Pale: 5.5 - Verona

Back Away – 5.5 | Pale
Car doors slammed as they climbed out of Sharon’s car and Matthew’s truck.

Verona joined Lucy and Avery in climbing out of the bed of Matthew’s truck, going over the side, stepping on the tire, then hopping down to the road.  She was tired.  She’d probably walked and ran around more tonight than she had most weeks.  With gym class included.

She was tired in other ways.  Nothing was wrong, exactly, they’d come out ahead and Clementine, Daniel, and Sharon were going to leave soon.  There’d been cool practice, cool monsters, and it was all exciting.  And she still felt like… like if she turned on her cell phone to check the time and found the battery was dead, or if she dug into her bag for a granola bar to tide herself over and it was too crumbly, she might cry a bit.

And she didn’t want that, she didn’t want to be a crybaby or be needy.  Verona made a conscious effort to brace herself against those feelings.  Magic school tomorrow, unless something else came up.  Or… technically it was later today, since it was after midnight.  But tomorrow too.

Just hold onto that, she thought.  Magic school tomorrow.

Lucy was holding up, despite having a worse day before this whole thing.  But Lucy didn’t like to show weakness and it took a lot of careful attention to see how she was doing.  Verona committed herself mentally to keep that eye out.

And Avery had sat the entire drive over, between Verona and Lucy, her head resting sideways on Lucy’s shoulder, her gaze on nothing in particular.  Thinking, maybe.

The movies didn’t cover this.  How you only had so much ability to deal with crap before you had to retreat into your Self.  What you knew, your basic ways of functioning and dealing.  It had been dumb, so dumb, to go bird form back there.  To have the Faerie be able to manipulate that.

Sans hat, sans mask, sans cape, Verona walked across the road without cars, beneath a streetlight with a thick spiderweb below it, illuminated bright in a way that probably drew in a lot of food for the spider.

No cars on the road.  Most of Kennet was dark.  The stars were bright overhead.

There was a bit of blood by the side of the road.  Verona turned on her Sight to look around, and saw more.  She pointed.

“Yeah,” Lucy said, quiet.

“It was here,” Clementine said.  She’d climbed out of Sharon’s car and walked over from that distant parking spot, while John had walked over the other way, from Matthew’s truck to the car, guarding Sharon.

Clementine’s hair was short and parted like a schoolboy’s, but she had a lot of feminine affectation in the choice of basic makeup, shirt, shorts, and shoe colors, and a bigger-than-average chest that would make it hard for her to be mistaken as a little boy from any distance.  She had a bead of blood at one earlobe and a heavy, blocky metal bracelet of overlapping and interlocking cubes and prisms at her wrist, but no other jewelry.

She also had scars.  Some were a bruised purple-blue that would always stand out, and others were smaller.  One by her eye, making it perpetually a bit more closed than the other, one at the side of her throat, one bad one inside the crook of her elbow.  It looked like she’d been stabbed at one point, with how straight and short a line it was, on the back of her forearm.

“The car?  The bag of fur?” Lucy asked.

“Bundle, I’d say.  Or package.  It probably took time to put together in that dense way.  I’m surprised it didn’t smell or have maggots.  It had to be fresh.”

“It wasn’t, ” Avery murmured, bending down.  She reached out and the light from the streetlight above caught on a single strand of spider-silk Avery had picked out.  Verona could only see the strand with her Sight.

Avery stood, finger held out, and lifted up the strand.

“It is rare for someone or something to be held in such esteem that even the starving wouldn’t partake of their food,” Daniel said.  He had lain down across the hood of Matthew’s truck, knees bent and feet on the bumper, hands folded on his stomach, eyes on the sky.  “He or she must have been something special.”

“She was,” John intoned.

“She was,” Charles said, a bit begrudging in how he said it.

“There’s a stain around it,” Lucy murmured, to Avery and Verona.  She held up her hand, four fingers extended, and then swept it from a north-y direction down toward the bloodstain.  “Like… badness carried it here.  Or the culprit of the murder brought it here.  And there’s no accompanying stain painting the ground in the direction where it’s carried away.”

Avery held the silk and put her face close to it, looking along it.  She pointed in the same direction.

“Wind’s blowing that ribbon toward the road out of town,” Lucy said, her eyes staring off that way.

“Yeah,” Avery said.  “They left with it?”

“Maybe,” Verona said.  She paced, looking, her Sight active.

The Sight waned, getting less clear and less Sight-y.  She sighed, and looked up at John, waving, then indicating the car he was guarding.

He shifted position, his back to the window, blocking Sharon’s view.  Verona’s sight gradually returned.

“Clementine!” Sharon shouted, top of her lungs.  “Call the police!”

Even the shouting caused Verona’s sight to dim.  It rankled.

“Oh yes, do call the police,” Daniel said.  “We have a dark and mysterious gunman, a bedraggled mess of a man who is clearly in ill health-”

“A much abused, bedraggled mess of a man in bad health,” Charles grumbled.  “Even the boy with dangerous flights of fancy denigrates me.”

“Ah, but you see,” Daniel said, “to denigrate, if you pull the word apart, is to paint something black.  How could I denigrate you if you’re already blackened, through and through?”

“Is he?” Clementine asked.

“Isn’t he?  You don’t see it?  If you’ll trust me, know it’s there.”

“I think I trust you on things like this, Daniel.  Sure,” Clementine said.

“I would be careful with your words, sir,” Daniel told Charles.  “You can’t be careless, or you’ll get yourself into great trouble.  I don’t think denigrate is the word you want.”

“I can say whatever the hell I damn well please,” Charles said.  “I can’t do much.  I don’t have much.  But I have that.”

“I know I didn’t agree to leave the apartment,” Clementine said.  “But you can’t tell me anything?  I’ve tried to be cooperative and helpful here.  I’ll be driving back all night, because Daniel can’t drive and Sharon would probably steer things around to come back here.”

“Telling you would be costly,” Charles said.  “People would know.  I’d be expected to pay a price, and I don’t have much to pay with.  If it meant taking him down a peg, I’d risk it.  Hurt my enemy, sure.  But no.  It’s not easy.  We made our terms clear.”

“So there’s this secret organization, then?” Clementine asked.  “I’ve seen hints of something behind the scenes.  Networks like my landlord, this guy who was in this city Sharon mentioned, and… those kids?  You?”

Charles was silent, chin set.

Verona walked down the road until she found a drain.  She bent down and looked through with her Sight.

An eyeless, noseless face pressed against the underside of the grate, mouth opening and closing.  Its flesh was slick and boiled red-white.

In the background, Daniel was saying, “Officer, officer, those three little girls are especially dangerous.  Arrest them.”

“I’ve been kidnapped, Daniel, and you’re all buddy-buddy with them!” Sharon shrieked the words.

Verona glanced around, but they were near the rest stop, and the nearest house was a minute or two of driving away.

“Teenagers,” Lucy said.  “Not little girls.”

“Well, you’re certainly not large girls, you may be glad of that, or you wouldn’t be so nimble, and you are girls, I think.  Do correct me if I’m wrong.”

“We’re girls,” Avery said. At a nudging from Lucy, she added, “Teenage girls.”

Verona smiled at that, then turned her attention to the grate-meat-thing.

“Hey,” Verona murmured.  She cupped a hand and addressed the thing below. “Hello down there.  You had to notice the big chunk of bloody meat that was pulled out of the car, right?”

The thing’s approximation of a nod was a up-down slap of boneless face against the underside of the grate.

“Was it three teenagers?”

“Were they from out of town?”

The head turned, like it was looking off to the side or touching cheek to shoulder, then flipped around to the other shoulder, slapping itself like a dead fish against the grate, side to side.  Slap slap for ‘No’.  Then the ‘yes’.

Verona dropped her bag and dug into it.  She found the granola bar she had been considering eating, and then cracked it open.

Yep, most of it was loose oats, floating in the wrapper, with only two intact chunks.  She pinned the chunks down and tipped the oats into the drain.  “Payment for your answers and any answers to come.  Food I was looking forward to, a bit.  May you draw some sustenance from it.”

The face returned.  Most of the oats had settled into the vague hollows where eyes should be, or stuck to fluids on the ‘skin’.

It smiled, toothless, and slapped the grate once.

“Did they say anything about practice?  Or spirits?  Or recognize any spirits?”

Slap slap slap.  No, no, no.

“They weren’t practitioners then.”

“So a car narrowly avoids a car accident, and this bundle of meat is in a trash bag at the back, right?”

“Was there a driver?”

“Okay, so the car wasn’t magicked to run on its own.  And this driver, they didn’t stick around?  They let someone else take the meat…”

“And they were a local?”

The head retreated down into the darkness a bit.

She tossed down one of the two big chunks.  The face caught it, and mashed it up in a gumless, tongueless mouth.

“Why did they leave?”

“Yes no only, huh?  Did they run?”

“Was this person who drove the car and ran-”

A distant scream cut her off.  The face plummeted into darkness, and she straightened, blinking to try to see as she went blind.  No, it was her Sight failing her, her ability to see in the dark slipping away and letting everything fall into darkness and gloom.

A police car was coming down the road.  Sharon leaned out of her window, shrieking at the top of her lungs.

The car slowed to a stop in the middle of the road.  There was nothing in the way of traffic this late at night, so it didn’t seem to matter.  The officer spoke through the open window.  “Everything okay?”

“All good,” Clementine said.

“This guy’s not giving you trouble?”

“Him?” Clementine looked surprised, turning to Charles.

“He’s very grouchy,” Daniel said.  “When you really dwell on the matter, isn’t a sour disposition a kind of assault as bad as any scar?  We have such limited time on the earth, and spoiling that limited time is really a grave, terrible thing, isn’t it?”

“Are you on something?”

“I find myself wishing I were,” Daniel said.  “Alas.”

“He’s- um, he’s got a mental health issue,” Clementine said.

“I do.  I was mistreated as a child, you see.  I would call it a lifelong heartsickess, stemming from that.”

“Uh huh,” the officer said, unimpressed, even as Daniel affected a pose, head lolling back, back of the hand on his forehead.

“You girls?” the officer raised his voice, making it a question.  His attention was on Lucy.  “It’s late for you to be out.”

“Yes sir,” Lucy said.

“Are we in trouble, sir?  I’m not trying to be rude, just wondering,” Lucy said.

“It depends on what you’re up to.  Three kids out in the middle of the night, with people they don’t seem to be related to?”

“I’m not sure what you want me to say, sir.”

“Are you playing games with me?”

“We’re with adults, isn’t that all that matters?” Avery asked.

Verona looked back at the absent face, mouthed a swear word, then jogged over.

“You’re with adults.  One with mental issues, and another is…”

The cop trailed off, but he was looking at Charles.  He didn’t seem to have the words for why he didn’t think highly of Charles.

“We’re going to this summer school type thing, sir,” Verona said, faking a bright expression.  “We still have the rest of the trip ahead of us, and it’s a long way away.  Hopefully we get there soon.  This is Clementine, and she was giving us a bit of a ride, then going home with people from her neighborhood.”

Clementine raised a hand as she was identified.

“The person from the neighborhood would be me,” Daniel said

“Your parents know about this?” the officer asked them.

“They gave us the go-ahead to go and gave us a bit of money,” Avery said.

Lucy was getting a bit more tense.  As hard as it was for Verona to figure out how Lucy was doing, she could see that plain and clear.  The cop probably could too.

“ID?” he asked Clementine.

“Clementine.  Manitoba?”

“Vision problem noted on your license.  It’s too late to drive with rowdy kids, this guy-”

He indicated Daniel, who was humming loudly, still leaning back against the hood of the truck.

“-who might be rowdy on his own.”

“Oh, I am.  But I can sit quiet when I must,” Daniel said.

The officer looked at Charles, and again, couldn’t seem to articulate his reservations.

“-Kids, strange company, and at night, with a vision problem.  For a long trip?”

“Yes sir.  I’m cleared for night driving but it isn’t fun.  We’ll probably stop at a hotel or motel.”

“There’s two places in town, north end.”  The officer stuck an arm out the window to point.  Verona’s heart sank.  “And a couple more about an hour west.”

“Hour west it is,” she said.

Okay, good.  They didn’t have to worry about these guys staying in town for any longer.

“Drive safe,” he told her.

“Will do, sir,” Clementine said.

They stepped off the road, and he carried on his way.  Verona watched the cop car disappear.

Verona looked over.  John was inside the car, casually leaning out the window Sharon had been at a moment ago.  His arm was around Sharon’s head and mouth.

The officer hadn’t heard the screaming, and she hadn’t been able to scream with John holding her.

“In the future,” Lucy said, to Verona and Avery.  “Maybe don’t volunteer information to the police that you don’t have to?  I know you’re good at-”

Lucy glanced at Clementine.

“Yeah,” Verona said.  “Wording?”

“You’re good at wording, sure, but that could have gone sideways if he was an asshole, or if he was a little more curious.”

“Yeah, but what you were doing wasn’t working.”

“Maybe, maybe not.  But my concern is less about the moment and more about the long-term.  I’m okay with him not being happy with us if it means we’re not giving him ammo to use later.  I’m basing this on stuff that happened to Booker.  Stuff my mom’s said.  Be polite, no sudden moves, don’t volunteer anything, call mom to get a lawyer if they arrest you.”

“We handled it okay, I think?” Avery said.

“This time, sure, but what if he wanted to call our parents and verify what we were up to?  And told them where we were?  They think we’re at camp, and those bindings have taken a beating.”

Verona nodded.  Off to her side, Avery was nodding too.

“I’m not meaning to eavesdrop,” Clementine said.  “But I had my own bad experience.  I made friends with two kids who weren’t… I don’t think they were human.  One very pretty, one ugly, with false faces.  I made some mistakes, but with the way things went, I got in a lot of trouble.  You can do everything right and still get the short end of the stick.”

“Yes,” Lucy said.  She seemed to relax a bit, as Clementine said that.

It was like Lucy was tensed up all the time, and Verona could help with that, in a friend way or a being reliable way, but it only ever really helped a little bit.  Having someone agree with her and tell her she wasn’t crazy was like… part of that tension was wondering if she should be tense or if she was overreacting.

Clementine went on, “And you can do everything right and still get punished.  I don’t know how much you know about me, but it happens to me.  I would love more answers.  But what I do know is you can’t make mistakes.  They’ll use that.”

“Broken systems and bad people will,” Lucy said, her eyes downcast.  She looked up at Verona, and there was something in her eyes.  “Can we talk?”

“Just you and me, or…?”

“Avery too.  This is personal but I don’t want you to feel left out.”

“If it’s personal-”

“Come,” Lucy said.  “Back me up.  Tell me I’m not crazy.”

Avery without Snowdrop in tow was a weird thing.  But they’d needed to send Melissa home, and since Clementine needed to show them the way to the car, they’d called Louise.  Snowdrop and Louise were dropping off Melissa, and Louise’s voice was hopefully an easier to digest one compared to a non-local and Charles.

It was just the three of them.  Charles was periodically making gravelly noises at Daniel, talking to Clementine, and looking like he’d rather be somewhere else.  John guarded Sharon.

“Couldn’t say it with Clementine close, but a spiritual type thing in the Drains had some things to say about the car crash,” Verona reported.

“Not what I wanted to talk about,” Lucy said.  “But?  Useful?”

“Two locals and one out of towner, pretty much confirmed not practitioner or Other, arrived on the scene after the near-accident.  The driver ran for it, uninjured, for reasons unknown.  The three teenage boys left.”

“Do we try to chase?” Avery asked.  “Is there any point?”

“It’s… it’s valuable,” Lucy said.  “We should maybe head down that way.  But the cleanup for this whole thing, and chasing this down… we’ll be tight on time.”

“We have the watch,” Avery said.  “That helps.”

“It’s still a lot,” Lucy said.  “And I’m making it worse by asking, but while we were waiting for Matthew and Edith, Ronnie.  You talked about being a cat.  And then Daniel said stuff… and it got me thinking again.”

“Oh,” Verona said.  She opened her mouth to say something, then stopped.

This was pretty close to that territory of what she’d been thinking about earlier, where the wrong thing could make her break down in a stupid way she really didn’t want to.

“I’m a little out of the loop here,” Avery said.

“I thought it was a joke, or random Verona ramblings.  Something like how she could be a cat full time, be a familiar, and hang out with you and me indefinitely,” Lucy said.

Please don’t tip off Lucy that I talked to you first.  It would hurt her more than anything, Verona thought.  She wanted to jump in, say something, or even ask for a… what was it called, when someone postponed- stay of execution.  Putting this off until she could deal with it.

But she ended up clearing her throat, trying to find her voice, failing to, and looked back at Kennet, her Sight on so she could see the town’s pulsing heartbeat.

“Can you explain what you’re thinking, Lucy?” Avery asked.

“Were you serious, Verona?” Lucy asked.

Verona took in a deep breath, then exhaled an iffy “Uhhm,” before pressing her lips together and sighing.

The idea of the nightmare sat heavy in her mind’s eye.  The divide that had happened there.  Was this what pushed Lucy away?

Avery touched her upper arm, rubbing it.  Her hand and Verona’s arm were both cooler than warm.

“Is that the plan, Ronnie?” Lucy asked.  “Escape?  Giving up your life as a human?”

“A,” Verona responded, not making eye contact.  She had to try for what felt like two seconds so she could get out more words without getting emotional.  “A plan.  Just in case.”

“What are the other plans?” Lucy asked.

“I don’t-” Verona started.  She shook her head.

“Maybe we can talk this out later?  Or put it to paper, if talking’s hard?” Avery asked, very quiet.

“Please,” Verona said.  She took in a deep breath.  Still calm.  Still collected.  “Can we deal with the monsters invading our home town, first?  And the missing meat of giant red wolf spirit-judge thing?  And getting back to school?”

“We can try,” Avery said.

“You keep not telling me what’s going on.” Lucy sounded hurt, which hurt Verona.

“If I tell you everything, how do I stop from becoming my dad?” Verona asked.  “Whining all the time, and being nothing but vulnerable, or nothing but a sad sack.”

“I don’t think you would go that far,” Lucy said.

“But what if I did or what if it did happen?  What- it’s… it might be what scares me more than anything.  That I open up and then I can’t close up again and I become my dad.  Or I close up and I become just what he always accuses my mom of being, this distant, awful person.  I can’t win, so why play?  Why- what am I supposed to do?” Verona asked, doing her best to control her voice.

“I don’t think being a cat would solve it,” Lucy said.  “I’m sorry.  It’d have its own problems.”

“But I’d choose it!  I’d be living on my own terms.  It sucks, it sucks so much, because everything I do or don’t do feels like I’m- do you get what I mean?”

“I’m trying to,” Lucy said.

“Every day, you know that, right?  It’s every day even when I try to go away to school, it somehow brings me back and every decision I make is influenced by it.”

“Careful,” Lucy said.

“It is!” Verona raised her voice.  Off to the side, the Aware, Charles, and John looked her way.  She looked away, turning her back to them.  “It is.”

“Maybe, I don’t want to say you’re lying, but just be careful.  Moments like this are when it’s easy to slip up.  Like Charles getting angry at Alexander.”

“Take five seconds?” Avery asked.

She took another five.  The others didn’t interrupt, except to give each other worried looks.

“It’s my family.  It’s what I go home to when I go home.  It’s deciding the meals I’m eating and when I’m going to sleep, or if I’m staying up late unable to sleep, and it’s when I spend time with you and how much I want to get into the practice and out of all that, back home.  It literally becomes a part of me and it’s not a part of me I like and I don’t want to become that.  I want that out of my life and out of me.”

“How-” Lucy started.  She made eye contact with Avery.  “How much worse have things gotten since I stopped coming over?”

“It’s mostly the same,” Verona answered.  “But it’s const- it’s the repetition of it.  It’s grinding me down and even the good things are getting less good because it’s- how do I enjoy something if in the back of my mind I’m like, uh, but there’s that?”

“I do kind of get it,” Lucy said.  “I’m- I’m really lucky I have the ability to go home.  I can breathe at the end of the day.  And for you it’s almost the opposite.”

“At the risk of butting in,” Avery ventured, clearly holding off on the next part of what she was saying.

“No, no, no no,” Verona said.  “Please butt.  All the butt.”

Lucy made a small sniffing sound, and it was close enough to a laugh that it made Verona react.  It took a second or two, each of them contributing or realizing why the others were amused.

They laughed, and it was a tired, exhausted, loopy sort of laugh, Verona’s hand at Avery’s shoulder, fingernails in her sleeve, leaning on Lucy too for balance, until Lucy hugged her and the movement of Lucy’s chest as Lucy laughed helped set off Verona’s own.

Lucy must have pulled Avery into the hug, because Avery didn’t join the hug so much as she crashed into it, her ribs bumping into Verona and Lucy’s sides.

Foreheads touching, arms around one another in an uncomfortable way, Lucy’s one arm squeezing Verona’s ribs so much it hurt, someone’s fingernails between her shoulder blades, the giggles and laughs tapered off.

“I experienced that.  That emotional grind, the worry it would consume me,” Avery murmured.  “Feeling suffocated at home.”

Verona nodded.  Probably messing up her bangs as they rubbed against the others’ heads.  But whatever.

“I got out and I’ll probably keep a space in my heart forever for Ms. Hardy for helping me out of that awful dynamic.  I can’t even imagine being stuck in it for…”

“Too long,” Verona finished the sentence.

“What do we do?” Lucy asked.

“We need to find the bundle of meat and fur, and do something about the perimeter, and maybe help deal with some Others, we’ll have to talk to Matthew and Edith about that,” Verona said.  “Then school, hopefully, in… not that many hours.  Seven?  Eight?”

“I think Lucy meant about your situation,” Avery said.

“Let me pretend,” Verona said.  “Let me pretend you’re entertaining it.  Let me just imagine that hey, maybe, just maybe, if I run out of patience we can sit down and you won’t get mad at me.  And I can be a cat.  Or we can make a demesne and I can run away and stay in it.  Or I can become some Other that isn’t too awful to be.”

“Talk to me before you do anything in that department?  Because I want to do high school with you two.  I want to take on adult life with you two.  I know you talk a lot about not having any adults to look to who are doing great, but I- I look at my mom and Aunt Heather, or my mom and her friends, or people around them.  And that’s cool.  I can see that.  Except it’s us, and with magic on the side.”

“Magic smack dab in the middle, please,” Verona said.

“…We’ll try to figure something out.”

“Is pretending enough?” Avery asked.  “Because I got pretty crazy into some fantasizing and building up narratives in my head, during my lonely patch.  I don’t think it made things that much better.”

“I don’t know,” Verona said.  “I have five more years, right?  I don’t get any real choice in that.  Which- which is crazy because we have all these powers and all this freedom to run off to school with connection breaker diagrams and stuff, but I’ve still got to be eighteen before I can go off on my own, right?”

“There’s emancipation,” Avery said.  “I think you can be sixteen?”

“Harder than it sounds.  Gotta prove a steady stream of income and crap,” Verona said.  “Maybe.  I’m just so worried that a few more years will pass and I’ll be so ground down or so tired that- that it becomes easier to stay like that.  And then what?  I’m twenty?  Twenty-five?  Stuck in that.”

Her voice cracked a bit on that last word.

Which- which sucked, because she’d held it together up until now.

“I won’t let you,” Lucy said.  “Provisional on Avery’s a-okay…”

“Wait, wait, what are you doing?” Verona broke the hug.  “Stop.  I have to okay it too.”

�Provisional on Avery saying it’s okay,” Lucy spoke more seriously, meeting Verona’s eyes, her Sight active so the whites of her eyes were red.  Her hair took on a pink tint.  “I will swear to step in before you end up like that.”

“What if I turn out to be the worst person?” Verona asked.  “A miniature version of my dad?  Or an addict?  Or- what if a cursed item or possessing Other turns me evil?”

“I’m okay with this,” Avery told Lucy.  “If you’ll let me swear the same.”

“Go for it,” Avery said.

“I swear,” Lucy said, her eyes fixed on Verona’s.  “I will get you out of there if you get too old.  I will fight to get you out of there if it looks like it’s too much.  I will get a place for you to stay, abduct you, or do whatever else, if it gets you clear.”

“I don’t want to drag you down with me.”

“Too bad,” Avery said.  She smiled.  “What she said?  I’m butting in, with, quote, all the butts.  Lucy’ll have help when it comes down to it, as long as I’ve got two legs and a working brain.”

The gold leaf letters glimmered all over Avery’s skin and around her eyes, accenting the misty look with the stark black pupils and the irises that had everything that wasn’t that steely blue now a deep black that branched out a bit past the usual bounds.

Verona drew in a deep breath, looking up at the sky.  The stars were so clear at this time of night.  She nodded.

“Just promise me, no big changes without asking,” Lucy said.

“I won’t try anything huge and permanent without asking you guys,” Verona said.

A moment passed, where they were breathing a bit harder than necessary, as if they’d been holding breath, or putting double the breath into words that weren’t any louder as a result, just… heavier.  Denser.

A moment where they took it in.  Verona absorbed the deals, promises, and filed them away mentally, thinking about ways it could go wrong and everything she might do to avert it.  Most of the ways were things that would probably destroy them.  Like something happening to Lucy, or Verona being taken somewhere out of reach, somehow.

Inside her chest and her head, it felt like a whole bunch of stuff was stored in boxes, and now those boxes were just a bit bigger.  Stuff needed to be moved around and she in no way had the capacity to do that moving or think about it, so it just felt… bigger.  Like she could breathe a bit more, even if she felt apprehensive about having to sort through all of this.

It wasn’t an ambient, soul-grinding dread, now.  It was something she still didn’t want to face… a long, long tunnel, with freedom at the end.  An escape hatch if she really needed it, one that Lucy accepted.

She didn’t want to cry.  She didn’t want to be a crybaby.  She didn’t want to be a loser.

She had to control the next deep breath and exhalation, to keep from tipping over that line.

“Want to try seeing what we can do here?” Avery asked.  She extended a hand back in the direction of the others.

“You don’t get away with this, you know.  There are consequences.  Legal ones.  For you too, Clem!  I thought we were friends!”

“This is going to be a long drive,” Clementine said.

“Hold up a bit?” Lucy asked.  “In case we need something?”

Clementine obliged.  She bent down, a finger extended.

She had a hair that was resting on her finger, or two hairs spliced together.  According to her, each of the two ends of the hair pulled toward the Faerie.  One to Guilherme, one to Maricica.

They’d checked, putting bits of glamour close.  The hairs were drawn to it.

Clementine approached the crashed car.  It was a sedan, and that was about where her interest and knowledge about cars ended.

Fifteen minutes west from Kennet, it had driven off into a ditch.  There was a note on the windshield asking the owners to call some number for what might have been a tow company.

“It’s strange,” Clementine said.  “I haven’t had many instances where I could really get into the history of a thing.”

“This is not the time to talk about antique collecting,” Sharon said.  “They assaulted and kidnapped me.  They’re clearly out of their minds.  Why are we playing along?”

“Can you get her to be quiet?” Avery asked.

John adjusted his stance and his grip on the rifle.

Avery, Verona, and Lucy moved around to the back of the car.  Verona pulled the Ratfink Key out of her pocket, then slid it into the lock of the trunk.

The trunk popped open.  It wouldn’t close again without a bungee cord to hold it that way, or a change-out of the lock.  That was the drawback of the Ratfink Key.

The interior was dark, and Sharon was too close for Verona to use her Sight.  She used the flashlight function on her smartphone, instead.

Blood.  Verona reached in and she felt clumps of coarse hair rolling and dragging in the blood as she ran her fingers over it.  She picked it up and held it out.

The blood was still fresh, but it looked like it didn’t clot or it clotted in the order of months, not seconds.  The hair was the same color as the blood, which made it hard to tell where one ended and the other began.

“This was the car the teenagers were driving?” Avery asked.

“Yes,” Daniel said.  “I remember seeing it and thinking the color matched a dress one of my audience members wore, once.  It matched her eyes and hair, to great effect.”

“It’s magenta,” Verona said.

“She was very extra, even for her kind.”

“So,” Lucy murmured.  “Seems like, around the same time we’re coming into town using the Ruins, they decide to move the Carmine Beast’s remains.”

“Yes,” Verona confirmed.

“This person or people then carry it from the Ruins to the bridge, where things enter back into our world.  They pack it up into a car.  A lone driver goes to take it somewhere else, possibly aiming to take it out of town.”

“They were on a straight course to leave town,” Avery said.

“There’s a near accident with Clementine.  It’s standard Gilded Lily stuff,” Lucy noted.  “The driver can’t stick around because… either concerns about Sharon, likely, or something about Daniel or Clementine.”

“Daniel may trip up one of the Faerie,” Avery said.  “I can’t imagine them running though.  Or driving a car.  Clementine… maybe Alpy wouldn’t want to get involved because she hates getting involved?”

Verona shook her head.  “The way she acted around Matthew’s truck and nearly scared him into crashing, I don’t think she could even get a car moving, let alone drive it.”

“Could it be acting?” Lucy asked.

“Pretty sure it’s not.”

“This was a risky move to make,” Avery noted, her arms folded.  It was chilly out, and they’d pulled on jackets.  Dead of night.  “Moving the stuff now.  They had to be worried we’d find it.”

“Maybe the plan was to move it before we got back, and when we declared we were on our way, their hand was forced?  Maybe they couldn’t risk that we’d learned a new, simple trick and now we had the ability to find it?” Verona suggested.

“This is a lot of maybes and supposition,” Lucy said.

“But it’s- it’s good to think of the roads they might have taken,” Avery said.

Lucy nodded.  “For whatever reason, they decide to move it.  They have to leave it.  Clem’s dynamic helps.  Maybe Sharon’s.”

“If it was Matthew and-or Edith, then being near Sharon would be dangerous.  Losing the spirit or losing the bindings that keep the Doom contained,” Verona noted.

“Teenagers take the furs.  Probably figure it’s worth money, or they want to ask someone, and so they load it into their trunk, on top of newspapers and plastic bags, looks like, and drive off.  They don’t make it far.”

“Once they�re far enough from Sharon, maybe, the driver can come for them?”

“When Daniel and my friend who wears the deer mask seemed to disappear, was the car you nearly hit still there?”

“So it might have driven after these guys,” Lucy said.

“Who disappeared,” Avery murmured.  “No connections, so I don’t think there’s any bodies in the woods that are close by… eesh.  I get shivers just saying that.”

Verona walked around the magenta sedan.  “No car damage, but they get scared off the road.  They disappear, and this meat…”

“Stains are heavy and streaked.  Same kind of streak as there was before,” Lucy noted.  “I think the same people who went after the Beast moved the meat, then chased these guys and took the meat back.”

“It’s too clean,” Avery said.

“What do you mean?” Lucy asked.

“There’s this area around the car without handprints.  Do you guys see anything?”

They walked around.  Searching.

There was an area around the car where the Sight didn’t offer anything.  They had to get Clementine to drive Sharon’s car further away to check the one end, because Sharon was watching it.

“They covered their tracks,” Verona said, bending down.  She touched the road.  Nothing obvious.  Just grit.  She tasted it.

“Salt, but I don’t know if that’s salt from the de-icing last winter or something they did.”

She checked the ground further away.

“Not as salty in this spot.”

“So they threw down salt?” Lucy asked.

“They know enough about the practice to do that,” Verona mused.  “I wonder if salt helps keep echoes from springing up, off the three boys.”

“Eesh,” Avery muttered.

“The way they did this narrows some things down,” Lucy said.  “Probably not a culprit who can drive.  Hey, Clem?”

“Still have that hair?  The one the man in the cave gave you?”

Clementine held out her finger.  The hair stuck to her fingernail, strands blowing in the wind, pointing toward Avery and Lucy.

Lucy backed up, pulling on Avery’s shoulder.

After they got about five paces away, the strands shifted direction, pointing back toward Kennet.

“This is how I knew to go north, to where you were,” Clementine said.

“Can you move over to the trunk?”

Clementine did, then stopped.  “Oh, wow, that’s- that’s a lot of blood.”

“Can you put your finger close to it?”

Clementine did.  Verona shone the flashlight for a better view, being careful not to get too close, out of concern it might burn away the glamour.

“Nothing,” Clementine said.  The strands were blowing in a way that still pointed at Kennet, which meant they laid pretty much flat against her arm.  She moved this way and that, and they remained consistent, up until Avery walked closer.

“I figured if they were the cuprits,” Lucy mused, “maybe there’d be fingerprints or dust or something we could track.  But it didn’t fit them anyway.  Driving, handling meat.”

“That could be what they want us to think,” Verona pointed out.

“Good.  Good thinking.  Yes.  But it’s still a weird fit.”

“Thank you, Clementine,” Avery said.

Clementine nodded, frowning.

“We must be going, dear Clementine,” Daniel proclaimed.  “Sharon will blow a fuse and that is a very macabre thing when it’s a human.  People leak everywhere.”

Clementine gave him a smile.  “Get situated?”

Daniel did, climbing into the car.  He began to sing.  Sharon had rolled down the window to shout at them earlier and to scream to the police, but John had fixed the doors and the way her wrists were bound to the middle seatbelt to keep her from doing so.  Even with all the doors and windows shut, and the car parked a good distance away, Daniel’s singing and Sharon’s voice were both audible.  The louder she got, the louder he got.

“I don’t know if I can see him the same way again,” Clementine said.  “It’s like a crazy nightmare.”

“Daniel?” Avery asked.

“He’s always had his head in the clouds, but I never thought those clouds were so dark.  Or… I’ve seen things like he described.  It’s how we connected at first.  But I didn’t think it would be so tangible.”

“I’m sorry,” Verona said.  “That sucks.”

“I want to find a way forward that doesn’t mean I lose people.  I had what may be a once-in-a-lifetime sort of moment, meeting someone very special, and if I take too long, I may not be able to reconnect with them again.”

“I’m pretty sure Bristow isn’t the way to that person,” Lucy said.

Daniel sang, a tremulous high note.

“I’d better go keep Sharon from blowing a messy fuse,” Clementine said.

“Give me… five minutes?” Verona asked.

Verona hurried back to the truck.

She sorted out the stuff she’d left there, and that included Sharon’s phone and laptop.

“Luce!?” she called out.

“I’m pretty sure Sharon can’t hear.”

Lucy pulled out her wallet, found the card they’d gotten from Zed back when they’d confiscated things, and handed it over.

There were no disc drives or slots big enough for the card, so she ran it through the seam along the side of the lower section.  The screen fritzed, and she did it again.

Everything glitched up, with scrambled characters and spots of color across the thing.  Tapping the touchpad got her past the password.  Into the desktop.

Clicking through, she found the online stream as the homepage.  She had to fiddle to find the right video file.  She deleted the footage from earlier in the night.

Video file, open as notepad.  Taking out her quill, she dragged it across the screen and moved some characters around, saved, then tried to open it.

She did that with everything she could find from the last twenty-four hours.

The centipede offered everything up.  It was a little arcane in how it presented that everything, but that was fine.

Map program.  Kennet was saved as a location.  She swapped its name with an island just inside the lake.  She checked that a few times, and every time she re-searched Kennet using the program, it took her to the same location.  She did the same thing for the browser, and a few other common map programs.

Avery pulled out her phone, frowning.

“What?” Verona asked.

“Checking it didn’t do that on everything on the internet.  Doesn’t look like it.”

“Good,” Verona said.  “I guess if she borrows someone’s phone, she can find us.  Otherwise… this’ll slow her down.”

“It’s been five minutes,” Lucy noted.

“I made it a question, not a statement, right?” Verona asked.

“It’s possible all this gets undone when she gets her hands on it,” Avery said.

“I think if she can accept it as normal, she can’t push back against it.”

“Don’t overdo it then,” Lucy said.  “Don’t get too weird.”

“She’s the type who’ll come back, you know.  She’s dangerous.  She was picking on Mr. Lai, getting cops to go bother him, and he’s a good teacher.”

“I’m not saying no,” Lucy said.  “But whatever we’re doing here, do it right, keep it simple and effective.”

“I vote for dropping the laptop into deep water,” Avery said.  “That’s both simple and effective.”

“She’d push back against that.  But if we send her to the wrong place, and give her enough misdirection and distractions… maybe?”

Verona found the other streaming site, and scrolled through the two hundred videos that had been posted.

Verona looked over at her friend.

“I hate to say this.  I really, really, really hate to say this.  But she invaded our home, hurt people we -I- swore to protect.  I think we’re clear to misdirect her and delete the stuff about Kennet.  She pointed a gun at you and you and John knocked her out.  Cool.  But if you do something here, to her livelihood, as awful as that livelihood is?  That’s probably a karmic hit.  It might mean stuff doesn’t go our way for a while, maybe a good while.  It hurts us as much as it hurts her.”

Verona was silent, clicking through a bit.  She found the social media.  Comments left on other people’s videos.  Messages sent in private.

Verona stepped away, stretching.

“Almost done?” Clementine asked.

“Think so,” Verona asked.

Lucy took over, scrolling.  Her expression darkened a bit with every passing moment.

“She’s hurt enough people,” Avery said.

She clicked through the three pages of warnings and information.  Deleted.

The ghost hunting site was on fire with the heated discussion of the ‘hoax’ and, Verona saw, a lot of speculation about who she was.  A lot of that was working to figure out who she was, looking at class rolls for her school.

That was, uh, spooky.  Even with the mask on…

Lucy interrupted the ongoing conversation, deleting that archive too.

Lucy transposed characters in the password, then closed the laptop up.  They gathered everything, then handed it over.

They kept the rifle.  Or John did.

“Any anger on her part should be directed at Bristow,” Verona said.  “I don’t know how he’ll handle it.  He’ll probably have a way, from the way our phone conversation went.”

“Good luck finding what you’re looking for.”

Clementine looked over at Charles, who was having a smoke.  He turned to look back.

“The way out isn’t to get in deeper,” Charles growled.

He shrugged.  “It started off not as bad, didn’t it?”

“You had a lot of friends then?  Big family?”

“Decent sized family.  A neighbor I got along with.  But the stuff… the items took it all.”

“And as they went away, the issue got worse?”

“I can’t bring them back.  I don’t think so, anyway.”

“Find some more.  Build a new family.”

“A found family,” Avery said.

“And get away from Lawrence.  I knew him a long time ago.”  Charles managed to both growl his words and make an expression like someone had just put a daub of dog crap on the tip of his nose, and he couldn’t do anything but move his face.

“It feels like you’re all connected.”

“Not commenting on that.  But I knew the man back before the mustache and tweed.  Before he collected people.  He was always an asshole who thought clever and pretty words hid the repulsive parts.  Always bullish, always ambitious.  Because he wants to collect titles.  Landlord, professor, lawyer, other ones.”

“I’ll figure something out,” Clementine said.

“Nothing would be better for you than walking away.  Nothing would hurt his ambitions more than losing you, and anyone else who might leave after you go.  Fight every instinct you have,” Charles said.  “I’m too beaten and battered to have much goodwill to spare for others… but I told these three girls to walk away from this.  I’m telling you the same.  You, walk away from that man.  That’s coming from the best parts of me, and I know there’s no use to it.”

“I’ll figure something out,” Clementine said, repeating herself, but in a very different, more thoughtful tone.

She shut the door and started up the car.

The three of them watched as she drove off.

“Does being forsworn mean people don’t listen to you?  That stuff goes wrong?” Avery asked.

“Can,” Charles said, watching the carload of people go.

“Does you arguing for something possibly make it less likely they do that something?”

“The deal for me in Kennet is they protect me from most of it.  That includes the strife, doom, whatever else that might flock to me to twist what I try.”

“The protections are pretty weak right now,” Verona observed.

“You’re not wrong.  I think we�re fine.”

“Clem’s a tough cookie,” Avery said.  “That’s a long car ride with those two.  Talk about being ground down.”

John, largely quiet up to this point, opened the driver’s door of the truck.

“Want to go?” Lucy asked.

“The perimeter is down.  Dangerous Others are inside Kennet.  There’s work to do.”

They climbed into the back.  Charles took the passenger seat.

It was Avery who pulled open the window at the back.  “Charles?”

“You knew the faculty of the Blue Heron?”

“I wasn’t part of their inner circle, but I worked with most now and then.  I did custom work for custom jobs.”

“Any association with the actual Blue Heron?  The god they bound for their big power boost at the start of things?”

“No.  No, they protected that well, early on.  I really was your practitioner equivalent of a… let’s call me an animal trainer.  If they needed a monkey to crawl through the vents and pick a lock or a dog to work alongside a specific person, I could do that.  I made Others.”

Like you maybe made the Hungry Choir?

Or someone else used your tools to make it?

Charles went on, “I preferred being on my own.  They were known names in their field.  I was labor.  A niche specialist.  Then Alexander seemed to decide it would be less work if he could forswear me and take everything I had, to do that work himself.”

“What were they like, then?”

“Durocher was… she wasn’t anything exceedingly remarkable in the looks department, but she was so driven and excited by what she did that I think they all took turns falling in love with her.  I did, even.  But being beside her means having your feet held to the fire.  The fire in this case is monsters most practitioners won’t get within miles of.  She’s teaching?”

“Yeah.  I want to take a class with her,” Verona said.

“So would I,” Charles said.

They couldn’t see his face, but Verona could hear his voice, and it was warm.  Harkening back to older times.

“There was Raymond.  He was bright, goofy, cheerful.  Hard exterior to penetrate on your first few meetings, have to learn how he ticks and work with it.  But the brightness in him… the silence from him that followed my being forsworn stung.  Durocher works big, but Raymond thinks big, and he does it so casually.”

“He’s teaching too,” Avery volunteered.

“I figured.  He’s well?”

“He’s not so bright, colors-wise, not anymore,” Lucy said.  “Bit of a dick.  Not so goofy, not so cheerful.”

“I can’t imagine that.”

“He passed some of that brightness onto his apprentice, maybe,” Avery said.  “Zed.”

“I heard about him.  Hmm.  I wonder how much of that is his being in Alexander’s orbit.”

“His son died,” Lucy said.

“Ah,” Charles said, from the front seat.  There was a long pause.  “That would do it.”

“Tell us about Alexander?” Avery asked.

“Alexander was a scoundrel.  The kind you keep in your friend group but have to warn newcomers about, because he could be so biting, he’d seize on a subject or puzzle and wouldn’t let it go.  If he couldn’t unravel something, it’d eat at him.  It made him a great private investigator and crook at the same time.  He liked the ladies but didn’t have the patience or time to date, so he’d leave a trail of broken or bitter hearts in his wake.  Durocher was the only one who kept talking to him after their fling, but she was intense enough she left her own trail of upset partners behind her.  More intimidated than bitter, mind.”

“Seems like you kept the company of a lot of people who were jerks or hard to get along with,” Verona said.  “Sounds exhausting.”

“It wasn’t,” Charles said, his voice rough.  He sighed.  “That was the problem, I suppose, looking back, that it was so easy to work with them and match their pace.  It should have been harder.  It should have been harder to accept their troubling personalities, it should have been hard because I was spending so much time being careful and watching my back.”

There was something in his tone.  Defeat maybe.  They didn’t pry or ask more questions.

The watch ticked audibly, sitting within a partial circle drawn with chalk powder on dirt.

They’d tested, they’d checked, and they’d deciphered some of the individual facets of the watch.  The one to three o’clock positions and the eleven o’clock through midnight positions were slivers of space that it cast out, where things were more efficient.  Standing on the outside, looking in, the people within were fast.  The environment made it hard to watch for any prolonged period of time, so they helped the environment, in hopes of assisting the watch.

It gave them a good field within which they could work and do more.

Charles had showed them how to make some charms.  They made the trinkets and charms until their hands got sore, and then they ducked away, doing a quick loop of the northern end of forest above Kennet.

Others were covering other avenues of approach, or roving through the city to find the problems.

“No, no, no, no, please!” a skinny man screamed.  “No!  I’ve never hurt anyone!  I didn’t ask to be this!”

Edith advanced on him, unfolding into her spirit form, which slowed how fast she could walk, as her human body flopped forward, hands touching ground, while that feminine, wax-coated body and the candle it held rose high, stretching.

“I’ll obey your rules, I’ll bow to your leadership, I’ll do whatever you say!”

His chest melted like wax.  A heart, burning, was mounted within.

“Please, please, please.  I need that.”

“Edith?” Verona asked.  It was her asking because Lucy and Avery were busy weaving strips of bark into lashes to keep twigs stuck to rocks in specific patterns.  “Can you explain him to me?”

“Look at him with the Sight,” the Girl by Candlelight ordered.

Verona was already using the Sight, but she looked closer.

He was marked, the number ‘3135’ etched onto his back.  Something black and twisted pulsed behind that etching.

“There are Others who allow their nature to be corrupted, for strength, sustenance, tools they need to survive in this world,” the Girl by Candlelight intoned.  “They bend to powers that are better left sealed away, because they are bad for Other and mankind alike.  John has had to gun down some of this one’s ilk.  They would like to dwell here in Kennet, safe, free to have children with human women and mark them with the same corruption, as they have been told to do.  Then, on the day there are seven thousand, nine hundred-”

“-And nineteen,” the man finished.  “It’s not likely to happen.  It won’t be the case.  That’s the gamble, isn’t it?  I’m a harmless creature.  I’m like a man, but I swim well, I breathe underwater.  It’s hard, being this weak, when the draconian rules meant to restrain the biggest and most violent Others also apply to something like me.  I had to, I had to gamble.”

“What happens?” Verona asked.  “When there are seven thousand nine hundred and nineteen?”

“When there are enough of them, they all die in that moment, and that old, ugly power comes to earth and millions of mankind and millions of Other all perish.  As that parent Other slithers from this to its home in some dark world between two adjacent realms, it will cause things that your news will excuse as natural disasters or plague.”

“Geez.  Gotta kill your own buddies then huh?  Or be killed?” Verona asked.

“Forbidden,” the man said, shooting her an apologetic look.  “The mark gives us so much, but it binds us to do certain things.  To carry on our lines.  To abstain from harm or acting against her.  Abstain from taking our own lives.  Abstain from taking the lives of other marked.� Say a pledge daily.”

“They make themselves someone else’s problem,” Edith said.  “Benefits for themselves today, at a risk to the people tomorrow.”

“We estimate there are a mere four thousand and twelve of us now.  Only four thousand.  There’s no reason to panic or take measures just yet…”

“You should revise your estimate to four thousand and eleven,” Edith said.  She crushed the heart she held.

The man ignited, head to toe, in a smokeless flame.

He flailed, staggering, shrieking.

Verona backed away as he reached for her.  Edith, meanwhile, marched forward.  She tossed the wax heart, now unlit, onto a pile of other, very similar hearts.  Some goblin, some strong echoes.

Edith didn’t make it twenty paces into the forest before she touched a spirit that was floating through the trees.  It was a faint shape of a woman with a tangle of wood for a head, crowned in a mane of thorns, translucent and legless, and her touch ignited it.

The first man was still burning.  He collapsed, but crawled.

“Will you stay?” the Girl by Candlelight asked.

“I don’t know,” Verona told her, watching the man stop moving.

“If you go, know that we’ll do what we can here, to protect this town and our territory.  Matthew and I discussed it, and we think we may have to bring more Others in.  We’ll have to be very careful with who and what we select.”

“That swimmy dude that’s supposed to help kill millions is probably not great.”

The Girl by Candlelight’s head turned, tracking someone as they made a mad dash through the trees.

“So many, even without the earring,” Verona noted.

“Some lurked, waiting, hoping to ambush the one with the earring as they made their escape from this town.  Others smell the Carmine Beast’s blood.”

That Other in the trees was surrounded by a growing number of papers attached to the trees.

Papers ignited.  Sparks flew everywhere, but didn’t set fires.  There was only heat.

The heat radiating off the papered tree closest to Verona, about fifty paces away, was enough that she took a step back.

That Other kept going, with twenty or more trees within ten feet of him each radiating that heat.

He tipped over, collapsing.

“Faking,” the Girl by Candlelight said.

Fire erupted around him.  He rose to his feet in a flash, then started running again, but this time he was on fire.  A dog-faced man, lower jaw ajar, naked and covered in sores.

He seemed intent on toughing out the fire, or maybe charging in ahead enough he could dive into the river.  But the fire crawled all over him, apparently blinding him, and he bounced off of tree after tree, tripped over branches, and lost all momentum.  The fire eventually consumed him, and he burned like hot slag, not flesh, with impurities boiling to the surface by the second.

“It’s dawn.  You said you wanted to do this at the crack of dawn.  When he’d be awake.”

“We’ll catch up with you in a bit, then.  Then we decide what we’re doing.”

She had only one transformation left, and she used it.  It made it easier not to think too hard.

His car was in the driveway.  There was a ding in the door, a bit of rust by the wheel well.

It felt more like a stranger’s house than her own.  She’d only been away for one overnight.

She let herself in without noise.  Shoes off, again without noise.

She climbed the stairs.  As she got toward the top of the stairs, she could look down the length of the hallway to her dad’s room.  The television was on, and it was five forty-five in the morning.

She silently made her way to the doorway, where she leaned half in, half out.

He was in bed, and he was awake, drinking from a plastic cup with a cap and a straw.  His expression twisted in pain as he drank.  His breaths, as she watched, were short and pained, one hand at the left side of his stomach, pressing in.

She jumped a little.  He was looking at her.

“Jes- jesus,” he said.  He winced.  “When did you get in?”

“Are you getting the surgery?”

“No.  They’re saying it’s improving, I’m supposed to go in again today, to make sure it keeps going that way.”

“Oh.  How long until you’re better?”

“Up to eight weeks, depending on if they need to intervene.  I’m going to need help, Verona.  I know- I know this isn’t what you wanted for your summer.  I promise you, as awful as it is for you, and I do know it’s awful, it’s worse for me.”

He flinched all of a sudden, making a face.  “Agh.”

“What do you need?” she asked.

“Water.  I’m trying to keep a pitcher filled.  Um, I’ve got to wait another hour and twenty minutes before I can take the pain meds again.  I barely slept all night because of the cramps and vomiting.  When I get up to do that, I want you to change my sheets.  I’m sweating enough it’s probably soaked through to the mattress.  At the current rate, it’ll be once or twice a day.  So keep the laundry running.”

She didn’t respond, listening.

“I appreciate your coming home, Verona.  More than you will ever know.  I know it’s a sacrifice.  I’ll make it up to you somehow.”

“Mmm,” she made a sound.

“I’d like company on my trip to the doctor.  But company in general- what would you say about a marathon of movies?  You can pick one, I can pick one?  Or if you’re not helping me here, there’s stuff to do in the basement.  If you didn’t go too crazy you could use your artistic talents there.  Run what you’re doing by me, pick some colors and do some painting?  Finish the walls, tear up the old carpet?”

She pressed her lips together.

“Or not,” he said.  “You don’t have to.  It’s enough you’re here.”

“You’re on the mend?” she asked.

“No, Verona.  If I was, they wouldn’t be keeping as close an eye on me as they are.  It could go south and it could go south fast.  I’ve set up reminders about my temperature, because a fever could mean my intestines have ruptured.  But I can handle that.  If you could read the sheet, keep an eye on me, that would help.

She wished he’d given a different answer.  One that wasn’t so convincing.

“Stay within earshot?  You can take the cordless phone when you’re doing laundry.  Just in case?  This can be life threatening and I’m pretty scared.”

She’d come, she realized, primed to be angry.  Bitter.  Frustrated.  To lash out, then to storm away.  Back to the school.

She didn’t know how to handle this.

Eight weeks?  A whole summer?  Of having to be close, run errands?  Of changing sheets and whatever else?

Alpeana, she thought, as she leaned away from the door and walked to her room.  Step up your nightmares, because this has your one from last night beat.

“Verona!” he called out.  “I really do appreciate this.  Could you get me a ginger ale from the kitchen?  And open a second one to let it go flat?”

She went into her room, headed to her desk, and dug into her art supplies.

She didn’t have a compass big enough, so she used a ruler with an L-bend, pressed one tip to the floor, and dragged the other in a big circle.

With white paint, she traced the gouge.

With care, she drew the connection breaker diagram.  She elaborated with the ‘s’ curls instead of straight lines, as Eloise had suggested.

Then she adorned it with cursive script, to match that ‘s’ bend.

‘Imagine Verona was never here.  Think you dreamed she came whilst you were half asleep at the crack of dawn’.

She wanted to add to that, to give some pithy encouragement to think about why.  She worried it was too far out of bounds.

She didn’t know if this was right, but she felt like if he was that sick, he’d be in the hospital.  If there was that much real danger they wouldn’t have sent him home.

But, even as she thought that and used it to ease her conscience, she knew she could have said as much to his face.  She could have.  But there was the risk that if she had, he might have had a good answer as to why.

And then she would have had to stay.  Out of love.  Because family.

She left as quietly as she’d come.