Page 15 of Never Nix Up

But she’s not so deceased that she doesn’t make a snack bowl for us to eat in bed. Grapes and chopped up bread and some vegan cheese that is far more delicious than I thought it would be. There’s a second bowl though, and that she takes into the living room. I pad after her, not bothering with her towel, because it doesn’t fit.

There’s a pen in the other room that I think I was just too horny to notice before, and a large tortoise ambles over see what’s going on. When he sees that Finn is carrying a bowl, he starts snapping at her impatiently, and then tries to mount a log in his desperation to get some food.

“This is Luci,” says Finn, after she puts the bowl down. He is not paying any attention to her after that. “Officially named Lucifer, being the devil that he is. Luci would eat his pen if he could work out how to digest metal.” She opens a small gate in the side. “He usually runs around freestyle, I just close him up here when I’m working or he smells the bread from the bakery and tries to get down to eat some.”

She gestures towards a mark at the bottom of the door to the apartment. “Damned tortoise tried to ram it one time. Don’t worry, he’s not allowed in my bedroom. I don’t trust him not to chomp on my bedsheets.”

Finn tops up his water bowl and scratches the bottom of his shell for a few moments before heading back into her bedroom. She pauses in the doorway and looks back at me. “You’re staying over, right?”

I nod, and she sighs in relief. “Oh good. I only just realised that I forgot to ask.”

Snacking in bed is yummy, and when it’s time to go to sleep, Finn nudges me over until she can spoon me. She’s big spoon, and she slots in next to me as perfectly as if we were made to lie together.

Maybe we were. I don’t know much about afterlifes, but I work with a Goddess. There’re some elements of the mysteries of life that I try not to think about too hard. Either way, if I was made for something, I hope it was this.

This is a far nicer purpose.

Perhaps that’swhy the nightmare I have is so brutal: Trisantona reminding me that whatever I think my life’s purpose may be, sex with a mortal is not it.

It’s worse than usual, in that I know that it’s a dream, but I can’t seem to snap myself out of it. And in that it’s not me being drowned this time. It’s Johnny.

Of all the drownings that I’ve witnessed, this one has never come up–perhaps it’s because it’s too recent, and there a thousand other deaths that Trisantona wants me to witness first. Or perhaps it’s because I knew him. But either way, I have to watch.

There’s nothing to dobutwatch.

I never knew for certain who drowned Johnny. He was Marla’s younger brother and we didn’t quite move in the same circles, but I saw the ripple effect his death had, especially as it coincided with the fall of the Veil. Trisantona and our magic all came back just as a teenage boy died.

It was a tragedy that the whole village mourned, but I knew. Us nixes, weallknew. It wasn’t the accident the coroner said it was.

He’s swimming in front of me, looking below the surface and in the starwort along the riverbank, looking for something. He’s so alive, the same mess of red curls plastered to his face as those that adorn Marla’s. He takes a breath and is diving deeper until his hand catches in someone else’s.

My breath hitches and I can’t breathe, which makes no sense. I’m a river nix and we can breathe underwater, but in this moment I am both Johnny and myself, watching and feeling and knowing what happened for the first time.

The face I see so resembles Kit’s that for a horrible brief moment, I think it’s her. And then he moves back and I see that it isn’t Kit, but it is her brother Ryder. Her father swims up beside them, and Johnny is starting to thrash now, looking confused, trying to kick his way up to the surface of the river, but they don’t let him. They each take a hand and drag him further down into the river’s depths and Johnny, sweet Johnny, is kicking and struggling.

Then he’s not really kicking and struggling anymore.

His movements become weaker and weaker until they stop completely, and his body floats in the water until Ryder ties some rocks to him, and he sinks.

And I wake up.

14

Finn

Hazel is sobbing.

The sound breaks through whatever dream I’m having and I’m sat bolt upright before I even really comprehend what’s going on. “Hazel?”

She’s crying too hard to speak, and all I can do is take her in my arms and rock her back and forth until her sobs recede enough for her to take a breath without choking.

“Have some water.” I shove the water bottle from my bedside table in her direction, floundering. I don’t want her to cry, but I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know if this is something thatcanbe fixed.

She gulps and I wait as patiently as I know how. Eventually, half the water bottle drained, she looks up, cheeks streaked with tears. “I had a nightmare. I had one ofhernightmares.”

I don’t know what that means, but ‘her’ said in that tone? It can only be the river goddess.

“It’s been happening ever since I became her acolyte. I go to sleep, and I don’t dream my dreams anymore, I just dream hers, and they are…” Her voice trails off, and she runs her hand through her hair roughly. “She doesn’t have ordinary dreams Finn. Her dreams–her nightmares–are just her reliving every drowning in the river that she’s missed. And I’ve witnessed hundreds of them. I’ve seen my parents involved, I’ve seen grandparents, but tonight? Tonight is the first time I’ve ever seen someone I know get murdered.”

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