The Water Witch

by Juliet Dark

  “Not sickness, but wasting.” Liam had come up beside me, having freed himself of his admiring throng.

  “Wasting?” I recalled that Soheila had said that the fey had to return to Faerie periodically or they would fade, but she hadn’t said that the reverse was true, only that some creatures couldn’t procreate in Faerie any longer. “Is there anything that can be done for her?”

  “Oh yes. Watch.”

  The sick—or wasting—undine approached a group of new undines. They looked a little startled at her appearance, but in their enthusiasm and trustfulness, they welcomed her into their circle, winding their arms around her thin waist and stroking her long white hair. She smiled wanly and touched their hair and skin, as if remembering when she was young like them. I was just about to remark to Liam on how sad the scene was when I noticed that the wasting undine was changing. Her skin was brightening and her hair was turning gold. She stood straighter—she even seemed to gain an inch in height—and her arms looked rounder. To accommodate her new looks she changed her dress to one of the clingy green and gold ones worn by the younger undines. Within minutes she was indistinguishable from the juveniles.

  “Did she just … feed off them?” I asked, appalled.

  “Yes. After a few years here in Faerie, the undines become unable to absorb the Aelvesgold. It’s kind of like a vitamin deficiency in your world. No one knows exactly why some of the creatures in Faerie have it—undines, sprites, brownies, goblins—and some do not. The newly arrived undines can still absorb the Aelvesgold and they can pass it on to the older ones. But the effect won’t last long. The older undines have to go back to the human world or they’ll die.”

  “But if they go back now, they might have to leave in just a few days. The Grove wants to close the door forever.” As soon as the words were out I knew I shouldn’t have said anything. All the happy chatter and laughter stopped. The undines turned their faces to me in a synchronous wave, like a herd of cattle turning to watch an interloper crossing their field, but their eyes had none of the docility of cows. Instead I felt pinned by a hundred sharp green spears.

  “What do you mean,” one of the undines asked, stepping forward out of the crowd, “close the door forever?”

  I recognized that she was one of the older undines. Although her hair and skin were golden there was a waxy pallor just below the surface.

  “No final decision has been made,” I said quickly. “There’s going to be a meeting to decide the matter. Perhaps they’ll decide to keep the door open. I don’t really know. In fact I’m pretty new to the whole … fairy thing.”

  “But you have fey blood …” She stepped closer and sniffed at me as if smelling sour milk. “… mixed with human.” She took another step closer, but Liam inserted himself between us.

  “Feed off your own kind, Lorelei,” he snapped.

  Lorelei? He knew her?

  Lorelei bared sharp, pointy teeth and hissed. “Like you do, incubus? I can smell her on you. Are you protecting her so you can drain her dry yourself?”

  “I will see her to the door safely, just as she has brought these undines here safely. You should thank her for bringing them.”

  “Why? She’s only brought them to a barren land where they’ll fade away. They’ll never have the joy of love or bearing children …”

  “But there are a few male undines among you,” I interjected. “I saw some.”

  Lorelei snickered meanly. “Did you? Well, let’s give you a closer look. Hans!” She snapped her fingers and one of the wan boys lifted his head and tried to melt back into the crowd. But she turned and pinned him with her hard, glittering eyes. Hans skulked forward, head down and shoulders stooped. When he was a few feet away Lorelei caught him by a hank of his hair and pulled him forward.

  “Take off your clothes for the nice lady, Hans.”

  “Please,” I said, seeing the look of dread in Hans’s eyes. “I think I get your point …”

  “My point?” Lorelei laughed, baring a mouth full of tiny sharp teeth. “But do you get Hans’s?” She snapped her fingers and Hans’s clothes disappeared. He clutched his hands to his groin, but unfortunately the motion of his hands drew my eyes there and I saw what Lorelei meant by her cruel joke. His groin was as bare as a Ken doll’s. I looked away, but not before I glimpsed the pain in his eyes.

  “All the males born in the last spawning were eunuchs,” Lorelei said.

  “Eunuchs?” The juvenile undines echoed. “Does that mean …”

  “It means no fun for you and no babies,” Lorelei hissed. “It means that if we can’t go back to the human world and stay for a season there won’t be another spawn. It means we’ll all fade away. Open the door for us, doorkeeper, or sign our death warrant.”

  “But the door might close in a few days and then you would have to come back,” I said.

  “Who will make me?” she said, baring her teeth.

  She had a point. But suddenly I didn’t like the idea of letting Lorelei loose on my world. She was mean and her teeth were scary …

  A gust of wind suddenly tore Liam from my side and Lorelei was at my throat, teeth bared. “Mean? Scary? You haven’t seen mean or scary yet, doorkeeper. Let me through or I’ll rip your throat out.” Her teeth grazed my throat and I smelled her rotting fish breath. I could also hear the juvenile undines’ fluttering thoughts.

  She helped us, don’t hurt her.

  Then I smelled the scent of raspberry and saw my new friend plucking at Lorelei’s arm. “Let go of Callie. She’s my friend.”

  Lorelei swatted Raspberry away as if she were a gnat. I heard Raspberry’s cry of pain and felt her anguished surprise that one of her own kind would hurt her. But the years in Faerie had drained Lorelei of any kindness she might have once had. No way was I letting her loose on Fairwick.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not taking you through the door.” I turned to face Raspberry and the other undines. “I will, however, try to keep the door open in the future for undines who promise not to hurt humans.”

  Lorelei laughed and the wind roared around us. The honey light of Faerie was gone, replaced by dark scudding clouds. The undines were clustered together, clutching one another. Where had Liam gone?

  “Not hurt humans?” Lorelei hissed in my ear, her spit spraying against my cheek just as a needle-sharp rain began lashing at my face. “How dare you dictate terms to our breeding! You have no idea what hurt humans have done us. Maybe I should just eat you.” Her rough tongue flicked against my face. “Maybe I’ll gain your doorkeeper’s power. These undines heard the spell you used to open the door. Only a very stupid doorkeeper allows her spell to be overheard.”

  I was pretty sure she was bluffing, but just in case I drove my elbow into her ribs and uttered a spell I’d learned a few months ago. It was to ward off an attack from above and right now the storm Lorelei was raising was coming from above. I was halfway through it when Liam came up from behind me, grabbed me out of Lorelei’s grasp, and clamped his hand over my mouth.

  “You can’t use spells in Faerie,” he yelled over the raging storm. “They do the opposite.”

  “Shit,” I swore, looking up into a green funnel cloud. The tornado picked Lorelei up. She spread her arms and caught the wind in her dress. She snapped her teeth at me but she was too far away to reach me. Which wouldn’t do me any good if the storm killed me. “How can I stop it?”

  “You can’t. The only thing to do is get you through the door. The storm will die out after you go. Quick, before Lorelei gets back down. It’s still her storm—she’ll use it to rip you to pieces.”

  The undines were running for cover. The wind tore at their new flesh and ripped the skin from their bones. Then I looked at Liam. The wind was gnawing at him, scratching long red streaks down his face.

  “I don’t know how to open the door from this side,” I shouted, “if I can’t use the opening spell.”

  “You have only to need it to open,” he said pressing his lips to my ear so I cou
ld hear him over the roar of the storm.

  I looked around and saw the destruction I’d caused. My first trip to Faerie and I’d pretty much wrecked the place. I closed my eyes and pictured the door as I saw it the first time—an archway in a moonlit, snow-covered grove, Liam by my side telling me he’d brought me there so we could remember how perfect our first week together had been.

  The roar of the storm was suddenly muffled. I opened my eyes and Liam and I stood together in that moonlit grove. Above us the storm raged, but we were in a protected bubble. Like being inside a snow globe.

  I took Liam’s hand and stepped toward the door. “Come with me,” I said, turning to him.

  His eyes widened. “Do you love me, then?” he asked.

  Did I? I looked into his eyes for the answer. I could practically feel my heart swelling. Surely that was love! But then a cold and barbed coil squeezed my heart and the words died in my throat. I could see the look of disappointment in Liam’s eyes and then, as if I’d broken the bubble we were in as well as his heart, the snow globe shattered into a million pieces. Lorelei rode the shattered glass, teeth bared, claws aimed at my throat.

  “Go!” Liam screamed. He flung himself on Lorelei just before she struck me. I tried to grab on to Liam’s shirt but the impact had sent me sprawling backward. The storm picked me up and carried me through the door—along with something else that seemed to be flying beside me—and then I was sucked into the storm’s black maw and swallowed whole.

  FIVE

  I came to on the forest floor, face in the mud, the rush of water in my ears. Drowned, I thought. I tried to move, but I couldn’t feel anything but the mud against my face. Every bone in my body felt as though it had been ground to dust.

  “There she is!” said a familiar female voice.

  At least my ears worked. Or was I imagining voices? They came and went on the shrieking wind and amid gusts of rain.

  “She’s in the ravine,” I heard, and then, “She’ll drown if we don’t get to her right away.”

  Drown? Hadn’t I already? I felt water pooling under my cheek. I could taste it—it tasted like mud and grass and it smelled like rain. It had reached my nose. If I didn’t move, I would drown.

  I tried to turn my head, but something seemed to have happened to my spinal cord. Lorelei. That’s what had happened to me. That bitch undine had raised a storm in Faerie that had slammed through the door. The storm followed me into this world. Had anything else followed me? All I remembered was Liam tackling Lorelei to give me time to escape. Had he been able to restrain her—or had she killed him?

  Something hot slid down my nose. Tears mingling with the rain and mud. Liam had sacrificed himself so I could get away. But it had all been for nothing. My neck was broken. I was paralyzed. I might as well drown in this two-inch-deep mud puddle.

  “Is she alive? Can you see if she’s breathing?”

  The voices were closer. I felt the vibrations of footsteps against my cheek—but nowhere else. I was paralyzed. That bitch had turned me into a vegetable. Before I died I ought to at least attempt to tell them about Lorelei—warn them that she was trying to come through the door …

  I opened my eyes, seeing only the tangle of my own wet, mud-caked hair. Then soft, cool hands brushed the hair away.

  “Callie? Can you hear me?”

  Soheila’s warm amber eyes were so close I felt I could fall into them. I’d seen that color before … I tried to move my lips, but only swallowed mud.

  She cupped her hands and scooped water out of the pool collecting around my face. She used a dampened bandanna to clean the mud from my face.

  “Lore … lei,” I managed when I could work my lips. “… Raised storm … might have … followed.”

  Soheila muttered something in Farsi that I suspected might have been a worse epithet than the one I’d given Lorelei. “I might have known it was her. All the undines are quite good at weather, and she’s one of the most powerful.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her turn her head. “It was Lorelei,” she said to someone behind her.

  “That nasty bit of baggage,” Diana said. “I don’t suppose she cares how many poor innocent animals will lose their homes in this storm.”

  “We have a worse problem than that,” Liz said before lowering her voice and whispering something I couldn’t catch.

  “It’s my neck,” I said. “It’s … broken … isn’t it?”

  Soheila paused in scooping water to cup my face with her hand and bend down so I could see her eyes. That color … it was Aelvesgold. Her eyes were the color of Faerie light. “I’m afraid so, Callie, but don’t give up. There are things we can do.” She looked up, but not before I saw a tear fall from her eye.

  “I know a knitting spell,” Diana said. “Of course we’d have to set the bone in the right position …”

  “I have some experience with that from the days I drove an ambulance in the war,” Liz said. I wondered which war.

  “And I can summon a wind to cushion her spine while we manipulate it …”

  “I’ll need needles,” Diana said. “And yarn.”

  Needles? Yarn? Was Diana truly planning to knit me a new spine? From within, laughter unexpectedly began to erupt, but all three women instantly quieted me.

  “You mustn’t move, Cailleach,” Liz said in her sternest schoolmistress voice. “Diana and I will get what we need and be back as soon as we can. Soheila, stay with Callie and keep bailing the water away from her mouth. We won’t be long.”

  I would have liked to turn to say good-bye, but could not. I had a horrible feeling I would never see either woman again.

  “Hey,” I said to Soheila after the other women had left, “how good is this knitting trick of Diana’s?”

  “Pretty good. She heals animal bones all the time with it. And you know what a devoted knitter she is.”

  “Yeah, she made me a sweater last Christmas …” With a lumpy-looking deer on the front and one arm shorter than the other, I recalled. “Soheila, promise me something?”

  “Yes, Callie?”

  “If it looks like I’m going to wind up looking like Igor, could you just snap my neck instead?”

  “Don’t talk like that, Callie. You won’t wind up looking like Igor, but even if you did, wouldn’t it be better than dying?”

  I sighed. My breath made ripples in the water that Soheila was so valiantly scooping away. My friends were doing their best to save me. This wasn’t the time to indulge in self-pity, but I couldn’t help wondering who would miss me if I died here in the mud. Liz and Diana had each other and Soheila had lived for centuries watching her human loved ones die before her. What was one more? I didn’t have children, and although I knew my students cared about me, I didn’t flatter myself that I was essential to their lives. Even Nicky Ballard, whom I’d saved from a family curse a few months ago, was doing so well on her own that she’d gone away to a study abroad program in Scotland. My childhood friend Annie would be heartbroken, but she had her girlfriend, Maxine. My grandmother Adelaide would probably think I had gotten what was coming to me, dying in the mud from a foolish attempt to help Faerotrash—as she and her club members at the Grove derisively referred to the fey.

  And Liam?

  I’d just made love to him and he’d saved my life today, but when he’d asked, I couldn’t tell him I loved him. If I couldn’t say it then, would I ever? If I couldn’t, we’d never be together. So what would it matter to him if I were dead?

  “It’s not like there’d be anyone to really miss me,” I said.

  Soheila lay down beside me in the mud so that her face was level with mine. “My dear, why set your life at such a low value?”

  “I don’t … it’s just that …” I was going to tell her that I was afraid I’d never love anyone, but I realized in time that it was a tactless thing to say to Soheila, who had selflessly renounced any chance at love. Still, I wondered if it were true. When Paul, my boyfriend of the last six years, had broken up with me last s
ummer he’d said that he’d felt for a long time that I didn’t love him. He was right. I had kept a piece of myself apart. Maybe I’d been keeping that piece of myself separate and protected since the day I had learned that my parents were dead. And today, just when I thought I might be able to tell Liam I loved him, I felt an iron band squeezing my heart—as if even the possibility of loving someone was so frightening my body had revolted. What was wrong with me? Was I ever going to be able to love someone?

  I had no time to ponder that question, though, because Liz and Diana returned, both of them sopping wet and out of breath. Diana plopped herself down in the mud puddle, a colorful quilted bag in her lap. Liz moved behind me. I felt her hands slide on either side of my neck, gentle but firm. For some reason I recalled the first time I’d shaken Liz’s hand, at my job interview. I’d been surprised at how firm her handshake was and thought to myself that beneath her pink Chanel suit beat the heart of a steel-willed administrator. Little did I know then that those steel hands would someday be around my neck. I tried to distract myself from the thought of what she was about to do by watching Diana. From the quilted bag, she had taken out two long knitting needles. I thought they had unusually sharp points. Then she took out a skein of bright pink wool.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It was the only color I had enough of.”

  “What … exactly … are you going to do … with it?”

  “Knit your spinal cord together, of course. I have to make the first stitch at the exact moment Liz realigns the bones. Oh my, but is it a knit or a purl? I don’t remember.”

  “Knit, I should think,” Soheila remarked. She’d gotten up and knelt behind me. I heard her voice close to my ear, but if she was touching me I couldn’t feel it.