The Water Witch (2 page)

“Okay, okay,” I interrupted. Although I’d written a book called
The Sex Lives of Demon Lovers
I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to know about the sex lives of fish-tailed undines. Thankfully, Diana took the hint and left out the more graphic details of the undines’ sex life, concentrating instead on the life cycle of their young.

“The eggs are laid in a pool at the headwaters of the Undine …”

“Is that why the stream is called the Undine?” I asked. I’d heard of the stream. The lower branch, south of the village, was popular with fishermen, but the upper branch, which had its headwaters somewhere in these woods, had been declared off limits by the Department of Ecological Conservation.

Liz Book sighed. “The locals started calling it that because of a legend about a young woman who lured fishermen into the depths of the trout pools and then drowned them.”

“They probably just fell in after a few too many drinks,” Soheila said. “It’s true that undines seduce human men—if they get one to marry them, they get a soul—but they don’t kill them unless they’re betrayed.” Soheila pushed back a vine and let it snap behind her, nearly hitting me in the face. Since she was normally the most charming and sophisticated of women, I had the feeling that the subject was sensitive for her. I’d learned this past year that Soheila had become part human
when a mortal man fell in love with her, but he had died because her succubus nature had drained the life from him. Since then she’d scrupulously avoided any physical contact with mortal men, even though I suspected she had a crush on our American Studies professor, Frank Delmarco. A suspicion confirmed by how melancholy she’d been since Frank had gone away a few weeks ago to a conference called “The Discourses of Witchcraft” in Salem, Massachusetts.

“Anyway,” Diana continued in the strained, cheerful voice of a grade school teacher trying to keep her class on subject, “the eggs hatch into fingerlings that stay in the headwaters until they’re mature—we think it takes close to a hundred years—then, when they’ve matured into smolts, they begin the downstream journey to the sea.”

“The sea?” I asked. “But we’re hundreds of miles from the sea.”

“Not the Atlantic,” Liz said. “The Faerie Sea. The upper branch of the Undine flows through an underground passage into Faerie before it joins the lower branch.”

“I thought the door in the honeysuckle thicket was the only way into Faerie. You told me it was the last door.”

“It
is
the last door,” Liz said, “but there’s also an underwater passage to Faerie in these woods … or at least there used to be. It’s been growing narrower over the years, just as all the other passages to Faerie did until they closed. This passage was only big enough for a juvenile undine to slip through the last time they migrated a hundred years ago. We’re afraid that it’s clogged now, and when a passage to Faerie clogs it’s like when an artery to the heart closes—smaller veins open up around it. Unfortunately many of these smaller veins lead to the Borderlands instead of Faerie. If they don’t get through to Faerie they’ll die, but if they get stuck in the Borderlands …”

Her voice trailed off and I shivered, recalling my dream from last night. To be caught in the Borderlands meant death or an eternity of suffering.

“So,” Liz continued, “we thought with your doorkeeper powers you might be able to open the passage wide enough for them to go straight through to Faerie without getting lost in the Borderlands.”

“But I have no idea how to open an underwater passage,” I said. This was true, but I was also thinking of the dream. It had started seductively enough but had ended with my demon lover trying to drown me. He had been angry with me for trapping him in a watery hell. If that were true, I didn’t much like the idea of taking a dip into any body of water that might be connected to the Borderlands.

“Would I have to get in the water?” I asked.

“We don’t think so, dear … Wait … Do you hear that?”

Liz tilted her head and held up a manicured finger. At first all I heard was the buzzing of mosquitoes and flies in the heavy humid air. Even the birds were too tired to sing in the midday heat. I wiped a trickle of sweat away from my eyes and was about to tell Liz I didn’t hear anything when I became aware of a soft burbling beneath the drone of insects. A breeze stirred the heavy underbrush, bringing with it the delicious chill of running water.

“We’re at the headwaters,” Soheila said, sniffing the air and lifting her heavy dark hair off the nape of her neck. “The water bubbles up from a deep natural spring—the coldest, clearest water you’ve ever seen. Not many ever get to see it because it’s carefully hidden.”

Although I was still disturbed by the idea of going anywhere near a watery passage to Faerie, the sound of the stream was making my parched mouth water and my sweaty feet
ache for a cold dip. If I could help the undines without getting into the water I wanted to do it. After all, they were harmless juveniles.

Only when I’d agreed to follow the three women farther into the woods did I remember just how volatile teenagers could be.

We scrambled through tangles of shrub, following the sound of water deeper into the thicket. Pushing the vines aside, we dislodged the bones of small animals and birds. I’d seen remnants like these around the door to Faerie, the remains of creatures who had gotten stuck in the Borderlands and died there. I felt the pressure of the vines on my skin as we passed and heard the creak of fiber and pulp as the thicket contracted around us—like one of those Chinese finger puzzles.

“Are you sure we can make it through this?” I asked, struggling to keep my mounting sense of claustrophobia at bay. It felt like we were in a wicker basket that was shrinking around us.

“Don’t worry,” Soheila said matter-of-factly. “Liz knows a spell to keep the thicket from closing in on us.”

That’s when I noticed Liz and Diana were silently mouthing words as they walked through the woods and that the vines were curling away from us as we approached. I felt reassured until I looked back and saw that the vines were also intertwining behind us. Just when I thought I couldn’t stand the claustrophobic woods another second we emerged into open air: a glade encircled by ferns. I felt and smelled the coolness of water before I saw the pool, which was the same deep green as the surrounding woods. When my eyes adjusted to the murk, I realized that the burble that had drawn us came
from a spring bubbling up from a cleft in a giant boulder and falling into a wide basin hollowed out of gray-green granite. The women formed a circle around the basin and then crouched down beside it to scoop handfuls of water to their mouths. In this age of bottled water and rampant pollution it went against most of my instincts to drink from a hole in the ground, but thirst overcame my reservations. I knelt beside Soheila, cupped my hands beneath the ice-cold trickle, and brought a handful to my lips …

A mineral chill filled my mouth, my throat, my belly … then spread outward, plumping every desiccated cell in my body. It was like drinking pure oxygen. I took another sip and it was like imbibing the ether of outer space. After a long draft I bathed my face, resisting the urge to plunge headlong into the shallow basin. Instead I sat back on my heels to look around.

From the basin the water spilled from rock to rock: a granite stairway leading down to a green pool scooped out of the stone. Wild irises grew around the pool; water lilies floated on top of it. I made my way down to where Soheila, Liz, and Diana were bent over, gazing into the water. I crouched beside them and stared through crystal clear water down to moss-covered stones. I leaned farther … and found myself looking into a pair of moss green eyes, the same color and shape as the stones at the bottom of the pool. I flinched and the eyes blinked—then vanished in a whirlpool that splashed cold water in my face.

“They’re quite frisky,” Liz said, handing me a bandanna to wipe my face.

“They’re ready to migrate,” Soheila said, pointing to the far side of the pool. At first all I could see were rapids spilling into a fast-flowing stream, the clear water twisted into skeins of transparent silk where it braided over the rocks, but as we
moved closer I saw that those transparent skeins were actually long thin bodies, slender as eels, slipping over the rim of the pool and into the stream.

“Those are
undines
?” I asked, recalling the illustrations of the winsome maiden Arthur Rackham did for the German fairy tale. She had looked far different from these eel-like creatures.

“Immature undines,” Soheila replied, slipping her fingers in the water and tickling the underbelly of one of the undines. It flipped over and stared at us with its large mossy eyes. Up close I saw that it did have arms, but they were loosely clamped to its sides by sheer, weblike netting. On some undines the netting had frayed to long streamers, freeing their arms. “Their arms start to separate from their bodies to help with their passage, but their legs won’t form until they get to Faerie. That’s why it’s so important that they get there. If they’re stranded here …” Soheila shook her head sadly. “They can’t survive past the summer here in this form. Poor things. During the last migration we found several dead ones stranded in the woods.”

While I knew Soheila was ancient, it still unnerved me when she spoke about events that had taken place a hundred years ago as though they had just happened yesterday.

“Let’s hurry,” Liz said, striking out down the narrow path beside the stream. “The first wave will be reaching the junction pool by now.”

I followed the women, who now walked single file—Liz in the lead, followed by Diana, then Soheila—trying to keep up with their accelerated pace, but I found myself distracted by the activity in the stream. If I hadn’t known about the undines I might have thought the water was just running fast, as these mountain streams ran during the spring thaw or after a heavy rain. But it was the end of June and it hadn’t rained in a week.
Nor could the water pressure explain the way the stream leapt over its banks, spraying bright arcs into the air, or the way the stream sounded. Beneath the rushing water was the sound of laughter—the raucous, wild twitter and screech of excited teenaged girls.

“Are all the undines female?” I asked, watching a slender shape break from the frothing rapids and pirouette in the air before gracefully diving back into the stream.

Soheila paused and looked back at me. She seemed unsure if she should answer, glancing nervously ahead on the path toward Diana, but then she said in a low voice, “There used to be male undines, but during the last spawning there were only a few. We fear there might not be any this season. We’ve noticed that many of the indigenous species of Faerie seem to only produce female offspring—and a few only produce males, and others simply can’t reproduce anymore. It’s a source of great concern in the fey community because it means, of course, that many species will die out unless …”

“Unless what, Soheila?”

“Unless they are allowed into this world to find a mate. Every hundred years, when the juvenile undines run downstream into Faerie, there are mature undines on the other side waiting to come through the door to find a human mate. It’s their only chance to reproduce.”

“So these undines …” I pointed to the roiling mass of bodies in the stream.… “are the offspring of an undine and a human?”

Soheila tilted her head and gave me a curious look. Instantly I was ashamed of the surprise—and the little bit of horror—in my voice. Soheila, after all, was an otherworldly being who had fallen in love with a human, the folklorist Angus Fraser. Perhaps she had hoped for children from the union. I myself had made love to an incubus many—
many—
times.
Could I have gotten pregnant with Liam’s child? I felt myself go hot with the thought. A splash of cold water brought me back to the moment—and my body temperature back down to normal.

Soheila finally answered: “We believe they’re the children of an undine who came through the door in the summer of 1910 and a fisherman by the name of Sullivan Trask. Sul, as he was known. In fact, the pool we’re heading for is known as Sul’s Eddy.” Soheila had resumed the cool, dispassionate tone of a lecturer. If I’d offended her, she wasn’t letting on. “The spot is famous in local angling lore. Come, I’ll show you the sign.”

She turned to go, but I stopped her by laying my hand on her arm. I was startled by how cold her skin felt. While I knew that Soheila was always cold in the winter, since she had forsworn feeding off the life force of humans, it was shocking to discover that she was still frigid to the touch on a broiling summer day. “Soheila, was there something else you were going to tell me?”

Soheila sighed—a sound like wind rippling through the pines, reminding me that in the centuries before she became flesh Soheila had been a wind spirit. “Hmm. Well, we were going to tell you later, after we saved the undines. There’s a meeting on Monday, the day of the summer solstice, of IMP and the Grove.”

IMP was the Institute of Magical Professionals and a much more liberal organization than the Grove, a conservative witch’s club that my grandmother belonged to. I had joined the Grove myself a few months before in exchange for learning how to lift a curse from one of my favorite students—a fact of which my friends at Fairwick were unaware.

“I’m surprised that the Grove would meet with an organization
that includes fairies and demons.” I was also surprised—and not a little put out—that my grandmother hadn’t told me about it.

“So were we. They said they want to improve relations with the witches of Fairwick. The governing board of IMP thought it was prudent to take them up on the offer of a meeting. The Grove has been growing more and more powerful.” I could tell by Soheila’s expression that she certainly wasn’t happy about the prospect.

“What do
you
think about the meeting?” I asked.

Soheila sighed again, but this time the sound was more like a gust of wind before a storm.

“I’m afraid that IMP will be helpless to stop the Grove from pushing their own agenda, which is to close the door between this world and Faerie.”