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the room was lacy or floral; his few scattered belongings were clearly intrusive, disturbers of the peace. Lindy’s sewing machine and knitting supplies took up a large corner. Dorian kept jumping off the bed, pacing twitchily back and forth, even though it was after two in the morning and he definitely didn’t want Lindy waking up.
    He was going to blackmail a mermaid. Excitement jumped in his muscles at the prospect, speeded his breath. He wrenched open the bottom drawer of the hideously ornate, baby blue dresser with its painted wreaths of bloated purple roses. He’d finished well over a hundred drawings in the months since he’d first seen her, and now he pulled thick messy stacks of them out from under the tangle of jeans and hoodies. Not all of them would work—there were dozens that showed cresting waves crowded with staring eyes, or sometimes with one huge eye all alone. Cyclops waves. But there were others where he’d made a painstaking effort to capture her face, drawn her framed in peaked slopes of water. A number of those portraits showed a decent likeness, though somehow getting her features right didn’t begin to convey how phenomenally beautiful she was. “When Dorian drew her, she was never more than very pretty. But one thing was obvious about her: she didn’t look anything like mermaids were supposed to, with her short, spiky, almost punk, dark hair and long, shadowy eyes. He felt confident that if any other mermaid found one of the drawings, they’d recognize that face right away.
    They’d realize the truth, too. Probably she wasn’t supposed to let anybody see her. If the mermaids weren’t all seriously careful to keep out of sight, he wouldn’t be the only person in the world who knew they were more than an old myth.
    It was lucky that he’d used black permanent marker on glossy paper. The images wouldn’t bleed in the sea. Dorian began sorting through the stack with his hands trembling, pulling out the best ones and setting them to the side on the matted carpet. He’d just do one or two to start with. If she still wouldn’t cooperate, well, he could draw as many more as he needed.
    He took out his pen, thinking of a message. It seemed bizarre to imagine that she could read, but then it was also inexplicable that she’d known English. In a movie she would have learned by secretly watching TV somehow, but Dorian knew that wasn’t it. Say she could read, then, freakish as that sounded. It wasn’t any more freakish than the fact that she existed. He thought for a minute before writing in clear block letters in the empty space above her head: If I keep putting these drawings in the water, your friends will find out what you did. So you’d better come talk to me. I’m not playing. He hesitated briefly and then decided not to sign his name. There was the risk his message would be discovered by a person instead of a mermaid. Dorian took the inscribed drawing and folded it into a crude boat. He stuffed it in his pocket and clambered out his ground floor window, dropping into a narrow channel of bracken that ran between the houses.
    By the time he’d made it to the beach where she’d left him he’d started to feel just a little bit sorry for her. For all he knew, he was about to mess up her life completely. And she’d saved his, no matter what else she’d done. No matter whom she’d killed ... He sat on the shore, the cold lumps of the stones digging into his legs, and looked up at the sky. The stars here were bigger than he’d ever seen, outrageous in their purity and blue, blinding fire. The waves shone steel-bright in their frozen light, rising in liquid metal arches, crumpling like silver paper as they hit the stones.
    Was he really going to back down out of compassion for Emily’s murderer?
    Dorian waited for the water to roll back, then ran down the beach and jumped onto a rock. He didn’t want his fragile missive to get swamped. When the water tumbled in below him, he waited a