Authors: Tim Pratt
Trey rushed out of his side of the truck so hastily that he fell out. He scrambled to his feet. “Bekah! Did you see that?”
“Yeah.” I leaned forward and rested my forehead on the steering wheel. “Or rather, no, I didn’t see
anything
.
Well, if Wonder Woman can have an invisible plane, why can’t I have an invisible pickup truck?”
He walked around to the driver’s side, observing the truck warily. “Start it up again?”
I shrugged, pushed in the clutch, and turned the key. This time I just kept my eyes closed, which made everything a lot less disorienting.
“I can’t see you at all,” Trey said. “Are…you’re still there, right?”
“As far as I know.”
“Wow. I hear you, but from out here, I can’t see you. You’ve got an actual cloak of invisibility. In truck form.”
“Oh, good. So I could drive this around, and none of the other cars on the road would see me, and I could have lots of exciting collisions.”
“It’s also noisy as hell.” The engine did indeed idle at a low and steady roar. “And if it’s only invisible when the engine runs…that’s not so stealthy.”
I turned off the key. “A sword that heals people. A pointlessly invisible truck. Did my dead dad have a weird sense of humor or something?”
“It’s starting to look that way.” He rapped his knuckles against the side of the truck, as if to reassure himself of its solidity, then shook his head. “So. Want to take my car to check on Melinda? Or we could just walk. It’s not that far if we take the path straight through the woods out back.”
“Hmm. I’m torn. Does your car fly or turn into a dinosaur?”
“It hasn’t yet, but I’m not going to rule anything out.”
I got down from the truck, and he said, “Wait. You mind letting me see your keys?”
“Why?”
“I just…want to try something.”
I handed the keys over, and he clambered into the pickup and cranked it up.
The truck didn’t disappear. It sat there, solid as two tons of pinkish iron can be, and after a moment, he turned it off. “Yeah. I thought that might happen.” He looked at me through the open door. “My dad told me this truck still worked, but he didn’t mention that it turned invisible, which seemed like kind of a significant omission. You’re Archibald Grace’s heir, Bekah. The magic works for you, but not for me. I bet if I stabbed somebody with that sword, I’d just put a hole in them.”
“If that’s true, then why did the Firstborn take the mirror? It wouldn’t do her any good…” I trailed off, remembering what the Eldest Daughter had said to me. “Renounce your claim to the door and the sanctum,” I repeated. “She made me give up my birthright.”
He nodded. “I think so. She was yelling about making you renounce your claim to the whole inheritance, remember, before she got all excited about the mirror?”
“I really wish my dead dad had left some clear instructions about how all this stuff works.”
“Yeah, a nice letter about the dos and don’ts of managing a magical inheritance. That wouldn’t have seemed like the ravings of a crazy old man at
all
.”
“I wonder if it’s all or nothing, though…” I tapped my forefinger against my lips for a moment as I thought. “Trey, I give you permission to use the power of, uh, my truck.”
Trey obligingly turned the key, and the Studebaker shimmered and vanished, though I could still see Trey hanging there, through the open door. I reached out until I felt the door handle, then slammed it shut, and he disappeared entirely. I grunted. “Well. That’s interesting.”
“This is how you tell the difference between magic and chemistry, I guess.” Trey’s disembodied voice was thoughtful. “A chemistry set doesn’t care who mixes up the chemicals—as long as they get mixed right, the chemical reaction happens all the same. But magic cares about who’s
doing
the mixing.”
“Trey, you’re not allowed to use my truck anymore.”
The truck shimmered back into visibility, which I’d sort of expected, but then the driver-side door popped open, and the whole truck sort of leaned over and shook—like a wet dog shaking off droplets—causing Trey to bounce around before falling out of the truck and landing in the dirt on his ass. Once he was ejected, the truck went still, and the engine coughed and died.
“Shit, Trey, I’m so sorry!”
“Ow.” He got to his feet and rubbed his butt. “That was dramatic.”
I brushed dirt off his back. “I’m really sorry, I didn’t know.…but now that I think about it, Melinda—or I guess the Firstborn, disguised as Melinda—kept asking me to invite her into the house. Do you think she couldn’t come in without my permission?”
“Like with vampires, who can’t enter without an invitation,” Trey said. “Except
everybody’s
a vampire, and nobody can come in unless you say it’s okay? Nobody’s been in the house since you took possession except me and the Firstborn, and, what, the cable guy? And you told all of us we could come in.”
“I’d say you aren’t welcome here anymore to test it, but I’m afraid you’d get catapulted into the sun or something.”
“Maybe if you put up a ‘No Trespassing’ sign it really works.”
“It’s not like my word is law, though.” He gave me a questioning look. “Remember—I wasn’t able to open that stupid door in the kitchen.”
“You probably just need to find the right key. We’ll keep looking. It’s a big house. You never know what’s hidden where. Do you still want to go to Melinda’s cottage, or stay here and test your awesome powers more thoroughly?”
“I don’t want awesome powers. They come with awesome responsibilities, and those suck. Sure, let’s go meet my neighbor, and find out if I’ve ever actually met her before. Walking sounds like a better idea than driving, though. I’m going to get twitchy every time I sit behind the wheel of anything for a while, I think.”
“Understood.”
We set off together around the house and into the woods. I thought back fondly to how freaked out I’d been by weird noises in the forest—being scared of mystery animals just seemed like an amusing affectation, now that I’d dealt with a supernatural home invasion.
I still jumped like someone had pinched my ass when that fluting-trumpeting-screaming sound emerged from the woods off to the west, though, and Trey stepped closer to me, looking around wildly. “What was that?”
“According to you, it’s a loon or a woodpecker.”
“
That’s
the noise you heard? Wow. I am such a dick. I’m sorry I brushed you off before.”
“I forgive you. Just don’t dismiss me next time I tell you I heard some eldritch shit. I’m not a country girl, but it’s not like I’ve never been in the woods. Seriously, though, you haven’t heard anything like that before?”
“I have not, and I wouldn’t want to investigate without some kind of firearm handy. Maybe after you find that magical flamethrower.”
“I had to suggest a restful walk in the woods.” We listened for another moment, but didn’t hear anything else. “I wonder if it’s a monster.”
He frowned. “What do you mean a monster?”
I bared my teeth and made the hand that wasn’t holding the sword cane into a claw and raked at the air. “Roar. Monster. Scary thing. Eats people, et cetera.”
“Ah. We’ll call that ‘the monster hypothesis.’ But there’s an old saying—if you hear hoofbeats, you should think horses, not zebras. It means—”
“The simplest explanation is the most likely, yes, I know. Most people just say ‘Occam’s razor’ and leave the poor horses out of it, you know. Your morsel of folksy wisdom makes a lot of sense—unless you happen to be standing in a zebra habitat. But we saw a woman’s face melt off and reveal a different face underneath.” I brandished the cane. “I slashed you with this blade and it fixed your broken neck
and
leg. You really think monsters are the least likely explanation around here? For all we know, we just heard the dragon the Eldest Daughter flies around on.”
“I withdraw my argument, your honor.” Trey lifted his hands up in surrender. “I know when I’ve been out-argued. Your monster sounds far away, at least. And we’re headed in the opposite direction, so I say let’s just keep going.”
We kept walking, this time in silence, and I assumed he was keeping his ears open for further strange sounds, just like I was—which was kind of silly, since the monster noise was loud enough that we’d hear it again even if we were singing sea shanties at top volume. But our quiet
did
allow us both to hear a rustling sound to the right.
I grabbed Trey’s arm, and we froze, looking toward the sound. The trees in that direction were especially thick, trunks close together and clogged with vines, but I saw something (or more likely someone) dressed in red hurrying away, deeper into the forest.
“Do you think that’s the Firstborn?” Trey whispered.
“I’m not sure she’d run away from us. She seemed less the spying type and more the jumping-from-a-bush-and-eating-us type.”
“Touché.” Trey looked around. “Could just be a kid from the college taking a walk. There’s parkland not far from your property—someone could have started hiking and wandered onto your land, maybe without even noticing. The fence is down in a few places.”
“The way you talk, you’d think I don’t have good reasons to be paranoid and jump at shadows.”
“Just because there are monsters doesn’t mean every noise you hear belongs to one.”
“Yes, your honor. Let’s keep going.”
We continued on, and I even managed to relax a little when there were no more bizarre screams or mysterious interlopers for fifteen whole minutes in a row. We reached Melinda’s cottage, which looked just as it had last time we visited—homey, cozy, and uninhabited. This time, though, the cats didn’t run from our presence, but came up to us, yowling pitifully, rubbing against our calves, obviously in distress, or at least hungry for attention. Or food. Trey knocked on the door and peered in the windows, calling, “Melinda!”
I didn’t wait for an answer. Instead I went through the garden, which was equal parts ornamental and practical, with vegetables and flowers intermingled in a haphazard but beautiful fashion. A mess of empty flower pots, half-empty bags of fertilizer, and assorted yard tools were piled at the end of the garden, and the cats raced ahead of me and began meowing at an overturned wheelbarrow next to a couple of big black garbage bags stuffed with leaves—
And an outstretched human hand. It was wearing a chunky fake ruby ring on one finger and half a dozen bracelets on the wrist. I walked around the wheelbarrow, the air seeming to thicken around me, everything stretching out and slowing down in an endless moment of anticipatory horror.
The woman in the garden looked exactly like the disguise the Firstborn had worn, except for her glassy, staring eyes…and the leaves stuck in her hair…and the fact that she was dead. I didn’t touch her to feel for a pulse, but there was no doubt in my mind she wasn’t among the living anymore. It wasn’t just the absence of breath, the bits of dirt that flecked her open eyes, or the awkwardness of her sprawl. I actually felt her absence of life like an ache in the back of my head. She’d ceased to be a some
one
and had become a some
thing
.
I’d never seen a dead person outside the context of a coffin, and I was struck by how wrong it seemed, her body just twisted there in the dirt in her garden, all messy, with no dignity, as simply and pointlessly lifeless as the corpse of a deer by the side of the road. There were no obvious signs of violence—she might have just fallen over, stricken by a heart attack or an errant blood clot or a lightning storm of rogue electrical activity in the brain—but I didn’t believe it. It seemed much more likely the Firstborn had killed her, as easily as she’d tried to kill Trey, and for even less reason. Just to make sure Melinda didn’t wander onto my property while the Firstborn herself was there in disguise. To leave Melinda unburied, unhidden, added an insult to the crime, I thought—as if Melinda were so insignificant she could be dropped in the dirt and left for nature to deal with as it saw fit, her mortal remains no more important than an apple core dropped in the grass after a picnic.
I opened my mouth to call out for Trey, then closed it. I still had the sword cane in my hand, after all, so maybe this was a problem I could solve. Trey had been on the edge of death, down to his last breaths, and the merest brush of the blade had healed him entirely, new wounds and old. I understood there was a chasm between
almost
dead and
all the way
dead, but I needed to see if I could bridge it.
Yes, I thought about “The Monkey’s Paw” and
Pet Sematary
and even
Night of the Living Dead
, but this woman had been killed because of me—indirectly, at least, since the Firstborn was only in Meat Camp to take things away from me. If it was even theoretically in my power to save her, I had to try.
At least I wasn’t stupid about it. I didn’t stab her through the heart. I unsheathed the cane, and knelt, and decided to press the point of the blade against the bottom of her bare left foot—because if I failed, and the police came to take her body away, a scratch there probably wouldn’t excite much comment.
I pushed the point of the sword, gently, into the dirty sole of her foot.
I don’t have the vocabulary to describe what I felt when the sword touched her corpse. Every comparison I come up with is a pochade sketch at best, just a quick attempt to capture a sense of the color and atmosphere without anything approaching clarity of line. But: It was like my entire self became a tidal wave, rushing toward some distant land. As if my soul became a geyser, bursting up through the top of my head. Like I’d closed some immensely powerful circuit, allowing unimaginable energies to pass through me and on out into the sword. Or, more prosaically, like I was a gas tank, and someone was siphoning me out.
Then I vomited and blacked out.
I woke to Trey’s insistent and panicked voice in my ear and his arms around my body, and when I opened my eyes and mumbled some complaint or question, he squeezed me hard, saying, “I thought you were dead, I was afraid you were both dead, I thought the Firstborn found you, that she got you—”
Once I got my muscles under control, I cut off his babbling and said, “I’m okay,” at the same time pushing him away. My mouth was sour and my head pounded like a heavy metal drummer had set up his kit inside my skull. There was a puddle of my puke way too close to my body, and when I looked around for the sword cane, I discovered it a good five feet away, half stuck in a compost heap, as if I’d hurled it away from myself with great force. Which, maybe I had. Sometimes when you black out your body goes right on doing stuff without the involvement of your conscious mind, right?