Thank you once more to J. Deo (@JDeoWrites) for their fantastic sensitivity reading!

TW: violence, threats towards a child, sexual harassment, emotional abuse, attack on/near a place of worship, trauma, reality distortion

I opened the gurdwara doors with both hands, walk turning into a march across the asphalt as I approached her. My feet ached with each spike of the asphalt, but I could ignore that – what I couldn’t ignore was the bile in my mouth, the blood welling from my tongue where my teeth were digging into it, the salt from – I don’t know where.

“How dare you? How dare you?” My vision swam, and for a moment, I thought it was the Mercury affecting me even more. Then I dragged the back of my hand over my face, and it came away wet. I was crying. That was just – that was pathetic. I knew why – it was because for all her horror, I’d hoped that Kiera – that anybody – would be better than this. I didn’t feel that way often. “This is his funeral.”

“I figured you’d be here,” she said, sweeping hair out of her face. It was slightly longer than before, messier, less elegant than it had been. Her coat was tattered at the edges, too, although I knew I couldn’t trust what I saw. “I didn’t take you for the sentimental type, though.”

“There’s sentimentality, and then there’s not being a shit excuse for a human being. I’m not giving you what you want.” It stung. I knew it was meant to, but sentimental was just another word for weak.

“Even if I were to, say…” She unsheathed her sword, balancing it by its tip on the pavement, “give you some incentive?”

“Nice try. I’m not delivering some poor innocent kid to you so you can… god, I don’t think I want to know what you want with her.”

“Uh huh.” Kiera cocked her head. “What if I just asked you to spend time with me?” She lifted her eyebrows questioningly.

“You’re threatening to attack a place of worship so I’ll go on a date with you? That’s new levels of disgusting.”

“Oh, don’t be silly. I have no intentions of attacking the temple. There’s enough gods I have to deal with on their own. I’m not adding another one to the mix.”

I couldn’t get my head around that statement. I knew Kiera wasn’t exactly sane but also, I didn’t know anything. I wasn’t sure how comfortable I felt with the idea of actual, real gods being a thing. “Good. I was hoping you still had some humanity.”

Kiera’s eyes grew very cold. “You don’t know anything about me.” She lifted her sword from the ground and raised it to my neck.

I gulped, trying not to think about how sharp it was. Or the fact that Kiera was stone cold enough to threaten somebody with a sword in the first place. “Alright. You got me. I don’t.”

“There’s nothing human about me. Nothing at all,” she spat.

I raised my hands. “Then what are you?”

“Didn’t your mother read you any fairytales?” she asked mockingly, and if the sword had been anywhere else than hovering against my jugular, I would have punched her in the face. That had to be deliberate. I didn’t know how, but it had to be. “I am Aes Sidhe. One of the thousand hidden people.”

“A-and for those who don’t speak anything that isn’t English?” I asked. My voice had gotten all funny and high pitched again.

“The monster under your bed,” she crooned. “The darkness in the light. The children of the new moon.” She was getting closer and closer to me, and something sparked on my skin like fire. Then she was so close that I could feel the static between our bodies. Her long coat was swishing against my legs. I could feel her breath on my cheekbone, full of malice. “I’m a faerie. And you are nothing.”

“Then why are you so close to me?”

Her hand rose to my chin. “Because I know you,” she said, her voice full of astonishment. “You’re nothing, because you’re human. But…” She let it hang in the air, inviting me to read into the quiet speech, to feel the longing in her touch.

She was going to kiss me.

“Where’d you get a sword?” came the voice from behind me, and I suppressed the urge to cry. What had Chandra been saying earlier? I’d ignored it. It hadn’t been relevant. “It’s cool! I want one.”

Kiera lowered the sword from my neck, hatred simmering from her eyes. I glanced over my shoulder, wincing as the bronze blade bit into my skin. A little boy, maybe six years old, stood there staring at us. In one of his hands was a samosa he must have nabbed from the temple kitchen. He had Gurjas’s eyes, and my brain filled in the name. Ruben.

“A child.” Kiera’s mouth twisted, and then she smiled again, her teeth turning black. “Another of you. Everywhere I turn around.”

She raised the sword, and several things happened at once. I saw Ruben’s eyes widen. Behind him, Chandra was hammering on the lobby door, held back by some other congregation members. The door swung open, and Kiera raised the sword over Ruben, who stuttered, fell backwards and stared up at her with growing horror.

I swung out at Kiera, my fist landing against her face. She stumbled back, and Ruben began to crawl backwards, looking back over his shoulder at his mother. Then the claws came raking out of her sleeve, sharp and cruel, and I felt then lash across my face. I barely felt it.

I grabbed at her arm, but she tore it away, then went for Ruben again. It was like slow-motion, watching her ready the point, ready to kill him where he stood for some crime I couldn’t understand…

A splintering crash shattered the air, and something wooden flew through the air from the lobby, shedding shards of broken glass as it came. Kiera saw it coming, and turned away, but not fast enough – it hit her lengthways with a sick ‘thud’, and continued the length of the parking lot.

I stared at it, then turned my head to look back at the shattered lobby. Chandra was running out of the temple, her feet bleeding from the shattered glass, her eyes wild and hair coming out of her veil. She crouched over Ruben, gathering him into her arms. “Shh, shh, it’s okay…”

The wooden bench – torn out of the floor, I realized, looking at the pieces of carpet still embedded to its legs – began to move, and Kiera emerged from underneath it. I’d resisted whatever she did to the world before, but now it was getting worse. The parking lot asphalt was shattering, blooming with flowers that disappeared once I tried to clutch them. The sky was dropping.

I plunged my hand into my pocket. I hadn’t brought most of my stuff with me, but funeral or not, I was always paranoid, I was always ready for something to happen. My wallet, my keys – I tossed them aside for later. And then, there it was. My knife.

Kiera ignored me, setting a beeline for Chandra and Ruben. She passed by me, and I lunged forward, burying the steel knife into her thigh.

The howl of pain that came from her mouth proved to me that she wasn’t human at all. She sounded more like a wolf, or a panther. I was too dazed to make much sense of it, why my knife had worked so well. She collapsed to her knees, turning on me with a seething expression.

Then the earth began to shake. I looked away from her, searching around for the source of it – I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that a random earthquake had just happened. When I looked back, she was gone. But the ground was still trembling.

I looked over at Chandra, who had Ruben held tight to her chest and was murmuring something under her breath. Then I remembered what Will had said about Salts. Why I was so important. How we got our powers. It all clicked into place.

I stumbled over towards her, and wrapped my arms around both her and Ruben.

“Is she gone?” Chandra whispered.

“She’s gone,” I murmured in reply. And I could feel it – the tension easing out of her arms, the heartbeat beginning to slow, the breaths evening out. The quaking stopped, finally, and Chandra began to cry. Not the desperate but still restrained crying she’d done when she first came to my office – instead, these were heartbroken sobs, tearing out of her throat like knives.

“Not my children, please, not my babies, not this time, please…”

“You’re safe. Ruben’s safe.”

“I miss him,” Chandra sobbed. “I miss him so much.”

“I know.”

She took more and more deep breaths, then reluctantly released Ruben as Hushaima came over to us. The ground below us really was shattered – it wasn’t one of Kiera’s tricks. Chandra had caused a real earthquake – just a small one, but a real one nonetheless.

Finally, she turned to me, eyes red and sore. “What’s happening to me?” she whispered. She’d been scared for her kids before, and for her husband, when she’d first come to me. Now she was scared for herself.

“I can’t tell you. Or at least not very well. But I know somebody who can.”

My hands were tingling. I didn’t know if it was from adrenaline or from calming Chandra down. But the anger, the fury at Kiera for her destructive presence – that was still there.

Fuck being protected and looked after. To hell with it.

Kiera was going to need protection from me.

And that’s all for now, folks! Ghosts in Quicksilver WILL return in June with Book 2; in the meantime, learn more about the universe on the @AlkimiaFables twitter.

<–Chapter Nineteen

Thank you to J. Deo (@JDeoWrites) for the wonderful sensitivity reading on this chapter! I am not Sikh and most of the description of the funeral is their work. 

TW: religion, death/grief, reality distortion, attack on/near a place of worship

“Are you sure this is alright?” I asked, for the third time that night.

Will scoffed, adjusting my collar with a focused expression. “No reason it wouldn’t be. You gotta relax.”

“I just – how do I explain to people how I knew him?”

“Would you stop moving? I haven’t tied a tie in four years-”

“You don’t have to,” Isaiah said from the other end of the room, fixing the buttons on his white shirt in the mirror. “You’ve never been to a Sikh temple, have you?”

“I’ve never even been to a church. I don’t think either of you understand how staggeringly out of my depth I am here,” I complained. I knew I was being whiny, but it was that or find something else to take out my problems on.

“You’re the one who wanted to go,” Will shot back, tossing her hair over her shoulder and still fiddling with some of my hair to make it lie flat. I’d already told her her efforts were wasted, but she was apparently just as stubborn as I was. “I’m just as happy not to. I feel like I’d probably burst into flames once I crossed the threshold.”

Isaiah rolled his eyes. “Sikhism isn’t like that. Everyone’s welcome here, that’s kind of their whole thing.And as far as trans stuff goes, this temple’s pretty good.”

“You’ve also been read as a dude for what, fifteen years? I still have to shave every day and quite aside from that, I dress like a skank.” Will caught my worried expression and snickered. “A cute, feminist skank. Is that better?” Then she shrugged. “I dress nice, I get read as a guy.”

I couldn’t imagine that somehow, but I supposed I’d just gotten used to it. I’d had a few trans friends in school, most of them closeted, and I could appreciate Will’s wariness. Still, I wished it wasn’t just me and Isaiah. The realization that we were the only two Salts left in Ottawa was starting to sink in. I hadn’t been asked to stabilize anybody yet, but I imagined it was just a matter of time, as terrifying as the prospect was.

“You haven’t stolen my phone again, have you?”

“-go to hell,” I snarled, then felt myself turning pink at her grin. Okay, that had helped. I pulled my own phone out, waggling it vaguely in her direction. “I have my own thanks.”

Isaiah cleared his throat. “If you’re done flirting?”

“Not flirting,” I grouched. “Fine, let’s get going.”

I glanced in the mirror, double-checking my outfit one last time. The dress shirt and jacket was a bit big on me, and despite Will’s insistence I thought the tie was kind of overkill, but the slacks fit well enough. I couldn’t shake the discomfort over not having my denim jacket, but after one attempt to put it on, Will had fixed me with such a withering glare that I thought I might burst into flames.

As it turned out, though, the Sikh temple was refreshingly lowkey, at least from outdoors. I’d expected cupolas, maybe a mosque or stained glass windows – I didn’t have a lot to draw on. Instead, it was a simple, kind of blocky building, with glass doors leading into a lobby.

The real surprise was walking in and realizing that, for the first time in my life, I did look like I belonged. There were plenty of white folks mixed in with the crowd, but the crowd itself was –

“They’re all brown,” I said with a quiet thrill. “Er, Indian, right? South Asian?” I desperately tried not to embarrass myself in front of Isaiah.

Instead, he just gave me a gentle nudge with his shoulder. “White family, huh?” he asked.

“Several,” I grumbled. “Most of them shitty. One of them called me Gemma for two years.”

“Ouch.”

I searched the crowd for Mrs. Chaudhury, and finally found her in a white dress, talking to some others. I was too nervous to approach her, though, and stood there like an idiot for a little while until Isaiah tapped me gently on the shoulder.

“Whuh?”

He was standing with another woman in a long dress wrap, who smiled at me and handed me a kerchief. “It’s important to cover your head inside the gurdwara,” she said, and she didn’t sound mad, but I still swallowed awkwardly. Oops. Maybe I should have done more than a cursory Google.

“Alright.” I did my best to tie the kerchief over my head, and bit back a curse as my hair kept slipping out of the way. I didn’t know for sure, but I figured swearing was also pretty disrespectful.

“Here, here.” Isaiah stood behind me and bundled my ponytail up under the kerchief, knotting the scarf underneath it.

“Thanks,” I mumbled. “I’m bad at this.”

“It’s alright, dear,” said the woman, giving me a pat on the shoulder. “Be quiet and respectful, take off your shoes and wash your hands. You’ll be alright. My name’s Hushaima.” She took my hand in both of hers. “I’m Gurjas’s cousin. It’s lovely to meet you.”

“H-hi. I’m Jamal.”

“Why don’t you two sit next to me during the ceremony? You look awfully lost.”

Isaiah nodded, and I decided to follow his lead. Everybody was dressed so beautifully – I hadn’t known anything about Sikhism aside from a few basic details before meeting Mrs. Chaudhury, and now I felt myself both intimidated and entranced by a world I’d never been part of, so different from the isolated life I led. If I died, who would come to my funeral? Who would even know?

That wasn’t the point. I jerked myself away from the cycle that I knew I’d worry myself into. Today wasn’t about me. So instead I followed Hushaima and Isaiah into the temple itself, sliding my shoes off of my feet and shaking the last drops of water off of my hands.

—

The ceremony was much shorter than I’d imagined, although I had the strange feeling I was picking things up in the middle. There were readings from scripture and hymns, both of them impenetrable to me, but they sounded nice. I hoped Gurjas could hear them. Once it was over, someone came around and started handing out something that looked kind of like cookie dough. I glanced nervously around, then by the time he reached me, I just did what everybody else was doing, and offered my cupped hands, letting him scoop out out a dollop. “Th-thank you?”

“It’s the prashad,” Hushaima explained, obviously entertained by my ignorance. “It’s been blessed and given as a religious offering. Now we hand it out to everybody to eat, in Gurjas’s memory and in devotion.”

“Oh… so, kind of like communion.”

There was a quiet noise from behind me as Isaiah struggled to contain his reaction. “Not quite,” he managed to say. “For one, it tastes good.”

“Ah.” I took a bite. It was sweet, warm, and melted on my tongue.“What-” I stopped myself again, and took another bite.

“It’s good?’

“Yes.” Then I stared down at my napkin. “… Also, apparently I was hungry. Thank you.” I decided not to ask what it actually was. Somehow the mystery made it better.

People began to trickle out of the hall, and I crumpled my napkin, depositing it in the garbage on my way out. When I turned around, Chandra was standing with Hushaima, her white dress and headscarf soft against the surroundings, and she smiled at me. “I wasn’t sure if you’d come.”

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “Well, you know. I wanted to -” Then I shrugged. Words were stupid.

She opened her arms and drew me into a hug, planting a gentle kiss on my forehead. Then she withdrew, smiling at Hushaima. “This is the private investigator I was talking about.”

“Really?” Hushaima looked at me with new eyes, and I swelled a little with pride. “You’re so young! That’s impressive. Maybe I should hire you.”

I bit back the please I am poor, and instead nodded as solemnly as I could muster. I was trying to be good.

“Where are the kids?”

“Oh, Akal has them. They’re playing with their food again, but at least that means Ruben isn’t wandering off trying to catch leaves again.”

I stifled a snicker. That sounded like kids to me. Then – I didn’t know how to describe it. Something changed. Something roiled, sick, in my stomach. I pressed a hand to it, wondering what was wrong. Maybe it was just how quickly I’d eaten that prashad stuff.

Chandra frowned slightly. “Ohh, I might have to lie down. I can feel a headache coming on.”

“It’s been a hard day! Don’t worry a bit. I’ll take care of cleanup -”

“Shush,” I said, interrupting Hushaima. “Sorry.”

Isaiah glanced at me. I ignored him, and then looked – properly looked at Chandra’s dress. It was harder than it should have been – it kept shimmering, like heat-haze. That wasn’t just the dress, I realized. It was everything.

“Chandra, what colour is your dress?”

“White, of course.”

“No, it isn’t.”

She looked down at the dress, which was drenched in emerald green. “…Did I spill something on it? Where did all that blue come from-?”

I froze for a moment, pieces falling into place – then took off for the door.

“Wait!”

I couldn’t wait. I stopped just inside of the glass doors, bare feet arching against the tile.

Kiera stood in the parking lot outside, her poison leeching into the air. She saw me, and her eyes glowed that awful, bitter green, and she smiled with teeth like needles.

<–Chapter Eighteen                                                                                           Chapter Twenty –>