AND A LITTLE CHILD
SHALL LEAD THEM
Forty
Anchor Harbor Wayside
Grandma Cassie stood near the road, her back hunched, her mouth open. She held a strand of hair in her right hand and twisted it like she couldn’t even feel the pain.
Emily bit her lower lip. Mommy had a grip on her hand, a tight grip, and Emily knew she wasn’t going to let go. Great-Grandma Athena was talking to the weird man who thought dead things were cool, talking about old history and oil and the Walter Aggie.
Great-Grandma Athena kept saying it didn’t matter, and the weird man said it did, that the scientific evidence proved that it did, and Great-Grandma Athena said that science didn’t know everything, and the weird man was quoting something—more things in heaven and earth, Horatio—or something like that. Emily didn’t really pay attention.
She didn’t really care. What she cared about was Grandma Cassie, and nobody else seemed to.
Grandma Cassie looked like she had been stabbed in the heart, and Emily couldn’t tell why.
“Em?” her mother said.
“Look at Grandma,” Emily said.
But Mommy looked at Great-Grandma Athena, and Emily wanted to stop her, but she didn’t know how, without taking her gaze off Grandma Cassie. And Emily felt like if she stopped looking at Grandma Cassie, Grandma Cassie would fall over into the road and maybe even die.
“Your mom,” Emily said.
Mommy was still looking at Great-Grandma Athena though, and she started to say something, but Emily couldn’t hear it, because there was a big rushing noise in her ears.
Child. Daray’s granddaughter. Look at me.
Emily willed herself not to look. She kept staring at Grandma Cassie, who hadn’t moved.
Look at me.
Now Emily recognized the voice. It belonged to her greataunt, the selkie Roseluna that her Buckingham relatives hated, the woman who had tried to hurt her grandmother.
Emily let go of her mom’s hand and put her fingers in her ears.
Silly child. I’m not in your ears.
Emily almost looked. But she didn’t. Still, she could see sideways out of the corners of her eyes, see Roseluna standing next to the reporter lady that Mommy had yelled at.
Come with me, Emily. We need you. You’ll save us all.
“Emily?” Mommy crouched in front of her, blocking Emily’s view of Grandma Cassie, and put her hands on Emily’s shoulders. “Emily, are you okay?”
Emily craned around her, trying to see Grandma Cassie, but she couldn’t. For a minute, she thought Grandma Cassie had disappeared.
Emily, please. Come with us. All that magic they don’t want you to use, all those things that are part of you, belong with us.
“Emily, what’s wrong, honey?”
Great-Grandma Athena stopped talking to the weird man, and they stepped in front of her too.
Emily shook herself away from Mommy and started to run across the parking lot. Emily could see Grandma-Cassie now, swaying like she was in a great wind.
“Grandma!” Emily screamed, but Grandma Cassie didn’t seem to hear her.
Instead, Grandma Cassie toppled forward, hitting the concrete with a great smack. Emily ran faster, and now Mommy was beside her and Great-Grandma Athena too, and all the other people were looking and talking and pointing and giving orders.
Except Roseluna, who was watching Emily.
Come with me. No one will notice. Not right now.
And Emily couldn’t help it. She looked at Roseluna and felt a joy that she hadn’t felt before, a sense of belonging, of knowing who and what she was—
Then she tripped against a parking block and fell forward, skinning her knees. The pain made tears come to her eyes, but that feeling left. It hadn’t come from inside her anyway. It had come from Roseluna.
It’s how you’ll feel if you come with me.
Emily shook her head, then Mommy took her arm and said, “Baby, are you okay?” and Emily said no but Grandma’s worse, and Mommy helped her up and they all ran to Grandma Cassie’s side.
By the time they got there, Roseluna was gone.
But I’ll send for you, she said as if she were getting far away. When the time is right, we’ll be together. It’s the only way.
Emily wanted to tell her no, but she didn’t know how. And Emily was afraid that if she couldn’t say no, Roseluna would take her against her will, and she would go somewhere else and be something else, like Great-Grandma Athena thought she was, like everyone would know she was, if they found out she wasn’t totally human.
But neither was Mommy, and Mommy didn’t seem to hear it. She had a hold of Emily and was helping her up, and people were running to Grandma Cassie, and there was shouting about an ambulance, and that would make everything all right, right? Because it had to.
It had to.
Because Emily couldn’t take any more.
Forty-One
Anchor Harbor Wayside
Lyssa helped her injured daughter over to Cassie. Emily’s palms were scraped, even though she didn’t seem to notice, and her knees were bleeding. She limped as she walked, her eyes searching the crowd across the street as if she had seen a ghost.
Lyssa’s heart was pounding. Her mother lay in a crumpled heap on the curb, Gabriel beside her, his hand on her neck, checking her pulse. Lyssa’s mouth went dry.
What if Cassie was dead? What if her heart, stressed by that too thin frame, gave out? What would Lyssa do without her? She would have no one to push against, no one to worry about, no one to fear.
She reached Cassie’s side as Athena did.
“She’s alive,” Gabriel said.
Athena let out a sharp breath, like a sigh of relief. Lyssa reached for her grandmother’s hand, linking herself between her daughter and her grandmother, the circle of her family minus one.
“But I have no idea what caused this. I—”
Denne reached them, crouched beside Gabriel, and gave Cassie a quick examination. Lyssa watched him open her mother’s eyes, run his fingers along her face and neck, check her head for lumps. He also counted her pulse.
Lyssa had forgotten that coroners were real doctors too. They just practiced on the dead rather than the living.
“I think we can move her,” he said, his tone businesslike.
Lyssa stepped back, along with Athena and Emily. Denne and Gabriel picked up Cassie and lifted her into the parking lot. Gabriel cradled her head as if she were his mother instead of Lyssa’s.
Emily was watching, eyes wide. Lyssa wrapped an arm around her, wondering if her daughter was remembering that horrible day when Reginald had died.
Lyssa hoped not. She didn’t want all of Emily’s thoughts of death to be connected to her father.
“What happened?” Denne asked Gabriel.
“Damned if I know,” he said. “I just saw her crumple to the ground.”
Athena’s expression mirrored Emily’s. Lyssa wouldn’t have thought that they resembled each other, but something in their eyes, in the way they held their bodies, made it clear that they were related.
“She been having health problems, Athena?” Denne asked.
“She doesn’t eat enough,” Athena said. “But she never did.”
“Yeah,” Denne said. “I would call her anorectic. Amazing she’s made it this long then. Prolonged starvation puts pressure on all the internal organs.”
“She’s not starving,” Emily said. “She just fainted.”
“It’s all right, honey,” Denne said. “I’ll call an ambulance—”
“No!” Emily said. “She doesn’t need one. She’s all right.”
Lyssa glanced at Athena, who shrugged.
“I don’t think we should discount what she says.” Athena spoke in a low tone.
Lyssa nodded, then put her hands on Emily’s shoulders. “What do you know, baby?”
Gabriel’s blue eyes took in everything. He was frowning as he watched Lyssa talk to Emily. Den
ne wasn’t paying attention at all. He was still examining Cassie, but he had also taken a cell phone out of his pocket
“That lady,” Emily said, and looked across the street. Lyssa followed her gaze. The reporter was still there with her cameraman, filming the whole scene.
“The reporter?”
“No, Great-Aunt Roseluna.”
Lyssa frowned. She didn’t remember any Aunt Roseluna. She didn’t remember any aunts at all.
But Athena crouched next to them. “What about her?”
Apparently Athena knew who she was.
“She was making Grandma mad. Then she got in her head, showed her some stuff, and stayed there.” Emily shot a frightened glance at Athena. “She found it.”
“Found what?” Lyssa asked.
“That place inside Grandma. The place that makes her so unhappy. The one where she doesn’t want to live anymore.”
Lyssa started. She had never known that there was such a place inside her mother, but it made sense. Cassie had never taken care of herself—rarely ate, often took risks that seemed silly to Lyssa, even to the young Lyssa who had taken quite a few unnecessary risks herself.
“She has a place like that?” Lyssa turned toward Athena.
Athena’s patrician features were softened by compassion. “Lyssa, sweetheart. You’re the only reason that she’s still here. If she hadn’t been pregnant with you when Daray died, she probably would have followed him.”
“Followed him?” Lyssa repeated. “You mean she would have killed herself?”
Athena nodded, then put a hand on Cassie’s long, dark hair. “She was never the same after that.”
“After he died?” Lyssa asked.
But Athena didn’t answer.
“What exactly happened?” Lyssa asked her daughter. “What did that woman do to Mother?”
“Made her remember,” Emily said. “I got parts, but I couldn’t stop it. Grandma was too far away.”
Emily’s link to her grandmother was strong. Lyssa wasn’t sure she liked that. She wasn’t sure about anything that had happened since she’d returned to Anchor Bay.
“Why would she do that?” Lyssa asked, and the question wasn’t just directed at Emily. She was asking everyone and no one.
“If what the little girl says is true,” Denne said, “that woman—your aunt?—wanted to disable Cassie.”
“I don’t have an aunt,” Lyssa said. “My mother was an only child.”
“But your father wasn’t,” Athena said.
“Some selkie’s been going after my mother?” Lyssa asked.
“She was across the street,” Emily said. “She was at lunch.”
“Mother had lunch with her?”
“It’s a long story,” Athena said, “and I don’t think we have time to discuss it.”
Gabriel glanced over his shoulder, as if he were expecting someone.
“You want to call the ambulance or should I?” Denne asked Gabriel.
Then Cassie’s hand reached up and grabbed Denne’s phone. “No ambulance.”
“I’m sorry, Cassandra, but you could have a concussion at worst or something else. And if the little girl is right—”
“Emily,” Cassie said. “My Emily.”
Lyssa felt her breath catch. Her mother had never spoken about Lyssa like that. Not with such protectiveness, such love.
“And she is right,” Cassie said. “I made a mistake.”
“If someone got in your head, it’s not your fault.” Athena’s tone was brusque. She knelt beside Cassie, so that Cassie could see her closely.
Lyssa couldn’t remember ever seeing Athena look so vulnerable.
“It’s my fault,” Cassie said. “I let Roseluna there. She was telling me something I thought I wanted to know. I let down my guard, and she did this.”
Cassie seemed to be getting stronger with each sentence.
“Did what?” Lyssa asked.
Cassie turned toward her, tears in her dark eyes. “Made me remember the day your dad died. The day I realized everyone was right. You see, Lys, it was never about me or this great love I’d made up. Your father wasn’t human, even though I wanted to pretend he was. He wasn’t capable of loving me. He just used me, and when I wasn’t important anymore, he took matters into his own hands, without consulting me. Without even saying good-bye.”
Her voice broke.
“Cassie, it’s past,” Athena said.
“You’ve always said that.” Cassie wiped at her face like a little child who didn’t want anyone to know she was in pain. “And you’ve always been wrong. No one has gotten past that day. Not me, not the selkies, not even Anchor Bay.”
“What day?” Gabriel asked Lyssa.
“The day of the great storm,” she said.
“Right after the Walter Aggie went down.” Denne sounded awestruck. “The day the storm cleaned the beaches.”
“And destroyed most of Anchor Bay,” Cassie said. “A lot of people died when that wave hit. John Aluke, Michael Sheehan, Andrea Thomesan. Friends.”
“And my dad,” Lyssa said.
Cassie shook her head. “He caused it.”
Lyssa sank to the curb. This wasn’t the story she had heard all her life. The story she had heard had been that her father—her marvelous, perfect, heroic father—had died while working on the oil cleanup on the beach. The storm had come in too fast for anyone to survive it. Her mother had lived through it only because she had been changing clothes in the rest area, and that building, one of the few left standing, protected her.
“Don’t be silly,” Lyssa heard herself say, using her mother’s perfect detached tones, the tones she had grown up listening to. “No one can cause a storm.”
“Selkies can,” Athena said.
“I’ve seen it,” Denne said, apparently not realizing this was a family conversation. “In Whale Rock, four years ago. A selkie staying at the Sand Castle Hotel decided—long story, short version—decided to get revenge on the hotel’s owner for serious crimes his son had committed. The selkie slit her wrists and jumped off the balcony into the sea. The resulting storm destroyed all the homes along the D River as well as the Sand Castle—and the weird thing was, no other towns on the coast got hit by a storm that day. In fact, they were in sunshine.”
“Like here,” Lyssa said. She remembered that part of the story too. Everyone talked about the beautiful clear night that the rest of Oregon enjoyed—how clear the stars were, how bright the moon was—and yet the storm that hit Anchor Bay was so powerful that it had created a tidal wave that had leveled the entire downtown.
Denne nodded.
Cassie was sitting up, her chin on her knees. She was wiping her face with one hand, and with the other, she held on to Emily. Lyssa didn’t remember when Emily had moved away from her to go to her grandmother, but the two of them seemed to be bonded in a way that Lyssa simply didn’t understand.
“Why would this woman go after Mother?” Lyssa asked Denne.
He shrugged. “I don’t know your family’s history with the selkies.”
“It’s a long one,” Athena said. “And not always pretty.”
Emily put her arms around her grandmother and leaned against her thigh.
“But the question really isn’t a matter of history,” Athena said. “It’s a matter for now.”
“What does that mean?” Lyssa asked.
“A vision disabled Cassie only once before,” Athena said, “and I’ve always wondered about it.”
Cassie looked over her shoulder at her mother. “The night we could have stopped the Walter Aggie from going aground.”
“Yes.” Athena gave Cassie a small smile. Tentative, just the way that Lyssa was feeling.
Gabriel was watching closely, occasionally glancing at Denne. But Denne didn’t seem to notice. He seemed completely involved in this conversation, as if discussing the past had some meaning to him.
“You think this—person—tapped into Mom’s memories to disable her?” Lyssa ask
ed.
“That’s what Emily said.” Athena looked at Emily, a frown on her face.
“That’s what Dr. Denne said,” Lyssa corrected. “Emily just discussed the place that selkie touched.”
“To stop Grandma,” Emily said, still leaning on Cassie’s hip. “Grandma didn’t like what they’re going to do, so Roseluna wanted Grandma out of the way.”
“What are they doing?” Lyssa asked.
“What Daray didn’t manage the first time,” Cassie said, her voice thick with unshed tears, “although he came close.”
Lyssa shook her head. “I wasn’t there, Mom.”
“Destroying Anchor Bay, honey,” Cassie said with a sigh. “And all the Buckinghams with it.”
Forty-Two
Anchor Harbor Wayside
Gabriel shoved his hands in his back pockets and turned away from the Buckinghams. Lyssa looked stricken, her eyes large on her narrow face. Emily merely seemed exhausted. Athena still crouched, a frown creasing her forehead, as if she was trying to put pieces together. And Cassie—Cassie seemed the same, fragile, broken, like a small bird that had never recovered from a damaging flight.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know this much about someone else’s family, for any reason. And he wasn’t sure what it meant to him.
He took a step down, onto the highway, saw that the slime trail had tracked a good fifteen feet in either direction, moved by tires as they crossed over the mound of goo. He was going to need to get someone to clean all that up, as well as deal with the mess that was forming around him.
If Emily’s accusations were true—and after all the strange things Gabriel had seen, he had no reason to doubt her—then he was going to have to stop these selkies, and he wasn’t sure how. State and county laws—human laws—didn’t account for murder by magic. They certainly wouldn’t accommodate attempted murder by magic, and he wasn’t sure he would be able to prove conspiracy to commit murder either, not with a jury or even a judge who hadn’t spent a long time in Seavy County.
Not that it mattered. Even if he could arrest these creatures, he wasn’t sure his jail would hold them. Or if just being in the jail would stop them.
Fantasy Life Page 36