Chapter 25
“What is that?” Meredith asked, pointing at the brown bundle in Noah’s arms.
Noah had almost reached his room; the coat cradled in his arms looked as if he was holding a rather large furry animal.
For half a second, he contemplated saying that’s exactly what it was.
It was too big to be a cat, but lying about having a dog was better than telling the truth about having a magic coat.
Meredith stepped closer.
And Noah caved, unwilling to lie to his aunt. “It’s a fur coat.”
“Why did you have it in the bathroom? More importantly, why did I find brown fur in the bath?”
She frowned at him as if she couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing. Noah was sure that the answer was obvious to any mytho. They wouldn’t have even asked.
“I’m not sure if you’re going to believe me even if I tell you.” And if he told her then that was another person who knew the secret. The more people who knew, the more likely it was that word would get out.
Meredith crossed her arms. “Try me. I’ve seen so much weird shit in the last two months that nothing is going to shock me.”
Noah doubted that that was true.
“Leave him alone, Meredith. He’s not breaking any laws,” Nan said as she walked down the corridor, cup of tea in hand. “Have you caught the serial arsonist who keeps burning mytho houses?”
“No…we’ve been told it’s not a priority.”
“Will it be a priority when one of them is killed?” Noah asked.
Meredith didn’t answer.
“Or when the mythos go after the person themselves?” he added.
“I have to obey what the higher-ups say. It doesn’t matter what I think. But I think it’s unhelpful and disruptive behavior that’s slowing progress for everyone.”
“The higher-ups need to pull their heads out of their asses. Because if they don’t catch the humans causing trouble, people will end up clashing,” Nan said. They’d spent the morning scrubbing graffiti off the side of the pub and palace, as they had most mornings since Samhain.
Since then, two more almost complete mytho houses had been set on fire.
Tomorrow, the shrine was supposed to be opening. Noah hoped that wasn’t the next target. He took a step towards his room, hoping that Meredith had forgotten about the coat.
She hadn’t. “Why do you keep taking the coat into the bathroom? And where did you get it?”
He really didn’t want to drop Pan in the shit. “It was given to me because it has magic.”
Meredith rolled her eyes, and while once she would’ve ignored his talk of magic, now that there were mythological people walking around town, it was much harder. “And what does it do?”
“It’s a selkie coat, Mer,” Nan said.
Her frown deepened. “Why do you have a selkie coat?”
“Because it called to him,” Nan said as though that explained everything.
Noah sighed. “I’m a selkie.”
“The coat turned you into a seal?” Meredith’s frown turned to confusion.
“It’s in our blood.” Nan sipped her tea.
“Mum, selkies aren’t real…weren’t real.” She shook her head as if trying to make the thoughts make sense.
“My grandfather would disagree,” Nan said.
That was news to Noah, even though Nan had said she was going to investigate the family tree.
Meredith gave a short laugh. “Was he the fisherman? Are you telling me he saw selkies?”
“He plucked one out of the water, thinking it was a tired and injured seal. Turned out it was a selkie who became your great-grandmother.”
“That’s a story told by an old drunk who was sad that his wife left him.”
Nan nodded. “All of that is true. But so is the reason she left. She wanted to go home, and this world was never her home.”
“Did she make it home?”
“I don’t know.” Nan sighed. “But he never saw her again. She left him with three children under ten. My mother being the eldest. I have her diary, and she wrote about the night her mother left.”
“And how did a selkie end up in this world before the collapse? It doesn’t make any sense. How can you believe the stories told by a drunk fisherman and a scared ten-year-old girl?”
“And how many other stories have we disbelieved because they were complicated? Why can’t we accept that he was telling the truth?
That he pulled a selkie out of the ocean and that they were happily married for fifteen years?
We have all those myths, Mer, because they were able to visit our world, and we were able to go to theirs.
The coat sensed it in Noah’s blood and bonded to him. ”
Noah realized he was biting his bottom lip hard enough to make it bleed. He ran his tongue over the cut. He’d never worried about being kicked out of home for being gay, even by his mother, but was he about to be kicked out for being a seal?
Meredith was silent for several seconds. “If the stories about the coats are true, you need to keep it well hidden.”
“They are, and I know, and it’s kind of shit.
” He hugged the coat a little closer. “It’s not something I want.
And the only reason I take it into the bathroom is because I’m too scared to go to the beach and swim, but I can lie in the bathtub.
I’ll try and clean the fur out better.” He thought he’d been doing a good job. Clearly not good enough.
He should have asked the drak to do it. They were always ready to jump in with a cloth, but he still wasn’t used to having them follow him around.
David stuck his head around the corner and peered down the hallway. “Dinner is almost ready…is there a problem?”
Meredith nodded. “Yeah, but we’d best discuss it over dinner, because I’m sure Pan knows something about it.”
Noah winced, but bit back on the temptation to defend him because that would only make him seem more guilty.
Pan was in the kitchen, dishing up. Whenever they stayed over, Pan assisted David in the kitchen. Noah wasn’t sure if it was to learn how to cook or learn more about the human world; either way, they seemed to be doing a lot of talking, and it often involved a glass of wine.
The drak who followed Pan around usually busied themselves dusting and cleaning, and while Meredith had freaked out the first time she saw one, she was now used to seeing them in the house.
They especially loved lying on a cushion in front of the fire and watching TV.
They even loafed like cats with their human-like hands tucked in.
Pan took one look at Noah and went still as if knowing something was up.
There was no point in hiding it or turning it into a big family meeting, so Noah told David. “I was given a magical coat, and I’m now a selkie.”
“Just blurt it out, why don’t you?” Nan said as she sat down. “You need to get better at telling a story.”
David blinked a couple of times. “You know what? I’m going to agree because why not? Three months ago, I would’ve wondered if you were taking drugs, but now…I think that’s pretty reasonable, and it explains why Meredith kept finding brown fur in the bathtub when the talking cats have red fur.”
The drak turned to look at him.
David lifted his hands, as if not wanting any trouble. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. I’m trying to make sense of the fact that my nephew can now turn into a seal.”
They nodded wisely. “He has a selkie’s voice. It is very powerful. He is a good consort for a god.”
“Consort?” David asked, looking at Noah.
“Er, it’s what gods call their boyfriends.” He forced a smile.
Pan rolled his eyes behind David’s back. “Dinner is ready. It is called depression soup.”
“That’s not its proper name,” David said. “I was trying to explain the great depression and World War II rationing.”
“I have lived through wars and rations… Well, I didn’t stay, but I showed up to answer prayers. So I suppose this is the first time I have experienced depression soup.”
Nan laughed. “As long as it’s got something in the soup and it’s not only hot water, we will be fine.”
“We will be out of tea next week,” Meredith said.
“I take that back. We will not be fine,” Nan gripped her cup a little tighter.
Pan fluttered his fingers in the air. “The Strega can make tea out of anything. You will be fine.”
Nan glanced at Noah. Noah wasn’t sure he wanted to be in debt to the witch, or that he’d trust the tea she made, given the amount of poisonous plants in her garden.
Nate and Rohan could have stayed in the castle, but instead they had fixed up and moved into one of the houses near hers.
No one had dared torch her house, or any on that street.
The street was supposed to be closed due to the damage, but after tea with the Strega, the humans had agreed she could stay there.
David and Pan put the bowls of soup on the table, along with the bread.
If it weren’t for the farmer and some ogres working together, they wouldn’t have milk or butter.
He couldn’t get the milk delivered to where it got processed, and so some of it had gone to waste until the ogres had said they could use it to make butter and soft cheese.
They’d negotiated a trade and had fixed the road to a near enough standard—much to the council’s horror—so the farmer could get his milk out, and every week he gave them payment.
Noah had half expected him to stop. But he seemed to realize that he was onto a good thing. If a cow died, he called up and said he had something for the dragon. And if he needed help on the farm, with fences and such, the ogres were happy to assist, and he paid them cash.
Things like that gave Noah hope.
“Are you going to tell your mother about the coat?” David asked.
“No. She has enough to deal with.” The pool has still not been repaired, and she did not like the disruptions to her life and acted as though it had been done deliberately to upset her. “I don’t want word of it getting around.”
Meredith stirred the soup and stared at it as if it were the most unappetizing thing she had ever seen. “I suppose you’d better pull out the diary, Mum. So we can look at our family history with new eyes.”
“You found the selkie?” Pan asked.
“My grandmother. My grandfather always said he fished her out of the sea. I’d forgotten about that story until I started looking.
I remember him telling it after a few too many drinks, and I thought that meant she was drowning.
My mother, his eldest daughter, never talked about her, but she wrote about her in her diaries.
And I have them. I have an entire trunk of family history that no one was ever interested in, but it felt like the kind of thing that shouldn’t be thrown out. ”
Meredith put her hand over her mother’s. “I’m glad you didn’t. And no offence to the chef but…it does taste like depression soup. How are you all out of curry powder and stock?”
“We’re all out of everything that isn’t local,” David said.
“So we start boiling bones for our own stock,” Nan said.
“David said in World War II, people kept rabbits. Perhaps we could acquire some of them?” Pan asked. “Or would you prefer I ask the dragons for a leg of their next cow?”
Everyone was silent for several seconds. Neither option was great.
It was David who spoke first. “What are your people doing?”
“I am sure your human authorities would not approve, but the werewolves have begun hunting in the hills. Everyone is sharing and bartering to make sure there is enough. Perhaps when your people are hungry enough, they will agree that repairing the roads to near enough is better than waiting in line for asphalt.”
“The council has not agreed to meet with you?” David buttered a piece of bread.
It was a loaf the drak had made when they had been there two days ago.
It was dense and chewy, and the butter was soft and salty.
It was a thousand times better than the soup made of whatever vegetables they had lying around, some lentils, and rice.
“They have not, even though we have a list of names and trades. People who are willing to work under human supervision to fix pipes and houses and roads.”
“I will speak to the people I know because it is ridiculous that we have the humans trying to fix their buildings and the mythological people trying to fix theirs, and they aren’t working together.”
“The humans keep burning our buildings, as if we are somehow taking their resources.” Pan tapped his chest. “I have never known such selfishness in a time of disaster.”
“If it was only this area…city-state…then others would be helping,” Meredith said.
“Then we must help ourselves. And prove to others that it can be done.” Pan said. “Because the alternative is we keep fighting amongst ourselves and we all grow thin on depression soup.”