike from this area. We were able to intercept the call, and have taken possession of the scene.”
Including the little sister, who probably had no idea what was going on, and who had just lost her brother. Shit. “Any sign that someone else was involved with getting him into the water?”
Jeff shook his head. “He’s still in the pool—I assumed you’d want to see the body before we moved it—but there are no signs of foul play. Everything is consistent with a single person drowning.”
“Except for the blood.”
“Except for the blood,” Jeff grimly agreed.
“Okay, this is all portentous and spooky and all, but can we go see the dead guy now? Because you people are seriously boring me.” Sloane rocked back onto her heels, giving the living room a seemingly disinterested once-over before adding, “And they’re orphans. Parents have been dead five, six years. Probably explains why he was such a good target—if they had any fairy tale potential at all, losing their parents was like a flare to the narrative.”
“Somebody check the records on this family, find out what happened to the parents and when,” I snapped to the cleanup crew, neither arguing with Sloane nor asking her to explain her reasoning further. “Agent Davis, take me to the body.”
“Right this way,” said Jeff, and started toward the back of the house, plainly expecting us to follow him.
As we walked I scanned the rooms around us, first the front room, and then the hall that led into the dining room adjoining the backyard. Sloane was right. The décor was elegant, obviously chosen with exquisite care—and at least five years out of date. Something had caused the people who lived here to stop caring about whether or not their pictures reflected reality. And in all the full-length shots, Linda was standing on her own two feet, not confined to the chair I’d seen in front of the house.
The backyard was as large and well-designed as the rest of the house, and here at least they’d been keeping things up, maybe because hiring a landscaper was easier to deal with than the local homeowners association. A brown-haired man floated in the middle of the pool, the back of his shirt soaked through with blood. It was still leaking into the water, sending out little crimson tendrils that dissolved as the tireless action of the pool cleaner sucked the blood away.
I walked to the edge of the pool and stopped, crouching down. “How sure are we about drowning as the cause of death?”
“Fairly sure,” said Jeff. “We’ll need to do an autopsy and toxicology screen to make sure that he didn’t drug or poison himself before going into the water, but one of the cleanup staffers got in and swam beneath him to check for a cut throat.” He caught my look and put his hands up, adding, “We tested the water for biohazards before anyone went in.”
“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 ever 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.”