Fantasy Life

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “The school?” Denne said.

  “They’re not getting inside,” Athena said, “and they sound pretty harmless. It’s just strange.”

  “There’s been a lot of strange lately.” Gabriel opened his door, grabbed his jacket, hat, and the keys for one of the squads. “Tell them I’ll be right down there. Have Zeke meet me.”

  Athena nodded and headed down the hall.

  “Give it one second to let me make sure our little specimen is on ice, and I’ll come with you,” Denne said.

  “I don’t need civilians,” Gabriel said.

  Denne got a faraway look in his eyes. “When it comes to Seavy County, I’m anything but a civilian.”

  Twenty-Seven

  Anchor Bay Elementary School

  The car rocked with the weight of hundreds of creatures flinging themselves into it, on top of it, over it. Lyssa huddled in the driver’s seat, wishing she still had a cell phone. Then someone would know she was in trouble.

  Surely people saw these creatures. Surely the authorities—Athena, Gabriel, someone—knew what was going on.

  Her car had become dark, despite the sunny day. The creatures blanketed it, always in motion, scrambling past. They weren’t all the apple-faced humanoids that she had initially seen.

  Some were froglike and left a trail of green slime across her windshield. Others had flippers that made flat prints in the green goo. Still others were large and ethereal, reminding her of drawings she had seen on posters of fairies, their entire beings suffused with light.

  Only they weren’t light. They were heavy enough to keep rocking the car.

  Lyssa had turned herself toward the ocean, and when she could see out the passenger-side window, all she saw was a stream of movement, almost as if the creatures themselves were a sea.

  The noise was unbearable. Different levels of chatter, some with words, some with sounds—pongs and peeps and chirrups—as overpowering as the pounding on the metal sides of her car.

  No one had come to help her. No one was doing anything. She felt almost as if she were alone, as if, somehow, she had made this up and it was happening only to her.

  Perhaps it was happening only to her. After all, no one had seen that attack in the closet either, and she had nearly choked to death. Maybe her mother and grandmother were wrong. Maybe this was something else, something directed toward her.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have come back here at all.

  Things kept launching themselves at the car. Some of them had human faces, albeit tiny, and she wondered at their intelligence. Humans would have gone around the vehicle, but these creatures didn’t seem to be going around anything. Over, under, on top of—but not around, as if they were in a blind panic.

  Some of their eyes looked that way—glazed, almost empty. That expression on a human would have indicated terror, but she wasn’t sure what these things were. Certainly, they weren’t anything she had had contact with before.

  Something slammed into the roof of the car, denting it. Lyssa reached up, touched the dent, as another pounded into place. The dents were twice the size of a human hand and shaped like a frog’s leg.

  Only the frog creatures she had seen didn’t have the weight to create a dent like that. Not even if they had hit from a great height.

  Lyssa sank down in her seat. If she started the car, would these creatures go around? Or were they so blindly panicked, so focused, that they would keep coming at her?

  She had no idea. Humans sometimes got this focused, especially in terrifying circumstances—that was how people got trampled to death in fires.

  Maybe the sounds she was hearing weren’t conversation. Maybe they were screams of terror, warnings, and cries of panic.

  Her own heart was pounding. She couldn’t get out of the car if she wanted to.

  She put the keys in the ignition and swallowed hard. Her mouth was dry. She wiped her face with her hand and then caressed the keys.

  If she started the car, she might injure the creatures. So far, they hadn’t hurt her. So far, they had done nothing.

  To get out of here, she would have to back up, and the odds were that she would run over several of these creatures on the way.

  She would probably kill a few.

  Then what? She was a Buckingham, in the hometown of Buckinghams, sworn to protect magical creatures from the sea. What kind of revenge would the creatures have on her? What would they do if she killed some of them?

  What if this was something that only she could see?

  What if it was some kind of test?

  She let her hand fall away from the ignition. Her stomach was churning.

  The run of creatures had to end soon. After what Athena and Cassie had said last night—using the word refuge—there couldn’t be a lot of creatures. It wasn’t possible.

  So this couldn’t go on for days. Maybe only for a few hours.

  If she didn’t get home in the middle of the afternoon, people would miss her. Emily would wonder where Lyssa was. Cassie would go searching. Athena would know that Lyssa went to the elementary school.

  Eventually, they would find her.

  Or the teachers would come out and see her, maybe even the principal’s secretary. If this was something only she could see, then she must be sitting in this car cringing as if something were wrong.

  Someone would see her and report to Cassie or Athena. Someone would let them know.

  Of course, if this was only happening in Lyssa’s head, then she could get out without causing any harm.

  Maybe all she had to do was shatter the illusion.

  She took a deep breath, then reached for the door handle with her left hand. Something large and black and slimy slammed into the passenger window. The underbelly—or whatever she was looking at—was covered with suckers, and they appeared to be oozing gray fluid.

  Lyssa felt her stomach turn. She made herself look away.

  Instead, she focused on the green goo slimed across her driver’s window, at the little prints—some shaped like regular feet, some like frog’s legs, and some like flippers—and tried to think of nothing.

  Then her fingers wrapped around the cool handle and she tugged.

  The handle unlatched the door.

  She let out a breath. For some reason, she hadn’t expected the handle to work. But of course it would. The creatures hadn’t gotten into the workings of the car; they only covered the exterior.

  She pushed the door slightly, and something screamed. That was a sound she recognized, long, drawn-out, agonized. Then the scream was followed by a plop and a squishing sound.

  The stench of rotted seaweed hit her, followed by dead fish, and brine. It was so overpowering that her eyes watered.

  Lyssa grabbed the armrest on the side of the door, praying that nothing was between the door and the car’s frame, and pulled the door shut, just as slowly as she had tried to open it.

  This time, nothing screamed—and something, anything, would have if it had gotten caught in between.

  But the door eased closed and clicked as it latched. The creatures didn’t seem to notice that the door had moved.

  Lyssa wondered what had happened to the screamer, then decided she didn’t want to know. Her stomach was rolling over and over from the smell. She hadn’t been this nauseated since she was pregnant.

  The smell was trapped in there with her now. The smell, and the peeping, chirruping, and chirring sounds, along with the banging of bodies against the car frame.

  The thing with the suckers had left gray ooze on the passenger-side window, destroying the occasional view she got between the bodies.

  If this was some vision something was giving her, then it was more realistic than the visions her mother got. Cassie always seemed to know when something was real and when it wasn’t.

  And if this all was real, then it meant that Lyssa couldn’t back up without running over real, living, breathing creatures, creatures her grandmother was convinced were sentient.

  Even
starting the car was a risk. Not just because Lyssa might scare these creatures, but because some of them might be caught in the car’s undercarriage or in the exhaust pipe or even, somehow, in the engine.

  She was trapped here until someone found her. Trapped until this panicked run was over.

  And she hoped that nothing was following these creatures. Not some kind of ogre or tsunami like it mentioned in the school.

  Did creatures that survived in land and water always abandon the ocean before an earthquake? Some mammals and birds could tell when one was coming—sometimes days before. Maybe seafaring creatures could too.

  Maybe they were fleeing before something bad got them, something they knew about, something that drove them from their home waters.

  Maybe she wouldn’t survive after all. Maybe when they disappeared, maybe when the last one had clambered over her car and made for the hills, the ocean would have receded, and a wave the size of the Empire State Building would be heading her way.

  She was making things up. She had no idea what was going on and wouldn’t until she was out of this mess.

  And there was only one other thing she could do, one other thing she could try.

  She was going to have to contact her mother.

  There was no guarantee this would work. She had asked Cassie to block their mental link. But Lyssa was going to have to try.

  She bowed her head and rubbed her nose. She felt like a little girl again, waiting for her mother to find her, waiting for her mother to save her.

  That hadn’t worked in the past.

  Lyssa had no idea why she thought it would work now.

  Twenty Eight

  The Trawler

  “Who’s going to destroy Anchor Bay?” Cassie asked, keeping her voice low. “You people? Nice try, Roseluna, but I know a bit about selkies. I spent a year with one, one who chose to be with me, and you don’t have it in you to destroy a human city. And even if you did, you don’t have the resources or the power. Most of your magic is long gone.”

  Emily frowned, as if she were trying to follow everything.

  Roseluna took a single shrimp, held it between her thumb and forefinger, then ate it, daintily, as if it were a great delicacy. She licked off her fingers before wiping them with a napkin.

  “What you know of our tribe is old and out-of-date,” Roseluna said. “You have lost touch with us, while we have worked on understanding all of you.”

  The waiter appeared with Cassie’s and Emily’s meals. The halibut smelled heavenly, and as upset as she was, Cassie still wanted something to eat.

  Emily smiled up at the waiter as he set her plate in front of her, but it wasn’t a sincere smile. Like an adult, she reminded him gently that she had ordered a root beer, and he apologized, promising to get it for her.

  Cassie cut a piece of halibut with her fork. Roseluna took another shrimp between her fingers.

  The waiter tucked his tray under his arm and left, presumably off to get Emily’s root beer.

  “What do you mean, you’ve been working to understand us?” Cassie asked.

  Roseluna ate the shrimp, then licked her fingers again, as if getting the taste of the shrimp off her fingers was as important as eating the shrimp itself.

  “Did not Daray tell you?” Her voice had an edge of sarcasm to it, but the casual listener might not have picked it up, might have thought she’d asked an honest question. “I would have thought that he told you everything.”

  Cassie set her fork down. Emily had poured a pile of ketchup on one side of her plate and was busy dipping french fries into it. She didn’t seem interested in the conversation, but Cassie couldn’t tell for sure.

  “We’re not talking about Daray,” Cassie said.

  “Ah, but we should be. It is because of him that I am here, his request. You see, you are right. He did remember his past, and he did value it. And he valued his new family as well.”

  Roseluna looked at Emily as she said that, and Cassie felt a shiver run down her back. Emily continued to eat french fries, ignoring the deep-fried hunks of fish entirely.

  “I don’t want to talk about the past,” Cassie said. “I want to talk about Anchor Bay. You threatened us.”

  “I warned you.” Roseluna reached for Emily’s hair, then stopped, as if realizing she didn’t have permission to touch it. “Technically, that is all I have to do.”

  “But a warning means nothing if I don’t know what the threat is.”

  “The threat is a simple one. Your mother promised that we would not have to move again, that our lives would be sacrosanct. You have broken that promise.”

  “I have?” Cassie asked.

  “All of you,” Roseluna said. “And I am convinced that you will continue to do so.”

  Cassie pushed her uneaten food away. The waiter came back with Emily’s root beer. She took the glass from his hands as if it were a stiff drink that she couldn’t live without.

  The waiter left.

  “Convinced how?” Cassie asked.

  “I was sent, after Daray failed—”

  “He did not fail.” Cassie was breathing hard.

  Roseluna raised her chin. “I was sent, and so were several others. Some came as children. We went to your schools, studied your language. After remedial education, since I had to start as an adult, I spent years in Oregon State University’s marine biology program.”

  Cassie frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “Perhaps if you had some patience, you would.” Roseluna paused, ate another shrimp in her unique style, then licked her fingers.

  Emily watched her, then reached for a shrimp. Roseluna handed one to her. Emily ate it the same way, then grimaced, as if she didn’t like the taste.

  Instead of licking her fingers, she wiped them on a napkin.

  “Your people understand many things,” Roseluna said. “I learned a great deal. But there is no understanding of the subtleties of the water, no way to know how many creatures thrive below. Your so-called experts, the professors, seem to have no idea that there could be creatures they have never heard of, particularly in the deep.”

  “Most people don’t believe in what they call the fantastic,” Cassie said. “I can tell them their life story with uncanny accuracy, and they’ll insist that I read about it somewhere, even if I encountered them at random. This shouldn’t surprise you.”

  “It surprises me when people who claim open-mindedness lack it,” Roseluna said. “Or it used to surprise me. In the past two decades, I have come to realize that your species likes to confirm its expectations of itself and its intelligence. It does not like to have those expectations challenged.”

  Emily used her fork to take a bite of fish. She chewed it, then chased it with more root beer. Her head was bowed, but this time, Cassie had a hunch she was listening.

  “Many of us went to work at the Marine Science Center. Others of us went on deep-sea study trips. And some went inland for as long as they could tolerate the dryness, trying to learn about other aspects of your culture.” Roseluna ate the last shrimp, then picked up her spoon and started eating the ice. “After the crisis in July, we were all called home.”

  “July?” Cassie asked, trying hard not to look at Emily. How could they know what had happened to her? It seemed that Roseluna hadn’t even realized that Daray had a daughter, much less a granddaughter. Or had that just been Cassie’s mistaken impression? Had they had someone watching Emily at all times?

  “July,” Roseluna said, setting her spoon in the cocktail glass. “We lost one of the paestish.”

  Cassie frowned. She got an image with the word, as if Roseluna were trying to tell her something, allowing her a peek, while blocking the rest of her thoughts.

  Cassie saw a woman with strawlike, blond hair, a face that was more fishlike than human, with suckers on the tips of her fingers, and scales instead of skin. Cassie had heard of women like that before. Gabriel Schelling called them fish women, and Hamilton Denne, who visited Athena too often
for Cassie’s taste, always asking questions he did not deserve the answer to, called them mermaids.

  No one ever used the word paestish, and Athena rarely mentioned them at all.

  “You lost one?” Cassie said.

  “We believe she died. There were reports of her body on your beach, but when we went for her, we did not find her. Later, I heard through some friends from OSU that a strange creature had been found by Seavy County’s coroner, and he wanted to have someone ‘reliable’ see it. I contacted him via email, but he never responded to me.”

  Denne. Somehow Denne had gotten the corpse. Cassie would have to check into it. She wondered if her mother knew.

  “The paestish had been prowling wrecks. They did that often, to find gifts, which they often brought to shore.”

  Cassie frowned. Roseluna was leaving something out, but Cassie didn’t know what.

  “These paestish were young, only recently allowed to fend for themselves, and no one told them about the Walter Aggie.”

  Cassie did not expect to hear that term again. She picked up her coffee cup. “The Walter Aggie? Why should that matter? It’s ancient history.”

  “It’s not history at all,” Roseluna said. “I thought you knew about the ship. It is, after all, what killed Daray.”

  Cassie’s hand started to shake so badly that she had to set her cup down. She blinked hard, then stood, starting away from the table.

  “Grandma?”

  The voice belonged to Emily. Emily, her granddaughter, sitting beside Daray’s sister, in a restaurant overlooking the sea.

  Thirty-four years later. A lifetime had passed.

  Several lifetimes.

  “Grandma?”

  Cassie had to force herself back to the table. Her heart was beating hard, and her breath was coming rapidly. A headache was forming in her temples, and she hadn’t even had a vision.

  Although she was hearing knocking, like a hand pounding on a wooden door.

  Roseluna’s gaze was cool, as if she had only contempt for Cassie’s strange interlude. But Emily looked panicked.

  That panic put Cassie firmly back inside herself.