“Hey.” Graves had appeared right next to me, crouching down. Strings of wavy hair fell in his face, and he pushed them back with a quick flick of his long fingers. “You okay? You hurt anywhere?”
The question struck me as absurd. I hurt all over, every muscle in my back was tight, my legs ached, my shoulders felt like lead bars, my arms were heavy—and my heart, speared with something dark and terrible, hurt worst of all. My hands shook. Even my hair ached, now that I was sitting down, not moving from one thing to the next. I opened my mouth to tell him so, and a dry, barking sob interrupted me halfway.
“Oh shit.” He sounded really alarmed, and he dropped down next to me. “Dru? Jesus. Dru?”
I couldn’t answer him. Sobs racked me, horrible sounds like I was being strangled because I couldn’t keep them back but I tried so hard my teeth locked together, grinding. My jaw creaked, and I couldn’t smell the coffee after a while because my nose was full.
Graves put one bony arm around me and didn’t say anything while I cried. It was decent of him, and I liked him for it. I was almost sorry I was going to have to blow town and leave him behind.
He gave me the cot and the sleeping bag, and I passed out clutching my messenger bag to my chest, Dad’s coat on the floor next to the bed. When I woke up hours later, Graves was gone. There was a scrawled note attached to the inside of the door with a wad of spearmint gum.
Went to school. I’ll bring your homework back. . There was another line, more heavily crossed out, that I couldn’t decipher, then: Stay as long as you want. I’ll be back.
I dug in my bag until I came up with my watch, a waterproof Swiss number Dad had bought in New York when I was twelve. He’d left me with August for about a month while he was up near the Canadian border doing something or another. Even though August was pretty cool and knew more about the Real World than a lot of books, he still wasn’t real company, like Dad. And besides, he always made me stay inside while he was out “working.” A whole month in New York and all I knew was one street in Brooklyn.
It was a little after 3 p.m. I’d slept for a long time; my head felt heavy, my mouth sandy and nasty, every muscle stiff and my back hurting like a sonofabitch. I’d definitely pulled something getting away from the zombie.
The thought hurt, but not as much as I thought it would. It was like pinching your toes after they’ve gone to sleep. Dad was a zombie. Had been a zombie. Whatever.
What am I going to do now? I stood staring blankly at the note on the door for a little while, just breathing and feeling the inside of my head full of cotton wool.
A thought swam through the fuzziness, linking up with the memory of August’s close, stuffy apartment. Contacts. Dad has contacts. I should go find the list and let one of them know.
We weren’t the only ones hunting down ghosts, poltergeists, flickers, bad hexes, chupacabras, gator spirits, bad voodoo, or anything else you care to name. There’s a whole underground movement, checking in at occult and Army-Navy surplus stores, passing along information and trading tips on how to best clean out a haunted house or take down a sucker, how to disperse a poltergeist or where the next wave of weird crap moving through a region is coming from.
I shivered at the thought of suckers, gooseflesh rising hard and hot on my arms, spilling down my back. They were bad news, like werwulfen—though wulfen were generally not dangerous to people like Dad, having their own running feud with the suckers to keep them busy.
I shut my eyes. Why hadn’t I told Dad about Gran’s owl? He might have listened and not gone out that night.
Which made it my fault, in a fuzzy sort of way. And the house was standing open, getting colder and colder, with a hole the size of Texas in the back door and a stain on the living-room carpet, plus a bullet hole in the living-room wall.
What am I going to do?
First things first. I was starving. I needed food, and I needed to think. I had to make a list of Things To Do. I’d have to go back to the house during daylight. Daylight was safest. I needed to get the ammo together, and all the weapons. I needed to pack up, and I needed to find Dad’s truck.
Our battered blue Ford truck rose up inside my head like a beacon. If I could find the truck, I could make it out of town and figure out what to do next. Gran’s house up in the Blue Ridge was still standing solid—we’d been there a few months back, swinging through to check in on it—and mine under the terms of the trust fund she and Dad had set up. I could hide out there. Once I was up in the mountains, I would have a little space to breathe. Nobody would come looking for me there—it took two dirt roads and a piece to even get close, as Gran always said.
Dad deserved a funeral service. There wouldn’t be anything left of him but greasy dust and bits of bleached bone, though. Zombies fall apart amazingly quick.
One scorching tear trickled down my cheek, then another. He wasn’t going to come stamping in the door yelling, Dru, honey, get your ass up! He wasn’t going to walk in tired and heavy, lock the door, and ask me what was for dinner. He wasn’t ever going to quiz me about sage smudging, hex-breaking, or poltergeist-clearing ever again. Or even leave me a note reminding me to do my katas.
I came back to myself with a jolt and looked down at my watch. It was buckled on my wrist now, my clever little fingers doing the work for me. Thirty minutes had passed while I stood staring at the note on the door. My back ached, every single muscle glued to its neighbors and protesting. I needed some aspirin in the worst way.