So, instead of asking the thing she was begging me not to ask, I asked something else.
“You sent something in your message. About Myrus.”
She nodded, and I could see a bit of relief take over her body.
“You’re looking for him, right?” She continued when we nodded to the affirmative, “I can try a spell for you, but it isn’t guaranteed. I just found it the other day, so I thought I’d give it a try.”
Part of me wondered if this was really worth her trip over. Just that brief message in warning, and this random spell she found? I mean, I was grateful, but… was there another reason she wanted to come this way? Was this her way of ‘getting out of the house’?
“If it doesn’t work, we’ll find another way.”
“Do you have anything of his?” she directed the question at Jane, who nodded and trotted back up the steps to her room, only to return holding that box she’d grabbed before we left. She handed it over to Minnie
“This, but he had left it behind in a cabin.”
She nodded, opening the box to find an old pocket watch. It was bronze and no longer ticked. I leaned closer to Jane.
“Weren’t you fighting a guy at that cabin?”
She shrugged.
“When did you have time to look through it all? I thought you all went to Melodia’s right after?”
“I don’t know… I just saw it and grabbed it. There wasn’t anything else worthwhile in there…”
When she’d run off on her own to go save Lee and his parents after they’d been taken captive, she’d met Myrus’s son. They’d fought, she was injured, they all got out of there and back to safety and healing. The son got locked up. She didn’t talk about it often, but she’d mentioned it once, when she’d gotten a few too many drinks in her. How there were tubs of used needles and syringes. They’d basically been drugging Lee and his father the whole time they were there. I’d thought she’d want to get out of there as fast as she could, without taking anything – just get out and leave… but it must’ve caught her eye somehow.
And then the pocket watch was pocketed.
I scolded myself for nearly laughing at that thought. Now was not the time for jokes. Bad Kat. Bad Kat.
Thankfully, Minnie was ready to save me from my thoughts.
“I’ll try it now.”
She muttered words, and they sounded like they were in another language, so they probably were, even if I didn’t recognize a single word, and the thing, the pocket watch? It started to actually glow as she set it on the floorboards in the middle of our triangle we’d made by sitting down.
A sort of image started flickering into appearance above the watch, like a hologram.
Wow.
This was cool.
Minnie’s brows furrowed in concentration and the image got clearer. And image it wasn’t. It was like a video. It was moving.
The man, who I assumed was this Myrus fellow, handed a pair of binoculars to a young woman, who nodded and peered through them.
“Who’s the girl?” Minnie asked.
I was curious too, but as I didn’t know, I just shrugged.
“Probably the one with insane hearing abilities.” Jane told us, unfazed. “Myrus’s son mentioned her.”
“The one you pepper sprayed?”
Her gaze snapped to Minnie at those words. Oops. I bit my lip, knowing what was coming.
“You heard about that?” Jane asked her.
“I did.”
Very not discreetly, Minnie turned to look at me. And so did Jane. I held my hands up in surrender before anything could come out of her mouth.
“I didn’t mean to spill it, but it was kinda funny!” I rushed to say.
“Wait. Look.”
Before Jane could respond, Minnie drew our attention back to the hologram, to Myrus and his daughter walking into a building. Strolling… over to a wall?
And then I saw it. What they were looking at.
There were pictures. A lot of pictures. Pictures that I recognized and some that I didn’t. Some of those were taken, without our knowledge, by Myrus or one of his kids.
A hand flew up to my mouth.
Oh god…
I was going to be sick.
Some were off to the side in an odd collection, separate from the cluster of ones containing individual faces. One was of Jane and Lee together, at the large cabin – Melodia’s cabin – where we had our yearly reunions at… from a time when none of us knew about their relationship. There was one of two kids in a treehouse, but it was blurry. Another was just as fuzzy, of a man stepping out of a car, and I couldn’t tell who it was, but it looked like there were a couple other people in the vehicle as well.
Jane pointed, having noticed the same pictures.
“That’s Lee’s dad. It’s from their… vacation.”
Vacation… the time they took, away from the packs, traveling as a family. The one where they ended up getting attacked and held captive for weeks by Myrus’s son? That vacation?
I glanced at her, only to see the same expression I was wearing.
Our individual pictures were there too. Mine was there. Jane’s was there. Only Minnie’s wasn’t.
Horror and anger didn’t begin to describe this.
Because above that… were pictures of our parents when they were younger. My parents… were up there. Other than the lines drawn through my dad’s picture… My mom’s image had been stabbed through, right in the middle, with a knife. The knife wasn’t there anymore, obviously, but there was a hole in the middle, with no lines or tears from the top or bottom. It was as if, in a fit of anger, they’d stabbed the picture of the person responsible for their excessive anger…
It took me just a few seconds to register all of that. Just a few seconds to realize that I knew nothing about what my parents had gone through. We all received watered down versions of events from their pasts.
The woman who had attacked Jane’s mother as well as my own… was killed by mine in self-defense. My dad had been attacked in his family home as a teen, and that’s when he lost his mother and nearly his own life as well. But, was it connected somehow?
“That’s us…” I finally said. “All of us.”
“Is that my mom, too?” Jane asked quietly.
Minnie nodded, looking just as upset as us. Then again, these were all people she’d grown up with. We were her friends. Our parents baked cookies she liked and sent them home with her or her mom whenever they could.
“Why is there an ‘x’ over her picture? Dad’s too,” Jane muttered, confused.
That was right. It wasn’t just my parents crossed off like they were on a hit list. It was Jane’s. It was Lee’s.
And it was Jane herself.
She was crossed off.
But she was still alive… which meant that maybe they started crossing them off before they attacked them? In a way, it would be naming them as someone they’ve tried to kill… and well, it fit a little too well. Without many of the details, we all knew that their lives had been at risk, more than once.
And because they weren’t dead, those ‘x’ marks on the pictures didn’t mean death. It meant attempted. And for our parents and Jane, it meant a foiled attempt.
“It’s all the routes he’s tried. Look at your picture, Jane.” I gestured to hers. To the ‘x’.
“Lee’s too.”
Then I noticed one good thing. “There’s nothing on me, William, Lynn, or Josephine. That’s good, right?”
“All of you must be careful.” Just as she raised her hand and began to open her mouth to dispel the now flickering video, I stopped her, grabbing her wrist.
“Wait. They’re walking back over to the wall.”
We all stared at the image before us, moving, my heart pounded in my chest and my teeth tugged on my bottom lip in worry.
Without hesitation, Myrus reached out and grabbed the bottom edge of William’s picture and ripped it off the wall, the staple remaining embedded. I flinched at the movement. He circled Will’s picture with that bright red marker before leaving it sit on the table. Then, that young girl, his daughter, was next to him again, binoculars no longer in her hand.
All warmth seemed to leave me as that girl… pointed right to my picture, with fury blazing in her eyes, saying words that I couldn’t hear. She was talking about me. As far as I could tell, all the blood drained from my face. The room, despite the warmth from outside, and the air conditioner turned off, felt suddenly chilly around me.
Goosebumps rose on my arms and I shivered.
He replied to the girl, which only made her more furious. She jabbed her finger right in the middle of my face, and I flinched again, expecting to feel some kind of pain from it, despite it being only a picture of me and not actually being me.
After a moment, I watched his shoulders fall a little as he exhaled. A sigh? Was that a sigh? And then he nodded.
Nodded?!
That marker moved up, within his grasp and marked a diagonal line across my face, from one corner of the picture, to the other.
“What did they say?” I asked Minnie and Jane, as if they could hear anything, which they couldn’t because this spell didn’t seem to come with sound.
I… I made that girl angry somehow.
How?
Minnie shook her head. “I don’t know.”
How did I make her angry? I didn’t even know her! I’d never seen her before. It wasn’t like I’d taken something of hers or been rude to her somehow!
Why me?!
It just didn’t make sense without the words. And we wouldn’t ever get them…
“Kat…” Jane whispered, her voice low and more serious than I’d ever heard it, her eyes glued to the scene we were seeing. Minnie and I both gazed her way.
“What is it?”
She hesitated before looking at me. And then I saw it in her eyes. Horror. Fear. Worry.
“Don’t go anywhere without me, alright?”
“What?”
“Myrus…” Jane trailed off, glancing out the window before her gaze snapped back to Myrus, where Minnie had cut the spell, sweat rolling down her face, her clothes soaked in spots, her hands trembling from exertion. All that was left was an image of the room, of Myrus, of the girl, and all of our pictures. Her eyes widened, picking up on something we hadn’t.
“What is it?”
“Did you pick up on what he was saying, Jane?”
“Yes…”
“What is it?”
Jane gazed at Minnie after glancing at the window and all around the room. “This was essentially a live video, right?”
“Yes. Though there aren’t any clear landmarks or places within to tell of location. Sorry–”
She cut Minnie off. “Don’t be so sure.”
“Hm?”
Minnie’s eyes widened in surprise at her words before she looked between the video and the room like Jane had, only becoming more confused. Like me. I was confused too. What had she seen to make her react like this?
I wanted an answer to that, but there was something else bothering me more.
“Jane, what did he say?” I put a hand on her shoulder, desperately needing to know what was said. If she knew, then I felt I had every right to know. This was about me after all. Only, when I touched her shoulder, I felt a tremble run through it. She was… shaking.
She was freaking out?!
What the hell did they say?!
“We should get you home as soon as possible.”
I didn’t understand.
Home?
Why?
It wasn’t like they were at a beach. I gazed back at the image. Did she see some kind of travel voucher or something? A map?
I didn’t find anything that could clue her in to where they were.
“Jane, what are you saying?”
She nodded to the image.
“Look.” She told both of us. “Out the window.”
Minnie and I did. And then, through the few trees, I spotted it, blue, but a different shade than the sky.
“That’s…”
“The ocean.” Minnie seemed to pick up on Jane’s meaning faster than I did, because she gasped.
“What is it?”
Minnie shook her head.
“The shadow of the sun in the room there, and the room here, Kat. Look closely.”
Terrified, I looked at the image and then at the room we were sitting in. The shadows. If the ocean was that way… and the shadows were coming in from… I froze.
“Are you saying he’s here?!” I shouted, unable to contain myself, leaping to my feet.
No.
No, no, no.
This was not happening.
Not now.
I just found Noah, and… now I had to leave?
Jane nodded once before gesturing back at the image. “And he just put a target on your head.” She paused, swallowing hard. “He called you dispensable. And…”
“Jane. Tell me.”
She sighed, refusing to meet my gaze. “You know… Your mother…?”
“What is it? What about my mother?”
This was about me, then about my mother? Where was the connection? Did we both do something terrible to them?
She made that face. The face she always made when she didn’t want to say something. She closed her eyes and licked her lips before uttering her next words quietly.
“The woman she killed in self-defense? Do you remember hearing about it? The one that nearly killed her?”
“Yes? What about her? We know nothing about her!” I stepped back from her, unable to stay still, unable to stay so close. “Why is she – why are you… Jane? What do you know?”
I was freaking out already. She needed to just rip the whole band-aid off, not take it one measly millimeter at a time!
Shaking, I stared at her, willing her to explain why the hell any of this connected.
“She… Aunt Karen, your mother… She killed his – she killed… That woman was Myrus’s sister. Just now… He mentioned revenge, among other things.”
His…
His… sister.
My mom killed Myrus’s sister.
Okay.
So… I made the girl mad and now Myrus was willing to indulge in his revenge for his sister by killing me?
Great.
And I’d thought the day couldn’t get worse.
“How do you know that?” I choked out, tears threatening my eyes.
My life was being threatened and now Jane was telling me these things I didn’t ever know. But how did she know?
“I overheard our moms talking about it when we were younger.” She stood and took my hand gently in hers. “I’m sorry.”
I exhaled, as loudly and dramatically as I could. It made me feel about a millimeter better, if my emotional well-being ranged about that of a whole meter stick. About a millimeter better. Yeah, seemed about right.
“It’s…thanks for telling me now.”
Jane nodded solemnly. I could tell it was hard for her to even tell me, so I squeezed her hand a little, to show her silently that my words weren’t sarcastic. I meant them.
She gave me an attempt, a very sad attempt, at a smile and I did the same. Probably failed as much as she did too.
Comments (0)
See all