by Layla Lawlor
"We're just—us," Irmingard said. "Humans with something different about them—or even run-of-the-mill ordinary humans, like Daniel, who's just a smart guy who works with computers and got mixed up with us by total accident. You'll meet him eventually, I expect; he lives in Lagos and doesn't come to this side of the pond very often. And then there are minor supernatural entities, like me, for example. Or Taza. He's an encantado, an Amazon river dolphin who shape-changes into a human."
"Seriously?" I took a second look at Taza. "He's a dolphin?"
Millie pointed to her head. "You can always recognize an encantado by the hat. It's to cover up their blowhole." At my look, she laughed. "I'm serious! Ask Taza to show you sometime. He'll be delighted."
"Is Felipa an encantado also?"
"No. She's a soap opera actress." This time the look I gave her was longer, and both Millie and Irmingard cracked up. "Your face!" Millie said. "Kay, I'm not putting you on, really. I'm sure they'll tell you the story themselves, but basically he fell in love with her on TV, when she was starring on a Brazilian novela—a soap opera—in the eighties."
"And he left the river for her," Irmingard said wistfully. "It's very romantic."
"If you call having a supernatural dolphin stalker romantic," Millie retorted. "But it worked out for them, apparently."
Muirin, now engaged in conversation with Skathi and the big blond guy, turned her head and crooked her finger at me.
"Duty calls," Irmingard murmured. She patted my arm. "Don't worry, Kay. It'll be all right."
I buckled the swordbelt around my waist. I knew I wasn't going into battle, but it made me feel better to have it on. And, really, I didn't even know what I was afraid of. They were just going to ask me some questions, right? If they didn't like my answers, then what was the worst that could happen? I'd go back to my everyday art-student life, which was what I wanted anyway.
At least, I hoped it was the worst thing. Bad thought. I should've asked Muirin what happened to failed Gatekeeper candidates.
I realized that I was still standing in the kitchen, and everyone was looking at me.
Millie gave me a little shove. "C'mon, Kay. We'll be right with you."
Chapter 8
It turned out that Millie and Irmingard were right: it wasn't that bad. There were no hazing rituals, no walking across fire or pit-fighting lions. We all sat in a circle and drank coffee and they asked me questions.
I told them about the last couple of months, starting with Bill O'Connor bursting into my life in pursuit of a sea monster named Scylla. I told them about picking up the sword in a last-ditch effort to protect myself and Fresca, only later discovering that I shouldn't have been able to see it in the first place, and wouldn't have been able to see it if not for my apparently innate ability to see through glamours.
Here they had me back up and quizzed me on my family history. No, I had no idea if anyone else in my family could do this. Growing up, I would occasionally get colored haloes around things. My mom took me to various doctors who told us it was a migraine symptom that never went ahead and developed into full-blown headaches. I thought, looking back on it, that I might have seen ghosts sometimes, but I hadn't realized at the time that they were anything other than regular people.
"And then we hunted Scylla all over Ithaca," I said. "It turned out she was after Bill because he killed her friend Charybdis, and then after me because I was trying to kill her. Understandable, I think."
I saw no particular sympathy for Scylla on any of the faces around me, even Millie and Irmingard, so I moved on to telling them about going into the afterlife looking for Bill, in the hopes of getting his help. All I'd managed to do was untangle Bill's soul from his body, setting him free to go ahead and die of the injuries he'd suffered in the fight with Scylla. I noticed Muirin staring fixedly at the carpet as I told that part of the story. I had never told her everything that had happened in the afterlife, I realized—I'd given her the Cliffs Notes version when I had first come back, but things happened so fast afterwards that I had never gone back and talked about the whole thing: the dark misty world along the River Styx; the lost, wandering ghosts and the way that Bill had been helping them; the afterlife horseman named Manannán mac Lir who came for Bill, and the smile Bill had given me as I cut him free and he faded away.
I left out his last words: Tell Muirin she was the best thing that ever happened to me. That part, at least, I'd passed along to her, and I didn't think the Gatekeepers were entitled to all her secrets.
I made it through the next part of my story with the barest shreds of self-control—Scylla dragging Fresca off to her lair, and the awful, ugly, bloody fight that followed. "She only wanted to avenge her friend," I said. "If she had killed Fresca, I think I would have been her."
"What makes you say that?" Skathi asked. She had been quiet throughout the questioning; this was the first time she'd spoken.
And I froze: how do you tell a bunch of superpowered people who consider themselves the good guys that you think their whole purpose for existing is kind of fucked up? It didn't help that I really liked most of the Gatekeepers I'd talked to. Even the scary, powerful ones like Skathi and Seth seemed like nice enough people.
Integrity, I thought, is doing the right thing because it's right, not because people will like you for it.
"Because there was nothing wrong with Scylla except grief and anger," I said. "She killed some other people including my roommate, and that was really terrible and wrong, it's true. But she thought she was defending herself. There wasn't any reason for Bill to attack her friend. They weren't doing anything bad."
The broad-shouldered blond guy drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair and looked at Muirin. "How can she have such a fundamental misunderstanding of our basic purpose? Haven't you explained to her?"
"I did," Muirin said sharply. "She's her own person, George, not an extension of me."
I pressed my fingernails into my palms and didn't look at Irmingard or Millie; if they looked at me with scorn or pity or hate, I didn't want to know. "I don't think I fundamentally misunderstand anything. Look, it makes sense to kill someth—someone like Scylla if they're attacking people and can't be stopped or reasoned with. Once she started actually going after people, I don't think it was wrong. But it's not okay to attack her just for—for existing."
"No, Kay, you really don't understand," Skathi said. "We don't address situations like that of Scylla and Charybdis because they are attacking people. We do it because they are there, and they shouldn't be."
Which was more or less what Muirin had said to me.
"Kay," Millie said gently. She put a hand on my arm, which made me realize I was shaking with anger. "It's not what it sounds like. Really, it's not. The thing about magic—did Muirin explain how there's a sense of location to it?"
"I did." Muirin's voice cut like a knife. "It's not my fault if she doesn't want to believe me."
I gave her a hot, hard look.
"It is your fault," George said, his voice calm but implacable. "You're her teacher. Her failings are your responsibility."
Muirin's jaw set in the stubborn lines I'd come to know all too well. But she said nothing. Seth reached out a hand to touch her shoulder. She shrugged it off with a violent twitch.
George turned to me. "Kay, each place has its own magical ecosystem. It's just like nature: it's in equilibrium as long as nothing upsets it. With me so far?"
"Sort of," I said.
"That means she's not," Muirin put in, her voice tight.
I couldn't help wishing they'd send her out of the room. "No, I get it, I think. Where you're going with this, it's the same deal as—as kudzu, right? Magical creatures that didn't, what's the right term for that, evolve locally will overwhelm the local ones." I saw some of them nodding, so obviously I was on the right track. "But, guys, Scylla's a person. You can't treat people like they're kudzu."
"You're almost there," George said. "There is a balance to things. Magical beings cannot stop be
ing what they are. They change the world by their presence. And we're living in a world that has been terribly changed, terribly damaged by the spread of European colonists and the magic they brought with them into every last corner, overwriting the local magic with their own."
Oh, seriously, don't you school me about colonialism, I thought, but Skathi stepped in before I could say anything, speaking in her quiet voice. "We're trying to put right what was put so very wrong in the last few centuries," she said.
I stared around at them. I couldn't figure out whether to be impressed at their optimism or horrified at their hubris. "You're trying to fix the last, what, five hundred years of Western history? By putting everything back? Are you nuts?"
"I think you're overstating the case," Seth said. "We're just trying to do some good where we can for a situation that you surely must admit is a problem for all."
"It's unfortunate that your first encounter with us was a morally ambiguous case like Scylla," George added.
Given that their entire approach seemed to be "hack first and ask questions later," with an extra bonus side of never consulting the people who actually lived there, I found it hard to believe that there weren't a whole lot of morally ambiguous cases out there. I knew I was young, especially compared to them, and I didn't have all the answers yet either, so maybe I was missing something that would make sense out of it. But the whole lot of them reminded me of a bunch of teenagers who'd just read a pile of books on Western imperialism and had rushed off to "fix" it—in the most insane possible way.
And yet.
If they weren't openly lying to me about the way the magical world worked—and as I looked around at the sincerity on the faces of people like Irmingard and Millie, I found it hard to believe that they were—I couldn't honestly say that they didn't have a point. Something was wrong. Someone should do something about it. Maybe all my qualms were nothing but my cowardly attempts to shove myself back into a safe box labeled "art student" where I didn't have to worry about this sort of thing. I really, truly didn't know.
"I guess I need to think about it a little more," I said.
George cleared his throat. "You said she's bonded to the sword?" At Muirin's nod, he turned to me. "Show me."
I glanced at Muirin out of habit; she was my expert for all things sword-related. She inclined her head to me in another very small nod. I drew the sword and held it carefully. The sword can cut through literally anything; I didn't want to cut anyone's arm off.
From the reactions of everyone in the room, I could tell who could see it and who couldn't. Felipa and two of the guys—Wolfe and Rob—couldn't see it, or rather, they weren't quite looking at it; I could see that they kept losing interest as the glamour worked on them and then having to reorient themselves. It was possible, I'd learned by way of Fresca, for ordinary people to see through a glamour if they knew what was really there, but they had to work at it.
The others observed the sword with interest. Taza looked especially fascinated, and I remembered Millie's offhand comment that Taza and Felipa were relatively new to the Gatekeepers. He might not have seen anything like it before.
"May I?" George asked me. I nodded, and he reached out. I started to relinquish the sword to him, but he repositioned my hand on the hilt and then touched my arm, the back of my hand, my shoulder. His hands were huge, each one a gnarled map of scars and calluses. Yet his touch was light and gentle, butterfly wings brushing my skin. I could feel the small sparks of magic whenever he touched me, like a pop of static electricity—not painful exactly, but he was doing something. I had to force myself to remain still. It reminded me of how Seth had examined Irmingard yesterday.
"I'd like to see her wield it," Skathi said. "That's when the bond engages fully, correct?"
"Yes, but it doesn't usually do its thing when I'm not in danger." I set down my coffee cup and stepped away from the circle of chairs. The sword refused to cooperate on the first couple of swings, so I closed my eyes and concentrated on last night's fight against the Tiger: the stink of its fur, the bad-wrong-awful feeling whenever I tried to look at it, the shriek of its claws on the marble floor as it slid into the elevator—
My hands went cold, and I opened my eyes to see that the sword had lit up dimly with its blue-white fire that cast no shadows. In an actual fight, I could feel the sword reaching down into my body, becoming one with me, drawing on my own life energy to fuel it. This was more of an expectant feeling, as if the sword was awaiting instructions.
"That's fascinating," Seth said, and I looked up; I'd nearly forgotten they were there. The blue light died. "It's not as intense as the bond with Bill—"
"Well, that's to be expected," George said. "She's not of O'Connor blood, and hasn't had nearly as long to become habituated to the sword. If anything, the impressive thing is that she's in tune with it to the extent that she is. And something else that's interesting ... Seth, I'd like to get a second opinion on this. Could you examine her as well?"
I set my jaw and tried not to feel invaded, objectified. Seth's examination was less intrusive than George's, though; he ran his hands quickly over and around my body, at a distance of about a foot away. "Oh, I see," he said, raising his thin brows.
Muirin leaned forward in her chair. "What?"
"There's something else. A spell, a geas of some sort."
George turned to Muirin; her body language became defensive. "Did you put something on her?" he asked.
"No," Muirin said shortly.
Skathi's eyes ran over me from head to foot. I got the impression that she was doing an examination of her own, but without needing to come near me. "It's very subtle. I'm not sure if I would have noticed it in the normal course of events."
My stomach twisted. Jill Frost, in the kitchen with her little candy hearts ...
"Kay, did you consent to have some sort of magic put on you?" Seth asked me.
Yes, I thought, but my mouth said, "No," and for just the instant that the words left my lips, I believed it.
"It flared just then," Seth said.
Skathi nodded. "I felt it."
"Whatever it is, she can't talk about it."
"Guys, you're scaring me," I said. Muirin's gaze on me had turned intense, and both Millie and Irmingard wore identical looks of concern.
Seth shared a look with Skathi. "Whatever it is, it would be complicated to remove, and I'm not certain any of us could do it without doing damage." He patted my shoulder, and gestured me back to the chair. "Whatever it is, it's not hurting you, and it's not hurting us. It seems to be largely passive."
"Am I in danger?" I asked.
"I don't know," Seth said. "You'd have to tell me when and how this was done to you, and I don't think you can. You may not even remember."
Oh, I remembered, all right. But I couldn't say a thing, and how do you research something like this if you can't ask the people who would know? I doubted Google would be any use, though I'd have to check it when I had a chance. Sometimes the more whack-a-doodle corners of the Internet were actually useful in my new line of work.
Muirin was still watching me, a small crease between her brows. Genuine concern? Or just waiting to see if I'd explode?
"I think we're nearly done, anyway," George said. "Everything you've told me matches Muirin's account, Kay."
He crooked a finger at Seth and Skathi, and the three of them drifted away to the kitchen, where they chatted in voices too low for me to hear. After a moment, Rob and Wolfe followed them and joined the conversation. I glanced around at those of us who remained: Millie, Irmingard, Taza and Felipa and me, as well as Muirin, who had a leg drawn up under her on the chair and was contemplating the carpet. The divide was as clear as if we'd all moved to squares on a chessboard. Old guard versus newbies. And I couldn't help noticing that the old guard were mostly guys, and nearly all white. Big surprise.
Millie blew out her cheeks and grinned at me. "Well, that wasn't so bad, was it?"
"We're done?" I asked, surprised.
"This wasn't a job interview," Felipa said. She had a low, mellow voice, tinged with a particular inflection that must be Brazilian. "We're not that organized."
"One might say disorganized," Millie added. "We don't have leaders, or a hierarchy—"
I glanced pointedly at the kitchen clique.
"All right, there's an informal chain of command," she conceded. "But it's more a matter of who has the experience and the spellslinging muscle, rather than all of us getting together to hold elections or anything of the sort."
"Unelected leaders," I said. "The best kind."
Muirin gave me a difficult-to-read look and then rose and went down the hallway leading to the bedrooms and bathroom. Millie waved off my sarcasm, unconcerned. "You'll see how it works. The point is, it's not like you're putting in a membership application and we're rubber-stamping it. This is a volunteer thing. If you didn't get along with us but wanted to do what we do, then you could just go off and do it; you wouldn't have our backup, that's all."
Irmingard touched my arm. "All we're doing here is deciding if you're someone we want to work with."
"And?" I asked, unable to quell an involuntary rush of first-day-of-school nerves.
Taza smiled. Though his teeth were perfectly ordinary human teeth, there was something predatory about it all the same—it was very much a dolphin's sharp smile of secret amusement. "We quite like you. New blood is marvelous for this stuffy bunch."
Irmingard squeezed my hand. "It is good to have younger people in the group. Humans especially. The world changes. We don't always keep up."
"What's the story behind the Gatekeepers, anyway?" I wanted to know. "Where did they come from?"
Taza snorted and Felipa smiled; they glanced at each other in the way of couples sharing a private joke. "Smoke-filled back rooms and clandestine meetings," Taza said, and Felipa giggled.
Millie rolled her eyes at them both. "None of us were around for it, but it started with the ones we call the heavy hitters and a few others, sometime in the last half of the nineteenth century. They got on a kick for cleaning up the world, setting it back in balance, something like that."
