“I don’t know how anyone can stand to be alive. The world is way too beautiful to live in, Luce! Just being me is—it’s so amazing I can’t begin to deal with it. And the sea, and the light. It’s so beautiful I want to stab it with daggers, or I want to blow up into those colors . . .”

This didn’t exactly make Luce any less worried. “Tell me you’re okay! Before I get completely freaked out.”

“You are the most beautiful thing in the world. If you were the sea I’d walk right in, and I’d be so happy.”

“Dorian!”

“Of course I’m okay, Luce! I’m so, so much better now. More than I’ve ever been.” There was still something manic in his smile, but he seemed to be slightly more grounded. “I wish my mom was alive. I wish you could sing to her that way. Maybe you could have fixed—whatever it was that made her do those things. Luce, I was so scared of her, but even more than that I was so, so, so sorry . . .” Luce held his face in both hands, watching his eyes. Their gold looked a little more solid now. Even though she could see for herself what he’d been through with his parents, she knew it would be much better for him, and for their relationship, if he could tell her the truth of his own free will. Was he about to? “I’m really in love with you, Luce. You know that, right?”

“I’m in love with you, too . . .” She couldn’t help smiling, even as she watched him intensely, hoping for signs that he was truly sane.

“If you can’t be human again then I want to be like you,” Dorian announced. The melted craziness came back in his eyes.

“I don’t think it’s possible—”

“You said I am, though, that I have the . . . that you can see it . . .”

“You do. I can see the sparkling around you right now. But Catarina said boys can’t change, and I’ll hurt you if I try.”

“What did Catarina know? It’s not like she’d seen everything. Her saying it’s impossible—that doesn’t prove anything.”

“Dorian, I mean . . .” She hated to remind him of it, but he still seemed deranged by joy. He just wasn’t being rational. “The mermaids killed your family. Mermaids, including me. You really want to be a merman?”

“They killed your father, too, though. Probably Catarina killed him, right? But if you ever saw somebody try to hurt Catarina you’d drown them, like, boom. Instant death.”

Luce couldn’t actually deny it. “That’s the only way I’d ever kill a human again. If I had to, to protect another mermaid.”

“Exactly.”

“I loved Catarina. It was too hard for me not to forgive her.”