Page 36 of Tidal Creatures

Slowly, Kelpie steps around the doorframe and into the room, where half a dozen women have already gathered. They smile at the sight of her, with none of them so much as hesitating. She begins, cautiously, to relax.

“Cousin?” asks a woman. “She’s blonde.”

“Distant,” repeats Isabella.

The woman laughs. “When I told you one of my cousins was in the running for Winter, you said that was proof we shouldn’t work with family. What possessed you to take one as an apprentice?”

“I … I asked her to,” says Kelpie, defensively.

“She know anything?” asks the woman who seems to have decided she’s the one who makes the call on whether or not Kelpie is trustworthy. She looks her up and down, and Kelpie has the distinct feeling she’s seeing something that’s not there, some pale, unremarkable shadow of Kelpie herself. Finally, the stranger shrugs one shoulder and turns back to Isabella. “About the art, or about us?”

“She knows you’re my coven, she knows you all practice in one form or another, and she knows I’m an hechicera, or I wouldn’t be able to train her.”

“You mean bruja, don’t you, dear?” asks Catrina, who, for all the group’s apparent deference to Isabella, has taken the largest and most comfortable-looking chair in the room as her own. “That’s the word for witch.”

“As I’ve told you several times now, I’m not a witch, and it would be dishonest of me to call myself one,” says Isabella carefully. “I’m an hechicera, which is a different tradition, and works by different rules. I don’t know how else I can explain it.”

“We’re a coven of witches,” says Catrina. “We’re women working with the sacred feminine and the divine energy of the goddess. You have to be a witch. You’re our high priestess.”

“I’m not your high priestess,” says Isabella, with clearly fraying patience. “I’m your leader, yes, but that’s not the same thing, and it never has been. If you want a Wiccan-style structure, with a high priestess telling you what to do and a deeply appropriative approach to ritual, you’re more than welcome to find another coven to work with, or you can ask that I leave and do my workings elsewhere. You can’t have me and the structure you’re describing at the same time.”

“I didn’t mean that,” objects Catrina. “Just that … we’re supposed to be doing things the traditional way.”

“There are many traditions,” says Isabella staunchly.

There’s a clatter from behind them as someone comes rushing down the hall, and a pretty, black-haired, dark-skinned woman in a diamond-patterned sweater containing all the colors the house doesn’t appears in the doorway. She’s barefoot, carrying a large canvas bag, and she looks like she’s on the verge of panic.

“I’m sorry!” she says. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I was at the lab and I lost track of time again, I didn’t mean to be late!”

“I showed up five minutes after she was supposed to have left and she was still at her desk, looking at some diagram of acidic interactions that I couldn’t explain if you paid me,” says the woman who strolls calmly in after her, before she stops and stares at Kelpie.

Kelpie stares back. She feels like she knows this woman already, like she’s known her all her life, like they’re sisters and enemies and the best and worst of friends, all at the very same time. The stranger is shorter than her companion, more softly built, but the sort of softness that promises steel beneath: despite the layer of fat she carries, Kelpie can tell by the way she moves that she’s physically the most powerful person in the room. Her hair is strawberry blonde, like she’s been bleeding for years and never figured out how to wash it all out, and her eyes, as Isabella said, are impossible, blue on blue, like a butterfly’s wing. They’re eyes for a painting, not a person, and they’re fixed on Kelpie with a sharpness that says, very clearly, that she can see her.

“Hello,” she says. “Who’s this?”

“Isabella’s taken an apprentice,” says Catrina, apparently happy to answer any question she can, even when those questions aren’t for her.

“Hello, Erin,” says Isabella. “I was hoping you’d swing through today, so I could introduce you. I think you’re going to have a lot to talk about.”

“Oh, yes,” says Erin. “I think so, too.”

Silence falls over the room, thick and heavy, smothering them all with its weight, and Kelpie resists the urge to turn and run.

Mare Ingenii

TIMELINE: AUGUST 18, 2017. THREE DAYS TO THE ECLIPSE.

As a newly transferred student, Anna is in on-campus housing, sharing her room with three other girls, none of whom have ever heard the moon speaking through their bedroom windows, none of whom have any idea who they’re living with. They look at Judy with the flat, disinterested eyes of junior predators who’ve already been fed well enough not to care when she enters the room on Anna’s heels, feeling awkward and out of place and hating it.

She’s used to being the second most powerful Lunar in Berkeley, coming directly after Diana in what passes for the local hierarchy. Not that it matters who’s more powerful than who, unless it comes down to an outright brawl, and this isn’t a comic book: they don’t fight each other for access to the everything. That would be ridiculous. Still, it makes her a little uncomfortable to know that there’s a new Lunar in town, one who’s been embodied long enough to understand her powers and what they allow her to achieve. Chang’e probably has more active worshippers in the modern world, but Artemis has stories. Artemis has Percy Jackson. There’s no denying the fact that those things feed into her manifestations, granting them a level of strength any Lunar would envy.

So yeah, she accompanied Anna when the other woman said she needed to grab something from her dorm, and now she’s standing uncomfortably in the center of the room, watching the junior predators assess her potential as a future meal. She’s unable to quash the relief when Anna returns, now carrying a backpack, and says, “Okay, Judy, let’s go.”

Judy doesn’t need to be told twice. She falls into step alongside the taller girl, and together they exit the dorm, Anna taking every turn in the labyrinthine building with easy confidence. “How long did you say you’d been here?”

“Not that long. The place looks confusing, but it’s really straightforward once you get the lay of the land. This used to be one of those houses too big for anyone sensible to maintain on their own. I don’t mean like the bitchin’ Victorians downtown, I mean like hello, Mr. Mansion. At some point, ownership passed to the university and they carved it up like a Christmas turkey, turned it into something they could stuff a couple hundred students into. That didn’t leave the refurbishing architects a lot of internal wiggle room, and so if you keep going left, you always come to an elevator—assuming your building has one.”

Judy last lived in student housing when she was getting her undergrad degree, and that was in a different state, in what sometimes felt like a different world. Berkeley’s bewildering dorms aside, she understands the scarcity of elevators in supposedly accessible housing. “Is it legal for them to not have an elevator? In California?”