Happy Birthday dear Emily

"Oh," Lochlann said. "That makes sense. I thought it was dark, so where else would it be dark but the bottom of the lake?"

He spent a lot of time at the bottom of the lake during some of his darkest periods.

He nodded.

"Yeah, I've been swimming for a long time," he said. It was weird for him to think he was probably swimming before he could walk. Lochlann honestly didn't know which came first for him.

"Okay," Lochlann said. He had to navigate. He needed clues about who the hell would do those terrible things to Guin. The first time he'd met Guin, it'd been a scorching hot day in August and they were by the ocean, not the lake.

He reached out to grab Emily's hand. He wasn't sure why, but he was afraid of getting lost in here.

Lochlann began to walk and the bottom of the lake suddenly started to look more like the bottom of the ocean.

He stumbled and fell over a necklace.

When he looked at it, it matched the one hidden beneath his shirt. Lochlann's hand actually fluttered to his neck to make sure he was wearing it, but he was.

"So how do i uh..." he eyed the necklace on the ground and he was uncomfortable. "What do memories normally look like for people? How do I know when I find one?"

Going to the beach with Emily would probably be a disaster. There was all that water, all that sand, and too many chances for all different kind of temptations.

But he wanted to.

He wanted to so badly.

"That'd be nice," he said, and he gave her hand a squeeze.

He nodded and listened to what she said. He leaned down to pick up the amulet but instead, the koi fish he'd batted aside earlier smacked him in the head and then--




"There were fish," he said.

Lochlann stood next to Emily, watching the event unfold before them. It was surprising that he was watching it from outside himself, as if he was a fly on the wall.

The memory Lochlann looked terrible. His face was flushed and there were dark bags beneath his eyes. He was wearing a suit, though, and a masquerade mask with a horse.

Guinevere Haze was standing before him, looking lethal as always although she was dressed as a dryad. She must have been wearing heels, Lochlann realized, because there was no way Guin was that tall. They were both on the ground. Lochlann looked as though he might have fallen, or maybe he pulled Guin down with him.

Then, they were kissing. There was an unsteadyness to Lochlann's movements that made it seem like he was sleep walking.

Fish?" she echoed, a questioning hanging off her voice.

They were so close, her lips brushed his as she whispered.

"Sometimes, if you stay still in the water on a misty day after a storm, the fish will come to the surface to see what you are," Lochlann whispered.

His voice did have the tone of a story, but, unfortuantely, he was a central character in this one.

"They look even more beautiful under the water," he said.



The present Lochlann looked petrified by the scene before him. His face was flushed, too, but it wasn't with the heat of desire and a whole lot of alcohol. He didn't' even know what he was feeling.

Why had he picked this one?

He looked at Emily and said, "How do I make it stop?"


The Lochlann in the memory had just confessed to murder.

Lochlann seemed to get a grip on himself when Emily's hands came to his face. He didn't realize he was starting to shake. He shoved his hands in his pockets and rooted around.

Could he smoke in his head space?

"Okay," he said, and he took a deep breath and said, "I want this to stop."

Nothing happened. He suddenly realized he couldn't exhale that deep breath he'd taken.

The scene behind them grew a little more intense. The memory Lochlann was coming out of a panic attack by kissing Guin, and the present Lochlann was coming into one by thinking about that.

How could he have told her that?

"Emily," Lochlann's voice rose into panic. "I don't know what I'm doing--"



The scene changed abruptly.

"--doing here," Lochlann's voice said. It was cruel and cold. They were in the entry way of his tiny old studio apartment. Guinever was unlocking the door, and he was asking her long long she'd had keys to his apartment.

Lochlann looked tired and worn out. He did not look happy to see the woman he'd been kissing so passionately in the last memory.


"No," Lochlann begged Emily. "I don't want to see this again."

He saw it a lot more than he wanted to admit.

Dani's death was behind him, but it didn't him from dreaming about it. Of all his nightmares, this was the most frequent.

He expected it to happen just like it did in his dreams. Lochlann expected his dream to twitch and fade in and out to the worst bits, but it didn't. It played in order like a movie.



An obscene amount of time," she admitted, "But it doesn't matter. I need to talk to you."

She was going to say please, but it would take too much time, so she pulled out a gun and pointed it at him.

"Let me in or I'll shoot you in your other foot."

She had to tell him.

"I have to tell you something. It's important."



The real Lochlann flinched at this and touched his leg. It took over a year, but the pain had finally faded. He felt it when it rained or when a storm was approaching, but he no longer limped every single day.

The dream Lochlann kept trying to turn Guin away, to get her talk without going into the apartment.

"Lochlann, please," she finally pleaded, panic edging her voice. "I need to tell you something and I can't do it out here."

She shivered, as if she could feel the steel gaze of a snipers scope on her neck.

"Please."


"Emily," Lochlann said. He kept trying to think of some other memory. He tried to think of the very pleasant Christmas they shared, trying to get his mind to go back there and to exit this place, but it was almost as if some part of him was rooted to this moment.


And there it was.

Lochlann finally had the information he'd been looking for.


Guinevere groaned, knowing that this was exactly what Lochlann would say.

"No, Lochlann, believe it or not there are people out there that are far more dangerous than I am. And they're coming for you. My father —"

She froze for a few moments.

Then as if she hadn't said anything unusual, she continued.

"There are so many things that you don't know about, but they will come for you and they'll kill you and probably me if you aren't careful." Guinevere was looking him over, feeling desperate. She didn't know how to compel him to believe her. She didn't even know what she was doing here in the first place.

All she knew was that she didn't want Lochlann to die.


The conversation happening behind them kept playing out and Lochlann's face turned white because he knew what was coming next. Without realizing what he was doing, Lochlann dropped to his knees on the kitchen floor to watch it happen.

"This is the worst part," Lochlann told Emily. His voice was bitter and tired. The panic that ovecame him had drained out.


The door opened.

Dani, his girlfriend, holding a knife.

And Guinevere shot her six times in the chest.




Lochlann hadn't shown Emily anyone he'd drowned, but he had showed her what happened to the people who got close to him.

"Emily," Lochlann said. "I don't know how to control this. How did the others get out?"

Lochlann’s eyes were closed but it didn’t matter because he kept seeing the scene unfold in slow motion. He saw himself go numb in the memory and Lochlann was surprised that he numb, now, too.

It was different, he thought, seeing it play out.

It was different because this time he wasn’t filled with anger or blame or hatred for Guin. He felt some of the old, familiar self-loathing that whispered this is your fault to him, but even that was subdued. It was different because he knew it was coming and he knew there was nothing he could do to stop it. It was different because he understood now that he couldn’t have stopped it.

Something cold and wet hit his face. It was raining, he thought, but when he opened his eyes he realized that Emily was holding him and she was crying.

He was numb but he was also fascinated. Lochlann reached up and brushed his thumb across her cheek, trying to wipe her tears away.

He could not cry.

His eyes produced moisture and he had a second pair of eyelids to help him see beneath the murky water, but to this day, Lochlann had never shed a tear. It was a very human thing and he was very much a monster.

“Oh, Emily,” Lochlann said, and he wrapped his arms around her middle and held her close to him. “No, please, don’t, it's not your fault, I’m sorry. It was—I thought it wouldn’t..”

He swallowed.

“Dani isn’t the first person I’ve seen die,” he told her. “I thought that by now I’d be used to it. I told myself I would be. But I’m not. And I just don’t want to see another person die.”

A quick stream of memories flashed past them, mostly dialogue, because now that Lochlann had fixated on it he couldn’t help but realize he’d known all along.

“No, Lochlann, believe it or not there are people out there that are far more dangerous than I am. And they're coming for you. My father —"Guin had said.

A flash. Guin was sitting at a bar, taking a shot of whiskey. Lochlann was bartending.

“Perhaps I wanted to make sure my father didn't fucking assassinate you like I was afraid of. Maybe, just maybe, I wanted to make sure you were alive.”

The same bar. Lochlann was frowning.

"What are you trying to save yourself from?" Lochlann asked.

She stared at him as if she could see through him, see past his human glamour and past his kelpie form and into the depths of his existence. If looks could kill, this would be the end for him.

"My Father," she said.

Lochlann had taken Guin for her word when she said she’d been attacked by some random bloke. Lochlann had spent a year looking for information on the academy by traveling outside of the academy. He’d been so fixated on her bruises and broken bones and trying to find out who caused them that he’d searched every avenue. He’d taken Guin’s absent history on the school’s records for granted.

For the first time, Lochlann was starting to understand.

He was looking up at Emily and thinking that he would very much like to kiss her, and that would be a dangerous thing because they were already at the bottom of a lake and that would be bad.

He didn’t realize he’d been shaking this entire time. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

When Lochlann opened his eyes, he was still holding onto Emily, only now they were laying in her bed.

"It's okay, Em, it's okay, shhh," Lochlann said, pulling her closer to his chest and wrapping his arms around her so now he was holding her. He rested his head ontop of her own and closed his eyes. "You couldn't know, because even if you asked, I wouldn't have known to tell you. I thought I was okay. I wouldn't have done it if I didn't think I was okay."

Lochlann felt exhausted, which in a way was a relief because he'd been running on so little sleep for days. He felt like he had too much energy all the time, and no one ever told him how exhausting it was to have too much energy.

But Emily was right, because Lochlann was so numb he wasn't feeling anything. Part of him was afraid to. For a long moment, Lochlann thought about picking up a bottle of something on the way back to his motel just to make sure he didn't have to feel anything.

Instead, Emily's crying got worse, and Lochlann's reaction to her was instinctive. He crushed her further against his chest and kissed the top of her head.

The first feeling to come back was gratitude.

It masked the guilt that he felt for showing Emily that, the guilt for Dani, the guilt for Guin, the guilt for every other girl that was hurt because he was a monster. It masked the sadness and the loneliness.

Lochlann was just grateful.

She'd shown him something he'd have been looking for forever. She'd been kind to him at all times. She'd chosen to believe in him rather than believe in the rumors, and she'd chosen to believe in him even when the awful things were played out right in front of her.

Lochlann was holding her like he didn't ever want to go.