Page 33 of Tidal Creatures

Luis shrugs, still grinning. “I’ll take Bobby out and then I’ll go.”

“Okay. You do that.” Isabella watches as he scurries away, then finally picks up her own breakfast and sits down across from Kelpie. “Don’t get the wrong idea. He’s a good kid, but he likes to press the rules as much as any child does. If I gave him an inch, he’d take a mile. Fortunately, we only have one car, and Juan needs it for work.”

“What does he do?”

“He’s a mechanic. Works at a shop over in Oakland, comes home every night smelling like grease, with new calluses on his hands. It’s wonderful. He enjoys his work, I enjoy not needing to worry about him, and his income is unpredictable enough that the government doesn’t notice the money I bring in under the table.”

Most of this makes no sense to Kelpie, so she just nods, hoping she looks like she understands, and cuts into her eggs with a quick swipe of her butter knife. The yolks rupture in a river of gold that seems oddly alchemical in nature, reminding her far too much of Margaret’s eyes running down her cheeks, impossibly still pigmented in their original color. She pushes her chair back and drops her fork, abruptly no longer hungry.

“I’m sorry. I should have asked how you liked your eggs.”

“It’s not…” There’s a lump in Kelpie’s throat. She doesn’t know how it got there, but it hurts. She swallows as hard as she can, forcing herself to speak around it, even as she wraps her tail around her leg and draws it tight, cutting off the circulation below the knee. “I guess I’m just not hungry. Sorry to waste food.”

“I can put it in the fridge for later, but the eggs will congeal if I do that,” says Isabella.

Congealed eggs won’t run like liquefied human eyes. Kelpie nods immediately. “Yes please could you do that?” she asks.

Looking confused, Isabella rises, takes Kelpie’s plate, and carries it to the counter, where she wraps a piece of tinfoil over it before putting it in the fridge. “This is here whenever you’re ready,” she says.

“Thank you,” says Kelpie, meekly.

“But if you’re going to be staying longer than a day, we need to talk about how much you actually eat when you’re not traumatized.”

Kelpie unwraps her tail before anything can go numb, flicking it out of the way, and blinks at Isabella. “Why?”

“Oh, for—because, hon, food isn’t free when it’s not being provided by the evil underground alchemy lab. I’m happy to feed you. You’re a victim of those bastards as much as anyone else I’ve ever known, but if you eat like the age you look, we’re going to need extra money, and there’s no way you legally exist. Even if you could afford to take the risk of being behind the counter at 7-Eleven when an alchemist came in looking for bottled water and M&M’s, they’d never hire you to begin with, because their computers will all say you’re not real.”

Kelpie’s head is starting to spin. This is a lot, and she’s been loose in the world for less than a day, and she doesn’t know how she’s going to handle any of it. Of course she exists! If she didn’t exist, this would all be so much easier. But she’s been called into being by alchemists whose educations outstripped their ethics by such a wide margin that they never stopped to ask themselves whether this, any of this, was acceptable. She is. How can a computer decide she’s not?

“I don’t know how much I eat,” she says, in a small voice. “A normal amount.”

“Was last night normal?”

“No. I was hungry and I’d been so scared and sometimes adrenaline can convert into hunger signals when the body comes down from the peak of panic, and the food was so good. I never had anything like that before.”

“Sounds about white,” says Isabella, and eyes her. “That stuff about adrenaline—why do you know that?”

“I helped with the animals in the bio lab sometimes,” says Kelpie. “You’d have a rat so scared it was forgetting to breathe, and then five minutes later, it’d be trying to eat a chunk of bread bigger than its body. I know a lot about biology.”

“And nothing about the cost of food. What a fun education you’ve had.” Isabella sighs, but she’s smiling; she’s not mad. “Well, you can’t get a job, and you can’t go back to the alchemists, so that means you’re going to have to learn how to do what an hechicera does, just a little. Maybe you’re going to be amazing at talking the universe into things, since technically you’re an incarnate piece of it walking around on two hooves—and don’t think they were doing you any favors when they built you so far off the human norm, kiddo. Maybe most people won’t see you for what you are, but enough will, and that’s going to make you a target any time you go out in public.”

Kelpie blinks. “Margaret always said I was a lab accident,” she says, not fully aware that she’s omitted the word “in” from that sentence; she’s adjusting to the reality of what she is and how she came to be. “I don’t know if they did it on purpose, or whether they could have made me any other way.”

“You look kinda like a deer; maybe it’s the Hind coming out in you. But by that logic, every Winter would look like Jack Frost, and every Summer would look like a harvest icon, so maybe it’s just because they were working with something that didn’t want to manifest. Who knows why alchemists do anything? They’re like kids with a chemistry set way above their age level. Half the time, I don’t think they know why they do the things they do.”

“But I can go out?”

“Yes. As long as we stay out of crowds and avoid places where alchemists tend to congregate, you can go out. Which is good. You’re coming to my coven meeting today, and then you and I are going to figure out what of my services you can help for. I do things for the local community. Luck charms, water-purification stones—with the plumbing around here, sometimes you don’t have a choice—all the little forms of magic that the alchemists can’t monitor or admit exist without showing their whole hand. If you can help me do my job faster, I can take more clients, and we’ll be able to pay whatever increase you cause in the food bill. And we can start setting you up with funds for when you inevitably get tired of haunting my living room.”

“Do you think that’s going to happen?”

“Stranger things happen every day,” says Isabella.

She’s finished her breakfast while they were talking, and after a brief pause to rinse the dishes and load them into the dishwasher (which Isabella dismisses merrily as “a piece of crap” while still using it), she leads Kelpie to the bathroom and presents her with the available sanitary products: toothpaste and a fresh toothbrush, a hairbrush that looks like it might be up to the challenge of her hair, a washcloth, and a towel. She stays long enough to establish that they did have showers in the lab, then excuses herself, telling Kelpie to come out when she’s ready, and leaves her alone.

The bathroom is small, square, and very, very white. It’s the most familiar thing she’s seen since leaving the lab. Kelpie looks at the brush and tube of paste in her hands, and decides to start with what she knows hasn’t changed: oral hygiene doesn’t care whether you’re real or lab-grown. It’s a constant. Her hair is more of a challenge. It’s not curly so much as it’s wavy and stubborn, with a tendency to tie itself into knots if she looks at it funny. Sleeping under a tree and then on a couch definitely qualifies as looking at it funny, and it takes the brush away from her several times before she feels like she can safely step into the shower.

The soap doesn’t smell like anything she recognizes, and the bottle doesn’t help as much as she’d like it to. Is “Summer Berry Medley Dream” a kind of fruit? It’s probably delicious, with a name like that, which explains why someone would want to smell that way. She lathers herself up and rinses twice, the way she always did down in the lab, and wishes she’d thought to go by her quarters for her nail kit. Normally, she files her nails every morning, and oils her hooves and horns to keep them from cracking. It’s a tedious routine, and she never thought she could miss it.