Pale: 5.3 - Verona

Verona

Having no Sight sucked.  The woods were dark and Verona was pretty sure that something was crawling up her leg.

“My daughter,” a voice creaked, diffuse, reaching out into the woods.  “Please.  Visit me.  Why have you gone so far away?”

“Go away,” Verona said, as firmly as she could.

“I don’t ask for much.  A call once a week would be nice.  Give me something to look forward to.  A visit now and then.  Bring the grandchildren.”

“I’m thirteen.  I don’t have grandchildren.  Go away.”

The woman who was speaking had black hair, and was wearing a sweater too big for her narrow frame.  Forty-something, but it was hard to tell because it was dark and details didn’t match up well.  She looked old but her hair was black and neat.  The blur of an echo was there around the edges.  Tatters more than the cloudiness that had been around… what had her name been?  Bev?  The wife of the old man Alpeana had visited.

Verona had put together a plan.  It involved a little bit of sneaking around, for which she’d transformed her hat into a hood, and it had taken some preparation with Matthew, but she’d discovered there were a few wrinkles.  Sharon Griggs had retreated a little ways, which gave Verona the freedom to move, but it also meant that the Others that were leaking in through the open perimeter were more there.

The woman inched closer to her, hobbling, reaching out to a tree to lean against it.

Verona checked the coast was clear, then jogged through the woods.  To the side of her, the echo of the woman matched her movements.  Verona took a few quick steps back, and the echo moved as if she’d taken a matching number of steps toward her.

Verona stopped, and the woman trudged forward another step, closing the gap.

No matter how she moved, the ghost was nine feet to her left and inching closer.

“Go away,” she said, a third time.

Words were supposed to matter.

“Is this because of what happened with bottles?” the woman asked.  She took another hobbling step forward.  Eight feet to Verona’s left.

Verona ran, not to get away, but because she needed to move fast if this was going to work.  She ignored the echo – if she didn’t pay attention to her, maybe that would help.  She could jog through the woods, keeping her head down, and trace her way through to where Sharon Griggs had been most active.

The police lights were periodically flashing through the trees.  Sharon was walking toward them and away from Verona, wearing a lot of wires, and carrying a laptop under one arm.

The ghost had closed to seven feet away.

“I’ve apologized so many times for bottles.  I’ve apologized for Ace, and for Speedle, and for Plank.”

Bottles was a name, maybe?  Not a human name, unless it was a nickname.

“I can’t forgive you,” Verona tried.  She bent down and fumbled, until her hand brushed up against a mutilated animal.  A squirrel, bloated, with a rancid smell leaking out of it.  She grabbed it by a back foot, which made the smell increase, and hucked it into the deep foliage.

“Don’t hold onto grudges.  We’re family, Holly.”

“I don’t think you should get anything by default by being family,” Verona said, continuing to move, keeping an eye out for the advancing echo.  “And I’m not Holly.”

Playing along with Bev had helped her stay together.  Now there was this woman, and Verona really wanted her to go away.  Avery might be upset Verona was trying to destroy or weaken her, but there was a lot going on.  So she challenged the ghost.

“Are you angry about Aaron, Holly?”

“I don’t know who Aaron is, I don’t know who Bottles is, and I’m not Holly,” Verona said.  She found another bloated animal, by nose more than anything else, and picked it up.  She found another a step away.  She tossed them.

“I know you wanted to say goodbye to Bottles, but something had to be done.  Vet bills get too expensive.  It’s not worth hating me over.”

Verona snatched charms from trees and from the ground.  She couldn’t get them all, but she could put a dent in things.  She tried holding out a fistful of charms in the ghost’s direction.

It was only just barely past her arm’s reach.  Verona withdrew her hand as it stepped closer.

“I don’t know what you want of me,” the echo told her.

“I want you to go away and let me work.”  Verona found another animal and picked it up.  It deflated in her hands, leaking out gases, and she had to twist her face away.

She got stomachaches if the wind blew in the wrong direction, but this, at least, didn’t bother her much.

“I did my best for you, Holly, and ever since my cancer diagnosis, you’ve been so cold and distant.  You’ve forgotten everything good I did for you and you clung to the bad.”

“You didn’t do anything for me,” Verona told the ghost.  It was so close it could have extended a hand to touch her face, now.  She backed away and it didn’t help at all.  Her Sight wasn’t working especially well, and she didn’t trust her cards.  Most of the cards she had would draw the attention of the police, anyway.

“I fed you.  I clothed you.  I gave you a home.”

“Those are things you have to do, legally.  Or you lose custody.  You don’t get points for that.  If you bring a kid into the world, that’s for you, your benefit.  It’s not for them, not until you’ve made that world bright and positive and worth being brought into.”

“I don’t know how many times I can explain myself.  You don’t seem to listen.  Bottles… it was good we put him down while he was happy and young.  Ace jumped up too much.  He escaped his gate.  We couldn’t bring people over, it was too much.  Speedle got into the garbage, which you didn’t take out to the curb.  I told you, I was never going to clean up another mess like that.  If you didn’t take the garbage out when you were supposed to, I’d have to get rid of him.  And I did.  Plank kept us up at night with his squeaking and scratching.”

“And Aaron?” Verona asked, hating that she was wasting time on this.  Something tickled her leg again.  She couldn’t take her eyes off the echo to look.

“Your boy needs to learn to talk to his elders with respect.  But I was still too heavy-handed with him.  I’ve admitted that, and I don’t know how many times I can apologize for that.  Please, forgive me.  Let me back into your life.”

“You were never a part of my life.  You’re a shitty ghost of a shitty person,” Verona said.  “And I really have other things to do.”

“Please, Holly.  I’m dying, alone, and the nurses treat me like garbage.  You can’t give me a bit of your time?”

“It sounds like you took it on yourself to murder a lot of pets. I don’t even know what you did to your grandkid, lady, but what the hell?  Maybe you deserved to die alone or whatever.”

“I’ve admitted that,” the ghost whispered, fading a bit.  “I don’t know how many more times I can apologize for that.  Bottles, Ace, Speedle, Plank, Aaron. I brought apology flowers to Aaron in the hospital and you wouldn’t even let me give them to him.  You wouldn’t let me see him.  It’s like you want me to be alone…”

The voice got smaller and fainter as she went.  Verona experimentally backed up, and the ghost didn’t match her movement.  She began looking for more animal carcasses and charms, grabbing a charm from a branch.

“I added a lot of new members to our family, Holly.  Bottles and Ace and Speedle and Plank and Aaron.  You told Kathlee that you wanted another pet but you were afraid.  I told you you didn’t have to be afraid if you’d just take responsibility and be good.”

The voice was gaining more strength again.

“I had to get rid of them.  I had to.  You can’t hold a grudge over that.  I had to get rid of them.  I had to.”

There was that eerie copying of tone and tempo, like the woman was a recording, the exact same words playing out in the exact same way, but with different strength, depending.

The echo stood there, and her head twisted ninety-degrees, until her chin was pointing to the right of her and her forehead to the left.

“I suppose I have to get rid of you too, little black-haired witch,” the echo said.  The voice sounded like it had come from an ordinary person standing a matter of feet away.  No fuzz, nothing distorted, nothing broken.

The echo -or whatever it was– approached, fast.  In her retreat, Verona bumped into a branch she hadn’t seen in the near-total darkness, and wasn’t able to get away quickly enough.  The echo-thing reached, and Verona shielded her face.

It reached through her arm, sliding through flesh like a splash of cold water.  In Verona’s mind’s eye, she could see flashes of a scene.  This same woman, healthy and a good bit younger, looking down at a crying young girl.  The woman was holding a limp, dead weasel or ferret in one hand at her side, in the same way one might hold a grocery bag.

“Why?” Verona asked.  Her voice sounded like it came from very far away.

The vision passed, and before Verona could recover, the hand continued forward, long painted nails scraping the side of her face as the hand settled into place.  The palm was cold and it smelled so strongly of hospitals and wet fur that the smells seemed to have solidity to them, transferring some of those smells into physical sensations.  More scenes flashed through Verona’s mind.  Hospitals, plots in the backyard.  Crying kid. Crying kid.  Crying grandkid.

“Don’t you dare talk back to me, Aaron.”

“I’m not-” Verona protested, surprised a bit that she could speak even with the hand over her face.

Gripping her face, nails pressing in against scalp, the ghost picked her up, lifting her up with one hand, while her legs kicked and her arms flailed.

Verona reached for the echo’s arm, trying to find leverage, and her hand passed through it, treating her to a vision of a sullen, heartbroken Holly at the breakfast table.

She tried to divorce her thoughts from the scenes that flooded her head.  Things that weren’t her.  Glimpses of Holly.  Glimpses of the woman.  Of the hospital.

Verona couldn’t form a coherent thought, but she could tap into instinct.  She let her bag slip down her shoulders, and caught one strap.  It was hard to swing while being held like this, so she held it down where her foot could touch it, and used her foot to thrust it in the general direction of the ghost.

The ghost dissipated.  Verona dropped to all fours, the bag collapsing and rolling a bit down a slight slope.

She waited, watching.  Off in the distance, the red and blue lights were still flashing, the headlights shining through trees.  Sharon had gone over there.

This was a game of chess, essentially, and Sharon had a lot of advantages.  The sole advantage Verona had was that Sharon didn’t know she was playing.  Not yet.

And that advantage was dwindling.  Sharon was free to do her thing, while Verona was stuck.

Verona watched as the echo materialized once again, pulling together from what looked like wisps of fog, edged with red that could have been raw flesh.  The woman gathered together.

Verona picked up her bag, holding it like a weapon.  Even in the gloom, Verona could see the salt that Jessica had tossed onto her head while they’d trudged through the Ruins.  The moisture and the grooves in the bags, especially the straps, had helped to hold onto the salt.  Just enough to count.

Pure salt was better than anything tainted, Verona remembered.  But this apparently counted enough to help.

She held out her bag, keeping it between herself and the echo.

She turned on her Sight, and she could see in the gloom.  She could see the Echo, wispy, with something meaty inside it.  The meaty larval chunk twisted, writhing, and Verona could see the parasite or tumor that was attached to it, black and slick.

The woman wasn’t advancing, so Verona retreated, cutting across the woods, keeping one eye on her.

The woman stood there until she was done reforming.  Then she disappeared.

Verona, using her Sight to look wildly around herself, heart beating what felt like a thousand times a minute, mouth dry, saw the hand reach out of darkness.  Pale, with painted nails.

Avoiding the hand meant falling over.

She lay in moist leaves in darkness, and looked up to see that the ghost loomed above her, foot raised, head still turned to the side, parasite-tumor still squirming or even exulting within her.

The ghost kicked her in the side, making her roll over onto her stomach. For a moment, Verona was a dog, hurting, bewildered and surprised.

She kicked back, and her foot passed through the ghost.  She had another sensation of the dog, snapping.

“It is going to be such a relief to be rid of you, you shitty little cur.”

Verona scrambled back, and her hand touched something hairy.  It squeaked.

She hoped for a second it was Snowdrop, but when she looked, she saw what might have been a badger, badly decayed, the end of what might have been a really big, wide balloon sticking out of its mouth.

The squeaking became a long squeal that rose in volume and pitch by the second.

Verona scrambled.  She had to be far enough away from the skeptic.  She reached for glamour, the last bit of cat fur, and pulled her cape around her.

She stopped at the last second as the ghost appeared before her.  She pushed against a tree to try and change direction, and saw an image of the ghost holding a kitten.

She was glad she hadn’t become a kitten, that close to this infected ghost.

It was attached to her, somehow.  The way it had followed, a measured distance away.  The way it was fixated on her now.

She remembered how the doll had been dealt with.  How the connection magics had been explained.  Adjusting her grip on her bag, she dragged it along the ground, creating a line.

Probably losing some of the salt.

The ghost, standing a ways ahead, began to walk toward her, giving the line a wide berth.

The badger’s squealing peaked, and Verona’s bag fell from her hands as she instinctively brought her hands up to her ears, at the sound.  Holding her hands firm there, she hurried to put a tree between herself and her best recollection of where the badger had been.

And then it detonated.  The sound was like a fart combined with a grenade.  A wash of foul smell and fine droplets of decay and ass spattered the area around Verona.

She coughed, and as she pulled her hands down, she dimly heard the shouts of police, along with a young woman.

The coughing left her breathless, and every breath she tried to take tasted like a fart that had been primed inside a dead badger for at least a week.

This ruined everything.  She’d had a plan.

She started running, directly away from the incoming police, from Sharon.  Because maybe there was a chance to do something if she could get away.

She didn’t even make it one step.  A hand seized her by the neck, then hauled her back, holding her there against the tree.  She was already breathless, trying not to breathe or cough, even though she felt like she was suffocating.  The hand tightened.

Even though her back was to the tree, the infected ghost was behind her, standing in and reaching out through the tree.

Another hand gripped her chin.

Verona reached up, and her fingers reached through ghost hands to touch her own skin.

“Won’t be getting into the garbage now, will we, kitten?”

Verona’s foot scraped the ground, reaching for her dropped bag that was coated in salt.  She moved her head, in case some salt still clung to her scalp.  But she’d worn the Brownie-given raincoat that was now bundled up in her bag.  The bag was too far out.

This sick ghost could grip her and she couldn’t touch it back.  It wasn’t fair.

She could hear the police shouting, coughing.

Verona managed to suck in a breath, and she gagged at the taste of it.  She needed to buy time.

What were the ghost’s triggers?  If it saw her as an animal that was bad.

“Do you want to know why I haven’t visited?” Verona asked, quiet, her voice strained.  She fought the urge to cough.

“Do you know why I haven’t called?”

“Do you-” she started to cough, stopped, and saw stars from the force of the urge and the lack of air.

“Tell me!” the ghost raised its voice.

A beam of a flashlight swept her way.  The sensation of hands at her throat and chin disappeared.  Verona drew her shoulders together, best as she could, to make her profile smaller, and to try and let the tree block their view of her.

“I told you.  Mutilated animals.  if you’d listened, then we could have wasted a lot less time.  Again, really thankful you were so prompt-”

“No need to be sarcastic, miss.”

“Sharon.  You can call me Sharon.  And I’m not being sarcastic.  I’m a big, big supporter of the police.  Some creeps were out in the wood, playing with fire.  I can show you the location.”

“You should talk to the park authorities.”

The flashlight beam swept past Verona.  She tried to stay still.  She was trying hard not to breathe or gasp too loud, but holding her breath reminded her of why she was holding her breath, and she found herself gagging.

The flashlight beam settled.  It shone on the tree behind her, the diffuse outermost edges of the beam sweeping out to her left and her right, and it didn’t move.

There was more tickling at her leg.  She looked down, and saw a Cherrypop-sized goblin clinging to her shoe, circling around toward the inside of her foot to move away from the beam.

She couldn’t bend down to grab it because that would have risked giving her away.  She couldn’t bring her foot up for the same reason.

“You need to investigate this.  There are some creeps in the woods who seem to think they’re doing something satanic, but these things are always idiots with an overactive imagination and a lack of long-term thinking who end up hurting others.  Hurting animals, in this case.”

“Animals die in the woods.  That’s for park rangers to handle.”

“Listen to me.  Please.  I’m a visitor to your beautiful little town here, I happened to be getting film footage for my streaming series, and I stumbled onto something horrific.  I’d really appreciate it if you could check this out for me.  I wouldn’t waste your time on something I didn’t think was serious.”

“What’s this streaming thing?”

“Like a documentary, online.  I record stuff, I’m currently recording stuff, and I’ll disprove myths.  I have another, better channel, but it’s not getting many views yet.  It’s still new.”

“It’s a Woobtube thing, Damien,” another man said.  Another officer.

“Another site.  Woobtube has issues.  But you have the right idea, sir.”

“Are you recording right now?” the first officer asked, stern.

“I’ve got my microphones muted and I’m standing so the camera I’ve got attached to my shirt isn’t pointing your way.  You can listen on my headphones if you want to check.”

“That’s fine.  You popular?”

“Six thousand people check in regularly to watch me prove ghosts don’t exist.  I’ve got four hundred on my other channel.”

“Good number.  Wow.  Amazing,” officer one said.

“Really impressive,” the other said.  “You’re a minor celebrity.”

“Uhhhh… yeah.  Thank you.”

“Can I see?  Show me this thing?”

“Can you check out the thing I’m talking about, after?”

“It really might be some kids messing around.  I had to step in when some kids on the beach were throwing frogs into a campfire.  They’ll do messed up stuff with fireworks and animal carcasses.”

The other officer added, “Let the stink clear out for a minute.”

“If a kid really put a firework in an animal corpse, isn’t that actually serious?  The risk of forest fire, and they could be out there.”

“They probably are.  But they’re long gone by now.  I twisted my ankle two years ago chasing some teenagers down by the rivershore.  It’s not worth it.  I’ll ask the usual suspects tomorrow.”

“I guess.  Not very satisfying.”

“I have some guesses about who would do this sort of thing.”

“It’d be great for my stream if I could record you arresting someone.”

“Things don’t happen like that in reality.  Investigating something like this takes time.”

“A year ago, I stumbled onto some real creeps, and the arrest happened pretty fast after that.  Here, you wanted to see a video.  I’ll show you the highlight reel.  Maybe if you do get an arrest, you can do a phone interview with me?  For my channel?”

“Alright, but only if you show me these numbers first, what is it?  Six thousand people watching?  I don’t believe that.”

Verona waited, glanced around to check the flashlight beams weren’t anywhere near her, then ducked down.

She had a glimpse of Sharon standing with an officer on either side of her, their upper bodies illuminated by flashlights they held, Sharon holding her laptop out, with an officer helping to keep it balanced while she typed.

Verona coughed as quietly as she could, trying to breathe in full lungfuls of air, which were laced with the stink of the little badger bomb.  She was probably laced with the stink of the badger bomb.

She stopped, crouching, and stuck her leg out.  The goblin was clinging to her shoe for dear life.

“What’s your deal, little guy?” she asked.  “Come from outside?

The tiny goblin nodded.  It had no nose, only two oval nostrils that might have been larger than its eyes, which were black and spaced too far apart.  It had a beak rather than a mouth, too small, too stubby, too low on its round head, and set off center from the rest of its face, jutting out a bit from the folds beneath the weird nose.

It stuck one long finger into its large nostril, dug around, and then drew a line of snot onto her leg.  It barely seemed to care that she was watching it.

“Hey dude,” she told it.  “Got a name?”

It shook its head.  It drew another line of snot.  If it was drawing anything specific, it was impossible to tell.

She could have shaken it off, but she had other priorities.  She thought for a second.

“Hey, little dude, do you like art?” she whispered.

It looked up at her, then snorted, spattering her leg some more.  It rubbed it in, nodding.

It reached into its pants.

“Wait wait wait wait.  Let’s strike a deal, little guy.”

It stopped, hand still in the back of its pants.

“If you do something for me, I’ll hand out a present.  I think you’ll really, really like it, and if you don’t, then I promise you I’ll try to find a way to get you something you do like.”

It picked its nose with one hand, the other still in its pants, standing on her shoe, looking up at her.

It was a bit of a dope, it seemed.

“Do you have friends?”

“Do you know where there might be some stray goblins who might want a prize too?”

“Find them, really really fast, if you can.  And then go and find all the goblin traps and dead animals around here, and hide them.  Find the little broken charms and ward things and hide them.  If you can do it before those police officers find it, it’ll be great.”

The goblin stared at her, as slack jawed as something with a beak could be.

�It’ll make this woman out there super mad.  It’ll ruin her day.”

“It’ll annoy the police too.  They might even fight.  And you get a prize.  But only if you hurry.”

“I am a practitioner of Kennet.  Do this and I will give the prize to the most deserving goblin, provided I’m able.  I pledge this.”

That seemed to get him going.  He stood up, then scampered off.

Verona used some grass to try to wipe up her leg, but they mostly stuck there.  She stood, adjusted her bag, then reached for glamour and cat fur.

The feathers and bird form might be necessary for later, and she’d really rather use the bird form while not in the woods where owls were more common.

She wrapped herself up in a cat form, then took off running, keeping to cover, because those same owls would come after a cat.

Every rustle of a branch was a potential predator, or potential prey.  Her eyes, open wide and ‘set’ to a wide field of view that could take in more light, not so good at seeing up-down movements, while the side-to-side sway of a branch was clear and made her attention snap this way and that.

She wasn’t a nature cat.  She was a cat that knew the city.  There were too many distractions and too many possible vectors for attack.

She just had to remember that she could turn human in a pinch.  If trouble came and she had a third of a second to react, she had to drop the cat form.  Just had to keep that in mind.

Being a cat made it easier to recall the visions the ghost had dropped on her.  It made it easier to forget the dream.  To forget the looming issue of her dad.  The ghost had had some eerie similarities, with the hospital association, but she could sort of buy that maybe the parallels were what had drawn the ghost to her in the first place.

Man, people could be awful.  That ghost… probably someone so evil that their ghost had had that magnetic effect, sucking in something ugly and parasitic, and combining to make something stronger.  An echo who could break pattern, observe.  Maybe the touching and ability to hurt was from the parasite.

Verona almost started to reach for her scalp to check where the fingernails had scraped her, and then stopped just in time, segueing into pawing at one ear.

She’d almost split her glamour.

She ventured out onto a branch, keeping tabs on the officers.

One officer had broken away, while his buddy was still watching on the laptop.  Sharon twisted her body to keep the wandering officer in her bodycam’s field of view, while her other hand kept the laptop propped up.

Verona prowled forward, smelled the fart, and her mouth involuntarily opened wide, retching and hacking, and fighting a need to sneeze.  Hair all down her body stood on end.

A flashlight beam, bright, fell on her.  Her pupils adapted quickly.

She didn’t lose the glamour.

Verona ran off, trying to get to high ground, above the stink, pausing periodically to cough and retch.

The dossier had said that glamours tended to shatter pre-emptively when Sharon turned her attention toward them.  Which Verona had kind of thought might be a good early warning sign that Sharon was coming.  Now she was here, perched on a branch, wearing a cat form, and she was pretty sure she couldn’t turn human now if she tried.

Sharon’s ability made the world make sense.  It simplified, made things easier.

A glamour that tested Sharon’s grip on reality would shatter first, probably.  But an animal in the forest?  That was fine.

It was so, so tempting to go straight for Sharon.  If she could pounce, land on that laptop, and make it fall, that would be perfect.

But it was too hard to manage, and she wasn’t sure the glamour wouldn’t break.  If she jumped down from a tree, then there was a chance she could fall out of the tree as Verona, instead of as a cat.

Off in the other direction, so far away even her cat eyes could barely make it out, a deer stalked the woods.  Something about the way it moved bothered her, so she hurried over in its direction, continuing to be careful about possible predators.

She caught up with it after a minute or so.  It walked with a bowed head, and its face and one of its antlers was melted like candle wax, trickles hanging low and wobbling like jelly as it moved this way and that.  It turned a head toward Verona, and she could see the symbol inscribed on its brow, along with a sphere set in the candle wax where an eye should be, milk white and faintly glowing in the gloom.

She hissed, and it turned and walked in the other direction, using three functioning legs and a melted one that dragged.

They really needed to get this perimeter back up.

She hurried back, and she saw that the other officer had walked off a fair distance.

She had to circle around the cloud of stink, and evaded a small goblin that was running by with a dead mouse and a dead snake on a skewer.

He was getting dangerously close to the messy spot, and the goblins were nowhere near done.

She went hunting.  She sniffed out some decay, then chased it down.  She found the beaked dope of a goblin and a female goblin with droopy noodle-breasts basket-weaved into a dress carrying a bloated toad between them.

She bowled them over, knocking the toad from their grip, then hissed at them.  The dope barely reacted, reaching for the toad.  She swatted his hand away, hard, then took the toad’s leg into her mouth, and dragged it.

It deflated as she dragged, leaking out foul smells and foaming at the nose and mouth.

Sharon was still back there?  No.  She’d stopped showing the officer videos, and was hanging back, while he walked in the same general direction of his buddy.  She trailed behind them, following after, with her flashlight beam periodically sweeping around.

There were other cops from the other cars further away.  Verona hadn’t accounted for those.

Didn’t Kennet’s officers have more to do around here?  They’d sent four cops?  Six?

Sharon talked, “Hey guys, so I convinced them to check out the scene.  They seem to think it’s bored teens, but it seemed more serious than that.  It was a lot of animals.  I know you saw it.  It’s bad enough I think serial killer.  And with the way that creepy Asian teacher was being evasive, I can’t help but wonder if he knows something.”

“Creepy teacher?” an officer called back.

“They’re asking a question.  Yeah.  I interviewed him earlier.  He’s this Asian guy, had a bad accent.  I don’t get the impression he’s been in Canada long.  I quizzed him, asked if he heard anything weird.  Stuff for my video, right?”

Verona had to hurry.  She dragged the toad, trying to get out ahead of the officers.

“Sure.  Stuff for the video, makes sense.  What’d he say?”

“That the class numbers didn’t add up.  The way the students get divided among teachers, he had three new kids from homeschool, but he was missing one.  So I asked him if he followed up, and he said no.  Which seems suspicious to me.”

“You’d think you’d ask, right?  I asked if he had records of students who were supposed to be in his class, and he said the school server had a data crash early May, and he lost those records.  Which, you know, do your job, right?”

“I’m not sure I follow, but yeah.”

Verona was too small, the toad too big, and the officer’s stride too long.

Different tack.  She dragged it away, off to the right.

“So you asked about the bodycam, right?  Part of the reason I wear it is I run into some real creepy types out there.  Crazies, twisted people, people who’ve gotten lost in their own fantasies.”

“They’re definitely out there.”

“I’ve clocked enough hours at this I’ve learned some of the tricks and tells.  They talk a certain way, or feign confusion.  This guy, he was pulling that.  Something’s up.”

“Huh.  Get his name?”

“I took a note.  Tony Lai.”

“We’ll look him up after.”

“Ninety percent of the time, when I really press people like that, you find the stories don’t add up, or they’ve got some weird beliefs and fantasies.”

“You ever think of being a cop?”

“I’m tiny, for one thing.”

“Doesn’t automatically rule you out.”

“And I can be a real bitch, but I don’t have the clout when it counts.  I’d think about it, if things were different.”

Verona dropped the partially deflated toad, backed away, then pounced on it.

It foamed from one nostril, but nothing happened.

Hurrying, she resumed dragging.

Sharon was no longer in earshot.

The burbling intensified, and the dragging got harder.  Verona checked, and saw the toad was swelling.  Re-inflating.  Fast.

She let go and bolted, dashing away.  The froth nearly buried it, as it began to tremble.

It detonated before she could get one hundred percent clear.

Verona, human, tumbled roughly into a bush.  Her hat lost its glamour.

She scrambled, looking for a hiding spot, clutching her hat to her chest because the brim was too wide.

The smell hit her a second later.  This was a different sort of bad smell.

The cops came running, flashlights out.  They held hands to their mouths, and backed away as the smell hit them, too.

They’d run straight into it, while Verona ran away, moving as quietly as she could through undergrowth.  She didn’t have her Sight.

“What are you doing?  Go after them!” Sharon called out.

“They’re-” one officer started.  The next word was choked out by vomit, as he heaved out onto his front and then onto the ground.

The other officer covered his mouth, trying to press into the pale yellow-brown fog.  He reversed direction, then stooped over, hands on his knees, controlling his breathing.  His hand wiped at his eyes.

“Why didn’t you keep going?”

“Can’t see.  It’s-” he stopped to gag.

“Caking my eyeballs.  God.  I can taste it with my eyeballs.”

“I guess this whole fucked up project, excuse me for swearing-”

“Uggggh,” the first officer, still vomiting, managed to say something between heaves.  “Fuuuck.”

“-They might have been making stinkbombs,” Sharon said.  She was keeping a good distance away from the dissipating fog.

At the edge of that fog, the dopey goblin wandered out.  He looked up at Verona.

She made an ok sign at him.

He gave her two thumbs up, then ventured closer.

“Soon,” she whispered.  “Prize soon.”

He walked closer, stamping a foot.

He came for her, running, and she ran away, not just because he was after her, but because she didn’t want to be this close by when the officers recovered.

Goblins converged on her.  Most were smaller than Doglick, who was the next-smallest after Cherry.  One was about Doglick’s size, the female goblin with the dress woven out of her own droopy breasts.

Verona held up a finger.  She pulled off her bag, opened it, and reached inside, digging.

She had to flip through, as goblins got increasingly impatient, some growling.

She folded the cover of the book around to the back, and then held up the page for the assembled goblins, glancing back to make sure Sharon didn’t have eyes on her.

The smallest goblins jumped with excitement, clawing at the air.  The one with the dress smiled, showing off sharp teeth.

The answer, from goblins who seemed mostly nonverbal, seemed to be a resounding yes.  The female goblin said something rude about ‘wants’.

The picture was a pencil sketch Verona had ended up doing while using rude videos online as her nude models for figure drawing.  Some of that was about learning anatomy and refining her art.  Some of it, though, was her just wrapping her head around what was going on there.  And this was one mystery she’d hoped to enlist Jeremy’s help in figuring out.

The picture was a particular, stand-out piece of a male, put to paper in as much glistening detail as her art skills allowed.  She’d gone to some effort, detailing it, as if sufficient detail could bring it to life on the page or unlock some understanding.

“Does this satisfy our arrangement, booger guy?” she asked.

The goblin with the beak nodded with enthusiasm.

The strangest things could be so valuable in practice.

“You need to leave,” she told them, keeping her voice low as she checked the other direction.  “Get out of town.  And you can have this?  Deal?”

There were more cops, sticking closer to the road, and others out in the woods, investigating.  She hoped they hadn’t found anything much.

She gave the goblins the picture, and they silently fought over it, biting and clawing at one another.  After about ten seconds, they inadvertently tore the page, and two groups ran in separate directions, each with a different half of the picture.

She found a hiding spot, then hunkered down for a wait.

She almost screamed, jumping out of her skin, when she realized she’d sat down next to something.  It was a girl, with skin that drooped on her like a bulldog, and a few gaping wounds at her chest and limbs, the skin hanging away.  She wore a dress that had probably looked nice, once, but had been stained black with the oily ichor that leaked from her wounds and orifices.

Everything that was inside the wounds, past the eye-holes of drooping eyelids, and inside her mouth, which perpetually drooped open, was as sleek as the skin wasn’t.  it was all black eyeballs with yellow irises, all interlocked together so the corner of one was nestled into others. All eyeballs moved in unison, and the sound of them all moving was like a faint slosh of water.  They flicked over to looking the other way, and again, there was that faint slosh.

The girl held a finger to her lips.  A fingernail was missing, and an eye peeked out from the nail bed, the edges of that nail bed bleeding black ooze.

Verona nodded, then gave the girl a thumbs up.

It wasn’t a long wait.  Verona’s sense of smell struggled to recover, and she was increasingly aware of an ammonia smell from the girl.

“This isn’t a good town to be in.  They’re very protective of their territory,” Verona whispered.

The girl’s eyeballs sloshed around, moving in what could almost be a language, like Morse code, except there were more things than dashes and dots in there.

“Can’t understand you, and you need to be quiet,” Verona whispered, as a flashlight shone on… not them, but on their general section of forest.

The girl waited until the light had moved on, then reached out, in the general direction of Kennet.  She made clutching motions with her hand, opening and closing them.

“You want something?”

The girl nodded, eyeballs moving this way and that.  She brought her hands up, one with barely any skin on it, only two fingertips remaining attached, the hand sleek beneath.  She pressed index fingers and thumbs together and made a diamond shape.

So-so gesture, hand wobbling.

“I think a lot of things are after it,” Verona whispered.  “I think it might be fake.  Bait, or a lure, or a trick.  Someone’s trying to make a lot of trouble for Kennet, and luring strangers here might be part of that.”

The girl nodded.  Jowls separated from and slapped against the sleek eye-flesh beneath as part of the motion.

“I love this whole thing you’ve got going on, by the way,” Verona whispered, gesturing head to toe on the girl.

The girl made a similar gesture, indicating Verona’s top and hair.  Eyeballs made their noises as they looked.

“Thank you.  Please don’t tell me you’re evil and eat babies or whatever.”

The girl made a so-so gesture again.

“I guess that’s all any of us can say, huh?”

The girl nodded.  Then she pressed a finger to her lips.

Verona went silent, pulling her knees to her chest.

A flashlight swept over the woods.

“There was something out there.  They were quick about cleaning it up.”

“I believe you.  But I think when you stumble onto something in the woods, you can think it’s more.”

“It was more.  Really.  I have extensive video from my stream.”

“Can you rewind?  Show us?”

“I have to end the stream and then upload it.  I don’t have it set to auto-upload videos, because it makes these really unprofessional cuts and interruptions.”

“How long does that take?  Minutes?”

Sharon laughed.  “For hours of stream?  To compress and everything?  Overnight.”

“Will you be here in the morning?”

“That’s the plan.  My friends and I have a motel room.”

“Be careful up there, alright?”

“Really?  That kind of place?”

“Damn.  Okay.  I’m- I’m bewildered and upset that there was so little to show you.  I’m sorry.  And I’m annoyed because this really isn’t the kind of video I want to make.  I’ll have to do follow-ups, to chase this down and work out what happened.”

“Just leave the police work to the Ontario police, okay?”

“Yeah.  Yeah, for sure.”

“We can’t officially tell you about any ongoing investigations, and I think with that kind of following, you might count as a journalist-”

“Please, no.  I want to undo the damage media causes with my primary stream.”

“That’s interesting.  Listen, I- we can’t tell you stuff, not officially, not on the record.”

“There’s no record.  Not a journalist.”

“But if you’re staying in town, we could meet up again, you can tell me about that over some Dead Tim’s, and I could do that interview with you, if you’ll cut my name from it.”

“Sure!  Cool, yeah.  What’s your number?”

The following exchange was too quiet and full of murmurs for Verona to hear.

Verona looked at the Other sitting next to her.  It sat with all of its eyes, some as long as Verona’s hand, some as big as a thumbprint, fixed forward.  A dribble of black ichor hung from a nostril, growing longer without breaking off as an actual droplet.

“Good.  Thank you, Sharon.  I’ll talk to you soon, then,” the officer said.  He sounded happy.

“Absolutely.  Thanks for everything you do, guys.  Bye.”

There was a pause.  As the four officers drew nearer to Verona, walking down the road toward where their cars were parked, Verona heard a faint scoff or sniff sound, from one and laughter from another.  The first officer muttered, “Shut up.”

“As if,” Sharon said, once they were out of earshot.  “Like I’d date some hick who lives in a shithole like this.”

Verona tensed, feeling instinctively protective of her hometown.  Even if it was a bit of a shithole, sometimes.

“Heyyyy big brain thinkers!  Were you watching?  Sorry I had to mute things for my chat with the officers, but I hope you liked what the bodycam showed.  I’m reading chat and you guys think we finally caught a real live one huh?  I think you’re going to be disapppoinnntteeeed.  Our culprits knew exactly what they were doing and those stink-bombs- haha.  Those poor guys.  They got a faceful of it.  They were just buying time to hide the really fake setup they did.  Cops think they hurt some animals, and they agreed with me that this teacher’s story seemed off, so they’re going to do the ol’ door knock and, at my advisement, lean on him a bit.”

Sharon kept talking, walking out of Verona’s earshot.  The headlights of the police cars briefly flashed through the trees, filtered into a dozen bright segments each as the cars turned around to get onto the single-lane road.

The girl with the eyes rose to a standing position without leaning on anything, and her skin slid around and resettled.  She started walking toward Kennet.

“Hey, hey, no,” Verona hissed.  “No.”

The girl pressed fingers together into a diamond.

“No,” Verona whispered.  “Please be as cool as you look.”

The girl pressed her fingers together to make a diamond again.  She started walking, and Verona nearly tripped over a bush in her haste to get in the girl’s way.

“No.  Really.  Please.”

Off to the side, a blurry figure strode through the trees with more speed than he should’ve had, walking through branches and greenery.  He wore a business suit, not dissimilar to Verona’s dad, and his hair was messy, his clothes disheveled.  He had his hands on his head, muttering.

“If I work an extra four hours this week and take saturday off… I’d have to get the promotion, and add an extra five… maybe if I took out another line of credit… she deserves a ring.  Fifty two ninety nine and seventy cents.  If I can skip a meal now and then… she won’t be satisfied with less…”

“Dude,” Verona said, to the ghost.  “I don’t think she’s worth it.”

“She’s worth it.  She’s worth it.  I can’t lose her.  Fifty two ninety nine and seventy cents.  I’ll have to work an extra seven hours this week, four or five next week.  If I work through the holidays… I need- need a ring.  That’s the ring.”

He fixated his gaze on the distance.

“Maybe it’s a ring,” Verona told him, keeping her voice low.  “I think it’s a trap.”

“I’m trapped.  I don’t know what to do.  I have only four more months and then she leaves, I need five thousand, two hundred and ninety nine, I’m barely making enough to scrape by as it is…”

“Aw guy,” Verona said, wincing.  “It’s all a scam, I’m pretty sure, engagement to marriage and everything that follows.”

The girl with the skin got Verona’s attention, pointed at the same location, then made the diamond shape.

“No,” Verona said.  “It’s some kind of Other-bait.  Why are you guys being dumb about this?”

“I won’t have her and I won’t have a roof over my head,” the echo said.  He looked at Verona.  “Roof over my head.  I need help.  Roof over my head.”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to communicate.”

He reached out for her, then approached, walking swiftly.

She stepped back, bumped up against a tree branch, then used her bag, blocking his hands.

The salt still on the bag seemed to shred his substance.  He collapsed into the bag, coming to pieces as it tore his arms and then chest up.  His echo-substance head passed through her, and she had glimpses of him, elbows on the table, face in hands, looking at a spreadsheet on a tablet.

Then he was gone.  He didn’t reform.

“I’ve got stuff to do, I can’t be your hallow.  I’m sorry you had it rough,” Verona said.

The girl with the eyes looked down at him, moist eyes squelching with their simultaneous movement.

“I didn’t do that on purpose.  But that might be the sort of thing that happens if you keep going after this jewel.  They’re pretty territorial down there.  I think they were torching echoes and spirits on sight.”

The girl looked back at the jewel.

“No, really really.  I know you want it, but…”

The girl turned and walked away, opposite direction.  She cut across the path Sharon had been so near, then disappeared into darker woods.

“Good.  Okay,” Verona said, huffing.  Her heart was pounding from the two close calls, and everything else.  For a moment, with no immediate threats, she didn’t know what to do with herself.  Adrenaline left over in her system.

It didn’t help that there were so many high-stakes things coming up.  Dealing with Sharon in a proper way.  Helping the others.  Getting back to the Institute.

Dealing with her dad.  Whatever was going on there.

Her thoughts turned to the dream.

Alpeana had said something like how someone strong enough could take away lessons or grow from it.  Right now, thinking about it, she didn’t feel especially strong.

She’d somehow expected, going in, that the practice stuff, the magic would be this extra thing.  Like the Sight was, kind of, but more.  A sixth sense, a third eye, an extra hand.

But with the recent thing with her losing her bag, and the dream, and Lucy getting mad, and how personal some of those things had been, it felt kind of like the opposite.  Like instead of being extra, it was striking right at the middle of her.  The core of who she was.

And it felt like enough strikes to something vital could make her shatter.

She wasn’t sure she had it in her to face down her dad.  To hear that he was sick and she genuinely needed to help.  To hear that he wasn’t sick, and that he was willing to go this far.

She watched as a faintly translucent figure walked through the woods, a woman with lime green skin that had pineapple print on it, and magenta hair.

She didn’t have it in her to intervene.  Probably, if the entire perimeter was down, they were coming in from all directions.  This mess wouldn’t be all the way cleaned up by the end of summer, even if the perimeter was put back up right away.  Somehow.

She wanted to go to magic school with Lucy, have a sleepover every night, hang out with Avery and Snowdrop, and get to know some freaky practitioners.  She wanted to unravel some mysteries and tie up problems and doing that was something she was supposed to do.

She hung her head, struggling to find her equilibrium.  A bit of roughhousing from the infected ghost aside, the vast majority of today had been an emotional beating.  The ruins, her dad, the ghost, seeing Lucy have a bad day…

She squeezed her eyes shut tight, trying to block out the light, and a tear rolled down her cheeks, surprising her as much as the eyeball girl had.  She wiped it away as fast as she was humanly able, then blinked a few times.

She wanted to hug Lucy and Avery.  And to nuzzle an animal Snowdrop.

“…gonna go see my friends, check into this motel that is apparently not very good, and see about getting some shut-eye.  Investigations continue tomorrow and might even carry on into the next few days.  There’s a few things here to dig into.  No, haha, I’m reading chat.  There’s nothing saying the motel is haunted.  You’re smarter than that.”

…she had to deal with this bitch.

Verona took a moment to sort herself out.  She popped on her mask, knowing that around Sharon, she would have no peripheral vision, when she could normally see through it with the Sight.

She ducked out across the path, closer to the cars.

She stopped in her tracks.  Sharon was there too, about thirty paces down the straight dirt path, with its periodic set of dodgy wooden stairs.

“Uh, hello,” Sharon said.

“Sharon!  Hey!” Verona said, peppy and upbeat.

“Uhh, I don’t know you.  But I think I saw you.”

“I was hired,” Verona said.  “Just a bit ago.  My friends and I cleaned up the animal bodies before the police got there.  How was it for the stream?  Did you get a good clip?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sharon!  Sharon Griggs, right?  We’re both here because of Bristow?  Come on,” Verona laughed.  “We did the fire thing, we arranged the old looking guy there and then sent him home.  I hope he’s going home.  The dangly things and bundles of sticks in the ground, and the animals that the others set up were all sorted and hidden away.  Just like I was told.”

Told by Matthew.  She’d also had Matthew hire her for pocket change before he left.  Just so she could say this stuff.

Sharon fumbled at the camera that was clipped to her shirt, with its curly wire extending to the laptop.

“Oh!” Verona exclaimed, loud.  “Are you still streaming?”

Sharon shut it off, closing the laptop.

“Are you messing with me?”

“Yeah.  Hey, Bristow says hello,” Verona said, dropping the cheery tone.

He speaks English.  He says hello sometimes.  “This was all a setup.  Now you’re being messed with.  I was surprised you brought the police into this.”

“My integrity is really important to me.  This is ugly.  It’s slander.  You’re attacking my career.”

“Your career is kinda awful,” Verona said.  “And you’re not very good at it.  Four hundred subs?  Wow.  That’s sad, but it makes me kind of happy you’re not getting more traction as a racist.”

“What are- what are you even talking about?” Sharon asked.  She seemed flustered.  “I’m not racist.  My best friend is Asian.  Tell me you’re not one of those people, who sling around major accusations like that.”

“Four hundred subs.  Did you tell that cop you’re new to this?”

“You were listening?”

“Did you, though?”  Verona pressed.  She knew from the dossier that it was a point of annoyance for Sharon, and she was damn well going to use everything she could.

“It’s none of your business.”

“So did you lie?  Hiding your embarrassment over how badly you’re doing with your conspiracy videos?”

“It’s not conspiracy, hon.  It’s making sense of a chaotic and messed up world.  Why am I even talking to you?  Who are you?  You just jump into the middle of my stream to lie and try to mess with me?  Were you sent by a rival streamer?”

“That seems to make about as much sense as your conspiracy videos probably do.  Did you ever consider that maybe you’re really dumb and that’s why you’re not doing well?”

Not her best line, but she was tired and she really just wanted to press Sharon to get a response.

“I’m done with this.  I’ve got things to do.”  Sharon walked ahead, toward Verona.  Verona backed away, trying to maintain a rough equivalent distance.  “Good job, to whoever set this up.”

“I told you, your landlord arranged this whole thing with you being here.  I’m here because of him too.”

“He wouldn’t do that.  He likes my videos.”

“Are you really gullible, then, on top of everything else?”

“Less than ninety-nine percent of the population.”

“How does that work?  What kind of education did you get?”

“I got life education, hon.  How old are you?  Eleven?  Twelve?  What kind of education do you have?”

“Such a cop-out answer.  I’m sure there are criminals and people who work at fast food for their entire lives who say they got life educations.”

“Get out of my face.  You smell like those carcasses and I can smell it when the wind blows from you to me.  You really did move them around.”

“Did your life education keep Bristow from messing with you?”

“Then why am I here?  You’ve got all the answers?  Why am I here, Sharon?  Why do I know your full name?  Or the weird building you live in?  Or your history with your family, who seem to believe in so many things you don’t?”

“Because I talk about a lot of stuff with my community.  It’s not hard to put the pieces together.”

“So you drop personal details online?  Then you really are dumb.  We were told in grade two that you had to be careful about what we said online.  We could barely write in full sentences, back then.”

Verona had to step carefully because there was a wooden staircase on the path, only three steps, which bridged a ledge where the dirt road led off the edge of a rock.  Sharon got a bit closer.  She scrambled back a bit more.

Sharon wasn’t engaging, so she switched tacks.  “What’s this conspiracy then?  Are you a flat earther?”

“No.  I believe in science and sociology.”

“I believe in science, and the science raises questions.  I think corporations have been sketchy for as long as there have been corporations.  Being worried about what they’re putting into your body when we don’t know what happens over generations is just sensible.”

“Secret cabal controlling the world?”

“It’s not a secret, hon.  The information is out there, people just don’t want to believe it.  The same names keep popping up, and a lot of those names are the sorts who wouldn’t have gone from being scattered refugees to some of the most powerful men in the world if there wasn’t something going on.  They organized.”

“Maybe they’re good at what they do?”

“Or maybe they collaborated and gamed the system, shook hands and made deals, and schemed their way to where they control entertainment and media.”

“See, that doesn’t make sense to me.  Most people out there seem to be real idiots, sometimes, but these guys have a secret master plan, and it hasn’t leaked once?  Nobody’s fumbled the ball or let something slip?  No paperwork?”

“They’ve slipped.  You just have to know where to look and who to listen to, the information is out there.”

“And you want to be one of the people they listen to?”

“I am one of the people they listen to.”

“With no degree, no connections, a cheap apartment with a guy who sends you on weird errands, and four hundred subscribers?  Sharon, hon, there’s a kid in my school who makes up his own stickyblock dragons while his baby sister screams in the background and he has seven hundred subscribers.  There are girls who do dance videos who have thousands.  Is this really your deal?  This is where you want to be in the world?”

They were in the parking lot now.  Verona continued to back away.  Sharon, stone-faced, walked up to her car, opening the door.

“Sharon, hon,” Verona said, “Leave.  Go to Mr. Bristow.  Go grill him like you told the cops to do to that poor teacher, Mr. Lai.  Push him for those answers.  It’ll be pretty illuminating.”

Sharon looked like she was going to climb into the car, but then she stood again, holding a rifle.

She leveled it at Verona.

“Did Alexander Belanger send you?”

Verona swallowed.  “He gave you that name, huh?”

“When you talk to Mr. Bristow, tell him a girl in a witch’s hat and cat mask told you, no lie, Alexander has no involvement with Kennet.  In fact, he swore off of dealing with this town.  He’ll take me seriously.”

“That means nothing to me right now.  Who are you?”

“Talk to him.  Really truly, if you quiz him, it’ll be better.”

“Who are you!?” Sharon raised her voice, shifting her grip on the gun.  “Tell me or start saying your prayers.”

“You’d really shoot an unarmed kid?  And prayers- you’re religious?”

“Of course, and of course.  Last chance.  Who are you?”

“I’m a kid who’s in town to check on her sick dad.  For the rest of it… ask Mr. Bristow.  If he doesn’t know, he knows where to find me.  Now I’m- I’m going to trust you’re not going to shoot me in the back.  I’m trusting you’re not that big of a monster.”

The gunshot rang out as she stepped forward.

It was a miss.  Going high or something.  But… still scary.

“You messed with my stream.  My livelihood.  Why?”

“You insulted my town, you pointed cops at a good teacher.  You… you’re not a good person, Sharon.  For the rest of it, you have to ask your landlord.”

“Not good enough.  Turn around.  Face me.  And take off the hat and mask.”

Sharon stood by her passenger side door, holding the rifle.

John stood on the other side of the car.

John was… probably not all that special or invincible, if Sharon shot him.

“Mask off.  Or I’ll see if I can take it off with a bullet.  I’ve shot people before, I’ll do it again.”

Verona looked at John, then nodded.  “Okay.”

John took that as his cue to move.  He walked without making noise, circling around the car.

Sharon reacted to the movement in her peripheral vision.  She turned, and he caught the barrel.  He wrested the gun from her, then hit her in the face with it.  He caught her before she could fall all the way down, and smashed her head into the handle of the door with enough force it flew off and bounced halfway between John and Verona.

Sharon dropped to the ground, forehead split open, unconscious.

“I thought she canceled you out.”

“She does.  But I don’t need what she takes from me.  Are you okay?  I heard the shot.”

There was a pause.  Verona wrung her shaking hands together a bit, blinking a few times.

Verona looked down at the unconscious woman.  She reached for her bag, fumbled, and found a little thing of tissues.  She pulled out a bunch and then pressed them to the head wound.

“I think we’re okay?” Verona guessed.  “It was self defense, right?  That makes us karmically okay?  And we didn’t spoil her Awareness.”

“I don’t know,” John said.

“Things are bad,” John said.  “The perimeter is down.  It’s getting out of control.”

“I know.  I’m kinda really hoping Avery and Lucy are getting a handle on their parts of it.”

“I had to leave Lucy, but she has help.”

“Can we go back and help them?”

“We can if you’re up for it.  Are you?”

Verona hesitated.  Then she nodded.

He bent down and picked up Sharon by her belt.  He opened the door and tossed her into the back seat.  Rather than use the broken passenger side door, Verona climbed in after her, and continued to apply pressure to the cut on her forehead.  John, holding the rifle, climbed into the driver’s seat.  He paused, turning.

Verona was already inside Sharon’s pockets, fishing.  She handed the keys to John, then, while still leaning forward, grabbed the laptop from the front seat.

“Seatbelt,” John said.

“Really?” she asked.  But she belted up.  She worked one around Sharon’s middle too, as best she could.

John drove them into the city, where that drumming heartbeat in the center was rapid and starting to bleed out in larger quantities.  Verona checked the laptop and it was a simple password input, but she didn’t know what to put, so she moved on.

She fished in Sharon’s other pocket, found the phone, and used Sharon’s thumb to unlock it.

“Mr. Bristow…” she murmured, as she found the contact.