The Water Witch

T
he dream began as all the others had, with moonlight pouring through an open window, shadow branches stretching across the floor, the scent of honeysuckle on the air.

“You’re back,” I whispered. “I thought …”

“That you had sent me away,” he whispered, his teeth gleaming pearly white as his lips parted. “You did. But it’s not too late to call me back. I miss you.”

“I miss you too,” I sighed.

The moonlight cleaved the dark, carving a cheekbone out of shadow, which I longed to reach out and stroke, so achingly familiar was the face taking shape just inches from my own. But I couldn’t move. He was still only shadow hovering above me but I could feel the weight of him, pressing down on me.

“I can’t,” I panted. “It won’t work. We can’t be together …”

“Why not?” he cooed, his honeyed breath lapping against my face. “Because they told you I was no good for you? That I would hurt you? How could I ever harm you? I love you.”

I breathed in his words and let out a long sigh. My breath filled his chest, each muscle rippling in the silver light like
water running over smooth stones in a stream. I felt those hard muscles slam down against my chest, forcing the air from my lungs. He sipped the air from my lips and the moonlight drew hands from the dark that stroked my face, my throat, my breasts …

I gasped and his hips bore down on mine. I was filling him out with my breath. All I had to do was keep breathing and he would become flesh and blood.

But I couldn’t breathe.

He was sucking the breath out of me, draining my life. His legs parted mine and I felt him rigid against me, waiting to enter me …

Waiting for what?

He moved away, his body shifted lower. “You have only to call my name to bring me back,” he whispered, his breath hot in my ear. “You have only to want me to make me flesh again.” His lips sealed each word to my throat, my breasts, my navel … “You have only to love me to make me human.”

Oh,
that
. If I loved him he would become human. It seemed a small thing. I was close, wasn’t I? As close as his lips were to my skin as they brushed along my inner thigh. Tantalizingly close. I had only to call out his name and tell him I loved him for the waiting to be over, for the teasing to end …

He was
teasing
me. The little nips on my thighs, the way he moved against me and then retreated. He was holding back, waiting for me to release him from his exile.

“You’re trying to bribe me,” I said, my voice betraying my desire. His lips froze on the crook below my right kneecap and grew chill. His face appeared above mine, more shadow than moonlight, already fading.

“I wouldn’t call it a bribe,” he said, his voice sulky. “Just a little taste of what could be.”

“But it cannot be,” I said, trying not to let him hear the
regret and frustration in my voice or how much I
wanted
to love him. “I don’t love you … yet … and I can’t love you when you try to
make
me love you, so you’ll suck the life out of me before I
can
love you.”

He frowned. He furrowed his eyebrows and looked confused. He looked sweet when he was confused, like the boy he must have been centuries ago before he became … 
this
. I could have loved that boy, I thought, but then his confusion turned to anger.

“Nonsense,” he hissed, “those are just words.” His body curled into a coil of black smoke. “If you could feel what it’s like …”

The coil of smoke whipped against the windowpanes, smashing wood and glass. Moonlight flooded in, only it wasn’t moonlight anymore; it was silver water rushing into the room, a wave crashing over my bed, the water shockingly cold after the warm breeze and his hot kisses. I still couldn’t move. I was powerless to save myself as the water rose around me. It began pouring from the ceiling, down the walls, into my mouth. As the waters rose his face floated above me, watching without pity as I drowned. This is what I had done to him, his expression seemed to say. I had exiled my incubus lover to the Borderlands and condemned him to an eternity underwater.

I awoke, gasping in the moonlit bedroom, my body chilled despite the hot summer night. I’d never really feel warm again while he was trapped beneath all that cold water. I’d never love anyone if I couldn’t love him.

O
ne of the perks of academia—the part that was supposed to make up for the low salary, living in a hick town a hundred miles from a good shoe store and a decent hair salon, putting up with demanding, entitled eighteen-to-twenty-two-year-olds, and navigating departmental politics—was getting summers off. I had always imagined that once I was established in a tenure track job I would spend my summers abroad. Sure, I’d pin the trip on some worthy research goal—reading the juvenilia of Charlotte Brontë at the British Library or researching the court fairy tales of Marie d’Aulnoy at the Bibliothèque Nationale—but there was no law that when those venerable institutions closed at dusk I couldn’t spend my evenings catching a show on the West End or listening to jazz in a Left Bank café.

What I had
not
pictured myself doing during my summer break was swatting through the humid, mosquito-infested woods of upstate New York in knee-high rubber boots.

I had known I was in trouble when I opened my door that morning to find Elizabeth Book, Dean of Fairwick College and my boss; Diana Hart, owner of the Hart Brake Inn; and
Soheila Lilly, Middle Eastern studies professor, on my front porch. The first time these three women had shown up on my doorstep together had been last year, the night before Thanksgiving, when they’d come to banish an incorporeal incubus from my house.

Only then they hadn’t been tricked out in knee-high rubber boots and fishing tackle. Fairwick was big on fishing. The town had been plastered with
FISHERMEN WELCOME!
signs since Memorial Day. There was a “Small Fry Fry-Up” at the Village Diner, an “Angler’s Weekend” at the Motel 6 on the highway, and a “Romantic Rainbow Trout Dinner for Two” at DiNapoli’s. Out-of-town RVs with airbrushed vistas of rushing streams and leaping trout had been clogging Main Street for the last few weeks. Our part of the Catskills was apparently the fly-fishing capital of the Northeast. Still, fishing seemed like a mundane activity for these three women. The dean, as I’d learned this past year, was a witch; Diana was an ancient deer-fairy; and Soheila was a succubus. A reformed, nonpracticing succubus. But still. A succubus.

“What’s up?” I asked guardedly. “Is this an intervention for my plumbing? It
has
been making some strange sounds.”

I was only half joking. One of the reasons I had opted to stay home this summer was to get some work done on Honeysuckle House, the lovely—but time consuming—Victorian I’d bought the fall before. Since I’d been forced to banish my boyfriend four months ago I’d thrown myself into an orgy of home repair. I’d been breathing dust and paint fumes for weeks. Today I’d been waiting for the arrival of Brock, my handyman (who also happened to be an ancient Norse divinity), to fix some broken roof tiles, when the doorbell rang.

“No, dear,” Diana said, her freckled face breaking into an awkward smile. When the three of them had come to banish the incubus from my house I’d joked that they were there for
an intervention, but when four months later Diana and Soheila had come to break it to me that my lover, Liam Doyle, was that same incubus and that he was draining not just me but a dozen students of our life force, the joke hadn’t seemed so funny. I think they all felt a little guilty when we found out Liam was innocent of attacking the students. But he’d been an incubus and you couldn’t go on living with an incubus. Could you?

“I’m afraid we have a problem that only you can help us with,” Liz said.

“You need me to open the door?” I had learned in the past year that I was descended on my father’s side from a long line of “doorkeepers”—a type of fairy that could open the door between the two worlds. By a lucky—or perhaps unlucky, depending on how you looked at it—coincidence, the last door to Faerie was here in Fairwick, New York. So far my unusual talent had brought me nothing but grief and trouble.

“Yes!” they all three said together.

“What do you want me to let in?” I asked suspiciously. The last creature I’d let in from Faerie had tried to eat me.

“Nothing!” Diana insisted, her freckles standing out on her pale skin the way they did when she wasn’t telling the whole truth. “We want you to let something out. A lot of somethings, actually …”

Liz sighed, squeezed Diana’s hand, and finished for her. “Undines,” she said. “About two dozen of them. Unless you can help us get them back to Faerie they’re all going to die.”

“It’s their spawning season,” Soheila explained as we tramped through the woods that started at the edge of my backyard. “It only happens once every hundred years. The undine eggs …”

“Eggs? Undines come from eggs?” I asked, appalled. The only undine I knew about was the water nymph in the German fairy tale who marries a human husband and then, when he is unfaithful to her, curses him to cease breathing the moment he falls asleep.

“Of course, dear,” Diana answered, looking back over her shoulder. The path obliged us to walk in twos and Diana and Liz were up in front. “They have tails at this stage so you couldn’t very well expect them to give birth …”