by K. F. Breene
“One might look at the conditions in which you live your life and assume you have no pride in yourself, your magic, or your profession,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Many assume that, actually.” I rose, picked up my chair, and turned it sideways. I couldn’t see much of the water, but I enjoyed feeling the salty air softly muss my hair. I’d rather ignore his handsome face and look out at mostly nothing than attempt to relax within his hardcore focus.
“That doesn’t bother you.”
“Not at all. It’s liberating, actually. I know what box they’ve put me in, and I generally know how they’ll act toward me, too.”
“You are creating a predictable environment in an unpredictable life situation.”
I turned down my lips in thought, then shrugged. “That sounds about right, yes.”
“I assume this is the…young man for whom you bought the turquoise blanket?”
“Was it the turquoise blanket wrapped around his shoulders that gave it away?”
“Yes.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You’ve nailed it. Amazing that I’m such a puzzle to you, what with your fantastic powers of observation.”
“What ails him?”
I closed my eyes against the breeze, letting calm roll over me. “That’s not my information to disclose.”
“I apologize. I wanted to give you the chance to tell me yourself. The nature of his…condition is in his file.”
“Which you looked up,” I said softly.
“Naturally. A young person in his situation, living in poverty and without the resources of his pack, would rarely live past the beginning of puberty. He is nearly cresting, if I’m judging the surges of his power correctly. How have you kept him alive?”
“Hope and a prayer.” I clasped my hands. “And a few ugly blankets.”
“She sacrifices for us,” Mordecai said with a note of pride in his voice. Also sadness. “She sits here, with her rickety setup, and lets the masses belittle her. For us. She takes odd jobs that are way below her intelligence level. She begs, takes handouts, and doesn’t have any use for pride, all because she wants to give us the chance at a future. So while you sit there on your high horse, inspecting her choices like she’s some colorful yet insignificant bug, she’s busting her ass to give us a chance. She’s forfeiting her own life so that we get to have one. You won’t ever find a truer, bigger-hearted person in the world. So you should pack up your enormous ego and go find someone else to mildly threaten with your presence and your interest. We have enough problems around here.”
Heat prickled my eyes at his speech, overcome a moment later by fear. I didn’t know what the stranger’s situation was, but he had clout if he could keep the non-magical people in this freak show away from me. I also knew there were limits to the amount of abuse the guy would take. Being a woman who perplexed him, I’d gotten a momentary pass while he toyed with me a while longer.
Mordecai wouldn’t get the same lenience. And I didn’t know how to protect him.
22
Alexis
“Don’t mind him.” I tried to keep the worry from my voice, still looking out over the bay. “He’s—”
“Exactly right,” the stranger finished softly. “Thank you, Mordecai. You have fit a piece of the puzzle into place.”
“Good job, Mordie.” Daisy sniffed.
“Do you get that medicine at a discount?” the stranger asked.
“I thought you had extensive records on magical people?” I couldn’t help it. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to what the guy knew and what he didn’t.
“Mordecai was left for dead, and the pack has been operating on the belief that nature took its course. Their records are lacking, and as such, so are—” The chair squeaked as the stranger shifted. I glanced over, but his face was a hard mask, giving nothing away. “The girl is not in our records at all.”
“I’m a Chester,” Daisy said. “Also left for dead.”
“Shh.”
“I swear to God, Mordie, if you elbow me one more time—”
“She’s not a Chester.” I cradled my head in my hand, suddenly exhausted. “She’s not nearly that ignorant. Or arrogant. But she is non-magical, and her situation, if she were to go back to the non-magical foster system, would be a nightmare. And no, we do not get the medicine at a discount.”
“Does a five-finger discount count?” I could hear the laughter in Daisy’s voice.
“Elbow her, Mordecai,” I said.
“I see.” The cards slid against each other in the stranger’s hands.
“Do you?” I wasn’t sure what prompted me to ask, but there it was, out in the world.
Silence dropped around us, then stretched. The heaviness of it competed with the shrieks and roars of the fair around us. Finally, when I was about ready to turn my head and look at him again, if only to see what danger clouds lurked on his expression, he said, “No. I’ve never known poverty. I’ve never watched a loved one suffer because I couldn’t afford the treatment she—or he—needed.”
That had been a slip, and now I did turn my head.
A shadow sliced across the stranger’s face, partially covering the simmering fury in his expression. One eye, catching the light of the fair, shone bright with viciousness.
But under it all existed pain. A hollowness he couldn’t seem to fill.
His magic rose around me, but this time it was different. Instead of the sexiness and passion I’d felt at the bar, which had nearly driven me to questionable life decisions, I felt a vast emptiness. The salty breeze took on a life of its own, its caress turning into a longing for the rise and fall of the waves. The song of the ocean drifted to me from the bay, mournful yet beautiful, blanketing my heart.
A tear slipped from my eye as I tucked into this feeling like I had the sexy-type magic. Its beauty captivated me. Its vitality invigorated me. But that sadness weaving within it broke my heart.
The presence came slowly, from a place I never would’ve thought to look.
Turning my head toward the bay, I saw it despite the darkness: arms swinging up and down, stroking a path through the water. The body attached to them rode a wave up, then sank into the swell. The person disappeared as he or she neared the edge of the large dock, only to float up again. This time she ascended the dock, revealing a long, white flowing dress and bare feet pointed elegantly like a ballerina’s.
The wind whipped her raven hair around her beautiful face, the breeze she was experiencing different than that of reality, her chosen place of un-rest wild and blustery. She hadn’t, or maybe wouldn’t, acclimate to her new surroundings. This wasn’t her home.
Her bare feet, still wet, touched down onto the dirty ground beside the dock, and spirit or not, I couldn’t help but grimace with the grime they’d be touching. Her movements were elegant as she drifted toward and then past me.
Slightly in awe, because I’d never seen anything like that—and I thought I’d seen it all—I rose and turned my chair to again face the stranger. The woman stopped beside him, staring down at him with adoration.
“You were expecting a woman, I take it,” I said, clasping my hands in my lap. I didn't notice the stranger’s reaction because I couldn’t take my eyes off her, she was so beautiful. “In life, was it like an ethereal glow radiated out from her? Like she was lit up from within?”
“Yes,” he said in a release of breath, and though I could tell he was trying to keep his voice flat, a slight tremor jiggled his words.
“She’s young. My age.” High, arching eyebrows sat above large blue eyes and a thin, dainty nose. Sharp cheekbones and a strong jaw defined her face, the look completed by lush, shapely lips. She was a soft, feminine version of the stranger. “Is she a sister, or is this her chosen age and not the age she was at death?”
“You see her?” His throat was tight, and I finally switched my focus.
He’d leaned forward, staring at me, not in the intent way from earlier, but hard, like h
e was willing words to come out of my mouth. Earnestness and longing clouded his expression, and the muscles on his sizable frame flexed.
“She’s here, yes. Beside you. Looking down on you. She loved you very much, and it transferred into death.” I scratched my chin. “So your mother, then, because I don’t think a sister would be that gushy about the situation.”
“Your age, you said?” he asked. “Twenty-five?”
“Around there, yes. I’m not a master at telling ages.”
“Before she met my father.” His jaw clenched.
“Hey, look.” I leaned forward as well, dropping my hands to my knees. “That doesn’t mean she loved you any less. It just means that she was happiest with her appearance at that age. When my mother died, she assumed the age of twenty-two. She told me I’d ruined her body beyond repair and she was happy to go back to a time when she didn’t grimace every time she looked in the mirror. So that’s probably all this is.”
“Can you speak to her?”
It didn’t seem like he’d heard anything I’d just said.
“Yes. What would you like me to say?”
“Just…speak to her. See if she can hear you.”
I frowned, because that was weird. Of course she could hear me. She could hear everyone in the living world, trapped here as she was.
“Her name?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Look, I’m trying my best to be respectful of the situation, but you’re making things awfully difficult.” When he didn’t offer any more information, I sighed and went about things the way I normally did. “Hey, lady in the white dress…”
“She can be professional, it’s just that she usually doesn’t want to be,” Daisy said, always thinking about business. That would be good someday. If only she’d put it off until then.
The woman’s head turned slowly toward me.
“Yes, you. I can see you,” I said, suddenly showered in a kind of regal regard that made me want to sit up straight and comb my hair. The woman’s eyes drifted over my body and then back to my face before glancing back at the stranger.
“He can’t see or hear you. Only I can. Try me out. See how it goes.”
She adjusted her stance until she was facing me, her eyes soft and kind, but expectant. She was a woman who’d had support staff, but she hadn’t been a dick to them. That was at least nice.
“You can just…say anything you want. Anything at all. Maybe your name? We can start there.” She stared at me. To the stranger, I said, “She obviously passed that stare down along with the looks. My God, the two of you probably made people quail when you were in the same room.”
“What is this place?” she finally asked in a voice like a bell.
“Holy crap, this woman was a heartbreaker,” I murmured. “We’re in San Francisco. In America.”
“San Francisco…” A flash of soft anger pinched her expression. I’d never known anger could be soft, but she did it well. “My son is trying to free me. Even still.”
“Are you trying to free her?” I asked the stranger. His eyes hardened and his fists flexed.
“To admit it would be death,” she said in a harsh voice, and I felt like a whipped dog. “His father would never permit it.”
“How dumb of me,” I said quickly. “Stupid me. She said be her. Dress in skirts, that sort of thing.”
“Oh boy,” Daisy said.
“Forget it.” I waved the issue away. I was terrible at improv. “Why haven’t you crossed over?” I asked her.
“A selkie is trapped by the land without her skin,” the woman said. “And in death, trapped in the world of the living.”
I pushed back against my chair, sadness washing over me. That issue rang a bell in my memory.
If some asshole land-dweller stole a selkie’s seal skin, the selkie would be trapped on land until the skin was returned. In that time, the selkie, a very sexual, loving, and clearly forgiving creature, would marry said asshole and have kids with him or her.
Rumor had it that selkies never stopped looking for their skins. It was like a shifter who couldn’t heed the moon’s urging to change. Like Mordecai. Given what I saw him go through every month, with or without that medicine, denying the magic created a horrible itch inside him, impossible to completely ignore.
And now I saw that even death would give a selkie no comfort. She was here until she reclaimed her skin.
“So…does the skin…die with you, or is it just…hanging out wherever the dickhead thief stashed it, or…?” I asked.
“It is in this strange plane with me. Somewhere.”
“Hmm. Mmhm. So you just need to pull it to you and slip it back on then?”
Her head tilted and she took a step toward me. “Pull it to me?”
“Yeah. Just…think about it really hard, and feel it with everything you have, and long for it, and it really should come sailing back to you. I mean, that’s what your son did, and here you are, all the way from…?”
A crease formed between her brows, matching the one on her son’s face. She minutely shook her head, and I just barely registered the stranger’s intensity beating into me, his gaze now determined as well as vicious.
“Right. So that’s another hush-hush topic. Got it.”
The stranger wanted to find her skin for her so she could be at peace. That was what she’d meant by setting her free.
“How’d you know she needed her skin?” I asked.
“As I said,” he replied, “I’ve seen a few of…your kind before.”
The hitch in his speech made it seem like he didn’t think they were my kind at all. But then, if he had a habit of visiting fairs like this, he’d probably gotten the losers of the trade.
“They were useless,” his mother said, her tone dripping with arrogance. Somehow, she still seemed lovely despite it. A true gift. “The strongest of them did not look at me, as you are doing. They did not hear me. They felt me, sure enough, and got a few of my words correct, but they all mangled the message before sending him on his way.”
“Right. Well, in fairness, most people who have my magic set up shop as mediums because they don’t have enough juice for the big-paying jobs, like with the cops or on TV or whatever.”
“What did she say?” the stranger asked.
I told him quickly.
“One of the women was employed by the Demigod of London,” the stranger said with derision. “She was heralded as the top of her trade. Useless.”
“You two have spent a lot of time together, I can see.” I mock-grimaced at them before moving on. “So you’ve tried to pull…it to you, and nothing happened?”
“I felt the need for it when I first entered this strange plane,” she said wistfully. “The longing. But though it continues to call to me, I cannot find it. I have searched every place I know, including my husband’s many estates…”
Her voice had turned harsh by the end, still lovely and lilting, but more like the sea surging over jagged, ship-smashing rocks.
“Huh.” I bit my lip, racking my brain for an answer to this riddle. “And you know you’re dead, I take it?” Her look was enough to wither flowers. “Right. Of course.”
I rested my forearms on my knees, thinking.
“She’s smart and talented. You should enlist her aid,” I heard the woman say.
“Thankfully, he can’t hear you,” I replied.
“What?” the stranger asked.
I ignored him. I’d already been sucked into helping one dangerous criminal; I didn’t need to get sucked into helping a man who was probably ten times as dangerous, especially since that man was an extremely powerful magical person who didn’t understand personal boundaries.
“Have you enlisted the help of a medium specializing in calling the dead from the other side?” I asked.
“Isn’t that what you do?” the woman countered.
“Well…yes. But your skin isn’t dead, and I’ve had no experience with this. I just meant a person with all
the bells and whistles who can put a lot more oomph behind the calling.”
“If we don’t push through our fear, we will never learn what it means to achieve true success,” she said.
I lifted my eyebrows. “I’m not afraid. I just don’t know how I’d even go about something like this.”
“Then you must try.” She trailed the back of her hand down her cheek, a dainty gesture indicating she was tired. “I must go. I have no stamina in this plane. Please hurry. My son has suffered for far too long. He must release me so he can finally live his life in peace. Help him.”
With that, her form flickered, then blinked out.
“It wasn’t lack of energy; she just wasn’t comfortable so far away from her un-resting place,” I mumbled, mostly to myself.
I blew out a breath, thinking it all over. Somehow, without actually asking, she’d roped me into helping her.
No. Not roped me in, tried to rope me in. I felt for her situation, I really did. But I had absolutely no experience in these matters and wouldn’t know the first thing about calling someone’s shifter skin. Like…was that even possible?
I leaned back in my chair, utterly spent, belatedly realizing the crowd that had gathered around my space was now at a distance. As in, someone had pushed them back and kept them there.
That was when I saw the crew of guys, all in suits, standing guard at the edge of the crowd. The stranger had a team of men, it seemed, and clearly he didn’t want anyone hearing his business. I had no idea how long they’d been there.
“So that’s what all this has been about, huh?” I asked, making a circle in the air with my finger. “The stalking, the checking up on me—you’re trying to get someone to help…that certain person…find the thing so you can go about your business?”
“Has she gone?” Sadness crossed his features before they snapped back to stony. His body tensed. “Did she ask you for your help?”
I let my eyebrows crawl up my forehead and lied like a thief. “Nope. No. She didn’t. Because I don’t have any experience in this stuff and couldn’t possibly help. So.” I stood so fast that the blood didn’t have time to get to my head, and I staggered a bit. “Come on, kids. Let’s pack up.”