by Heidi Lang
“Don’t touch,” Vivienne warned, pulling the box closer to her.
“What is it?”
“Your mom called it a sealing stone. She said my curse would never go away, but it wouldn’t get worse as long as I kept this thing as close as possible as much as possible.” She shut the lid again, hiding the pendant away. Immediately Caden felt better, like he’d just unbuttoned a pair of too-tight jeans.
“Your mom was wrong, though,” Vivienne said sadly. “It is getting worse. So my mom went somewhere else for help.” She closed the latch on the box. “She went to Patrick.”
“Ah.”
“I know you hate him, but he really did help me for a while.”
“How?” Caden tried to keep his voice neutral.
“He was making this elixir. I took some every day. But then on Sunday, I think my mom did something at work. Some kind of mistake? Anyhow, she accidentally set off an alarm, and Patrick stopped giving her the elixir for me.”
“That’s terrible!”
“Well, it was starting to lose its effect anyhow. He promised that if my team wins this competition, he’ll get me something better. Something that will cure me for good.”
“Do you believe him?”
She tucked the box back inside her backpack and carefully covered it with her mountain of items, shifting the ropes a little, adjusting the balled-up jacket. Stalling. Finally her hands stilled, and she looked up, her eyes wide and vulnerable. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “And I’m scared, Caden. I’m so, so scared. I don’t know what to do.” She wrapped her arms around herself and started crying.
When Caden was in elementary school, he’d learned that other kids didn’t like the way he seemed to know what they were feeling. They’d called him creepy, a mind reader, ghoul boy. So he had turned himself inward. If they didn’t want anything to do with him, then fine. He didn’t need them, either. He had his family, his drawing, and his mom’s business. He didn’t need friends.
And then Aiden had vanished, his parents had started drifting apart, and he’d been banned from helping with Paranormal Price. He hadn’t recognized how alone he’d felt until Rae moved to Whispering Pines. Rae, who seemed to understand him.
Now Rae was his friend. And so, he realized, was Vivienne. He couldn’t close his heart to her, and her outpouring of pain surrounded him like a hurricane.
This was the downside of his gift, the thing his brother had once warned him about. If he let people get in too close, their pain became his.
Caden pressed a hand against his chest. He knew he could put up his shields, imagine himself in a ball of white light, and shut Vivienne out. Let her deal with her own pain. It’s what his brother had always recommended. Instead, he scooted over and clumsily put an arm around her shaking shoulders.
“I’ll help you,” he said, holding her. “We’ll find a solution together. I promise.”
“Thanks,” Vivienne sniffled, her tears slowing.
They sat there in silence for several minutes, as Caden increasingly noticed how close they were, the way her hip was against his, how he still had his arm around her. Should he move it? Or wait until she moved? He had no idea what to do in this situation.
“Well, this is awkward,” Vivienne said at last.
“You know, you’re not the first girl to say that to me recently,” Caden admitted.
“I’m not surprised.”
“Should I move my arm?”
“I think so,” she said.
Caden carefully lifted his arm like he was taking off a coat.
Vivienne laughed. “You don’t hug many people, do you?”
“Not often, no.”
“We’ll have to work on that.” She twisted to smile at him, her eyes still glossy with tears. “Thank you.” She hesitated. “Can you maybe not tell Rae yet? I’ll tell her eventually. I will. But not yet.”
Caden was good at secrets. He’d had plenty of practice keeping them. But the thought of keeping one from Rae made him uncomfortable. Still, it was Vivienne’s secret to keep or share as she wished. “Okay,” he said at last. He got a glimpse of emotion. A sort of embarrassed worry. “But Rae isn’t going to hold this against you,” he said, slowly understanding her reluctance. “You know that, right?”
Vivienne shrugged. “I ate a rabbit.”
“Yeah, well, we all make mistakes.”
She snorted. “Thanks, ghoul boy.”
Caden stood and offered her a hand up. “Anytime, ghoul girl,” he said. “Anytime.”
29. RAE
Rae trudged inside her house, kicked off her shoes, and headed immediately to the kitchen. She dropped her backpack on the floor with a dramatic thump, then slumped into a chair next to it.
“Someone’s not looking perky,” Ava said. She had taken over the kitchen table, her calculus book lying open next to a notebook full of what looked like alien chicken scratch.
“Not looking perky?” Rae repeated. “What are you, seventy?”
Ava grinned and took a big sip from her mug.
Rae opened her bag and tugged a large library book out of it, dropping it on the table in front of her. The cover read: BUGGING OUT: A GUIDE TO ALL THINGS CREEPY-CRAWLY. It seemed like a good place to start. “Does Mom know you’ve been pilfering her coffee?”
“Pilfering, huh? Now who’s old-fashioned?”
“It was a vocab word. I’m trying it out.” Rae flipped open her book. “I can’t imagine ‘perky’ was your English class’s word of the day.”
Ava snorted. “No, it wasn’t. Which is too bad, really. Not enough people use it. And no, Mom doesn’t know. And you’re not going to tell her either.” She pointed her pen at Rae, who put her hands up. “Wait, it’s Thursday! Aren’t you supposed to be at cross-country practice?”
Rae checked the index of her book. “Today’s practice was canceled.”
“Canceled? Really? I thought that as long as the world wasn’t coming to some horrible apocalyptic end or the field hadn’t been swallowed by a sinkhole, then practice went on.”
Rae found the section on Myriapoda, “the many-legged ones,” and flipped to it. The first page had a close-up photo of a large millipede. “Coach Briggs was sick today,” she said. Which, according to Alyssa, was weird. She said their coach never got sick. Rae had wanted to ask Vivienne about it too, but she hadn’t been able to find her after school.
Rae frowned. In her mind she replayed that awful scene from yesterday, Vivienne’s eyes as she licked blood off her fingers, the smears of red on her chin…
“You okay?” Ava asked.
Rae forced a smile. Caden had promised to look into it. She had to trust him. It was hard; trust wasn’t something that came easy to her these days. “Yeah,” she said. “Just…” She shuddered.
“I know what you mean. I keep thinking there’s something crawling on me.”
“Me too.” Rae felt it now, even. The echoing sensation of hundreds of tiny legs whispering across her skin. She slapped at her arms and legs, even though she knew it was just her imagination. She tried ignoring it and went back to her reading. “Did you know centipedes are venomous?”
“Isn’t that delightful information.” Ava glanced at the book. “Bit of light reading?”
“Researching the things we saw. I figured this huge book”—Rae tapped it with one finger—“ought to be a good place to start.”
Ava shook her head. “You know there’s this thing called the internet.”
“You know, I don’t care.”
“So do bugs normally lay their eggs inside goats? Or is that an alien thing?”
“Some insects do,” Rae said. “For instance, there’s a type of spider that lays its eggs under a person’s skin. Luckily, they live in another part of the world.”
“Did you read that just now, or was that fact already stored away in that disturbing brain of yours?”
Rae grinned. “What can I say? Bugs are fascinating. Like, there’s also a desert wasp that stings its prey
to paralyze it, then lays its eggs on top, so that when they hatch—”
“Stop! I don’t want to hear it.”
“Hey, you asked the question. Besides, aren’t you planning to major in biology or something?”
“Astrobiology. It’s completely different,” Ava said.
Rae stared down at the photograph of the centipede in her book and thought of another photo. One she’d never shown Ava before.
She’d wanted to. After their dad disappeared and she’d discovered it hidden in his office, she’d gone to Ava intending to tell her everything. But her sister had been so scornful, right from the start. You’re being a child. There’s no such thing as aliens, and no one took Dad. Grow up, Rae. Lots of people’s dads run off… After that little lecture, Rae had kept the photo tucked away, and she and Ava had slowly drifted apart. If Ava wanted to pretend that everything was normal when Rae knew it wasn’t, then fine. But Rae wasn’t about to pretend with her.
But recently everything between them had changed.
Ava had admitted that she did believe Rae, that she was still searching for their dad too. And the two of them had made a deal: they would share their info, and search for him together.
It was time for Rae to start upholding her end. “There’s something I need to show you,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
She used to keep all of her top-secret articles pinned to a corkboard hidden behind a decoy board on her desk. But then the Unseeing had somehow snuck into her room and put his own photo there, and suddenly her hiding spot hadn’t seemed so secure. So she’d moved all of her papers and photos and articles into a folder that she kept hidden at the bottom of her underwear drawer. It wasn’t the safest place, but for now it worked.
She slipped a photo out from the back of that stack and hurried downstairs, her heart hammering with every step. “I found this in Dad’s office,” she told Ava, laying it on the table in front of her. In the photo an alien peered out from between the bars of a cage, its eyes large, dark ovals sunk deep inside the gray skin of its face. It had no hair and no discernible mouth, but there was something almost humanlike in its expression.
Rae felt oddly exposed as her sister stared down at that picture. It reminded her of the way she felt when Caden really studied her, like her soul was on display.
“And you’re sure this is real?” Ava said at last. “No Photoshop?”
“Remember those men who were tearing up Dad’s study? I think they were looking for this. So yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s real.”
“It’s awful.” Ava’s eyes watered. “Look. They have the poor thing tagged like some kind of animal.”
Rae peered down at the photo. She hadn’t noticed the small green tag before, sticking out from the alien’s neck, almost blending into the bars of the cage. “Hmm. I wonder why they—”
“Look at the two of you doing homework together,” their mom said as she walked into the kitchen. She was already wearing her sea-green scrubs, her damp hair pulled back in a tight braid.
Rae nudged the photo underneath a stack of papers while Ava made a show of attempting to hide her coffee mug. “You’re down early,” Ava said.
“I saw that, Ava.” Their mom snagged the mug and took a large gulp.
“Hey!”
“You shouldn’t be drinking this stuff. It’ll stunt your growth.”
“I’m almost eighteen,” Ava grumbled. “I doubt I’ll be growing much more.” She eyed their mom. “You just didn’t want to bother with making your own coffee.”
“Is that really what you think of me?” Their mom made an exaggerated sad face.
Ava laughed. “Nice try, Mom.”
“Fine, you got me. But only because I’m running out of time.”
Rae watched the two of them, her heart a stone in her chest. She used to have easy interactions with her mom, but now it felt like every exchange was weighted. Her mom was either distant or hypercritical ever since her dad was taken. Or maybe her mom had always been like that with her, but she hadn’t noticed because her dad had been there to cushion it.
“… heading in early today,” her mom was saying. “I’ll be pulling a double shift, so you’re on your own tonight. And also tomorrow.”
“We know the drill,” Ava said.
“Okay. Love you.” She kissed Ava on the top of the head, then turned to Rae. For a second their eyes met, and Rae felt the stone around her heart cracking. But instead of kissing her, her mom frowned at the open book on the table. “You know, I saw something that looked like that in the bathroom just now. Creepy.” She grabbed her purse and her keys and headed for the door. “Call me if there are any problems!” The door slammed shut.
Rae stared at Ava, who stared back. Then they both looked at the centipede photograph in Rae’s book, the antennae in front, the hundreds of legs splayed out to the sides.
“You don’t think…” Rae couldn’t even finish the thought. It was too horrible.
“Coincidence.” Ava scratched her neck. She froze. “Um, Rae?”
“Yeah?”
“Is there something on my back?”
“Not funny,” Rae said.
“I’m not joking.”
The fear in Ava’s voice convinced Rae that her sister was serious. Rae stood and, heart pounding, inched around Ava.
A pale yellowish bug, as long as her index finger and about the same width, was crawling down the back of Ava’s sweater.
Rae yelped and leaped back, her hands clasped over her mouth.
Ava’s eyes went wide. “Don’t just stand there! Get it off!”
“I don’t want to touch it!”
“Well, I don’t want to wear it!”
“Take off your sweater.”
“I’m scared I’ll accidentally knock it into my shirt.”
Rae shuddered. “Okay. Okay, wait. I’ll get something.” She turned and rummaged in the drawers.
“Hurry,” Ava said through gritted teeth. “I can feel it crawling.”
Rae found a spatula and came back, brandishing it in front of her like a weapon.
“Seriously?” Ava said.
Rae raised it up over her head, focusing on that creepy-crawly.
“Wait, Rae—”
Whack! Rae slapped the bug off her sister and onto the tiled floor, then grabbed her book off the table and dropped it on it.
“Effective,” Ava said. She crouched and lifted up the book so they could look at the smashed bug underneath it.
“See? Could the internet have done that?”
Ava laughed, and it only sounded a little strained, but then it stopped abruptly. “No,” she whispered, horrified.
“What?” Rae whipped around but didn’t see anything. “What?”
“I saw something moving. On the love seat.” Ava swallowed.
“Maybe it was a spider?” Rae knew it was not a good day when she was hoping for a spider.
“Maybe…” Ava stood. “I’m going to see if we have Raid anywhere.”
Ava returned a moment later with a can of citrus cleaner and a metal-handled mop. “No Raid. Instead they will get death by lemon spray.” She passed Rae the can. “Now, let’s go check out this bug.”
They crept toward the couch, Rae clutching her can of Super Citrus, Ava brandishing her mop ahead of her. Ava pointed at the love seat, then at Rae, making a little lifting gesture.
Rae shook her head. No way was she going to move the cushions.
“This is ridiculous,” Ava said. “Why are we trying to sneak up on them? It’s not like they can hear us coming.”
“Actually, a lot of bugs are quite sensitive to noise vibrations, more so than most other animals,” Rae explained, feeling oddly like Nate in that moment. It was a good thing Vivienne wasn’t there to witness it.
“Did you get that from the bug book you’re reading?”
“No, that fact was from the internet.”
“Oh, good. Now quit stalling and lift those cushions.”
“You l
ift,” Rae said.
“Isn’t this whole bug mystery part of your internship project?”
Ava had a point. Rae hated when that happened. “Fine,” she grumbled. She eyed the couch, with its two overstuffed cushions. She didn’t like it, but she’d have to risk her fingers to its darkened underbelly. She put down her can of citrus and rubbed her hands together. “Ready?”
Ava clenched the mop. “Ready.”
Rae lunged for the bottom edge of the closest cushion and hoisted it up. Immediately, two many-legged, milky-white bugs uncurled from the shadows. They skittered rapidly out of the couch and onto the floor. One of them went straight for Rae’s feet.
Rae squealed and dropped the cushion, leaping on top of it, while Ava beat the first bug into oblivion with the cheap mop.
“Ava, quick, toss me the Super Citrus!”
Ava tossed the can one-handed, and Rae snatched it out of the air. She flicked the nozzle open and doused the second bug. The aroma of citrus was thick and sickening. And completely ineffective. The bug twitched, and then resumed scurrying.
“Argh! Mop!”
Ava smacked her mop into the insect, smashing it. “So much for the Super Citrus,” she said, panting slightly.
“I guess it should really be ‘Not-So-Super Citrus.’ ” Rae frowned at the can.
“At least they squash easy.”
“Yeah.” Rae looked at the dead bug on the carpet. It was a little smaller than the one she’d found on Ava’s back, but just as creepy, all of its legs splayed out. “Do you think there are any more in our house?”
“I don’t know. But there’s no way I’ll be able to sleep until we find out for sure.”
Rae remembered the bugs she’d found in the Town Square, their bodies stained pink with blood. Now that she’d found the same kind of bugs in her own home, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to sleep tonight no matter what. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked her sister.
“It’s time for some serious cleaning.” Ava hoisted her mop.
Rae nodded grimly. “Let’s do this.”
