by Kali Wallace
None of their plans had required me to take care of my sisters on my own. To become responsible, to get a job, to pay the bills and solve the problems, to be the adult. It had never even come up.
“Can I ask another question?” I said.
“Can I stop you?” Zeke replied.
“Unlikely. My third grade teacher, Mr. Schrader, told my parents I wasn’t allowed to raise my hand in class anymore because I was bothering the other students.”
“Were you?”
“Mr. Schrader was a jerk.” He was the same teacher who had called me a liar in front of the class when I couldn’t share any Chinese words as part of Culture Day because my dad had never taught me any. “Ingrid said everybody knows stories about things—people like me.”
“Okay?”
“I don’t know those stories.” I sat up, drew my knees to my chest, and hugged my arms around my legs. “I tried looking it up, but they don’t cover this stuff on Wikipedia. All Google gave me was a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons character profiles and this random French TV show. Nothing helpful.”
“Humans don’t know anything,” Zeke said.
“Yeah, we suck. I’m serious. Do you know something? Have you ever heard of anything like me?”
“There was this guy we used to know, this human. Jake and I sort of lived with him one winter.” Zeke leaned forward, rested his chin on his knees, mirroring my position. It made him look young and vulnerable. “He was in Vietnam, you know, back in the sixties or whenever. I guess they—attacked a village. Killed everybody who lived there.” He sounded honestly baffled when he added, “I don’t understand human wars.”
“Neither do we,” I said.
“After they took out this village, people from their unit, what’s it called?”
“Platoon.”
“Right. From their platoon. They started to die. They would go off into the jungle and something would get them. They couldn’t stop it. They only saw it once.”
A faint shiver wormed down my spine. “It was one of the people from the village? Somebody they killed.”
“A kid, yeah. A little boy.”
“But only the one kid,” I said. “Millions of people died in Vietnam. Why did that one kid come back? Why was he special?”
Zeke only shrugged.
“Does anybody know?”
“I don’t know. Magicians don’t exactly share their secrets with people like us.”
“Ingrid thinks I’m going to be like that kid. Start killing a whole bunch of people.”
“Ingrid can’t tell you what you’re going to do. Magic can’t do that.”
“You just said you don’t know how magic works.”
“I know that much,” he said.
It could have been reassuring, but I wasn’t in the mood to be reassured. I especially wasn’t in the mood to be reassured by the vague and ill-defined rules of what magic could and couldn’t do.
“One more question.” If Zeke really wanted me to stop, he would have gone inside already. “Why did you help Rain when she asked? I know you didn’t want to,” I said, before he could deny it. “Whatever it was made your brother angry enough to threaten to cut me into little pieces if I was part of it.”
“Jake said that?” Zeke said, surprised.
“Well, no. He didn’t say anything, but he was holding a scalpel when he didn’t say it.”
“He wouldn’t do that.”
“So what was it? I get the impression she’s not a friend of yours and, to be honest, she creeps me out.”
“She’s a nightmare,” Zeke said.
I started to answer, hesitated, turned the word over in my mind. “You don’t mean a bad dream, or, like, a really unpleasant person.”
“No. I mean she’s a nightmare.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said.
“I don’t know how to explain it. That’s what she is. She can do things to people’s minds just by talking to them. Make them think they’re in danger or lost or whatever. Give them real nightmares.”
My skin crawled with an uncomfortable realization. “Do they have to be asleep?”
“No. She can do waking nightmares too.”
Rain, in the red room, speaking in that sultry low voice, and the images that rose unbidden in my mind. The screaming woman—a mother separated from her children—the blank-faced men dragging her away. Telling Brian Kerr to come into the room, and how quickly I had wanted to agree. They had her mouth taped shut before I woke up. They knew what she could do.
And again, at Ingrid’s house, repeating what Ingrid was saying, and how clearly and how vividly I had seen what she wanted me to see.
I hadn’t questioned it at the time. I hadn’t wondered where the thoughts were coming from, or why Ingrid wanted Rain there at all. I had been so focused on figuring out what I could do to other people I hadn’t suspected what she was doing to me.
“She can make you think anything? Anything at all?” I said.
“I don’t think so,” Zeke said. “I think she can only use something you’re already scared of. Like, if you’ve never been scared of spiders, she can’t make you think giant spiders are going to eat you. But if you’re scared of heights she can make you think you’re going to die falling off the bed.”
What was I scared of? If they had asked, I wouldn’t have had a good answer. But Rain didn’t need to ask. She had plucked it from my mind and turned it back on me, she and Ingrid together.
I took a breath—reflexive, unnecessary—to steady my voice. “Okay, that makes every conversation I’ve had with her a hundred times more disturbing, but it doesn’t exactly answer my question. Are you avoiding answering? If you don’t want to tell me why you helped her, it’s fine. I’m just curious.”
“It’s not that. It’s just . . . We haven’t been here very long. When we first got here, we . . . we didn’t really know anybody. We didn’t know who to trust. We met Ingrid and her son.”
“The pervert.”
“He and Rain have a thing—”
“I so don’t want to know the details.”
“You really don’t. Anyway, they helped us, I guess.” Zeke didn’t sound like he had appreciated the help. “Found a place to live, told us who we could trust, who we couldn’t, you know. It was, um, more than we expected.”
“Why?”
“Nobody likes ghouls.”
“Is that it? Rain and her creepy boyfriend helped you, and you owed her?”
“A little, yeah. A couple months later she came by one day and said she was calling in a favor. Family emergency. It didn’t sound like a big deal, so Jake went with her. They were gone all night, and when he came back he had—”
A long pause.
“Food,” Zeke said.
It took me a second to understand he didn’t mean takeout from the local Thai place.
“Rain’s never killed anybody,” I said.
He said nothing.
“Neither has Jake. He definitely hasn’t.”
Zeke was relieved, but he tried to hide it. It wasn’t hard to guess what kind of secrets he had been imagining Jake was keeping from him.
“But if Rain can do what you say she can, she wouldn’t have to do it herself, would she?” I said. “She could, you know, scare somebody else into doing it. On purpose or on accident.”
“I guess.”
“Does it work on you? What she can do?”
Zeke was quiet for a moment before answering. “We can tell when she’s trying to do it.”
That sounded like a qualified yes, but it also sounded like he didn’t want to talk about it. I let it drop. I said, “Oh, by the way, I met Steve.”
“I told you not to go into the basement.”
“When has that ever worked? I’m a girl in a horror movie. I have to go into the basement.”
“Is that what you think this is?” Zeke asked.
“I woke up buried in somebody’s backyard. I’m dead, but I can’t die. I’m a monster. What
else am I supposed to think?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s super helpful.”
“I don’t know how else things can be.” Zeke’s voice was quiet.
All at once I wanted the conversation to be over. I didn’t understand why he was talking to me anyway. Maybe he was bored or lonely, but it didn’t matter. It was just another day, another stupid monster for him, but I didn’t want to hear that this was normal, this was ordinary, this was how people lived, people who had been there all along, never mind that I had never been smart enough or sharp enough to see them. I wanted him to go away and leave me alone.
“You don’t have to stay up to entertain me,” I said.
Zeke gave me a quick look. “Yeah, okay.” He stood up and offered a quiet “Good night” as he went inside.
I missed him as soon as he was gone. Alone was worse. I hadn’t noticed, when I had been running away across the country, because I hadn’t wanted to notice. But now that there were people who knew what I was and didn’t seem to care, the thought of endless empty days and nights of solitude stretching into the future was too painful to consider.
I was going to need a hobby. Learn to knit. Get a library card. Join a Warcraft guild. Take up vigilantism. There are so many more hours in a day when you don’t spend a third of them sleeping.
I was going to have to learn how to pass the time, if I was going to stay like this forever.
THIRTY
IN THE MORNING I was reading the news from Cheyenne when Jake shuffled into the living room. Zeke was asleep on the couch; he hadn’t stirred when I came in as the sky started to turn pink. Jake picked up the blanket from the floor and dropped it over Zeke, tucked it over his shoulder.
“You could have made him take the floor,” he said. He yawned and ran his hand through his hair.
I shrugged. “It’s fine.”
Jake sat down and glanced at the computer. “What’s that?”
I turned it so he could see the article I was reading. They had found Brian Kerr. I explained, “He’s the one who takes the monsters . . . wherever they take them. To try to change them.”
I said wherever, but I was thinking whoever.
There was the figure of a woman lurking at the edge of all my thoughts, the Mother to whom Mr. Willow was bringing his tributes. Ingrid had said it might be a creature, a monster, but in my mind she was tall and grim and featureless, a terrible silent shape with arms opened in a gathering embrace. I hadn’t told anybody what I knew about her yet. Not Rain, not Ingrid, and I wasn’t going to tell Jake either. She was the linchpin at the center of Mr. Willow’s world. I was keeping her to myself.
I kept telling myself it was because I wanted more information. It felt so clean and rational to think of it that way. Information. Facts, data. I couldn’t trust secondary evidence. I had been telling myself that all night. A responsible researcher would go to the source.
The article about Brian Kerr didn’t have much information: The paramedics and state police had been called to the house after Kerr’s wife found him unconscious on the premises. Nothing about the room full of belongings. Nothing about the blood. There was a picture of him perched on a wooden fence and smiling, majestic mountains in the background. He looked normal, nonthreatening, but the sight of his face put a knot in my stomach. I scratched my fingernails softly against my jeans and imagined a phantom pain, the splinter-sharp agony of scrabbling helplessly along a long stone tunnel.
There were too many of Brian Kerr’s memories trapped in my head.
So I turned the conversation to something that had bothered me since the night before, when I finally realized how Rain had been manipulating my thoughts in the red room.
I asked, “Does Rain have kids?”
Jake hesitated, which was all the answer I needed.
“She does,” I said. “Doesn’t she?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Zeke told me that you helped her with a family emergency. And she did her nightmare thing on you, made you think something bad would happen if you told anybody. That was about her kids, wasn’t it?”
“Is that true?” Zeke pushed the blanket down and sat up; his voice was rough with sleep. “Jake?”
“That’s not what happened,” Jake said.
“A boy and a girl. Maybe seven or eight years old?”
Jake shook his head. “I have no idea how you know that. I know she didn’t tell you. She doesn’t want anybody to know.”
Maybe not, but she had wanted to find out, without asking, if I had seen them. That’s why she had made up that other woman and put her into my mind. It might have worked too—I might have been overcome with sympathy, eager to share that I had seen the kids at the church—if only I hadn’t been so wrapped in myself, so convinced that being this thing that I was, this inhuman monster, meant being so unique and isolated that the idea of mothers and children and families all in it together hadn’t even occurred to me.
“She didn’t tell me. But she does, right?”
“Yeah. I don’t know how old they are. They’re not human. Rain’s a lot older than she looks.”
“What are you talking about? Since when does Rain have kids?” Zeke asked.
“It’s not—”
“That’s what that was about?” Zeke said. “When you went with her that day?”
“Yeah, but it’s not—”
“You know what she is. And you still—”
“Zeke.” The angrier Zeke got, the more tired Jake looked. “It didn’t happen like that. The kids needed help.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Zeke asked.
Jake glanced at me before answering. I couldn’t read that look at all, but I had a feeling they would be having a very different conversation if I wasn’t in the room.
“They were staying with their grandfather, their human grandfather. He didn’t know what they are.”
“Why would she leave them with a human?” Zeke asked, disgusted.
“I don’t know. She didn’t tell me, okay? All she said was that her kids had called her and she needed to go pick them up right away. By the time we got there . . .” Jake rubbed his hand over his face. “The kids were defending themselves.”
“What did—”
“I’m not going to tell you what he did.” Jake voice was sharp.
Zeke shut his mouth.
“It doesn’t matter. It was technically suicide, but it was messy enough that the cops would ask questions. So we cleaned it up and got them out of there. That’s all. I don’t know where she took them after that. She said she was going to find somebody else to look after them, but I don’t know who.”
Two little kids with the power to manipulate thoughts, separated from their mother, protecting themselves, and your friendly neighborhood ghoul on call to help clean up the crime scene. I was selfishly glad Jake didn’t share any details, but I understood now why he had been so angry at Rain for getting Zeke to help her.
“You should have told me,” Zeke said.
“I thought—” Jake sighed. “You’re right. I should have.”
“I need to talk to Rain,” I said. “Can you call her?”
“Why?”
“Wherever she took them, it wasn’t as safe as she thought. I think she went looking for Mr. Willow’s people because they have her kids,” I said. “She kind of told me when we were stuck in that room, but I didn’t realize she was talking about herself.”
“You know where they are?” Jake asked.
“I know where they were a few days ago.”
Zeke pulled the blanket up to his chin and slumped into the couch. “She’s at Ingrid’s. I’m not calling.”
Jake went to get his phone.
I didn’t tell them that it might be too late for Rain’s children. I wasn’t planning on telling her either. Not until she told me what I wanted to know first.
THIRTY-ONE
RAIN REFUSED TO come to Jake and Zeke’s house. She listened to my pr
oposed trade—information about her children for information about Willow—and accepted with a reasonable minimum of cursing and threats of bodily harm.
“Meet me downtown,” she said. “Pearl Street, in front of the bookstore. Be there in about an hour. There’s someone you have to meet.”
“Who is it?”
“The guy who put me in touch with our Wyoming friend,” she said. “I told you about him, remember? He’s one of the lucky survivors. Speaking of which, you see the Cheyenne news this morning? How does it feel to be famous?”
I said, “I’ll be there,” and hung up.
She hadn’t said to come alone, and I didn’t know how to find Pearl Street anyway. It only took a little bit of wheedling to convince Zeke to come with me. Jake left for work after making Zeke swear about a dozen times, a dozen different ways, not to do anything stupid and definitely not to go anywhere with Rain or any of her friends or any monster-hunting humans we might come across. Zeke rolled his eyes, but he promised.
