Fantasy Life (46 page)

Gabriel’s blue eyes took in everything. He was frowning as he watched Lyssa talk to Emily. Denne wasn’t paying attention at all. He was still examining Cassie, but he had also taken a cell phone out of his pocket

“That lady,” Emily said, and looked across the street. Lyssa followed her gaze. The reporter was still there with her cameraman, filming the whole scene.

“The reporter?”

“No, Great-Aunt Roseluna.”

Lyssa frowned. She didn’t remember any Aunt Roseluna. She didn’t remember any aunts at all.

But Athena crouched next to them. “What about her?”

Apparently Athena knew who she was.

“She was making Grandma mad. Then she got in her head, showed her some stuff, and stayed there.” Emily shot a frightened glance at Athena. “She found it.”

“Found what?” Lyssa asked.

“That place inside Grandma. The place that makes her so unhappy. The one where she doesn’t want to live anymore.”

Lyssa started. She had never known that there was such a place inside her mother, but it made sense. Cassie had never taken care of herself—rarely ate, often took risks that seemed silly to Lyssa, even to the young Lyssa who had taken quite a few unnecessary risks herself.

“She has a place like that?” Lyssa turned toward Athena.

Athena’s patrician features were softened by compassion. “Lyssa, sweetheart. You’re the only reason that she’s still here. If she hadn’t been pregnant with you when Daray died, she probably would have followed him.”

“Followed him?” Lyssa repeated. “You mean she would have killed herself?”

Athena nodded, then put a hand on Cassie’s long, dark hair. “She was never the same after that.”

“After he died?” Lyssa asked.

But Athena didn’t answer.

“What exactly happened?” Lyssa asked her daughter. “What did that woman do to Mother?”

“Made her remember,” Emily said. “I got parts, but I couldn’t stop it. Grandma was too far away.”

Emily’s link to her grandmother was strong. Lyssa wasn’t
sure she liked that. She wasn’t sure about anything that had happened since she’d returned to Anchor Bay.

“Why would she do that?” Lyssa asked, and the question wasn’t just directed at Emily. She was asking everyone and no one.

“If what the little girl says is true,” Denne said, “that woman—your aunt?—wanted to disable Cassie.”

“I don’t have an aunt,” Lyssa said. “My mother was an only child.”

“But your father wasn’t,” Athena said.

“Some selkie’s been going after my mother?” Lyssa asked.

“She was across the street,” Emily said. “She was at lunch.”

“Mother had lunch with her?”

“It’s a long story,” Athena said, “and I don’t think we have time to discuss it.”

Gabriel glanced over his shoulder, as if he were expecting someone.

“You want to call the ambulance or should I?” Denne asked Gabriel.

Then Cassie’s hand reached up and grabbed Denne’s phone. “No ambulance.”

“I’m sorry, Cassandra, but you could have a concussion at worst or something else. And if the little girl is right—”

“Emily,” Cassie said. “My Emily.”

Lyssa felt her breath catch. Her mother had never spoken about Lyssa like that. Not with such protectiveness, such love.

“And she is right,” Cassie said. “I made a mistake.”

“If someone got in your head, it’s not your fault.” Athena’s tone was brusque. She knelt beside Cassie, so that Cassie could see her closely.

Lyssa couldn’t remember ever seeing Athena look so vulnerable.

“It’s my fault,” Cassie said. “I let Roseluna there. She was
telling me something I thought I wanted to know. I let down my guard, and she did this.”

Cassie seemed to be getting stronger with each sentence.

“Did what?” Lyssa asked.

Cassie turned toward her, tears in her dark eyes. “Made me remember the day your dad died. The day I realized everyone was right. You see, Lys, it was never about me or this great love I’d made up. Your father wasn’t human, even though I wanted to pretend he was. He wasn’t capable of loving me. He just used me, and when I wasn’t important anymore, he took matters into his own hands, without consulting me. Without even saying good-bye.”

Her voice broke.

“Cassie, it’s past,” Athena said.

“You’ve always said that.” Cassie wiped at her face like a little child who didn’t want anyone to know she was in pain. “And you’ve always been wrong. No one has gotten past that day. Not me, not the selkies, not even Anchor Bay.”

“What day?” Gabriel asked Lyssa.

“The day of the great storm,” she said.

“Right after the
Walter Aggie
went down.” Denne sounded awestruck. “The day the storm cleaned the beaches.”

“And destroyed most of Anchor Bay,” Cassie said. “A lot of people died when that wave hit. John Aluke, Michael Sheehan, Andrea Thomesan. Friends.”

“And my dad,” Lyssa said.

Cassie shook her head. “He caused it.”

Lyssa sank to the curb. This wasn’t the story she had heard all her life. The story she had heard had been that her father—her marvelous, perfect, heroic father—had died while working on the oil cleanup on the beach. The storm had come in too fast for anyone to survive it. Her mother had lived through it only because she had been changing clothes in the rest area, and that building, one of the few left standing, protected her.

“Don’t be silly,” Lyssa heard herself say, using her mother’s
perfect detached tones, the tones she had grown up listening to. “No one can cause a storm.”

“Selkies can,” Athena said.

“I’ve seen it,” Denne said, apparently not realizing this was a family conversation. “In Whale Rock, four years ago. A selkie staying at the Sand Castle Hotel decided—long story, short version—decided to get revenge on the hotel’s owner for serious crimes his son had committed. The selkie slit her wrists and jumped off the balcony into the sea. The resulting storm destroyed all the homes along the D River as well as the Sand Castle—and the weird thing was, no other towns on the coast got hit by a storm that day. In fact, they were in sunshine.”

“Like here,” Lyssa said. She remembered that part of the story too. Everyone talked about the beautiful clear night that the rest of Oregon enjoyed—how clear the stars were, how bright the moon was—and yet the storm that hit Anchor Bay was so powerful that it had created a tidal wave that had leveled the entire downtown.

Denne nodded.

Cassie was sitting up, her chin on her knees. She was wiping her face with one hand, and with the other, she held on to Emily. Lyssa didn’t remember when Emily had moved away from her to go to her grandmother, but the two of them seemed to be bonded in a way that Lyssa simply didn’t understand.

“Why would this woman go after Mother?” Lyssa asked Denne.

He shrugged. “I don’t know your family’s history with the selkies.”

“It’s a long one,” Athena said. “And not always pretty.”

Emily put her arms around her grandmother and leaned against her thigh.

“But the question really isn’t a matter of history,” Athena said. “It’s a matter for now.”

“What does that mean?” Lyssa asked.

“A vision disabled Cassie only once before,” Athena said, “and I’ve always wondered about it.”

Cassie looked over her shoulder at her mother. “The night we could have stopped the
Walter Aggie
from going aground.”

“Yes.” Athena gave Cassie a small smile. Tentative, just the way that Lyssa was feeling.

Gabriel was watching closely, occasionally glancing at Denne. But Denne didn’t seem to notice. He seemed completely involved in this conversation, as if discussing the past had some meaning to him.

“You think this—person—tapped into Mom’s memories to disable her?” Lyssa asked.

“That’s what Emily said.” Athena looked at Emily, a frown on her face.

“That’s what Dr. Denne said,” Lyssa corrected. “Emily just discussed the place that selkie touched.”

“To stop Grandma,” Emily said, still leaning on Cassie’s hip. “Grandma didn’t like what they’re going to do, so Roseluna wanted Grandma out of the way.”

“What are they doing?” Lyssa asked.

“What Daray didn’t manage the first time,” Cassie said, her voice thick with unshed tears, “although he came close.”

Lyssa shook her head. “I wasn’t there, Mom.”

“Destroying Anchor Bay, honey,” Cassie said with a sigh. “And all the Buckinghams with it.”

Anchor Harbor Wayside

Gabriel shoved his hands in his back pockets and turned away from the Buckinghams. Lyssa looked stricken, her eyes large on
her narrow face. Emily merely seemed exhausted. Athena still crouched, a frown creasing her forehead, as if she was trying to put pieces together. And Cassie—Cassie seemed the same, fragile, broken, like a small bird that had never recovered from a damaging flight.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know this much about someone else’s family, for any reason. And he wasn’t sure what it meant to him.

He took a step down, onto the highway, saw that the slime trail had tracked a good fifteen feet in either direction, moved by tires as they crossed over the mound of goo. He was going to need to get someone to clean all that up, as well as deal with the mess that was forming around him.

If Emily’s accusations were true—and after all the strange things Gabriel had seen, he had no reason to doubt her—then he was going to have to stop these selkies, and he wasn’t sure how. State and county laws—human laws—didn’t account for murder by magic. They certainly wouldn’t accommodate attempted murder by magic, and he wasn’t sure he would be able to prove conspiracy to commit murder either, not with a jury or even a judge who hadn’t spent a long time in Seavy County.

Not that it mattered. Even if he could arrest these creatures, he wasn’t sure his jail would hold them. Or if just being in the jail would stop them.

And that was the kicker. How did a man like him, a man who dealt with routine traffic stops, drug busts, and the occasional drowning, handle something this large, something so beyond him? He had no magical skills. He only had two weapons: his mind and his gun—and he had never fired his gun on the job, not once in all his years.

Nicole Drapier’s cameraman was still filming. She was standing off to the side, her head tilted sideways, and Gabriel wondered if she was taping the Buckinghams’ conversation with one of those parabolic microphones.

There was only one way to find out.

He started across the highway, only to be forced back by a horn sounding just a few feet away.

Gabriel turned, startled to see a stretch limo cross the goo line. He would have walked right in front of the vehicle if it hadn’t honked at him.

That wasn’t like him. Usually he paid more attention.

Usually he had a lot less on his mind.

He stepped back beside the curb and watched as the limo pulled into the wayside. Another limo followed directly behind it. They crossed the empty parking spaces until they reached his patrol car, still parked diagonally on the sand.

“Shit!” he whispered. He had forgotten all about the other player, the one who’d arrived just a little while ago. Samuel Walters, Emily’s grandfather.

It was old home week for the Buckinghams, and that couldn’t be good.

Gabriel started toward the limos, but Athena stood and caught his arm in the same movement. She was surprisingly strong—not just for a woman her age, but for anyone. If the power in those fingers extended to the rest of her body, Athena could probably take him in a fight.

“What is this?” she asked.

“In the excitement, I forgot to tell you,” he said.

The first limo’s back door opened, and a woman dressed in a black business suit got out. She tugged her knee-length skirt down so that she didn’t reveal any thigh as she stepped into the wind. She was short, curly haired, and wore glasses. In her left hand, she held a briefcase.

The other limo was disgorging short people in black business suits as well. All of them were expensively dressed and seemed astonishingly out of place on the Oregon Coast.

“What is this?” Athena repeated.

Gabriel swallowed hard, not sure how to tell her after all this afternoon’s revelations.

Then a man got out of the first limo. He was taller than the others, but heavyset in the way of old football players who still could handle a mean game of touch. He was completely bald, his perfectly shaped skull shining in the sunlight.

He wore a denim shirt and jeans, but on his fingers were gold rings with glittering jewels. The blue of his clothes accented the blueness of his eyes, but they were pale, almost clear—making him seem otherworldly somehow.

Samuel Walters, whom someone had told to come to the beach instead of the office.

Gabriel’s stomach clenched. Next to him, Athena gasped. Cassie rose to her feet, followed by Lyssa.

“Son of a bitch,” Athena whispered. “Son of a goddamn bitch.”

But Lyssa stepped in front of her, grabbing her grandmother’s arm, and forcing her to hold on to Emily.

Lyssa’s chin was raised, and she moved with an aggressiveness that Gabriel had never seen from her.

She pointed at Walters. “You have no right to be here. You never visited her, you never saw her, you never even sent her Christmas presents, for chrissakes. She’s my daughter and you’ll have nothing to do with her.”

Walters grinned. His smile was wide, infectious, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

“Well, hello to you too, Lysandra. It’s been a very, very long time.”

“Don’t try to charm me,” Lyssa said. “After everything you’ve done, after all you’ve been—”

“Everything I’ve done?” Walters leaned inside the limousine and grabbed a hat, a soft brown cowboy hat with tooled silver around the brim.

He set the hat on his head, making him look a lot younger. Even though he hadn’t said a word since he’d reached for the hat, he still had everyone’s attention.

“Missy.” His voice was easygoing, taking each word as if he had an hour instead of a few minutes. “I’m not the one who married an innocent boy out of revenge and then got his own child to murder him.”

Lyssa lunged for him, and Gabriel grabbed her around the waist, pulling her back.