Page 81 of Tidal Creatures

She hesitates. She doesn’t know what happens next. This was a murder committed in the shadow lands that skirt normal reality, and she knows how the universe glosses those over, obscures the clues, dulls the interest of the people who stumble across them. Juan’s death will be written off as a home invasion gone wrong, and the only real question is whether Catrina’s body will be something the coroners recognize as human. If it is, they may actually find something worth sensationalizing, and Catrina will finally have the fame she craved so deeply. “White woman murdered” is probably not the headline she would have wanted, but any port in a storm, as the sages say.

Isabella smiles slightly at the thought of Catrina’s rage upon being reported as a victim. Oh, she would be so mad. That would have been something to see. But if the dead walk, she’s never seen it; the spirits who speak to her are spirits of place and prayer, embodied aspects of the universe without the strength or weight to move all the way to incarnation. If all ideas incarnated, there would be no lares or pentates. No people, either, just small gods and natural forces walking around, all playing at being human, all convinced they were the only ones.

She starts to close the suitcase, hesitates, and grabs one of Juan’s T-shirts from the hamper, putting it in on top of her own clothes. The smell of him won’t linger forever. It will linger long enough that she might remember how to sleep before it fades. There’s nothing else.

There are so many things she’d love to take, if she had the time to box it all and consider every piece. But time is a luxury she doesn’t have, and so she shuts the suitcase on the memories she can carry, hoists it, weighing it out with her arm and her heart at the same time—this is the weight of a life; can you balance it against a feather?—and turns her back on the bed she’ll never sleep in again.

Nostrils full of the scent of Juan, she goes to retrieve their son. He has finished his packing; he’s staring at the wall. He looks around when she enters the room.

“Something bad is happening, isn’t it?” he asks.

Isabella pauses. “Yes, sweetheart. Something bad is happening. I’m sorry.”

But he doesn’t want her apologies. She’s his mother. He wants her strength and support, wants her to have all the answers he doesn’t. His face screws up, just a little, as he thinks. Finally, he says, “It sounded bad. But I don’t remember why it sounded bad. If it’s so bad, I should remember it, shouldn’t I?”

“Sometimes your mind doesn’t want to remember the bad things,” says Isabella. “If it’s important enough, you’ll remember it later.”

“Oh.” He picks up his duffel bag, looks to the suitcase in her hand. “Are we going somewhere?”

“Yes, we are. Your friend Kelpie from last night, she’ll be there, too.”

“Oh!” He brightens, just for a moment, then asks, with heartbreaking wariness, “Is she why a bad thing happened?”

That answer is huge and complex. Isabella goes for the shorter, simpler one: “No, and neither are you. This is no one’s fault.”

No one but the alchemists, may they rot for what they’ve done to her family. All of them, everywhere in the world, may they rot where they stand. She sees no purpose to them, no reason for the universe to continue their appearance or allow their education. They are nothing but parasites attaching themselves to the spiritual skin of the universe, taking and taking and giving nothing back, and she hates them as she has never hated anything in all her life, as she did not know she could hate. It doesn’t seem possible that she could hate this much, but she does, as she takes her son by his free hand and leads him back to the living room.

The shattered shape of the Catrina-thing is still sprawled across the floor, difficult to look upon or truly comprehend; Isabella is deep enough into the elemental world that she should be able to see it more clearly than this, or at least feels like she should. The back of the woman’s clothing appears to have been sliced through and stitched back together, the seam visible due to the otherwise seamless slickness of the fabric. The back of the creature’s neck and arms makes it clear that the seams go all the way to the bone, that what was cut into was more than merely fabric.

Once she comes to understand that, Isabella looks no deeper, suddenly grateful that Luis doesn’t seem to see the body at all. Instead, he focuses on Artemis, and Bobby, who is standing rigidly at heel beside her, posture tight and perfect, ready for the hunt. He looks like a sighthound, like something bred to follow prey through ancient, endless forests. Bobby has never seemed noble before, but in this moment, in this light, he does.

“That’s my dog,” says Luis, almost petulantly. “Who are you?”

Artemis looks at him and smiles, sweet and gentle, like she’s trying not to upset him. “My name’s Anna, but my friends call me ‘Artemis,’” she says.

“You mean like from Percy Jackson?” asks Luis, brightening.

“Yes. Just like from Percy Jackson,” says Artemis. “I’m a friend of your mother’s. I’m here to walk you to where you’ll be staying tonight.”

Isabella remembers that in the old stories, Artemis is also the goddess responsible for child care, and feels a vast surge of sudden relief. Artemis will make sure Luis is safe, even if Isabella can’t protect him herself.

“Now,” Artemis continues. “I like taking walks, especially walks with a dog as good as Bobby here, but I like it even better when we can play a game at the same time. Do you want to play a game with me?”

Luis nods, enthusiastically

“Wonderful. For this game, I need you to close your eyes and follow the sound of my voice, and don’t open them until I say you can. Do you think you can do that?”

“I can,” says Luis, and screws his eyes obediently closed. Curious, he asks, “What game is this?”

“Um … I call it Bats! Because we’re traveling by echolocation, see, and you need to trust your ears since you can’t trust your eyes when they’re closed. Real bats don’t fly with their eyes closed, but their eyes are very small, and they do almost all of their hunting in the dark, which means they have to find their food by sending out sounds and following them.”

“Okay,” says Luis.

Artemis looks at Isabella and winks broadly, before taking several steps back and saying, “Okay, walk toward me.”

Bobby follows her, and Luis walks toward the sound of her voice, Artemis calling out directions and corrections to lead him where he needs to be. She manages, somehow, to steer him out of the apartment without stepping on the body of his father, which has fallen to halfway block the exit; Isabella can’t understand quite how that worked out but, now that she’s looking, can see that it’s true.

“Juan, I am so sorry,” she says to the empty apartment once the others are gone. She keeps her voice low, to avoid attracting Luis’s attention. Artemis has him outside without understanding what’s happened. She doesn’t want to change that. “I had no idea this could happen. I swear, if I’d even suspected, I would never have let her in, I would never have let you go to work today, I would have done so many things so very differently. I will never stop wishing this had gone differently, and I will never stop loving you. I’ll keep our boy safe. You have my word.”