by Harper Lin
I glanced up, afraid of how much the bystander had heard. Someone was approaching us slowly, step by lurching step. By the dress, I figured that it was a woman. The dress was faded and stained with dirt, but I’d seen it before. I didn’t recognize her face, but it wasn’t one I would forget if I’d ever seen it in town.
The skin was taut as a drum over her bones. Her eyes were closed, and I wondered if she was some wandering homeless lady, starved and maybe blind… we never see them for too long in Wonder Falls. There was even a search party for Topher, who didn’t have a family anymore.
She reeked something awful. I clapped a hand over my nose and mouth in reflex. She smelled awful, yet familiar.
“Cath,” Aunt Astrid warned, pulling at my arm. She wrinkled her nose and coughed a little too.
I recognized the smell then. It was the same smell around the body of Shelley Marina. This woman was walking and dead.
“Let’s run!” I said.
Another Resurrection
Peanut Butter caught me up later on what had happened at the police station. Somebody was screaming. Bea left the room to see where the screaming was coming from, and Peanut Butter followed her. It wasn’t exactly logical. Peanut Butter was afraid of everything but would rather stay by his mommy and daddy and be less afraid. Even though his mommy and daddy were going toward the strange new danger.
Together, Bea and Jake rushed through the aisles between the police officers’ desks.
They met Police Chief Talbot, who shouted over his shoulder at Diane, “Put that down and stop dialing! I said that we have a direct line!”
“Direct line to what?” Jake asked. “Who was shouting?”
“Our prime suspect in the Perry case, of course,” Talbot answered. “Murray Willis. Looks like a heart attack in the interrogation—hey!”
Bea ran toward the interrogation room despite Chief Talbot’s objection. She ran past Diane, who spoke into the phone that had a direct line to the hospital, “Hi, this is Officer Diane Davis, requesting an ambulance at the Wonder Falls police department. Please hurry!”
“Where’s your wife going?” Talbot asked Jake.
“I’ll get her,” Jake said to the police chief.
When he caught up to Bea, she had her face and hands pressed to the glass window of the interrogation room. “That’s not a heart attack. It’s something else. I can see it! I need to get in there—I need to help him!”
Jake didn’t hesitate. He rapped his knuckles against the door until Jason, one of the other officers, unlocked it for him.
Jason swung open the door but said, “Jake, we can’t have random civilians passing by and—even if she is your wife—”
“She knows how to resuscitate him,” Jake said as Bea bolted in.
Jason frowned as she passed. “So do I, and that’s what I was doing. But did you”—he turned to Jake—“stop me just now so that she could…” He turned back to Bea, who was on her knees beside Old Murray. Her eyes were closed and she was waving a hand over Old Murray’s unconscious body. “Do nothing? She’s not doing CPR. That is not CPR.”
“I’ll take it from here then,” Jake assured him then locked him out. Jake knelt at Old Murray’s other side. “What does it look like?”
“A heart attack,” Bea said decisively. “But only because that’s where the knot is.”
“The knot?”
“Where Cath put the Unfamiliar. A binding spell. She can’t get rid of the thing, only tie it up so it won’t do any more damage to the host. The knot is still there, but the Unfamiliar is gone.”
* * *
Back at the graveyard, Aunt Astrid and I outran the smell. It wasn’t difficult to outrun a corpse, which walked so slowly.
“How do we kill it?” I asked.
Aunt Astrid raised an eyebrow. “Ruthless! She hasn’t done anything to us, other than come near when she smells bad.”
“She’s supposed to be dead,” I argued. “If this body is anything like Shelley Marina, killing her would be a mercy. But this is impossible!”
“Saying that this is impossible obviously won’t stop it from happening,” Aunt Astrid said.
“I know her,” I said, “but I don’t want to wait until she grows back completely. Where’s her gravestone? Can we walk around to take a look?”
We could, and we did, jogging over the turf in the afternoon sunlight. The corpse turned slowly when it heard us and inched toward the grave she’d left. On the gravestone, it said—
“Dolores Thompson. 1946 to 2009. Thompson! I thought I knew that dress.” I turned to Aunt Astrid. “It belonged to Tommy’s grandmother!”
“She was buried in it.” Aunt Astrid nodded. “I wasn’t at the funeral, but I heard when she passed away. Breast cancer.”
“She was only sixty-three,” I said gloomily. I hadn’t been at Tommy’s grandmother’s funeral either.
A death rattle sounded behind us, like, “Taaa…mmm…”
“I think,” I said, as I covered my nose and mouth with my sleeve, “she’s calling for Tommy. How do we tell her?”
Aunt Astrid stepped between myself and Dolores and declared, “You can join him in the grave!”
“But how?” I wondered. “The bones are moving with some magic force, must be, because the muscles haven’t even all grown back. That magic is borrowed by an Unfamiliar, but the only one I’ve seen in this town recently is bound to Old Murray. I tied it all up myself. Shelley Marina grew back her gristle because Samantha Perry died. Whose life force is Dolores taking to even walk toward us?”
Bloodline
“That made no sense to me,” Jake said to Bea.
“It doesn’t have to,” Bea said distractedly. “I’m just thinking aloud. Look, there’s a magic knot in his chest. It’s slowly draining him of energy, maybe even his life. I’m going to untie it, and if the Unfamiliar is in there anyway… Jake, you run. Do you understand?”
“No,” Jake answered. Then he said tensely, “I’m not going to leave you if this unleashes some demon from another dimension either.”
Peanut Butter wandered in and miaowed plaintively. He’d been diligent with Marshmallow’s magic lessons. He saw Bea’s hand in the other world, struggling against the knot and forcing it to loosen.
“Almost there,” Bea breathed.
Jake didn’t see anything, but he kept quiet.
“They can’t break,” Bea realized. “The bond between Old Murray and… they share a bloodline.” She opened her eyes then opened her otherworldly eyes with a new clarity.
* * *
At that moment, Dolores Thompson collapsed into a heap of bones in front of Aunt Astrid and myself.
“What just happened?” I said.
Astrid peered at the air around Dolores’s unmoving corpse. “Not a single Unfamiliar to be seen.”
“Blake is going to lose sleep over this,” I muttered. “We’ve got to get her back into her coffin before anybody sees.”
* * *
“Catch me,” Bea said to Jake, back at the police station. “I’m going to faint.”
“Why are you going to faint?” Jake asked.
She answered as she put both of her hands over Old Murray’s chest. “The drain on Old Murray’s life isn’t happening anymore, but it did happen.”
Peanut Butter put his paws over Bea’s hands and miaowed anxiously.
Jake tried again to make sense of Bea’s rambles about magic. “He needs his life restored… and it’s coming from you?” His expression quickly changed from confusion to apprehension.
“It won’t kill me,” Bea assured him and Peanut Butter. “But it’s taking a lot out of—”
Then she fainted. Jake caught her.
* * *
By the time afternoon had turned into evening, Aunt Astrid and I were patting flat the pieces of turf atop Dolores Thompson’s grave. I’d had to break into the groundskeeper’s tool shed to steal two shovels.
“More than one Unfamiliar in town,” I offered. “At leas
t one witch without training. Another secret society, with a book of magic, who sin against nature.”
“Wrath of ancient gods,” Aunt Astrid added. “Curses that the dead shall walk the earth, outnumber the living, and eat our brains.”
“Maybe we can try to ask the Maid of the Mist if this is just something that happens once a month in Wonder Falls for maybe so-and-so number of months every three hundred years or something.”
“It would have been in the Greenstone family record.”
Aunt Astrid and I went back to the tool shed to return the shovels.
“I think I know how Blake feels now,” I remarked. “If he were only in the know, I could leave him voice messages in the wee hours of the morning, containing the increasingly improbable theories of witches.”
“Let’s start with what we do know then,” Aunt Astrid said. “Try to keep it as simple as possible.” Aunt Astrid’s phone rang. She took it out of her pocket, and I dusted off my hands as she reacted to the call. “Hello? What happened? Oh, dear.”
When she hung up, I said, “The simplest explanation would be that I’m just not very good at binding Unfamiliars.”
“We’ll ask Bea about that,” Aunt Astrid said to me. “That was Jake. He says that she undid your binding on Old Murray. They’re both in the hospital.”
* * *
Jake hadn’t told us how bad it was, so Aunt Astrid and I rushed to the hospital, expecting the worst. We found him and Bea in the hospital lobby. Bea leaned against Jake’s shoulder, looking exhausted. He was laughing about something as Aunt Astrid and I approached, and eventually Bea gave a tired chuckle as well.
I said to them, “I’m glad to see that you both patched things up.”
“Bea was telling me about burnout,” Jake explained. He must have meant magic burnout, which happened when a witch used too much magic.
“And you’re all right with that?” I asked, still sounding suspicious.
“It’s not that different from keeping her comfortable during that time of the month,” Jake said.
Then it was Aunt Astrid’s turn to look suspicious. “And you’re all right with that?”
Jake and Bea laughed together, in their own world.
Aunt Astrid and I looked at each other, and I knew that we were both thinking the same thing. It couldn’t have been this easy. We looked at Jake until he remembered that we had arrived and that we both were waiting for more of an explanation.
Bea said, “Old Murray’s in aftercare for cardiac arrest. I came in with low blood pressure.”
Aunt Astrid sat beside Jake and asked, “And what’s the real story?”
I sat beside Bea, and they caught us up on what happened.
Jake finished with, “I’ve been a coward. These are things I thought I couldn’t understand even if you explained them to me. All I’ve known since the visit to the animal shelter was that this was dangerous. Bea showed me today that magic also heals.”
I gave Jake an exasperated expression. “That was obvious.”
“All right,” Jake said, “I’m sorry that it took the danger of losing Bea today to get me to wake up to the fact that I don’t want to spend any more time apart than we have to.”
I thought, sarcastically, that we were so lucky to have life-threatening situations come up like this to save marriages… that shouldn’t have been so rocky in the first place, if anybody was willing to communicate.
To test Jake, I said, “You won’t have a problem then with the fact that the Greenstones never stay dead, but as witches, we rise from the graves to sustain our eternal youth by drinking blood.”
Jake didn’t miss a beat. “Nobody’s perfect. Considering that blood is the private property of their owners until donated, however, I would be duty-bound to arrest your ancestors if not all transactions are conducted above board.”
Bea chuckled.
“What?” Jake said. “I was serious. Was Cath joking? I thought she was explaining more about the Greenstone legacy—”
Bea hushed her husband with a kiss. Aunt Astrid gave them a satisfied smile.
“Anyway,” I continued, “at this point, even if we Greenstones explained everything that we knew to each other about the past month, we wouldn’t understand it.”
Aunt Astrid and I told them about what had happened at the graveyard earlier that afternoon.
When we’d finished, Bea said, “It does make sense now. Dolores Thompson was the one taking Murray Willis’s life force.”
“No, wait,” I said, “Burger witnessed Samantha Perry’s death, which was instant. The Unfamiliar was making Old Murray fly around at that time too. It was there, and it was powerful.”
Aunt Astrid finished, “Dolores Thompson’s life force was slow because of Murray’s age. We saw no Unfamiliars at the graveyard. Did you see one at the police station, Bea? Even when you loosed the binding?”
Bea shook her head.
Jake cleared his throat then made an effort to ask, casually, “So you managed to get Burger’s, umm… testimony?”
I nodded. “Burger gave Old Murray a nasty bite.”
Bea blurted, “No, he didn’t.”
The three of us looked at her.
“I heal people, remember?” Bea said. “I have an intuition for injury. I would have noticed a month-old bite mark while I was healing Old Murray.”
I asked, “Even if the Unfamiliar had healed him?”
“I would have noticed traces of Unfamiliar interference too,” Bea said with certainty.
Jake said, “And you mentioned something about bloodline?”
“Hey,” I realized, “Old Murray and Dolores Thompson are related, right?”
At that, Aunt Astrid said, “It would explain the connection between them. Not so much with Samantha Perry and Shelley Marina.”
“That’s why!” I realized. “For all the Unfamiliar’s power, the night that Samantha Perry died… if Shelley Marina wasn’t drawing life force from the same genetic pool, then the resurrection would fizzle out on its own. If they did share a bloodline, however…”
“You’re saying,” Jake said, leaning forward, “that Dolores Thompson could have come back to full life and health.”
“And Old Murray would have died,” Bea said.
Aunt Astrid said, “But then the Unfamiliar wouldn’t have a host. They usually latch on to just one person. Crossing from their world into ours is difficult for them.”
“Unless,” I said, “some people already have a close enough bond for the Unfamiliar to move between. The Unfamiliar could have moved straight to Dolores Thompson.”
Bea scratched her head, thought about it, and sighed. “I just don’t feel like Old Murray was involved at all in the magical sense, not until this afternoon.”
We sat around in silence for a while, lost in our thoughts.
Then I wondered, “Where’s Peanut Butter?”
Jake answered, “I called Blake and Cody Willis over from the animal shelter. They arrived before you, and I left Blake to babysit Peanut Butter.”
Bea beamed. “Peanut Butter’s our baby.”
“You know,” Jake said, with a tone of mock suspicion, “he doesn’t look anything like me…”
“Oh, don’t even joke,” I said.
But Bea laughed and snuggled against him again. They’d hardly heard me.
I put my face in my hands and released a groan of aggravation. “I don’t know what to do with everything that’s been happening.”
Aunt Astrid reached over Jake and Bea to give me a comforting pat on the knee. “We won’t have our next clue until next month.”
I groaned again, even though I knew that Aunt Astrid meant that to be comforting.
“I’m hungry,” Bea said.
Jake stood. “I’ll get Peanut Butter, then we can head home for dinner.” He turned to Aunt Astrid and me. “Both of you are welcome to join us, of course.”
Aunt Astrid nodded. “I’d love to.”
“I’ll pass,” I told him.
I waved good-bye and walked away.
Night Jog
For dinner, I ordered a five-cheese pizza. It was still early in the evening when it came, only slightly later when I’d finished half of it, and properly nighttime by the time I felt I’d digested it. Since I felt guilty about binging like that, I decided to go for a jog around the neighborhood.
Sometimes I resented living in this town. In general, nobody liked to be singled out for gossip, but everybody liked to have a target to gossip about. They would say it was because they cared, and that was easy to believe when almost everybody knew each other. I was always wary about that though. How could anybody really know each other?
On the upside, as I said, nobody liked to be singled out for gossip. That kept most people’s behavior in line. The Wonder Falls police department had nothing to do most days. It was usually a crime-free town, but that didn’t mean it didn’t have mysteries.
It was a chilly night. As my jog went on, I panted out white wreaths of mist. With each step kicking off the pavement, I imagined the momentum taking me one step closer to the solution.
“Cath!” Min’s voice called behind me.
I jogged in place then turned around. “Hi, Min. I can’t stop. I’ve got to keep my heart rate up.”
He was dressed for jogging too. “I’ll race you to the falls,” he said as he jogged alongside me.
“Through the woods? I didn’t bring my flashlight though.” As we turned beyond the glow of the streetlamps though, I saw that Min’s sneakers had lights at the toes. “So,” I panted, as we jogged over the meadow, “did you find Topher?”
“Nuh-uh,” Min replied. He had joined the search party that morning. “I’m still getting to know this town again, so I’m not that much help.”
“Wish I could have joined,” I said, “but, you know, family comes first. We didn’t even catch up on rebuilding the Brew-Ha-Ha today.”
“Is Blake part of the family again?”
