The Dearly Departed (The Patron Seints #1)

PROLOGUE

Age Twelve

“What’s that?”

I looked up from my book to glance at Anna, holding her stuffed white rabbit with the pink ears, huddled beside me on the library’s cushioned window seat.

She held a book on her lap—something about a ballerina—but her attention wasn’t on what she was reading.

I followed her gaze to the open page I was on, where an illustration of a plague doctor was printed.

“You mean this?” I asked, pointing to the picture.

“Yeah,” she replied, nodding her head against my arm.

I shifted in the seat to lift the book higher, trying to give her a better view of the page, but she was sitting so close, practically pinning me to the window frame.

I held in a sigh, not wanting her to know I was annoyed. Because I wasn’t bothered by her. It was just that this stupid seat was so small, there wasn’t enough space for both of us, and I would’ve happily sat on the floor to give us both more space if she hadn’t insisted on me sitting beside her.

Anna was always like this with me. We had met a year ago when she was placed in the foster home where my brothers and I were staying. She was only seven when she showed up at Jim’s house—she turned eight a couple of months ago—and from the very second we met, she’d been stuck to me like glue.

Shawn thought she had a crush on me, and Ike thought she was just an irritating little kid for always wanting to hang out with us.

But I didn’t find her annoying at all, and I wasn’t so sure about the whole crush thing.

To me, she seemed scared. I wasn’t sure of what, but I thought that maybe, with me, she felt safe.

“That’s a plague doctor,” I told her, pointing to the book in my hand.

“Why do they look like that?”

I shrugged and began to read the caption printed below the picture, “The plague doctor was a physician in the seventeenth century, hired to treat those who had fallen ill with the bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death. Today, it is a historic symbol of mortality, death, and the fear of disease.”

“What’s a … a physician?” she asked, the word tumbling from her mouth like it didn’t fit quite right.

“It’s, um … it’s a doctor,” I said with another shrug.

I didn’t always feel very smart. I didn’t do well in school. Actually, I didn’t even like school. But sometimes, when Anna asked questions and looked at me like I might have the answers, I felt like maybe I was smart after all.

She peered at the picture. “It looks scary.”

“I mean, it kinda is scary,” I said, my eyes skimming over the excerpt about the bubonic plague. “A lot of people died then—they were really, really sick—and these doctors were some of the only people brave enough to try and save them.”

She turned to look up at me, a horrified look on her face. I met her big, dark eyes and smiled reassuringly.

“You don’t have to worry about that though,” I told her. “This isn’t happening now. The seventeenth century was, like … hundreds of years ago.”

“But people still get sick,” she argued.

“Yeah, but not with, like, the plague.” Or at least, I didn’t think so … but I wouldn’t tell her that.

I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t smart.

“What does the plague do to you?”

I sucked in a deep breath and leaned toward the book to scan the page for more information.

Anna always had questions. She wasn’t much younger than Ike, but Ike never asked questions the way Anna did.

She wanted to know everything, and I liked that about her.

Because when she asked me questions, I got to learn things too.

“Fever, chills, cough,” I rattled off.

“Cough?”

I nodded. “Yeah, it’s a, um … respiratory thing. Like, uh … I don’t know … when you get sick with something and it goes into your lungs.”

I tried to think of what it was I’d been sick with a couple of years ago. Whatever it was had settled in my lungs, and it had made my chest feel heavy, like I could barely breathe. It was one of the only times I could remember going to the doctor and needing medicine.

“Jim coughs.”

Jim was our foster father, and she was right. He coughed a lot.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “But he doesn’t have the plague.”

“How do you know?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Because he’d be dead. And we’d all be sick too. The plague was really, really contagious.”

She dropped her eyes to the black-and-white drawing of the plague doctor, and as she swallowed, she shifted closer to me, if it were at all possible to get closer on this tiny seat.

She pressed her temple to my side and, while still holding her rabbit, wrapped her arms around mine, like she was trying to melt into me.

Anna did this sometimes, too, but usually at night.

Every now and then, she would sneak into the room I shared with Ike and Shawn and crawl into my bed to sleep with me.

She said she was scared, and I believed her, but I wasn’t sure of what.

The dark maybe. Or perhaps it was that she didn’t like to be alone.

She was in a room all by herself, so … maybe she was lonely.

I got lonely sometimes too.

“I wish Jim would die,” she whispered, her voice trembling.

I became tense at her sudden confession. “What? Why would you say that?”

It wasn’t that I loved Jim. I didn’t love him at all actually. It was just that, compared to some of the other foster parents I’d had, he wasn’t the worst.

Sure, he smacked us around occasionally, but there was always a reason. Like, if Ike had talked back or Shawn hadn’t done his chores. One time, I had tried to steal a pack of cigarettes from the gas station, and he’d really kicked my ass for that.

But, no, all things considered, being with Jim was better than some of the other places we’d been. He kept us fed, washed our clothes, and took us to the doctor if we were really sick. I couldn’t ask for much more than that.

Until now.

Because Anna was tightening her grip on my arm and that dumb rabbit, and she was shaking. She was turning her face into my side, hiding herself away from me, but I could feel the wetness seeping through my shirt and knew she was crying.

The book in her lap tumbled to the floor, and she didn’t move to pick it up. She just kept holding onto me and her rabbit.

“Anna,” I said, lowering my voice to a whisper, “what’s wrong?”

Then she said something, but her voice was muffled against my arm. I asked her to repeat herself, told her I couldn’t hear what she had said. I told her I wanted to help, that I would help, and all the while, my heartbeat thumped wildly against my chest until I thought it might explode.

I watched the other people in the library passing by, oblivious to the two kids smooshed together on the window seat, as one of them cried and the other desperately wished for the ability to fix every single stupid problem in this world.

How can they just walk by and not see us sitting here?

Don’t they see that something’s wrong?

I wanted to scream. I wanted to break things. Maybe even this window behind me. I could throw a chair right through it, shatter the glass, and maybe then they’d notice.

They’d probably just yell at me for making a mess.

“Anna,” I begged, dropping the book with the plague doctor onto the floor beside Anna’s book about the ballerina.

One of my arms was trapped in her trembling hold, so I used my opposite hand to gently pry her away from me.

She protested, sniffling and shaking her head, but I finally maneuvered our bodies until both of my hands could grip her shoulders and I could see the tears streaking her cheeks.

She hung her head and nuzzled her face into her rabbit’s matted fur, attempting to hide her face from view, but that was okay.

I just needed to hear her voice.

“Does Jim hurt you?” I finally asked, already knowing the answer, even before she softly nodded. My stomach sank as my rage flared. “What does he do?”

She shook her head rapidly.

“You don’t want to tell me?”

She sniffled and shook her head again.

“That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me. But …” I swallowed and glanced toward the crowd of library-goers, slowly moving along with their arms full of books. “Can you … can you show me, um … where?”

Through the veil of her long, dark hair, I watched as her pale cheeks reddened with embarrassment, like she had any reason to be ashamed of the terrible things adults chose to do to children, and that only made me angrier.

She lifted a shaking hand from her rabbit to hover it briefly over her waist before she dropped it again and gave her head another rapid shake.

“That’s okay,” I told her. “You don’t have to. It’s okay.”

She’d already said enough.

And as I pulled her against my chest and swore to God that I would do something to save her, I realized that she’d been right.

Jim really was sick … but with a different sort of plague.

One that had spread to many, many people, yet nobody seemed to be able to do anything about it.

And maybe that was because they didn’t look sick, and if they didn’t look sick, how was anyone else supposed to know they were infected?

These people had the ability to hide, to take in kids who were in desperate situations, to pick them up off the street and do whatever they wanted to them. Because adults were strong, and kids were weak, and nobody on the outside of it all could stop moving long enough to notice and help.

Where’s a plague doctor when you need one? I thought as Anna clung to me like her life depended on it.

Then I huffed a bitter, sardonic laugh because nobody was going to help us.

Nobody ever did.

It was on me to do something.

It was always, always on me.