The tide was going out when the voice said his name.
Thomas Lane had walked the shore path below Sitka a hundred times. Spruce on one side, kelp and black rock on the other, the water making the small sounds water makes when it is finished with being high. He was thirty-one. He knew the difference between a raven and a man. He knew his sister’s voice, which was the problem, because his sister was in town, two miles inland, and the cry that used her mouth was coming from the flats.
“Thomas.”
Not shouted. Called. The way she called when someone had fallen, or when the boat was late.
He stopped on the wet boards of the path. The old warning lived in this place the way moss lived on the trunks. Kushtaka. Land otter people. They borrowed voices. They borrowed the faces of the drowned and the faces of the living. They stood in the shallows and made you come down off the path because love is a kind of gravity.
Thomas did not call back.
That was the first right thing he did.
The second cry was closer to the rocks and less like his sister. It had her vowels. It did not have her breath. Something in it was too even, as if a throat were practicing. Out on the dark water a shape sat up the way an otter sits up, and then it was not an otter. It had shoulders. It had the suggestion of hands.
He should have gone inland.
He took three steps down toward the kelp because three steps are how stories begin, and he had not yet decided to be in one.
The smell of the flats was ordinary: salt, iodine, cold weed. Under it there was a musk, animal and close. The shape in the shallows turned its head. Eyes too pale for the hour. A muzzle that was not quite a muzzle. Whiskers beaded with the tide. When it opened its mouth, his sister’s voice came out of a place that had never been her mouth.
“Thomas. Help me. The water—”
He knew the rest of that sentence. Everyone on this coast knew the rest. You go down. You take the hand. The hand is not a hand long enough to matter. The kushtaka does not always kill. Sometimes it keeps you. It puts otter in the blood. It makes you a thing that will stand in the shallows later and use someone else’s name.
Thomas backed up until the boards were under his heels again.
The thing in the water stood.
That was worse than the sitting. Standing made it the height of a person. Fur slicked to a chest that wanted to be human. Hands that wanted to be hands and ended in something that could hook kelp or a wrist. It did not climb the rocks. It did not have to. It only looked at him and let the borrowed voice drop, and what was left was a sound otters make when they fight, sharpened, aimed.
Lights moved on the road above the trees. A truck. Thomas turned and ran for the road without looking down. Behind him the water slapped once, hard, as if a body had gone under on purpose.
He told his sister that night. She was at the kitchen table with her hair still wet from a shower that proved she had not been on the flats. She did not laugh. Their grandmother had said copper and fire and the company of other people. Their grandmother had said you do not follow a cry off the path after dusk, not even if the cry knows your birthday.
Thomas stayed off the shore path for a month. When he went back it was noon and the tide was an honest thing, low and wide and empty. He found no tracks that would hold up in a story. He found a place in the kelp that looked slept in, or waited in.
In town they still say it when the fog sits on the channel. If you hear your name from the water, let the water keep it. If you see a child at the edge of the tide who was not there a moment before, you do not go down. The kushtaka is patient. It can wear a voice until the voice feels like duty.
Thomas still hears it sometimes, in the last hour before sleep, the exact shape of his sister’s call. He checks the next room. She is there. The voice is not.
On that coast the rule has not changed.
Do not answer the water.
The ones who go down learn it in the same order.
The name you love, spoken from the flats.
The otter that sits up too far.
The face that wants to be a face.
The hand that is not a hand.
And the moment, if you are lucky, when the boards are under your heels again and the tide takes back whatever practiced your sister’s breath.
