#
It had seven legs, two groups of three each wrapped around the side of Andrew’s head, all hooking together behind each of his ears, and another one stretching out under his chin. Its body was an oval with soft scales.
The monster was blue. There was a portal floating in the air behind it that was the same color.
Josh stood up, he took a step towards Andrew but didn’t get any further than that. He didn’t know what to do.
The seven legs slowly dug their way into Andrew’s skin. Blood dripped slowly down his face to his neck, staining his shirt. Andrew didn’t seem to notice. He sat perfectly still. His eyes were closed.
Josh looked down at the ground. The familiar was rolling on the floor furiously right at the edge of the salt circle. Josh swept the salt away with his foot and the familiar dived towards Andrew’s head, toppling him over backwards when it made impact.
It ripped the monster off of Andrew’s head and tore it in two. It bled onto the floor, filling the room with a smell like rotten strawberries.
The portal closed as soon as the monster died. Andrew slowly woke up. He touched his face. When he pulled his hands away his palms were covered with blood.
Andrew looked up at Josh, Josh looked down at Andrew.
“It wasn’t me,” Josh said.
#
They stayed in the attic for the rest of the school day, and snuck out ten minutes after the bell rang at the end of eighth period. They killed time searching the boxes in the attic for some bandages and a new shirt for Andrew to wear. There was a giant plastic container buried in the back where the track team apparently kept all the old stuff they weren’t using anymore; there was a first aid kit and a shirt Andrew’s size with the number eleven on the front of it. The thing that had jumped on his face hadn’t penetrated the skin too deeply, and two of the cuts were behind his ears where they were hard to notice. The one on his chin was impossible to miss though; they spent a lot of time trying to figure out what Andrew was going to tell his grandma. They decided that there had been an accident in the kitchen during home ec. Andrew didn’t take home ec but his grandma had never expressed much interest in his schedule, so they were pretty sure it would work.
They still had an hour and a half to kill before they thought it would be safe to leave. There was a bag of Styrofoam cups and a forgotten bottle of orange soda hidden near the box with the track supplies. They helped themselves.
Andrew hoped that Josh would be the one to start talking, but it took a while.
“I’m really sorry about this,” Josh said.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“No, I’m sorry, it was really stupid to do this in the first place.”
It took a while for Andrew to think of an answer.
“We’ll be more careful next time.” He got up. “Thanks for saving my life.”
The bell rang. They cleaned everything up and left together.
They never talked about what they’d seen after they’d cast the spell. Andrew spent some time thinking about what he’d say if Josh asked, but neither of them ever brought it up.
#
Paul slept in the hospital and dreamed and remembered.
#
He remembered Anna. There was no one image that came to mind, it was everything at once. Falling asleep in each other’s arms on the train taking them cross country. Stealing cars, spending weeks in rented houses looking through books and taking turns cooking. Fighting, her leaving, him finding her days later, him begging, her laughing at him. Saving each other’s lives, killing people and talking about how that made them feel, if there was a place for them in the world most people lived in, if there had to be, if that was something they wanted or needed. Sex, magic, occasional violence. The first time he'd taken her to one of the White Rabbit meetings, Jeremiah the Gentleman shaking her hand, Hard Chris and Fat Rob both keeping their poker faces in place, Mike the Kid and Luke the Bastard not afraid to roll their eyes at Paul's breach in etiquette. You didn't take your fucking girlfriend to a White Rabbit meeting.
She'd had to show more than Paul had when he'd first gotten started, to give away more for free, just to show what she knew and what she could do. But once she did, nobody rolled their eyes anymore. Except Luke the Bastard, but that meant nothing, Luke earned his name every day of his life, there was no point taking him seriously.
Paul dreamed about the first time he met his mother. Finding her had not been simple. He’d traded a shoebox full of random crap in exchange for the spell. The guy he’d dealt with was an idiot but even so, it wasn’t a deal Paul enjoyed making; there could be a few different reasons you might want a spell that’d tell you who your parents were, but most of them were personal, and Paul didn’t want it to be common knowledge that he was an orphan.
He didn’t touch it until about a month after Anna got locked up. He was hiding out in a trailer in Iowa, so far in the middle of nowhere he might as well be in outer space. The idea was that he was planning his next move, but he ran out of ideas as soon as he knew he wasn’t being followed. He spent his days sleeping on the roof of the trailer and his nights driving around and drinking and flipping through books. After about two weeks of that, he decided to perform the ritual. It might not solve any of his problems but at least it would give him something to do.
It was warm out that night; the stars clumped together in the sky like liquid sugar dripping from a honeycomb. He picked a spot in the middle of a cornfield, a shallow valley dividing two farmers’ property, as far from prying eyes as he could get, and stomped around until he’d flattened enough space to work inside of. He took off his clothes and smeared his body with green paste.
He sat down and started chanting. Two blue spheres rose up from the ground in front of him, each one the size of a basketball. He reached towards the one on the right, and they both disappeared.
Paul woke to see the sun rising. All of his clothes were on, there was a pen in his hand, and written in his own handwriting on the inside of his opposite arm was a woman’s name and address. He tried the ritual again the next night, but nothing happened. He wasn’t surprised; most spells had a catch built into them someplace. He never did find out who his father was.
He made it to Wisconsin a few days later. The first time he went to his mother’s house, he didn’t have the guts to do it sober. He just showed up trashed at her front door, did some scary shit with his familiar, yelled at her, and left. When he came back later, he wasn’t sure if he was going to apologize or just yell at her some more.
He knocked on the door and she opened it. She knew who he was, what he was to her. The moment she’d seen him, she knew.
“Would you like something to eat?” she whispered.
She served him dinner. She just kept giving him food, and when she ran out of food she gave him coffee, one cup after another. She didn’t have anything herself; she didn’t even sit down, just stood there on the other side of the kitchen looking from the window to her feet.
He didn’t know where to start. He’d planned on asking about his dad first, but seeing how easily she adjusted to having a drunken asshole hanging around the house, he wasn’t sure it was a topic he wanted to explore. So he asked about the other people in his family. It turned out that he had a brother and a sister, both older than he was. They had kids. When his mother spoke about her grandchildren, she became a different person; she talked about their GPAs and swimming trophies. She wasn’t scared anymore.
It pissed him off at first, that she was always scared. He took it personally. But after a while he got over it— she wasn’t scared of him, she was scared of everything. It was how she was. He visited her a couple more times over the next few months. It was always the same; he came inside, she gave him all the food in the house, they talked for a little while and he left.
The fifth time he came by he met Andrew.
#
"Luke."
There was a tall man with big hands and
a pair of blue glass eyes standing over Paul's hospital bed with his palm resting on Paul's face right where Paul's hairline gave out. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt.
"Luke, that's enough for one day."
There was a much shorter, much younger man sitting in a blue plastic hospital chair near the bed. Luke the Bastard didn't pay him any more attention than he could help. He was watching the movie. He thought it was funny that No-Name Paul had a mom. A little old lady who served him casserole when he stopped by her house. It was funny.
"Our time is up." Still polite, but with a little more force. Luke's leash got pulled on, he could feel the top in his head start spinning and cutting. He removed his hand from Paul's face and the movie stopped.
"Let's go."
Luke the Bastard put on a pair of back sunglasses to hide his eyes, and left the hospital with his minder walking close behind him. He was disappointed. But there was always tomorrow.
Paul kept dreaming.
#
Paul was waiting for her at the kitchen table when she came back in. Rose had thought that he'd just headed out a few minutes earlier than usual so he wouldn't arrive at school at the same time as the others. It was a new thing, but it wasn't unexpected now that some of the other kids were old enough to be going to the same school he was.
"You're going to be late for school. You need to get going right now."
Flat, not starting a fight but making it clear that this was not going to be the magic day she started taking shit from a child living in her house.
"I'm not going to school today." His tone was something recent, and this was something she hadn't quite expected. He projected adultness. You're the unreasonable one, not me, said Paul's posture. He'd tried this a couple of times on her and it had gotten him nowhere, but he was still doing it. Maybe he'd had luck with it at school.
"You're mistaken," she said. Still giving him a chance.
"No, I'm not." And now he was asking to get his ass kicked. Not literally, Rose didn't do that. But you didn't take on six foster kids if you didn't know how to cut them down when that was called for. Not unless you were stupid, and Rose wasn't.
She opened her mouth, was about to get started.
"My social security number belongs to a dead guy," Paul said.
And that was new, and that was unexpected, and now Rose didn't know what to say.
"I'm not going to school today. Or tomorrow. I'm leaving. I'm not going to live with you anymore."
Pause, giving her a chance to answer she didn't take. Still acting like he was the grown up. She really did want to slap him now, but under that her heart was thumping and her hands were stiff and numb.
He knew. The details almost weren't important.
"I want you to tell me where I came from. I deserve that."
He waited for her answer.
CHAPTER 10
#
For the few weeks following the event, you could not avoid hearing about Branville, Wisconsin. Every newspaper, every magazine had a full spread of pictures, the bank cut in half and flipped over, the old library steeple sliced from the top of the building and speared through the middle of the main bridge like a toothpick, the deli that had been turned inside out and buried two feet deep in the ground. The president made a speech on television; he said that everything was under control, that they would find an explanation, that whatever it was that had happened wouldn't happen again. The chairman of the city council made a similar speech, emphasizing that the town was going to be all right, that they would rebuild.
Everyone saw, everyone watched. Of those, a few packed suitcases. They didn't all rush into town at the same time. It was a trickle. Nobody wanted to attract attention, least of all from each other. But everybody was moving in the same direction.
#
It would be impossible to overstate how important Andrew was to Shadow. The earliest thing she could remember was Paul’s face, leering over her in the dim recesses of her memory, but it was Andrew she had chosen, Andrew who’d taught her what she needed to know. Everything she needed to know.
She remembered when it used to bother her that she couldn’t remember where she had come from or how she’d ended up where she was now. She asked Andrew about it one time while they were playing chess.
“Andrew, do you remember being born?”
He made a funny face he sometimes made when she asked him questions.
“No, Shadow, I don’t.”
“All right.”
She made her move, and it didn’t bother her anymore that she couldn’t remember. It was all right now.
Andrew had told her that he wouldn’t be around today; he was having a half day at school that his grandmother didn’t know about, and he wanted to use the time to work on something with Josh. She wanted to see him. Shadow was uncomfortable leaving the gazebo. She didn’t like her body, it was so clumsy compared to Andrew’s body and the bodies that everybody else had, but she didn’t like to go without it either. She resented the way she could just leave it behind like a puppet.
But she missed him, so she did leave. She listened and felt, all at once in every direction until she knew where Andrew was, and then she went to him.
She didn’t have to travel very far. He was in the park outside the gazebo with Joshua, sitting on the grass with an open book in between them.
“Now,” Josh said.
Andrew squeezed his left hand into a fist and inhaled sharply. He blinked several times.
“I can’t see anything…”
Josh grinned. “All right, now touch me. Just follow the sound of my voice.”
Andrew stuck his hand out in front of him and poked Josh in the forehead. He blinked, looked around; Josh closed his eyes and leaned back on the grass, laughing to himself.
“Are you all right?” Andrew asked.
“I’m blind, stupid. It’s like a hot potato. First you hold it, then you give it to somebody else.”
“So if you touch me back…”
“No, it only works once. Wait, I think it’s wearing off now...” Josh got up and rubbed his eyes. “That is so weird, it’s great.”
They talked for a while. The conversation drifted to Josh’s family.
“My dad hasn’t talked to me about Tom in a long time now.”
“Josh, I’m sorry…”
“Andrew, you apologize every time we talk about this. It’s fine, don’t worry about it. As long as they’re leaving me alone, I don’t care. At least they’re not sending me to a shrink or anything. How’s your grandma?”
“My grandma?”
“She’s leaving you alone?”
“Oh.” Andrew looked away. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“Good.” Josh kept flipping through the book. “We don’t want people noticing anything’s up, right?”
Andrew didn’t know what to say. He leaned back on the ground. Winter was coming— the grass was dead but there wasn’t any snow. He closed his eyes. He hadn’t gotten much sleep lately.
He heard female voices coming from a clump of trees in the middle of the park. It took him a moment to realize he hadn’t fallen asleep, that he wasn’t dreaming.
He got up and followed the sound. Josh went with him.
They were older than Josh and Andrew, a lot older. They could actually be in college, Andrew decided. There were three of them; a girl with long brown hair in a green sun dress, a girl in black sitting on the ground, and another girl dressed about the same as she was, sitting on the ground next to her. The girl in the green dress was climbing a tree. They were all talking.
“What are they supposed to say? They don’t know what happened.”
“Sue said…”
“Sue’s a philosophy professor. She just wants to look like she knows what’s going on.”
The girl in the green dress climbed back down to the ground. “It’s scary, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know, nobody got hurt.”
/> “That’s not what I mean. I mean it’s scary that something so amazing can happen and nobody really cares all that much. When I told my parents we were coming to visit they thought it was cute. My fun college road trip. I might as well be going to Mardi Gras.”
“It’s not like nobody is noticing. We’re not the only people coming out here.”
“Yeah, I guess.” She looked away and laughed. “Bunch of hippie freaks.”
The other girl smiled. “You’re a hippie freak.”
“No, you are.”
They started throwing chestnuts at each other. Josh tugged on the collar of Andrew’s shirt.
“Do you have your familiar here?” he whispered.
“No, I left it watching my grandma, why?”
“You should show it to them, make it do something cool.”
“What happened to keeping things a secret?”
“We’re making an exception.”
“No, we’re not.”
“Andrew!”
“Josh, we can’t…”
The girl with brown hair cleared her throat.
Andrew gave Josh a hard glance, and they slowly turned around.
“Hello,” said the girl with the brown hair.
“Hello,” Josh offered.
One of the other girls looked away and smiled to herself. Andrew desperately hoped his face wasn’t turning red.
“You guys skipping school?”
“It’s a half-day today.”
“Just hanging out in the park, then?”
“Yeah. What about you guys? What are you doing here?”
“We just came by to see downtown. Just like all the other hippie freaks.” The girl’s friend hit her in the shoulder and they both laughed. “It must be weird for you guys, with everything that’s happened.”
Josh shrugged. “Just one big thing, really. Then a bunch of people came by to see it.”
They laughed again. Josh came over and sat down. Andrew sat down next to him, a little further away.
“So you guys were here for the whole thing. Was it scary when you guys had to duck and cover?”
“Not really, I didn’t even know what was going on.”
White Rabbit Society Part One EPUB Page 9
