Page 45 of Tidal Creatures

Maybe all magic is the same at the heart, and alchemical superiority is just another lie the alchemists told when they were afraid they might be losing control over the world as a whole. Kelpie has so much to unlearn.

Isabella stands. “Our time is done, our close is come; we bore our banners, and we won,” she says. It’s bad poetry, false rhymes and no internal structure, and yet the last of the candles burning around the edges of the room gutter and go out, somehow extinguished by her declaration. She smiles warmly at the women around her, then bows to them, deep and serious. When she straightens, she says, “I thank you, sisters, for your time in this circle. Go in peace, and know that you are powerful.”

And then, perplexingly, the women begin to rise and leave, murmuring their own farewells as they turn to exit. Smita doesn’t move. Catrina rises but lingers, watching the others, and then begins inching toward Isabella. “Isa, I was wondering—”

Isabella turns toward Catrina. “Go in peace,” she repeats, but not the remainder of the phrase.

Catrina stops, jerking sharply into a tensely upright position. It’s like watching a doll get lifted by its hair. She looks unsurprised but somehow affronted by Isabella’s response, like she’s not the one who gets dismissed. She’s supposed to be the one who does the dismissal.

“We’ll talk after,” she says, voice clipped, and turns to follow the others out.

Isabella turns, not toward Smita but toward Erin, the woman who remained outside the circle the whole time. “The circle is open,” she says. “It poses no dangers to the unaffiliated.”

“I am the dangers, witchy lady,” says Erin, pushing away from the wall. “I’m not afraid of you.”

“Good, for I am not your enemy.”

“Oh, you could be. You could be, really easily. These little circles of yours are basically chaos pits. You dig holes in the surface of the world and you fill them up with elemental energy. You know what happens when you dig a hole?”

“Erin, please,” says Smita.

“Things fall into it,” says Erin, unflagging. “If you scoop out all the elementalism by the time you’re done, then maybe it heals, but if you don’t, when it crusts over, you’ve made yourself a nice, ripe zit right on reality’s chin. You’re giving the universe acne.”

“That’s nice of you to say,” says Isabella. “I suppose you’ve brought the acne treatment?”

“Me? Nah. That was my brother’s gig. I just want you to know how much you hurt my eyes. You’re doing things you shouldn’t be doing. But you’re not as bad as the people who made me, so I guess you’re right, and you’re not my enemy. Yet.”

Smita sighs, leaning back in her chair. Kelpie sits up a bit straighter.

“Made you?” she asks.

Erin’s gaze swivels around to Kelpie, and it’s unnervingly heavy and direct, like a smothering sheet of cotton laid directly across her shoulders. “Yup. Made me. In a lab, deep underground. In Ohio, of all places, flatland at the center of the country. Oz territory. I think it amused Reed to know that he was pissing on Baum’s grave with his work, after everything Baum had done to Baker, both before and after she was gone.”

She leans forward, still watching Kelpie, measuring her reactions. “He didn’t put me together himself. That was accomplished by Leigh Barrow, his right-hand woman and favorite monster. But he approved and adjusted the recipe that made me and my brother possible. He knew me completely, both inside and out, every bone, every organ. He wasn’t my father. He was my doting uncle, and he killed my brother, and he owned me until the day he died. Got any more questions?”

Kelpie’s heart is beating so hard it hurts, and she feels like she can barely breathe. Still, she manages to squeak out a faint “What are you?”

“I am something that should never have been, and will probably be forever now, because that’s how the universe works, isn’t it? It can go forever not incarnating a piece of itself, and then it trips and drops a concept into a human shell, and it’s all over after that. It gets addicted, hooked to the possibilities inherent in mortal flesh, and it wants more, more, more all the time. Reality is greedy. It contains everything because it wants everything, and the greatest constraint on its hunger is the fact that in its natural state, it can’t interact with half of what it has, any more than Smita here can interact with her own liver. Not directly, anyway. She can drink and bathe it in toxins, and interact with it that way, but she can’t kiss and caress it, can’t tell it everything’s going to be all right after all. She’s limited by the confines of her flesh, and the universe is limited by the confines of itself. Very sad, isn’t it?”

“That’s a lot of pretty words to not give an actual answer,” says Isabella.

“Oh, I know you, hechicera,” says Erin. “You’ve been sniffing around me for months.”

Isabella shrugs. “I know a construct when I see one. You’ll forgive me for being curious, I hope?”

“Ah, but you see, that’s where you’re wrong,” says Erin. “I’m not a construct; I’m a cuckoo. The difference is the blood and body of Asphodel Baker, who has more descendants than she ever dreamed she might, thanks to the tireless efforts of her only son. He died childless, by the way. Every single one of us repudiated him, bigtime. Over and over again, until it finally stuck and we decided we liked the timeline we were in well enough to let it continue.”

“What?” asks Isabella.

Smita just sighs. She’s clearly heard all this before, and while Erin might take pleasure from playing with people the way a cat plays with a bird, she doesn’t. “Can we hurry this up?” she asks.

“Anything for you,” says Erin. She focuses on Isabella again. “I am the living force of Order, forced to incarnate by Leigh Barrow as part of the run-up to James Reed’s incarnation of the Doctrine of Ethos. They were experimenting with capturing what they saw as ‘lesser forces’ before they tackled the big one. My brother, Darren, was the living force of Chaos. They killed him when he ceased to be useful to them. So now here I am, alone in the madhouse, with no way to close my eyes to just how fucked everything around me really is.”

Isabella blinks, eyebrows lifting. “I … see,” she says. “That must be very hard. Does Smita help to center you in the chaos?”

“Nah. Smita’s a friend from school.”

Smita eyes Erin for a moment, looking faintly amused. “That is absolutely the most reductive description of our relationship that I have ever heard, Erin. You want to try again?”