It was a tired face, with the tips of dully pointed ears barely managing to poke through its frame of wet, shaggy brown hair. Her skin was pale from over a decade without sun, and her features were too sharp to be beautiful, although people called them “interesting” when they were being charitable. Her eyebrows were arched high, making her look perpetually surprised, and her eyes were a colorless foggy gray. I stared. I knew that face. I’d always known that face, because it was my own.

I stood there, still staring, as the sun finished rising and the dawn slammed into me, bringing the truth about who and what I was crashing down, along with the inevitable comprehension of what had happened. It was too much. I did the only thing I could to make the pain stop: I passed out.

Lily didn’t appear during my slow stagger through her domain, but she must have been there, because when the maintenance man found me sprawled naked in front of the ticket booth with no identification or reason to be there, he saw nothing but a human woman who had been the victim of some brutal attack. He called the police, and they came, collected me, and carried me off to the station for questioning. I didn’t fight them. Shock is a beautiful thing.

The police station looked pretty much like every other station I’ve ever seen: a little sad, a little overused, and seriously in need of a good steam cleaning. I didn’t notice the computers on the desks or the dates on the calendars; I still wasn’t used to being bipedal, and most of my attention was fixed on staying upright. The attending officer, a brisk, no-nonsense man named Paul Underwood, called for someone to clean the scrapes on my elbows, hands, and knees, and had them bring me some clothes. They were kind enough to let me dress alone in the bathroom; I guess having no possessions or pockets makes you seem less likely to be a dangerous criminal, and the various small injuries I’d picked up during my trek through the garden made them more inclined to believe me when I claimed to have been assaulted and left for dead. Being in a state of shock helped me ramble convincingly.

Now that I was starting to understand what Simon had done, I couldn’t get past the fact that he’d actually turned me into a fish. My thoughts were chasing their tails like puppies, caught between fear and fury. I thought the worst was over. I had no idea that the worst was still to come, or just how bad that could be.

Officer Underwood fed me coffee and stale donuts until I started making sense, and then he gave me papers to fill out—name, social security number, residence, place of employment—all the standard questions. He took them away when I was finished, presumably to be filed. Still standard procedure . . . at least until he came back ten minutes later with murder in his eyes.