Fantasy Life

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  He didn’t look like the same man he had been when he had been married to some Portland society woman. His features had softened, as if he were happier, but his clothing had deteriorated, as if he no longer took pride in his appearance.

  “Cassandra,” he said as if he were interviewing her. “What can you tell me about this?”

  “About what?” she asked. Emily was gazing at the school, longingly. Lyssa hadn’t seen them yet.

  The reporter was still standing at the wayside, talking to Gabriel Schelling, who seemed distracted. And the honking continued on the beach.

  “About this stream of fantasylife. This exodus. Do you think they’re acting like wildlife fleeing in front of a fire?”

  Cassie put her free hand to her neck. The memory of the flame-vision returned as a taste, an acrid, burning taste that scarred the back of her throat.

  “No,” she said.

  “You don’t think they’re fleeing?”

  “No, I can’t tell you anything.” She slipped past him, tugging Emily with her. Cassie was a bit amazed at herself. It was her day to be rude, apparently. Her day to tell people, as best she could, to leave her alone.

  Emily had to run to keep up with her. Cassie slowed down as she approached the wayside. The cameraman was still filming, his hand at the front of his lens, obviously zooming in and out on the creature stream.

  Behind her, Cassie heard Denne call to Athena, saying something about how he needed to talk with her.

  “Mommy looks scared,” Emily said.

  Cassie looked across the street. Lyssa was standing near the slime trail, her head bent, her hands clasped behind her back. She didn’t look so much scared as unnerved.

  Then she looked up and her gaze met Cassie’s. In it, Cassie saw blame. She felt herself flush, felt a memory rise—the knocking all throughout her conversation with Roseluna. Cassie had failed to recognize the sound.

  It had been Lyssa. Lyssa, asking for help after all those years of silence.

  Cassie stumbled into the road, Emily making a sound of surprise as she got dragged along. A car zoomed by, narrowly missing them, but Cassie didn’t care. She ran to Lyssa, who stayed behind the slime trail, watching.

  When Cassie reached Azalea Road, she paused. The parking lot was a disaster. It stank of dead fish, and the slime was everywhere.

  Not just slime, but bodies too, flattened and emptied as if they had fallen from a great height.

  All of the cars were covered in goo.

  “That’s our car!” Emily said, pointing. There was real loss in her voice.

  Cassie squinted, followed Emily’s finger, and finally saw the Bug. It was pearlish white and green with slime, and many bodies lay around it. Only the back end had any blue showing at all. The roof looked as if it had caved in.

  The driver’s door was open, and no alarms tinged. The car seemed dead.

  And it was obvious that Lyssa had been inside it. Lyssa, alone while those things crawled over her car. Lyssa, calling for help and unable to get it because their links had been shut off, and Cassie had been too dumb to realize that her only child needed her.

  Cassie crossed the parking lot and stayed on her edge of the slime trail. The stink rose from it, and she thought that an appropriate metaphor, given everything Roseluna had told her.

  “I’m sorry,” Cassie said. “I only just realized you were trying to reach me.”

  Lyssa’s face flattened, as if she had cleared the emotion off it. “It’s all right,” Lyssa said. “I managed.”

  Her voice was slightly hoarse, as if her throat was dry. Emily’s hand slipped out of Cassie’s and Emily stepped closer to the slime trail.

  “Mommy?”

  “It’s okay,” Lyssa said. “I think it’s pretty safe to cross, but let me come to you.”

  Cassie watched her daughter pick her way across the goo. Until Roseluna’s visit, Cassie hadn’t realized just how much Lyssa looked like her father. She had Daray’s dark coloring, right down to the tinge of her skin. Her eyes were slightly rounder than normal, and their irises were wider than most. Her pert nose came from the Buckinghams, but her mobile mouth was Daray’s, just like Roseluna’s was.

  Lyssa moved like her father. She spoke with the same deliberation, and she had the same careless passion that he had, as well as an ability to impress people who needed impressing.

  No wonder Cassie hadn’t been able to handle her daughter in those early years. She still couldn’t handle the memory of Daray, and she had seen him every day in her daughter’s face.

  Lyssa reached the dry pavement, her shoes covered. She held up a finger, silently asking Emily to wait, while Lyssa went to a small patch of grass and wiped the goo away.

  “What is that stuff, Mommy?” Emily asked.

  Lyssa shook her head. “Your grandma can probably tell you.”

  But Cassie had no idea. She sighed, feeling slightly dizzy from all the emotional highs and lows of the day. Lyssa was deliberately ignoring her, and Cassie didn’t blame her.

  She didn’t blame her daughter at all.

  Gabriel was watching Lyssa from across the street, worry and longing mixing on his face. Cassie had forgotten what a crush he had had on her daughter. She had forgotten a lot about Lyssa—or never really taken notice, not on a deep level.

  Cassie had done so much wrong. She was beginning to think she had done even more wrong than she had realized.

  The reporter signaled her cameraman and started across the street. Gabriel grabbed her arm, shaking his head, but the reporter just smiled at him. She slipped her arm from his grasp and kept coming.

  Cassie’s stomach churned even more. The reporter was coming to see them.

  “Do you know what’s going on, Mother?” Lyssa asked.

  “Yeah.” Cassie sighed. “The fantasylife has decided to leave the reservation.”

  “What?” Lyssa looked shocked. She had probably never heard her mother be politically incorrect before.

  Cassie shook her head. She didn’t know how to explain, not in the short period of time they had before the reporter got here.

  “Everything’s changed,” Cassie said, “and I’m not really sure how to fix it. I’m not even sure if we should fix it.”

  And then the reporter stopped in front of Lyssa, pasted a smile on her too pretty face, and thrust the microphone forward.

  “So you’re the woman who was stuck in the car,” the reporter said.

  That flat expression covered Lyssa’s face once more. “No,” Lyssa said. “I’m not.”

  Cassie felt shock run through her at the lie. Emily looked over at her grandmother, as if she was wondering if Cassie was going to correct Lyssa.

  “But we saw you—”

  “Did you?” Lyssa said. “I suppose you thought you saw a lot of things today.”

  “We have them on tape,” the reporter said.

  “Which I’m sure makes them all true.” Then Lyssa took Emily’s hand and led her across the street, not looking back.

  The reporter watched her for a moment, then turned to Cassie. “What’s your relationship with that woman?”

  “I wish I knew,” Cassie said, and hurried toward her family on the ocean side of Highway 101.

  Thirty-Six

  Anchor Harbor Wayside

  Gabriel wished he knew Lyssa better. She was walking across the highway, paralleling the slime, her daughter clutching her right hand. They had identical short black hair, as dark as Gabriel had ever seen, but Lyssa’s was spiked from running her fingers through it. Her face was lined with exhaustion, and her clothes were spattered with goo.

  She seemed remarkably calm, considering, and she had handled the reporter like a pro. He wished he had been as good. Nicole Drapier had finally cornered him after he had driven back up the beach, leaving Zeke to complete the honking. Drapier had asked Gabriel about his efforts to drive the creatures off the road.

  He had said some garbage about the ways that improvisation was important on the co
ast, and that a person had to prepare for anything. Then she had asked if he thought the creatures they saw were supernatural.

  He had smiled at her and said of course not. If they were, they would have just disappeared. She had asked some sort of follow-up, a rephrasing of the same question, and he had given her his most condescending look.

  The Oregon Coast is quite gothic, he had said. People not familiar with it see beasties on the waves all the time.

  That response had angered her, and that was when she had left him. Now Nicole Drapier was standing in the school parking lot with her cameraman, looking confused, as if the story had gotten away from her again.

  If only she would leave. The story was about to get bigger, and Gabriel didn’t know how to keep it from her.

  Lyssa reached the parking lot. She held Emily firmly, and Emily didn’t seem to mind. Lyssa’s gaze was on Gabriel, and his breath caught.

  He had no idea how she had become more beautiful over the years. Even with the exhaustion in her eyes, and the slime goo on her clothing, she was still the most interesting woman he had ever seen.

  He would have thought that he could have shaken her over the years, gotten her out of his system, replaced her with someone else. But he hadn’t. Lyssa had gotten to him when he was young, in a way that no one else had been able to do since.

  “You handled that well,” he said as she stopped near him.

  “What?” She looked over her shoulder as if she could see what he had meant.

  “I meant the reporter. But you handled the car well too. I hadn’t realized you were inside.”

  Her smile was tired but sincere. “That’s all right. Looking at that car now, I can see why.”

  “It’s wrecked, Mommy,” Emily said.

  The little girl had panic in her voice. Gabriel gave her a sharp look. It was clear that the car meant something to her, or that it had been important to the family somehow.

  “I’m sure the insurance will cover it,” Lyssa said in a voice that wasn’t certain at all.

  “At least you’re here in Anchor Bay where you really don’t need a car,” Gabriel said.

  Lyssa frowned at the highway.

  “It’s only seven miles long, and a few miles wide. You can walk everywhere if you have to.” His explanation sounded lame, even to him.

  “I suppose,” she said. “I’m used to a city with public transportation.”

  After marrying into such a rich family, she was probably used to a lot of things that Gabriel couldn’t provide. And now her memories of that time were about to get worse.

  He had no idea if he should tell her about the call he had gotten from dispatch just before he’d got out of his car. Nicole Drapier had sidetracked him, and he had been partially glad for it.

  The helicopter landing on the private landing strip outside of town created more problems for Gabriel than he wanted to think about. Mayor Asher avoided problems as best he could. He hadn’t ever come down here, although Gabriel had had him paged.

  He couldn’t imagine how the mayor would deal with Samuel Walters, the head of Walters Petroleum.

  Lyssa drifted past Gabriel, toward the beach. The honking still continued as Zeke kept corralling the creatures toward the drainage system under the hill. She seemed fascinated by the exodus stream pouring out of the ocean. Maybe now that she wasn’t directly threatened by the creatures, they seemed interesting.

  Her daughter stood beside her, still talking softly about the car. Gabriel sighed. He had no idea how to tell them that Samuel Walters was coming.

  He had no idea why Walters was coming. The only thing that Gabriel could think of was that Walters had flown here to see his granddaughter.

  But Gabriel didn’t know why. He also didn’t know how Walters knew Emily was here. Athena had been clear about the estrangement with that side of the family—an estrangement that had happened before Lyssa’s husband had died so mysteriously.

  Was Walters coming to apologize? If so, why had he flown in with so little fanfare, and why hadn’t he contacted the Buckinghams?

  Gabriel knew about this only because Walters had requested an emergency meeting with the local sheriff and the mayor. Maybe he knew something about the oil that was choking the fantasylife. But Gabriel couldn’t think how.

  Denne and Athena were walking toward Gabriel as well. They were deep in conversation, probably about the creatures and what to do about them.

  Gabriel was even more hesitant to tell Athena that Walters was coming. She disapproved of the family so strongly that the topic of Lyssa’s marriage always seemed to infuriate Athena, and her reaction hadn’t gotten better over time.

  Once Gabriel had made the mistake of asking Athena why she didn’t go visit her great-granddaughter. Athena’s eyes had flashed with an anger so deep that she frightened Gabriel.

  Her last name is Walters, Athena had said, then left the room, effectively closing the conversation.

  Her last name is Walters. He shivered, not sure what to do.

  Cassandra Buckingham made her own way across the street, her gaze on her daughter and granddaughter. Cassandra seemed even tenser than usual. Her face was gaunt and lined with fatigue.

  When she saw Gabriel, though, she smiled. “Smart thinking, Sheriff,” she said as she walked past him.

  He assumed she was referring to the creature stream. He shook his head slightly. That had been as much luck as anything. Lyssa was the one who had found the solution, not him.

  Cassandra joined Lyssa and Emily at the railing just as Denne and Athena reached Gabriel’s side.

  “It’s working better than I thought,” Denne said.

  “It’s just going on a lot longer than I expected,” Gabriel said.

  “There’s a lot of magic in that ocean,” Athena said.

  Gabriel looked at her. She seemed sad, defeated, old. Something was leaving her as well. “You okay?”

  She shook her head slightly. “I’ve been better.”

  “Athena seems to believe that the creatures are leaving of their own accord,” Denne said. “That it has nothing to do with the oil.”

  Denne had just provided Gabriel with the opening he needed. This exodus had to do with the oil or Samuel Walters wouldn’t be here.

  Gabriel’s gaze met Athena’s. The powerful woman was still part of her. No matter how tired she was, she still had the ability to terrify him.

  “If it has nothing to do with oil, then what is it about?” Gabriel said.

  “I have no idea,” Athena said. Then she looked across the street and visibly started. Gabriel followed her gaze.

  A slender woman with black hair down to her midthighs stood beside Nicole Drapier. The woman looked familiar. At that moment, she turned toward the Wayside, and Gabriel felt a pang of recognition.

  She looked like Lyssa, an older, darker version of Lyssa.

  “Who’s that?” Gabriel asked.

  Athena sighed. “No one.”

  “It can’t be no one,” Denne said. “She looks just like your granddaughter.”

  Athena shot him a glare so filled with anger that Denne took a step back.

  “Her name is Roseluna,” Athena said, her voice trembling with fury. “And she’s the reason we’re out here today.”

  “She is?” Gabriel couldn’t hide his skepticism. “How is that possible?”

  “She convinced them that life is better out here, that it’s time to take back a world they once considered theirs.” Athena had turned her attention back to the woman.

  “What?” Gabriel asked. “The creatures? She convinced the creatures?”

  Athena nodded.

  “How could she do that?” Gabriel asked.

  “I wish I knew,” Athena said. “They were safe here. Now they’re going to God knows where for heaven knows what reason.”

  “I think he means,” Denne said quietly, “how could a human influence the fantasylife?”

  Athena whirled so fast that Denne took a step back. “You think she’s huma
n?”

  “She looks human,” Gabriel said.

  Athena snorted. “Looks human. Of course she looks human. It’s her secondary form.”

  “She’s a selkie,” Denne said, awe in his voice.

  “Yep,” Athena said. “A selkie with a modern education. God help us all.”

  She shook her head and walked toward her family, turning her back on the women across the street.

  When Athena got out of hearing range, Denne said, “What do you think that was all about?”

  “I don’t know,” Gabriel said. But he wasn’t as intrigued by Athena’s anger as he was by the woman across the street, and her resemblance to Lyssa. Lyssa, who had the same dark eyes, the same black-black hair. Lyssa, who had always seemed slightly otherworldly to him.

  Perhaps the Buckingham magic had nothing to do with Cliffside House.

  Gabriel shook his head. The mess he had walked into seemed even more tangled now than it had before.

  “What’s the matter?” Denne asked.

  “I thought I understood this place,” Gabriel said. “I’m beginning to realize that I was wrong.”

  Thirty-Seven

  Anchor Harbor Wayside

  She felt him. She felt him as if he were right there beside her, as if she had just seen him fifteen minutes ago instead of thirty-four years ago.

  Cassie shivered and moved away from her family. They hadn’t acknowledged her anyway. Lyssa was watching the last sheriff’s car corral the creatures still streaming out of the ocean. Athena was watching Emily. And Emily was staring out to sea as if she knew something no one else did.

  Cassie walked toward the beach access. She wasn’t going to go down there, but she didn’t want her family to share in her memories again. The fact that her mother and her granddaughter had seen her memories of Daray upset her deeply.

  She rubbed her arms as another shiver went through her. She made herself take a deep breath.

  He had put his hands on her arms the afternoon he had arrived in his helicopter, rubbing them like she did now.