Fantasy Life

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Cassie got out of the car as Emily let herself out the passenger side. Cassie was a bit shaky—she hadn’t eaten any of her lunch—and she was tired after the mental journey.

  She was also a bit shell-shocked, not at all certain why Roseluna had picked her out or why she had come to Cassie with all those truthful-sounding lies. Cassie wanted to talk with her mother more than anything, but she didn’t want to do it on the phone, and certainly not in front of other people.

  Athena might have more than suspicions about what was going on. She might actually have reasons for what the selkies were doing.

  Cassie had been thinking so hard about her mother that she wasn’t surprised when she saw Athena cross the street, heading down the sidewalk toward the center of town. At first, Cassie thought she had imagined her—after all, Athena had insisted on working dispatch this morning, even though she hadn’t gotten any sleep at all.

  Emily’s presence disturbed her, which was all Cassie could get out of Athena’s emotions without feeling as if she were prying into her mother’s thoughts. Emily and something else, the touch end of a prophecy, or the feeling of a betrayal.

  Or maybe Cassie only felt that way because Roseluna had obviously been preying on her memories to weave her lies. Daray might have made his family promise to protect Cassie, but she doubted it. Daray hadn’t seen much, if any, of his family after he’d married Cassie.

  At least, not until the day he died.

  She shivered.

  “You okay, Grandma?” Emily had reached her side.

  Cassie nodded and extended her hand. Emily took it, instantly calming her. There was nothing like the simple trust of a child, even if the child herself was one of the most complex people Cassie had ever met.

  They walked toward the center of town. A crowd of people was lined up in the middle of the street, and it took Cassie a moment to realize the crowd was lined up on both sides. Two different people, one a teenager, the other an adult male, were filming the ground with their camcorders.

  A TV cameraman was standing at the edge of the Anchor Harbor Wayside, filming something on the beach. A woman stood beside him, struggling with her shoulder-length, blondish hair in the wind.

  Athena stopped just short of the Wayside, took in the cameraman, and sighed visibly. Cassie frowned.

  She kept a firm grasp on Emily’s hand and crossed the highway. The air smelled of brine and fish and exhaust, a combination that made her empty stomach churn. She slipped between two SUVs and headed to the sidewalk on the beach side.

  There she saw two sheriff’s cars drive down the beach, a sight that shocked her. Even though the beaches were designated highways in Oregon, cars weren’t allowed on them. The highway designation made the beaches public land and prevented people from owning the sand. It was one of Oregon’s many quirks, and something she loved about the place—something that made it very different from California or Florida where the beaches could be blocked off, and no one, save the very rich, could walk on them.

  “What’s going on?” Emily asked.

  “I don’t know,” Cassie said. She stepped off the sidewalk and onto the beach grass, bringing Emily with her.

  That was when she saw the wide streak of blackness making its way out of the ocean. For a moment, she thought it was oil, and her eyes filled. But she blinked hard, and the illusion vanished.

  There were things in that black streak—creatures from sand pixies to gator-frogs, things she’d never seen onshore before. What were they doing? It looked like an exodus, but it felt too calm. It was almost like a march.

  A protest march.

  The anger she had felt at Roseluna flooded her, and Cassie had to beat it back. This was part of that plan that Roseluna had put into place. Shutting down the highway seemed like an outrageous display for the fantasylife, which had always told the Buckinghams that magical creatures should be kept secret.

  But Cassie was beginning to realize she was now in a completely different world, one she didn’t entirely understand.

  The sheriff’s cars eased toward the stream. Cassie’s queasy stomach got worse when she realized that the cars were going to drive over the creatures.

  “You can’t let them do that!” Emily shouted, and tugged her hand away from Cassie’s. But Cassie had had a split second of warning, and she grabbed Emily’s elbow, pulling her back.

  “You’re not going to be able to stop them,” Cassie said.

  Emily’s scream had caught Athena’s attention. Her shoulders slumped even farther, then rose and fell in another sigh. She turned away from the beach and walked toward them, moving with purpose.

  Cassie brought Emily close, holding her against her hips.

  The cars had almost reached the stream. From Cassie’s angle, she couldn’t tell if the cars were driving on the stream yet or were just close.

  Then the honking started.

  It so startled Cassie that she jumped. Emily jumped too, and her little body tensed. She reached up and grabbed Cassie’s hand, holding her in place.

  The stream broke, as if in confusion, then reassembled itself. But, Cassie noted, the far edge of the stream had moved in an arc, away from the cars.

  The cars continued forward slowly, honking as they went. The stream moved just ahead of them, as if it didn’t want to get anywhere near the noise.

  Emily grabbed Cassie’s arm so tightly that she was cutting off the circulation. Her breathing was ragged, and Cassie could feel an echo of something—pain—radiating from Emily.

  “Does it hurt you, baby?” Cassie asked. “The sound?”

  She wasn’t sure how it could—Emily had grown up in a city. She was used to city noises. But Emily whirled, burying her face in Cassie’s stomach.

  Cassie put her hands over Emily’s ears. The girl shuddered, and Cassie leaned into her, as if she could protect the child with her body.

  “Here,” Athena said as she approached. “Let me.”

  She ran her hands over Emily’s ears, and Emily leaned back, looking up with gratitude.

  “What did you do, Great-Grandma?”

  “Restored your human hearing, child. You can’t go about as if you’re a selkie.” Athena’s voice was not gentle. She had no calm when she spoke to Emily.

  Cassie sent a thought to her mother, asking her to be kinder to her great-granddaughter, but Athena acted as if she hadn’t heard.

  The honking was still continuing on the beach. The cars were slowly moving forward. The tourists who had gotten out of the cars had moved to the railing on the wayside, watching the movement below.

  The TV crew had moved to the side as well, the reporter talking as if she had a lot of interesting things to say. Cassie felt her skin crawl. News of this event might not shake up Portland, but eventually someone would pick it up—the Enquirer, the SciFi Channel someone—and Anchor Bay would never be the same.

  Emily let go of Cassie, taking her hand once more. They started down the sidewalk, heading toward the crowd at the Wayside—like lemmings, Cassie thought. But she didn’t say so.

  She was emotionally exhausted, unwilling to do much more fighting. At least that knocking in her head had quit. She finally had silence—inside, anyway.

  Then the cars broke the stream in half. The creatures that they pushed away from the highway no longer arched, no longer hooked up with the last of the group that headed across 101. The break was still on the beach, but eventually it would reach the highway itself.

  The tourists seemed to realize it too and scrambled for their cars. The TV camera turned on them, the lights illuminating faces that seemed both eager and frightened.

  Cassie wondered if the people looked much different from the creatures fleeing the ocean floor.

  “Where’re they trying to divert them to?” Cassie asked Athena.

  “I don’t know,” Athena said. “I just got here. But I’m guessing that if they’re not trying to turn them back to the ocean, they’re heading toward the drainage pipes. That way the creatures ca
n cross the highway without stopping traffic.”

  “Are they all the same kind of thing?” Emily asked. “Like Roseluna?”

  Athena looked sharply at her, then raised her head and stared at Cassie. “Roseluna?”

  Cassie nodded. “She found us at the Trawler.”

  “No wonder Emily had selkie ears. She was triggered by that—woman.”

  The pause was just long enough to remind Cassie of old arguments. How inappropriate her relationship with Daray was; how Daray wasn’t really human; how it had been a male selkie’s role from time immemorial to impregnate a human female to add diversity to the selkie line.

  “She probably was triggered,” Cassie said. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”

  And she should have. It showed how much Roseluna’s visit had disturbed her that she hadn’t checked Emily to see what else had been triggered.

  “What did she want?” Athena asked.

  The honking was growing fainter, drowned out by the sounds of engines revving. No one stood outside the cars now. Only the TV reporter and her cameraman, catching the human response.

  The last of the creatures were crossing the highway. A trail of silvery goo covered the asphalt. The goo glowed in the sun, the way a slug trail caught the light.

  Cassie shivered. “She wanted to warn us.”

  Athena sighed. “Too late.”

  “Not about this,” Cassie said. Then she told her mother the whole story, including the fact that the Walter Aggie wasn’t leaking.

  “You’re sure of that?” Athena asked. “Because if it was, that would explain what happened to Lyssa last night.”

  “The tar ball?” Cassie asked.

  Emily was watching all of this as if it concerned her deeply. It probably did.

  The cars were moving forward, and other cars, heading north, were crawling over the slime trail. No tires appeared to be melting, which was so far so good.

  “The tar ball and the attack,” Athena said. “It was another warning.”

  “They asked her for help,” Cassie said.

  “Which bothered me right from the start.” Athena put her hands on her hips, watching the cars go by. “Why go to Lyssa when she had newly arrived? Why not come to you or me, the ones pledged to take care of the refuge?”

  “Lyssa’s a Buckingham,” Cassie said. “Maybe they were just waiting for someone to go deep enough in that closet.”

  Athena shook her head. “I always make a point of going in there. It is a contact space.”

  Cassie always made a point of avoiding it for the same reason. The last thing she wanted—or needed—was contact.

  “No.” Athena turned and faced the ocean. She put her hands on her hips. “If what you believe is true—”

  “It is, Great-Grandma,” Emily said. “I was there. I felt it too.”

  Athena nodded, to acknowledge that she’d heard Emily, but didn’t respond directly.

  “If it’s true,” Athena said again, “then they contacted Lyssa because she’s part selkie. They wanted help with their plan, not with the fact that lives were being lost to oil.”

  “Lives?” Cassie said.

  Athena glanced at the wayside. The only people left in it now were the reporter and the corner, Hamilton Denne. He was ignoring the reporter, his hands on his hips, as he stared at the trail coming out of the ocean.

  “Zeke found a dead water sprite last night. She had ingested too much oil. At least, that’s what I understand.” Athena frowned. “You know, with the two dead bodies, the conversation you had, and this, we would have thought that the Walter Aggie was leaking. We would have taken some kind of action, and it would have been wrong, but not in a way that would have harmed any of the refuge. I still don’t understand this.”

  “She kept mentioning Daray and the Walter Aggie,” Cassie said slowly.

  “So you don’t think this is about freedom, like she told you.”

  “Oh, I do,” Cassie said. “But they could have left the refuge in a nondramatic fashion. So I think freedom is only one small part of this.”

  “What’s the other part?” Athena asked.

  “Oh, that’s simple,” Cassie said, looking out at the sea. It was strangely calm. The only problem was the black stream still pouring out of the water. “The other part is revenge.”

  “The Walter Aggie happened thirty years ago,” Athena said. “They’re bound to be over it.”

  Cassie shook her head. “Some of us will never get over it, Mom. No matter how hard we try.”

  DIGGING INTO THE PAST

  The Second Layer

  Thirty-Four

  January 1970

  Cliffside House. North Tower

  He was there beside her, warm and naked in her bed. His arm stretched across her stomach, his legs tangled in her own. His pelt hung on the bedpost, which she teased him about, saying that she could keep him forever if she wanted to, just by hiding the pelt.

  Daray used to smile at her, that winsome smile, one that lit his dark, dark eyes, and say, “You love me too much to do that.”

  And she did.

  So when she woke, startled, out of a very sound sleep, he was holding her. She was convinced the house was going to fall into the sea, but it was a dream. It had to be a dream.

  It couldn’t be anything else, not with Daray’s long hair mingling with her own, the musky smell of sex still in the air, the odor of incense failing to cover it all.

  “White Rabbit” still played on the hi-fi, Grace Slick’s voice imploring them all to go ask Alice. Daray loved the song, so fascinated by it that he insisted Cassie play it again and again, loving the magical content of it.

  She tried to tell him it was a drug song, and he said it didn’t matter. Psychedelic was psychedelic, man, no matter how you achieved it.

  She thought, as she awoke, that his eyes glistened in the candlelight, but when she said his name, ever so softly, he didn’t respond. His breathing was heavy and even, and she wondered how she had ever thought him awake.

  She slipped out of bed and went to the window, but didn’t see anything. Then she went out on the widow’s walk and saw the ship.

  Daray didn’t wake up that night, not with the storm, the winds, the terrible seas. He slept while Cassie ran blindly toward the stairs, when she met with her mother and Daray’s father, and hurried, to try to save the refuge, the people below.

  Daray did nothing, even though his father had asked about him.

  He didn’t wake until dawn, then came stumbling through Cliffside House, finally finding Cassie still sitting on the stairs, her heart pounding with a panic she didn’t know how to shake.

  His arms wrapped around her, and he rocked her, trying to soothe her. But she had seen something in his eyes, a sadness, an understanding, maybe even a fear.

  Something she later tried to forget.

  THE DEVIL AND

  THE DEEP BLUE SEA

  Thirty-Five

  Highway 101

  The Village of Anchor Bay

  “Grandma?”

  “Cassandra?”

  The voices came from far away. For a moment, Cassie wondered what other people were doing in the staircase at Cliffside House. Her throat was raw from smoke. Her eyes burned, and Daray had his arms around her.

  No matter how scared she was, she didn’t want to leave.

  “Cassandra, what are you doing?”

  It was the fear in her mother’s voice that brought her back. Athena wasn’t afraid of anything. She was strong and tall and powerful. Even when she had been running to the sea, she was in charge.

  Cassie blinked, and the smoke-burning went away. Then she cleared her throat, and the greasy taste of oil, petroleum and fire, was gone.

  “How did you do that?” Athena asked, her expression pale.

  Emily didn’t say anything. She still clutched Cassie’s hand.

  The honking continued, but only one car was doing it now. The road was empty except for an occasional passing car and the slime trai
l.

  And Lyssa had come out of the school, her walk so like Daray’s that it broke Cassie’s heart.

  “Cassandra, are you all right?”

  Cassie finally made herself look at Athena. Athena, who was three decades older, just as tall, just as strong, but somehow not as powerful.

  “I’m fine, Mother,” Cassie said, and even to her own ears her voice sounded strange.

  “What was that?” Athena asked.

  “What was what?”

  “The pictures.” Emily squeezed her hand. “We made pictures again.”

  Cassie felt her cheeks heat. They had seen Daray? And her—that night when everything changed?

  “The night the Walter Aggie went down,” Athena said. “Your headlong rush down the stairs just played for us like a movie. I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “I can’t.” This time, Cassie’s voice sounded more like her own. “At least, not alone. That’s me and Emily, together.”

  “You and Emily,” Athena said, as if resigned. Then she crouched in front of Emily. “What kind of powers do you have, child?”

  “Powers?” Emily’s grip became so tight in Cassie’s hand that the circulation cut off. “I don’t have powers.”

  “The ability to make pictures. The selkie hearing. The—”

  “Mother.” Cassie’s voice was sharp, a warning. She didn’t want Athena to antagonize Emily—not because Cassie was afraid of Emily, but because Emily was, in her own way, as emotionally exhausted as Cassie was.

  Athena gave Cassie that flat, measuring look, the one that she always used when she thought Cassie was being stupid. Athena opened her mouth, probably to ask more questions, when Cassie tugged Emily forward.

  “C’mon, Em,” Cassie said. “Let’s go see your mom.”

  “Mom?” Emily looked away from Athena. “Mom’s here?”

  Cassie nodded. “Over by the school.”

  They walked around Athena, who glared at Cassie. Cassie ignored her. She didn’t want to think about her mother or her mother’s problems at the moment.

  The coroner, Hamilton Denne, was striding up the sidewalk. His khaki pants were spattered with shiny goo from the creature stream, and his hair, which used to be his best feature, was ragged from neglect.