Fantasy Life

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Cassie would give her family a few more minutes. But if they didn’t arrive soon, she would propel herself all the way into Roseluna’s mind and see if she could argue her side of this, maybe even take over Roseluna’s mouth to convince the others that this wasn’t the way to go.

  It was a long shot, but Cassie knew it was the only shot she had.

  Forty-Nine

  Pacific Ocean

  Two Hundred Miles off the Oregon Coast

  They saw it long before they got there, the giant back half of the Walter Aggie rising out of the ocean. It was black and covered with barnacles and moss, dripping into the sea. It rose up as if it were propelled from underneath, yet somehow they knew that the selkies encircling it were making the difference.

  Somehow, as they got closer to Cassie, they blended into one mind—Emily, Lyssa, Athena. They had the same thoughts and yet all of their own. No question, though, that they were looking out the same pair of eyes, and those eyes seemed to belong to Cassie.

  Even though Emily pulled them through the pathway that Cassie had created, the driver was Athena. She was already making plans, thinking of strategies, asking questions.

  It took Emily and Lyssa a minute to realize that Cassie was with them, only reporting back in images, not in words. Athena would wonder where all the selkies were, then an image would rise up—thirty in the water, and ten on the barrier that Athena had built with Daray’s father’s help all those years ago.

  The only member of Daray’s family in the selkie grouping was Roseluna. No mother, father, or other siblings. No one seemed to know if they had died or if they had gone to safety or if they didn’t agree with the path that Roseluna was leading the selkies on.

  All they could tell was that they were coming up on a troupe of forty selkies, armed with knives, an old ship that was coming apart, and an oil slick that would harm this part of the ocean even if the storm never hit.

  All right, Athena sent to them. Here’s what we do: Emily, Cassie, Lyssa, disarm as many of those creatures as you can. I’m going for the barricade.

  No! Emily thought, and zoomed ahead of them. Great-Grandma, Grandma, make another barricade. Keep the selkies out of the water. Mommy, talk to them. You’re half like them. Tell them this isn’t right.

  Emily, Lyssa thought, then realized all of them had separated. The link that had made them see as one was broken.

  Lyssa faltered in the passageway, her hand no longer holding Emily’s. Emily had zoomed away from her, leaving her and Athena behind.

  It’s too soon for her to take over this family, Athena said.

  It doesn’t matter, Lyssa said. She’s already done it. And since we only have one shot at whatever we’re going to do, I suggest we follow her instructions.

  Instructions from a child, Athena said. She shook her head, then floated through the passageway, leaving only her thoughts behind. We’re going to fail after all.

  Fifty

  Pacific Ocean

  Two Hundred Miles off the Oregon Coast

  They didn’t trust her. Not even Mommy trusted her, but not for the same reason. Mommy thought she was too little to know what she was doing. Great-Grandma Athena thought that she was reckless and stupid, and Grandma Cassie—Grandma Cassie was still worried that Emily was going to side with the selkies.

  The whole thought made Emily’s eyes burn. Her family didn’t trust her, but they had to. They had to put up with her, had to do it her way because she wasn’t leaving them any choice.

  She got, from Grandma Cassie’s mind, how awful all this was going to be, even if it was just the ship, the Walter Aggie, sliding back into the sea.

  She hoped Great-Grandma Athena was following the plan, because if she wasn’t, then everything would get really bad. Emily couldn’t think about that, though. She only had one chance, and Grandma Cassie had given her the idea the night before.

  When Emily’d been asleep (sort of) on the couch, when she’d heard them remembering—if that’s what you wanted to call it—all the stuff that had happened before Mommy was born. They said there were two ways to deal with the part of the ship still filled with oil. And they had tried one.

  Now Emily was going to try the other.

  Only she didn’t know if it was going to work. She had made Daddy hurt—that fire, that day, had come from inside her, but she didn’t know if she could just make fire happen. And she didn’t know if she could do it when her body was in Cliffside House and her mind was floating here on the ocean.

  But she was going to try.

  She zoomed past Grandma Cassie, who was trying to signal her to stop. Emily ignored her. She didn’t want to hear more talking and more arguments.

  Emily went all the way to the selkies and past, zooming over Great-Aunt Roseluna, who saw her and looked really scared. Emily liked the really scared part. That meant Great-Aunt Roseluna was going to take her seriously.

  Nobody else was.

  Then Emily stopped over the ship. It was a lot bigger than she thought it was going to be. It still hung over the water, held in place by thoughts from all the selkies.

  They’d lied to Grandma Cassie. They had more powers than anyone knew about. But back then, they didn’t have a lot of numbers. Not many selkies were still alive when they had made their pact with the Buckinghams more than a century ago.

  The selkies had spent all this time replenishing their ranks, and because they weren’t being hunted anymore and because nobody believed in them, and nobody knew they still existed, none of their people got killed off. There were lots and lots and lots of selkies, and if this group failed, another would try.

  Emily froze in place. Those weren’t her thoughts. That was Great-Aunt Roseluna trying to stop her. Grandma didn’t believe everything Great-Aunt Roseluna sent, so why should Emily?

  Emily put the thoughts out of her mind and focused on the ship instead.

  The ship, which looked even weirder out of the water than it had in the water. Then, when she had gone with Grandma Cassie, the ship had been all dark and spooky and weird colors because of the black water. Now it was kinda gray and kinda green and had stuff dripping off it and Emily could sense the black goo inside, and she knew in that moment, that sense of the oil, the useful oil, came from her daddy’s family.

  She made herself think about Daddy and his family because she hadn’t very much. She hadn’t thought about how one of her grandpas killed the other, and how Daddy had tried to drown her—what had he known? He’d kept saying she’d be useful. Was he really crazy or was he trying to hurt her the way Grandpa Walters had hurt Grandpa Daray?

  Maybe with her magic coming, Daddy got afraid. Maybe he got really afraid.

  Emily’s chest hurt, and her stomach hurt, and she knew none of that was real, because her body was in Cliffside House. But she remembered how scared she was under that water and how her lungs had burned and how her eyes were burning even now, because there were tears back there and she would be damned—to say what her mom sometimes said—she would be damned if she let those tears come out.

  Instead, she closed her eyes and pushed the burning out of her and sent it into the black goo—the oil that everyone hated and everyone needed, and she sent as much burning in there as she had, even more than she had when Daddy died.

  There was Daddy hurting her, and then his body, and then all those reporter people trying to talk to her, and the way that Mommy’s eyes looked all sad, and Grandma Cassie loving her and then not trusting her, and that look in Grandpa Walters’ eyes when he saw her, that look of hate, knowing she had killed his son, and that look of hate again when she saw the memory of him killing Grandpa Daray, and how it was all going to end and how nobody cared about anybody, and she pushed and she pushed and she pushed, until it felt like her head and her heart were going to explode, and then she heard it—the whoosh of something igniting.

  She opened her eyes in time to see an orange flame inside the ship, glowing like a trapped sun, and then the ship blew up, tossing her end over
end over end on top of the water, plumes of black, black smoke following her.

  She skipped along the water’s surface, then slammed into it, knocking the wind out of her till she remembered that the body she thought she was in was all made up.

  Emily sat up on the water and saw the selkies floating above it, many of them on fire, a lot of them screaming, holding wounds, but their blood wasn’t falling into the ocean. Great-Grandma Athena had listened after all. And a bunch of the selkies were behind some kind of screen with Mommy. Mommy had talked to them and they had listened, and it was all going right, all of it—

  Except she saw Great-Aunt Roseluna, standing on the barrier Emily’s grandmas had put over the sea. When Great-Aunt Roseluna saw Emily, she grinned, took out her knife, and sliced open her arm.

  Then she jumped as hard as she could toward the burning ship.

  Nobody saw her. Nobody except Emily, and Emily had no more of herself to send. She couldn’t make barriers like her grandmas could. She couldn’t stop Great-Aunt Roseluna.

  Great-Aunt Roseluna fell into the sea.

  I won anyway, Great-Aunt Roseluna thought loud enough for Emily to hear. I won.

  Fifty-One

  Pacific Ocean

  Two Hundred Miles off the Oregon Coast

  It took all that was left of Cassie’s strength, but with her mother’s help, she managed to gather all of the selkies onto one of the barriers and deliver them down the coast to the Marine Science Center. The selkies were in their seal form, and they were injured; the center would help them, heal them, and send them on their way, without once knowing what their magical abilities were.

  Cassie managed to deliver the barrier, let Athena knock on the Science Center’s door, and keep the pathway open to the burning Walter Aggie.

  Lyssa wasn’t with them. She was staying behind to find Emily, Emily who had spun away with the blast when the Walter Aggie had blown up.

  Cassie wished she had known what Emily was going to do. She would have stopped her. By now, everyone would know that a ship had blown up out here, and in time, they might even figure out that it was the Walter Aggie. There would be a lot of explaining to do.

  Or maybe not. Maybe the cover-up would be revealed, and maybe there would be outrage at Walters Petroleum. It certainly was time.

  Cassie floated slowly back down the passageway, and that was when she saw it, building like a funnel cloud in the middle of the sea.

  The smoke poured off the Walter Aggie, and in front of it, a whirlpool swirled downward, then spiraled upward.

  She knew without being told that it was a storm—a selkie-caused storm. She hurried toward the site.

  Lyssa held on to Emily, who leaned against her.

  It was Roseluna, Mother, Lyssa said or thought or let her know. Maybe the blocks separating them were completely gone. She did it anyway. Can we stop her?

  Cassie looked at the swirling water, felt the wind rising, and knew that the storm was already building.

  At that moment, Athena joined her. We don’t have the power, Athena said. We just have to ride it out.

  She was right. Emily was burned out—quite literally—and Cassie was exhausted. Athena still had some strength, but not enough to fight this, and Lyssa’s talent was in her voice, her ties to the selkies, not in her mental abilities.

  Cassie gathered them all to her, her family, the most precious people she had ever known, and carried them back through the pathway she had created.

  They arrived in the closet at Cliffside House just as the wind came up, shaking the entire building. Cassie arrived inside her own body, then sank into a heap on the floor. The air smelled of rain, and she thought she heard thunder outside.

  Emily collapsed beside her. Only Lyssa and Athena remained upright.

  “Let’s get them out of here,” Athena said to Lyssa. “Let’s move them somewhere safer in the house.”

  “Wait, Athena Buckingham!”

  The male voice made Cassie lift her head. She felt hope in her heart for the first time in decades.

  A man came through the darkness in the back of the closet. He was naked and tall and dripping wet, holding a pelt in his left hand.

  For a moment, Cassie held her breath, thinking maybe Daray hadn’t died after all. Then the man nodded, and Cassie recognized him. It was DaRu, Daray’s father.

  “Cassandra,” he said, and bowed to her.

  She nodded, but couldn’t find any words. His voice was the same as Daray’s, his build the same, even his face had similarities—this was probably what Daray would have looked like if he had lived this long.

  “And you,” DaRu said, turning toward Lyssa, “must be my granddaughter.”

  Lyssa’s eyes were wide at being confronted by a naked man who claimed to be her grandfather.

  “I am DaRu. Forgive my intrusion, but we haven’t a lot of time. It seems I always come to you in emergencies, Athena.”

  “This time it’s an emergency your people caused,” she said.

  “I know. I need your strength. I can get Roseluna’s body before it does more damage, but I need your help in doing so.”

  “Can we do it from here?” Athena asked.

  “Yes. It’ll take but a minute. But I cannot do it alone.”

  He extended his hands. In one of them, he kept the pelt. Athena looked at it, then at him.

  “I’m so sorry.” He turned, bowed to Lyssa again, and handed her the pelt. “Pray keep this for me, Granddaughter. I’ll have need of it in a moment.”

  Lyssa took it and held it, her face upturned toward his. She looked even more like Daray than she had before, that angular face. The pelt in her hand made her seem otherworldly.

  Emily crawled up beside her and put her head on Lyssa’s lap. “Is this okay, Mommy?”

  If Cassie hadn’t known the child so well, she would have thought Emily was asking about resting against her mother. Instead, she was asking if it was all right for her great-grandmother to help her grandfather.

  “If your great-grandmother says it is,” Lyssa said. But her voice didn’t sound convinced.

  Cassie used the last of her strength to touch DaRu’s mind. He looked down at her with incredible patience.

  “I would probably have done the same, Daughter,” he said, giving her the title he had given her the day she’d married Daray. “Am I clear?”

  “Yes,” Cassie said. “He’s fine.”

  DaRu smiled at her, then took Athena’s hands. His head tilted back, his eyes shown white, and his mouth fell open. Athena closed her eyes and held on to him, not moving.

  Outside the wind whistled and rattled and howled. Rain slapped against the building.

  And then—nothing. Silence. The rain stopped, and the wind died down as if it had never been.

  Cassie sat up and leaned against the cold wall. Emily held on to Lyssa’s knee. Lyssa clutched the pelt to her chest.

  After a moment, Athena opened her eyes. DaRu lifted his head upright and closed his mouth. He bent over, kissed Athena’s hands one at a time, then let them go.

  “I have to beg forgiveness,” he said softly. “Our people’s quarrels have spilled into your world, where they have no place.”

  Cassie blinked. “Roseluna?”

  “My daughter was merely part of a faction that has felt that we have been powerless too long. They don’t understand debt and mutual respect. They don’t realize that Seavy County, the refuge, and the Buckinghams saved not just our people, but hundreds of others.” DaRu turned toward her, as formal as he had always been. “Please understand that we are forever grateful for your kindness.”

  “This could have been ugly,” Athena said. “It came so close. If it wasn’t for Emily—”

  “Daray’s granddaughter.” DaRu smiled. “He would have been proud. Very proud.”

  Cassie swallowed hard. He would have been. Daray saw the blending of their two families as something that would make the world better.

  She had forgotten that—or not allowed he
rself to remember it, not after the night of the storm.

  Maybe he hadn’t been so far wrong.

  Then DaRu extended his hand to Lyssa. She handed him his pelt, reluctantly, it seemed to Cassie.

  “There’s a lot I want to ask you,” Lyssa said. “I know nothing about you or your family or—”

  She glanced briefly at Cassie.

  “—or my father.”

  DaRu nodded. “I would love to speak with you and your daughter. But not now. My people are in disarray, our refuge is broken. I have much to do, and I am not sure I can heal it. I am sorry for that.”

  “My great-grandmother knew it was temporary,” Athena said. “She would probably be surprised that the refuge has lasted this long.”

  DaRu bowed again. “You are too kind, Athena. I shall return when I can. Until then, thank you once more for your help.”

  He slung his pelt over his arm and headed back into the darkness. Cassie watched him go, feeling a longing follow him.

  She would never get past Daray, never really move beyond him. But she felt stronger now, now that she knew what she had believed in—and thought lost—hadn’t really been lost at all.

  “What did you do?” Lyssa asked Athena.

  “He took Roseluna’s body out of the sea and somehow managed to gather her blood. The storm stopped,” Athena said. “All I did was provide the strength to let him do the magic.”

  “He asked you to do the same the night the Walter Aggie went down,” Cassie said.

  Athena nodded.

  “You are not the first Buckingham to marry a selkie, Cassie,” Athena said. “Our powers come from the selkie side. Most of our ancestry is human, but my great-grandmother’s first love came from the sea. They did that on purpose, just like they designed Cliffside House as a gateway. It was part of the refuge.”