Fantasy Life (20 page)

“I think the house attacked me, Mom.” The words rushed out of Lyssa. “I can’t stay here if it’s dangerous.”

She glanced through the open door. Cassie followed her gaze. Emily was sleeping peacefully, one arm wrapped around that stuffed dog of hers. She looked content here. She looked like she belonged.

“Cliffside House isn’t dangerous,” Cassie said. “You know that.”

“I knew that,” Lyssa said. “Then it tried to choke me.”

Cassie sat in the chair next to Lyssa. “It what?”

“It put something in my throat and I couldn’t breathe. I had to force myself out of the closet before the stuff cleared. Didn’t you hear me fall?”

Cassie shook her head, her heart sinking. Already, in Lyssa’s mind, Cassie was failing her. But it was impossible to hear anything room to room in this house. Lyssa had to know that.

“Whatever was in my throat disappeared, but this I coughed out just before I came in here.” Lyssa brought her other hand to the tabletop. Her hand was streaked with black. The lines looked familiar. Lyssa had that hand clenched into a fist, and she slowly opened it.

In her palm was a black ball, the size of a marble. It left a stain against Lyssa’s skin.

Cassie remembered holding hundreds of balls like that. Removing them, taking them one at a time, and trying to clean them off the beach.

She knew what the ball would feel like even before she touched it.

“A tar ball,” she breathed.

“What?” Lyssa asked.

Cassie brought her hand over Lyssa’s, then paused. “Mind if I touch it?”

“Be my guest.”

Cassie took the ball. It was as rubbery as she expected and a little more gooey than she would have thought. It looked like it had solidified more than it had.

She brought it to her face, sniffed, and caught the faint chemical stench. Tears flooded her eyes, and she blinked them back.

“Mom?” Lyssa said.

“It’s a tar ball, honey. You find them at oil spills.”

Lyssa looked at her as if she were crazy. There had been a number of oil spills up and down the Oregon Coast, and Cassie had worked all of them as a volunteer—even when Lyssa was little, never telling her where she was going, of course. But there had only been one in Seavy County. That had been in 1970, and it had nearly destroyed Anchor Bay.

Cassie handed the ball back to Lyssa, even though she wasn’t sure what Lyssa would do with it. “You said you coughed this up?”

Lyssa nodded. Then she told Cassie what had happened in the closet, start to finish: the whisper, the choking, the request for help.

“Why would the house do something like that?” Cassie asked. “And to you of all people? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Lyssa flinched, and it took Cassie a moment to understand her daughter’s reaction.

“I wasn’t criticizing you, Lys,” Cassie said. “It’s just that you’re—”

She paused. She had never told Lyssa about her father, more than what little she felt Lyssa should know, and she hadn’t really talked with her about the Walters family. It seemed odd to start now.

“You’re a Buckingham,” Cassie finished lamely.

Lyssa frowned at her. “It scared me, Mom. Emily can’t deal with more trauma right now, and the first thing that happens to me in this house is frightening. What if it goes for her?”

“It won’t, honey,” Cassie said.

“But it went for me.”

“No.” The voice came from behind them. Cassie looked up. Athena stood in the doorway, wearing a silver lamé robe that looked like something out of a 1940s movie. It brought out the highlights in her hair, which was down around her shoulders.

She looked both older and younger than usual—the hair accenting the soft, papery lines of her skin and the robe accenting her strong, unbending frame.

Lyssa’s eyes lit up at the sight of her grandmother, but Lyssa didn’t move. Apparently, she was wondering about her welcome even with Athena.

“I thought you were tired, Mother,” Cassie said.

“I couldn’t sleep, not with my Lyssa here.” Athena opened her hands, a less showy method of welcoming someone toward her than Cassie had used. “Don’t I get a hug, Lys?”

Lyssa got up, and for a moment Cassie thought she might refuse. Then Lyssa walked over to Athena and put both arms around her.

Lyssa closed her eyes, and Athena rocked her as if she were a child, murmuring endearments.

Cassie turned away. Her daughter hadn’t hugged her, hadn’t even made her feel like she had been missed. But then, that was the story of their relationship, wasn’t it? The way they constantly avoided closeness, and the depth with which Cassie wanted it.

She set the tar ball on a napkin and washed her hands. Lyssa and Athena were still hugging, although not as close. They were speaking to each other softly, Athena offering words of comfort.

Cassie couldn’t remember Athena ever doing that for her, not even as a little child. Cassie sighed, poured herself more tea, and took a cookie. It was small comfort.

“Would you like some tea, Grandma?” Lyssa said after a moment.

“It looks like I’m going to be awake for a while, so I don’t have to drink that disgusting stuff.” Athena walked over to the cupboards, her robe swishing as she moved. “I’m going to have something with caffeine.”

Cassie didn’t say anything. She finished her cookie and put a hand around her mug, letting the warmth flow through her palm.

It only took Athena a moment to prepare her coffee, then plug in the machine. The smell of freshly roasted beans reached Cassie and her mouth watered, but she knew better than to have coffee this late at night.

“Now,” Athena said as she took her favorite mug from the cupboard. “What’s this nonsense I hear about Cliffside House attacking someone?”

Lyssa went through her story again, and when she got to the ball, Cassie pushed it toward Athena. Athena gave the tar ball a passing glance, then raised her gaze to Cassie.

Cassie looked away.

“Cliffside House has never, in its entire history, attacked anyone,” Athena said as she poured herself a cup of coffee. She waved the pot at Lyssa, silently asking if she wanted any. Lyssa shook her head. “What you’ve described to me is a request for help, and a demonstration of the problem.”

“I gleaned some of that.” Lyssa’s tone was dry. “But it felt frightening. And why come to me? Why not go to you or Mother? I’ve only just come back to town.”

Athena looked at Cassie again. Cassie took another cookie, broke it in half, and wished there were a fortune inside it. Something, anything, to take her away from this conversation.

“You belong here, Lys,” Athena said. “You and your daughter.”

Still she wouldn’t say Emily’s name, but Lyssa didn’t seem to catch that.

“I know,” Lyssa said. “Buckinghams should never leave Cliffside House.”

“That’s not what I said.” Athena looked at Cassie a third time. “You carry a bit of the sea, Lys. You hear better than the rest of us.”

“A bit of the sea? What’s that, Gram?”

Cassie reached for the teapot, but her hand shook and she nearly knocked it over. “Sorry,” she said.

Both Lyssa and Athena were watching her. But she didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t. She had promised herself long ago that Daray was hers, that she wouldn’t share him with anyone, not for any reason. Lyssa was the gift that Daray had left her. He had known she was pregnant long before Cassie had, and still, that day, he had gone to the sea, knowing he would die.

“Mom?” There was actual concern in Lyssa’s voice.

Cassie righted the teapot. She had only spilled a little bit. She grabbed a napkin and started to wipe up, but Lyssa’s hand caught hers.

“What’s going on, Mom?”

Cassie swallowed. She silently cursed Athena, sitting across from them like the goddess she had been named for.

“You left,” Cassie said, and instantly regretted pausing after that word. It made her sound like she had condemned Lyssa for doing something Cassie had always believed to be completely natural. “You left, and we never really got the chance to talk to you about Anchor Bay and Cliffside House.”

“We always thought you’d come back,” Athena said, and even though the comment was meant helpfully, it wasn’t helpful.

Cassie balled up the soggy napkin, got up, and threw it into the trash.

“We thought you’d come back
sooner,”
Cassie said as she returned to her chair. “Certainly, when Emily was born.”

“She was the first Buckingham in six generations not born in the house,” Athena said.

“Mother, please.” Cassie was watching Lyssa. There was already a small frown on Lyssa’s forehead. They were going to lose her again if they weren’t careful.

Athena shrugged one shoulder. “I would have told this differently.”

“You grew up here,” Cassie said a little desperately. “You know the house. You’ve seen it change, and you’ve seen the things that sometimes appear on the beach.”

“I haven’t forgotten the magic, Mother.” Lyssa’s tone was dry.

Cassie nodded. That was what she was checking. “Cliffside House is the link between the past and the present, between the real and the unreal.”

Athena watched her, knowing as well as Cassie did that Cassie was using the very words that Athena had used with Cassie when she’d imparted this secret decades ago.

“That’s why the house changes,” Cassie said, deviating from the script. “It wasn’t built here. It was built there in ways we don’t completely understand. But it lives here, as a crossroads. And we’re guardians of that crossroads. We protect both sides of the link.”

“You and Grandma?” Lyssa didn’t sound skeptical, but she did sound confused.

“The Buckinghams,” Cassie said. “You, me, your grandmother. And now Emily.”

Lyssa blinked hard. She brought her mug of tea to her lips and then set it down again without drinking.

“I didn’t bring Emily to this place to trap her here,” Lyssa said.

“She doesn’t belong anywhere else, child,” Athena said. “Mom,” Cassie warned.

But Athena, typically, didn’t listen to her. “That’s why your husband got so ill. All those powers, untrained and unchanneled, mixing in his head. You’re immune to the texture of magic, to the way it bends everything around it. You grew up here. But he had no defense.”

Lyssa’s eyes had filled with tears. “You’re saying that Reginald’s illness could have been prevented?”

“It was expected, Lys,” Athena said.

“And you didn’t tell me? You didn’t warn me?”

It was Cassie’s turn to wince. She knew what Athena was going to say.

“Mom,” she said. “Don’t.”

But as Athena’s gaze met Cassie’s, her expression hardened.

“Sometimes, Lyssa,” Athena said, “the men are irrelevant.”

Cassie’s breath caught. She remembered those words, that inflection. She had been standing on the beach, ankle-deep in the surf, and her mother, her damn mother, trying to comfort her, had said that men were irrelevant.

That Daray was irrelevant.

Has he already done his duty?
Athena asked.
Are you pregnant?

“Reginald was not irrelevant, Grandmother.” Lyssa tapped her mug. “I
loved
him. Losing him may have destroyed Emily. How can you say he’s irrelevant?”

Athena looked down at her hands. Cassandra clutched her mug so tightly she could hear the ceramic crack.

But Lyssa wasn’t done. “How could you,” she said to Athena, “and you—” She turned to Cassie. “How could you both let me, let us, lose him like that? If we had known—”

“If you had known,” Athena said, “you might not have married him.”

“And you say that would have been better for him.”

Cassie gripped her mug even tighter. This was what she feared from Lyssa’s homecoming, this discord. It had always been Lyssa’s hallmark.

“Yes,” Athena said. “It would have been better for him.”

Lyssa blinked hard, holding back tears.

“Mother,” Cassie said. “That’s enough.”

It was too much, actually, and Cassie should have jumped in sooner.

Athena leaned toward Cassie. “She needs to know what is happening here. She needs to know—”

“Lys,” Cassie said. “It’s complicated. It’s always complicated for us. And she’s wrong. We all failed you. I failed you. I didn’t want a Walters back in Anchor Bay . . .”

Her voice trailed off as she realized what she had said. Lyssa raised her head, and the tears seemed to vanish. Cassie felt her cheeks grow even warmer.

“Back?” Lyssa asked.

Athena touched Lyssa’s arm. “Child, these old arguments are useless. We must stay focused on the present.”

But Lyssa pulled away from her. “What do you mean
back?”

Cassie sighed. Apparently it was time to tell her. It was past time, truly. Only Cassie’s fear had held her back before.

She didn’t want to lose her daughter—not that she had ever had her. And now that Athena had spoken up, the chances of losing Lyssa permanently were very, very real.

“Back,” Cassie said. “His father was here, over thirty years ago.”

The First Layer

January 1970
Anchor Harbor. Oregon

The storm had been predicted for three days and when it arrived, it arrived fast. Winds over forty knots created thirty-foot seas, which turned the harbor at Anchor Bay into a death trap.

John Aluke, captain of the tugboat
Anchor One,
was halfway out of the harbor when the storm hit. He’d been through worse—most notably the Columbus Day Storm eight years before. He knew he could survive this storm, maybe even bring in the ship that he was supposed to pilot into the harbor, but he also knew which risks were worth his while.

He radioed the
Walter Aggie,
which, according to their last readings, was still twenty miles out, and warned them to come no closer to port. He told them to anchor offshore, and he would come for them as soon as the winds died down, perhaps as early as the morning.

He got no response. For by then, the
Aggie
was already in trouble.

Cliffside House North Tower

Twenty-year-old Cassandra Buckingham woke out of a sound sleep convinced the cliff was going to fall into the sea. She had heard a large bang and felt a huge shudder run through the entire building.