by Tanya Huff
Momentarily.
Dark eyes gleaming, Auntie Catherine stroked the end of her braid, and said, “Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes, I am stealing Selkie skins in order to get them to support Carlson Oil drilling off Hay Island.”
“Okay, then.” Down on Summer Garden Road, someone hit their horn. Under cover of the noise, Charlie gathered her thoughts. Thought. “Why?”
“Because they’re paying me.” Dropping her braid on her lap, her hair looking more like white gold than silver in the sun, she grinned. “In fact, they’re paying me a great deal. As you’ll recall, I handed my business over to Alysha so, as I don’t want to return home, a sentiment I’m sure you understand, I needed an alternative income stream.”
“An alternative . . .” Hands flat on the table, Charlie leaned forward and snarled, “The Selkies are pretty fucking upset!”
“That’s the point, Charlotte. You can’t blackmail someone with the potential loss of something they don’t care about, now can you?”
“And that’s not my point, Auntie Catherine. They’re upset. Hysterical. Unhappy.”
“Good, that was the intention. But why do you care? They’re not family, they’re Fey. This isn’t even their world.”
“I care because this is affecting the band and the band is a family, a type of family,” she amended as Auntie Catherine’s eyes narrowed. “And I’ll be damned if I let you just fuck them over!”
“Yes, quite probably. Oh, look, they did have iced tea after all . . .”
The faked surprise set Charlie’s teeth on edge. She stared down at her placemat until Frank was gone—poor bastard didn’t need to deal with her mood as well as Auntie Catherine’s salacious interest—then kept her eyes on the wet ring marking the table as she drained half the glass and took a deep breath. She’d been expecting jazz, each of them trying to lead the other through complex signatures. What she got was the big bass drum in the marching band. Bam. Bam. Bam. Yes. I. Did.
When she looked up, dark eyes were watching her with amusement. “When you called, when I was in Calgary, why did you want me to come to Halifax?
“I felt sorry for you.”
“Well, I wouldn’t help you . . . what?”
“You’d been domesticated.” Auntie Catherine smiled an aspartame smile, likely to turn to formaldehyde at any moment. “You still believed yourself a wild child with your hair a dozen different, brilliant colors, but my granddaughter would play out the leash, give you the illusion of freedom, and then tug you back to her side.”
“I came back willingly . . .”
“I know, dear. And I’m not blaming you. After all, I designed my granddaughter to be strong enough to defeat the Dragon Queen. It’s no surprise you can’t stand against her.”
“And yet here I am.”
“Here you are.” And there was the formaldehyde. “Still wasting your potential.”
“Because I’m not working with you?”
“Because you’re dragging that guitar . . .”
Charlie reached back to touch the gig bag. “I’m a musician!”
“My point, exactly. You think you’re a musician.” She held up a hand for silence as Frank brought their orders, cut the end of her crepe off with the side of her fork, moaned around the mouthful of food and purred, “Exactly firm enough.”
“Forget working for Carlson Oil,” Charlie muttered, spearing a cherry tomato. “You should try porn.”
“What, again?”
Charlie followed Mark’s song back to Mabou, stepped out of the stand of Norfolk pines protecting the line of cottages from the north wind, and came face-to-face with Eineen. Literally, face-to-face. Their noses no more than a centimeter apart. Her breath smelled slightly salty and her lips, parted just enough to show the edges of perfect teeth, were slightly chapped. Charlie fought the urge to lean just a little closer and taste, taking the chance she’d probably never be offered again.
Two things stopped her.
One, she didn’t want to be that girl.
Two, many of the Human-seeming Fey were significantly stronger than they looked. Charlie had no idea if the Selkies fell into that category and had no intention of finding out as a result of pissing Eineen off. As much as she wanted to know how Eineen’s mouth would feel under hers, she was against pain on principle. Pain hurt.
“I was waiting for you to return.”
“Yeah.” Charlie took a step back, smacked herself in the head with a tree branch, and jerked forward, leaving a clump of hair attached to a gob of pine gum. “Ow! God fucking damn it! Yeah, I got that! What do you want?”
“You said you were waiting for a phone call.”
“She called. And then we had lunch.” Eyes watering, she rubbed the back of her head. “And—oh, joy—Auntie Catherine is stealing your skins to force your people to support Carlson Oil.”
“That’s more than we knew. We can use that to try and stop this.”
Charlie figured we in that instance didn’t involve her. She reached out and grabbed Eineen’s arm as the Selkie turned. “What part of auntie were you missing there, babe? This is work for hire right now; it’s nothing personal . . .”
“It’s very . . .”
“On her part,” Charlie cut Eineen’s protest short. “And believe me, you don’t want to piss her off.”
“And yet, we can’t leave things as they are.”
“No, we can’t.”
Eineen stared at her for a long moment, long enough to realize the definition of we had changed. “So, what do we do?”
You think you’re a musician.
It was nothing personal as far as the Selkies were concerned. Charlie, personally, was hoping she’d piss Auntie Catherine off to the point of spontaneous combustion. “We stop her.”
“How?”
Realizing she’d been hanging onto Eineen’s arm maybe a little too long, Charlie let go and started for the cottage. “First, we find out how she’s getting to the skins, and we block her from getting any more.” Eineen fell into step beside her. “Then we find the skins she’s already taken, and we take them back. Or I will.”
“So easy.”
Okay, she did not deserve that level of sarcasm. “Not really. While I’m doing that, you and your people will pretend to play along so that Carlson Oil doesn’t up the stakes because it’s one small step from Auntie Catherine to nuking you from orbit and letting the gods sort things out.”
The campsite was strangely quiet, or their footsteps as they reached the access road were strangely loud.
“I assume your auntie is getting to the pelts by . . .” Eineen waved both hands in random patterns.
“Semaphore?” Charlie guessed. “ASL? Wet nail polish?”
“Magic.”
“Can’t think why you’d believe that.” At the far end of the road, down by cottage number one, two fiddlers were in an argument so intense, even at a distance, it looked as though their bows were about to be used as swords. “If we’re going to find out how Auntie Catherine is doing it, I need to examine the crime scenes.”
“UnderRealm CSI?” When Charlie turned to look, Eineen gave a soft bark of laughter. “What? I watch television. We should start in Neela’s RV.”
Charlie stepped over a Nerf crossbow as she stepped up into the trailer, pushed a half dozen tiny cars out of the way with her foot, and had to slide sideways as Eineen followed her in to keep from knocking a stack of dirty dishes into the tiny sink. The bed over the “sofa” hadn’t been made, the tangle of sheets sprinkled with plastic building blocks. About four meters of orange track spilled down from the double bed up over the cab.
Seals and fiddlers. Not the best housekeepers in the worlds.
Eineen pointed past her shoulder. “Keep going back that way.”
To the left, wet bathing suits had been piled in the bottom of the shower. To the right, a headless doll sprawled on the closed toilet seat like the crime scene for the latest hooker decapitation. Charlie ha
d no idea why those dolls were so popular.
The hunter-green striped wallpaper and the burgundy carpet suggested the rear bedroom had been decorated in the early ’90s. An empty violin case shared the unmade bed with piles of clothes and there were two closed cases stacked on the dresser—the lower one held together by strategically applied duct tape. There were no visible charms.
“Neela’s was the first skin to go missing.”
“How could she tell?” Charlie muttered, lifting a stack of sheet music off the dresser and steadying a trembling tower of DVD cases with her elbow as she scanned the newly exposed artificial walnut wood grain finish for charms. She sketched a quick charm of her own on the top case to prevent disaster before she lifted the DVDs.
“We always know where we put our skins.” Eineen reached past her, brushing warm against Charlie’s arm. “We keep them on us if we’re walking around in daylight and somewhere safe if we’re spending the night ashore.”
“And Neela was spending every night ashore.”
“Neela had a landlife so, yes. She kept her skin in this violin case.”
“In that violin case?” Two Transformer stickers held down a worn edge of tape. “An entire sealskin?”
“They fit wherever we put them. In other hands they’re larger, heavier . . .”
“Harder to move.” Made sense. “For security reasons?”
“Not that it seems to be working, but yes.”
Charlie took the case from Eineen’s hands and opened it. No charms inside, but then there didn’t need to be. By the time she opened the case, Auntie Catherine had found what she was looking for. “Okay, there isn’t as much as a potted plant in the entire RV, so she must’ve come out of the Woods near where Gavin was parked and then charmed a lock open.”
“It happened at night, while everyone was asleep.”
“Yeah, well, the aunties like to wander around and check on things. If they don’t want to be heard, they’re not heard.”
Eineen frowned. “That’s seriously creepy.”
“Tell me about it. One of the first charms we learn is how to block our doors.” Charlie smacked herself in the forehead. “I’m an idiot. If I put that charm on the hiding places of every skin that belongs to a Selkie with a landlife, Auntie Catherine won’t be able to get to them.”
“But then you’ll know where every Selkie with a landlife hides her skin.”
“Only the room they’re in.”
“You’re asking for an enormous amount of trust.”
Charlie glanced at her reflection in the big mirror screwed to the wall over the dresser, shifted enough to see herself between the photos of Neela’s kids stuck to the glass, picked a bit of pine tree out of her hair, and tried to look trustworthy. “I know.”
“You’re asking us to trust in a member of the same family who has stolen our skins.”
“The aunties are a law unto themselves.” The UN Security Council rumors were probably untrue.
“Blood tells.”
“Yeah, well, when you put it that way . . .” Leaning forward, Charlie picked a picture of the girl who’d returned her phone off the floor and stuck it back where the tape marks suggested it went. “Think it over.”
Auntie Catherine had left no charm on the bedroom door. Or on the window. As Eineen returned the violin case to its place, Charlie checked the rest of the trailer. Nothing.
“This looks like it’s been washed recently.” Squatting to check the outside bottom of the actual entrance, she looked up as Eineen descended the two steps to the ground and found herself momentarily mesmerized by the long line of her legs and the soft downy hair that covered them.
“It rained last Tuesday. Could rain wash a charm away?”
“Rain could wash a charm drawn in dirt away,” Charlie admitted, straightening and shrugging her gig bag back up on her shoulders. “Well, this was time productively spent. Not. If Auntie Catherine’s just walking in and your people won’t let me close off the remaining skins, I can’t stop her. If she’s getting in another way, I don’t know what the way is, and, I can’t . . .”
Her phone rang; John Bonham’s drum solo from Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick.” Proximity had gotten Mark a ringtone of his own.
“Chuck! Where the hell are you? It’s two ten and we’re waiting.”
Shit. She’d forgotten about running through Mark’s new song. “I’m at cottage four. I’ll be there in five. No, three. I have to go,” she told Eineen, sliding the phone back into her pocket. “I am one hundred percent on your side and I will get your skins back, but I have commitments and . . .”
“The music calls.”
“The crazy drummer called, but yeah.” To Charlie’s surprise, Eineen fell into step beside her. “You’re . . . uh . . . ?”
“Coming with you so I can take Tanis away for a while. Bo won’t be able to give himself fully to the music while she’s there.”
“True that.” It had to be hard to play with a lap full of weeping Selkie. “She’s really taking this hard.”
“No more than the rest, but Tanis isn’t as able to hide her feelings. She’s young and this is her first landlife.”
How rude would it be to ask about Eineen’s past? How many landlives have you lived? Have you loved a Human? Would you like to? Give me a couple of days; I can learn to play the fiddle. Or I could play a symphony on you. Before her train of thought degenerated further, Charlie settled for a neutral, “Ouch. Rough start.”
“Yes, your people have made it memorable for her.”
“Person, not people. Don’t blame the whole family.”
“I meant Humans.” Charlie could feel Eineen’s gaze on the side of her face.
“My people are Gales first. And moving past my people for the moment . . .” She stepped over a rut outside cottage seven. “. . . according to the note, Carlson Oil doesn’t just want you to back off, they want you to actually support the drilling. Have you?”
“We spoke to a reporter from the Post, telling him we withdrew our opposition. I believe there was something said about new jobs.”
“The Cape Breton Post? I suspect Amelia Carlson is going to think that’s nothing more than a local paper.”
Eineen shrugged. “We’re a local group.”
“A local group she brought out the big guns for. Why? I mean, it’s not like you can march up and down in front of the legislature buildings carrying protest signs that say Selkies against offshore drilling. Although,” she added after a moment’s reflection, “that’d be pretty damned cool.”
“My family has been in this area for a very long time, and we’ve made some canny investments.”
“Bonus points for planning ahead, but you can’t be able to throw the kind of money at the problem that’ll worry an oil company.”
“Perhaps not. But by approaching their leaders one on one, we can convince other environmental groups to protest with us and bring significant numbers to bear against local and provincial politicians. We stopped the Hay Island seal hunt, we had the effluent regulations tightened for Halifax Harbor, we forced new items onto the environmental protection act regarding the disposal of items other than bilge water at sea. And, as you well know, if those in power are male, we can attract their attention and influence their decisions.”
“What if it’s a woman?”
“No. My people cannot move outside rigidly defined gender norms.”
Charlie snorted. “You have been here for a while. What about your males?”
“We use them if we have to, but our males seldom come out of the water. Their time on land is dangerously constrained.”
Charlie waited for more as they turned in toward number ten cottage but that seemed to be all the information about Selkie males Eineen was offering. “Does Carlson Oil know what you can do?”
“They know what we are if they brought one of your aunties in. There’s no way of knowing what specifics they’re aware of.”
“We should find out. It’s not like Auntie
Catherine had an ad on Craigs-list. Scary older woman available for all your metaphysical ass-kicking needs.” Charlie paused, one foot up on the porch step. “Actually, we should check into that.”
“Tanis has a smart phone with an extensive data plan. I’ll have her look it up.” When Charlie turned, Eineen shrugged. “As I said, her first landlife. She’s embracing the possibilities. What do you need to know?”
“I’m just curious how they contacted . . .” Charlie turned again to see Mark staring at her through the screen. Back to Eineen. “Mostly, I’m curious, but a few internet searches might distract Tanis long enough for Bo’s shirts to dry out.” Back to Mark. “I’m sorry I’m late and I . . .”
Her phone rang; “Evelyn Evelyn” by Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley.
The twins. Not answering would only mean they’d keep calling. “What?”
“Ever since Uncle Evan took over, the boys are showing horn most of the time. It’s a good thing school’s not in.”
“Yeah, Kevin got sent home twice last year for fighting as it was.”
“Andy broke Peter’s cheek, but Peter stuck a tine into his shoulder.”
“We didn’t know they were that sharp.”
“Did Mom tell you about Europe?
“We’re totally going.”
This is why she preferred to keep her phone elsewhere. Like inside a whale. “Guys, I can’t talk right now.” She waved her other hand at Mark in the universal sign for family shit.
“Will you be home Tuesday?”
“Yes . . . I mean, no. I’ll be in Calgary.”
“Ha. Knew it!”
“You’ve totally switched to the Allie side of the force.”
“Totally.”
Charlie closed her phone without responding and handed it to Eineen. “Drop it mid Atlantic. I don’t actually need it until Wednesday.”
The fiddler in her head broke into a perky version of “Over the Waves.”
“Charlotte?”
“Sorry.” Concentrating brought the volume down, but it seemed as though the intermittent soundtrack her life had acquired was there to stay.