Anais and Samantha bobbed up and down in the waves, both pearl-skinned and almost shining with beauty, both lacquered with mist and the dizzy pale sunlight. Luce noticed that they were keeping their distance, though, and that Samantha couldn’t hide the apprehension in her sea green eyes. It made her want to laugh. “Hi, Anais. Hey, Samantha.” Luce wondered if they’d seen the wild burst of water carrying her up into the air. She smiled to herself. There was no reason not to be polite to the two blondes, not when she could send a vertical wave slashing up beneath them anytime she felt like it. “How’s everything been going?”

As Luce had expected, her friendly tone annoyed Anais more than any display of hostility could have done. Luce could feel the hardness of her own smile as she watched Anais’s sharp blue eyes start to flicker back in the direction of the tribe’s cave. Her golden hair rayed out around her, curling gorgeously with each loft of the water.

“Let’s just go,” Samantha muttered weakly, tugging at her queen’s arm. “Why should we even talk to her?” Anais ignored her.

“Oh, wait.” Anais made a show of suddenly recalling something, rolling her eyes upward. “Isn’t this thing some kind of trashy, broken-down mermaid? I know it’s kind of hard to believe, Samantha. But don’t you remember there was a mermaid with dark, ratty hair like that? We threw her out of the tribe. Remember?”

Luce felt a little ill, like there was something clammy and thick in her stomach. But what really surprised her was how little Anais’s words upset her. Mostly they seemed funny, in a disgusting kind of way. There she was, the perfect blond pseudo-queen, the heartless usurper, pretending that insults could change what they both knew perfectly well: the best singer was the rightful ruler. And while Anais might be very good, she wasn’t even close to equaling Luce. Catarina had said so before she’d vanished, and suddenly Luce found that she believed it absolutely.

“Threw her out?” Of course that wasn’t really what had happened, but still Samantha was being pretty slow on the uptake. She was clearly too nervous to think straight. “Anais, please! Let’s just get out of here before she tries something.”

Lazily Luce began to hum a little, stretching backwards on the waves. Even as she did it, Luce was aware that she was acting in a way her old self wouldn’t have recognized. Even when she’d been furiously angry before, she’d never been deliberately cruel, never enjoyed taunting someone. Now, though, the rising anxiety in Samantha’s gaping face filled her with hard sparks of delight. She wasn’t entirely comfortable with what she was doing, but she was too excited to stop. And anyway, didn’t these two deserve whatever they got?