Children of the Bloodlands

by S. M. Beiko

  At first, she didn’t know what was happening. There was a lightening sensation of floating above it all, but that wasn’t Natti — that was the tank’s water, which had surged and lifted completely out of the glass-bottomed enclosure the polar bears called home. The bears themselves burst out of the water for higher ground, narrowly avoiding the deluge as it came back down onto the glass, which exploded outward in a tidal crush.

  Screams echoed and faded as the exhibit collapsed around Natti with a sound like an aquatic thunderclap. When she finally opened her eyes, as if in a dream, she realized that her hands were out, and that the water surrounded her in a delicate orb. Inside the water with her, swam the bears.

  Natti couldn’t help herself, opening her mouth to release precious air as fear began to grip her. Then one of the bears swam forward and pressed its forehead to hers just as she considered the possibility she would be eaten alive.

  Thank you, came the thought, the words, in that strange watery tone that Aunty had sang to her so often. We knew you would come.

  What? Natti sent the thought back, less as a word, and more a general outcry of surprise. Too many questions roiled through her: They had been expecting her? Why?

  The second bear swam forward, jerking its head to the side as if to say hurry. The motion was brief, but Natti could see clearly this bear was agitated beyond the situation; it had a dark ring around the coat at its throat, and Natti could feel it wasn’t natural.

  A siren blared outside their protective bubble. The crowd had long scattered, but others would come soon to assess the damage. To lay blame. And they wouldn’t believe what they saw even when it was right in front of them.

  We must get to the water. We can feel it near. Will you help us further, Sea Daughter? Now that calm inner voice was one of urgent panic, and Natti felt like someone had tied a ribbon around her ribs and yanked sharply. Why her?

  Without thinking she went through the familiar movements, guiding her hands, heart racing. She knew that now was not the time to be afraid. The water shifted and carried them like a great serpent out through the rubble in a flash, across the access road, and deposited them into the fast-tracking brown of the Assiniboine River. Guided by the current and the desperation of the hunted, Natti and the bears dove deeper and headed east, towards the Red River, and the only place she could think to hide them all.

  ~

  Aivik parked his car on the street. He’d have to get his buddy to check the engine belt before he left for the next haul. Not like it mattered — he always parked his little Toyota at the depot after trading off his semi, and he’d be parking it again for the next trip out to Fort Mac. But he wanted the peace of mind; the car was the first thing he’d managed to save up for, his little point of pride, and having that “check engine” light come on didn’t sit well with him. At the best of times, Aivik didn’t like surprises.

  Takeout bags swung heavily from both his hands — he was hoping to hearten Natti and Aunty with more than just his early return from his first successful drive. Now that he was older, Aivik was doing his best to take charge and help out, despite his absence, and he knew Natti had her hands full with Aunty’s flagging health. A little something from Neechi Commons always perked them all up.

  It was warm out despite the shifting clouds, but when Aivik reached the crumbling steps of Aunty’s house, he flagged. Had he really felt a chill in the air? His hand paused at the latch when he looked down and saw water seeping out from under the poorly sealed storm door. Errant water in the house of a Seal never bodes well, Aunty used to say.

  “Natti, what —” Aivik started, frustrated that on his first haul he’d come back to another roof leak or a burst pipe or something else he’d have to fix on his off time.

  But there wasn’t really much he could fix about the two soaking polar bears with their hungry eyes on him as he burst into the living room, dropping the takeout bags when he jerked his arms up defensively.

  Natti was holding up her hands, too, pulling the water out of the carpet as she popped up from behind the shaggy beasts. “Look, Aiv, it’s not —”

  “Hope you brought enough for our guests,” Aunty said, tone familiarly wry above her rising cough. “Or something stronger than water.”

  Hollow Spirit

  Eli feels the wind. In his hair. In his lungs. Impossibly, he breathes. Then he realizes he is the wind. That it passes right through him, in and out, like a needle and fine thread. Like a red ribbon connecting everything — thoughts and body . . . though he’s not sure if his body is a factor any longer.

  He is standing in a spiral of white pebbles, which makes a path to a shrine of tokens left behind by tourists, wanderers, those rare few people who still believe in magic. Playing cards and coins and paper clips. He bends down and sees the remnants of a gold tooth lodged in the dirt. He tries to extract it, but his fingers — what he thinks are still his fingers — pass right through.

  You cannot touch a memory, he thinks. If that’s what this is, anyway.

  He stretches back up, feels the wind tugging him around in a slow waltz. He knows the place, even though it is shrouded in mist and damp and almost two decades’ worth of time he seems to have lost between then and now.

  The Fairy Glen.

  He grew up not far from here, in a croft, he remembers. There was a woman there, spitting and wailing. She had a terrible secret, one that she passed down to Eli before he was even ready. He was like a boy trapped in a fairy story with the ending ripped out. In his tower he waited, but he never felt ready to leave.

  When the wind spins him around again, he is facing a boy who stares at him as if he can see him. Or through him. Eli doesn’t wave, and even though the boy is moving towards him, he moves around him entirely.

  Eli remembers something else vague, about children. Children with desolate eyes and crimson smiles, children with coals beneath their skin. They followed a creature — a man — a creature that had once been a man, and where there had been screaming people, suddenly there were trees . . .

  Eli shakes his head, and the wind whispers. He follows the boy up the hill.

  On the hill is a well-worn switchback. A child’s mountain pass. The boy has come here many times before, but Eli thinks — knows — he’s come here now because the boy has followed someone here. Someone who will be at the top of the hill. Eli’s heart quickens and sickens, like a child’s does as they prepare for the jump-scare and hide behind their hands, tensing. Something inevitable waits at the top of that hill. The ending that Eli isn’t sure he wants to see.

  The boy stops and looks over his shoulder, right at Eli. Not through him, this time. His eyes ask, Do we have to? And Eli doesn’t know what to say, even as the wind sifts the boy’s hair, his clear eyes that are his own wincing with the cold. Let’s just go home. Under the covers. Someone else will save us. Save her.

  They turn as one to the sound of errant sheep bleating below them, and from up here they perceive the tourist shrines more clearly. Even though they haven’t come very far, Eli realizes they are high enough up now that, if they fell, they could get hurt.

  The boy continues going up, closer to harm, and Eli has no choice but to follow.

  They come to a dark pass in the rock. The boy wriggles through like the path was made for him, and then there is a climb. Eli watches the boy struggle, all skinny arms and wheeling legs. Eli knows that, looking down at his hands, made of the same silver fog of winter breath, he couldn’t help the boy up even if he wanted to. Eli truly is a ghost. And knowing any physical limitations are gone, he lets go of gravity’s hold and floats to the surface of the rock, just as the boy emerges.

  The boy is not alone. A figure stand stands on the precipice of the caer — the castle, she had called it, in her lucid moments when she held him while the nightmares readied for the next salvo. Those moments when he could believe it would all be all right.

  Her a
rms are out, as though they could be wings. She is trembling.

  “Go home, Eli,” she says. His heart catches; her voice is clear. For once her mind is knowing. “You have to go home now.”

  Eli the ghost almost opens his mouth to answer, but the little boy does instead. “You have to come, too.” He is twisting his shirt in his hands. The wind calls through the pointed hills beckoning.

  The woman turns. Her hair is a wild, furious tangle, but her eyes, Eli’s own eyes, are serene. “My brave boy,” she says. “I know what you dreamed of. I know the stone is calling for you. But you have to promise Mommy you won’t go after it. No matter what anyone asks. Please promise.”

  Little Eli nods. He is being brave. He is always so much braver in this dream when Eli watches it, over and over, though he knows that the boy is raw with terror. She is so close to the edge. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s go home now.”

  “My darling,” she whispers, and it is not her voice, but the thousands that came before. The ones that have tried to wrap their silvery tendrils around Eli’s heart since a girl he once hated helped him cast them out. The voices that ruined everything. “Don’t you want Mommy to stop hurting?”

  “Please.” But there is no boy anymore. Only Eli. Reaching, as she backs nearer to the edge. He is close enough to count the lines around her mouth, carved from too many nights screaming, crying. She touched the Moonstone, and it hurt her. It had chosen the little boy when he was still inside her, and the stone would not be refused.

  She turns her back on him again. He rushes to her, feeling that perhaps this time, in this dream, he will be able to pull her back to safety. He’ll take her down the hill to the fisher’s croft and make her up some fresh broth, and put her to bed, and he will read the only book there — Island Birds — until the pages crinkle with his drying tears, and all will be as it was, because desolation is better than nothing at all.

  But, as always, his hand is too late, and he feels her dark hair just missing his grip as she leaps, turns over, face finally at peace as she shuts her eyes and lets the air take her back to the earth.

  ~

  Eli woke still screaming, full of a pain he couldn’t quantify. His arms, his wings, were twisted around him, and he could still hear the wind . . . but he couldn’t move, like he’d been encased in glass. One eye looked out into the dismal world in front of him. A smouldering plane wreck. And trees, black trees, reaching and reaching, as he was, to the darkening overcast sky. Trees whose minds, he knew, were trapped in nightmares like the ones he’d just barely surfaced from.

  Trees that were once Owls, and one that maybe was his father. And now him, too.

  Eli screamed, but in the dead forest, there was no one to hear but the wind.

  ~

  Phae barely shifted, even when a blast of wind cracked the trees around her in the fading crepuscular dusk. It wasn’t uncommon for a summer windstorm to rise out of nowhere in Manitoba, and both she, and her subjects in the field past her hiding spot, were accustomed to the temperamental prairie elements. To the changing world around them.

  She raised the DSLR to her eye, adjusted the lens and the shutter, popped off a few shots. Focus. Another batch. She scrolled through the display. Sunset, she felt, even after only a few months dabbling with photography, was one of the best kinds of light, especially now at the start of autumn. She came upon a shot she was particularly proud of, and with that same surge of pride came disappointment, because there wasn’t anyone she could really show it to right now. Not her parents, who still resented her for taking the year off rather than going directly to university and the med school track she’d been preparing for. Not Barton, who was more preoccupied than she’d ever seen him, training endlessly with his new running blades and throwing himself into his still-new powers.

  And not Roan, who, even though her image and voice had been so close on their recent FaceTime call, was the farthest away of them all.

  “There you are!” Phae had said into her phone, trying to put on the cheer. “I’m out in the shed for some privacy. I put in a new router so the connection should be better . . . Where are you?” She mentally calculated what time it could be with the six-hour time difference — afternoon, judging by the background in Roan’s screen, which seemed to be a restaurant of some kind.

  “Oh, I’m in a café . . . just needed to get out of the flat.” Her voice was lowered, and she looked around a bit anxiously. She looked like she hadn’t slept.

  Phae immediately cottoned on. “I tried calling you yesterday as soon as I saw the news. That . . . that was the restaurant you worked in, wasn’t it?” The minute she’d seen the flames and the words freak explosion in Royal Mile pub all over her Facebook feed, she knew right away. “Was it . . . ?”

  “I don’t know what it was. Honestly.” Roan exhaled like the breath she’d been holding was a painful one. “I came here for answers, and after months of nothing, I’m suddenly knee-deep in way too much something.” She got up, seemed to move to a quieter corner with her cellphone. “I couldn’t help it, Phae. There was this guy . . . he seemed to know who I was. What I was. But there was something wrong with him. He gave me this warning . . . I have no idea what it meant. For a second I could’ve sworn it was Urka’s voice — it’s stupid and bizarre, I know. But what about our lives is normal anymore, really?”

  Phae nodded, consciously loosening her jaw at the mention of Urka. Things had happened so fast when Roan came back out from hell just last spring, and the images she’d painted would certainly haunt Phae’s nightmares for a while yet. There was no telling what it was doing to Roan, who rubbed her face now, that same pain evident in the crease between her mismatched eyes. All Phae wanted to do was push herself through her iPhone and do something to erase that — even if she had to use the powers she’d been secretly resenting lately.

  “It’s not just Fingal’s Pint that’s been weird,” Roan went on, lowering her voice. “I’m . . . seeing things. Not just visions, like what I usually see with the spirit eye. I’m seeing . . . memories. I think the stone is showing me Cecelia’s memories. And they’re vivid, like I’m in them. Then I’m pushed out, and I wake up in places I don’t remember being. But I feel like I have to keep watching, keep letting the stone show me. Like Cecelia is trying to tell me something.”

  Phae frowned. “Or the stone is trying to control you, Roan, the same way that Eli’s did. You need to be careful.” She didn’t want to call it wishful thinking, that Roan’s grandmother was trying to communicate with her from beyond the grave. Phae knew a raw wound when she saw one.

  Roan’s smirk, however weak, was followed by the same old sardonic tone. “I know you’re dying to encase me in bubble wrap, Phae, but I do still know how to take care of myself.”

  “Hardly.” She smiled, but it was brief. “The guy who confronted you, the one with the warning. What was weird about him? I mean, aside from the usual. Weird can encompass too many factors.”

  Roan glanced around, brought the phone closer, and made her voice quieter. “That other thing on the news. You know, the Cinder Plague?”

  Roan was right to whisper that in a public place. The Cinder Plague had become more widespread than SARS, with twice as much panic as the news spread the word faster than the disease itself. Roan could get kicked out of the café for even mentioning it.

  “Sinusitis erysipelas? You mean he had it? Did he touch you?”

  “Yes. Well, no. Look, he touched me, but I’m fine, see?” She showed her hands. “No black gunk, no sudden fever. Again, fine is a relative term. But like you said before, Denizens don’t seem to be affected. Just, you know, regular people who don’t have a supernatural immunity.”

  Still, Phae felt her heart speeding up. “Did he —”

  “Yeah, he definitely exploded right in front of me, and that’s when the rest of the restaurant followed suit.”

  The worst part of some of the
se isolated cases was that those with already-compromised immune systems seemed to literally combust. Incidents had been isolated, and some had speculated that the illness was caused by some biological weapon rather than just a skin fungus. Researchers and governments were already hastening to manufacture a cure, but what was most sinister was that its origin remained vague, though it was striking Western countries and not the usual developing countries. And cases seemed to be popping up more and more in Scotland, of all places, since Roan appeared there.

  “It can’t be a coincidence,” Roan said, voicing Phae’s greatest worry. “I show up here, this freak virus pops up, some guy with it issues me a warning before making me blow up my restaurant . . . and I saw some of my co-workers after. No one died, Phae. But I thought one of them, Ben . . . I thought he had . . .” She winced, neck tensing as she bent forwards like she was about to throw up.

  Phae leaned in as close to her phone as possible. “Roan? Roan, are you okay?”

  “ — fine,” she heard, when Roan’s face was back in the picture, and though Roan had tried to hide it, Phae had seen her clutch her chest before quickly dropping her hand. Roan sighed raggedly. “I’m just tired. It’s all been a lot. But I guess I asked for this, didn’t I? I wanted action. Now I’ve got it.”

  Phae let that sink in a bit before she said, “Roan . . . you don’t have to do this alone, you know. You went out there by yourself. I’m sure you’ve kept your aunt and uncle at arm’s length. We’re all stronger together, remember? We should be there with you. It’s obviously getting too much —”

  “Phae,” Roan cut her off, voice wavering but hard. “I can’t chance it. Not if I’m going off like an atom bomb. I’m trying to stay in control. I can’t let what happened to Eli happen to me. I could hurt someone. I don’t want it to be you.” Phae knew that was as much as she was going to get on the subject. “Speaking of which . . . where is Mr. Know-It-All-Before-You-Know-It?”