Page 77 of Tidal Creatures

Isabella automatically reaches for the doorknob, which locked behind her when she came inside. She hesitates, hand hovering above the metal, and tries to pin down the question now itching at the edges of her mind, all sharp edges and urgency.

Without letting herself dwell too hard on why she’s doing it, she pulls her hand away from the doorknob and reaches the deadbolt instead, flipping it home before she reaches higher up, for the chain.

“You saw me this morning,” she says. “I’m tired now. This isn’t a good time.”

“Come now. Aren’t we friends?” Catrina’s voice drops, turns cajoling. “Didn’t I open my home to your practice? And didn’t you promise to keep me safe from the world I was only half-aware of?”

“I did do that, and so did you,” says Isabella carefully. When she’d met Catrina, the other woman had been exactly as she’d remained up until this morning: smug and quietly superior, convinced of her own power and innate authority. She’d never once paused to ask herself whether the people she envied for their position had done anything to earn it; the accident of her birth was the only thing she considered to have been necessary to grant her whatever privileges she desired. Catrina was a lovely woman when you played to her ego and didn’t contradict her in any way, and a remarkably fragile one when you didn’t. Like many people whose social superiority had rarely if ever been challenged, she’d been unprepared to react quickly when people didn’t do what she expected.

Isabella realizes, with a sick, sinking feeling, that she’s started thinking of Catrina in the past tense: part of her has already written the woman off as lost. They’re not friends. They’ve never been friends, not in any of the ways that truly matter. She and Catrina have never gone shopping, braided each other’s hair, or shared secrets while giggling over ice cream, and she feels a pang for not having tried harder. Maybe the other woman had secret depths that Isabella has never bothered to go searching for. Maybe she could have been a bosom companion, a true friend to walk through life with.

Not anymore. There are strange harmonics in her sweet, familiar voice, things that sing to Isabella’s sensitivities as black flags, warning signs of death come to the door.

“You made me promises, Isabella Diaz. You told me your coven would bring good things to my door, would light up my halls with power, would purge the shadows from the corners and the cobwebs from my dreams. You promised me wonders. Well, it wasn’t wonders that came to me today.”

“What did come?”

“Let me in, and I’ll show you.” There’s a sour, cajoling note to Catrina’s tone, beguiling and bitter. It blames, that note. It points fingers into nothingness, and says any crimes committed here belong to Isabella above all, no matter whose hands commit them.

Isabella’s heart is hammering hard, a brutal pounding against the inside of her chest. “No,” she says. “I don’t think so.”

“Mama?”

“Stay in the kitchen, Luis!” she snaps, and feels instantly bad about raising her voice to the boy, who has had such a long and terrible afternoon, and doesn’t have the tools to understand any of it. She’s always done her best to keep her home life separate from her work, and until today, it’s seemed as if she could keep that up forever. Now she’s wondering how long the tower of her deceptions has been teetering.

“Come on, Isabella, be a friend,” cajoles Catrina.

“I am being a friend, Catrina,” says Isabella, and the last, itching piece of information finally tumbles into place, bringing understanding in its wake.

She never told Catrina where she lives.

“Or I would be, if you were Catrina,” she adds, a little slowly, a little sadly. She really did like the woman, frustrating and snooty as she could frequently be. This isn’t the ending she deserved.

The woman outside her door hisses. The sound is inhuman. It belongs in the mouth of some great prehistoric reptile, something massive and scaled, slouching out of the depths of a primeval swamp with murder in its primitive mind. Isabella can’t reconcile that sound with Catrina, not at all, and her confused curiosity is strong enough to lure her to the peephole, rising slightly onto her toes as she looks out onto the space outside her door.

A walkway runs along the side of the building, connecting the rowed apartments so the occupants won’t have to walk on grass or wade through mud to get to their doors. The same runs along the second floor, overhanging the first. It’s an earthquake hazard, but it’s that or tier the building like a wedding cake, each floor losing a few square feet of living space as they try to keep things in balance. Each floor’s hanging walkway supports the lower floor’s exterior lighting, and so even as the sun is dipping lower, Isabella can see the figure outside her door with perfect clarity.

It’s Catrina, and it isn’t Catrina at the same time, and Isabella feels bile rise in her throat, hot and burning and difficult to swallow back down. The figure outside her door has Catrina’s face, skin pulled tight across the shape of her skull, and Catrina’s hair, silver-blonde and tied in a high ponytail that only serves to pull her face tighter. She has Catrina’s body, familiar in its angles and its height. And that’s where the familiarity ends.

The way she’s standing isn’t human. It’s more like the stance of a large predatory insect that has somehow figured out how to take its natural gift for camouflage and elevate it to a whole new level of functionality. She stands like a praying mantis, almost, her hands tucked high against her chest in a way that might be comfortable or even natural for some but is entirely wrong for her. And it’s not even that creating the impression that she’s more something masquerading as human than actual human being—people carry their hands in all sorts of ways, and none of them radiate inhumanity the way Catrina is right now.

It’s the strangeness of her posture, the subtle, almost indefinable little things about the way she moves, the slight sway as she stands staring at the door. People mock Lovecraft for his tendency to write things off as indescribable, but the truth is, the human mind isn’t equipped to process every form of sensory input. There are colors humans can’t see, sounds they can’t hear, flavors they can’t taste. The world is greater than the human form can comfortably encompass. Catrina has always moved solidly within the lines of what it means to be a human. Here and now, she doesn’t, and it’s that complicated, almost indescribable wrongness that keeps Isabella’s eye glued to the peephole, trying to understand what she’s looking at.

There are ways a person can be forced to share their skin with something else, something called and cajoled and finally imprisoned inside the structure of their skeleton. Alchemists usually don’t practice those methods, but it’s possible that if Erin was right about their ritual work leading to pits of raw chaos energy pooling around the house, Catrina might have reached for a reassuring calming chant or the like and managed to tap into something she shouldn’t have been anywhere near.

There’s no good reason for Isabella to be jumping straight to “an alchemist did this,” except that everything about this day has primed her to place the blame on them. The alchemists are up in arms, they’re nearby, and they have reason to be targeting ordinary people who might have crossed paths with their escaped creation.

Her stomach sinks. She warded her house like a vault door before she’d gone to the coven meeting in the morning, making it virtually impossible for anyone who wasn’t already a resident to even notice the place existed. Hostile forces should have walked right by, never realizing the trail they were trying to follow went cold behind a door they didn’t see. She protected her home and her family and …

And she didn’t do the same for Catrina. She’d taken Kelpie, her little alchemical runaway, and she’d walked down the street as proud and exposed as anything, all the way to Catrina’s house, and she hadn’t been scattering salt and iron shavings behind them the whole way, she hadn’t been squirting essence of St. John’s wort into the air like a strange perfume. She’d been cocky and convinced the steps already taken would be enough, and now it seems Catrina has paid the price.

The thing inside Catrina’s skin turns its face, focusing on the peephole, and smiles.

It’s not a normal expression. Her lips draw back from her teeth and keep on drawing, smile growing wider and wider, until that smile must split the skin, must strain the muscles of her cheeks, until her teeth are exposed all the way to the rear molars, no secrets left in the caverns of Catrina’s mouth, the corners of which are red with beaded blood. It doesn’t fall, only pools there, thick and somehow sluggish—the blood of a thing that has died but not yet started to decay.

“Come out, Isabella,” she croons. “Come out, little hechicera, and talk to your friend. I can tell you about my day. I’m sure you’ll find it very interesting.”

Isabella takes a step back from the door, self-preservation telling her not to stand so close.