3. Touch the Water
3
TOUCH THE WATER
Bitter is the wind tonight,
It tosses the ocean’s white hair
— ANONYMOUS NINTH-CENTURY POET, “THE VIKING TERROR”
I t was all I could do to get out of the building before my head started to split. By the time I turned the lights off, the room was spinning and my gloves weren’t doing a thing to guard me. None of the clothes I wore seemed to be doing anything to protect me from the emotions and histories seeping from Gasson with every footstep down the main hall toward the exit.
It was a bad spell. A bad day. The worst I’d had in some time, maybe even years.
As soon as I stepped outside, I recognized the signs of an attack. It happened. Not often. But it happened.
The naked trees and snow-covered grass started to spin. Everything was bright and loud, simultaneously far away and much too close. Sounds, smells, tastes, touches, and yes, visions permeating through the lug soles of my boots. They clawed upward through the ground, disregarding the solid earth that was supposed to root me against their onslaught, coiling around me like too-tight bandages. I was prey bouncing in a spider’s web. A desperate catch in a net of time.
A thousand crying children. The heat of a battle over the Nipmuc land. Shouts and laughter and conversations between students, teachers, farmers, hunters, townspeople, colonists, and anyone else who had lived and died on this damn hill.
A lace collar or two.
The scent of brimstone.
Was that the scream of a witch being carted away to be hanged on some frigid day like this? Or someone who had lost a child to typhus?
I couldn’t tell. My reality was too blurred, incomprehensible as the overlapping experiences and sensations of so many others invaded.
I tried to relax, like my grandmother had taught me. Visions are like anyone else, Gran would say. They just want to say their piece. Ignore them, and they’ll stay that much longer. Give them a bit of empathy. Look at them, really Look, and Listen for what they have to tell you. They’ll get what they came for and be on their way.
So I tried to let the visions wash over me, ignoring the strange looks from passersby as I stood to one side of the walk and did my best to open my mind and heart to the snippets of thoughts, voices, and events that had happened in this spot.
Perhaps it would have been more bearable if any of it had been coherent. I had heard of seers who could channel the past with perfect clarity and summon events from a given day or even moment in recent times. As a student of history myself, the idea of seeing actual events would have been the greatest gift I could imagine.
But the Fates were so much crueler than that.
There in the middle of the quad, I was surrounded by a nameless mob, but even less organized. Jostling specters whom I couldn’t understand any more than I could See clearly trapped me here. They threatened to hold me down. Take over my last coherent sense of self. Sweep me up with them.
Panic set in. I was finding it hard to breathe.
Get. Out.
“Hey, are you okay?”
“Is everything all right?”
Were those real people? Or one of these phantoms?
I flapped my arms in case it was the former, hoping to signal I would be fine. Their proximity would only make it worse. Away, I had to get away. If I ran, I would fall. My body would touch even more ground, and it would get even worse.
Home, with my bundles of fresh juniper, sage, and rowan and tub full of water, might as well have been thousands of miles away. I didn’t even have a lighter here (and I was fairly sure the Catholic priests who ran BC wouldn’t appreciate one of their students conducting a pagan ritual in the middle of campus). Fingers trembling, I pulled my phone out of my pocket, used my teeth to remove a glove, and viciously swiped through to a contact while the voices shouted in my ears. The only person who could help, even from thousands of miles away.
“Shh,” I hissed, though to anyone passing, I’d look completely crazy.
The phone rang out. I tried again. And again. She was probably out in the garden. Or on the beach.
“Gran!” I groaned when I finally gave up.
The voices were at a roar. I could barely see a damn thing.
Focus , Cassandra I ordered myself, marveling for at least the thousandth time at the utter irony of my mother naming me after a crazy prophetess.
What would Gran do right now? What did Gran do?
Find the elements . Touch the water. Breathe the air. Feel the earth. Light the fire. Hear the silence.
It wasn’t a spell, but it might have been. Like I was thirteen again, quaking with the first barrage of memories, I kept my eyes closed until I could hear my own memories of my grandmother’s voice louder than the ones threatening to drown me. As a teenager, I’d make for the ocean, the roaring Pacific fifty feet from her house. I’d run into the waves, let the cold and the salt and the frigid wet sweep away the visions that plagued me.
But I had no ocean here. When I opened my eyes again, I focused on a rooftop peeking over the edge of the quad. Black and straight, the student athletic center loomed. But although the pool was a daily refuge, right now jumping into waters with anyone else seemed like the worst idea in the world.
The voices howled. I looked frantically over the campus rooftops for a glimpse of something blue. No, not blue. Silver. The top of the football stadium. And beyond that, the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, maybe half a mile away as the crow flew. I’d jogged this exact route so many times over the past six years, I could do it blindfolded. Couldn’t I?
It wouldn’t take long. A polar bear dip, right? I’d jump in, jump out, then trudge back through the snow and sit in front of the juniper and cedar fire I could make in our little hearth. Embrace the quiet. Find my center. Locate my strength before I could face the world again.
Touch the water. Breathe the air. Feel the earth. Light the fire. Hear the silence.
“Touch the water,” I murmured, my feet already starting to move.
So, I went, ignoring the curious looks of students and faculty as I sprinted down Campanella Way. I wasn’t the only runner, even in the cold, but I was the only one in boots and a skirt, a messenger bag under one arm instead of a water bottle. I didn’t care, struggling as I was to make out the shapes of cars on the winding concrete. Because I knew this path. Taken it plenty of times, on too many missions just like this.
I jumped into traffic, barely comprehending the blare of horns as I crossed Chestnut Hill Driveway and found the trail that looped the reservoir.
The voices keened. The water called.
Staggering now, I shed my coat, bag, and gloves before plowing through ice-encrusted cattails that blocked the road and running trail from the water. And with a barbaric scream that matched all the others in my ears, I crashed through the ice and into the water beneath.
Darkness found me. Quiet. Death, maybe.
Not mine, but theirs. None that I regretted, though, because with a torrent of visions trying to shout and strangle and squeeze the life out of me, it did feel like kill or be killed. It was their lives—or at least what was left of them—or mine.
Sweet, blissful silence wrapped around me like a blanket.
Then the cold set in. And with it, the knowledge that I was floating through an iced-over lake in the middle of winter. If I didn’t get out soon, I was going to die of hypothermia instead of magical schizophrenia.
Frantic and quickly numbing, I turned in the water for the hole I’d made in the surface. Then I smacked ice, a glassy mirage of freedom. I was trapped. My flight complete, the urge to fight arose just as strongly. I had seconds. If I could get back at all.
But as soon as my hand punched through the ice again, another grabbed it. Then its owner took my collar and proceeded to drag me up and back to the bank while something in the water literally lifted me from below like a small platform and carried me to shore.
“L-l-let me go !” I spluttered through thick, numb lips.
The hand around my neck was warm. And then it was gone as I was unceremoniously dumped on the snowy bank. I looked up to find the green-eyed man from Rachel Cardy’s talk bristling furiously at me.
“What in the hell did you think you were doing?” he demanded. “It’s less than five degrees out here, and you thought it was a good time for a bloody dip?” He jerked his head toward the water. “You might be the only person in the world who can drown in a meter of water, do you know that? Can you even swim?”
My teeth started to chatter, as much with anger as with chill. But before I could snap that of course I could swim, better than almost anyone, something else occurred to me. I stared at his hand as it waved through the air. His bare hand. Which had grabbed my bare hand, and my neck too. We had touched, skin to skin. To absolutely no effect.
“I was b-b-blocked b-by the ice,” I started to babble, already shivering convulsively. “I would have made my way out.”
I grappled on the bank for my coat. My gloves. Anything to stop the cold from lodging itself so far into my bones I couldn’t get it out.
“Of course I grabbed you. And it’s good I was here, you know. You were bloody drowning.” He seemed disgusted by the fact as he got up. He shook out his wet shoes, then rescued my coat a few feet away and shoved it roughly over my shoulders.
“H-help,” I said, unable to control my stutter. “P-please. I c-can’t get up on m-my own.”
I couldn’t, either. My feet were frozen.
He stared at me from where he was retrieving my gloves and messenger bag. Then, as if he had no choice, he reached down and offered his hand.
Tentatively, shaking, I took it and allowed him to pull me to my feet.
Again, there was nothing. No voices. No jumble of his emotions or immediate thoughts. No hints of secrets or even childhood memories waiting to be released. Like the water, he was utterly silent.
How odd. And how…lovely.
The man frowned, then hissed through his teeth like he was in pain before yanking his hand away.
“Come on,” he said gruffly. “My car’s over here.”
I stopped. “Your c-car?”
He scowled. “You need to get home and into a warm bath. It’s that or the hospital. Your choice.”
Then he turned for the road without waiting for an answer. It was almost as if he knew the new wave of panic just the idea of entering a place like that caused. Especially today.
Shivering, I stumbled after him, pushing away any trepidation of getting into a car with a strange sorcerer right along with the niggling questions of why he had been there in the first place. And why he had saved my life. Or why he seemed to hate me for it.
Once the heater was on, I gave him my address. The chattering in my teeth subsided while I held my hands in front of the vents and tried to ignore the chill of my wet clothing. But it wasn’t until I leaned my cheek into the seat only to feel a whole lot of nothing that I jerked straight, again in surprise.
“It’s a rental,” the man remarked. “Brand new. But it’s also been…cleaned.” His green eyes flickered toward me, then back onto the road as we circled the pond.
“So you are f-fae,” I murmured. “A seer too?”
Another flicker, but this time with a frown. “Of course not. You can’t tell?”
“I thought I could, but apparently not.” I swallowed and looked out the window. Yes I‘d originally guessed something else, but if he wasn’t a seer, how could he block his thoughts the way he had?
“I’m a sorcerer,” he said, confirming my initial suspicion. “And you’re a seer. Though not a very good one.”
I turned back. “What is that supposed to mean?”
One ginger brow arched wryly. “Why don’t you tell me? Isn’t that what your lot do?”
My jaw clenched against a wave of indignation. I barely tolerated it when Professor James nitpicked my gloves or minor word choices. I wasn’t about to put up with a strange fae disparaging my entire subspecies, rescue or not.
“Thanks for c-clearing that up,” I snapped. “And no, you don’t have to worry about me stealing your thoughts. We’re not touching, so I’m not exactly a threat, all right?”
He jerked as if he were examining some rare new species with eight eyes that couldn’t possibly exist. “You have to be touching to See?”
“It’s been suggested it’s because I’m a half-breed,” I fairly spat. “My father is plain if you must know.”
I honestly wasn’t sure why I had volunteered the information. I hated this conversation, avoided it at all costs with other fae, though most of them figured out something was off within a few minutes. Their looks of inevitable pity, disgust, loathing, or some mixture of all three were intolerable. Not because of my parentage, but because of my dysfunctional abilities. To people like this, I was a freak. Treated like an invalid or avoided completely.
This was why I kept so thoroughly to myself, despite my grandmother’s encouragement to reach out to local covens, of which there were many in Boston. Massachusetts had a long, venerated history of the craft for all fae creatures. But vertigo spells aside, I was better as a hermit. Better on my own in just about every way.
There was no response for several blocks. But when I dared to look up, the man’s expression only revealed faint skepticism over obvious fascination.
“So, have I got this right?” he continued as he turned onto Beacon Street. “You think you can’t hear my thoughts remotely because you’re half plain?”
I nodded. “That’s what I said.”
“I assure you, whatever your abilities, they have nothing to do with something as absurd as blood quantum.”
“Why do you think that?” I’d never heard such a statement.
“Because I’m a scientist, not a backwater charlatan.”
“A geneticist?”
He snorted. “Particle physicist, actually. But no matter. The point is that I believe in science, not fairy stories. And the genetics of magic don’t work that way. It’s like brown eyes or hair color. It either manifests or not. There’s no in-between.”
My jaw nearly dropped. It was one thing not to believe in something like fae eugenics. It was quite another to deride the myths that ungirded our kind’s entire history. Our raison d’être .
“And what fool convinced you otherwise?”
I bristled. “That is none of your business who’s told me what. I don’t know you.”
“Well, whoever they are, stop listening to them. Blood quantum is just more imperialist claptrap imported from plain folk.”
I opened my mouth to argue but found I couldn’t. There had always been something insidious about the assumption. It was as backward as any other theory of racism to emerge from the Imperialist era.
“It’s like taking medical advice from an eighteenth-century doctor,” he continued. “But maybe you would. Ponds are excellent places to find leeches. Perhaps that’s what you were doing in there.”
“I wasn’t looking for fugging leeches!” My lips still felt thick with numbness, but I found I couldn’t not speak. In barely ten minutes, this stranger was finding nearly every way under my chilled skin possible.
“Must it be skin to skin?” he asked, changing the subject as abruptly as his insults.
I frowned. When others discovered my disability, they never wanted to talk about it. More often, they would move on to more benign topics before making a quick excuse to leave.
The man seemed to take my pause for suspicion and held his hands up innocently before replacing them on the wheel. “I’m just curious. Truly.”
I rubbed my hands again in front of the heater, though I was quickly thawing out. “Okay…well, no, it doesn’t have to be skin-to-skin. But clothing can…muffle things. Most of the time, anyway.”
“But today it didn’t?”
Again, I wasn’t sure how he knew that. I shuddered as the memories of those hundreds of past threatened again.
“No,” I said. “Today it didn’t.”
I stared out the window toward the growing number of pedestrians on the sidewalks bordering the Cleveland Circle T stop, around which a small hub of bars and restaurants served the mostly student population of the area. A group of young people laughed together, their voices echoing raucously in the snow. One pair’s joined hands swung to and fro between them like a ribbon tossing in the wind. The girl leaned into the man’s shoulder, and he wrapped his arm around her waist to pull her close. She smiled, and a warmth passed between them.
“Whom did you touch that caused the episode?”
I tore my gaze from the couple and scowled. “The ground.”
The stranger reared. “You felt the thoughts of the ground?”
I sighed irritably. “If you must know, I saw the histories imprinted there. Jumbled and simultaneous. A lot of things can happen in a single spot over thousands of years of human history. Don’t ask me how it happens, because I don’t know. And don’t ask me what I saw, because I don’t know that either. It was just…everything at once.”
“You felt hundreds, maybe thousands of years of history through the soles of your shoes in a moment?”
Could this man say anything without sounding skeptical? I had a feeling that if I stated the sky was blue, he would demand to see my data.
But when I didn’t respond, he didn’t press. Instead, he only examined me for a half-second before turning onto Sutherland Road. “I see.”
He drove the final few blocks, then pulled the car over to the curb.
“Thank you for the ride,” I said woodenly, back to staring at my hands. “And for pulling me out of the water. Though I really didn’t need it.”
Didn’t you?
This time the voice was definitely mine.
Now the stranger didn’t bother to mask his penetrating gaze. I could practically feel its force gliding over me, cool and calculating like his kind was. Or so I’d been told. I’d never actually met a sorcerer before today.
His eyes glittered.
This time I was the one to look away.
“You’re welcome,” he said carefully. “I…” He trailed off, tipping his head this way and that. “I’d like to…”
I frowned. “You’d like to what?”
Was I imagining the way his eyes dropped to my lips?
Yes, yes, I was. I really was going crazy today.
“What’s your name?” I burst out. He had somehow managed to elicit so many of my personal qualities, secrets even, in such a short time. It only seemed fair that I should know the most basic thing about him.
Did he shrink?
“I—no,” he said. “Not yet. I’m a very private person. I’m sure you understand.”
I gritted my teeth. “I could just ask Dr. Cardy.”
This time his gaze flew to my hands, naked in front of the heating vent, like he knew just what I meant by “ask.”
“You won’t though.” He was almost thoughtful about it. “Besides, Rachel is as discreet as anyone else would be in her situation. She won’t betray me.”
Before I could ask what the hell that meant, he reached out. Very slowly, almost reluctantly, he hovered his palm over the top of my hand for a second before he frowned and rested it there. It was a brief touch, completely within the realm of social graces, no longer than a few seconds, as if he were trying to be comforting to me. This time, the cold, calculated chill of a sorcerer’s mind flooded mine along with flashes of some sort of laboratory and a lot of very complex math equations that made about as much sense as cuneiform.
His conscious thoughts, however, were primarily focused on what he wanted to say next. He was fighting the urge to tell me something, but that was muddied somehow. A tribal beat pulsed latently. He might have been the man from the club, but it was too faint to See if he wasn’t explicitly remembering it.
None of that was necessarily surprising. What was shocking, however, was the clarity of his conscious thought in a way I had never experienced with anyone. That, and the sudden flood of my thoughts and emotions mingling with his.
It never went both ways.
Had it?
He yanked his hand away as if he had been stung. I stared down at my arm and then back up at him.
“What did you just do?” I demanded, feeling the blood drain from my face. I knew what it felt like to have other seers read my mind, but never other kinds of people, fae or not. I was the one who did that. Not them.
His face seemed similarly colorless. “Nothing,” he whispered before clearing his throat. “And you?”
I swallowed. My throat was suddenly hoarse. “N-nothing.”
We stared at each other wordlessly while the sounds of the busy street seemed to fall away. A new gust of wind shook the little car, but our gazes remained locked like the snow now falling outside had no effect on the heat caused by that sudden touch.
I looked down at the sorcerer’s hand again. It was so strange. I didn’t know him from Adam, but part of me wanted him to do it again. Touch me. See me.
What would he do with those thoughts? What would it feel like for someone to See me as I Saw him?
“At least let me buy you a cup of tea,” I said. “But only because I’ll probably end up with f-frostbite if I don’t get something warm. Can you wait here while I change?”
He continued to stare, though his brow crinkled in a slight frown. It seemed to be his default expression. Grouchy or not, he was still very attractive.
“I—no,” he said, suddenly abrupt. “No, I don’t think so.”
He didn’t make any move to go, though. Or gesture that I should.
“Well, I’m not going to invite you up, if that’s what you’re wondering,” I told him. “I’m also a very…private…person.”
As much as my curiosity was piqued, my home was my sanctuary. I meant to keep it that way.
The man looked at me even closer somehow. There was something black in the depths of those mossy green eyes. Something steely, but with a strange heat too. It was unnerving. Last time my seer’s gaze caused him to look away, but this time, I found I was the one who couldn’t keep eye contact.
“Wise of you,” he said finally. “I trust you can get yourself inside?”
I closed my eyes. For someone who could read people’s minds, I was extraordinarily terrible at reading social cues. Of course, he didn’t want to get tea or come up. To him, I was a pathetic excuse for a fae. A sad, crippled witch, like a puppy missing its hind legs. Something to pity.
“Yes,” I said, unable to mask my bitterness. “Thank you again for, well, for…”
“Saving your life?” he suggested with an ironic lift of his brow. “You’re welcome.”
I scowled. “I suppose so.” I opened my door. “All right, then. I…” I trailed off, unsure of just what else I should say.
“Quite all right,” said the man. “Good day, Ms. Whelan.”
I frowned. “Goodbye, then.”
And on that strangely formal note, I got out of the car and hurried to my building when a gust of frigid wind swept up the street and froze my sopping clothes all over again. I didn’t look back at the sound of the car pulling away from the curb or the growl of the engine as he sped away.
I needed warmth. I needed fire. Because once again that day, for completely different reasons, I needed to clear my head.