Waking Storms by Sarah Porter Page B

said. Dorian could truthfully claim he didn’t know anything about that. Once they’d boarded the small propeller plane Dorian stared out the window. Instead of the clouds he saw her face with its soft internal glow, her eyes shut tight, in the moment before he’d covered her mouth with his. Once again he’d known exactly what to do.
    He’d outsmarted death a second time. It was impossible to repress the thrill of that, the sense it gave him of his own outrageous specialness. If he could make a mermaid like him too much to kill him, how ordinary could he be?
    ***
    In Anchorage there was another car waiting. Smitt took the front seat while Dorian slumped into the back. He’d spent a day here with his family just before they’d left on their fatal cruise, and he remembered the drive into town, the freeway curving beside a blue waterway, a handful of white office buildings set against whiter mountains, the blue-green luxuriance of trees. They pulled into an underground parking lot beneath one of those white buildings and took an elevator up to a floor where anonymous beige hallways mazed away in all directions.
    Smitt led Dorian around several turns. His eyes were still empty, but his smirk kept getting tighter, as if someone were steadily pulling on a drawstring threaded through his mouth. After a few minutes he opened a door onto a small room where a brown plastic table sat surrounded by blue plastic chairs. An older, thickset man looked up at them expectantly. He had tan skin—maybe he was Italian or Hispanic—gray hair, and large sympathetic eyes. His smile struck Dorian as genuine and even reassuring.
    “Thank you, Agent Smitt. And this is Dorian, of course. I’ve seen your picture. I’m Ben Ellison.”
    “Hi.” Dorian smiled back awkwardly and shook the proffered hand. Ben Ellison waved him to a chair, and Dorian sat down while Smitt leaned against the door. Ellison pulled a file folder out of a laptop bag and opened it, and Dorian caught his breath.
    “Your mother really liked to post pictures online, didn’t she? It’s wonderful to see a strong relationship like this between a boy your age and his little sister. I wish my kids could get along half this well.”
    The picture in the folder showed Emily sitting on his shoulders. They were in a park, the pale sky laced by bare black branches. She was wearing a bright polka-dotted jacket and mittens made to look like duck faces. She held her hands up menacingly on either side of Dorian’s face, thumbs flared to show that the ducks were quacking furiously. His own gloved hands wrapped her legs, and he was laughing so hard that he couldn’t quite stand up straight.
    Dorian turned his eyes away, only to find himself confronting Smitt’s contorted smile.
    “You must miss her very much,” Ben Ellison said. Now his voice sounded too warm, almost gluey.
    “Of course I miss her,” Dorian said. It came out harsh, rasping. He didn’t know where to look; definitely not into Emily’s giddy face.
    “I know you do. I spent a great deal of time studying these pictures.” He turned over the photo of Dorian and Emily in the park. From the corner of his eye Dorian could see more images of himself: roughhousing with his sister, reading to her, jumping with her in a pile of leaves. “Seeing them, I couldn’t doubt that you were telling us absolutely everything you know that might help us to understand why she died.”
    Dorian didn’t know what to say to that. “Sure.”
    “The little jerk’s been doing nothing but lying his ass off from the first time we talked to him,” Agent Smitt snarled from behind Dorian’s left shoulder. Dorian couldn’t help twisting around at the words, and Agent Smitt’s blue eyes met his with a slick, repellent look of self-satisfaction.
    “Please, Agent Smitt.” Ellison was warmly reproachful. “That’s not at all constructive. We have no reason to believe that Dorian is actually lying.”
    Dorian was aware that he was being