Page 20 of Tidal Creatures

“What is?” Kelpie isn’t actually sure she wants to know the answer, but the question is virtually unbidden, unavoidable.

Isabella shrugs. “Neither of the bodies made it to the county morgue. The woman was a Jane Doe, but Monroe, he was wealthy. He had connections, friends, patrons. Someone should have kicked up a fuss, but nobody did. Both of them just vanished en route, and not a trace of them has surfaced, not even in the night markets.”

There’s a ruckus then, and Luis comes surging back into the kitchen, Bobby beside him, the dog’s tail waving wildly. “Can we go back outside? Bobby needs to use the bathroom again.”

“Does Bobby really need to use the bathroom after you just took him out, or are you just tired of me monopolizing your friend’s attention and looking for something to do?”

Luis grins a gamin grin, utterly unrepentant, and shrugs. “You don’t normally steal my friends,” he says. “I want her back when you’re done.”

“You’ll have her, my prince of porchlights, I promise,” says Isabella. She licks her thumb and leans over to wipe a smudge from his forehead. “Go out, but don’t leave the courtyard, understand me? And take the potty bags! Maybe if Mr. Mendoza sees you carrying them, he won’t blame us for the cat shit in his bushes. Not likely, though.” She turns back to Kelpie, saying in an undertone, “Man can’t tell the difference between cat shit and what comes out of a full-grown silver lab.”

“Bobby isn’t silver,” says Kelpie, uncertainly.

“And American pit bull terriers aren’t bad dogs, but until the people who make the rental rules get their heads out of their asses and stop trying to enforce unreasonable breed bans, Bobby gets to be a silver lab, and he still doesn’t shit like a cat.”

“Oh,” says Kelpie. The world up here is much more complicated than she ever imagined it might be. She’s studied in preparation for her supposed “return” to the world, and she thought she understood the complexities she was walking into, but she didn’t know anything, not really. She doesn’t even know what she shouldn’t ask.

Isabella takes some pity. She leans across the table to pat Kelpie’s hand. “It’s all right. If you’re not an alchemist, I can help you.”

“I … used to work as a lab assistant,” says Kelpie.

“You ever strip the fat off a baby, or break a crow down to its component parts?”

Kelpie stares at her, horrified.

“Didn’t think so. You’re not an alchemist. I’m not sure you could be, not when you’re not a natural. Seems like that would be crossing the streams in a bad, bad way, if you could take the people who are more than just human and make them stronger. My coven, we don’t have anyone with us who’s not a straight-up human, no extra bits, no surprises at the bottom of the cereal box. Angeline says one of her cousins was tapped for the coronation, but they were never close, she and that cousin. She didn’t even go to his funeral. I think being too close to a manifestation, even if you’re not one yourself, can mess up your sympathy with the universe. So most likely, you would never have been good for anything beyond washing dishes and mixing chemicals together, even if you’d wanted to be.”

“I don’t think I want to be,” mutters Kelpie.

“Good choice, really. And you say ‘what damage,’ and I say ‘what damage haven’t they done?’ There used to be hundreds of different magical systems, all sorts of people doing things according to all different sets of rules. None of this ‘my way is the right way and if you don’t like it, you’re not going to accomplish anything.’ People could take a lot of paths to the same outcome.”

“What happened?”

“The alchemists happened,” says Isabella, darkly. “They started making rules, big rules, and when people didn’t want to follow them, they started finding ways to enforce those rules. It got to where almost no one else could do anything, because the universe thought they were doing it wrong when they didn’t follow the alchemists’ rules. That’s the problem with living in a world that wants to be a person. People tend to like rules. Even the ones who think they don’t like rules, they like them. We enjoy having the same atmosphere every day, and knowing we’re allergic to one thing but not another, and that we should drink water instead of hydrofluoric acid. We like gravity and thermodynamics, and even though we complain about it, we like time. We like the way it passes at a consistent rate for everyone and everything. We like rules. And when you turn the basic building blocks of reality into people, what you wind up with is a reality that likes rules just as much as people do. So they follow along. Even the rule-breakers acknowledge the rules, because if they didn’t, they couldn’t break them. You see?”

“Yes … no. Not really.”

“The first horrible thing the alchemists did was convince the universe it needed rules to run smoothly. Their rules. They took a lot of chaos and they tamed it as much as they could. They weren’t alone in those days—most people who had any pull with the universe wanted at least a few rules, to make things easier on themselves—but as time went on, more and more of the rules the alchemists made said ‘and we’re on top and everyone else is on the bottom, and that’s the way things are meant to be.’ The alchemists built the boxes, and shoved the rest of us inside, and then they got mad when we didn’t want to stay where we’d been put.”

“You’re not an alchemist, then?”

Isabella laughs, loud and bright and genuinely amused. “If I were an alchemist, would I be so happy to talk shit about them? No, kid, I’m an hechicera. Unless you ask the ladies in my coven, then I’m a witch, although we have a couple of dabblers who keep trying to call me a bruja.”

“What’s the difference?” Kelpie’s head is spinning. This is all so much, so fast and so out of order.

“An hechicera, that’s like a sorcerer. We do big, deep magic—kind of like your alchemists do. We talk the universe into things. A witch, they stay shallow. They talk people into things. A bruja is a kind of witch, and there’s nothing wrong with being one, unless you’re Puerto Rican and a white lady keeps insisting that has to be what you are.”

“Oh.”

“So no, I’m not an alchemist. They might have been willing to have me when I was younger, if I’d been whiter or more male, but at this point I know so many rules they don’t approve of that they wouldn’t have me even if I was willing to have them. Which I’m not.” Isabella leans forward, serious again. “Now. You were saying they wanted one of the Lunars. How does that drop a girl with hooves in my kitchen?”

“Oh. Um. Margaret was the head of a team that thought they could attract certain Lunars if they could force their traditional companions to incarnate. Like a dog, for the Man in the Moon? But most of those companions haven’t been manifest in a long, long time, so they had to build the vessels themselves. I thought we were only working on animals, but I found out today that actually, they’d been using some material created for use in compelling nonstandard forces to manifest, and since it’s human at its roots, they were getting humans with animalistic features.”

“And you’re one of those manifest companions?”

“I was supposed to be.”

“Which one?”