Dean barked savagely and snapped at passing crows as they all scattered, returning to the woods.
*****
Patrick and Dean kicked open the door and shuffled into the dark house, Mr. Vincent’s arms draped over their shoulders. Most of his wounds had stopped bleeding, but he had already lost so much blood that his every attempt at walking on his own had ended with a fall. The two of them attracted a few odd looks and even an offer for assistance or to call an ambulance as they hurried down quiet backstreets to the man’s house, but they insisted that they had it under control. Patrick and Dean had received several wounds to the back, but had narrowly avoided any debilitating injuries and walked with nothing more than the occasional wince. All the while Dean rattled off a series of curses to himself and to the witch who had escaped them once again, this time leaving a good deal of physical damage in her wake, no less. The fact that the guy hadn’t gotten a chance to put in his fair portion of the fight seemed to infuriate him.
Patrick was angry, sure; but for the moment he was mostly thankful to be alive.
They carried Mr. Vincent into the living room and made their way to the hallway.
“Where’s the bathroom?” Patrick asked, out of breath.
“No,” Mr. Vincent said, his voice a harsh whisper, “just bring me to the chair.”
“But you need to clean yourself up, you just about died!”
“I’ll be fine, I’ll have plenty of time to do that later. We need to talk about this now.”
They obeyed and carried him over to the blue recliner. They eased him into it and he slumped back with a painful sigh. His shirt was full of holes and he was undoubtedly covering the upholstery with blood, but he didn’t seem to care. Patrick and Dean sat on opposite ends of the couch facing him. Patrick’s own bloody back screamed in pain as he sat, but he found that pushing it out of his mind was somehow easy under the circumstances.
“What happened out there?” Patrick asked, unable to contain himself. “What were you doing in the woods?”
There was pain in Mr. Vincent’s face, the prominent lines dark in the curtained room, but his voice sounded as though he might have been giving a lecture on the Byzantines.
“I couldn’t stay in here any longer. I remembered how you wanted my help and I told you I had no help to give. I thought maybe I should at least go look around for her, whoever she is, so I could get some questions answered—so I could feel like I was doing something…” He wiped absentmindedly at a trail of blood that was sliding down his temple, smearing the back of his arm with dark red. “And I found her. It was like she was waiting for me there. The crows attacked me, and I think I blacked out… When I came to, you were coming down the trail. I don’t know why she didn’t finish me off before you got there.”
“It was the howl,” Dean said. His deep voice was low, but carried sharply in the still air.
“Your howl came long after she first attacked me.”
“No,” Patrick interjected, “not ours. You howled before we got there. We heard it, that was why we showed up.”
Mr. Vincent eyed them curiously.
“That’s odd, I don’t remember that.”
“It must be why she didn’t finish you off,” Patrick said.
“But why did the howling get rid of the birds at all?” If Dean was as disinterested as he normally looked, he was doing a good job of hiding it; he was leaning forward with his hands on his knees, his face serious, his eyes now wide with anger and confusion.
The three of them considered his question for a few moments.
Patrick thought about the talk on the swing.
“Maybe we have some power over her,” he said. He turned to Dean. “What made you howl in the first place?”
Dean’s brow furrowed as he thought about it, making him look incredibly intense.
“I don’t know, I guess it just… kind of came out of me. When I felt like I was losing control it’s like it welled up from… from the wolf part of me, maybe.”
Mr. Vincent looked at each of them in turn, though his body didn’t move an inch.
“I get the feeling that you two know more about all this than I do.”
Patrick told Mr. Vincent what he had told Dean, similarly leaving out what Ramildienne had said about both of them. He put a special emphasis on the fates of all the other people that the witch had “gifted” over the years, a motivational tactic which Patrick immediately regretted after seeing the effect it had on Dean.
The huge figure sitting on the couch next to him was practically shaking with anger by the end of the retelling. Dean kept mostly still but the shadows on his face grew as did the hatred, and he looked like he might lash out and punch something at any moment. Patrick was reminded of a grand piano with all of its strings wound far too tightly, the knobs still slowly turning.
“I can’t believe she would just run like that,” he said through gritted teeth, “why can’t she just face us? When I catch that damn witch I’m going to tear out her throat!”
“No!” Patrick shouted. He startled himself with the sound and automatically readjusted the volume of his voice, though the urgency was the same. “That’s still Rachel’s body! You can’t touch her!”
“Maybe we won’t have to,” Mr. Vincent said quietly.
Patrick and Dean looked at him, and his eyes were so heavily lidded he might have been sleeping.
“The necklace,” he said. “It was the reason she lost her body in the first place, right? If what she told you was true, then maybe we only need to take it from her.”
“She’s so fast…” Patrick nearly whispered, remembering how his fingers had snatched at the little red stone and closed around dry leaves.
“It’s true, but it’s the only plan we have. If you can call it a plan…” Mr. Vincent lifted a shaking hand to his forehead, where he wiped away another trail of blood that was running from a distorted gash that looked as though it would be leaving a nasty scar. (Patrick suspected he would have plenty of his own scars if he survived all of this.)
“I don’t think she’ll ever stop trying to kill us,” the man said a moment later. “It sounds like too many people have already died for her benefit for her to turn back now. But there are two things that we seem to have going for us…” He shifted in his chair, winced at the pain, and settled again with a sigh. “She doesn’t seem to want to make her appearance public for whatever reason, so we shouldn’t have to worry about being attacked while other people are around.”
“That’s true,” Patrick chimed. “When I went back to the woods she had cleaned up the hole and the casket and made it look like nothing had ever happened.”
“The second advantage we have been given—though this is purely speculation—is that we are protected while in our homes. Otherwise there has been nothing to stop her from simply poofing herself into our houses and killing us while we sleep, or even as we speak now.”
“Ownership…” Patrick said vaguely, hardly aware that he had said it at all. When the others turned to him for elaboration, he straightened up in his seat and regarded them with mild surprise. “When Ramildienne was talking to me on the swings she said something about ownership. How it was really important. The reason she lost her powers when that villager took her necklace was because it was no longer in her possession. I guess it’s the same reason why she can’t leave town; she said that she affected us, and in turn was bound to this place. So maybe it would make sense that she couldn’t harm us if we were in our own houses.”
“The only problem is, we can’t stay in our houses and around other people forever,” Mr. Vincent said. “And above all else, we want this whole thing to end. I’m sure you miss Rachel very much…” He looked at Patrick, who met his eyes with all the determination he could muster.
“So what do we do?” Dean had calmed down considerably, and now stared blankly at the floor.
“I don’t know what we do,” Mr. Vincent said.
“But whatever is going to happen, I think it will happen soon.
Chapter 23
It was often hard to read his wrinkly face, he made many comments and jokes that were so old-fashioned they were practically indecipherable, and his breath smelled rather bad, but no one could deny that Mr. Baker was a very, very nice man. The fact that he was willing to meet with Owen on a teacher conference day for an unpaid hour of algebra tutoring proved this if nothing else.
He agreed to meet when the conference was over, at three o’clock. Owen thought that his office contained at least three different smells that were completely unidentifiable and a tad disturbing, but there were some little Reese’s Cups in a bowl on his desk.
Mr. Baker (who insisted upon being called Fred, though Owen could scarcely remember to do so) wasn’t like other teachers who had given him help over the years. Owen had always had trouble asking an adult for help; somehow he always found himself under an enormous amount of pressure, trying his very hardest to understand the material that the teacher was so comfortable with, psyching himself out into a panic in the process, each concept bouncing off the mental block in his mind. Something about having the full attention of someone who knew it all so fluently, whether it was math or English or science or Spanish, intimidated Owen a great deal.
But for some reason Mr. Baker was different. Maybe it was the candy, maybe it was his incredibly soft voice and his big bushy eyebrows that made him look a little like Dr. Brain, but something about the man sapped most of the nervousness right out of him. It took a little while of course; walking into the strange office with its odd smells and weird bear statues had been uncomfortable at first, but as the old man went over the concepts that Owen had been struggling with he found it easier and easier to take it all in. In fact, by the end of the session Owen was quite confident that he had learned more in that one hour than he had in any month of class; maybe even any year. And the best part about it was that with a new understanding of these basic concepts, other concepts would surely come easier. Mr. Baker even surprised him by explaining a formula and testing him on it until he understood its execution and application clearly, only to reveal that he hadn’t even gone over it in class yet.
Owen marveled at the long series of calculations on his paper, strength and accomplishment coursing through his veins, almost tangible enough to actually feel.
“See?” Mr. Baker said with a chuckle, his nostrils flaring oddly. “You came in here thinking you were terrible at math, and now you’re ahead of the game!”
Owen left the office and walked across the deserted lawn with a fresh new outlook (and a pocket full of peanut butter cups, as per Mr. Baker’ orders), ready to get home and break out the old textbook for another few rounds of problems.
Who’s getting KO’d this time? He thought, smiling at the mental image of himself in a ring, wearing boxing gloves and wailing on an oversized anthropomorphic version of his textbook, “Beginning Algebra by Anne King,” delivering the final blow and watching as it tumbles to the floor, the ref counting one, two, three, and the crowd erupting in a mighty cheer.
He would swat those problems one by one like flies.
He would shoot them out of the sky like nearsighted pheasants.
He would stab each one and send it reeling, like… like…
This last thought faltered and came to a complete stop. Owen’s mouth hung slightly open as he looked across the street, deciding that his glasses must need cleaning.
Rachel was standing by the trees, smiling at him. She was holding her book bag as though she had just gotten out of school.
Owen stood still for a long moment, all thoughts of math problems spiraling from the sky like downed birds and of giant textbooks sporting boxing gloves suddenly leaving him. He couldn’t think of what he should do or say, or even think.
“Uh…” The sound escaped his lips without intension, and when Rachel only continued to stare at him and smile for what was an uncomfortable amount of time he said, “Hi… Rachel. What are you doing here?”
When she had disappeared, Owen had been much more distraught than he let on. She had always been so nice to him, and even on occasion had tried to help him with his homework. The pressure of having something explained by someone who was not only really smart but also a girl had proven to be too much, of course, but the gesture had given Owen a great respect for her. And more recently she had stood up for him when Mr. Poulton gave him detention—her and Patrick both. While he felt really bad for getting them in trouble, he would never forget how they had fought the undue punishment simply because they thought he didn’t deserve it. It was a lot more than anyone else had done for him in his twelve long years of schooling so far…
Now Rachel stood on the other side of the road, alive and well.
And that smile. At any other time it would have been enchanting, but now it only made Owen feel strangely uncomfortable.
“Hello!” she said cheerily, one hand resting on her bag and the other dangling casually at her side.
Owen looked around to see if anyone else was witnessing this odd scene. The street was completely silent, all the teachers having left after the conference, the nearby houses very quiet and still.
“Where have you been, Rachel? Everyone’s been looking for you for over a week. We thought the wolf got you…”
Her smile didn’t falter; if anything, it grew wider.
“I know I’ve been gone a long time,” she said, “but I can show you where I went!”
Owen kept telling himself that he should have been jumping for joy at the mere sight of her, but he couldn’t shake this overwhelming peculiarity.
“What do you mean, you can show me?”
“I want to show you where I’ve been all this time. Come on!” She reached out a hand for Owen to take.
His stomach immediately jumped and his heartbeat quickened at the thought of holding her hand, though the feeling only lasted a moment. She stood with her arm outstretched, smiling that big smile of hers, and all he could think about was how none of this felt right.
Nonetheless, after a long pause and another look up and down the street he found himself inching toward her. He moved across the remainder of the lawn and to the asphalt, walking with a great hesitance but unable to stop himself. Soon he was standing in front of her, looking from the smile to the hand and back to the smile, wishing desperately that there was an adult around to see this and bring some sanity to the situation. He was almost tempted to run off and simply fetch the nearest adult he could find, putting an end to this weird suspension of reality, but even though it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense, he was afraid that Rachel may run off again—maybe for another week, maybe forever.
Finally, he raised his hand slowly and offered it to her. Rachel’s smiled widened, and after a moment she stepped forward and took his hand in hers.
Suddenly Owen was swallowed by blackness, the world draining from his vision in an instant. The last thing he remembered was falling.
Chapter 24
The sun had long since gone down and Patrick sat in his bed, holding a book in front of him in a failed attempt at passing the time, hearing the faint voices of his family downstairs, suddenly and fully realizing the fact that sometime very soon his life could end.
This thought petrified him—filled him with a terror that cut more deeply than a hot blade. The possibility of death was a reality; not just a vague idea that popped up from time to time, surely not to be fully realized for oh so many years, but something that was upon him now, as he sat in his room pretending to read a book. It perched on top of his TV and stared down at him, its beady red eyes glowing with menace, its talons gripping at the plastic eagerly. Every memory, every feeling he’d ever experienced threatened to rush back to him along with a wave of nausea, but he fought both. He shunned away each image as it crossed his mind.
There’s no reason to go reminiscing, he thought, because I’m not going to die. r />
(Watching The Fellowship of the Ring in the theater with his father. His father making a dwarf-fart comment during the Mines of Moria scene that sends Patrick into a fit of laughter.)
There was absolutely no reason to believe that he would soon be dead.
(Pushing Lizzy on the swing at the old playground by the church. Lizzy giggling madly as she climbs higher and higher into the sky, Patrick laughing with her.)
He had power over the witch, and he wouldn’t let her get away with her crimes.
(Sitting next to his mother on the Farris wheel, the two of them sampling each others’ ice cream cones. Being filled with a sense of complete wonder and awe as they reach the top and see half the city sprawled out before them.)
She was powerful, but not powerful enough.
(Rachel sliding her fingers into his. Holding her hand in the fading daylight.)
For the beating of his heart and the heavy breaths in his lungs, he barely heard the call from downstairs.
“Patrick?” his mother’s voice drifted faintly up to his room.
He bolted upright and looked to the door, involuntarily taking a gasping breath. He took a moment to gather himself, then put the book down on his nightstand and went to the door. He opened it and stepped outside his room, leaning over the banister.
“Yeah, Mom?” he called, trying to keep the shakiness out of his voice.
His mother walked into view below him, holding the cordless phone with the mouthpiece covered and craning her neck up to look at him.
“Do you know an Owen Wheeler?” she asked, her voice echoing in the uncarpeted hallway.
This question took Patrick off guard, and for a second he didn’t know how to answer.
Finally, he said, “Owen? Yeah, he’s in most of my classes.”
“Would you happen to have seen him today, or do you maybe know where he might be right now?”
Patrick paused.
“No,” he said. “I haven’t seen him since yesterday. Why?”
His mother looked a little concerned, but did her best to hide it.