by Ramy Vance
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In the morning, Justin and I did the most couple-y thing you could think of: I gave him my “new” phone number, and then we walked arm-in-arm to the coffee shop. On the way, he stopped us in front of a poster. Beneath the obnoxiously massive World Government symbol, it read:
The World Army wants you!
Think you have what it takes to train with humanity’s best?
Come find out at our recruitment session at McGill’s Fitness Center — 5pm this Thursday.
“Ugh,” I said automatically. The World Army—the encapsulation of just about everything that was wrong with this world. They were so Otherist it wasn’t even funny. It was scary, actually.
“Ugh?” Justin glanced at me.
Then I remembered: I wasn’t Isabella. I was Katrina Darling, who might be of a different opinion about the whole thing. I waved a hand. “Nothing. I got a hair in my mouth.”
“What do you think about me joining this?” Justin pointed at the poster. “I could be more useful to you.”
Useful to me? I didn’t know what he meant by that, but Katrina seemed like a tough girl. She probably liked her men rough and tumble.
“I don’t know much about it,” I said. “But if it would make you stronger, why not?”
“OK.” He gave the poster another once-over. “Maybe I’ll go to the session.”
At the cafe, we drank from tiny cups while admiring each other from either end of a small, wrought iron table.
“You drink coffee now.” Justin eyed my pure shot of espresso. “And not watered down, either.”
“Turns out college brings on a lot of vices,” I said, taking a short sip. “What have you been up to over the break?”
“I was home with my parents.” His shoulders rounded a little; this clearly made him uncomfortable. “I was pretty sad for a while, though I found ways to distract myself.”
I paused with my cup half-raised. “Sad?”
“About us. The way we fought before break.” His hand reached out to me. “I’m so glad we’ve fixed things, Kat. I’m sorry about what happened with dybbuk, for my part in all of it.”
Dybbuk. I had never heard of such a person—or such an ugly name. Had Justin cheated on Kat? I was irate on her behalf (even if I was the one with whom he was technically cheating now. Sort of). “Oh,” I said. He waited for me to say more, so I added, “I accept your apology.”
This made him smile. “I’m happy with you. It feels like things are different between us—you’re asking me more questions and listening to my answers more closely. You’re more forgiving.”
I set my hand over his. “That’s because I care about you.”
I didn’t know if he and Katrina had exchanged the L-word; I hadn’t heard him say it to me yet. But I did care about Justin, and I wanted to hear what he had to say about things.
I might have been bound to obsession by my encantado nature, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t recognize a good man when I saw one. And the truth was, every time I’d seen him over the past five months, he had been doing something decent, even if it was just giving his attention to the person he was with.
He had grown on me in the way most good things do: in small, incremental moments. Even if he hadn’t been aware of those moments.
He rubbed his thumb over my knuckles and a shiver went up my arm. The smallest inkling came to me that he might actually like Isabella—me—even if I didn't look like Katrina Darling.
"The way you handled that creature yesterday," he said, "it made me so proud of you."
I leaned close. "You mean the lobisomem?"
He touched my nose with one finger. "Yes, I mean the lobisomem."
A smile touched my lips, then disappeared. "But all I did was run."
"You led it out of the dining hall, away from all those students. And you had the brilliant thought of making for the underground, which saved both our bacons. You’re so brave. It’s the reason I fell for you.”
This was all very sweet, but my gut cinched. He liked Kat because she was brave, which was the opposite of how I’d spent pretty much my entire immortal and mortal life operating.
Subterfuge. Illusions. Hiding. Avoiding confrontation. Those were my bread and butter.
Yesterday, all I had done was run away from that creature. And if it showed up now, I would do it again. I would hide, hope all my problems would disappear while I kept my head down.
You could call me Isabella “Avoidance” Ramirez.
Justin was studying me. “What's wrong?”
I refocused on the man at hand. “You fell for me because I’m brave?”
“And because you’re cute. But that was just what turned my head. It’s who you are that I care about.”
I sighed, closing my eyes. “Merda.”
“What did you say?”
Right—Kat probably didn’t know Portuguese. “Nothing.” I pulled my hand from under his, shame enveloping me like a blanket. Another thing about encantados: we’re often driven by emotion, by the moment.
And in this moment, I felt terrible. He didn’t deserve the Katrina Darling currently sitting across from him. He deserved better—a woman who would step to the plate when she was tested.
And all of this—the trickery, the illusion—suddenly felt very wrong, and very stupid of me.
I’d opened my mouth to tell him as much when a hand slapped down in the center of our little table, sending our cups toppling. We both jerked back as coffee landed in our laps.
Around us, the cafe went silent. Every face turned.
The hand between Justin and me didn’t move, its long fingernails biting into the tablecloth. The back of that hand had lost some of its pigmentation to age, the coloring separating into light and dark spots pressing into wrinkles upon wrinkles.
I knew that hand. My eyes followed it to the wrist and up the arm it belonged to, finally landing on the face of the old woman who’d walked into my English class yesterday.
“Eu sabia que era você,” she whispered, so small and shrunken she barely rose higher than me when I was seated.
But she was terrifying nonetheless. She stared right at me, those green eyes boring into mine, and I thought again how familiar they were just before she raised an enormous claw and drew it down my arm as delicately as if she were opening an envelope.
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A line of red blood emerged where the old woman’s claw had ripped through my white shirt and into my skin. It wasn’t a deep cut, but that didn’t stop her from straightening and pointing the red-tipped end of the claw at my face.
“A maldição da minha família volta para você,” she growled with triumph. Which meant, “The curse on my family comes back to you.”
And then, before I or Justin or anyone else thought to react, she turned and swept out of the cafe and onto the street, her white hair and dress floating behind her.
For his part, Justin was too absorbed by the hot coffee all over his pants. When he looked back up at me, I’d already thrown my hand over the cut on my arm and stood from my seat.
“Kat,” he said, then his brow furrowed. “Hey, you’re looking kind of … pink.”
My breath caught. The other patrons were staring at us—at me. And the old woman was gone through the double doors. No one had seen her—not Justin, not the barista at the counter, not the other people sitting around us.
“The curse,” she had said. Coming from a superstitious culture, I was acutely familiar with curses—we encantado end up cursed often. Over five hundred years I’d been called all sorts of names, and I was used to it. I mean, I never enjoyed being cursed, but I empathized with those left behind when a man chose to run away with an encantado.
And by that, I mean: I never blamed them.
But sometimes they weren’t just idle curses. On occasion, people who have been so severely wronged curse themselves with all sorts of nasties: they vow never to die, never to find love. They do this as an exchange, because the flipside of that curse is tha
t they gain certain … well, for lack of a better word, powers.
And this old woman’s power was the Mark of the Huntress.
I’d seen it before. The Mark of the Huntress granted the cursed the ability to hunt their prey. When that happened, the focus of the cursed person’s hatred could easily shroud them from the sight of others. As a result, the cursed often appeared as a shadow to everyone else—except the one marked. You know, just to freak them out.
And I was the one marked.
“I got coffee all over me,” I said. “I have to nip to the bathroom.”
Justin stood and said something, but I was already halfway through the cafe, weaving my way past tables and all the eyes staring at my arm, which was starting to sting a little.
Not just sting—burn.
I stepped into a bathroom covered in a patchwork of faux-sophisticate art, a wallpaper of sketches and pithy quotes crafted over the years by an assortment of McGill’s students.
In the half-light, I lifted my hand from my arm, and a small puff of white smoke rose from the cut.
Yes, that’s right: I emitted smoke.
I swallowed, glanced up at my reflection in the circular mirror. If I hadn’t been ready for something wild, I might have shrieked at my own appearance.
I looked like Katrina Darling if her mom had mated with a pink fish. That is to say, I had scales instead of smooth cheeks, and my entire body was quickly changing into another form.
My form. The one I never wanted to see again.
Smoke was still rising from the cut on my arm, evaporating into the air around me. As I watched it go, I realized it wasn’t your typical smoke. It had an almost airy, luminous quality about it, and a particular scent.
Understanding hit me all at once, and I had to sit on the porcelain toilet with my face in my hands.
My magic was being nullified, dispersing off my body and into the air. I was quickly losing the illusion I had burnt two months of my life to take on, and I didn’t know if that was temporary or forever.
I grabbed some toilet paper off the roll, dabbed at the cut. It wasn’t bleeding, precisely—more like my magical essence was seeping out of it in a clear line. That wasn’t the color of encantado blood—ours was more a hot pink—but the color of my magic.
I pressed the toilet paper to the cut. That Brazilian woman had done this with the claw she’d been carrying. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to render it in my mind. It had been about a foot in length, which meant the creature it once belonged to was big. Enormous.
And it was curved and razor-sharp, which meant it wasn’t just for clawing and gripping—it was for ripping, tearing. Killing.
My eyes opened, and I stared at one of the pithy sayings written on the wall across from me: When someone shows you who they are, believe them.
A knock sounded on the door. “Kat? It’s Justin.”
I shot up from the toilet, and would have spun back to the mirror if I didn’t flop over onto the floor. I gasped, which came out squeakier than I’d hoped. When I glanced down, a pink fish tail stared back at me.
I’d lost my legs.
Chapter 5
In Brazil, some consider the encantado an enchantress. Some consider her mesmerizing, and they desire to see one as much as they fear it, for she is considered irresistible.
Here’s the thing about those dreams: they’re an illusion. An illusion of a young, beautiful woman.
The true encantado, without pretense or facade, will flop around on the bathroom floor of a coffee shop in Montreal like Darryl Hannah in Splash, but she will not be so graceful, nor so charming.
Because the true encantado form is something between a mermaid and a dolphin, with a mermaid’s general shape—fishlike lower body, human upper body—and a dolphin’s voice. A pink dolphin’s voice. Except we’re much more intelligent—no insult to dolphins, who tend to be kinder.
“One second!” I tried to call, but a series of squeaks came out between my rows of serrated teeth.
Oh yeah—I forgot about the serrated teeth.
All in all, we’re the bizarro mermaids. The ones from your nightmares.
“Kat?” Justin called through the door. “What was that noise?”
That claw had completely nullified my magic; every bit of my illusion had left me, and while I was still Isabella Ramirez on the inside, if Justin were to walk into this bathroom right now, he wouldn’t see anyone he recognized.
He would only see a creature. A fish.
Ugly. Abhorrent. A fearful, strange thing.
He kept knocking, saying Kat’s name. And I knew, with a leap of the heart, that he wouldn’t just leave. He wouldn’t go until he felt everything was set right, until he heard Kat’s voice saying, “It’s OK, Justin. I’m OK.”
What a thing, to have someone care about you like that.
I stilled on the floor. If only I could regain her voice, I could tell him everything was OK, that I needed more time. I closed my eyes, willing my magic to work. After I had assumed an illusion once, I could shift between forms almost seamlessly, only burning a second or two of my life to bring back a previous illusion.
I tried to bring back Katrina. Normally I’d feel the magic working, flitting over me like a static breeze, but I felt a whole lot of nothing.
And now there was someone else in the hallway—a young woman’s voice. One of the baristas, asking Justin if everything was all right with me. She offered to get a key and open the door.
I wanted to cry, “No!” but it would have only produced another squeak.
So I squeezed my eyes shut harder, tensing my entire body. This time the magic came leaking out, drop by drop, like water from a faucet.
Goddess Yemoja! My magic was slowly returning.
I heard the barista’s keyring jangling outside the door, and I tested my voice. “Hey!”
The keys paused. “Kat?” came Justin’s voice. “You sound … strange.”
Well, I might have been higher-pitched, but at least I was forming words. “I’m fine. I just need a few more minutes,” I said. “This coffee is really hard to get out of white cotton.”
“I’ll just wait at the table for you, then.”
The magic was leaking out a little faster now, but not fast enough for me to finish the illusion while we were talking. Not nearly fast enough.
“No—I don’t want to keep you waiting. Let’s just meet up later, OK?”
“It’s fine. I don’t mind waiting, Kat. It’s been so long since I’ve seen you.”
“Just go,” I pleaded. “I’ll find you in an hour or two.”
“I’ll be in class in an hour—“
“Then I’ll find you later tonight at the house!” I snapped.
He didn’t answer right away, and I wanted to let him know that this wasn’t me—I wasn’t the angry type. These were just extenuating, fishlike circumstances, and I really couldn’t have him seeing me in this state.
But I didn’t say any of those things. I could sense Justin debating what to do while I lay on the floor in a writhing ball of anxiety and shame. In the end, he only said, “OK, Kat. See you later.” And I heard the door close behind him. I guess their fight had left Justin wary of outright disobeying her. Whatever happened had happened because he ignored her boundaries or demands.
As much as I wanted to yell out for him to come back, what was done was done. He was gone, and I had successfully managed to alienate the one person I wanted to be near.
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Twenty minutes later, after a great deal of flopping and cursing, Katrina Darling finally emerged from the bathroom. Except this Katrina Darling looked like hell. Her shirt had a tear, her hair was out of place, and she had a hollow-eyed look like she’d seen some things.
At least I’d been able to get the illusion back.
When I emerged from the hallway, I peered around the cafe. The place looked exactly as it had when Justin and I arrived, which was to say, no old Brazilian women with claws.
And t
hen the thought struck me: Brazilian. That woman had spoken Portuguese and she’d had the Mark of the Huntress. That particular curse was unique to just a few villages of the Amazon rainforest, and provided exceptional power. But more importantly, she was of my culture, and perhaps of my past.
I hurried out of the cafe and headed straight for my dorm. Aimee would be in right now, taking her midday nap—or at least, she would be if she had recovered from the whole giant wolf attack.
On that note, I thought as I came into the stairwell and started climbing, I hadn’t checked on her after everything had happened in the dining hall. Instead, I had gone straight to Justin’s place and forgotten about my roommate entirely.
I made a face; I was being a terrible best friend.
“Please be OK, please be OK,” I whispered as I emerged into our hallway and yanked out my room key from my bag. I didn’t hear anything on the other side of the door.
When I opened the dorm room door, I let a sigh. Aimee was there in bed, sleeping. She rolled over when I came in, bleary eyes opening. “Hey...” Then she sat up with a suddenness that made me stop hard. “Katrina?”
Right—I hadn’t told her about my new illusion.
“Aimee,” I said, putting my hands out, “let me explain.”
Her eyebrows came together. “How did you get in here? Why do you have a key?”
“It’s Isa,” I said. “It’s your roommate.”
She looked at me like she’d seen a very rare and very extinct creature, and then anger clouded her blue eyes. “Seriously? You burned time to look like Katrina Darling?”
I slumped onto my desk chair. “Please don’t judge me right now. I can’t handle it. Not after the past twenty-four hours.”
She angled herself toward me, the comforter pulling around her. “What happened to your arm?”
I glanced down to where the ribbon of my sleeve revealed the angry cut from the claw. “An old Brazilian woman slashed me with a foot-long claw in the coffee shop.”
One of the things I liked best about Aimee: she had a strong nurturing instinct. As soon as I’d said it, instead of questioning me further, she leapt from the bed and went straight for the first-aid kit. “Take your shirt off.”