Anora’s gaze flicked once from his revolver to his face to check for any signs he would comply. She did a double take and sucked in a breath; she swore he looked even worse than he had even a few moments before. Like Death really
was about to pay Darsby a visit.
His eyes flicked in her direction, their strange, glowing pinkness momentarily meeting hers. Even his eyes looked ready to give up on life. She gasped and staggered back into a tree, the box of wipes falling from her hand as emotions and the ghosts of sensations slipped from him to her, her eyes going wide. But before the container had fully left her grasp, he looked away, taking with it the haunting, inexplicable occurrence. A shudder ran down her spine.
What is this guy? she wondered, her breaths frozen in her lungs for a precious second.
Wounded. Depleted. Whatever else he was, he was hurting. Perhaps in more ways than one.
When he tried to rasp in a breath, Anora hurried back to him, crouching down. She opened her mouth to ask what he needed, what she could do to help him, but he reached for her, cutting off her questions.
With a short, surprised shout, she tried to stand and step out of his reach, but, even looking on the verge of falling unconsciousness, he was fast. His fist gathered her shirt just below its collar. The collar dug into the back of her neck at his sudden weight, and she stumbled to a knee as he pulled himself up.
For a moment, she was sure her heart stopped. She gripped his hand, ready to pull it away, sparks of purple dancing over her fingers in her shock. His face drew up only inches from hers, the urgency alighting his pale, weary features giving her pause.
Her blood ran cold as the last raspy words left his lips. ‘
Our heads.’ Not ‘my,’ but ‘our.’
Before her mind could process the new implication enough to ask who in the world would be after
her, his body spasmed with the struggle for breath.
“Darsby!” she breathed, her free hand going to his shoulder to help support him.
It did no good. His grip loosened and slid from her shirt as his body fell lifelessly to the ground.
“D-Darsby?” Her voice came out in little more than a whisper, her eyes bulging at the still body.
She hesitantly reached a shaking hand toward him. She exhaled heavily as she touched his wrist, his skin already unnaturally chilled. She searched for a pulse, but found none.
She stared in astounded horror at the corpse that lay before her. Her body refused to move, too stunned to even suck in more than the smallest necessary breaths.
Sure, she had always wanted adventure. But this? This was in a league of its own.
Two hours to recover. Had he thought he wasn’t going to die, or had he meant…
“Are you fricken’ SERIOUS?” Her voice went from a whisper to a panicked shout that echoed in her ears. She cringed at her unintended volume.
Anora looked around nervously, paranoia making the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She wondered who was after them. The Blouth, or something worse? Were they after her only because she had accompanied Darsby? She glanced to his body. Or had he included her in that simply to keep her from abandoning him?
She took a deep breath, trying to steady her nerves. “Okay. Not the type of adventure I wanted,” she mumbled to herself, running a hand through her lengthy black hair. Her fingers caught at a tangle in the strands’ bleached tips. “But beggars can’t be choosers. Right?”
Feeling something dripping down her skin, she glanced to her arm. She scowled at the cut she had all but forgotten. Though fairly shallow, blood seeped from it, leaving a red trail snaking toward her elbow. It smeared in a couple places from brushing against either the seats or the tree.
Frowning, she returned her attention to the more pressing matter before her. She walked toward Darsby—or the shell that remained of him—on her knees. Looking to his gun, she reached for it, but his fingers were impossible to pry away. She gave a frustrated humph, then switched tactics. She quickly figured out how to check the cylinder.
She gave a heavy sigh in relief. Empty. He was out of bullets.
Ignoring his bare backside, she braced herself to lift him into a sitting position. She blinked in surprise at how much lighter he was than she expected, his muscles hard beneath her hands. Though it still took decent effort, it was easier than she anticipated to lean his back against the car.
She glanced between his body and the open door of the passenger seat. As much lighter as he was than the average guy, physical strength had always been a weakness of hers.
She got to her feet with unexpected steadiness and raised a hand toward Darsby. Her chin lowered in concentration, and her signature mist poured from her palm. It wrapped around him, casting his body in a harmless, electric-looking haze. With a silent command and push of will, the haze swirled around him, solidifying and softening in just the right combination to lift and transfer his body from the concrete and grass to the seat.
As soon as he was in, the mist fizzled from existence. Trying to not think about the fact she was handling a corpse—or something unnervingly close to it—she tucked him into the seat and, for good measure, buckled him in.
She quickly retrieved the wipes and pulled one out as she went around to the driver’s side. She wiped at the crimson on her arm. She winced slightly as she used it to put pressure on the cut. More of her mist formed around the wipe, keeping it in place in a makeshift bandage.
With a shaking hand, she opened her door and got in. She tossed the container into the back seat, then gripped the steering wheel, the engine of the van purring readily.
Thankful no one had driven by, she nervously adjusted the rearview mirror then started down the road.
“Nothing unusual about riding with a corpse as a passenger,” she muttered under her breath, overly conscious of the body beside her. “Nope. Nothing whatsoever.”
The next hour went by in a thick, dangerously contemplative silence. The quiet finally gave everything time to fully sink in.
In the span of the afternoon, Anora had hit a guy, witnessed a monster attack, become a car thief after fleeing a potential crime scene, had a shell-of-a-body to deal with, and was now apparently being hunted by who-knew-what. All but one of which because she had decided on a whim to follow a mysterious scarred-and-tattooed man who controlled magic and had a gun glued to his hand.
Smart.
Real smart.
Mom always said impulsiveness would get me in trouble one day, she thought with a humorless chuckle.
More than once, she caught herself going well above the speed limit, before she remembered she couldn’t risk getting pulled over. Forget the stolen car and suspended license; she had a freaking
dead body keeping her company.
At least he didn’t smell like rot.
At last, she came upon a turn onto a dirt road. The van bounced slightly, clods of dirt and rocks clinking and thudding against the underside of the vehicle. As the van crested a hill in front of them, trees began to replace the fields that had become the normal landscape. The thick green leaves of the branches cast their shade over the road.
Soon, she stopped just outside a gate blocking the path. It was an old dilapidated thing meant to keep horses in, but it had rusted away in places. It stood slightly ajar, the lock long since devoured by time. Grandpa Jack had never bothered to replace it, deeming it unnecessary.
She got out just long enough to open it fully, then drove the van through. She left it open in case they needed a quick escape.
Anora rounded a curve, and the familiar sight of Grandpa Jack’s farmhouse greeted her like an old friend. Despite the shape of the gate, the rest of the house was in relatively good condition.
Two stories tall with an attic on top, its white paint had faded and chipped in some places. Flat roofing jutted out over the protruding windows of the attic. Drapes covered each of the house’s many windows. A porch wrapped the front of the building and disappeared around the back. A large three-car garage sat apart from the house.
Anora pulled the car onto the overgrown lawn, driving as close to the front door as she could. Stopping so the passenger side faced the front door, she put the car in park, grabbed her backpack, and got out.
She hesitated at Darsby’s door. Taking a deep breath, she pulled the passenger door open, unbuckled the lifeless body, and summoned more of her mist.
As it had before, it surrounded and lifted Darsby from the seat, his limbs flopping disturbingly as the gold-and-purple sparks shifted around him to pull him out of the car and to the porch. Anora followed her cloud, carefully directing it up the couple steps of the wooden porch and to the front door.
At her direction, the mist sat Darsby gently on the wood of the floor, freeing her concentration. She opened her backpack and rummaged around inside for the farmhouse’s keys. Her favorite thick sketchbook, skull and black rose-patterned pouch of drawing materials, waterproof flashlight, extra batteries stored in Ziplock baggies, couple energy bars, a half-drank bottle of water, wallet, a dirt-caked chain she couldn’t remember ever having, a few interesting-looking stones she had randomly collected, a couple unused Ziplock baggies, and various empty wrappers and loose dirt cluttered the inside.
After a moment, she gave a defeated sigh. She didn’t have the keys.
Shouldering her backpack, she went to the door and examined the lock on the handle. She had locked only the bottom one the last time she had come, so at least she only had one to worry about.
She stared at it a moment in contemplation before pointing a finger at the lock. She had never tried creating a key before. Now seemed as good a time as any.
She closed her eyes and concentrated on the excited feel of her powers. She willed it into the lock, to conform and harden to the needs of the mechanism inside, and unlock it.
The satisfying metallic
click of a door unlocking met her ears. Despite her overall situation, a proud grin spread over her face as she opened her eyes.
She could add breaking and entering to her list of felonies later.
She opened the door, letting it swing inward with a loud creak of protesting hinges. The scent of musty, stagnant air floated outside.
She turned back to Darsby. She stretched a hand out to him again, calling again on her powers. She felt the beginnings of fatigue eating around her edges. Her stomach growled loudly, reminding her she hadn’t eaten anything all day. Between that and her slightly heavier power usage, she would have to find something to replenish her energy. And soon, in case who—or
what—ever was after them found them before Darsby came back to life.
If he came back to life. For all she knew from his request, she was just a creeper lugging around a corpse that would stay a corpse.
She walked in the house, Darsby’s magically floating form following her. They entered a fairly large entry room, the floor covered in wood panels, some still showing their former shine. The once white walls had faded to a dirty brown. An archway stood to both her right and left, a hall extended in front of her, and a staircase stretched upward at the side of the room, leading to the floor above.
She shut the front door behind her, locking both locks.
A guitar riff blared from her pocket, shattering the silence.
Anora shouted and jumped in the opposite direction of her musical jeans pocket. The electric mist holding Darsby up vanished with a fizzling pop, and his body fell to the floor with a loud
thunk Anora cringed, her face twisting in a sympathetic apology even though he couldn’t see it.
“Sorry, Darsby,” she offered as she pulled her forgotten phone from her pocket.
Caller ID read, ‘Janet, Work.’
Anora groaned. Work. In the mess that had arisen, she had forgotten about the mundane thing known as her job. Worse, she forgot she had her phone on. She slid the screen button to decline the call, then powered her phone down. If
Criminal Minds was anything to go off of, police could track her via cellphone GPS. Though signal sucked in the area, it didn’t mean she didn’t get it.
She scowled.
Great. She shoved her phone back in her pocket.
I’ve got the cops and ‘something in the wind’ to worry about. With a sigh, she looked to the wipe-turned-magic-bandage on her arm. She dismissed the magic, the blood-stained wipe clinging to her skin on its own. She carefully peeled it away, her nose scrunching as it irritated the cut beneath. Without paying the small wound much mind, she crumpled the wipe and shoved it in her pocket.
She resummoned her cushion around Darsby and quickly brought him up the stairs, paying closer attention to how much energy her abilities pulled from her. Upstairs, she hurried down a hall, the floorboards creaking beneath her feet, and into one of the guest bedrooms that still had a bit of furniture.
Inside the bedroom, a once-plush gray carpet muted her footsteps. A simple mirrored dresser sat in a corner beside a narrow closet door. A twin bed, its covers stripped, was shoved against the center of the wall, the mattress a bit stained and lumpy. Two windows on the wall opposite her let in a bit of the early evening’s light, the curtains tinting it a calming shade of blue.
She directed her magic to place Darsby on the mattress. The bed frame creaked at his added weight, but held. His weapon-wielding arm draped over the edge of the bed.
Satisfied, Anora returned downstairs and headed into the kitchen near the back of the house. Over the past few months, she had taken to leaving a few nonperishable items in the pantry.
She grabbed a bottle of water from a dwindling collection, selected a sealed microwavable bowl of soup, and pulled off its metal top. Without any power running regularly to the house, she sipped at its lukewarm contents hungrily as she headed to the bathroom. Her boots clicked gently on the wooden flooring, leaving soft prints in areas where dust and dirt had collected longer than in others.
In the bathroom, she placed the soup on the sink and dug out one of the many first aid kits Grandpa Jack insisted on keeping spattered throughout the house. She quickly set to work washing off the cut using the bottled water. Finally capable of getting a good look at it in the mirror, it looked a bit deeper than she had originally thought. The skin around it had grown red and irritated.
She quickly bandaged it up properly, then, soup in hand, headed to the attic to find Darsby something to wear. For her sake more than his.
Dust motes floated lazily in the light of the various windows of the stuffy attic. Boxes lined the walls from floor to ceiling, some stacked more precariously than others. A table with more smaller boxes sat in the middle of the room surrounded by—you’ll never guess—more boxes. Some were labeled, but most weren’t.
Anora downed the rest of her soup and placed the empty bowl on a small sliver of table visible between cardboard. She opened up a few of the boxes before finding some of Grandpa Jack’s old clothes. Hoping the two were at least somewhat similar in size, she found a pair of worn jeans, a belt with a tarnished horse head buckle, a red plaid shirt with a couple burn holes on one sleeve, and a pair of cowboy boots that had seen better days in the 80s.
She returned to the guest room, casting Darsby’s body an anxious glance. It hadn’t moved. She folded the clothing items and placed them on the dresser beside the boots.
Taking a deep breath, she approached the bed’s side. She glanced to his gun, its metal catching a stray ray of sunlight.
What’s with him and that thing? she wondered, thinking of anything besides that a dead guy, or sorta dead guy, was laying on her granddad’s guest bed. She took a deep breath and touched the barrel of the gun.
Some sort of connection to his lifeforce? The source of his magic? The EMTs got it away from him, though. And he still recovered, and did magic. She had so many questions to ask, so many things she needed to know. But, apparently, he would only answer two. Two she had not given much thought to. With somewhere around half an hour left before Darsby's two hour mark, she had a little time left to think on it.
She glanced to Darsby and shifted her weight awkwardly. The last thing she wanted was to be stuck in a room with a corpse for the next half hour or so. An hour’s drive with one had been bad enough.
“Can this day get
any weirder?” she muttered. She paused, then glanced toward the ceiling. “That’s
not a challenge,” she told the universe sternly. Just in case.
She hesitantly took his wrist, his skin the clammy cold only death could achieve. She shuddered as she moved his arm so it draped over his chest instead of the edge of the bed.
Going to the dresser, she pulled her sketchbook from her backpack, found a blank page, and tore a corner from it. She quickly scrawled a note for Darsby, her messy handwriting something somewhere between print and cursive.
Darsby, I’ll be on the roof keeping a lookout. Give me a yell when you’re… alive again. ~Anora
P.S. The windows stick sometimes. Wiggle them a bit and they’ll open. She placed the note atop the clothes, returned her items to her backpack, and went back to the attic. She forced one of the swollen windows open and climbed out onto the overhanging rooftop, as she had done so many times before.
She climbed to the peak of the house, careful of loose shingles. She nestled with her back against a chimney, angling herself so she could see both the front and back of the house. There were two roads leading to the farmhouse, one in front and another harder to find out back. A few other buildings occupied the space between the trees behind the house: a workshop, a barn, and an old shed.
The property extended well beyond the trees out into a decent portion of the fields, but she had always loved the seclusion and solitude the wall of trees provided. It felt like its own little world, its own small pocket of peace hidden away from the busy, nosy lifestyle of the rest of the world. As much as she loved the hustle of the city, the quiet of this place was a perfect occasional escape.
From her vantage point, she could spot anyone coming from either direction well before they would see her. Or, if Darsby decided to back down on his promise and try to leave, she’d see him. Unless he disappeared the same way he had moved the car.
She couldn’t tell if he had simply needed her, so told her what he thought she needed to hear to make her come with him, or wanted something in particular from her. Neither was a very pleasant scenario. In one, she could wear out her usefulness, and there was no telling what he may do then. In the other, the possibilities of what he wanted from her were innumerable, from exhilarating to terrifying.
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, listening, thinking. If he stayed and kept his word, she had two questions. That promise of answers kept her in place, kept her from leaving him behind. She needed to get to the bottom of things, figure out what was true, and what wasn’t. Besides, the only other place she had to go was back home to legal trouble.
She opened her eyes, watching for intruders, sorting through her many questions and whirling thoughts. Waiting for Darsby to wake up—if he was not truly, irreversibly dead.
