Chapter 17
Chapter
The next morning, as gray was fading into the pale yellow of dawn and I was grinding comfrey to a paste in the barn, a shadow darkened the doorway.
I knew you wouldn’t stay away for long, I almost said, but the words died on my lips as I realized it was not the devil.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I said instead. “And how did you get in?”
The pastor’s son stepped into the light from the overhead bulb. He looked better rested than he had a few days ago, but more troubled, his brow drawn into a knot.
“I just went around the gate,” he said. “There’s a little spot on one side between it and the ditch.”
My cut finger throbbed in its bandage. By the time I’d staggered back into the meadow yesterday afternoon, my head had been swimming from anemia. Were the runes truly so useless? Or had I created a weakness in them without realizing?
“You should be in school, or at least on the bus.”
“I have a free first period.”
“Shouldn’t you be using that to study or do homework or something?”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
I turned away, scooping the comfrey paste out of the mortar and into a jar. “I don’t have time to talk.”
“Tess, please. I really didn’t know what my dad was going to do. He’d told me about the new church, but he never said anything about where it would go.”
I kept working, my mind racing. Why did he say nothing of the hex bag? Surely he must know it was real, that it had real effects. Did he not assume I had planted it?
“I believe you,” I said. “I believed you the first time. There was nothing you could’ve done if you had known.”
“But what are you going to do?”
“Refuse to leave, of course.” As I said it, I longed for it to be that simple.
“But what happens if everyone else sells? He’s already talking to the farmer down the road.”
David doesn’t know about the deed, I thought. Zeke clearly didn’t trust his son. “Then everyone else sells. If your dad wants this land, he’ll have to take it over my dead body.”
He winced. “He’ll try to get you arrested.
Or get other people to harass you. There was a lady in our old church who left her husband, and he didn’t like that.
Everyone just treated her like a ghost until she left.
Aren’t you worried about what people will try to do?
It’s so dry—what if they try to start a fire or something? ”
That was exactly why I’d made the runes, but now I doubted they’d be enough when Zeke decided to make his play; clearly, he had practice with this. I shoved the thought aside to deal with the matter at hand. “David, why are you here? Aren’t you going to get in trouble?”
“I’m practically an adult, they can’t fucking ground me.”
He said the swear like he was trying it on for size, and I hid my snort. “But why are you here?”
“I said, I wanted to talk to you. And I’ve been wanting to come back. I love this place. And I wanted to see the sunrise from here.”
My throat tightened; it hurt worse than I expected to hear him say that when my friends had not. But instead of turning toward the sun, he came deeper into the barn, peering at the stalls. His brow creased further. “Whoa. You have a lot more than before.”
“Yeah, it’s been a rough couple of weeks.”
“Any idea why?”
I longed to tell him. The lack of my magic felt like a phantom limb, and I wished I could mourn it with someone besides myself.
“No,” I said instead. “And since you’re already here, you might as well help me with the chores.”
I put him in charge of scrubbing and refilling the water bowls and bottles, like last time.
I knew I should’ve sent him away, should’ve frog-marched him down the driveway and watched until he was out of sight, but the mere thought of it exhausted me.
Besides, he was the one person in Burrsville who wanted to see me, and I couldn’t deny that the presence of another person was a balm to my frayed nerves.
“What happened to this little guy?” he would ask as he brought in the water, regardless of the sex of the animal. I would give a brief, thoughtless account of the call and the rescue operation, wielding a syringe or bandage in one hand and holding the animal still with the other.
“I can’t believe they let you handle them,” he said admiringly, watching me soothe a disgruntled raccoon into compliance. “Do you get more babies or more adults?”
“Depends on the year, but it’s usually about even. I get a lot more adult males than females though—they fuck each other up pretty good.”
“What’s the worst you’ve ever seen?”
“River otters,” I said without hesitation.
“Couple of young males too dumb to pull their punches. Winner lost an eye and an ear, loser lost half his face and one of his legs. Animals take on a huge risk every time they fight; even if they win, they might die from infection or be too injured to hunt.”
“Have you ever done anything with, like, apex predators? Like wolves or bears?”
“No wolves around here, unfortunately. I usually see a few bears each year, but none that I’ve had to treat. I did have a young bobcat once, but trying to treat her without a sedative was a mistake.”
I rolled up my sleeve, unthinking, to reveal the long scar that curved over the tender inside of my forearm. Too late I realized it also put every scratch from the thicket on full display.
“Whoa.” He seized my arm and I stiffened, resisting the urge to return the grip and sink my nails into his arm until he released me. He ran his thumb gently over it, feeling the raised pattern of the scar. “That’s wild. What’s on your fingers?”
That time I did pull away. “Berry juice,” I said, although I was no longer certain that was true. I had scrubbed my hands with soap and bristles and finally lye, and still they were stained black. It was as if the belladonna had marked me, claimed me as its own.
The pastor’s son returned to the water bowl he’d been washing. “So what did you think of all that shit my dad pulled the other night?” he asked. “I’m pretty sure he made it all up.”
“Made what up?”
“The stuff about somebody putting a curse on our house and trying to make us leave.”
I thought back to the disembodied rattle of the squirrel skull, the rage it exuded. How could he not think it was real? Was he trying to bait me into exposing myself?
“He started talking about weird stuff he was seeing or hearing, and then when he did, Mom did, but he’s always been able to make her think what he wants.
He did just enough to get Mom worked up and then her imagination took over.
Then he said he found that little bag of sticks in the basement and she actually fainted. ”
“So you didn’t feel anything?” I asked, curiosity overcoming me.
“Nothing like my mom did. I’ve had some trouble sleeping, but that’s for—different reasons.”
“Ah. Find something worth sneaking out for?”
“Nah. Coming here is the only sneaking I do.”
“So why the trouble sleeping, then?”
There was a long pause, and for the first time in the conversation, I glanced up from the antibiotics I was crushing to look at him. There was a deep flush spreading from his chest to his neck, and he was scrubbing the crease of a bowl with ferocity.
Oh, I thought.
“Just really vivid dreams,” he said finally, although I was no longer waiting for an answer.
“Dreams that didn’t even feel like dreams. Like I was sure you—sure it was actually happening, so when I woke up I didn’t really know if I was awake.
It was hard to tell what was real sometimes, and it was every night. Has that ever happened to you?”
“Yes. Although more often I have moments when I’m awake that feel like dreaming. But you said ‘was’; are you not having these dreams anymore?”
He paused, frowning. “Well, I guess—I guess not. Not the past couple nights.”
“So maybe somebody really did try to curse your house.”
“Didn’t feel like a curse to me.”
This last was murmured under his breath as I walked away, my hands full of fresh bandages and a syringe of antibiotic slurry.
There was only one animal left to treat, and it was the groundhog I’d come to dread dealing with.
Most animals habituated to the daily routine quickly, allowing me to clean and dress their wounds even if they didn’t like to be handled, but almost every time I went into the groundhog’s pen, she acted like she’d never seen me before and this was all brand new.
Her struggling made it harder to get a good fit on the bandage, which inevitably led to her fussing with it, which in turn led to me having to redress it.
She was in a fine mood today, burrowing into a corner of the pen at the first sight of my makeshift exam table, then coming around with a snap of her huge, blunt teeth the moment she felt my hand.
There was a moment, not the first, when I thought about just leaving her be for the day, but it had been an uphill battle against infection that I was finally winning, and I wanted this animal healed and out of my barn as soon as possible.
I managed to avoid her teeth as I snipped off the remains of the last bandage, which wrapped around her wounded shoulder and then around her neck and chest like a sling.
There was no sign of pus on the cotton, which was good, and although there was new, pink flesh visible, I didn’t want to leave it exposed.
After a few minutes of struggling, I got a few swipes of salve on the wound, and I had to seize her by the scruff to get the antibiotic down her.
“Everything okay?”
David had appeared in the door, no doubt drawn by the groundhog’s furious squeaking and chittering.
“She’s not my favorite,” I grunted, yanking my hand back to avoid another snap of teeth. “And I’m not hers.”
“Can I help?”
The answer, of course, was no. If she took a swipe at me, that was simply part of the job. If she bit him, an unlicensed minor with no training, that opened a Pandora’s box—my license could be revoked, his parents could sue me, Broder would finally have a real reason to fire me.