Page 68 of Tidal Creatures

The neighborhood has been changing around him as he walks, apartments giving way to larger single-family homes. He moves now in an atmosphere of wealth and plenty, the territory of the sort of people who never want for anything for more than a moment. The territory of alchemists.

There are methods of becoming rich that don’t involve breaking the laws of nature, but those methods are far less fun than the methods practiced by the alchemically inclined. He continues to let the dowsing rod guide him, interpreting each twitch and tremor with the skill of someone who’s been doing this for decades, and stays on its path even as he begins to detect traces of chaotic, semi-controlled working from one of the houses up ahead. Pure elementalism, performed with the enthusiasm of the amateur and the power of the professional.

The two make for uneasy bedfellows. He can feel the contradictions in the power as he draws closer. The professional has been fighting to control the enthusiasm, but not as hard as he might have expected. Efforts have been made to disperse the energy afterward, but they’ve only been partially successful—pools of elemental power are gathered on the ground and in the branches of the nearby trees, making him wonder whether there are any self-respecting alchemists left in this benighted city.

Margaret may have been a liar and a thief, but he’d always thought better of her work than this implies. She should have been aware someone was making such a mess in her territory. She should have stepped in. That she didn’t speaks poorly to her training … or excellently to the shielding abilities of whoever made this mess. If someone has been actively hiding their activities, it’s possible that Margaret wasn’t entirely incompetent.

The dowsing rod leads him to the steps of a large house, and up them to the front door, where he rings the bell, listening to it echo. As the sound is fading, the padding of bare feet replaces it, and a blurry face swims into view on the other side of the leaded glass.

It’s a woman. She peers through the glass for a moment before incorrectly assessing him as harmless and unlocking the door, one hand resting on the doorframe and the other on the door itself, blocking him from seeing too far inside while also telegraphing, none too subtly, that she can slam the door in an instant.

If she does, he’ll come back later tonight with a Hand of Glory to guarantee no one responds too quickly to her screaming. She’s not a target—yet—but he doesn’t like to be denied.

She’s tall, pale in the way of someone who never goes outside without cause, thin in the way of someone who can afford the high price of thinness, the delicate, delicious, calorie-light foods and the personal chef to prepare them nightly, the trainers and the surgeries and the endless pursuit of an impossible illusion of “perfection.” As if “perfect” hasn’t been as mutable as any other human ideal across the centuries. As if people didn’t once pursue plumpness with all the vigor they now direct toward the opposite extreme.

Only three things in the universe are perfect: gold, alkahest, and the Impossible City. Everything else is flawed, and wasting time pretending otherwise has never served anyone well.

Her eyes flick to the rod in his hand, then back up to his face. A small crease forms between her eyebrows.

“Can I help you?” she asks. Her voice is pitched too high, a trained affectation intended to make her sound like something to be protected and cared for rather than pushed against. He pauses, giving her another look. Everything about her is designed to give that impression, to encourage underestimation, to nudge people toward the conclusion that she poses no threat, offers no obstacle to their own progress.

It’s a fascinatingly constructed façade. She has no power. He can tell that as well, from the pools of elemental energy dotted around the property, some of which have started to curdle and turn septic. That will be a problem eventually, but the future is a room there’s no guarantee either one of them will enter. Her, especially, with her measuring look and her hand on the door and her careful air of fragility.

Perhaps he can use that. He lowers the dowsing rod, taking in the perfect house, the elemental pools, the feigned fragility, and comes to a conclusion he hopes will be correct. It’s not that he doesn’t want to kill her—that would place too much importance on her one way or the other—it’s that he wants this to be simple. And if he’s correct, it still might be.

“No, but perhaps I can help you,” he says, and smiles a skeleton smile as he tucks the dowsing rod into his jacket. “I can tell that you’re a person of great power and connection within the local magical community.” The word “magical” is sour on his lips. “Alchemical” is the correct term, the scientific term that treats the taming of a natural force as the art it is rather than some trick out of children’s folklore. “Magical” is a word for people without training or safety rails, who believe the universe has no obligation to bow to humanity. It’s a word for amateurs, and he hates it.

But from the way she lights up, he’s alone in this. The line between her eyebrows disappears, replaced by a slight, smug tightening of the skin around her eyes, her puzzled look becoming a smile. “We took the flyers down months ago,” she says, and the way she pronounces the word “we” tells him she had nothing to do with the manual labor of taking down flyers: that was all handled by hands that weren’t as soft as hers, that were more accustomed to working. “How did you find me?”

“The sheer energy radiating from this location led me,” he says, and while he’s lying, he’s also not. The dowsing rod picked up on something. The girl has been here.

“I’m sorry, but you’ve missed this week’s meeting, and … forgive me for presuming, but we’re an all-female coven. It keeps the energies cleaner when we’re not pulling between the divine feminine and the divine masculine. I’m sure someone as learned as you clearly are will understand.”

“Oh, I do, I do, but I’m not looking for your coven.”

“No?” There’s a glossiness in her eyes, a slightly husky catch in her voice, and he knows what she’s hoping he’ll say next.

Reed should never have tried to make his cuckoos mind readers. All he’d really needed to do was teach them to watch people, and the world would have been in the palm of their hands whether or not they became manifest.

“No,” he echoes. “I’m looking for you. A coven has no power without its members, and even then, it accomplishes nothing without a strong hand at the wheel. A woman of your obvious position and potential … you must be that strong hand. I’m here because I need to speak to you.”

She looks at him assessingly, showing her first flicker of true brilliance since she opened the door. All her masks and affectations may be enough to protect her from predators when she goes out into the world, but nothing will protect her if she asks the predators into her home. Tristan stands perfectly still, doing his best to look nonthreatening, and much as he wants to press the issue, he doesn’t say a word, only waits. This is what she sees:

A man of average height who nevertheless holds himself like a tall man, like he expects to tower over the people around him and is perpetually surprised when it doesn’t happen. His hair is a sandy shade of brown, cut short and slightly feathered at the top, clearly styled by someone who was paid well for their time; his suit is impeccably cut and pressed, and tailored to fit the skeletal angles of his form, not allowed to wrinkle or drape inappropriately. If not for the spot on one shoe, he would be perfectly groomed. His thinness is off-putting for some, but this woman has been trained not to criticize what cannot be changed in a minute’s time, taught politeness like a weapon, and so she shunts that thought to the side as she continues her assessment.

He looks like the sort of man who moves in her social circles. He looks like money. Strangeness of the dowsing rod aside, he stands in her neighborhood like he belongs here, and she is thus inclined to trust him, to believe him when he speaks words of sweet flattery, to see him as one of her “own kind,” whatever that means. Finally, she nods and steps to the side, the door opening as she does.

“I’d love to talk more about this,” she says. “There’s coffee in the kitchen, if you’d care to join me.”

An alchemist is not a vampire: they don’t need to be invited inside. A gentleman, on the other hand, is a sort of vampire, in that they do generally need the invitation. Tristan, who has considered himself a gentleman for quite some time, smiles his thanks as he steps past her into the conditioned air of the hall.

“Yes,” he says. “I think we have a great deal to discuss.”

Palus Nebularum

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

Artemis takes a step toward Kelpie, looking like she’s been punched in the stomach hard enough to knock the air out of her and leave her reeling, no longer fully steady on her feet. Her hands have come up at some point, not reaching, not trying to grasp or grab, but just … hanging there, held in front of her like she no longer knows what to do with them.