Page 78 of Tidal Creatures

“You’re not Catrina,” she says, voice strained but carrying. “She’s never once called me an hechicera.”

“If I’m not Catrina, it’s because of you,” says the creature outside. “It’s because you led the danger to my door, you left me unprepared for what was yet to come. You did this. Not me. Not her, either. She was spoiled and indolent, but she was innocent. She believed magic was a trinket, a toy she could buy or bargain for. She thought the hidden world was hidden out of greed, and greed was something she knew well, so she thought it was destined to belong to her. You tried to warn her off, tried to tell her to stay shallow, stay within the bounds of what she could survive, but she was never going to listen. You know that. Women like her never, never listen to the help. And that’s all you were to her. A different sort of cleaning service, a slightly more self-important version of the women she paid to make her life easier. Money is a kind of alchemy, you know. You can use it to turn other people’s lives into your own, to steal their time and add it to what you already have. You knew what she was from the moment you met her, but she offered you the funding you needed to do the things you wanted to do, and so you ignored your reservations, and you pretended not to see her frailties, and now here we are, and if Catrina’s gone, that’s on you.”

“Begone, foul spirit,” snaps Isabella, all too aware of the boy in the kitchen behind her, the boy who is probably listening and wondering what all of this means, the boy she needs to protect at all costs. Catrina was an innocent, but the creature inside her skin is right about one thing: Catrina sought out the magical world on her own. No one had to push or lure her. She was just sensitive enough to know that there was something she didn’t have, and that had driven her to desperation, willing to do anything for proof that she was right, and more than anything for access to the power she could feel just out of reach.

It was right about two things, actually, because Isabella had known what Catrina was from the moment they met, had seen the greedy desperation in Catrina’s eyes. But she hadn’t welcomed Catrina out of greed or self-interest. She had done it because that desperation had been the result of a lifetime of being overlooked as foolish or shallow, of being treated like a pretty piece of furniture rather than a person. Catrina’s life had been one of immense privilege, absolutely, and she’d done things she should have atoned for, but she had also suffered, and suffering doesn’t care how much a person has or how fortunate they should feel. It still hurts. Isabella had looked at Catrina and seen a desperately lonely woman aching for connection, and she had been in a position to extend a hand that could easily have become a lifeline. Catrina would have insisted that she never needed saving. Isabella had known better from the beginning.

Catrina was an innocent who chose not to be, in small, mincing steps that were always going to lead her deeper than she could possibly realize. Luis, though … Luis is a true innocent. He’s done nothing to deserve this, nothing to put himself into the path of danger. If this creature makes it through the door, he’ll never escape intact. Maybe not even alive. There are many things the shape standing in Catrina’s skin could be, and none of them are good ones.

Isabella glances around the dim living room, familiar in the fading afternoon light as only a place you’ve been so many times that you cease to ever truly see it can be. Juan knows she has an interest in the occult—given where she was working when they met, how could he not know?—but she’s always made an effort to keep her profession away from her family. An hechicera’s bag of tricks may not be as gruesome or as immoral as an alchemist’s, but it could still be difficult to explain if Luis found it and started waving it around. There aren’t even candles.

She swears under her breath. There’s salt in the kitchen, and a Tupperware of iron shavings in the junk drawer, but going back there means leaving the door unguarded and possibly dealing with questions from Luis, who is absolutely terrified by this point. She stands frozen, unable to decide what happens next.

Fingernails drag across the door, scraping the wood. It sounds like they might be leaving gouges in their wake, like they might be something more than “fingernails” at this point.

“Isabella,” says Catrina’s voice. “Little hechicera, let me in, or I’ll let myself in, and you’re already going to regret this. Don’t regret it worse. I can do this quickly, or I can do it slowly, the way he did it for me.”

“He who?” asks Isabella.

“The man who showed me everything you’ve been hiding, Isabella,” says Catrina’s voice. It’s still horribly, brutally recognizable, even if it no longer belongs to her. “The man who sat me down and showed me the gates of the City. I always knew you were hiding things. I knew you were jealous of how much greater than you I had the potential to become. I never knew you were such a sneaky, slinky little liar.”

Nails across the door again, but this time it’s clear from the splintering sound that “claws” would be a more accurate word.

Isabella takes a step back, breath hitching in her chest. Even if she had her tools, this isn’t the sort of thing she does or deals with; she has no recourse here. Once that creature breaks down the door, if it does, she and Luis will be helpless to escape.

This isn’t what she does. This isn’t what she trained for.

But it may be how she dies.

“I never lied to Catrina,” she says, voice shaking. “I told her I would teach her to the limits of her power, help her hone her skills within the sphere she had the potential to control. I never promised her the entire elemental world. That would have been the lie. I didn’t lie to her.”

“To me, you mean,” says the creature, voice filled with new, bubbling overtones, like the creature is speaking through a layer of silt. It’s horrifying to hear. Isabella can’t close her ears or turn away. “You say you didn’t lie to me, but he said you did, and he unlocked more power in an afternoon than you’ve given me in years. Which of you should I believe? The woman who took my money and drank my coffee and elevated a toy above me in her estimation, or the man who showed me the Impossible City, who opened my eyes to the truth and my flesh to the splendor. The light will guide us home.”

Isabella takes another big step backward, toward the kitchen. If she can’t save her son, at least she can put her body between him and the thing that’s coming to destroy him; she can die first and buy him a few more seconds. And if there’s a cruelty to making a son watch his mother die, she can’t imagine it outstrips the cruelty of making a mother watch her child die. One way or the other, they both suffer, and she’s simply choosing the path her instincts order her to take.

The claws rake across the door again. Wood splinters and bows inward. This isn’t a playful swipe; this is the beginning of a true assault. Isabella cries out, soft and strained, as she finally whirls and runs for the kitchen.

Luis is huddled on the floor, Bobby growling between him and the door. Luis’s fear of the dog seems to have been overwhelmed by his fear of whatever’s happening in the living room; he has his arms around Bobby’s neck and his face pressed against the dog’s soft, familiar fur, tears running down his face and leaving salted tracks behind.

“Oh, baby, baby,” Isabella half-moans, hurrying to gather them both into her arms, a boy and his dog, a dog and his boy, and a woman who is not a witch but is something broadly similar, all huddled together on the kitchen floor as a terrible, impossible thing attacks their apartment door.

They can see the ending coming, each of them in their own way. Isabella knows Luis’s thoughts won’t be filled with the terrible economy of alchemists, who take the bodies of the dead apart and use them in a million different ways, refusing to let them rest.

Even dogs aren’t safe. Bobby won’t rest either, once they’re taken. Isabella buries her face in her son’s hair and breathes deeply, her own tears dripping down to mingle with the scent of his shampoo.

The clawing and tearing at the door continues for several seconds more, until it is replaced by a heart-rending silence. The wood hasn’t given way; there would have been a final cracking sound if it had. Instead, the attacker has just … stopped. Isabella lifts her head and looks over her shoulder, frowning. Alchemical monsters don’t just stop, especially not the ones who aren’t built to look as human as possible for long periods of time, to blend in with the communities that unknowingly shelter them. The creature that stole Catrina’s face and voice should still be trying to claw its way inside.

Then she hears a sound that would be welcome and wanted under any other circumstances, but is terrifying under these: a key, a simple key, sliding into a lock.

The key turns. The deadbolt disengages. A moment later, she hears the door open as far as the chain allows, only to draw up short when it hits the limits of that tether. Juan’s voice, normally so beloved, asks, “Isabella? Luis? Are you here, are you all right? What happened to the door?”

“Juan?” Isabella hears no strange harmonics or bubbling undertones in his voice. She doesn’t know what the alchemists did to Catrina, but that form of puppeteering must take longer than an instant, or there would be no question left of who ruled the world—the alchemists would have taken over long ago. As it stands, whatever they did to Catrina will have been expensive in terms of both resources and effort, and is probably not something they’ve done lightly.

Somehow, that doesn’t make Isabella feel any better.

“What happened to the door? And why is the chain locked? Is Luis with you? Fuck, Isabella, tell me what’s going on!”

He doesn’t normally swear in front of Luis, but the fear has him now, too. He may not be sensitive, and the Catrina-thing may have made her retreat when she saw him coming, but he can see the damaged door, the shattered wood and splinters, and you don’t need to be sensitive to the spiritual universe to understand that that’s a bad thing.