Fantasy Life

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The reading would be fairly simple. Cassie didn’t want to tell the boy’s secrets in front of his mother—the woman didn’t need to know that her son had manipulated her to get inside this building.

  But talking about other things would be difficult as well, given the boy’s nature. He was sweet. He had a gentle goodness that went deeper than Cassie had ever seen. He was about a year away from middle school, where he’d learn to hide that goodness so that the other boys wouldn’t call him names. But he would use it.

  Cassie’s trick was to talk to him about his nature without calling attention to his own gift. The last thing she wanted to do was stifle it by embarrassing him or shaming him or putting it into his mother’s head that the poor little boy always had to take the “right” way out of every circumstance.

  “Well?” the mother asked, and she sounded a little nervous, as if Cassie’s silence had frightened her. The mother’s tone frightened Cassie a little. She didn’t want to have a true believer here. That would cause the boy even more problems.

  Cassie gave the mother a warm smile. “It’ll take just a moment.”

  Then she traced the lines on the boy’s palm, what she could see of them through the sand and accumulated dirt. That had been another flaw in her plan—being this close to the beach meant she always had to deal with sand and dirty children. Next year, if she decided to do this again, she would find a different location, one that—

  Funnels, funnels, funnels of water mixed with flames and screams and—sirens, a lot of sirens, from every direction, more and more sirens—she couldn’t hear because of the sirens pounding, pounding, pounding . . . and then she got the sense of someone else, two someones—Lyssa, overwhelmed, terrified, lost—and someone else—Emily? She’s so big now, and so powerful—

  Cassie opened her eyes. The mother was staring at her, her face pale. The sirens were real. They were outside, blaring down Highway 101, the sounds of summer on the Oregon Coast. Some tourist probably got himself in trouble—

  “What was that?” the mother asked.

  Oh, damn. Cassie hoped she hadn’t spoken out loud. She did that sometimes when she got nailed by an outside vision. Her heart was pounding, and she loosened her grip on the poor little boy’s hand. Sweet thing that he was, he hadn’t said a word.

  Cassie made herself smile. “It was a flash,” she said. “Your son here is a wonderful child. He has a strong sense of ethics. You won’t ever have to worry about him.”

  “That was your flash?” the woman asked, as if she couldn’t believe it.

  “Yes,” Cassie lied. “I saw pieces of his future. Once he gets beyond the usual pains of adolescence—”

  Usual for someone a shade too kind, without a ruthless edge.

  “—he’ll go on to do some very good things for the people around him.”

  That was more than she intended to say, but she had no time for subtle language. The mother and her son would have to work out the expectations side of this.

  Cassie gave a few more platitudes, a review of the boy’s history as she had seen it—and she watched the mother pale even further as it all turned out to be correct—and then she closed the boy’s hand and gently set it on the table.

  He looked at her for the first time, and she realized that he wasn’t afraid of her. If anything, he seemed a bit in awe.

  “That’s it?” the mother said.

  Cassandra nodded. The sirens had grown quite loud, and she was getting a serious headache. She had to make a phone call before the post-vision migraine hit.

  “Wow,” the mother said. “That’s amazing for ten dollars. What do you do for forty-five?”

  Cassie made herself smile again. “Usually a bit more, but I rarely get a flash, like I did with your son. I had to share it.”

  “Without charging us for it?” The mother seemed stunned.

  “He is a special child,” Cassie said without lying. More people should have children as nice as this one.

  The mother stood and slipped her hand into the pocket of her jeans. She took out some crumpled bills and pried one out of the mess. She peered at it for a moment, then set it beside the crystal ball.

  “Thanks ever so much,” she said, and took her son’s hand. They headed out of the shop.

  Cassie rested one hand on the table. She had to pull herself together, pull her defenses back in place. They felt as if they had shattered.

  Through the gauze-covered window, she saw the mother put an arm around her son. The boy grinned up at her, and Cassie got the sense that he was pleased with the afternoon.

  She staggered to the door, flipped the lock, and put out the Closed sign. Then she wandered into the small back room where she kept her microwave, her mugs, and her teas, as well as the herbal remedies she mixed herself for ailments caused by what her mother called her powers.

  Cassie took a small headache draft, hoping it wasn’t too late. She might have to go home, take some real medicine, and climb into bed.

  But first she had things to do.

  She picked up the phone and called the sheriff’s dispatch. Athena Buckingham answered with a curt “Sheriff’s office.”

  “Mother?” Cassie said. “Dial home. Find out if we have a message from Lyssa.”

  “Lyssa? Why would she call?”

  “I got a flash. Something’s wrong with Emily. Something horrible.”

  “I’m on it,” Athena said, and hung up.

  Cassie hung up too, then grabbed herself a glass of water. The headache was receding just a little. She sank into a chair and dialed Lyssa’s home number in Wisconsin from memory.

  The phone rang and rang, but the ringing sounded off. And then, just as Cassie was about to hang up, an automated voice said, The number you have reached has been disconnected. If you have dialed this number in error, please hang up and try again.

  Cassie shut off her phone. She hadn’t reached the number in error. There was no reason for Lyssa to shut off her phone. But then, they hadn’t talked in nearly a year.

  Lyssa hated having Cassie in her life. Mostly it was because of the psychic connection. Lyssa had felt as if she had no privacy as a child. Even after she’d learned how to block most of Cassie’s mental probes, she still wanted nothing to do with her mother.

  It had gotten worse a year ago, or perhaps Lyssa had become blunt for the first time in her life.

  I know you can raise a barrier against me and my emotions, Mother. Please do it. I don’t want you to call every time I cut my finger.

  There was more to that request than cut fingers and prying mothers. Something was going drastically wrong with Lyssa’s life, and she didn’t want Cassie to know about it.

  Cassie had made the mistake of flying out to see Lyssa when Emily was born. Lyssa hadn’t told her that she was pregnant, so all Cassie had felt was the sudden extreme pain. She had booked a flight and arrived at the University Hospitals and Clinic in Madison just as the baby did.

  Instead of joy at the birth, Lyssa had felt angry and violated, as if the experience she had had was tainted somehow by Cassie’s presence.

  Cassie had tried to ignore that, for Emily was a little miracle. Not just the ten fingers and toes and the perfect little face, but the shape of her face, the deep black of her hair and eyes, proved to Cassie that her husband, Daray, lived on in the granddaughter he would never ever meet.

  It was because of Emily that Lyssa kept Cassie in her life. Or, more precisely, because of Emily’s paternal grandparents. The Walters family wanted to deny that they were related in any way to Lyssa.

  Lyssa had always thought it was because on the social scale she was a nobody, and Cassie had never disabused her of that notion. But the truth of it was that with the Walters family unavailable, Daray dead, and Lyssa an only child, Emily’s extended family became her maternal grandmother, Cassie, and her great-grandmother Athena. And because of Lyssa’s refusal to return to Anchor Bay, their visits were limited to trips to Wisconsin or family vacations in specific spots.r />
  Always, those trips were without Athena.

  Can’t leave Anchor Bay without a Buckingham, she would say. And even though Cassie wanted to disagree, she couldn’t.

  Athena was right.

  Cassie tried dialing again, assuming that she might have scrambled the numbers because of her headache. She hadn’t. She got the same message—the phone had been disconnected. And recently enough for that message to remain. Phone companies changed messages like that after three months.

  What was going on?

  Cassie felt like she was going to betray her daughter if she brought the barrier down—she had promised after all—but that flash had been so strong, so filled with terror.

  Cassie held the phone, willing it to ring. And, to her surprise, it did.

  She answered, a bit tentatively.

  “No message,” Athena said without a preamble. “What kind of flash?”

  Cassie tried to explain, but as always, words failed her. Then she told her mother that the phone had been disconnected.

  “I can find them,” Cassie said, “but it means breaking my promise to Lyssa. In an emergency, I’m thinking that maybe that’s okay.”

  “It won’t be to Lys,” Athena said. “Let me try first. If the phone’s disconnected, then maybe she has a new number. I can find that through the office.”

  “What if it’s worse than that, Mom? What if—”

  “Cassandra, phones are disconnected for two reasons: nonpayment and moving. Since she’s married to a Walters, I’m going to assume that payment wasn’t the issue. So they’ve moved.”

  “From their dream house?”

  Athena sighed, and Cassie got a whisper of something else, a sadness perhaps. But Cassie didn’t pursue it. When Cassie was a baby, Athena had gotten a protection spell against Cassie’s mental abilities. The spell had long since worn away, but not before Cassie was old enough to understand what it was and why it existed.

  Cassie had honored her mother’s privacy ever since.

  “Cass, you’ve gotta start reading the gossip rags. You learn things.”

  Cassandra felt cold. She brushed her hair out of her face. “Like what?”

  “Rumors that might be true.”

  “Don’t play with me, Mom. I don’t know if we have the time.”

  Athena shuffled in her chair. It made a familiar squeaking sound, and Cassie could picture her, back straight, her aristocratic features in their primmest position. If someone walked into the sheriff’s office at that moment, Athena’s expression would scare them away.

  “Cass, there were rumors about a year ago that Reginald Walters was mentally ill. He was at some funny farm in Austin, getting his brain rewired.”

  Cassie gripped the phone tightly. She almost corrected her mother—fanny farm, brain rewired, they weren’t things people said in polite company. And then she realized that she was objecting, as she always did, to her mother’s words when it was the content that disturbed her.

  “Do you think that’s true?” Cassie asked, her voice almost a whisper. But she could answer the question herself. Even though she had raised a barrier to Lyssa’s emotions and, because of Lyssa’s request, Emily’s too, Cassie could still feel a vague sense of them, almost like the background hum of the ocean.

  She had the feeling if that hum went away, they would be gone—killed in a car accident or taken from her by the violence that seemed so much a part of American life.

  So far the hum had remained. But it had changed in the last year. It had become sadder, angrier, and frightened. Very very frightened. Cassie had used all the restraint she had to keep her curiosity at bay, figuring if things got bad enough, Lyssa would call.

  But maybe Cassie was wrong about that. She always tried to take the best view of her relationship with her daughter.

  Lyssa had always had a strong sense of independence, that was all.

  Surely, she would come home if she needed to. She was stubborn, but not stupid.

  Right?

  “Yes, Cass, I think that’s true,” Athena said. “I did some digging at slow times at work, and I found a lot of things that supported the rumor.”

  Cassie twisted a strand of her black hair around her forefinger, a habit she hadn’t indulged in since she was a girl.

  “Why wouldn’t she have called?” Cassie heard the plaintive note in her voice and wished it weren’t there. But her mother already knew how isolated Cassie felt. It was the story of her entire life. “If they were having problems that serious, we could have helped. Even if she didn’t want any magical assistance, she would need help with Emily, right? She would call us for that, surely.”

  “Cassie.”

  All it took was that single word, filled with compassion. Cassie blinked, her eyes burning, and tugged on her hair, freeing it from her finger.

  “Sometimes you need family, Mom, no matter what your disagreement with them is.” Cassie knew this one from personal experience.

  “You forget,” Athena said, her voice gentle. “Lyssa always wanted to be normal. Bringing us in would just reinforce how abnormal she really is.”

  Cassie bit her lower lip, tasted blood, and made herself stop. “Find her, Mom. Maybe you should just tell her that you saw those gossip rags and you were wondering if the stories were true.”

  “Cass, that would work with someone who isn’t familiar with your talents, but Lyssa knows them better than anyone. She’ll know you had a flash and that you sent me to find out what’s going on.”

  Cassie was gripping the phone so hard her fingers hurt. It took all of her strength to keep from losing her rigid control on her emotions. She and Athena had had one version of this discussion every year of Lyssa’s life.

  Athena never got between the two of them, not even when she could have done some good.

  “Mom.” Cassie made sure her voice was even and calm, even though she wasn’t feeling that way. “The flash—it was really scary. Lots of violence and horrible things. Please. Help me.”

  “I’ll see what turns up with the department’s connections,” Athena said. “I’m not going to promise anything else.”

  Fine, Cassie wanted to say. Then I’ll just do it myself. But she held that impulse in reserve. If Athena didn’t find anything, Cassie would break her promise to Lyssa.

  After all, a woman could only be pushed so far.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Cassie said, and hung up before she really spoke her mind. Then she set the phone back in its cradle, got up, and walked to the main room.

  She picked up the crystal ball, wondering if it really worked. There was so much magic in the world, so much she didn’t know about it, and she had studied it every day of her life.

  If only she could see a half a year into the future. Or a half a day into the future.

  Or if she could have perfect vision instead of these flashes.

  What she needed to know was so very simple.

  She needed to know if her daughter and her granddaughter were all right.

  Six

  Whale Rock. Oregon

  The False Colors smelled like fish. The odor hit Gabriel as he pulled open the heavy oak door, and he almost turned around and headed back into the parking lot.

  It would be a day or two before he could eat fish again. That dead creature had smelled fishy, and the scent lingered on him, even though he hadn’t so much as touched her. He wondered how Hamilton Denne would smell after he finished the autopsy, then decided not to think about it.

  Denne had asked Gabriel to meet him for dinner in the False Colors, a restaurant in the town of Whale Rock. The coroner’s office was in Whale Rock, even though Seavy Village was the county seat. That the coroner worked out of Whale Rock showed just how much pull Denne really had.

  Denne lived in a gated community just south of Whale Rock, and had argued, apparently, that Whale Rock was a lot more convenient for his office than Seavy Village. It wasn’t just because he lived in Whale Rock; it was also because Whale Rock was more or less in
the center of the county. Whenever Denne had to report to a suspicious-death scene, he would have less driving time if he was coming from Whale Rock.

  Gabriel figured that driving time was the least of Denne’s worries. Mostly, Gabriel believed, Denne just wanted the privacy of an office that was difficult to get to. State officials often visited Seavy Village; they rarely made it all the way to Whale Rock.

  Denne’s office was filled with marvelous toys and equipment no Oregon county, no matter how wealthy, could afford. Denne had set the place up as his own private laboratory, and he protected it as vigilantly as any mad scientist. Gabriel could count on one hand the number of times he had been allowed inside the place.

  But Gabriel was used to Denne, and so, when Denne left the beach and proposed they meet at the False Colors, Gabriel had agreed. He now knew better than to argue that they had to get together in the coroner’s office. Denne would show him pictures, and maybe, if Gabriel played his cards right, Denne would let him see the interesting parts of the body itself.

  If Gabriel could handle that fish smell.

  He exhaled through his nostrils and stepped deeper into the False Colors, willing the fish smell away. It seemed to have faded just in the moment of his pause. Now the air smelled of frying foods, garlic, and beer.

  Those were the scents he associated with the False Colors anyway. The restaurant served some of the best food on the Oregon Coast, but only the locals knew that. Tourists wandered in and, in local parlance, ran away screaming.

  The decor wasn’t that bad, and the incidents of screaming never really happened, but it was true that tourists usually only visited the False Colors once. That was because the restaurant’s pirate theme had been seriously overdone. The black-and-white skull and crossbones over the door would have been fine by itself, but combined with the skulls over the fireplace, the sea chanteys with lyrics about death and mayhem blaring from the speakers, and the wooden furniture so rustic that a diner occasionally got splinters, the place seemed forbidding in summer sunshine. Add the rain and windstorms of the winter, and the False Colors seemed like a setting in a Hitchcock movie.