“I . . . I remember this place,” she breathed. Those dark eyes sought mine, brimming with sudden certainty. With hope. Grinning, I released her arm, and she took a stumbling step forward. “I’ve been here before. Le Présage.” She said the words as if tasting them, returning my smile. Her anger, her resentment momentarily forgotten. Memory was a strange and wonderful thing. “The Oracle City. Le Palais de Cristal.”

Angelica shadowed her movements, close enough to touch. She still didn’t dare. “You were born there.”

Coco whirled to face her, nearly breathless in her anticipation, and the dam finally burst. “How? How was I born here if you can’t leave? Is my father a merman? Is my father Constantin? Why is the Oracle City built on dry land? How is there dry land in the middle of the Wistful Waters?”

Angelica laughed at Coco’s outburst—it really did sound like bells—and gestured us onward toward the gate. The sea stars followed in our wake. Though they didn’t speak, though I could hardly see them, they seemed almost . . . curious. Sprite-like. “It isn’t always dry,” she said. “I told you. Melusines are courteous to a fault. They wouldn’t want their guests to feel uncomfortable.”

“So they drained their entire city?” Beau asked incredulously. “Just for us to breathe?”

Even Angelica’s shrug articulated elegance and grace. “Why not?”

“Does that mean they can walk on land?” I asked, sticking a finger into the waters on impulse. The sea stars clustered around my knuckle, illuminating the shape of my bone through my skin. I flexed it in fascination, watching as they swirled and eddied, desperate to touch me. They left a cold, tingling sensation in their wake.

Angelica’s smile vanished, and she slapped my hand away. “Stop it.” She lifted my finger to eye level, revealing thousands of tiny bloodred pricks. Teeth marks. “They’ll eat you if you let them.” I snatched my hand away with an outraged sound, wiping my blood on my chemise and glaring at the carnivorous little beasts. “And we are not on land,” she continued, resolute. “Make no mistake. We remain on the seafloor, where melusines are free to grow legs.”

“Grow legs?” Beau’s face twisted in disgust as a handful of humanoid shadows swam toward us from along the gate, their metallic tails flashing. I inched closer to Reid. “Like frogs?”

Angelica’s expression grew stony as the melusines’ faces took shape through the waters. Three women and two men. Though their bodies ranged in shape—from broad and coarse to fine and delicate—they all seemed somewhat longer than human, as if their limbs had been stretched, and each moved with a sort of liquid grace. Their colors varied from the palest of silver to the deepest of ebony, but all shimmered slightly, monochromatic and dusted with pearlescent scales. Their webbed fingers wrapped around what could only be described as spears. Perhaps tridents.