Fantasy Life (16 page)

After a moment, Athena closed the cupboard without taking out the second, much older, Mr. Coffee. She grabbed a black mug from the cupholders on the far wall and sank into her chair at the head of the table.

“I’m sorry, Cassie,” she said tiredly. “It’s been a hell of a day, and I’m taking it out on you.”

“Was it the weather?” Cassie asked as she made her way to the cookies. She needed fortification if she was going to spend quality time with her mother.

Athena took the tea cozy off the pot and poured the tea into her mug. The scent of peppermint filled the air. Athena
wrinkled her nose—she had probably been hoping for something with caffeine—but she continued pouring anyway.

“The weather’s been bad, and everyone is very stressed. When the roads fell away, I had a lot of upset people to contend with, but I’ve done that before. These kinds of emergencies happen on the coast.”

Not that often, though, or Cassie would be more comfortable with them. Still, Athena had rarely left the coast in her seventy-five years, and she had worked for the sheriff’s department for fifty of them. She had probably seen more emergencies than Cassie could imagine.

“Then what?” Cassie asked.

Athena shrugged. She put the tea cozy back on the pot and pushed it into the center of the table.

“A feeling,” she said. “I’ve been having a feeling.”

Cassie took a large, soft chocolate chip. Usually she preferred peanut butter, but she wanted something with a touch of serotonin.

“Now you sound like me,” Cassie said. “Feelings are my area.”

She regretted the words almost as soon as she spoke them. She didn’t want her mother to think she was feeling jealous or out of sorts.

But, as usual, Athena didn’t seem to notice.

“I know it’s odd,” Athena said. “I even mentioned it in passing to Gabriel, and he said it was probably the weather. All this rain is putting everyone on edge.”

Maybe, maybe not. One of the many things Cassie had learned about telepathy was that at times an entire group of people, psychic or not, shared the same feelings. Those times often meant something major was going to happen.

Cassie had ignored those signs once and lost everything that was precious to her. She would never do that again.

“What kind of feeling?” she asked, trying to sound casual. She never discussed this stuff with Athena.

Athena gave her a sheepish look. “Like something’s about to go wrong.”

Cassandra sat in the chair next to Athena’s. Cassie tore the cookie in half and offered part to her mother. Athena waved a hand and shook her head.

“Do you know what sort of something?” Cassie asked.

“No.” Athena wrapped her hands around her mug. “It sounds funny, doesn’t it, this vague feeling. Yours are always so specific.”

“It’s my gift,” Cassie said, although she had never felt it was a gift. The word
gift
was her mother’s, always used at a moment of great crisis, when Cassie was feeling particularly put upon or had suffered because she had told the wrong person something true.

Athena didn’t catch the irony. “You’re trusting my feeling?”

“I would be foolish not to. You’re the one who taught me that our gifts are simply extensions of the abilities normal people have.”

Athena smiled down at her mug. “I may have exaggerated a little.”

Exaggerated a lot, actually, especially in her own case. Athena had great abilities, mostly with the sea. She was a powerful swimmer who could practically live underwater, and she was strong, abnormally so.

Cassie had once seen her mother fight off a man twice her weight and defeat him as easily as if he were a child. Cassie suspected her mother had a few other abilities—she seemed to make money with great ease—but Cassie wasn’t exactly sure what they were.

Secrets, especially about powers, had become a way of life in Cliffside House.

“Still,” Cassie said, “I think everyone has a bit of telepathy, and a sense of the cosmos.”

Hippy-dippy crap.
Cassie heard the judgment as if Athena had spoken it. Her mother didn’t look up from her mug, but she didn’t have to. Cassie knew what her expression would be.

But Cassie wasn’t sure if the thought was so strong it got through their magical barriers or if she had lived with Athena so long that she knew what the response would be.

“What’s that ‘something’ that’s going to go wrong, Mom?”

The moment was passing, and Cassie knew it. If she didn’t press now, Athena wouldn’t tell her, and then Cassie might not have much-needed information.

“You think it’s something to do with Lyssa, don’t you?” Athena asked.

“No.” Cassie sounded surprised because she was. She had no idea what her mother’s something wrong was. “Do you?”

“No. Although I worried about it all the way home.”

For the entire two-mile drive. Still, Cassie understood the sentiment. Lyssa and Emily were the new factors in town.

“What do you think it could be?” Cassie asked.

“I don’t know,” Athena said. “I just know the feeling is stronger when I look at the ocean.”

Cassie started. She had had the same sense around the sea, but hers was more complex. It felt as if something buried had dug itself out, as if something that she thought was done had started again.

As if the book of her life, which was closed, had reopened.

Funny that she would think this was about her, and Athena had a more general sense.

“Have you talked to anyone about this?” Cassie asked.

“Good heavens, no.” Athena looked up at her, and this time, Cassie saw the shadows beneath Athena’s eyes. The day was taking its toll after all—or maybe the conversation was. “The town already thinks we’re crazy.”

“Yet they run to us every time something goes wrong.”

Athena shook her head. “The old-timers do. The younger folks are too sophisticated to believe that the Buckinghams can protect them.”

“They just don’t remember.” Cassie set the remains of the cookie on the table. Her stomach was suddenly queasy. “We’ve been lucky. There hasn’t been a big emergency in thirty years.”

“There’ve been a few.”

“South of here,” Cassie said. “Whale Rock and Seavy Village. But not Anchor Bay.”

“No.” Athena spoke quietly. “There’ve been a few here too.”

Cassie put her hands under the table. They wanted to become fists again. The anger was back—if indeed it had ever gone away.

“You didn’t tell me,” Cassie said.

“I figured you would know if you needed to.”

Cassie made the fists. “We’re blocked from each other, at your request.”

“I never requested it, Cass,” her mother said. “You intuited it.”

“Correctly,” Cassie said.

Her mother inclined her regal head forward.

“And because we’re blocked,” Cassie said, “I don’t always get the same information you do. There’s no way I could know if something was going on.”

“You should be able to predict these things.” Said so calmly as if nothing were wrong.

It took all of Cassie’s strength to keep herself from slamming her fists on the ugly black table and leaving the room. This was worse that feeling sixteen. This was five decades of struggle, revived in a single conversation.

And it didn’t help that they avoided this conversation as often as they could.

“You should know,” Cassie said, putting a space between each word, “that while my telepathy is constant, my ability to predict the future is not. You may have named me after that horrible, unfortunate bitch in Greek mythology, but I am not her, and no amount of wishing makes it so.”

“You’re mixing your legends.” Athena got up and poured the peppermint tea from her mug into the sink.

“I am not,” Cassie said, even though she knew she shouldn’t get sidetracked. “I know exactly what I’m talking about. Cassandra was cursed. She was given the ability to see the future, but no one would believe her when she told them what was going to happen. Well, I’m cursed too, but not with that particular ‘gift.’ People like that I can see the future. They just don’t want me around. I make them nervous. I’m odd and too intuitive and I give them the sense, even when I’m trying not to, that I can read their minds.”

Athena reached into the cupboard and took down the second Mr. Coffee. “You know, some day you’ll have to get past high school, Cassandra.”

“I am past high school.” Even though she still wanted to slam her fists onto the table like a teenager. “This is my life, Mother, and you refuse to recognize it.”

“And you refuse to believe that I can’t do anything about it.” Athena rested her hands on the countertop and bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Cassandra. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

Cassie wasn’t sure what caused her mother’s change of mood, but whatever it was, it hadn’t affected Cassie. She snapped, “You’re not going to wait to greet your granddaughter and great-granddaughter?”

Athena’s shoulders hunched forward. For a moment, she actually looked her age.

“They don’t need to see me in this condition,” she said. “They’ll understand. They didn’t call ahead. For all they know, we went to sleep hours ago.”

“Except that Gabriel talked to you and told you they were coming,” Cassie said. And even if he hadn’t, Lyssa would have expected them to be up. She knew what Cassie’s abilities were, and she knew what their habits were. At least, when Lyssa had been a child, neither Cassie nor Athena went to bed before 2
A.M.

“Ah, yes.” Athena raised her head and sighed. “I forgot.”

That alarmed Cassie more than the change of mood had. It sounded true. Athena had forgotten. She never forgot anything.

“Are you ill, Mother?”

Athena turned. Her face was pale, her cheekbones sunken. The exhaustion had eaten away at her, and Cassie, in her anger, hadn’t noticed how deeply.

“It’s nearly over, Cass.”

“What is, Mother?”

Athena looked at the kitchen, at the darkness outside the stone-framed window over the sink, at the second Mr. Coffee lying in a heap on the counter.

“This,” she said. “What you and I take for normal.”

Cassie sat upright in her chair. It felt odd to have someone else reciting a prediction to her. Athena crossed the room and placed her palm gently on Cassie’s cheek. Her hand was cold, and through the skin her bones seemed brittle.

“You and I shouldn’t fight anymore, baby girl.” Athena slid her hand down Cassie’s cheek and started to move away.

Cassie caught Athena’s wrist. “You know something. What?”

“Nothing concrete.”

“But?”

“But I know the minute Lyssa and her child cross that threshold, the end has started, and, selfishly, I’m not ready for it.” Athena slipped her hand out of Cassie’s grasp and walked toward the door.

Cassie let her go. It wasn’t so much Athena’s words that had shaken her.

It was the tears, swimming in Athena’s eyes.

Highway 101 South
The Village of Anchor Bay

The halogen lights arcing over the highway were one of the few new things in Anchor Bay. The extra lanes on either side, cut into a hill the town fathers had once vowed not to touch, were new, and of course, the names of the businesses were all different.

But the names of the businesses changed every summer—only the hardiest survived the winter season—so that wasn’t different at all. Nothing else seemed different, not even the buildings. Except for the new construction outside of town, it looked as if no one had invested a dime in Anchor Bay in more than twenty years.

The hill crested and turned toward the ocean. The businesses disappeared as the cliff appeared on the horizon. Even in the dark and the rain, Lyssa could see its outline black against the night sky.

The cliffs on either side of Anchor Bay were what made the village memorable. They rose like pillars out of the sea. Made of black lava rock, they had no trees growing on them, no greenery except for the occasional lichen.

They were also tall and imposing, and they seemed isolated, even though they were not. The entire Oregon coastline had areas like it, places where the ground rose to terrifying heights, and the ocean boomed below.

The unique thing about Anchor Bay was that the cliffs formed a natural harbor, and inside that harbor was a beautiful, six-mile-long stretch of beach that seemed as if it had been transplanted from Hawaii. Because all Oregon beaches were
public highways, protected by the state, no houses could be built on them.

Anchor Bay’s beach, one of the best in a state with tremendous beaches, brought tourists in from all over. But many of them didn’t stay. The cliffs concerned people—and then they saw Cliffside House, growing out of the south cliff like a castle born of the sea.

Lyssa leaned forward slightly. The car seemed cold, even though the heat was blasting. She wondered if Gabriel had noticed how nervous she was, and then she wondered why she cared.

She had had a crush on Gabriel Schelling when she was in high school, and he seemed nice enough now, but he was probably going home to a wife and 2.5 children who were nearly grown. She certainly couldn’t imagine him ever leaving Anchor Bay and discovering what the real world was like.

Fat lot of good discovering the real world had done her.

Emily was awake in the backseat, sitting up and clutching Yeller to her. She was looking out the oceanside window, staring into the darkness as if she could see something.

Lyssa could smell the ocean. Its briny smell was familiar and devastating, one more thing she had run away from. She could also hear the ocean, as it pounded and slammed against the sand. But she couldn’t see it. It blended with the night and the rain to form an inky darkness to her right.

“We’re almost there,” Lyssa said.

“Good,” Emily said, and leaned back against her seat.

Lyssa didn’t say any more and neither did Emily. Emily thought everything was fine—that casual trust that children had for parents. She didn’t know that Lyssa had been horribly irresponsible on this trip, that Lyssa hadn’t even called ahead to see if Athena and Cassie would welcome them into Cliffside House.

After the way Lyssa had treated her mother all these years, Lyssa wouldn’t blame her for turning them out.