Sight Unseen Read online

  “Yeah? You think trees have a good sense of humor?”

  “They’d require one, to put up with all that occurs beneath them.”

  “Well, here it’s mostly drum circles and firewalks.” She laughed. “Yeah, I guess you have a point. I wouldn’t be too keen on firewalks if I were made of wood.”

  His laughter startled her—low and rich, registering in her mind like a glinting vein of copper. “Indeed not.”

  After a moment, her joke made her uneasy. She didn’t like to imagine a fire in these woods. “There’s a whole self-contained ecosystem at the top of each tree, you know.” Entire species were just now being discovered that lived only in the canopies of redwoods.

  “Remarkable.” He gazed up, his expression contemplative in the half-light.

  He didn’t look like a man in a rush, so she let herself relax and settle beside him. After a long moment, the silence seemed to deepen. There was something distinct, special, about the silence in a redwood grove. The trees liked low places in otherwise mountainous terrain, damp grottoes and misted vales. Their leaves, once fallen, nourished a springy undergrowth of ferns and moss, which cushioned and dampened all sound. The air felt rich and still, the light murky and weighted, patterned into odd shapes by the leafed canopies high above.

  It was magical, in the truest sense of the word. And it worked a spell on her. She felt loosened, somehow. Eased.

  “I miss these trees,” she whispered.

  “Why not visit them, then?”

  She hesitated before admitting it. “Sometimes I creep in here after dark. Nobody even knows I’m here.”

  It was a weird thing to do. She was aware of that.

  But all he said was, “I’m sure they appreciate it.”

  And she smiled again despite herself. It was hard to dislike a guy who admired her trees. “Well, it’s nice to visit in the daytime, too. But you see what I have to deal with here.”

  He turned to face her, and her throat closed in surprise. His dark eyes had some kind of magnetic power. She felt their pull deep in her belly and breast; they lured her to fall right into them.

  A thought passed through her mind: You understand.

  But she wasn’t sure what the thought meant. She simply knew that she felt . . . seen, suddenly, in a way that was impossibly, powerfully familiar. His gaze held and filled her with the same silence that the trees offered. It promised to make her whole.

  Uneasiness tightened her stomach. Nonsense. She made herself look away.

  “You’re afraid,” he said. “Why?”

  Her instinct was to deny it. But there were plenty of reasons to be fearful. Life offered so many of them, and so few for hope. “Well, my mother is crazy, for one.”

  “And? Even if she were crazy, what of it? She seems content.”

  She hissed out a breath, looked back up at the treetops. “I don’t think you get it. She thinks she’s—I don’t know, working spells to save the world. Amassing a great force of witch-power.”

  “And who is harmed by it?”

  “She is.” She faced him again, frowning. “This is her life passing her by. And I can’t pretend to be okay with it. It would be like enabling her sickness. She needs help, North.”

  “That’s your objection, then? That her happiness is false?”

  “I think . . .” She took a deep breath. “I think false happiness is a contradiction in terms. Okay, depression is a real illness, to be sure. And it can kill. But I also think we, as a society, we’re not comfortable with the shittier parts of reality. And what we sometimes call depression is just . . . a clear view of the world, without all the bullshit. And if instead of focusing on feeling better, on buying useless shit and stressing over how we look, if we just all got together and acknowledged that life is short and dark and it can suck—then maybe we’d all be better off. Maybe we could start to look for some real ways to improve the world, instead of putting all our energy into trying to make ourselves feel better in the moment.”

  “Ah.” He tilted his head, a curious expression on his face. “And that’s why you refuse to visit your mother.”

  Blood pounded through her face. “Okay, whatever. So it’s not all about my mother.” She bit her lip and squinted up through a bar of sunlight that was slipping through the branches. “My therapist says I’m depressed. But I’m not. I’m just a realist. And yeah, that means I can’t, I won’t, enable my mother’s delusions.”

  “But what if you were wrong?”

  She slanted him a sharp glance. He was even more beautiful, if it was possible, in this ghostly half-light. “But I’m not.”

  “Consider it for a moment,” he said quietly. “What would it mean if your mother saw more clearly than you do? What if she were right, and the mundane world was the illusion?”

  Disappointment leached through her. Had he not heard a word she’d said? She was not a girl for games of what-if.

  She picked up a stray pebble, tossed it out of the ring. “Anyway.” She cleared her throat. Back to business. “I guess you’ll have to go to court, after all.” But she had held up her side of the bargain: he was going to have to pay her.

  “That depends,” he said. “Eagle may prove reasonable.”

  “Yeah, that’s not a quality my mother looks for in husbands.”

  He gave her a wry half-smile. “Not even your father?”

  She shrugged. “He was the first. She went downhill from there.”

  Boy, had she gone downhill from there. Kate remembered little of her dad, but all of it was good. A big laugh. Warm strong arms. Magic tricks he’d done with cards.

  He probably would have skipped those tricks had he seen how “magic” would drive his wife off the rails after his car accident. It had started with the mediums. Pangaea had visited one after the next, desperate for reassurance that her husband was in a better place. And from there to the mystics, for amulets and rings to protect her only child from misfortune.

  Somebody should have stepped in then. Put Pangaea on some anti-depressants, gotten her into therapy.

  Instead, a hundred grifters had seen a rich widow and decided to encourage her delusions.

  “I guess if my dad had been reasonable, he would have put a codicil in the will.” Kate heard the old anger in her voice. Maybe it wouldn’t ever fade. “He never intended this estate to become ground zero for a cult.”

  “You use that word a great deal.” North drew his hand along the fronds of a fern—a gentle, almost affectionate stroke, as though he were petting a housecat. “Cult. Also, ‘lunatics.’ ‘Insanity.’ Does it make you feel better, safer, to think of your mother as insane?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Are you saying she’s not? You heard her up there. She thinks you’re an elf.”

  He nodded. “A common mistake.”

  She tried to laugh. It didn’t come out right. “She thinks I’m the reason her spells didn’t work.”

  “True.”

  “Right. So you want to call that sane?”

  “I call that a misrecognition,” he said evenly. “For she is partly correct: you are the reason her spells weren’t working.”

  Oh, my God. Was he serious? She scrambled to her feet. “You are not going to seriously tell me—”

  “But it wasn’t your negativity that caused them to fail. Your talent was the cause.”

  She stared down at him. “You’ve got to be kidding. I thought you were at least normal.”

  “No, you didn’t.” He rose now, all six-something feet of him, brushing off his hands as he smiled at her. “But you assumed, quite rightly, that I have a better grasp on reality than your mother. She thinks you talentless. In fact, your talent is quite remarkable. With some training, you could control it. You would no longer be an obstacle to any spells in the vicinity, but you would be able to quell those of your choosing.”

  She licked her lips. “Let me get this straight. You believe in this shit. Not just—crystal balls and palm readings. You believe in—” She waved
her hand up the ridge, toward her mother’s house.

  He shrugged. “Until today, no.”

  “Today changed your mind? What—”

  “I haven’t met your kind in two centuries.”

  “Two cen—” She swallowed. Did he hear himself?

  “The Null are figures from ancient myths—myths that are very closely guarded. I had always wondered at that secrecy, but now I begin to understand. You appear to have the ability to overturn any magical force. That makes you tremendously powerful, Kate.”

  “Two centuries.” He needed to register the absurdity of what he was saying. “You’re saying you’re two centuries old.”

  He laughed. “You make me sound ancient. Fey live for a millennium, which makes me . . . what? Roughly twenty, in your years?”

  “Fuck.” The word slipped from her. She put her hand to her lips, which felt numb.

  It was like a bad trip. Just when she thought she’d escaped the lunacy, it started all over again. It was spreading. A contagion.

  She turned on her heel, desperate to get up the path, to escape from here. It infuriated her—this place had always been her secret refuge, and now it was ruined. Because she had chosen to bring him here.

  That had been madness. So maybe she was already infected too.

  “Kate.”

  She did not turn back. Tears were blurring her vision—why, she didn’t know. They pissed her off. She dashed her hand over her eyes as she climbed. Then stumbled—which made her even angrier. Once she had known this trail well enough to climb on a moonless night. But that had been taken from her, too.

  A wind rose. It made the trees above her shudder and creak. They fell abruptly still, but the wind did not. She saw it come toward her, a silvery veil that pushed her backward—then wrapped around her, holding her in place.

  Her throat closed, trapping a scream. The wind was warm. It lifted her physically, turned her so she was looking back down the trail.

  He stood below her, untouched by the gale, his silver-gold hair unruffled, his dark eyes lit by some emotion she rejected, refused to believe.

  Sympathy.

  “Fuck you!” she screamed.

  “Would you prefer to continue to believe her insane? Or do you wish to see reality as it is?”

  The wind died, its grip failing so instantly that she staggered to her knees.

  “That is your choice, of course.” His tone was formal. She heard his long breath. “Forgive me,” he said more quietly. “I overstepped. It is not my place to decide for you.”

  Was this what a panic attack felt like? Her heart was thundering, her lungs too tight to drag in the amount of air they desperately required.

  “Let me take you back to Berkeley,” he said. “You can forget all of this.”

  “Yes.” The word came out on a wheeze. She wanted to be in her studio. Alone, away from here.

  He took a step toward her, and she stumbled backward.

  “I can make you forget,” he said. “If that is your preference.”

  He held out one long-fingered hand. As she looked at it, she shuddered, and some deep-buried part of her brain recoiled so strongly that it kicked her body into gear, turning her around and setting her back onto the upward climb.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said over her shoulder.

  “As you wish,” he said.

  Chapter 5

  What was the difference between an orb, a crystal ball, and an oversized marble? In such questions were dissertations born. Kate zoomed in on the picture, tilting her phone to avoid the glare of the lighting behind the bar. The online auction catalog employed a neutral description: “Glass globe, Venetian, ca 1540 – 1600.”

  That had to be the orb. No other spherical objects had been auctioned last week at any of the auction houses her mother frequented.

  She closed the browser. Put down her phone and took a sip of her beer.

  Picked up the phone, opened Google and typed in F-A-Y. Or was it F-E-Y?

  Search Results

  fey, alt. fay

  fā/

  noun, literary

  1. a fairy.

  “What are you looking at?” asked Amelia as she came up to the table.

  Kate punched the home button. “It’s nothing.”

  It’s the collapse of my last shred of sanity, actually.

  No. It was nothing.

  Amelia fell into the chair opposite, a glass of wine in hand. This was their favorite haunt, a quiet pub located a little too far from campus to draw the undergrad crowd. At this time in the early evening, they had the long, dark room to themselves.

  “So?” Amelia asked. “You scared me earlier. That phone call was nuts.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. I didn’t realize he wanted to meet my mother.”

  Amelia nodded, studying her with dark eyes. This was how eyes were supposed to look. Even though Amelia’s irises were the color of black coffee, you could see the outlines of her pupils. Whereas North’s eyes . . .

  “He wasn’t a psycho, I guess?” Amelia said. “You’re still in one piece, anyway.”

  Yeah, he was a psycho. He thinks he’s a fairy.

  She swallowed a sick feeling. Six hours had passed since North had dropped her off. But she wasn’t calming down. If anything, the harder she tried not to think about it, the edgier she felt.

  The idea of sharing the whole story made her feel tired as well as nauseated. How to explain it when she couldn’t even put some of it into words? That wind at the end . . .

  It hadn’t been natural. But the alternative explanation was . . . what?

  Magic?

  It was just a fucking breeze!

  “Let’s not talk about it,” she said. “It’s done now.”

  Amelia sat a little straighter. She had come directly from her office, was still dressed in her therapist-best. It seemed like every therapist in the Bay Area stuck to the same uniform: a bright scarf or chunky jewelry or a silly tie to indicate a free spirit, over a button-down shirt that conjured competence, expertise. “You mean he actually paid you?”

  Kate reached into her bag and pulled out the cashier’s check.

  Amelia took it, then whistled, long and low. “Holy shit. So he was for real.”

  Butterflies churned in her stomach. “No, he wasn’t.”

  The denial shot out too forcefully. It made Amelia frown. “So, what? The check is fake?”

  “No.” Kate ran a hand up her face. She had a headache. The beer probably wasn’t helping. “I mean, I think it’s real.”

  “Well, then deposit it, Kate!” Amelia handed it back to her. “You don’t go walking around town with fifty thousand dollars in your purse! That check’s like cash, you know.”

  “Yeah.” She folded the check and stuck it into a zippered pocket. “Good idea. First thing in the morning, I’ll take it to the bank.”

  Amelia was giving her a weird look. “You okay? He didn’t . . . do anything, did he?”

  “No.” She took a deep breath, tried to act normal. That wind, it had been a freak occurrence. The weather was flukish lately.

  But the wind—she’d been dwelling on it, reconstructing the moment in her mind for hours now. It hadn’t shaken the leaves. Not after that first moment. The trees had fallen still. The wind had only moved her. It had physically turned her back toward him. And he’d been standing there, waiting—like he’d directed it to do his bidding.

  God help her. Some deep, forgotten, abandoned part of her was stirring now—the part that had lit candles and chanted when she was a child. The part that had bragged to her friends at school about how cool her mom was.

  The part that belonged to fantasy rather than reality.

  “He just wanted to meet my mother.” She didn’t sound convincing even to her own ears. “I introduced them. Voila, job done.”

  Amelia reached out to lay her hand over Kate’s, her expression reassembling into professional concern. She knew Kate was in therapy. She’d helped her find a shrink. �
��How was that?” she asked. “It must have been tough to see her again.”

  Amelia knew the backstory. She’d been finishing up her training during Kate’s first year of the master’s program. She’d known Galen, had watched the whole relationship start and develop and then, suddenly, implode. A few months ago, Kate had finally told her about the other important stuff: Pangaea’s cult, Galen’s obsession with it.

  She managed a rusty laugh. “Yeah. Actually, I saw Galen, too. He’s manning the guardhouse these days. A full-fledged member of the loony tunes.”

  Amelia made a disgusted noise. “Fine waste of a medical degree.”

  For a moment they sat in silence with their drinks. Then Amelia sighed. “Okay, I confess, I’m a little disappointed. I was hoping you’d run off to have a quick fling. That picture you sent—grade A super hottie.”

  “He was.” On that, Kate could not argue.

  “But no spark, huh?”

  Oh, there had been a spark. She was her mother’s own daughter, all right. “Worse. He’s into that whole scene.”

  “Your mother’s scene? Oh, God.” Amelia pulled a face.

  “Just my luck, right? Another Galen.”

  Except that wasn’t quite right. North hadn’t been interested in her mother. At the end, he’d been interested in her.

  Your talent is quite remarkable . . . I haven’t met your kind in two centuries.

  Batshit insane.

  Why, then, did the words keep playing in her head?

  Oh, it didn’t take a psych degree to know why. Throughout her teenage years, she’d listened to her mother despair over her. Harmony’s aura has always been so dark . . . She must take after her father . . . So closed off to the craft . . . Not a hint of the gift in her.

  God, it was beyond pathetic to feel gratified that some good-looking weirdo thought her mother might be wrong. It was downright embarrassing that she now felt, for the briefest moment, a flickering sense of wonder at the memory of her hallucination in the woods. She wasn’t eight years old anymore. She understood reality. Didn’t she?

  She slammed down her drink, making Amelia flinch. “Sorry,” she blurted. “Sorry, I’m just . . .”