Fantasy Life (22 page)

She wouldn’t be able to stay up here very long. She had no idea whether the tide was coming in or going out—she had stopped paying attention to tide tables long ago—but her time on the base was limited.

Either a wave would drag her to sea or a gust—anything stronger than this current wind—would fling her over the side.

And then, no amount of power would save her.

She glanced once at the door behind her. It had vanished into the cliffside, just like it had been designed to do, even though she didn’t remember closing it. She hoped Cassie would know that this was the place to come, this was the door she needed.

Maybe Athena shouldn’t have left Cassie on the stairs. She had never seen her daughter like that, frightened, and in the throes of something more than she was.

Athena did not like how this night was shaping up.

The rain grew thicker, harder, and seemed to have chunks of ice in it. The temperature had fallen just in the time she had stood out here.

Her nightgown and robe were plastered against her, her long hair glued to her face. Up ahead, the selkie stood, hands on his hips, waiting for her as if they were about to go on a picnic.

Behind him, she saw other figures. Men, women, she couldn’t tell. Not all of them appeared to be human.

She clambered across the rocks, suddenly missing the chivalry of her own kind. All she needed was a hand extended, guiding, helping. But she had to make it on her own, the wind pushing her toward the restless sea.

A wave crested, sending spray across her face, mixing with the icy rain. She couldn’t see what the problem was out there in that ocean, how she was needed, but she knew she was.

She was the lightning rod, the connection, the power source. The waiting group probably weren’t strong enough to prevent the problem on their own.

She climbed the last of the rocks, and suddenly hands were helping her, grasping her upper arms, supporting her back. But instead of fingers, some of the hands had talons and others had scales instead of skin.

As she reached the very edge of the base, she saw some of the creatures. It seemed like the entire population of the refuge had gathered: fish women standing on the edge of the rocks, their faces turned toward the rain; real mer-creatures clutching the side of the cliff, hanging on despite the treacherous seas; selkies, some with their pelts and some without, but all in their human form; and more—creatures she had no name for, some so small she was afraid she would crush them with her bare feet.

The languages swirled around her like the wind, and the magic sent sparks into the air that felt like electricity, making her wonder about the danger of being electrocuted, here on the lonely lava rock, in the middle of a terrible storm.

“Athena!” The selkie who had brought her shouted her name. His voice, so deep and rich inside Cliffside House, seemed small here compared with the ocean’s pounding and the wailing power of the wind. “We need you in the center of the circle.”

A circle. She had never done one of these. Her mother had, and her grandmother before her, and they had never talked about them, only saying that they were the best and worst times of their guardianships.

Athena crossed the rocks and stood in the center of the creatures she had sworn to protect. They looked at her, not threatening her as they would other humans, and then they reached out—arms, appendages, tails, whatever worked—and touched the creature next to them, forming an unbreakable circle.

The wind howled around them, and the sea roared, and the rain became even fiercer.

Light surrounded her and the rain fell off her and she raised her arms. In the midst of the storm, the selkie reminded her, “Barrier, Athena, we need a barrier,” but she wasn’t sure if he spoke the words or sent them to her telepathically, like Cassie used to do when she was a child, before she had control of her powers.

Cassie should have been out here. This was a mind-magic, not a physical one. But something—someone—had crippled Cassie with a vision, and Athena had left her on the stairs.

The light grew brighter, and in the center of it she saw a ship, tilting in the waves. It was going to slam into the Candlestick. Athena set up the barrier, but too late. The ship had already hit rocks. The barrier prevented it from tumbling into the harbor.

Something that looked like arterial blood poured out of the hull, but it was worse, much worse, and she realized she had put the barrier in the wrong place. She set up protections all around the harbor and deep into the ocean floor, not letting anything from this ship contaminate her world, her people, her refuge.

But the smell enveloped her, dank and oily and thick, and she heard screaming—human screaming—and she saw more blood pouring into the sea.

They were dying. Everyone was dying, and all she had done was put a Band-Aid on the wound.

Cliffside House

“I don’t understand, Mother,” Lyssa said, sounding both tired and irritated. “What wound? What are you talking about?”

Cassie sank into her chair. Through the open kitchen door, she saw Emily, still wrapped up in the quilt, sound asleep. Emily would have understood. The child had a gift, a deep gift, that no one else seemed to notice.

“Oil,” Athena said. “She’s talking about oil. The
Walter Aggie
was an oil tanker. In the middle of the storm, it slammed into the Devil’s Candlestick, swerved around it somehow, and then ran aground in the bay.”

Lyssa got up and poured herself some real coffee. Cassie poured the last of the peppermint tea. It was cold, but she didn’t care.

Lyssa sat back down and looked at her grandmother.

“You tried to prevent that?” Lyssa asked Athena.

She nodded. “We were too late to prevent the grounding. I think it was meant to happen, as a kind of test against the refuge.”

“Lyssa doesn’t know about the refuge, Mother.” Cassie had been trying to get there, but the memories had overwhelmed her. That time lived in her mind much more than this one did. It wasn’t just her past; it was her present as well.

“The refuge?” Lyssa reached for a cookie.

Athena sighed. “It sounds so silly when you actually talk about it. But remember the end of the nineteenth century was the beginning of the conservation movement.”

“I thought we were talking about 1970,” Lyssa said.

“We’re talking about the refuge.” Athena took a cookie as well. She held it up, examined it, and said to Cassie, “If we’re going to be up all night talking, perhaps we should have a real meal.”

“I just bake,” Cassie said. “Real meals are your province.”

“The refuge,” Lyssa prompted.

Athena ate the cookie and stood up. Cassie had seen her do this before. Athena hated talking about the true nature of the Buckinghams, of Cliffside House, of their history. But she was going to.

“In the 1880s, 1890s, my great-grandmother hated the direction the world was taking. This was the era of the robber barons, the first industrial age, and everything was considered ripe for the taking—trees, land, oil—”

“I’m an historian, Gram,” Lyssa said. “I do know this stuff.”

“You know the official American version,” Athena said. “Not the real version.”

“But she does understand the context,” Cassie said. The conversation had gotten away from her, but she wasn’t going to lose it entirely.

Athena took a pan out of the rack beside the stove. She set it on the flat cooktop.

“Magic,” she said as if she were giving a lecture in school, “exists all over nature. Not all creatures build and achieve like we do. Sometimes they believe other things are more important. My great-grandmother believed that when we tampered with the natural environment, we were destroying magic.”

“A nineteenth-century environmentalist,” Lyssa muttered.

Athena paused in her preparations to glare at Lyssa. Cassie tried to give her a cautionary look, but she wasn’t sure Lyssa saw it.

After a moment, Athena went to the refrigerator and
removed eggs, bacon, ham, several vegetables, and cheese. As she set them on the counter, she said, “Whatever you want to call her, my great-grandmother was adamant about this. But she was a Buckingham, and she knew if she tried to tell the officials or the heads of the various businesses or any man in power—”

“Why is it that Buckinghams are anti-male?” Lyssa asked, loudly enough to interrupt.

Maybe she hadn’t changed from her teenage self.

“We’re not,” Cassie said. Then she looked at her mother, who had her back to them. “At least, not all of us.”

“You’re an historian,” Athena said with some acidity. “You know how well women were treated in the nineteenth century.”

“It was better in the West,” Lyssa said.

Athena turned, gripping a wooden spoon like a sword. “Do you want to hear this or not?”

“Lys, please,” Cassie said. She didn’t want them driving again, and she couldn’t let Emily go. She wouldn’t. The child needed more help than Lyssa realized.

Lyssa paused, as if gathering herself, then shook her head. “I’m sorry, Gram. I’m exhausted. I was kind of hoping to come here, collapse on a bed, and not think about anything for a few weeks. Now I’m faced with some centuries-old problem, not to mention the fact that my ex-husband’s death might be due to my mistakes, and I don’t know what I’m going to do to help Emily. So I’m not exactly primed for a history lesson.”

“Well,” Athena said, “you’re going to listen anyway.”

Cassie suppressed a smile. Her mother used to talk to her that way too, but Athena had never spoken to Lyssa like that.

“Can I help you cook?” Lyssa asked. “I’m good at omelettes.”

“Who said I was making omelettes?” Athena grabbed a mixing bowl.

“I can do this, Mom,” Cassie said, although she wasn’t sure if she was offering to finish the story or to cook the middle-of-the-night meal.

Either way, Athena rejected the offer with the wave of her spoon. “I was telling you about the refuge,” she said. “My great-grandmother came to realize that she couldn’t protect hundreds of places, but she had charge of Anchor Bay and, through connection, Seavy County. She convinced all sorts of species to come here, and because of who we are, she got mostly water creatures. She promised them protection, if they promised not to war upon each other, and she used her magic to help them create habitats all along this part of the coast.”

“Even warm-water spirits?” Lyssa asked, and Cassie let out a sigh of relief. Apparently, Lyssa was losing her objections to the story.

“No,” Athena said. “She tried a few, but they couldn’t survive off this coast. Still, you’d be surprised how many different kinds of creatures live here, and how important they are to the ecology of the area.”

“I’m sure the State of Oregon would be surprised too,” Lyssa said.

Cassie smiled. That comment didn’t seem to bother Athena either. She was holding a mixing bowl under her right arm and cracking eggs into it with her left hand.

“The idea was to protect the fantasylife, even the kinds that weren’t exactly sentient, like the glowing waterlilies you find in Dawson’s Pond. It’s created some problems over the years, particularly to the south. We lost a few men to the fish women, and we’ve had to renegotiate treaties over and over, but by and large it works. We pool our magic, and we guard off any threat to the entire county.”

“But Mom said it didn’t work that night.” Lyssa grabbed another cookie. She seemed interested now.

Athena put the last broken eggshell back in the carton.
Cassie got up, grabbed the carton, and took the shells out. She would keep them for her compost pile, which she had been using for years now to actually make a garden out of their little stretch of rock.

Athena grabbed a fork and started beating the eggs in the bowl. The fork made a scraping sound against the metal sides that grated on Cassie’s nerves.

For a moment, she thought Athena wasn’t going to answer Lyssa. Then Athena sighed.

“There were several problems that night, some of which your mother didn’t mention.”

Cassie stiffened. Not every detail from that night was Lyssa’s business. Some of it wasn’t even Athena’s, which Cassie would remind her if she started to tell.

“But the big ones come from us. We Buckinghams don’t have the same powers. Mine aren’t cerebral, like your mother’s. I have some mental abilities, but nothing like Cassie’s.”

Cassie felt her cheeks warm. She had never heard Athena talk about Cassie’s powers in such a positive way.

“My powers are more aggressive. If we were under some kind of attack, I could have stopped it. I’m better than an entire army.” Then Athena shrugged, holding up the dripping fork and studying her hand. “Or, at least, I used to be.”

“And then there’s me,” Lyssa said. “No powers at all.”

“If that were true,” Cassie said, “then you wouldn’t have had that vision tonight.”

“You’re saying my powers are like yours?”

“Not at all,” Athena said. “You share a lot with your father.”

“My father?” Lyssa sat up in surprise. “He had magic?”

“Of course.”

Cassie’s cheeks were even warmer. She gripped the side of the counter, her head down. “Mother, please.”

“But,” Athena said sharply, “he’s apparently a topic for another night.”

Cassie felt the muscles in her arms twitch, as the tension from her fingers ran all the way to her back. She wanted to curse her mother, but she wouldn’t let herself. At some point, she would have to talk to Lyssa.

But on her terms, not her mother’s.

Athena had no right to set things up like this. She had no right to interfere in everyone’s life.

“Why haven’t you said anything about my father, Mom?” Lyssa asked.

The perennial question, which Cassie had dodged so many times that Lyssa had finally stopped asking it.

“Because,” Cassie said, opting for the truth, “it hurts too much to talk about him.”

“Cassie’s never gotten over him,” Athena said. “I don’t think she’s ever tried.”

Cassie closed her eyes. She could never see Daray as he had been in life; only in those last minutes, his body curled at her feet, after he had been released from the sea.