Fantasy Life

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “I wasn’t criticizing you, Lys,” Cassie said. “It’s just that you’re—”

  She paused. She had never told Lyssa about her father, more than what little she felt Lyssa should know, and she hadn’t really talked with her about the Walters family. It seemed odd to start now.

  “You’re a Buckingham,” Cassie finished lamely.

  Lyssa frowned at her. “It scared me, Mom. Emily can’t deal with more trauma right now, and the first thing that happens to me in this house is frightening. What if it goes for her?”

  “It won’t, honey,” Cassie said.

  “But it went for me.”

  “No.” The voice came from behind them. Cassie looked up. Athena stood in the doorway, wearing a silver lamé robe that looked like something out of a 1940s movie. It brought out the highlights in her hair, which was down around her shoulders.

  She looked both older and younger than usual—the hair accenting the soft, papery lines of her skin and the robe accenting her strong, unbending frame.

  Lyssa’s eyes lit up at the sight of her grandmother, but Lyssa didn’t move. Apparently, she was wondering about her welcome even with Athena.

  “I thought you were tired, Mother,” Cassie said.

  “I couldn’t sleep, not with my Lyssa here.” Athena opened her hands, a less showy method of welcoming someone toward her than Cassie had used. “Don’t I get a hug, Lys?”

  Lyssa got up, and for a moment Cassie thought she might refuse. Then Lyssa walked over to Athena and put both arms around her.

  Lyssa closed her eyes, and Athena rocked her as if she were a child, murmuring endearments.

  Cassie turned away. Her daughter hadn’t hugged her, hadn’t even made her feel like she had been missed. But then, that was the story of their relationship, wasn’t it? The way they constantly avoided closeness, and the depth with which Cassie wanted it.

  She set the tar ball on a napkin and washed her hands. Lyssa and Athena were still hugging, although not as close. They were speaking to each other softly, Athena offering words of comfort.

  Cassie couldn’t remember Athena ever doing that for her, not even as a little child. Cassie sighed, poured herself more tea, and took a cookie. It was small comfort.

  “Would you like some tea, Grandma?” Lyssa said after a moment.

  “It looks like I’m going to be awake for a while, so I don’t have to drink that disgusting stuff.” Athena walked over to the cupboards, her robe swishing as she moved. “I’m going to have something with caffeine.”

  Cassie didn’t say anything. She finished her cookie and put a hand around her mug, letting the warmth flow through her palm.

  It only took Athena a moment to prepare her coffee, then plug in the machine. The smell of freshly roasted beans reached Cassie and her mouth watered, but she knew better than to have coffee this late at night.

  “Now,” Athena said as she took her favorite mug from the cupboard. “What’s this nonsense I hear about Cliffside House attacking someone?”

  Lyssa went through her story again, and when she got to the ball, Cassie pushed it toward Athena. Athena gave the tar ball a passing glance, then raised her gaze to Cassie.

  Cassie looked away.

  “Cliffside House has never, in its entire history, attacked anyone,” Athena said as she poured herself a cup of coffee. She waved the pot at Lyssa, silently asking if she wanted any. Lyssa shook her head. “What you’ve described to me is a request for help, and a demonstration of the problem.”

  “I gleaned some of that.” Lyssa’s tone was dry. “But it felt frightening. And why come to me? Why not go to you or Mother? I’ve only just come back to town.”

  Athena looked at Cassie again. Cassie took another cookie, broke it in half, and wished there were a fortune inside it. Something, anything, to take her away from this conversation.

  “You belong here, Lys,” Athena said. “You and your daughter.”

  Still she wouldn’t say Emily’s name, but Lyssa didn’t seem to catch that.

  “I know,” Lyssa said. “Buckinghams should never leave Cliffside House.”

  “That’s not what I said.” Athena looked at Cassie a third time. “You carry a bit of the sea, Lys. You hear better than the rest of us.”

  “A bit of the sea? What’s that, Gram?”

  Cassie reached for the teapot, but her hand shook and she nearly knocked it over. “Sorry,” she said.

  Both Lyssa and Athena were watching her. But she didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t. She had promised herself long ago that Daray was hers, that she wouldn’t share him with anyone, not for any reason. Lyssa was the gift that Daray had left her. He had known she was pregnant long before Cassie had, and still, that day, he had gone to the sea, knowing he would die.

  “Mom?” There was actual concern in Lyssa’s voice.

  Cassie righted the teapot. She had only spilled a little bit. She grabbed a napkin and started to wipe up, but Lyssa’s hand caught hers.

  “What’s going on, Mom?”

  Cassie swallowed. She silently cursed Athena, sitting across from them like the goddess she had been named for.

  “You left,” Cassie said, and instantly regretted pausing after that word. It made her sound like she had condemned Lyssa for doing something Cassie had always believed to be completely natural. “You left, and we never really got the chance to talk to you about Anchor Bay and Cliffside House.”

  “We always thought you’d come back,” Athena said, and even though the comment was meant helpfully, it wasn’t helpful.

  Cassie balled up the soggy napkin, got up, and threw it into the trash.

  “We thought you’d come back sooner,” Cassie said as she returned to her chair. “Certainly, when Emily was born.”

  “She was the first Buckingham in six generations not born in the house,” Athena said.

  “Mother, please.” Cassie was watching Lyssa. There was already a small frown on Lyssa’s forehead. They were going to lose her again if they weren’t careful.

  Athena shrugged one shoulder. “I would have told this differently.”

  “You grew up here,” Cassie said a little desperately. “You know the house. You’ve seen it change, and you’ve seen the things that sometimes appear on the beach.”

  “I haven’t forgotten the magic, Mother.” Lyssa’s tone was dry.

  Cassie nodded. That was what she was checking. “Cliffside House is the link between the past and the present, between the real and the unreal.”

  Athena watched her, knowing as well as Cassie did that Cassie was using the very words that Athena had used with Cassie when she’d imparted this secret decades ago.

  “That’s why the house changes,” Cassie said, deviating from the script. “It wasn’t built here. It was built there in ways we don’t completely understand. But it lives here, as a crossroads. And we’re guardians of that crossroads. We protect both sides of the link.”

  “You and Grandma?” Lyssa didn’t sound skeptical, but she did sound confused.

  “The Buckinghams,” Cassie said. “You, me, your grandmother. And now Emily.”

  Lyssa blinked hard. She brought her mug of tea to her lips and then set it down again without drinking.

  “I didn’t bring Emily to this place to trap her here,” Lyssa said.

  “She doesn’t belong anywhere else, child,” Athena said. “Mom,” Cassie warned.

  But Athena, typically, didn’t listen to her. “That’s why your husband got so ill. All those powers, untrained and unchanneled, mixing in his head. You’re immune to the texture of magic, to the way it bends everything around it. You grew up here. But he had no defense.”

  Lyssa’s eyes had filled with tears. “You’re saying that Reginald’s illness could have been prevented?”

  “It was expected, Lys,” Athena said.

  “And you didn’t tell me? You didn’t warn me?”

  It was Cassie’s turn to wince. She knew what Athena was going to say.

  “Mo
m,” she said. “Don’t.”

  But as Athena’s gaze met Cassie’s, her expression hardened.

  “Sometimes, Lyssa,” Athena said, “the men are irrelevant.”

  Cassie’s breath caught. She remembered those words, that inflection. She had been standing on the beach, ankle-deep in the surf, and her mother, her damn mother, trying to comfort her, had said that men were irrelevant.

  That Daray was irrelevant.

  Has he already done his duty? Athena asked. Are you pregnant?

  “Reginald was not irrelevant, Grandmother.” Lyssa tapped her mug. “I loved him. Losing him may have destroyed Emily. How can you say he’s irrelevant?”

  Athena looked down at her hands. Cassandra clutched her mug so tightly she could hear the ceramic crack.

  But Lyssa wasn’t done. “How could you,” she said to Athena, “and you—” She turned to Cassie. “How could you both let me, let us, lose him like that? If we had known—”

  “If you had known,” Athena said, “you might not have married him.”

  “And you say that would have been better for him.”

  Cassie gripped her mug even tighter. This was what she feared from Lyssa’s homecoming, this discord. It had always been Lyssa’s hallmark.

  “Yes,” Athena said. “It would have been better for him.”

  Lyssa blinked hard, holding back tears.

  “Mother,” Cassie said. “That’s enough.”

  It was too much, actually, and Cassie should have jumped in sooner.

  Athena leaned toward Cassie. “She needs to know what is happening here. She needs to know—”

  “Lys,” Cassie said. “It’s complicated. It’s always complicated for us. And she’s wrong. We all failed you. I failed you. I didn’t want a Walters back in Anchor Bay . . .”

  Her voice trailed off as she realized what she had said. Lyssa raised her head, and the tears seemed to vanish. Cassie felt her cheeks grow even warmer.

  “Back?” Lyssa asked.

  Athena touched Lyssa’s arm. “Child, these old arguments are useless. We must stay focused on the present.”

  But Lyssa pulled away from her. “What do you mean back?”

  Cassie sighed. Apparently it was time to tell her. It was past time, truly. Only Cassie’s fear had held her back before.

  She didn’t want to lose her daughter—not that she had ever had her. And now that Athena had spoken up, the chances of losing Lyssa permanently were very, very real.

  “Back,” Cassie said. “His father was here, over thirty years ago.”

  DIGGING INTO THE PAST

  The First Layer

  Sixteen

  January 1970

  Anchor Harbor. Oregon

  The storm had been predicted for three days and when it arrived, it arrived fast. Winds over forty knots created thirty-foot seas, which turned the harbor at Anchor Bay into a death trap.

  John Aluke, captain of the tugboat Anchor One, was halfway out of the harbor when the storm hit. He’d been through worse—most notably the Columbus Day Storm eight years before. He knew he could survive this storm, maybe even bring in the ship that he was supposed to pilot into the harbor, but he also knew which risks were worth his while.

  He radioed the Walter Aggie, which, according to their last readings, was still twenty miles out, and warned them to come no closer to port. He told them to anchor offshore, and he would come for them as soon as the winds died down, perhaps as early as the morning.

  He got no response. For by then, the Aggie was already in trouble.

  Cliffside House North Tower

  Twenty-year-old Cassandra Buckingham woke out of a sound sleep convinced the cliff was going to fall into the sea. She had heard a large bang and felt a huge shudder run through the entire building.

  She was amazed she had stayed in bed. When she woke, nothing seemed disturbed. Her lamp was still on low beside the bed, her hi-fi playing the same record over and over, the last of the incense burning down.

  She went to the window and peered out, but saw nothing. The storm had come. Rain lashed the glass and she could hear the wind howling ever so faintly.

  For one brief moment, she pulled open the door to her widow’s walk and stepped outside. The lava rock which made up the walk was slick with rain, and cold to her bare feet. The wind whipped her hair around her naked form, and the rain pelted her skin.

  She held her hands up, asking the water to help her see, and for a brief instant, she saw the ship, sliding against the cliff face, the panicked sailors running around on the deck like crazy people.

  Then she choked, her throat suddenly full of something so thick that she couldn’t even swallow. She raised her hands to her neck and touched something slimy.

  She pulled her hands back. They were black and dripping, her skin losing its warmth as the substance coated her. She shivered, her body temperature dropping.

  She was going to drown. She was going to freeze to death. She was going to—

  Her hands were still in the air, and her eyes were closed. There was nothing in her throat, but inside her mouth, an awful taste remained, as if she had swallowed a cup of sour Vaseline.

  She looked down at the rocks below. There was no ship. And there were no sailors scrambling across the deck. The ocean looked angry, the swells spilling over the tallest points at the edge of the Devil’s Goblet.

  A large gust nearly knocked her over. She clutched the stone barrier in front of her, catching herself, then reached for the door. She had to pull herself back to her room.

  She had left the door open, and the rain had created a giant spreading wet spot in the shag carpet. The incense had gone out, either damped by the blowing rain or finally burned down.

  The familiar scent was gone, replaced by the briny scent of the ocean, covered by the stench of rotten eggs.

  Cliffside House South Tower

  Athena Buckingham woke to find a man standing at the foot of her bed. He was dripping wet and naked, holding a seal’s pelt in his left hand.

  “We don’t have a lot of time,” he said.

  No one had ever invaded the towers before. She sat up, clutching her nightgown closed.

  “What do you want?”

  “There’s no time, Athena. We’re going to lose everything if you do not come with me.”

  She knew better than to turn on the light. He would be six feet tall, black-eyed and black-haired, and one of the most beautiful men she had ever seen. She could already tell that from his voice, deep and rich.

  She had never seen him before, but she had seen his type, and she knew how dangerous they could be.

  “We have to set up a barrier,” he said, “and hope it holds. We don’t have the power to do it alone.”

  He held out a hand, but she didn’t take it. She threw the covers back, stuck her feet in her slippers, and pulled her hair back with a barrette.

  “Do we need to hang up your pelt?” she asked.

  “I’m going to need it. You’ll have to trust me.”

  A lot to ask on the first meeting, but she had done crazier things. For a brief moment, she wished her mother were alive—she always handled emergencies better than anyone else—and then Athena let the man lead her out of her bedroom, down the stairs, to the levels below.

  Cliffside House The Landing between the Towers

  Cassie had pulled on a pair of jeans and a University of Oregon sweatshirt without drying herself off. She had tucked her long hair inside the sweatshirt because she didn’t have time to pull it back.

  Her hair dripped cold water down her back, sending shivers through her as she ran down the circular staircase that led to the landing between the towers, flicking on lights as she went.

  She had to get her mother. Something was going to go wrong. Something might have already gone wrong. Cassie didn’t know, but it was her job to sound the warning, and she had to do it now.

  The sour Vaseline taste grew stronger on her tongue and the stench of rotten eggs had grown wor
se. Her eyes watered from the smell. She couldn’t tell if it was real or not, any more than she could tell if the sounds she kept hearing—the groaning of metal on rock—were real either.

  When she reached the landing, she nearly collided with her mother, who was running after a man. The man was tall and beautiful, with the liquid eyes of a seal. He held a pelt in his left hand and he was naked.

  A selkie, who had sought her mother out.

  Cassie felt a jolt of surprise and stopped before she ran into both of them.

  “Mother!”

  “No time, Cass,” her mother said, dashing across the landing to the door built into the wall. Her hand scraped at the black rock, trying to find the hidden release.

  “Mother, something’s wrong.”

  “I know, Cass.”

  “No, you don’t. There’s a ship. I think it’s going to hit the cliff.”

  Her mother looked at her, fear on her face. The selkie was touching the rock now, searching for the same opening.

  “Can’t you smell it?” Cassie asked. “The rotten eggs?”

  “What kind of ship?” Athena asked, and for the first time in her life, Cassie heard fear in her mother’s voice.

  “We don’t have time, Athena,” the selkie said. “Tell the child to go.”

  “We need her,” Athena said. “Her powers can augment mine.”

  Cassie looked from one to the other, feeling her heart pound. She had known that her mother did strange and magical things for Anchor Bay, but she had never known what they were.

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

  “Find the opening to the damn door for one thing,” Athena said.

  Cassie braced one hand on the wall and let the house show her where the release was. It clicked open without her even having to touch it.

  “I thought you said she wasn’t as powerful as you are,” the selkie said as he ducked inside the door.

  Cassandra looked at her mother, who ignored her. She was holding the door open as if she expected it to close.

  “I said her talents are different from mine.” Athena nodded at Cassie. “Go. Follow him.”