“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.”
“Only because people are small minded about the capabilities of Botox,” said Sloane, still leaning on the doorbell. “I figure the noise will start driving him out of his tree any second now, and then we can come in for a little chat.”
“Annoyance as an interrogation tactic is so very you,” I commented, and glanced at Jeff. He looked away, refusing to meet my eyes. I sighed. “Did anybody get any hits on a body while we were driving?”
“Three John Does came into the morgue last night, but none with stab wounds,” said Andy. “The only stabbing victims we have all came with confirmed attackers who weren’t our Mermaid.”
Someone started shouting unintelligibly from behind the club door. Sloane kept her finger on the doorbell, leaning even harder into the malicious act of driving everyone inside La Maison Verte out of their minds.
Then the door swung open, revealing a tall, skinny man in dirty jeans and nothing else, which gave us an impressive view of the colorful tattoos that covered his chest. He snarled at Sloane in a language I didn’t understand, making a grab for her arm.
I don’t think he saw her move. One second, he was trying to make her stop ringing the doorbell, and the next, she was holding his wrist firmly in one hand, while the other hand kept up the racket. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that it’s not polite to hit a lady?” she asked, in a voice so sugary-sweet that it was terrifying.
Time for me to step in, before she actually started breaking bones. “Hello. We’re from the ATF,” I said, stepping forward and flashing my badge too quickly for him to read the writing. He went pale and stopped struggling against Sloane’s hand. “We had a report of a stabbing here last night?”
“How did you—”
“You shouldn’t answer questions with questions,” said Sloane, doing something complicated with her fingers. The man groaned, sagging in her grip. “It’s rude.”
“Yes, okay, yes!” the man half said, half gasped. “One of our regulars. He didn’t want to go to the hospital. Said it wasn’t that bad. I let his friends take him home.”
I leaned close, looking at him coldly. “We’re gonna need a name.”
Jeff worked his magic on the local DMV database, and we quickly determined that our stabbing victim, Kyle Johnston, lived in a suburb less than five miles from the Christian house. We piled back into our cars and took off, ignoring traffic and safety regulations in favor of getting to the wounded Prince as quickly as possible. As callous as it sounded, things might still be okay if he died. If he fell into a coma…
The narrative
loves
comas. It can use them in all sorts of interesting, horrible ways that will do nothing good for anyone who comes into range. “Sloane, call the Bureau, ask them to put Demi on the phone,” I said, turning onto the freeway. “I need to ask her something.”
“Is it how to play ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ on the recorder? Because I can teach you that.” And yet she was already dialing—Sloane might be snarky and unpleasant when she had the chance, but she knew her job.
I focused on the road while Sloane talked, snapped, and shouted her way through the various levels of bureaucracy between us and our imprisoned team member. Finally, she said, “Demi, it’s Sloane. Henry needs to ask you something. I’m putting you on speaker.”
“Henry?” Demi’s voice was rendered thin and tinny by its passage through the phone.
“Here,” I said. “Demi, do you remember the other day when we were talking about Birdie’s plan and what you’d managed to ascertain while you were undercover?” That was the word we were using now, at least when there was a chance that we could have been bugged by the Bureau. Not “enthralled,” but “undercover.” It seemed so much more, well, on our side.
“Yes,” said Demi. “I told you I don’t know much—”
“But you know more than the rest of us. You said that Birdie was planting stories like bombs. What did you mean by that?”
“Just that she’d be triggering unstable narratives when she could, to see if the blowback could make other stories go active. Chain reactions. Why?”
“Because we have a Little Mermaid who should have been a Beast, and who tried for murder-suicide instead of picking one,” I said grimly. “Sound unstable to you?”
“I don’t know the Index as well as you do,” Demi said hesitantly. “Maybe?”
“Demi, did she say
anything else
about what she was planning to do with the unstable stories? Anything at all?”
“Just that there were a lot of them.”
Every time Demi started a sentence with the word “just” I felt like there were a dozen things she wasn’t telling me—things she might not even know she knew, because they were buried under a hundred inconsequential things, and she hadn’t been with us long enough to learn to
listen
. Demi had barely received enough field training to keep her from getting killed before we were shoving her into the path of the narrative.