by Skye Malone
It made me feel so alive.
Quivers shook my muscles, and I tensed. The greliaran side of me felt stronger in this too, as though the very air fed it energy. It wanted to take over, to draw in everything of this it could. My heart started to pound harder while heat spread through my skin. I drew a slow breath, fighting to keep control.
Chloe shifted on the seat. I couldn’t stop my gaze from snapping toward the motion. Below her jean shorts, she rubbed absently at her thigh, and I could see swirls of iridescence brushing her skin.
“Hey, you guys doing alright?” Baylie called, glancing at the rearview mirror.
“How much longer?” I asked, barely managing to keep the growl from my voice.
Baylie tossed a quick look to Ellie.
“I-I think we’re almost there,” the girl answered, sounding distracted.
“What’s wrong?” Chloe asked her.
“Just a bit carsick,” Ellie replied in the same tone.
Chloe glanced toward me. I turned away before she could meet my gaze.
Colors were getting sharper. This wasn’t good.
I closed my eyes. I wouldn’t lose control in this… this whatever it was. And if that bastard had put something here to make us all change…
Shivers coursed through me. I pushed the anger away. It was just making things worse.
Carefully, I took another breath.
My heartbeat slowed. The heat below my skin cooled and my greliaran impulses settled back inside.
I opened my eyes.
The dull world met my gaze. The air still felt just as odd, but it wasn’t as overwhelming as before, almost like I’d adjusted to it somehow. Swallowing hard, I glanced to Chloe.
She’d closed her eyes too. I could see her trembling.
“Chloe?”
She made a tight noise, shaking her head. Her fingers clutched her legs while furrows lined her brow.
In the front seat, Ellie twisted to look back at us. “Is she–”
“I’m fine,” Chloe snapped through gritted teeth.
I hesitated. That didn’t exactly look true.
A shudder ran through her and scales began to form on her legs. She tensed, something almost like rage flashing over her face.
The scales became skin again. A heartbeat passed, and then the iridescence disappeared as well.
Unsteadily, Chloe drew a breath. She opened her eyes, blinking a few times before turning her gaze to mine. Radiant green flecked her irises like glints from an emerald, but after a moment, the glow faded.
“What the hell?” she whispered.
I shook my head, watching her. Bloodlessly pale, she was still shaking and her breathing was ragged.
Before I could stop myself, I reached over again, taking her hand.
She didn’t move away this time. Her fingers laced through mine, and her grip trembled while she squeezed my hand tightly.
“You guys sure you’re okay?” Baylie asked.
“Yeah,” I said, still keeping an eye to Chloe. She nodded, her gaze back on her legs as though she was holding them in human form by sheer force of will.
“Weird, but alright,” Ellie replied.
“Does it hurt being this close to the water?” Chloe asked, glancing up sharply.
Ellie shook her head. “No, no it’s not like that. Just… shaky.” She swallowed hard. “I’m fine.”
A heartbeat passed, but no one said anything else. Taking a deep breath, I looked to the road ahead, grateful for being able to touch Chloe again, even if for nothing else that had just happened. The tree cover looked like it was thinning, and I caught glimpses of gray sky through the trunks. Beyond the growl of the tires on the gravel, the white-noise rush of waves carried through the salt-heavy air.
And meanwhile, the short pillars still dotted the roadside.
I eyed them warily. I couldn’t be certain – the moss was too thick – but the symbols on the sides looked different.
The car came around a turn and the tree cover fell away, leaving us on a barren expanse several hundred yards from a cliff. Gravel stretched around us without a weed or shred of grass to be seen, and at the edge of it, a two-story house stood so close to the cliff’s edge, it seemed a miracle the building hadn’t fallen into the sea. Stonework formed the house’s foundation, which rose nearly half a story high, and then a wide porch marked the line where white siding began. The porch wrapped around the entire building while a black roof formed the house’s top.
Baylie pulled the car to a stop. Nothing moved but the ocean and the wind in the trees. On the side of the house, tall windows looked back at us, reflecting the forest and revealing nothing of what lay inside. There wasn’t a car in the driveway – or even a driveway to speak of, for that matter – and when the noise from the engine died, no sound but the rushing of the waves took its place.
“So, um,” Baylie tried while she tugged the keys from the ignition. “I don’t suppose we should wait for Robin and Dave?”
Chloe drew a slow breath and I saw her glance toward the ocean, tension on her face. “They could be hours. Let’s just knock on the door. See if he’s willing to help.”
Her gaze flicked to the water again. I resisted the urge to ask if she felt anything strange coming from it.
But I could read between the lines of what she said. If Joseph wouldn’t help, getting out of here fast would be the best plan. There was no telling when this Beast thing might pick up on her.
Reluctantly, I released her hand and then pushed open the door. Shutting it behind me, I scanned the area warily and then headed for the steps, staying close to Chloe. I kept an eye to her while I went, in case her legs started to change again, and on the other side of her I could see Baylie doing the same thing.
“What is it?” Baylie whispered. “Something weird out there?”
“No,” Chloe answered just as softly.
“Then what?” Baylie pressed.
“Zeke. He should be here already.”
“Maybe he’s inside?”
Chloe didn’t respond.
I kept walking. Dark wood creaked under my shoes as I climbed to the porch, and equally dark wood greeted us at the door. With a glance to the windows nearby, I lifted a hand and knocked.
The door opened before I finished, revealing the oddest person I’d ever seen.
He looked like a turtle, and not just because of the lopsided hump that seemed to form the majority of his back. His face was scaly, his skin was a pale shade of green, and his nose seemed more a pointed lump than anything else. His lips were a dark and vaguely bony line on his face, and he barely had a chin to speak of. Though his left eye was brown and mostly normal, his right was black as a ball of onyx. On his head, his gray hair stood out like the fronds of some undersea plant. He wore a shapeless, maroon robe that shared more in common with an old woman’s polyester muumuu than anything, and at least twenty bits of jewelry dangled from him, ranging from necklaces of crystals to bracelets of various metals.
I tried to keep from staring. He was like a disconcerting mash-up of stereotypical wizardry and cartoon animals.
“Well?” he demanded. “What are you waiting for? Get inside already.”
Scuttling back from the door, he motioned impatiently for us to come in.
I cast a quick look to the girls. “Are you Joseph?” I asked him.
“No, I’m some other guy living right where Dave told you to find me,” he retorted. “Geez, so much for hoping that a few centuries would give you greliarans some brains.”
I tensed. “What do you–”
The man made an irritated noise. With a gnarled finger, he pointed at all of us in rapid succession. “Greliaran. Landwalker. Human. Dehaian – sort of. You think I’d miss something like you all coming toward my house? You’re the damned United Nations of Species, for pity’s sake. Half the reason I let you through was to see how a carload of people like you all was even possible. I assum
e you’re doing it?”
He directed the last to Chloe.
She hesitated and then gave a small shrug. “I helped her,” she replied, nodding toward Ellie.
He made a harrumphing sound and looked Ellie up and down for a heartbeat before doing the same to me. “Well, come in, then.”
Cautiously, I walked inside. Wood paneling lined the walls, floor and ceiling alike, making the hallway feel like a tunnel, and above the staircase to my right, nothing of the second story was visible. On my left, a large room extended farther back into the house, its floor slightly sunken from the hallway’s level. Assorted tables filled the space at random angles, while sprawled across and between them was such an arrangement of tubes, pipettes and beakers, it looked like a chemist’s lab gone berserk. Bunsen burners dotted the tabletops and liquids in countless shades bubbled in the containers above them. Sheets of translucent glass hung from chains on the walls, and in them, the reflected flames seemed to move in disconcerting ways. Over the tables, vent fans were lodged in the ceiling, their blades spinning idly behind metal screens.
Joseph shut the door and I looked back. For a heartbeat, he regarded the wood, and then pounded a fist to a spot near the top corner. Making a satisfied noise, he turned to the hall.
“This way,” he said shortly, pushing past us. Waddling down the step to the large room, he didn’t look back but just continued into the chemical chaos.
I stared after him, not sure what to feel. Some part of me wanted to laugh, but it wasn’t really funny. This was him. The guy who’d made greliarans.
The turtle who’d made greliarans.
I shook my head in disbelief and then glanced to the girls. Her gaze on the beakers and tubes, Chloe looked like she was reconsidering the plan.
Reaching out, I put a hand to her arm.
She drew a breath as if she hadn’t taken one since we’d walked in the door. “I’m fine,” she said tightly, not looking at me.
I hesitated, unconvinced, but she just started after Joseph. With a glance to Baylie, I followed, staying close to Chloe’s side. At the rear of the room, Joseph stood by a heavily locked wooden door, eyeing us with exasperation. When we came closer, he turned back, taking a ring of keys from inside his robes. In rapid succession, he inserted the keys into the row of metal locks on the dark wood, and then grabbed the latch and pushed the door wide.
My brow rose. I’d thought the last room was strange.
The floor was stone, and the walls were too. An enormous machine sat in the middle of the room, sunken into a circular space in the floor like a shallow and oversized well. Tarnished brass made up the majority of the machine’s body, the heart of which was cylindrical like a massive canister. Smaller brass canisters clung to its side like growths, connected to each other and the main container by a rat’s nest of pipes. Additional pipes, larger and thicker than the rest, ran up from the various, bolted-down lids through the ceiling or stretched from the machine’s base and into the walls like roots on some metal tree. Gauges protruded from everywhere, each one marked with strange symbols and monitoring nothing I could determine. A hissing sound I somehow hadn’t heard at all from the other room filtered from the machine, mixed with popping noises like the gaskets were barely holding under pressure.
“This way, this way,” Joseph prompted again.
He headed past the machine to a desk in the back of the room. A collection of a half dozen chairs butted up against each other in a corner nearby, like every seat in the house had congregated there for safety in numbers, and most of them held stacks of books.
“Don’t get many visitors,” Joseph muttered by way of explanation while he relocated the books to the floor.
We scooted the chairs farther from the corner, while Joseph leaned on the edge of his desk.
Chloe hesitated, her hands clutching the top of a wooden chair. “So no one else came by today before us? Like, maybe some dehaians?”
“What I just said, wasn’t it? I don’t do social.”
Swallowing hard, she nodded at the obvious statement and then sat down.
His normal eye twitching back and forth, Joseph regarded us. “Damned United Nations,” he muttered. “You let that crazy side of you out, I’ll show you what we did to wild greliarans in my day.”
He aimed the last at me.
I paused, not certain how to respond. “I won’t,” I managed.
Baylie glanced between us. “Yeah, okay… Well, um, Dave said you could help us. Her.”
“Oh, he did, did he?” Joseph replied. “Landwalkers. Think everything is just so easy. No clue what magic involves.”
Ellie shifted uncomfortably.
“Don’t get all offended, girl,” he continued. “You’ll be better at your tricks than any of them, once you grow up a bit and get a handle on what’s inside you. But that doesn’t mean the others aren’t idiots.”
Ellie’s brow drew down.
Joseph snorted.
“So can you help?” I hazarded when he didn’t say anything more.
“Well, of course I can. Take a bit though. I have to get things ready.”
“I thought you knew we were coming,” Chloe said.
“Yes,” he acknowledged pedantically, “but that doesn’t mean that I can just flip a switch and presto, make you like her or the ones out there.” He jerked his head at Ellie and then in the direction of the ocean. “This is complicated magic we’re talking about. Even the dehaians took years to get it right – and lost more than a few of their kind in the process. Now, that’s not going to happen here, but only if I adjust the procedure to your body chemistry just right.”
Chloe appeared paler than normal. “How long?”
“About ten minutes.”
The words were met with incredulous expressions.
“What?”
“That’s basically flipping a switch,” Baylie allowed.
“No, flipping a switch is instantaneous. Ten minutes isn’t. Ten minutes is me studying magic for centuries and being damn good at what I do.”
Chloe cleared her throat. “So is there any way to control which… which side I’ll be?”
Joseph shrugged. “Not that I know of. Whole families got split up when the old dehaians did it, so I heard. Why, you have a favorite or something?”
Chloe didn’t respond. I glanced over. She looked sick.
“Why should we trust you?” I asked. “You created greliarans to kill people like her. Either way she goes, she’s still your–”
“I know what she is,” Joseph interrupted, “same as I know what you are. I’ve been keeping her kind safe from yours for years.”
I stared at him.
“You think it’s an accident the greliarans haven’t hardly found a dehaian in decades? I’ve been doing my damnedest to keep dehaians from wandering near greliaran houses. I even had a deal worked out with the landwalkers about it. Every time they relocated greliarans to the coast, they were supposed to let me know so I could keep tabs on those greliarans and confuse their senses about any dehaians nearby. Worked great, too, till the landwalkers screwed up and forgot to tell me about one family. A guy and his teenage daughter. Without me stopping them, those two got their hands on a dehaian practically overnight. Tried to filet the bastard, he defended himself by making the kid fall for him, and next thing you know, the daddy’s offed the dehaian and the girl’s killed herself because she can’t live without her new boyfriend. And all because the damn landwalkers forgot to make a phone call.”
Chloe tensed. I glanced to her.
“Earl,” she said. “The guy who attacked us at Baylie’s place.”
“You’ve met him?” Joseph asked.
Chloe hesitated. “We stumbled on his house a few weeks ago.”
Joseph scoffed. “You’re a right mess, you know that? Can’t track you, and you screw up the magical signature of everything you come near. I would’ve kept you from going near there, but I can’t find up
from down in the soup you’ve made. You sent my monitoring systems all to hell a couple months back. There were power surges that vanished as fast as they came, ghost readings first here, then there. All sorts of chaos, and it hasn’t much stopped. And the Beast obviously isn’t dead yet, because the bastard picked up on it too. If you’re as good with this stuff as I am – and as that damn creature is – there’s no way you don’t notice that.”
I studied him distrustfully. Rants and cursing aside, the turtle wizard obviously liked to hear himself talk. Whether or not he ‘did social’, he’d clearly been on his own for a long time and now, with visitors, he’d become a geyser of one-sided conversation.
But he hadn’t answered the question. And given the reasons that we, the species he’d made, liked to get our hands on dehaians, that made me nervous.
“But why are you protecting them?” I asked. “Why should we trust you?”
“Because I need every one of her kind I can get.”
I tensed. “What does that mean?”
His expression turned withering. “Just that her lot screwed up the world when they did their little ‘splitting themselves’ trick. Magic is complicated. Like everything else, it’s part of an ecosystem, and when you take out a component of that, you break things. The ocean generates magic. Why do you think humans are so drawn to it? Why dehaians need it? Hell, even you need it to some degree.” He jerked his chin at me. “And the dehaians – the old ones – they helped that process of magic generation by going back and forth between land and sea. They created an exchange of energy – carried the magic with them like some damn bug with pollen on its body – and thus they kept things from stagnating and dying. Not that they cared, the selfish pricks. They’d already damn near destroyed everything with that ‘Beast’ of theirs. But when they split themselves apart like that, they altered the whole thing.”
He scowled. “And that screwed my kind over too. I made it through their first apocalypse by being off-island with some friends at the time. Saw it from a distance though. Bastards.” He shook his head. “And I did everything possible to avoid their Beast in the years after that. But once the dehaians split…” He made an angry noise. “To do what I do, I need access to magic. It’s kind of a big part of being a wizard. And it takes a lot, keeping yourself going after centuries. I’ve used what we learned from creating greliarans to help that–” he gestured to his face, “–though of course, my targets were long-lived creatures and the like, rather than the rabid concoction that went into you lot. But I still need magic to survive. My machines distill out what they can from the ocean water, and I can modify it to be like the old world magic to some extent in my laboratory, but the amount of energy I get from all that is pathetic compared to what it used to be. The dehaians don’t bring out much from the water, can’t travel far enough inland to carry energy from those places back with them, and regardless it’s not the same. The whole magical ecosystem isn’t the same – like they took saltwater and turned it into fresh. But the dehaians do still keep things going in some form, and without them, the ocean’s magic would just die out entirely. So you see, I can’t let the greliarans kill them off. Like I said, I need every one of them I can get.”