April

The sound of breaking glass could be as varied in range as a voice. The timbre and volume of even the subtlest crack told me everything about the environment the glass in question existed within. It was never a pretty sound, not to me, though glass itself was capable of making beautiful music. When it broke, it signaled a failure of some sort, and it always caused me pain. Was it too hot? Too cold? Had some violence been done? Some careless lack of attention paid to cause the damage?

This time, I was staring right at the bubble of viscous molten glass spinning at the end of my blowpipe while I shaped it. I'd done nothing wrong; my shop was as hot as ever. Sweat clung to my upper lip, and my hair stuck to my face and neck. The only thing keeping the sweat out of my eyes was the bandana tied around my head. I kept the pipe rolling, and yet I was sure I heard the sound of a crack, even felt it vibrate minutely through the metal of the pipe. It made no sense. In this state, it shouldn't be able to crack the way it had. Yet I knew in my bones that the piece was done for.

Every time this happened, I grieved. I wasn't a perfectionist, but I liked to think I gave life to the inanimate through my work, and every time a piece failed to achieve completion through some flaw—in the material or the environment or in myself as the artist—it felt like a death.

"We're done," I said, avoiding the perplexed looks of my assistants. Josh still crouched at the end of the pipe, ready to blow when I asked. Renee waited at the ready with the punty to complete the transfer so I could then begin opening up the piece to create an actual vessel. But there wouldn't be a transfer. This piece wouldn't make it to the next step because something was just off today. For the third time in a row, the glass didn't feel right, and it was as if gravity itself worked against me.

"But April, it looks fi—" Renee started to say. Before she could complete the thought, the glass globe formed a tiny crack, and then abruptly shattered as if I'd plunged it into ice—cold water.

"Talk about omens," Josh said, standing with a shake of his head. "Three for three. Did we get a bad batch?"

He took the blowpipe out of my hand while Renee swept up the mess. "Seriously," she said, glancing at me from where she crouched with the dustpan. "It's like the universe hates you today."

"The batch is fine. There's just something in the air, I guess."

The feeling that something was off—kilter had started when I woke up. It was one of those "you should really just stay in bed" moments, when I climbed out of bed realizing I'd overslept, then discovered my coffee pot that I set religiously every night had failed to brew. When I went to make breakfast, my eggs had mysteriously gone bad. Lack of coffee is enough to ruin my day as it was, but I've always been pretty good at bouncing back from little inconveniences. We had a killer coffeemaker at the shop and one of the best bakeries in Seattle only half a block down the street. But despite eventually finding the fuel I needed to have a pretty amazing day, it just kept going downhill. When I looked at the calendar and realized it was the first of April, somehow I wasn't surprised.

"You guys take the afternoon off. I'm going to work up some more sketches for the show. If nothing else, we'll have concept art." I waved the couple off, and they gave me understanding hugs before heading out into a misty rain, hand—in—hand.

I passed by the metalworking bench where a scale model of my sculpture sat in the center, and paused to bend down and examine the foot—tall creation. It was a work of art in its own right, but far from a complete concept. I couldn't create every detail at such a small scale. At the moment, it would have to do for inspiration, along with the sketches. It was a small tree of life, crafted out of copper and iron wire twined together in a tangle to create the trunk and fanning out in a canopy of metal roots that draped over a blown glass globe. The trunk rose up and flared into dozens of draping branches, each one tipped with a tiny bauble of a glass bead in a variety of shades of green.

The full—sized version of the sculpture was nothing more than a skeleton of metal at the moment, and I didn't trust myself to work on either the glass or metal after the repeated failures today. So colored pencils and paper it would have to be.

But I still couldn't focus, so I just sat doodling and feeling less and less like an acclaimed artist and more and more like an imposter. What if it was me? What if I'd lost my touch? I'd had one amazing year of achievements when every creative idea I had was effortlessly produced in metal and glass. It had been as if the very elements themselves obeyed my whims.

The success had landed me a solo show at an exclusive Seattle gallery and a residency at their studio. That was where I now sat, within the vast, cavernous space of the Olympic Glass gallery's resident artist studio. They'd spared no expense outfitting the warehouse—sized workshop behind the gallery with brand new furnaces, annealers, and gloryholes for my glass, with an entirely separate set of furnaces and benches and an anvil for my metalwork. Of course, my residency wasn't without its expectations. I had one month left to complete the centerpiece for my show, which they'd scheduled for May first.

And I was apparently blocked. Or something. It wasn't lack of ideas that was my problem. My materials had effectively rebelled. I smacked down the curling edge of my sketch pad and stared at it in dismay. Even my goddamn paper was misbehaving. Flipping the page, I began a fresh sketch, swiping the dark graphite around in a circle to describe the shape of one of the many glass globes that would hang from the branches of the metal tree. Only to have the tip of my pencil snap, leaving a dark blotch at the bottom of the arc.

"I give up!" I yelled up at the ceiling, standing and tossing my pencil down, ignoring when it rolled off the angled drafting table and cracked in half when it hit the floor. It was the first of April, so maybe the universe was playing some cosmic joke on me. After discovering a year ago that humanity was not alone on the planet, I supposed anything was possible, but I hadn't worked up the courage to approach any of the so—called higher races who might shed light on whether there was a bigger plan.

Turning to head to the door and get a change of scenery, I stopped short with a small yelp of alarm. A tall, bearded man stood halfway in the door as if I'd just caught him coming in, and for some reason, everything suddenly made perfect sense.

"Ah, didn't mean to scare you, hon."

I sighed. "Hi, Dad."

* * *

I loved my dad despite his wayward nature and questionable decisions. Today, I was grateful for the excuse to abandon my disaster of a workday and indulge in an extra pastry or two at the bakery down the street. On past visits, he would treat, but when we got to the register, he gave me a sheepish look and a shrug. I just shook my head and handed the cashier my credit card.

"You're the big success now. Have I told you how proud I am of you, April?" He flashed a wide grin through his graying beard, patting me on the shoulder before picking up his bear claw and coffee and heading to a table.

"So, what's the occasion?" I asked as I settled into the seat across from him. The prospect of a fresh banana muffin had improved my mood, but I was still wary.

Dad tugged off his knit hat and combed his fingers through unruly dark—blond curls. The scent of the road wafted off him, acrid but not unfamiliar. I guessed he hadn't been in town all that long.

He cleared his throat, stalling by picking up his mug and taking a tentative sip of coffee, then pausing longer to add more sugar and creamer. "Can't I just bask in the presence of my favorite woman in Seattle? Tell me about your show, honey."

"If you tell me why you're here, Dad. You never just pop in to visit without wanting something."

Dad's usual enthusiasm for food was nonexistent. He picked an almond sliver off his pastry, nibbling on it distractedly and glancing out the window. His eyes searched the street before slipping back to look at me, but he couldn't meet my gaze directly.

"I've got to go away for a while, honey."

"Dad, you've been away for a while. Why not stick around until my show? You can stay with me." Usually, I didn't offer—my father had a number of nameless girlfriends he hit up for a place to sleep whenever he was in town. But today I had the oddest instinct that something was wrong. Something was about to break in a much more catastrophic way than the globe I was trying to make at my hot shop this afternoon.

He shook his head. "No, it's better if I just go. I just wanted to see you, you know. Wish you luck. Tell you…" He frowned down at the sticky baked thing on his plate and lowered his voice. "Tell you that they're not all good the way they'd have us believe."

For a second, I thought he was critiquing his bear claw, but when he looked at me again, I knew it wasn't that at all. He meant them. The "them" we didn't talk about in mixed company. The people we saw around us, who we knew weren't human but didn't dare approach because they'd made it very clear they had enough power to infiltrate our dreams, and were capable of so much more.

This was the first time Dad had acknowledged his awareness of them to me. That he was like me was clear, since I supposed I'd inherited my link to them from him.

We were Bloodline, a term that united me with a certain segment of other humans who had the misfortune of carrying higher races blood.

That's what they were. The higher races who wandered among us, blending in easily and actually doing a pretty good job of pretending they were human too. We'd known what we were for more than a year thanks to a message delivered telepathically from some mysterious source late one night.

Since that night, those of us who'd heard the message began to gravitate to each other. We didn't talk about being Bloodline—that was the first rule of being Bloodline—but there was an understanding that we belonged together. Maybe even a subtler understanding that some of us belonged to them.

Even though we could recognize the higher races for who they were, we typically didn't approach them. I'd heard of Bloodline who did, and who had formed close bonds with them. There was a rumor that the pop star Aella was in a poly relationship with three of them, which blew my mind, but I imagined someone like her merited more than one.

And then there was the band Fate's Fools. Evidently, the male members of the band were all with their lead singer. Hearing their music somehow made it seem almost commonplace for a woman like Deva Rainsong to wind up with five of the hottest men in the world.

We weren't scared of them, not precisely. Just cautious and hyperaware of the power they wielded, which a few of us were able to sense more than others. Over the past several months, whenever a group of us Bloodline would get together, I watched as my new acquaintances would pair up, drawn together as if by fate—two halves to a broken thing made whole once again. Those moments resonated with their own subtle sound, one that gave me hope, the polar opposite of what I felt whenever I sensed a minute flaw in a piece of glass I was working on that would inevitably end with it in pieces on the floor of my shop.

Something about Dad's statement struck me the same as the ping of a tiny crack. Why was everything falling apart today?

I took a sip of my coffee to try to dislodge the knot of panic in my throat. It still made me sound strained and verging on hysteria when I asked, "Where are you going to go? Can you tell me why?"

Dad had always been a free spirit like me. The only parent I'd ever known since my mother split when I was a little girl, he nurtured my creativity from my first excited romps through the wet sand on the shores of the Puget Sound. He'd dabbled in a dozen different mediums when I was growing up, including glass, but driftwood had been his preferred material. Once upon a time, he created beautiful hand—carved likenesses of the water birds and other fauna that graced our little island. He gave me a good home as a single dad, despite having an itch to wander—something he always called his "pilgrimage," though he never went to any place specific.

I went with him for years until I was old enough to object. I wanted to do more than wander for my entire life. I wanted to be a kid and go to school and make friends. Sometimes I wondered if the years during my teens when we stayed put were too much for him because the day after I moved to college, he disappeared for several months without a word. But he always came back.

He had a hunted look now, his leg bouncing like he was ready to leap out of his seat at the smallest provocation, and he worried at the carved platinum and jade ring on his right ring finger. It had been a gift from my mom that he still wore, even though we hadn't heard from her in more than two decades. They'd never married, but that small memento and how much he treasured it had always proved to me they'd been as close as any married couple could be. Perhaps even closer. When he reached for his coffee, his jacket sleeve slipped back to reveal a strange, iridescent mark on the back of his hand, like a stamp from a night club, but more vivid. For some reason, it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

"Not sure yet. I just know I can't stay here." He stared into his mug, gathering himself, then took a breath. "There are men after me. Supernatural men. They think I stole from them."

My neck prickled with dread. "Did you? Where have you been?" Somehow, I knew the answer before he said it, but it didn't lessen the disappointment.

"Vegas. And, no… It wasn't exactly stealing. But you know me, I get lucky. The cards speak to me." He gave me a small smile, his eyes twinkling. He sobered at my stricken look, finally taking a bite of his bear claw and concentrating on eating it to avoid my reaction.

"Dad, you said you'd be careful."

"I was!" he snapped, dropping the pastry to the plate and leaning back. He wiped his mouth in exasperation and leaned in, his blue eyes blazing. "I was fucking careful, April. I'm always careful, you know this. My skills are what put you through college. But somehow they knew. Like I said, they weren't human. This casino—Pandemonium—I should never have gone there. I didn't know it'd be filled with them. And they somehow knew what I was doing, which effectively looks like counting cards, even if it isn't."

"But it isn't exactly luck either, is it? You have a gift. Can't you just explain? Tell them you're sorry? That you don't know your own strength or something? I don't know." I sighed as he shook his head. He looked defeated.

"It's stronger than it used to be, honey. Just like yours is. I think it was only a matter of time before I got caught."

"Then let them come. Stay, and we can face them together. Maybe we can reason with them. I see them all around us. Dragons and ursa mostly, but the other kind too. They don't scare me. I'm not afraid to talk to them."

His mouth turned down in a grim frown, and he shook his head. "I don't think these men are anything like the others. I don't know what they are, but they aren't any of the four higher races. They're…something else. All I know is that I need to get as far from here as I can, honey, for your sake. And it's better if you don't know where I went. Then they can't hurt you."

I wanted to object again, to try to talk some sense into him, but it had always been impossible to talk my dad out of a scheme. I clenched my eyes shut and forced my breathing into an even flow, then looked at him again. "At least tell me what to look for if they come."

His attention turned inward, and he blanched as if visualizing some horror. He shook his head. "I think you'll know them well enough if they show up. With any luck, they'll keep chasing me and leave you alone. But if they come, you should run. Go back to Bear Island to the house where we lived when you were little; you'll be safe there. I'll try to check in, just to make sure you're okay, but I'd better go."

He stood up, his hat clutched in one hand, and hovered over me. With a soft smile, he plucked at one of the stray ringlets that had escaped my haphazard braid. My chest clenched with sadness, and I lurched out of my seat, flinging my arms around him.

"Please be careful, okay?" I wasn't sure what else to say, or do, and only released him when he gently but forcefully peeled my arms away from his body.

"Good luck with your show. I'm sure it's going to be spectacular." He kissed me on the forehead then turned to go.

Somewhere in the kitchen, the crash of breaking glass echoed, just as he walked out the door.