Page 79 of Tidal Creatures

Isabella unwraps herself from her boy and his dog, twisting to look toward what remains of the front door. “Juan? Is anyone else out there?”

“No, just me. Isa, what happened?”

She wants to be brave and she wants to be cautious as the same time. These are not impulses that can be mutually fulfilled. The dog has stopped growling, which decides her; his ears aren’t up, but he no longer looks like he’s going to attack at any moment. Moving with slow and agonizing care, she rises, taking a carving knife from the block on the counter, and holds it low to her thigh as she starts back toward the living room. Luis has his eyes squeezed shut and his face pressed against Bobby’s neck.

“Mama will be right back, sweetheart,” she says, softly. She’s not sure he even hears her.

Knife against her leg, she makes her way to the front room.

It looks so normal. It shouldn’t be allowed to look this normal, not with everything that’s happening, but the Catrina-thing didn’t quite break through the door before Juan somehow scared her off; from this side, it’s perfectly intact, if open and stopped by the chain.

Isabella walks in a wide arc, so she can see out that propped-open door when she stops. There’s Juan, normal, familiar, and beloved, protective coverall still zipped over his street clothes, a smear of oil on one cheek. He looks utterly baffled by the situation, which is more than reasonable. This is an utterly baffling thing to come home to.

“Isa?” he says when he sees her, relief radiating outward in a wave. Then he pauses, frowning. “Isa, why do you have a knife? What’s going on?”

Something inside her snaps with a small shattering sensation, some safety wire giving way before the flood of relief that washes through her. “We have to leave,” she says, rushing for the door. She drops the knife and fumbles for the chain, but he’s still holding the door open, and she can’t get the slack she needs to unlatch it. “Juan, let go of the door, and I can—”

But his eyes have gone glassy with shock. His mouth works in silence for a moment before he makes a thin, pained choking noise, and a bubble of blood forms at the corner of his lips, a terrible echo of the way the Catrina-thing’s smile tore. He slumps forward, against the door, pulling the chain even tighter, and later, she’ll understand that was a blessing: that was the only thing that saved their son.

In the moment, she isn’t half that rational. Her husband is bleeding from the mouth and nonresponsive, limp against the door. “Juan? Juan?!” She grabs his shoulder, trying to keep him from slumping to the floor, trying to take some of his weight off the door. He’s larger than she is, enough so that she can’t do anything more than slow his descent, even when she grabs on with both hands. He’s going to fall.

When he hits the ground, he’s gone forever, she thinks nonsensically, as if holding on to his arm will somehow keep him from dying, something which is patently already an impossibility. He’s going to die. He’s going to die, or he’s already dead—he’s not making any more sounds, and the blood from his mouth is thick and dark.

Then the Catrina-thing appears behind him, her terrible wide smile a rictus slashed across her face, her eyes bright and manic behind a mask of skin that’s started sagging around the edges, like she’s coming to the end of the time she can spend in this form. Her arms are still her arms, but they’re longer than they should be, and each ends in a spade-shaped claw, like something stolen from an armadillo. She still stands wrong, moves wrong, sways wrong in the breeze from behind her, and her claws are tipped with blood.

“I told you to let me in,” she chides. “This didn’t have to happen. This is your fault, Isabella. He could have come home to an empty apartment and walked away a grieving widower, convinced his beloved witchy wife had run off with another man. But no, you had to argue with me, and now he’s dead, gone to take the graveyard path all the way to the Impossible City.”

Her giggle is like glass breaking inside a trash compactor, is like rotten ice breaking on a stagnant lake, is like frozen waste being fed into a garbage disposal. It’s the most terrible thing Isabella has ever heard.

“Now, then, shall we finish this?” asks the Catrina-thing, and slams into the door with all her weight, which seems to be much greater than her frame implies. The chain shudders in its socket, the metal bar at its base threatening to tear free of the wall. Isabella shrieks and spins to run back to the kitchen where Luis is waiting, intending to wrap herself around him once again. She hears the creature stepping back, hears it slam into the door a second time, and, worst of all, hears the chain give way.

There is a thundering gallop behind her, like something large has dropped onto all fours and is pursuing her into the apartment, and then there is a ripping, tearing sound, wet and awful, followed by the sound of a sack of concrete being dropped. Isabella stops, struggling to breathe, and turns to look back.

Mare Marginis

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

Part of Isabella is screaming that this is how teenage white girls die in the horror movies. She doesn’t listen, because the rest of her is just screaming, screaming without end, and she’s not sure it’s ever going to stop again. She has to know. She has to see.

She finishes her turn.

The Catrina-thing is sprawled across the living room floor, only a few feet behind her. It looks … unraveled, somehow, like its seams have been unstitched. It looks more like a puppet whose puppeteer has cast it carelessly aside than anything real. Nothing about it seems like it could have been moving or speaking or attacking only a moment before.

Blood seeps from the splits in its skin, forming a pool around the body. From where Isabella stands, she can see that some of those splits are fresher than others, but she can’t imagine what distinguishes them from one another. She’s an hechicera, trained and skilled, and this is not her area of expertise; this is not what she wants to be doing right now, or ever.

The body of her husband blocks the doorway, and it’s only a matter of time before one of the neighbors comes home or steps out of their apartment and sees him, a chaotic tumble of strong limbs rendered useless by the slaughter of the man who once controlled them. Tears burn in her eyes. She refuses to let them fall. Once she starts crying, she may never stop, and she should be dead right now, ripped apart by the thing that wore the face of her student and somewhat friend. The alchemists who made it and set it on her trail should have won.

So why didn’t they?

There is a brightness in the air beside the door, one that her eyes shy away from, refusing to focus. She frowns and forces the issue, staring at the bright spot as hard as she can until her vision blurs and the brightness begins to look like a woman, olive-skinned and dark-haired, still dressed in UC Berkeley athletic gear even after a long day of breaking nature’s laws and defying the constants of the universe. Even after she’s isolated Artemis’s outline from the brightness, the other woman is shaky and out of focus, illuminated from the inside, not quite solid and not quite real.

The hunting bow she holds gleams a sparkling moon-dark silver, and as Isabella watches, Artemis releases the string and lowers her hand, letting the bow go. It dissolves into glittering nothing, and the brightness fades, the blur around Artemis clearing like someone has wiped a window clean, revealing the person on the other side of the glass.

“I’m sorry,” says Artemis. Her words are too big: she’s not shouting, she’s not even speaking particularly loudly, but they fall into the silence of the living room with a weight and importance that makes it feel like they’ve been brought in from some other scene, like she’s been set up with a body mic and a hidden speaker. “I got here as quickly as I could.”

“What did you do?” Isabella’s voice shakes, and her words are small, the size words are meant to be, sliding easily into the spaces the world has made for them. No one should speak larger than this. No one should glisten and glow, either, or appear out of nowhere with a disappearing bow in hand.

“The woman had been subjected to some form of alchemical transmutation. I can’t tell you precisely what it was, only that they used it to rip her out of this reality, show her the Impossible City, and then return her to this world. I don’t know who did it, or what instructions they gave her, or how she found your apartment, but I promise you, that was not your friend anymore. By the time I let my arrow fly, your friend was gone.”