Chapter 29. Annette
Annette
Jenny had converted part of our stock room into a makeshift exam room. The pink-and-white gingham tablecloth on her exam table wasn’t exactly hospital-quality, but it kept shoggoth goo from seeping into the oak table.
She was currently listening to Morgan’s lungs with a stethoscope, though with her senses, she hardly needed it.
To my surprise, Morgan hadn’t only allowed me to stay with him during the exam; he’d asked me to.
Jenny stepped back from the table. “I’m prescribing dish soap.”
Morgan stared at her like he was trying to figure out if she was screwing with him. I wasn’t entirely sure myself. Her face was completely serious. Bruised and covered in cuts and butterfly bandages from yesterday’s battle, but serious.
She wore wide-legged brown pants and a loose forest-green top that looked old and worn and comfortable. The chain of her Greek necklace was just visible above her collar.
Her eyes were shadowed and puffy, and she kept turning away to hide her yawns. I was amazed she was standing at all. I imagined Artemis had something to do with this new stamina.
“Liquid soap,” Jenny clarified. “Don’t scrub yourself down with Tide Pods or anything. But dish soap should help clear up the grease and oils your body is expelling.”
Morgan’s mind was fully his own again, and had been ever since Temple freed him from R’gngyk’s influence. His body was still recovering from the infection. His pores oozed slime, and his bones were soft and flexible. But Jenny said she saw clear improvement from yesterday.
Morgan and Sage and the other ex-thralls would be staying with us for at least a week as part of their so-called “class trip.” So far, they’d mostly slept. I wasn’t thrilled about having them under our roof, but they seemed both regretful and thoroughly cowed by the events of the past week.
Noah Hovencamp and his two friends had been especially meek in the brief times when they were up and about. I hadn’t told them I was bound from harming others for a full year. Let them sweat, wondering when and how I’d pay them back for jumping me outside the Gauntlet.
I figured I’d start by making them help with repairs to the basement and the grounds.
Getting all their parents on board would have been difficult without Temple to ease their minds, but then Jenny had found Alex’s persuasion charm: a small, pressed pansy. The enchanted purple-and-yellow flower was only an inch wide. He’d laminated it and kept it in his wallet.
I’d spent two hours calling parents, calming their fears, and assuring them their kids would have a wonderful time studying the sea life of Cape Cod Bay.
Jenny and I also took a quick drive to the hospital, where the charm got us in to check on the four students who’d been brought in after taking black magic. All four were conscious and beginning to feel better now that Alex and his magic were out of the picture and we’d locked the door on R’gngyk.
Jenny used the charm to do what she called a Jedi mind trick, suggesting the kids not tell anyone about the stranger things they’d seen or heard, and also to stay off drugs. She sounded like a public service announcement from the eighties.
We locked the flower away after we got home so we wouldn’t be tempted to use it for more mundane things, like forcing our guests to put the toilet seat down when they were done in the bathroom.
Morgan rolled up his sleeve. “What about . . .”
A red-veined, crusty eye blinked from the inside of his elbow.
“Can you still see out of any of the extra eyes?” asked Jenny.
“No, but—”
“See how the eyelid is all wrinkled and dry? Your body’s reabsorbing it. In another week, it should be nothing but a nasty scab. A month or two, and they’ll all be as good as new. Maybe sooner, thanks to your bloodline. For now, just keep wearing long sleeves.”
Footsteps pounded through the house. Morgan tried to yank down his sleeve, but it was too late. Ava burst into the room and pointed at his arm. “That’s gross.”
“Ava, this is private,” he snapped.
“How long is he going to look like a seagull after an oil spill?” she asked.
“Not long.” With some difficulty, I kept my expression stern. “What are you doing here, Ava?”
“Today was a half day of school, and you promised me ice cream, so Dad said I could hang out here until dinner. He’s in the kitchen going through your leftovers. He took a sick day from work even though I had to go to school.”
“Life is cruel and unfair,” I said.
Ava pulled up a chair. “Why did Uncle Temple have to die but the bad guy lived? That sucks.”
Grief lodged in my throat like a sharp stone.
I knew Temple wasn’t gone completely. He’d left a message stuck to the fridge this morning, telling me I’d scrambled my eggs wrong.
But ghostly nagging wasn’t the same, and Ava was right.
“Yes, it does. It’s not fair, and I miss him very much.
But I think he’s happy knowing he saved all of us. ”
“It’s my fault,” mumbled Morgan. “I can’t believe I trusted Mr. Barclay.”
“Mistakes don’t make you evil,” I said. “Even stupid mistakes. Not as long as you learn from them and work to do better.”
“If I hadn’t been putting those spell cards in the store, maybe—”
“Don’t do that,” I interrupted. “Don’t get trapped in regrets and what-ifs. Alex had been planning this since before you were born. If you hadn’t helped, he would have found a different way to weaken the shop. He was going to try to bind himself to that world-ending octopus with or without you.”
“You were still stupid, though.” Ava punched his arm, then grimaced and grabbed a paper towel to wipe her knuckles.
“What’s going to happen to him?” asked Morgan.
Jenny removed her gloves and tossed them into the trash. “Until Alex wakes up, he’ll stay here under my care.”
The shock of having his eldritch sponsor ripped away had left Alex comatose. I would have been perfectly happy to let him die, but not Jenny. She’d set up an isolated room in the house and was working on magical and mundane long-term care for him.
“The room is locked, and we have magical monitors in place,” I assured Morgan, who looked worried. “If he does wake up, he’s not going anywhere.”
A fly buzzed through the room. I’d plugged in more than twenty air purifiers throughout the house and opened every window, but the smell from the basement persisted, and it had been attracting flies all day.
A large black streak shot across the floor. Squidward the cat leapt into the air and swatted at the fly with her front paws. The fly dodged higher.
With a low growl, Squidward stalked the fly toward the shelves on the back wall, crouched, and sent two slender tentacles shooting upward.
The buzzing stopped. The cat shoved the fallen fly into her mouth. The eye on her back blinked slowly at us as she pranced out of the room, still chewing.
“Is she going to get better?” asked Ava.
I watched her go. “I don’t think she wants to. I think she likes the way she is now.”
Ava pondered this for a moment. “Good.”
“Morgan, please go tell Noah to come down for his checkup,” said Jenny. She turned to Ava. “You can go hang out in the kitchen. Temple made cookies.”
“How?” asked Ava. “He’s—”
“I know.” Jenny shrugged. “If you don’t want them . . .”
Ava vanished.
“I should probably keep an eye on her,” I said.
Jenny gave me a look. “Save at least one cookie for me.”
· · ·
I found Blake sitting at the kitchen table, sipping a mug of coffee while Ava munched a red velvet cookie.
“You look worse than me,” I said. “Have you slept at all?”
“In the past week, or just last night?” He rubbed his eyes. “And the answer is no.”
I filled a mug, helped myself to two still-warm cookies, and joined them.
“Is this what you used to do as a PI?” asked Ava. “Tracking down bad guys and stopping evil gods and saving stupid kids like my stupid brother?”
“It wasn’t usually god-level problems,” I said. “That was more Jenny’s and Temple’s department. A lot of my jobs were the typical divorce and infidelity cases, just with vampires and hamadryads instead of humans. But sometimes I’d get a juicy one.”
“And then you’d disappear for weeks until you solved it.” The edge I was used to hearing in Blake’s voice was present but not as sharp as usual. “Dad and I never knew how long you’d be gone or what shape you’d be in when you came back to us.”
“I know.” My muscles tensed. I didn’t have it in me to go another nine rounds with my son. “Can we save the fighting for—”
“Let me finish, please.” He held up a hand. “I used to get mad at Dad, too. I didn’t understand why he put up with you leaving us all the time. When you two split up, I was relieved. I thought he deserved better.”
“Dang, Dad,” said Ava. “Why don’t you just burn her at the stake?”
“I didn’t understand why you left, why you did what you did,” said Blake. “But when Sage went missing, I saw the difference you made to his parents. And when Morgan got sick . . .” He swallowed and looked away. “I’m trying to say . . . maybe sometimes you had good reason to be gone.”
“Maybe sometimes,” I said. “Not always.”
“When Ronnie met us at the Northshore Mall yesterday and said you’d stayed behind, I was pissed.” He circled his mug with both hands. “I felt like a kid again. Like you’d abandoned me again.”
“I know. And I’m sorry.”
“I was mad because I was scared, Mom. But if you hadn’t made the choice you did, a lot more people would be dead today, and I might not have gotten Morgan back.
” He reached over and took my hand. “Ronnie told me how hard it was for you to stay behind. How upset you were. I’m saying you made the right call. ”
I needed to schedule an optometrist appointment. My vision was getting awfully blurry. “Thank you.”
“Ugh. Boring.” Ava hopped up to grab another cookie. “Grandma, you said you’d answer all my questions. You mentioned vampires and hamadryads, so those are real. And ghosts, right? What about zombies?”
“At least eight different subspecies, yes,” I said. “Though only two of those are found in North America.”
“Werewolves?”
“Yes.”
“Angels?”
“I had an affair with one when I was nineteen, shortly after I left my first husband. It was quite the scandal. She almost lost her halo.”
“Hobbits?”
“Made-up.”
“Can you teach me to cast spells?”
Blake and I answered that one together. “No!”
She scowled. “I bet Uncle Temple would have said yes.”
“He would not,” I said firmly. “Because he’d have known what I’d have done to him if he did.”
I knew the sharp pain at the mention of Temple’s name would eventually begin to heal. I also knew it would never disappear completely. Grief was a lifelong process, difficult and painful, but made easier by the presence of family . . . and the fresh-baked cookies of the recently deceased.
I licked red crumbs from my fingers and stood. “Why don’t I show you how to check the stock for magic? That’s kind of like casting a spell.”
Ava rolled her eyes with the flair and drama only a preteen girl could pull off. “And a glass of milk is kind of like ice cream.”
Most of the house was back to normal, but we’d found a few bits of magical chaos left behind after Temple closed the portal.
Since we didn’t want anyone buying a Salem-themed refrigerator magnet/bottle opener that would reanimate the contents of their fridge, that meant carefully inspecting every item by sight, smell, and feel.
“I’ll also tell you how Uncle Temple spent a semester as an exchange student in Atlantis,” I added. “His roommate was a goblin shark named Ximena.”
Ava’s eyes widened. “Did Uncle Temple know Aquaman?”
I aimed a playful swat at her head, which she dodged.
“Do you mind if I join you?” asked Blake.
“Why?” The defensiveness slipped out before I could stop myself.
“Because I’ve never heard that story either.” He finished his coffee and stood. “After everything that’s happened, I think I should learn how to spot curses and other nasty magic. If you don’t mind?”
My throat tightened. “I’d like that very much.”