Coming Soon from Freydís Moon

Three Kings

Ethan Shaw carried two knives, one for lilies, the other for veins. The blade in his left hand curved like a smile, clipping stems at a sweet, diagonal angle. The second weapon was concealed in a petite leather sheath, tucked neatly in his right palm.

The ritual called for innocence, and he had none to spare, so he searched the shoreline for white-petaled flowers—speckled with saltwater, yawning toward the sky—and remembered the folktale that wormed through Casper, spoken quietly at the pub, hollered by sailors on the docks, cooed in the apothecary, and sung by children on the playground. Those Casper lilies, the story went, are filled to the brim with what we’ve lost. Like snakes, the townsfolk shed their innocence, leaving it to stew in the bay, sink into the soil, and beat against the lighthouse. And like snakes, the lilies drew their outgrown magic into tangled roots and narrow stems and gilded pollen: an ouroboros consuming itself.

Most people refused to use the term—magic—but Ethan found it appropriate. Harvesting long-gone energy from a living thing felt like its very definition. Using said magic to reanimate a corpse felt less like magic, though, and more like recklessness.

He yelped and flailed before he hit the water, bracing for the icy shock. Panic shot through him. Salt water rushed into his nostrils and seaweed snagged his ankle. Swim, idiot. November wind nipped his face when he breached, sucking at the air, clutching drenched flowers to his chest. Casper lilies never promised to be easy, of course. But Ethan Shaw still cursed as he slushed through tidepools and mud. He sighed, relieved, when his soggy shoes hit the gravel path outside the tower.

“We need a lightkeeper, Ethan,” he mocked, shouldering through the wooden door. He left his boots in a puddle on the cheeky welcome mat: YOU BETTER BE BEER! “It’s a solid wage, Ethan. Not like it’s a—” The first knife clattered on the rectangular table, then the second. Sopping flowers landed with a splat next to an unopened power bill. “—hard gig, Ethan. Just take it.” He whined through the last three words, mimicking his mother, and trudged into the washroom.

He hadn’t the time for a bath, so he peeled the wet shirt from his back, unzipped his jeans, and wrestled his way out of his drenched binder. The chilly water had reddened his beige skin and left his boyish face chapped and raw. Droplets clung to his chestnut hair, shorn behind his ears and around the back of his skull, and worn long at his crown, hanging in messy strings over his brow. He slicked his hair back with an annoyed swipe and scrubbed lingering sea grime away with a warm, damp cloth. He dried with a towel scented like gardenia and tobacco, like Peter, and set his palms on the vanity, studying his reflection. Rabbit-framed, small-chested, wide-hipped, and delicately masculine, Ethan Shaw wasn’t the optimal lightkeeper type, per se. He hadn’t a beard, only annoying stubble, and carried himself on dainty, soft-pawed feet. Much as the townsfolk whispered about lilies, they whispered about him too.

Witch—hissed like a match strike in the nave and murmured by joggers at the park—wasn’t entirely untrue, but Ethan still preferred friendlier terminology. Alchemist, maybe. Magician, even.

“Take the job, Ethan,” he mumbled and huffed at the mirror. “Surely the lifestyle suits you.”

A job doing, literally, anything else would’ve suited him better.

Distantly, the front door heaved open, and the clip-clopping of heavy boots filled the living quarters. “Why is the floor wet?” Peter repeated the question, hollering through the lighthouse, “Darling, why is the floor wet?”

Ethan rolled his eyes. “I slipped,” he called, toeing the washroom door ajar.

Peter rounded the doorframe, square glasses crooked on his hawkish nose. Surprise shot to his face, but the expression faded, chased away by a frown. “You didn’t,” he warned, snaring Ethan’s reflection in a hard glare. “Ethan, we talked about this—”

“I don’t need your permission,” he snapped and slipped past Peter, striding confidently into the adjacent bedroom. Their clothes were heaped in the wicker hamper, the dresser littered with photographs—some framed, some not—half-empty cologne bottles, and stained coffee mugs. He opened a drawer and fingered through his clothes, settling on a brick-red sweater and corduroy trousers. “I’ve got the flowers; I know the ritual. Either have faith in me, or say I told you so if it doesn’t work, but hovering like a…” He batted at Peter’s broad chest. “Damn moth won’t change my mind. How was work?”

“Long,” Peter bit out. “Choppy water makes for terrible fishing, as you know. Even the local wildlife can’t handle the riptide—as you know—and consistently get thrown ashore, as you know, and—”

“You brought it home, not me.”

“I brought it home while it was still breathing,” Peter said, exasperated. He trailed Ethan into the closet, craning over him while he searched for wool socks—matching, preferably—and then into the kitchen, sighing stupidly, dramatically, at the waterlogged lilies. “Where’d you put the poor thing, anyway? Is it still in the garden shed?”

“No, I tossed it in the bathtub—yes, of course, it’s in the garden shed, Peter. You think I’d let a selkie loose in our home? Give me some credit.”

“Okay, wait, hold on—wait.” Peter snatched for his hand, feebly attempting to catch him while he bounced around the kitchen, yanked a bowl out of the cabinet, slid both knives behind his leather belt, unfastened the lavender from a rope above the sink, and stuffed his mortar and pestle underneath his arm. Before Ethan could make for the door, two palms clasped his waist, turning him, and his beautiful, ridiculous husband wrinkled his nose. His copper cheeks were sea-bitten, angular bones pressing hard against his skin. As always, Peter Vásquez looked dashing and exhausted and very, very worried. “Ay Dios mio, just wait, okay?”

Ethan arched an eyebrow. After a long, strangled pause, he lifted onto his tiptoes. “You brought it home,” he whispered and pecked Peter on the lips.

“It’s a leopard seal, Ethan. Not a selkie,” he said patiently, as he would to a toddler. “And it’s dead because animals that get caught in bad weather sometimes die.”

Ethan patted his cheek. “Sure, yeah. So, the next time you’re caught in bad weather and someone plops you on my doorstep, I’ll cash in your life insurance and call it a day. How’s that sound?”

Peter winced. “You’re impossible.”

“And you’re in my way.” Perhaps that was a little too far, considering. But impossible? Ethan scoffed. He wasn’t the one who’d mistaken a fae-beast—an extraordinarily obvious fae-beast, by the way—for a run-of-the-mill seal, and he wasn’t the one who’d whimpered when said not-seal had stopped breathing, and he certainly wasn’t the one who’d dragged a goddamn selkie home from work.

He narrowed his eyes, stepping around Peter’s broad frame. “Stay here if you want, but if I don’t give it the option to remove its pelt before morning, it’ll stay dead. Right now, I have the chance to bring it back, whoever it is, and I’d rather not deal with a rotting corpse if I can help it. So—” He tucked the herb bundle and his tools inside the mixing bowl and carefully lifted his leather-bound grimoire from the wooden holder on the countertop. “Stay or come. Your choice.”

Peter fiddled with the frayed bottom of his scarf. His buzz-cut was covered by a slouchy beanie, pursed lips framed by a short, neatly kept beard. Dark-eyed, dark-haired, and irritatingly tall, he radiated the utmost warmth. Even then, as he gave his best attempt at sharpening, Peter granted Ethan a slow, condescending once-over, and his stony face softened. “What if it bites you,” he muttered, and straightened his glasses with a bent knuckle.

“My mother’s exact words after I told her we were engaged,” Ethan teased. He stepped into a pair of Birkenstocks, straps loose and floppy atop his feet, and shuffled through the front door. “C’mon, then. Let’s go.”

Reluctantly, Peter followed, catching the door with his boot before it swung into Ethan’s shoulder. “Impossible.”

Ethan shot him a narrow-eyed glance.

As it turned out, marriage wasn’t exactly what everyone made it out to be. It was coexisting in the same place, building bridges when arguments landed like grenades, worrying ceaselessly about each other, being irrevocably consumed by one another. Marriage in the fiscal sense? Simple. Money could be made and tracked and divided. Marriage in the lifetime sense? Complicated. Because love was indomitable, but it could be lost and ruined and squandered.

“Give me that,” Peter grumbled. He plucked the unsteady grimoire from the crook of Ethan’s elbow, allowing the crowded bowl to sit more comfortably in his arms.

Ethan sighed through his nose, and said, very quietly, “Thank you.”

Marriage was intrusive and messy, but somehow, Peter Vásquez made it easy.

The garden shed hugged the backside of the lighthouse, a small, lonesome thing overgrown with white sage. Ethan stepped over a wandering pumpkin vine and scanned the planter boxes, brimming with turnips, radishes, bushy spinach, and sweet onion, and swallowed around the tightness in his throat. Like the town gossiped about lilies and witches, it also cautioned against magic—reckless magic, at least. A self-stirring coffee spoon or a vegetable overgrown from a gardening spell didn’t ruffle many feathers. That kind of magic—parlor-trick shit—didn’t cost the practitioner anything more than a headache and numb gums. But reanimation rituals, and bartering spells, and harnessing power from beyond earth’s elemental plane came with bloody price tags, and most people associated witches who practiced that kind of magic with danger. Seeing as Ethan could hardly reach the top shelf in the cupboard, dangerous seemed absurd. He preferred equipped. Knowledgeable, even. Brave or daring or—

“Careful with your wrist, all right? I’d hate to see you scar.” Peter whimpered like a hound.

Ethan inhaled through his nose. He did, truly, love his overbearing husband more than he cared to admit. “It’s only a few drops. Won’t leave a mark, I’m sure.”

Warped wood panels bowed inward, and the sheet metal roof had rusted over, twisting the unassuming garden shed into something spooky and decrepit. Around them, the ocean swayed and crashed, spraying foam across black rocks, muffling the click of a lock sliding free.

“Let me go first,” Peter said.

Ethan squeezed past him and swiped at the air, searching for the lamp string. “Oh, stop. It’s fine.” Rope smacked his palm. He yanked, bathing the small space in artificial light.

Gardening gloves, terracotta pots, propagation jars, and bundled herbs littered the narrow table against the far wall, and various tools—rakes, shears, shovels, hoes—were propped in corners. There were bulging bags of organic soil, a bucket filled with assorted seed packets, and in the center of the room, a ratty blanket carried back from The Oyster, Peter’s fishing rig, and an unnaturally still selkie resting atop it.

“Oh, look,” Peter mumbled. “A dead seal.”

“If it was dead, we’d smell it.”

“Or the saltwater delayed rigor mortis—Ethan, please—”

“Stay or go, but if you keep whining, I will scream. I swear to God, Peter, they’ll hear it on Berkshire Street. I’m not even—”

“All right, okay—fuck, just…” He tiptoed around the spotted body on the floor and dropped the grimoire on the table. “Get on with it, then.”

Get on with it. Ethan snorted, mirroring Peter’s path. At the table, he emptied the bowl and unsheathed the curved knife. The lilies came apart easily, peeled back like delicate skin where the stem thinned at each flower’s blooming head. Pollen dusted his fingertips—orange and mauve and stormy silver. Once the Casper lilies were disassembled and placed inside the mortar, he brushed dried lavender atop them, scenting the air like fresh laundry. Next, he dug the pestle into the floral concoction. Crushed and ground and kneaded until the lilies and lavender formed a chunky, perfumy paste, and flipped open his grimoire with two fingers.

“Have you ever done something like this?” Peter asked, peering over his shoulder.

“Not quite, no. I managed to restart your heart after Katia though. Same concept, different body.” He kept his attention fixed to his old spell book and ignored the twinge of fear that followed her name. Hurricane Katia. The storm that’d torn Peter’s boat to pieces, cut his crew from ten to six, and swallowed him whole. Ethan remembered how the pocketknife had slipped across his arm, how his blood had darkened Peter’s mouth, how the sea had jolted from between his husband’s blue lips. He’d begged the water to go. Traded a bit of himself to evacuate it. Three years ago, kneeling on the docks while hail pelted Casper, Ethan Shaw had deemed himself miraculous and deadly.

Townsfolk called him witch, as they always had, but after that, they called him necromancer too.

Peter gripped Ethan’s hipbone and leaned closer, resting his chin on the slope of his shoulder. “I’d only been out a few hours…” His breath coasted Ethan’s throat. “But I hear you.”

Out. Ethan wouldn’t bother correcting him—he never did. Dead was the right word, though. Deceased, gone, passed. He flipped to a sallow page titled RESURGENCE and dragged his index finger along the scribbled spell:

1. Innocence harvested by or from the practitioner—sacrificial, floral, bodily, or spiritually

2. Connective tissue—flesh: earthen or feather

3. Binding blood—practitioner offering

To bring back a living being, human or not, a witch needed to bind the spell with blood—their own or someone else’s. To bring back a fae-beast who had died in a singular form but could potentially be clinging to life in another? That required the practitioner’s blood, exclusively. Potency that couldn’t be replicated and rarity that couldn’t be found elsewhere. Despite having full confidence in his blood, Ethan had never attempted to fashion a spell with Casper lilies, and he hoped the gossip was as furiously true as it was prevalent.

“Easy enough,” Ethan mumbled. He turned, bumping his upturned nose against Peter’s forehead. “Sorry, dear, but you need to move.”

Peter huffed, annoyed, and stepped away. He gave the selkie a wide berth and went to stand at the far corner of the shed. Arms folded, mouth tensed into a frown, watchful gaze burning holes into Ethan’s back. “Careful,” he said again, as he tended to do.

Ethan struck a match. The flame glowed, bending away from a blackened wick as he lit a half-gone pillar candle. He shifted the crackling match to another, then a third. The shed glowed. Air thickened, turning inward, seeking whatever strange, ethereal force stirred in Ethan’s veins. Like this, the selkie appeared pitifully animal—snout long and spotted, eyes closed, flippers tucked beneath itself. But Ethan knew fae magic. Saw the seam where its pelt lifted away, making room for the promise of longer bones, extra ribs, larger lungs. Noticed the bend in its webbed hands where knuckles pressed firmly against the backside of its second-self. He whispered to the candle, coaxing smoke to sway and billow, and guided gray plumes into the mortar. The stone bowl balanced in his palm; he gripped the slender, needle-pointed knife in his free hand. Magic was topsy-turvy—palatable and friendly in one breath, urchin-shaped and aggressive in the next. He remembered how it’d crowded his throat, how he’d been willing to scrape away every ounce of himself if it meant getting Peter back. That was the strangest thing, he thought, how magic waited and considered and chose. Hurricane Katia had forced Ethan to claw at the power he carried and sacrifice it unchallenged. That specific, heartsick panic didn’t influence this spell with this selkie, though, and he had to prepare for what that meant. That the ritual might not work. That magic might not listen.

“Don’t be stubborn,” he whispered and knelt in front of the selkie. Its face was placid, chin resting on the floor, fur sleek and dark from brow to tail.

Peter made a childish, uncertain noise. “Careful.”

“I’m all right.” Ethan set the bowl down and eased the tip of the blade above his palm. When the knife bit, his skin parted, allowing a red stream to snake over his heartline. The sharp pain dulled into an ache almost immediately, but he still counted his heartbeat, following the quick pulse drumming in his wound.

“Rise,” he said under his breath and scooped the lily-lavender mixture onto his fingers. He pulled open the selkie’s jaws, flinching at the prick of sharp teeth, and smeared the salve onto the roof of its mouth. Magic pulsed, alive and curious, thrumming in his gums, jolting into his elbows, causing his stomach to churn. He hadn’t realized he’d closed his eyes. Didn’t register Peter’s soft gasp or the lamp dimming or the candle flame flickering. Ethan felt the spell snap away and leave him, as if it’d lived in his chest, rooted there like a weed. The sensation knocked the wind from him. He almost gagged. Almost toppled over. But he cracked his eyes open instead and found the selkie staring back at him.