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Sometimes, being the Sea Witch means that I get a first-class, one-way ticket to being the first person to hear any news. Dad and I were having burritos by the beach one fine summer afternoon, when he stopped speaking mid-sentence, pressing a hand to his chest as if he were having a heart attack.
"Something has torn a hole in the deep lands," he intoned.
"What is it? How?" I asked, mind spinning. Almost nothing had the strength to disturb the fabric of the realm badly enough to give him pause like that. Had Titania broken out of the Heart early?
Was Mom returning?
"I can't tell. It looks... very strange."
Dad brought his hand to his brow, then higher, pulling a chip of bone off his antlers.
He handed it to me, and I dropped the chip into my Diet Coke, trying to see what Dad had seen. At first, I thought he was looking in the wrong place; the buildings looked distinctly ugly, in an unmistakably mortal way. Squat, wide buildings lined green lawns, with thin pathways between them. A hodgepodge of different styles and minimal road access. Red and yellow flags hung from the streetlamps, with tornadoes on them. It looked like a college campus, but abandoned; no people in sight.
But I looked up, and the sky was the shifting, colorless purple of the deep realms of Faerie. And swarms of pixies flew overhead.
I took a few minutes to Google the mascot, then scroll Twitter, looking for the school--it was in Iowa. And people were still posting selfies from that campus, there was no uproar, so no college campuses had mysteriously gone missing in the mortal world. Probably. So who or what had taken one from somewhere else and put it here?
Sometimes, being the Sea Witch means that I don't have the freedom to investigate that news myself. Really, given my bindings, I could barely get this handled, and only by thinking of it as sating my selfish curiosity. So I did what I always do with mysteries. I called up my favorite niece and offered her the chance to discharge some debt if she'd just look into something for me quickly.
