“Hey, look.” I leaned forward as well, dropping my hands to my knees. “That doesn’t mean she loved you any less. It just means that she was happiest with her appearance at that age. When my mother died, she assumed the age of twenty-two. She told me I’d ruined her body beyond repair and she was happy to go back to a time when she didn’t grimace every time she looked in the mirror. So that’s probably all this is.”
“Can you speak to her?”
It didn’t seem like he’d heard anything I’d just said.
“Yes. What would you like me to say?”
“Just…speak to her. See if she can hear you.”
I frowned, because that was weird. Of course she could hear me. She could hear everyone in the living world, trapped here as she was.
“Her name?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Look, I’m trying my best to be respectful of the situation, but you’re making things awfully difficult.” When he didn’t offer any more information, I sighed and went about things the way I normally did. “Hey, lady in the white dress…”
“She can be professional, it’s just that she usually doesn’t want to be,” Daisy said, always thinking about business. That would be good someday. If only she’d put it off until then.
The woman’s head turned slowly toward me.
“Yes, you. I can see you,” I said, suddenly showered in a kind of regal regard that made me want to sit up straight and comb my hair. The woman’s eyes drifted over my body and then back to my face before glancing back at the stranger.
“He can’t see or hear you. Only I can. Try me out. See how it goes.”
She adjusted her stance until she was facing me, her eyes soft and kind, but expectant. She was a woman who’d had support staff, but she hadn’t been a dick to them. That was at least nice.
“You can just…say anything you want. Anything at all. Maybe your name? We can start there.” She stared at me. To the stranger, I said, “She obviously passed that stare down along with the looks. My God, the two of you probably made people quail when you were in the same room.”
“What is this place?” she finally asked in a voice like a bell.
“Holy crap, this woman was a heartbreaker,” I murmured. “We’re in San Francisco. In America.”
“San Francisco…” A flash of soft anger pinched her expression. I’d never known anger could be soft, but she did it well. “My son is trying to free me. Even still.”
“Are you trying to free her?” I asked the stranger. His eyes hardened and his fists flexed.
“To admit it would be death,” she said in a harsh voice, and I felt like a whipped dog. “His father would never permit it.”
“How dumb of me,” I said quickly. “Stupid me. She said be her. Dress in skirts, that sort of thing.”
“Oh boy,” Daisy said.
“Forget it.” I waved the issue away. I was terrible at improv. “Why haven’t you crossed over?” I asked her.
“A selkie is trapped by the land without her skin,” the woman said. “And in death, trapped in the world of the living.”
I pushed back against my chair, sadness washing over me. That issue rang a bell in my memory.
If some asshole land-dweller stole a selkie’s seal skin, the selkie would be trapped on land until the skin was returned. In that time, the selkie, a very sexual, loving, and clearly forgiving creature, would marry said asshole and have kids with him or her.
Rumor had it that selkies never stopped looking for their skins. It was like a shifter who couldn’t heed the moon’s urging to change. Like Mordecai. Given what I saw him go through every month, with or without that medicine, denying the magic created a horrible itch inside him, impossible to completely ignore.
And now I saw that even death would give a selkie no comfort. She was here until she reclaimed her skin.
“So…does the skin…die with you, or is it just…hanging out wherever the dickhead thief stashed it, or…?” I asked.
“It is in this strange plane with me. Somewhere.”
“Hmm. Mmhm. So you just need to pull it to you and slip it back on then?”
Her head tilted and she took a step toward me. “Pull it to me?”
“Yeah. Just…think about it really hard, and feel it with everything you have, and long for it, and it really should come sailing back to you. I mean, that’s what your son did, and here you are, all the way from…?”
A crease formed between her brows, matching the one on her son’s face. She minutely shook her head, and I just barely registered the stranger’s intensity beating into me, his gaze now determined as well as vicious.
“Right. So that’s another hush-hush topic. Got it.”
The stranger wanted to find her skin for her so she could be at peace. That was what she’d meant by setting her free.
“How’d you know she needed her skin?” I asked.
“As I said,” he replied, “I’ve seen a few of…your kind before.”
The hitch in his speech made it seem like he didn’t think they were my kind at all. But then, if he had a habit of visiting fairs like this, he’d probably gotten the losers of the trade.
“They were useless,” his mother said, her tone dripping with arrogance. Somehow, she still seemed lovely despite it. A true gift. “The strongest of them did not look at me, as you are doing. They did not hear me. They felt me, sure enough, and got a few of my words correct, but they all mangled the message before sending him on his way.”
“Right. Well, in fairness, most people who have my magic set up shop as mediums because they don’t have enough juice for the big-paying jobs, like with the cops or on TV or whatever.”
“What did she say?” the stranger asked.
I told him quickly.
“One of the women was employed by the Demigod of London,” the stranger said with derision. “She was heralded as the top of her trade. Useless.”
“You two have spent a lot of time together, I can see.” I mock-grimaced at them before moving on. “So you’ve tried to pull…it to you, and nothing happened?”
“I felt the need for it when I first entered this strange plane,” she said wistfully. “The longing. But though it continues to call to me, I cannot find it. I have searched every place I know, including my husband’s many estates…”
Her voice had turned harsh by the end, still lovely and lilting, but more like the sea surging over jagged, ship-smashing rocks.
“Huh.” I bit my lip, racking my brain for an answer to this riddle. “And you know you’re dead, I take it?” Her look was enough to wither flowers. “Right. Of course.”
I rested my forearms on my knees, thinking.
“She’s smart and talented. You should enlist her aid,” I heard the woman say.
“Thankfully, he can’t hear you,” I replied.
“What?” the stranger asked.
I ignored him. I’d already been sucked into helping one dangerous criminal; I didn’t need to get sucked into helping a man who was probably ten times as dangerous, especially since that man was an extremely powerful magical person who didn’t understand personal boundaries.
“Have you enlisted the help of a medium specializing in calling the dead from the other side?” I asked.
“Isn’t that what you do?” the woman countered.
“Well…yes. But your skin isn’t dead, and I’ve had no experience with this. I just meant a person with all the bells and whistles who can put a lot more oomph behind the calling.”
“If we don’t push through our fear, we will never learn what it means to achieve true success,” she said.
I lifted my eyebrows. “I’m not afraid. I just don’t know how I’d even go about something like this.”
“Then you must try.” She trailed the back of her hand down her cheek, a dainty gesture indicating she was tired. “I must go. I have no stamina in this plane. Please hurry. My son has suffered for far too long. He must release me so he can finally live his life in peace. Help him.”
With that, her form flickered, then blinked out.
“It wasn’t lack of energy; she just wasn’t comfortable so far away from her un-resting place,” I mumbled, mostly to myself.
I blew out a breath, thinking it all over. Somehow, without actually asking, she’d roped me into helping her.
No. Not roped me in, tried to rope me in. I felt for her situation, I really did. But I had absolutely no experience in these matters and wouldn’t know the first thing about calling someone’s shifter skin. Like…was that even possible?
I leaned back in my chair, utterly spent, belatedly realizing the crowd that had gathered around my space was now at a distance. As in, someone had pushed them back and kept them there.
That was when I saw the crew of guys, all in suits, standing guard at the edge of the crowd. The stranger had a team of men, it seemed, and clearly he didn’t want anyone hearing his business. I had no idea how long they’d been there.
“So that’s what all this has been about, huh?” I asked, making a circle in the air with my finger. “The stalking, the checking up on me—you’re trying to get someone to help…that certain person…find the thing so you can go about your business?”