Chapter Fifteen #2
“And if,” Senán continues when I don’t answer, “these animals, these parents and children, are being killed not to show them off, but to make them disappear, quietly and systematically, and it’s being carried out by people who know where to find them and have the resources to get a half-ton body out of these woods without leaving a trace… what does that sound like to you?”
I know what it sounds like. I know the system inside and out, and I know where priorities lay and where funding goes. I don’t want it to be true, but I know it is.
“A coverup.”
Senán’s only response is a bitter smile and a single finger tapping her nose.
I feel sick to my stomach, and I try to swallow the anger and nausea filling my chest. “How many are left?”
Senán shrugs. “No one knows, for sure. There are three families we know about in this region. My contacts over the border say there are more up north.”
“Contacts?”
Senán nods pointedly at the white-haired woman, who is still standing with the sasquatch family, apparently more comfortable with several massive wild animals than she is with me.
“Witches. Healers. We keep in touch about these things… When you can’t rely on your government, you learn to rely on each other. ”
In the time that we’ve been talking, the smallest of the sasquatch—the uninjured juvenile—has slowly made its way across the clearing to investigate us.
It eyes me curiously, circling around me as though I’m the more dangerous of the two of us.
It’s almost as tall as I am, but I still feel the urge to crouch down to interact with it as it reaches out and taps my knee with its knuckles.
“He’s trying to get you to play with him,” Senán says.
I can hear the smile in her voice. I offer a hand to the creature, who swats at it then scampers away, like he’s expecting me to chase after him.
I don’t follow—much as I want to, the mother and the white-haired Witch are still eyeing me like a threat, and I decide it’s best to stay back.
Looks like the animal kingdom isn’t finished with me yet, though, as I feel a tugging at the ankle of my jeans and look down to see a clean, chubby, gray-and-white opossum, wearing a tiny circlet of daisies on its head and staring up at me with curious black eyes.
I blink down at it, and it blinks back. “Is this one with you, too?”
Senán hums as though a possum in a flower crown is the most normal thing in the world. To her, it probably is. “She doesn’t usually warm up to people this quickly,” she says with only mild interest.
“Huh.” I respect animals enough to leave wildlife alone, but a possum is a lot less dangerous than a sasquatch, and since she seems interested in an introduction, I kneel down to say hello, scratching her behind the ears with my fingers. “Does she have a name?”
“Gretchyn,” Senán says. “I think she likes you.” Gretchyn is chuffing quietly in response to the petting, eyes closed and tail curled in joy.
“What can I do for them?” I ask as the marsupial rolls on her back so I can scratch her belly as well.
“Do?”
I nod towards the family of sasquatch, who seem to have relaxed to my presence a bit, as the mother has stopped staring me down and moved on to grooming the smaller of her children. “They need help, right? How can I help?”
I look up at Senán and find a cold, expressionless mask staring down at me. I wonder if she knows that I can see how much sadness is hidden behind it.
“You can leave.”
Before I can object, Senán turns away from me and starts her walk back in the direction we came from.
“Hey, wait!” I call after her.
She doesn’t stop. I scramble to my feet and follow her as quickly as I can, trying not to slip on the moss and rocks covering the ground as we make our way back down the hillside.
“Will you hang on for a second?!” I demand as I catch up to her.
“Do you need directions?” she asks sarcastically. She doesn’t slow her brisk pace, and I can hear the same emotional wall from our very first conversation in the hallway a week ago, a wall I didn’t realize had come down until I see it back up again now.
I try my best to fall in step beside her. “Let me help them. I can… I mean, there must be something I can do. I have connections, I know people—”
“Your connections aren’t going to help us, Ryder. The best thing you can do is pretend you never saw any of this.”
“I can help, Senán!”
“No, you can’t,” she snaps, finally stopping and turning to face me.
“You’re going to go back to your office, and once you’re there, you’ll have two options: you either tell someone what you just saw, or you don’t.
If you tell someone about what we’re doing here, even someone who wants to be on our side, whatever you do to try and help us will eventually be seen or heard.
You’ll be fired, we’ll be fucked. If you tell no one and move on like nothing happened, we can keep doing what we’re doing and, Goddess willing, move the animals someplace more remote before any more of them get slaughtered. ”
We stand facing each other on a mossy sward, surrounded by a circle of trees that leaks spackles of bright morning sunlight onto the ground.
It’s so peaceful that even the birds who make their home here have chosen not to break the silence.
It’s beautiful and quiet and I hate it, I hate where we are, because the setting is far too serene for our tumultuous reality and the emotional vertigo I’m drowning in.
“You don’t trust me.”
Senán shakes her head and crosses her arms over her chest. I can tell this conversation hurts her, maybe as much as it hurts me.
Maybe more. “This isn’t about trust. It’s about the system you’re part of.
I saw what the Bureau you know grew out of, and it’s been broken from the beginning.
No use in fixing the doors of a house built on a rotten foundation. ”
I hear the frigid bitterness in her voice, and a less stubborn man might give up at this point, might turn and walk back to the resort with his tail between his legs.
But if I were a less stubborn man, I wouldn’t have made contact with Senán in the first place.
I wouldn’t have made a bargain that turned into everything that’s transpired between us, wouldn’t have followed her out into the woods this morning to have more than just my mind changed.
If I were a less stubborn man, I wouldn’t be where I am now.
“What if I can help by breaking the system?” I say.
Senán’s face doesn’t move, but I definitely have her attention. “And just how would you do that?”
“I’ve been doing that. I’ve spent months blocking development of this medical facility they’ve been trying to build—”
“You stopped a hospital from being built?”
“No! It wasn’t—the guy behind it, I know him, and he wasn’t going to use it for anything good—”
“Medical facilities are generally a good thing, Ryder.”
“Not this one! It’s… You just have to trust me; Nix and I have been working with this guy for years and he’s bad news.”
Senán’s posture relaxes slightly, and she takes a step towards me. “Nix is the one who called last night?”
As if on cue, my phone rings, and when I see the caller ID, I don’t think twice about answering it.
“Hey, bro,” Nix says. “I just wanted to talk to you about tomorrow—”
“Nix!” I say quickly, “Nix, you’re on speaker! I need your help with something—”
“Do you have your pants on this time?”
I shut my eyes and try not to sound irritated when I answer. “Yes, I have my pants on. Look—”
“You hesitated!”
“I am fully clothed, Nix, that’s not what’s going on—”
“A lot can happen fully clothed.”
“Nicky, I am in the woods. I am outdoors —”
“You were outdoors last night, too, and that didn’t stop you from carrying on a full conversation while you were sliding into third.”
“ Veronica—”
Before I can say anything else, Senán grabs the phone out of my hand.
“Hi, Nix, is it?” Senán asks.
“To some. Nicky to most, Veronica to you. Who’s asking?”
“This is the Witch whose little finger Ryder’s been wrapped around.”
Nix’s tone changes immediately. “Oh, hi!”
“Hi, love. You seem the type of person to appreciate a long story being made short, so I’ll keep this brief: Ryder is helping me get to the bottom of a problem I’ve been dealing with, and he mentioned something about a hospital he’s stopped from being built?
Was hoping you could tell me a wee bit more about that. ”
A long, silent pause, then, “Hey, Ryder?”
I scrub my forehead with my hand. “Yeah, Nix?”
“You wanna tell me why you’re doling classified information out to your fuck buddies?”
“We’re not—Look, the info is already shared, we’re just confirming.”
“Confirming what, exactly?”
Senán jumps back into the conversation. “ Why does Ryder want to stop the Bureau from building a hospital?”
Another pause, then the familiar sound of Nix closing her office door. “Ryder, you know someone is going down for this, right? I’ll do what I can, but it’s most likely gonna be you.”
“I understand,” I say firmly. “Go ahead, Nix.”
Nix sighs again before she continues. “We have reason to believe the facility in question is not going to be used to provide supportive or diagnostic care.”
“And what makes you say that?” Senán asks.
“Well, for one thing, the funding acquisition forms include requests for all kinds of shit they wouldn’t need for a hospital. I’m not gonna give details, but it reads like a shopping list for a pharmaceuticals lab.”
“Pharmaceutical?”
“That’s our theory, anyway. Certain cryptids and supernaturals have… adaptations. Immortality, healing capabilities—”
“Adaptations that a drug company could sell for billions,” Senán interjects.
“Or cost them billions. Plus, the guy who’s running the whole thing practically has Pfizer paying off his Tesla truck. I mean, he paid out of pocket to send Ryder on vacation in Miami just to get him out of the way for a couple weeks.”
Senán’s brow furrows and she gives me a confused look. “Miami?”
“Yeah—oh, right, I forgot he traded it out for… where are you guys again? Seattle or something?”
I can see the gears turning in Senán’s mind.
“Or something. So, you’re telling me that this fellow at the Bureau paid to send Ryder, who’s been a wrench in his lab-building wheel for some time now, on vacation in a city that’s about as far away from the Pacific Northwest as you can get without going international? ”
“That’s the gist of it, yeah.”
Senán is still looking at me as a smile starts to curl up at the corner of her mouth. “He must have been quite a wrench.”
“Yeah, well, you’ve probably already figured out by now he doesn’t give up easily.”
“That he doesn’t.” The smile blooms further on Senán’s face, and I feel myself start to blush under the attention. “What else can you tell me about him?”
“Well, he’s a Taurus Sun and Mars, but basically the entire rest of his chart is fire sign placements, so have fun with that.”
“Hmm, that sounds about right from what I’ve seen. I’m going to guess… Aries Venus?”
“Oh, you are good!”
Now I’m starting to get annoyed with being talked about like I’m not here. “I don’t even know what any of that means. Are we done?”
Senán ignores me and keeps talking into the phone with her Cheshire grin. “You know, speaking of Mars and Venus, you gave me a very helpful tip last night regarding Ryder’s versatility. Would you like to elaborate?”
I feel my cheeks burn. “Okay, that’s enough,” I say, stepping towards Senán and reaching for the phone in her hand. She side-steps, holding it just out of my reach while Nix responds.
“Oh! Right, so, I don’t know from experience or anything (gross) but Ryder and I share an ex, and she used to call him Peggy Sue because apparently he was asking for the strap, like, every night—”
“ Thank you, Nix, I think we’re good here,” I say loudly as Senán continues dancing around with my phone just out of reach.
“That is wonderful information to have, Veronica, thank you! Do you happen to know what size it was?”
“No, but I could probably find out. Hang on, I’ll text her…”
I finally manage to grab the phone from Senán and carry it several paces away. “Okay, yes, thank you, Nix, that’s enough.”
“You’re welcome,” Nix says cheerfully. “You can tell me how it went when I pick you up tomorrow. Don’t forget to send me your flight info.”
I feel a pang of preemptive grief hit me with the reminder that it’s my last day at the resort. “Yeah… yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I end the call and slip the phone back in my pocket, then turn to face Senán again. She’s leaning against a tree a few yards away now, watching me, making her infinite and ineffable interpersonal calculations.
“So that’s… Nix,” I say awkwardly.
“How much longer do you think you can keep blocking that lab from being built, Ryder?” She sounds sad and wise, like she’s trying to help me come to a difficult conclusion.
I study the moss at my feet. “As long as it takes.”
“You really think they’ll give up before you do?”
I shrug and kick at a patch of grass. “I mean, I’m not giving up, so…”
“You think they’ll give up before they fire you?”
“If they fire me, then they fire me.”
“You’ll sacrifice your career over this? Your livelihood, your family’s legacy?”
“If it comes down to it.”
“It will come down to it, Ryder. They will cut you out of everything in pursuit of their own motives. I’ve seen it happen enough times. All that you’ve built for yourself in that organization, all your connections—all of it will be gone, do you understand?”
I stare at the ground.
What do you hate about it?
What do you love about it?
“Okay, then fine,” I say, the words roiling out of me like steam from a kettle. “Let them get rid of me, fuck them.”
“I’m sorry, love, could you repeat that?”
“I said ‘fuck them,’ fuck the Bureau!”
The next moment is a blur—my feet lift off the ground and something pulls hard in the center of my chest, like an invisible rope is tied to my heart.
It yanks me forward, dragging me through the air, closing the distance between me and Senán, and I barely have time to register her beckoning hand and sirenic expression before we collide and connect in a searing, game-ending kiss.