by Rowan Casey
He’d lived his whole life learning over and over to never underestimate his twin. He wasn’t about to start now.
Chapter Six
“You did what?” Dani glared at Perce, though inside she felt only relief that he’d come back in one piece.
She’d awoken from what felt like a dead sleep when the pain meds Dr. Zhou had given her wore off and she shifted position in her sleep. Her leg had been on fire with a bone-deep ache. Another pill took the edge off. Sophie had come when Dani had called out for Perce and explained that he’d left hours before. Dani could guess where he’d gone.
Sophie had helped her into the bathroom where Dani was able to relieve herself and clean up using a washcloth. She’d swallowed her pride and her shyness and allowed the other woman to help her change into a dark-colored summer dress that was much more comfortable and, more importantly, cleaner than her sweat-soaked t-shirt.
“I just wanted to get your bow back,” Perce said. He ran a hand through his hair, making it stick out at odd angles.
“Like hell you did,” Dani muttered.
“Don’t swear,” Perce said. They glared at each other for a moment and then Perce sighed and sat down in the wooden chair he’d pulled up near the bed. “I know it was dangerous, but I found the Questing Beast,” he said.
The words turned Dani’s stomach into a bottomless pit of roiling acid. The beast was her family’s curse, according to their mother, God rest her soul. Dani had hoped it didn’t exist, that the magic she and Perce had was a fluke somehow, that legends would stay in the dim and distant pass. She knew deep down that it had been too much to hope.
Years ago, while Perce lay in a coma after nearly drowning in the lake, Dani had slipped out with the dawn light and gone to where she’d found her brother face down in the shallows. She wanted to understand why he’d been there; why he had been like that, drowning in a couple feet of water. She’d gone to the lake and looked around, at a loss. Finally, she’d sat on the shore and prayed to God that he would be merciful and leave her brother here on earth with her.
That’s when the lake had started to glow. The waters had parted, revealing a path to the middle where something silvery glinted in the muck. Mesmerized, feeling utterly unlike herself, Dani had walked into the mud between the glass-like columns of parted water, and reached the middle of the lake. There she’d found the pentagram, silver and unsullied by the dirt as though filth couldn’t touch it.
Green mist had roiled around her, arriving from nowhere and everywhere all at once. From the mist emerged a woman in a white gown with long, black hair and glowing green eyes. She had closed Dani’s hand around the pentagram and spoken the words that would change Dani’s life forever.
“The curse will take your brother away from you.”
The lake had fallen in around Dani in that moment as she pulled away from the Lady, all questions she had drowning on her lips with the sudden deluge of water. She’d kicked hard and managed to surface, still clutching the pentagram. She’d swum to shore and hidden the pentagram where her mother wouldn’t find it. That day, Perce woke up though he was much changed from the inquisitive, smart twin she’d known. That day, Dani had vowed she would do whatever she could to keep him safe.
“So you found a beast with a body like a leopard and the head of a snake?” Dani asked, pushing away her memories.
“It doesn’t look like that. It’s white and about the size of a bear, but looks kind of like a cat got busy with a fox. It’s beautiful, Dani.” Perce got a faraway look in his eyes for a moment before he gave himself a shake. “I saw something like a gem or bit of metal on its chest. Think that could be the knife?”
“Grimm said the piece of the Caeg Dimmre might take a lot of forms to hide itself. It would explain why nobody has found the knife before this if it is transformed into a magical creature.” Dani chewed her lower lip and leaned back into the pillows. Her head hurt, her leg hurt, and now her heart started hurting out of fear.
“Questing Beast,” Perce said stubbornly. “I think those hell dogs are after it.”
Dani listened without interrupting as Perce explained what he’d seen and why he’d gone to the camp. She was impressed he’d thought of finding the hunters there, though thinking about what could have happened if they were the ones who shot her and her brother had confronted them made her feel ill all over again.
“I found this in their camp.” Perce finished his story and pulled out a small waterproof cloth bag.
Dani took it, wrinkling her nose at the faint trace of sulfur that clung to it. She would be happy if she never had to smell that again. Turning the bag over in her hands, she found the seal and unzipped it. Inside was a very old book. The leather was cracked from age and lack of moisture, the pages uneven parchment or perhaps vellum. The cover had only a symbol etched into it, some kind of tree with twisted roots made to look like branches so it was difficult to tell which side of the tree was up.
“Get me a cloth, like a napkin or something,” Dani said to Perce.
“What you want that for? Can you read the book?”
“Perce,” she said in her best mom tone. “Go get it.”
He rolled his eyes but stood up and left the room. Between the pain, the dangerous situation, and the medication, Dani was out of patience and didn’t feel like explaining to or coddling her brother right now.
Perce brought her a blue napkin with pink flowers on it and handed it over with a surly expression on his face.
Ignoring him, Dani used the napkin to lay the book on, then opened it with a corner of the cloth so she wouldn’t get her finger oils on the old pages. She also wasn’t sure she wanted to touch it given its possibly demonic origin. The book certainly smelled bad enough.
“Can you read that? What’s that symbol?” Perce leaned in, his head half-blocking her view.
“I could read some of it,” she said, “if you move your head.”
The book was written in a mix of Latin and something she didn’t recognize. The symbols looked like runes. Their mother had made them learn Latin, saying it was the Lord’s language, but Dani hadn’t used hers in a few years since after Mom got sick, she’d been more occupied with that than keeping up with learning. Perce was hopeless at it from the start and she doubted he remembered a single conjugation or could have told her the difference between cases.
Her head swam as she looked through the book. “It’s detailing some kind of ritual,” she said after she’d worked out enough words in the first few pages to begin to build a picture in her head. “I need to look at it more. Maybe I can borrow that tablet of Bertha’s? Can you go ask Sophie for me?” The internet was something fairly knew for both her and Perce, but Dani had been spending more time in their hometown library over the last two years while waiting on Mom’s appointments with the doctor and the priest, so she had a basic grasp of how to use it. Being able to look up words and maybe figure out the runes would make the translation go a lot faster.
Perce didn’t argue about being her errand boy this time. He left and soon returned with Sophie who helped set Dani up with the tablet. Dani had hidden the book in the napkin and tucked it under a pillow at her side. She didn’t even want to think about how she could explain weird stuff like that to their host. Sophie seemed so normal and wholesome. She lived in a world that had no Veil, no powers, no curses. No demons.
“Thanks,” Dani said. “I’m going a little stircrazy in here not being able to move. Figured I could use a distraction.”
“We could move a TV in here, if you want?” Sophie offered.
“This’ll do,” Dani said with a wide smile that hurt her dry lips.
“Supper will be in about an hour, I’m just about to put the chicken in,” Sophie said. “Call out if you need anything.”
Dani watched how Perce stared after Sophie as she left the room. She sighed.
“Go on, get out of my hair,” she told him. “This will probably take a while.”
“You sure?” Perce
said, already standing and moving toward the door.
“I have water, I have meds, I’m fine. Go.” She swallowed a laugh as he slipped out of the room quicker than a trout slipping a net. Then she got to work.
The kitchen smelled delicious and Perce’s stomach gave a noisy growl as he followed Sophie into the cozy room.
“Want some crackers and cheese?” Sophie asked him as she slid the chicken into the oven.
“Show me where they are, I can fix ’em,” he said. He didn’t want her waiting on him. “Sure nice of you to make us dinner, too.”
“It’s included in your boarding fee,” she said with a smile. “Besides, you are a guest. Always treat a guest well.”
He helped her by getting a plate down and dumping a box of Ritz onto it. She put some yellow cheese on a cutting board and they sat at the table. Sophie pulled out her cell phone and started tapping the screen.
“You calling somebody?” Perce asked around a mouthful of cracker.
“I’m setting a timer for the chicken. The one on the stove’s been busted since Grandpapa died.”
“It’s a phone,” Perce said. “It keeps time, too?”
Sophie looked up at him and set her phone down. Her mouth twitched with amusement but she didn’t quite laugh at him. “It does a lot of things. I can make calls, text people, take pictures, keep up with work from anywhere, even read books.”
Excitement shivered over Perce’s skin at her last statement. Books? On a phone?
“How do you read books on a phone?” he asked.
“Come here,” Sophie said with a chuckle, indicating with her hand that he should move to the seat next to her. She walked him through how ebooks on a phone worked, explaining in a gentle, non-patronizing way what an “app” was and how to download things.
Perce was impressed. Most people didn’t have even half this amount of patience with his boneheaded ignorance. He wasn’t even having to fake that much in this case. He had little experience with computers or phones that didn’t have big buttons and weren’t hooked into the wall. Even then, they hadn’t had one of those until he was a teenager and Mom had loosened up her policies about technology and the modern world.
The possibilities this cell phone thing opened up for him were endless. If he had one of those, he could figure out the internet and information. He’d be able to read books without anyone knowing he was reading. He had so much curiosity and so many questions that nobody could answer because his mask wouldn’t let him ask.
“You said you use it for work? I thought you worked here,” Perce said after he figured he had the gist of how a cell phone functioned.
Sophie laughed. “No, just for the summer. I live in Dawson City. I’m a teacher. But Grandma needed a little extra help what with Carl and the baby being here.”
Perce looked around the quiet kitchen. “Where are they?”
“Grandma takes a constitutional walk every evening before supper and she drags the kids with her. Tires them out for bed.”
“Carl doesn’t live here all the time?” Perce still wasn’t sure where all the kids had come from. It seemed Bertha had a thing for taking in strays or something.
“No, only Oliver is Grandma’s full-time, and that just started last winter. He still won’t speak. I guess they took him away from a pretty rough situation. Carl and the baby are cousins. Their daddies are away working the fishing boats in Alaska for the season. They’ll come back in another couple months and take the kids again. Carl’s mom died two years ago and the baby lost her mom during the birth, so Grandma takes them in since they don’t have other family.”
“She’s a good lady, your grandma,” Perce said, nodding sagely. He meant it. This house was full of love and light. So different from the strict religious and stressful upbringing he and Dani had experienced. They would have spent the time before supper studying or doing chores or demonstrating fifty ways to tie a knot. Not walking with their mom or playing in the yard.
“She’s the best,” Sophie agreed.
“What do you teach?” Perce asked to change the topic from the warm fuzzy intimacy he was feeling toward her and her family.
“Math,” she said. “I also help my mother out at the Dänojà Zho Cultural Centre.”
“The what?”
“It’s the center for my people, the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in. We keep our language and culture alive by passing it on to the next generation.”
“Oh, you’re native,” Perce said. He’d guessed as much from her and Bertha’s features, but hadn’t wanted to bring ask.
“First Nation,” Sophie said sharply. She then ducked her head and gave him a tight smile. “Sorry, we just prefer that term here, not native.”
“Makes sense,” Perce said, hoping he hadn’t offended her too much. “Your people were here first, after all.” It was a fine line to walk to stay looking like a dumbass but not completely alienate everyone around him. He found himself caring a little too much about Sophie’s opinion of him, but he couldn’t help himself. She was beautiful, sure, but also patient, smart, and had pride in her family.
“Mahsi’ Cho,” she said with a laugh. Her laugh had no meanness in it, just light.
Perce tipped his head to the side and gave her a curious look.
“It means ‘thank you’ in Hän, our language.”
“I got no head for languages,” Perce said even as he secretly filed away the knowledge in his mind like a precious gift.
“Perce!” He heard Dani calling his name.
Perce shoved two more crackers in his mouth to save having to say anything else to Sophie and got up, pointing toward where Dani’s room was as explanation. He was relieved that Dani was calling for him, as much as he hated to stop talking to Sophie. It was safer to keep his distance. He couldn’t trust himself with her. It would be so easy to let the mask slip out of desire to make her laugh again and look at him with something other than fond patience.
“Go on,” Sophie said. “I hear her, too.”
“Find something?” Perce asked after he closed the door to Dani’s room behind him. He could tell from the excitement vibrating off her that she had.
“I don’t know. It’s a ritual, like I suspected,” Dani said.
“Ritual? Like in church with the wine and stuff?” Perce asked, trying not to appear too sharply interested.
“Sure,” Dani said, waving a hand at him. “Like that. Only this one is some kind of magical trap. There’s a rune combination in here that isn’t clear. It could mean virgin, which would be typical I guess, but it could also refer to any woman.”
“So it’s some ritual to capture a lady? Demons are weird. Couldn’t they just talk to one in a bar? That’s what I do.” Perce scratched his chin. He needed to shave. Not that there weren’t more pressing concerns, like what the hunters wanted to trap with a demonic book ritual.
“I don’t think the trap is for a lady, Perce,” Dani said. She made a face at him. “I think, and I’m really speculating here, but I believe that the trap is for the beast you saw.”
“The Questing Beast,” Perce said. He nodded slowly. He’d jumped to that conclusion the moment she said the word trap, but he wouldn’t tell her that, of course.
“Fine, the Questing Beast,” she said with a sigh. “If it has the blade of Llawfrodedd Farchog hidden on it somehow, that would explain why those demon hounds are here. Maybe the hunters are working with the demons.”
“Maybe they are demons,” Perce said aloud before he could stop himself. He was thinking about the unused sleeping bags, the curiously similar packs and lack of personalization. It was like the three men had done exactly enough to present the appearance of normalcy but gone no further. Perce knew about pretenses enough to recognize them in others.
“Perhaps,” Dani said, staring down at the book in her lap. “I wish I hadn’t gotten shot. If they are going to do this ritual, we have to stop them or get to the blade first.”
Perce flashed to the knee-print in the woods. T
hey’d shot Dani on purpose, kneeling for a better angle. A lower angle. It could be that the hunter was a terrible shot and he had missed center mass, which Perce had at first assumed given the forested terrain and the speed of how things happened. Yet a dire possibility was taking shape in his mind. What if they’d shot Dani in the leg on purpose, like a wolf hamstringing a deer to keep it from getting away. The hunters shot the hell hound as well, but the hound might have killed Dani, so that didn’t rule out that the hounds and the hunters were working together or for the same purpose.
“Can they do the ritual without the book? I mean, if we have it, that stops them, right?” Perce asked.
“There’s a chance they memorized it, which is why they left it behind. It’s complicated though. So I can’t say. They might need it. They can’t do the ritual until after the moon rises tomorrow since the moon has to be at peak fullness.”
“I ain’t seen a moon,” Perce said, even though he knew why.
“It’s there, but rises and sets inside the sunlight hours so we probably haven’t seen it since it’s been too bright.”
“If they need the book and it is missing, they can’t do it, so we win, right?” Perce stood up from the chair and picked up Dani’s empty water cup. He walked over to the on-suite bathroom and refilled her cup to buy himself some thinking space.
“Thanks,” she said when he brought it back and set it down on the nightstand beside her bed. “I don’t know what they’ll do if they come back and find it missing.”
“We can’t give it back,” Perce said. “We want to catch the Beast though, so we could use the trap?” He knew before he said that it was a terrible idea, but he figured he could give Dani the satisfaction of shutting that down.
“Good lord, Perce. No. It’s a demonic ritual. Even the book is pretty evil feeling. I mean, I’ve had it out of the bag for what? Almost an hour? And it still reeks.”
