Page 76 of Tidal Creatures

Even expected, the sight of the blood is enough to make her stop and breathe sharply in. His eyes widen.

“No, Mama! He didn’t bite me! I think…” He hesitates. He knows what happens to pit bulls who bite, even by mistake; he’s heard the stories from the kids at his school, the ones who love to talk about killer dogs and how some animals are just bred bad. Isabella would shake them all if she could, demand to know who’s pouring that poison into their ears, and why they feel the need to pour it onward into her son’s. “I think he would have bit me, only I ran when he got all mad and started growling. I don’t know why, I didn’t do anything! But he growled and I ran and when I shut myself in the closet, I smacked my nose into the wall hard enough to make it bleed.”

“And your hand?”

“Wiping the blood so it didn’t go all over my clothes.”

It’s a believable-enough story that it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s true.

“All right, baby, well, Bobby’s calm now, and having a little snack, so let’s get you cleaned up and you can tell me what happened, all right?” She puts her hand on his shoulder, urging him out of the closet, and when he emerges, she wraps her arms around him in a tight hug, reveling in the warm closeness of him, the concrete reality. This is her boy. He’s here, he’s alive, he’s lost a little blood, but boys are full of blood at this age; he has blood to spare, quick, vital creature that he is. He’ll never notice its lack.

“I’m not a baby, Mama,” he says, even as he burrows into the warmth of her.

“You’ll always be my baby,” she replies, and kisses the top of his head before she lets him go. “Now. What happened?”

“I came home from school and I was going to take Bobby for his walk, so he could do his business and then I could watch TV, but when I opened the door, a man came out of that apartment you told me to never go near.”

“What kind of a man?”

“White man. Tall, really skinny, wearing a suit like he was going to go work in an office or something. He didn’t look right.”

“Not right how?”

“Not right,” says Luis, and his voice peaks and breaks, like the ghost of puberty yet to come has dropped by for a brief visit, stealing away his childhood piping for an instant. Isabella fights the urge to clutch at him again. “I don’t know how to say he wasn’t right, only that he wasn’t right. He stood like something that shouldn’t be standing the way it is. Like he didn’t belong here. Do you understand?”

She doesn’t, and because of that, she does. Luis doesn’t share her connection to the hidden world around them, but a person doesn’t need to be connected to the hidden world to know when something is a threat. Not being able to see why someone is a threat would create a feeling of dissonant wrongness, indescribable and absolutely real.

“I do,” she says. “I think what you saw was a very, very bad man. Did he see you?”

“I don’t know. I thought he did, for just a second, but I shut the door and sat on the floor with Bobby, and he didn’t come knocking or trying to look in the windows, so I figured he was gone. And then Bobby got all weird and mad, and everything turned scary, and I went and hid in case the man was coming back.”

Isabella hesitates. If Luis is telling the truth, the man he saw may have pulled down the wards as casually as she brushes away cobwebs during her once-monthly dusting sessions, barely noticing the act even as she performs it. Removing the wards would have let whatever negativity he was pouring out of himself come flowing into the apartment, and while Luis has never been sensitive, Bobby is. It was part of what attracted her to him above all the other leggy, loving puppies in the shelter, any one of whom could have been a beloved member of their family. If that alchemist took down the wards without even knowing it, it’s easy to believe Bobby could have been easily driven into a frenzy by the shadow of his passing, and not targeted at all.

Relief washes through her like bleach through a stain, washing her fears of intentional attack away. “All right, buddy. Thank you for telling me.”

Luis sniffles. “I didn’t ever take Bobby for his walk.”

Meaning there might be a mess somewhere in the apartment, a little biological time bomb for one of them to find. “That’s fine. You had good reason to hide, if a strange man was walking around and Bobby was all worked up about it. You didn’t do anything wrong, I promise.” She guides him to the kitchen, where Bobby has finished his snack and is now deeply immersed in licking his genitals, ignoring the humans. Luis still flinches away from him, and Isabella hates the alchemists even more than she did before. To make a boy fear his own dog …

She wets a paper towel and carefully, gently cleans the blood from his face, revealing no damage beyond a forming bruise around his upper lip that won’t be bad enough to catch the attention of the school administration. Oh, how she hates the phrase “boys will be boys” and the way it leads to casual dismissal of violence between children, but she appreciates that in this case, it’s going to work in her favor—no one call to child protective services because a boy got a bruise, as long as he’s not showing any other signs of abuse.

She hopes this particular gap in the supervision doesn’t lead to any children slipping between the cracks and being forgotten, even as she knows that it does, it must, it always has. Children are so sturdy and so fragile at the same time. It’s easy to forget.

She’s wetting a second paper towel when someone knocks on the front door. Bobby lifts his head and looks toward the sound, a low growl building in his throat as the hair on the back of his neck lifts up. Luis gasps, breath catching. He’s never been scared of the dog before. He clearly is now.

Isabella feels almost bad as she straightens and says, “Wait here.”

“I don’t wanna,” he says. “I want to stay with you.”

“I know, love. But I need to get the door, and in case it’s someone you don’t want to talk to, I want to get it by myself.”

He frowns deeply, clearly uncomfortable with the idea, but manages to force a nod and flatten himself against the counter, as far from Bobby as he can get in the confines of their small kitchen.

Isabella leaves them there, a boy and his dog. She’s not worried Bobby will turn violent again; the growling this time has a different timbre, more frightened than furious. Carefully, she makes her way to the door.

“Hello?” she calls, not opening it.

“Oh, good, you’re home,” says Catrina’s familiar, too-high voice. “I need to see you.”