Page 35 of Tidal Creatures

It’s strange. It’s impossible. It’s ridiculous.

It’s happening all the same.

They reach the end of a block defined by spreading maple trees and turn onto another residential street. This one has large houses instead of apartment buildings, each one with a set of stone steps leading up to its front door, most with small gardens or lawns in front, showing the world how wealthy the residents must be. The grass here is greener, healthier than the grass at the apartment complex, and Kelpie frowns.

Isabella catches her expression, and explains: “Water’s expensive. California’s experiencing a drought. So only the rich people can afford to water their lawns all the time.”

“That’s not fair,” protests Kelpie. “The grass doesn’t decide whether it gets planted by someone rich or poor. All the grass should have water.”

“You’re on the cusp of figuring something out there,” says Isabella, stopping in front of one of the larger houses. “Come on. When they ask you to take your shoes off, mime it. No one’s going to ask any questions.”

“Why would they ask me to take my shoes off?” asks Kelpie, following her up the stairs.

“Because this house belongs to a very nice, very clueless, very New Age–y white woman who doesn’t want us to scuff her bamboo parquet floors,” says Isabella, ringing the bell. When Kelpie still looks confused, she sighs. “That means no shoes in the house. A lot of cultures do that for good reasons; she does it because she thinks it’s spiritual, which is why I’m not actually being an asshole when I tease her lightly about it.”

“But I’m not wearing shoes,” says Kelpie, in case Isabella hadn’t noticed.

“Their eyes will fill them in along with the feet when they try to see you as something perfectly normal, I promise,” says Isabella. She steps back, putting a hand on Kelpie’s shoulder. “Now smile.”

The door opens.

Kelpie smiles.

The woman in the entryway smiles reflexively back before her eyes skitter to Isabella and her smile melts into an expression of petulant upset. “Isabella, there you are!” she says, a whining note in her voice that makes Kelpie’s shoulders tighten and draw upward, toward her ears. “I tried to call the apartment this morning, the energy in the house is simply dreadful, I don’t know how we’re supposed to have a meeting here today!”

“I have salt spires; I can purify it very quickly,” says Isabella, soothingly. “May I introduce you to my new apprentice, Kelly? She’s a distant cousin of mine, and she has the family gift.”

“Hello,” says Kelpie.

The woman barely glances at her, too focused on Isabella. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re going to have help; you overextend yourself so,” she gushes, reaching out as if to pull her bodily inside. At the last moment, she thinks better of it and steps to the side, allowing Isabella and Kelpie to enter. “I was just saying yesterday, I was saying, Isabella burns the candle at both ends and in the middle, and she needs to stop if she wants to keep going! And we need you to keep going, we do, you’re our spiritual leader, we would all be lost without you!” She does glance at Kelpie then, smile hardening and voice taking on the lilting quality of someone speaking to a child: “Take off your shoes, dear; this isn’t a barn.”

Barn comment aside, she doesn’t seem to see anything strange when Kelpie lifts her hooves, one by one, and mimes the removal of the shoes she isn’t wearing. The woman’s only flicker of confusion comes when Kelpie puts her “shoes” down, since it’s quite obvious that there’s nothing there. Then she shrugs, dismissing it as nothing, and her attention swings back to Isabella.

“While you’re looking at the humors of the house, can you check mine as well? I’ve been feeling faint in the mornings, you see…”

“I’ve told you before, Catrina, you can’t cut salt entirely out of your diet, no matter how much of an internal toxin you’ve decided it is. Your body needs some salt to regulate itself.”

The woman, who is tall and pale and not much older than Isabella herself, with silvery-gold hair pinned up in elaborate curls that look like they must have taken most of the morning, recoils, hands fluttering like she wants to brush Isabella’s words out of the room. “Salt is like bug spray,” she protests. “It’s good for cleansing and purifying a space, but it’s not meant to be taken internally! I don’t know why you insist on buying into the lies told by Big Sodium the way that you do, Isabella; a smart woman like you ought to know better.”

She begins to move deeper in the house, still chattering about the dangers of sodium. Isabella looks at Kelpie, smiling a little. “What did I tell you? She didn’t notice anything was wrong about your foot situation, or anything else.”

“Salt isn’t poisonous to humans,” says Kelpie, baffled. “They need it to live.”

“I know that, and you know that, and Catrina’s doctors know that, and I presume her in-home chef knows that and has been slipping salt into her food, since she hasn’t dropped dead yet, but she’s prone to crusading against things, and right now, it’s salt,” says Isabella. “At least she still lets us use it for ritual work. We could find another place to meet if we had to, but I’d very much prefer we didn’t. This is a private home, which means we don’t worry about rental fees or who might have been using it when we weren’t around. We’ve been able to install and charge a permanent ritual circle, and those make certain things so much easier. Magic is magic as a natural force, while alchemy is magic as a domesticated beast. We’re not doing science here.”

She follows Catrina then, and Kelpie follows her, not sure what else she’s meant to do. Her hooves tap against the bamboo floor with every step, and she can’t help wondering whether whatever quirk of the universe keeps people from seeing her strangeness will also keep them from hearing it. No one barefoot sounds like she does when they walk.

The house, which seemed large from the outside, is clearly massive, almost as large as a level of the lab, and she glimpses a staircase winding up to another floor, implying the existence of yet more house beyond what she’s already seen. She can’t imagine needing this much house. There’s no color, either, another thing that reminds her of the lab: the walls are white, only occasionally decorated with a tastefully framed, carefully placed piece of art, none of them in primary colors. It makes her yearn for the bright jewel tones and earth colors of Isabella’s apartment. The air, which is almost as cool as the outside, smells of nothing, the sort of nothing that she knows comes only from constant cleaning and air purification. It’s almost smothering. She had no idea people aboveground lived like this.

Maybe most of them don’t. Based on what she’s seen so far, lives like Isabella’s are far more common than lives like this one. That’s somewhat reassuring. She doesn’t want to flee from one sterile environment into another.

Catrina vanishes through a doorway, and Isabella vanishes after her, and Kelpie pauses in the hall as she hears voices greeting both women, feeling suddenly shy. What if none of them can see her properly, and she has to spend the rest of her life feeling like she’s lying to everyone around her by letting them believe she’s something that she’s not? Or what if one of them does see her properly and starts yelling about how she’s some sort of freak?

Both options are almost equally terrifying, and so she stands frozen as she hears Isabella explaining, “I brought my new apprentice for you to all meet. She’s a distant cousin of mine, and she’s a little shy, but I hope you’ll be friendly.”

A murmur of agreement from the room.

“All right, if you promise. Kelly! You can come on in; no one’s going to bite you.”