“I found my dad alive!” Luce blurted. Dorian’s face shifted, his eyes widening and his tensed mouth dropping, and Luce went on frantically. He’d forgive her once he understood. “I’m so sorry you had to wait, but I—got blown out into nowhere in a storm, and there was this island, and my dad was living there as a castaway! He didn’t die! And . . .” Luce wasn’t sure how to explain. “It wasn’t easy to get him out of there. Dorian, I missed you all the time, but I only managed to get him back to shore a few days ago. And then I came straight here.”

Dorian’s expression wavered a little. There was a hint of softening as he stared at her desperate face, and one hand drifted slightly forward as if he wanted to touch her. Luce waited for him, gazing up at his ochre eyes in the blue light, his dark blond hair tangling in the breeze. Then he stopped where he was, and Luce turned cold with dread.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dorian repeated. He sounded just a bit gentler now, but that didn’t help at all. “It’s too late, Luce.”

“It can’t be. You couldn’t expect me to leave him stranded! Dorian, please . . .”

“You’re not listening to me, Luce! It’s too late. If you’d only come back here before, it never would have happened, but . . .”

“But what?”

Dorian stared straight at her. His hands were clenched. “I’m with someone else now.”

“You . . .” A human, Luce thought. Zoe. It seemed impossible, but there was Dorian’s set brutal face. “Are you in love with her?”

Dorian sighed. “Honestly? Not really. But I like her a lot.”

Luce felt a fresh jolt of hope. She opened her mouth to say something, to ask something important, but Dorian glowered and interrupted her.

“But maybe that’s what I want, Luce. I like it that I’m not all in love with her, and that she’s not freakishly beautiful, and that there’s nothing magic about her! Maybe I like it that, whatever I feel around her, I never have to wonder where my feelings are coming from . . .”

“I can’t help that,” Luce whispered. She heard a kind of subliminal droning, a scream-song buried in her heart. She was afraid to let her voice come out at all in case the scream took over.

“You what?”

“I . . . can’t help being magic. I can’t help what my face is like now, or that you think—”

“You could have helped it, though,” Dorian snarled. “You had a choice!” He hesitated for a second but then went on, lashing her with the words. “So did Zoe. She could have changed, too, but instead she decided to stay human and deal with all the real problems! Instead of just being some kid forever, and playing at all this heroic crap . . .”