Every single time I ventured out of Dewdrop, I realized how much I belonged there. Sometimes I thought the place would drive me insane with monotony, but it was still my home, the only place that would ever be home. At seventeen, I headed out to a big city for college, bright eyed and ready to conquer the world. I came back three and half years later, one semester earlier than most students, more than ready for lazy days sitting on the porch and digging in the dirt.
I’ll always wonder what kind of witch I’d be if I’d taken a different path, if I’d even be much of a witch at all. But just because I think about it doesn’t mean I actually want it.
Although, I could use a vacation every now and again. All those years that my brother was in New York, I only went to visit him once. Cities are different, still not for me, but better than this. Pulsing with life and energy from all the people, all the activity. The humans could keep this sprawling suburban network of strip malls. No wonder the residents of Woodshade were always so eager to visit Dewdrop. We had more to offer than healing salves.
“You have arrived.” The sound of Wesley’s GPS ripped me out of my contemplation.
“This is it,” my brother said, pulling into a spot in the empty parking lot and cutting off the engine.
It was a fairly typical suburban forest preserve, a cleared area dotted with picnic tables and shelters surrounded by woods. But something was up here, magically speaking. I could sense it before I even got out of the car.
“That stream…” I trailed off and started wandering toward it. “It runs through Dewdrop. Through Wonder’s woods, then through the cemetery.”
“How can you tell?”
“I...” I sniffed the air and closed my eyes to focus. “The scent maybe? Or the energy? Maybe both.”
Wesley had his phone out when I opened my eyes. “Yeah. You’re right. Look.”
I peeked over his arm to see the map. Sure enough, the river ran the exact path I’d predicted before veering out of Dewdrop and heading here. It branched off into several tributaries, so this was a much smaller stream, but the water itself was still altered from flowing over magical land.
“So now what?” Wes asked.
I kneeled down and unzipped my back pack. The statue had to be kept in a special box to contain the magical beacon. If not, we’d be pestered by the bored ghosts of our dim witted, handsome male relatives. The box was made of lead because the metal was ideal for dampening spells and they didn’t know better back in the day. I’d have to remember to wash my hands.
The statue itself was cast in silver from a wooden bird that one of our grandfathers had whittled. You could tell that the simple carving was made by a novice, a child even. Somehow that just made it more special.
I pulled the bird from the hand woven silk lining and sat it on the ground, then stepped back.
“That’s it?” Wes looked skeptical.
“Clea gave me a spell to cast if nothing happens after a few minutes, but I don’t want to take any chances.”
“Yeah, let’s not take chances.” At least my brother had somewhat rediscovered the will to live. “Give it time. I don’t have anywhere else to be.”
It didn’t take long for the atmosphere around us to change, the pressure rising as the temperature dropped even further. I shivered and pulled my hands up into my sleeves, unwilling to put on my gloves just in case I needed to cast defensively. Wes gulped down his speed potion and I gripped a stone etched with a rune for distraction, even though I wasn’t sure it would work on spirits.
We both jumped as an ethereal scene of a werewolf chasing down a screaming young man unfolded before us. He tripped over a half buried stone that was still there, sealing his grisly fate. At least his death was relatively quick and the werewolf guzzled water from this haunted stream once he was made the kill.
Unfortunately, the boy’s hair was tied back in a ribbon and his shirt had billowing sleeves of an earlier era. Not the ghost we were looking for.
“Over there,” Wesley whispered, turning me around by my shoulders to look farther upstream.
A shot rang out from the trees and the next ghost ducked to miss it. This young man was barefoot and bare chested, but his pants and hairstyle also put him out of our time frame. He too was running, but from rotund, musket wielding man twice his age. A girl ran out of the forest behind them, wearing, well, not very much aside from an overcoat that matched the boy’s pants.
“Well, that’s a tale as old as time,” I remarked, watching the man taking forever to reload his musket as his daughter tugged at his arm.
“Father, don’t!” she cried.
“Why doesn’t he just run into the woods for cover?” Wesley wondered aloud as the boy ran away in a perfectly straight line.
“Too dumb. You’re in the 99th percentile in our family, remember?”
“Oh, John, make nothing of it.” The mother appeared beside them, shaking her head, wand in hand.
She aimed and fired at the boy, which seemed to me to be hypocritically making something of it until I noticed that it was a web to stop him instead of a lethal spell. Blue strands coiled around the boy’s legs, sending him tumbling down. Unfortunately, he fell on the sharp point of a broken fencepost that ran right through his chest. The daughter screamed, running toward her lover.
“What terrible misfortune,” Father said, smirking.
“Must have been one of Hetty’s boys,” Mother replied, bewildered.
They faded away just as another victim appeared and we watched as he was unexpectedly devoured by a gorgeous female vampire who he seemed to know well. Then came another werewolf, followed by an imp giggling behind a boy as he gorged himself on toxic mushrooms that were enchanted to look normal, then a particularly gruesome Wendigo attack.
It seemed that we were barely into the civil war era. Wesley was going to need therapy after this.
“Let’s see if we can speed this up.” I rifled through my satchel and pulled out a printed copy of Emmett’s obituary and Gavin’s cigarette butt that I’d gotten from when I’d eavesdropped.
The clearing became eerily quiet and fog crept into the clearing from the trees. It was daylight out, a cloudy day, but daytime all the same. Slowly a transparent night sky appeared over the clouds, complete with twinkling stars and a crescent moon. When we got here, the grass was mowed short, still brown and dormant from winter’s chill. Now it had sprung to life in a translucent green overlay of tall grass heads and meadow flowers.
“Gemma, is this normal?” my brother asked, kneeling and running his hand through the ethereal grass.
“It’s not exactly abnormal,” I replied, but honestly I had no idea and it took a lot to surprise me when it came to magic.
A police cruiser pulled into the lot, parking in the spot next to ours. Two young officers got out, flashlights in hand. Maybe Gavin really was pushing forty, because this apparition of him was so much skinnier and had a total baby face. His ridiculously handsome dark haired partner wasn’t nearly as transparent, perhaps amplified by his spirit’s presence whereas everything else was just a reflection of the past around him.
The two officers glanced at each other and grinned as they walked toward the apparition of another car.
“Smoking pot or fooling around?” Emmett theorized.
“Hopefully just fooling around,” Gavin said. “I hate doing paperwork this close to the end of my shift.”
“It’s your turn to write it up, too.”
Baby faced Not-So-Secret Agent man sighed and announced their presence to the kids in the car, who were in fact smoking pot. Wes and I watched what I assumed was a fairly standard police lecture that threatened to ruin the three kids’ futures, but ended with letting them off with a warning.
“If we ever catch them again, I’m arresting that tall kid. I don’t care how much paperwork it is,” Emmett said.
“Any particular reason?” Gavin asked, sniffing the joint but not inhaling, then handing it off to his partner.
E
mmett took a drag as Gavin shook his head. “I just didn’t like his weasel face,” Emmett said in an odd breathless voice before he exhaled in a cloud of smoke. He offered his partner the joint, which he refused.
“You’re gonna send a kid to juvie and break a mother’s heart because you don’t like his face?” Gavin laughed.
“Why do you think I became a cop?” Emmett headed over to the stream to dispose of the unrecorded evidence.
“Because you were too stupid to get into college?”
Emmett flipped him off, his back toward the creek. Gavin’s smirking face warped in horror as a glowing, glittering aqua mass rose up from the water and swarmed the unsuspecting officer.
“Pixies,” Wes and I whispered in unison.
Smacking at his skin and swatting the air, Emmett screeched and dodged as the flock engulfed him. I hated the sound of pixies, an eerie high-pitched buzz reminiscent of hornets, but ten thousand peals of malicious laughter mixed with the flaps of sparkling wings.
Gavin screamed out a warning and ran towards his partner, then stopped dead in his tracks. My brother and I winced as the pixies lifted Emmett into the air and over to stream, coalescing above his head and pushing his face down into the water. Thinking fast, Gavin spun around and retrieved a fire extinguisher from the cruiser. His feet hardly touched the ground as he sprinted back.
The pixies deflected the white cloud quite efficiently, but Emmett still had a moment to get his head above the water for a choking breath. The pixies’ laughter dropped in pitch, filled with anger as the swarm split in two, half intent on drowning their victim, the other half determined to stop the human interference.
Gavin cried out, little slices appearing on his face and hands as the pixies pulled the fire extinguisher away, some of them rushing down the spout. It exploded in a cloud transparent red metal shrapnel that went right through me and my brother. The victorious laughter was infuriating as I watched the swarm drag Gavin away from Emmet, screaming his name and screeching for help into the radio on his shoulder.
It wasn’t long until the pixies flew up and departed, reuniting in the air like a flock of starlings dancing away in hypnotic patterns that disappeared into the trees. The apparitions faded away, Emmett motionless in the water as Gavin crawled toward him, sobbing. Night sky turned into a sunny day, the ethereal grass growing higher as the flowers turned to seed.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a text from Amethyst.
“Bring him with you,” I read aloud in a questioning voice.
Who did she mean? Wes? The scene faded away and I looked behind me to see the icy blue eyes of a bewildered face that was becoming all too familiar.
“Brian?” my brother said.
Chapter 19
Captain Kavanagh stood there speechless. We must not have heard his unmarked car pull up over the haunt. “I’m losing my mind, aren’t I?” he murmured, looking up at the double sky.
“Not exactly,” Wes laughed.
“On the contrary, I think that’s exactly the explanation. I’ve spent so many years listening to Gavin ranting about what happened that night that his delusions finally became my own.”
“Don’t speak so formally,” my brother said. “You’re a cop.”
“It wasn’t all that formal.”
My brother rolled his eyes. It seemed a little formal to me, too, but maybe that was a coping mechanism when you think you’re going insane. Even though I really wanted to find out how they knew each other, now was not the time. This haunt wasn’t over yet.
The ghost sun rose from the east in fast motion until it was high in the sky. A younger apparition of Gavin materialized at the picnic table closest to us, sitting on the table with his feet on the bench, staring at the stream that had consumed his partner. His face wasn’t so childlike anymore, with sunken cheeks covered in overgrown stubble, but his line-free skin told me not much time had actually passed.
I vaguely recognized the young woman standing beside him. I’d seen her at Hettymoot before, a slightly older version anyway. Several Hettymoots actually, since before the tourists started crashing. She was tall with dark hair cut in a choppy bob with facial features similar to Emmett’s. He was there, too, a spirit standing right in front of them, waving his hands.
“Hey!” Emmett shouted.
“Why did you want to meet me out here?” she asked, not hearing him.
“Because this doesn’t make any sense,” Gavin said to her, ignorant of his former partner snapping his fingers right in front of his face.
“I already told you,” she sighed. “There’s nothing you could have done.”
“Farrah!” Emmett yelled over her. “C’mon guys…”
“He’s your brother. Why don’t you care?” Gavin asked.
“I do care. I guess I was just prepared for it.”
“How?” Gavin balked. “How could anyone be prepared for that?”
“Well, I didn’t see it, so I can’t understand what you’re going through.” She put her hand on Gavin’s shoulder.
“Are you screwing my sister?” Emmett asked.
“But my grandmother always told us something like this would happen if my mom married my dad,” Farrah continued. “And Dad died young, just like she said. So when Emmett did, too... It’s just the way it is.”
“Wait, a second. I’m dead?” Emmett crooked his head to the side and furrowed his brow. “That would explain a lot, actually.” His spirit flickered and Gavin and Farrah shuddered.
“Just the way it is?” Gavin scoffed.
“Okay, so granny logic here but… She said it was a curse. It happens a lot to people with roots over in Dewdrop, I guess. I don’t know if it’s a disease, or—”
“Emmett was drowned in a river by some kind of sparkly blue cloud.” Gavin shrugged her off. “That is not a disease.”
She sighed and wrapped her arms tightly around her chest. “I believe you. Because I also believe in that kind of thing. My grandmother still takes us, well, just me now I guess, into Dewdrop every so often to buy those crystals and potions they sell. And to the graveyard once a year, to visit her ancestors.”
“What does that have to do with any of this?”
“Dewdrop is… The people there are…”
“What, Farrah? What are they?”
“I don’t know!” She cringed. “Something supernatural. Witches maybe? At least they think they are.”
“Shut up, sis! We’re not supposed to tell anyone,” Emmett yelled. “I guess it’s not my problem anymore.”
Gavin shook his head dismissively, standing up and occupying the same space as Emmett for a moment before he stepped aside. “You can’t expect me to believe—”
“Oh, but everybody should believe you?” Farrah cut him off.
Gavin started to say something, then shut his mouth. “No. That’s… There has to be some kind of an explanation. A real one. Maybe it was a poison cloud. Or…”
“Curse, poison, whatever. He’s gone. It is what it is. There’s no reason for you throw your life away over it. So stop ranting and raving about impossible things before they lock you in the nut house.”
“Take her advice, man,” Emmett said.
Gavin glanced over as if he’d heard him. “I can’t just… No, I won’t let this go.”
“Then don’t,” Farrah said firmly. “But stop talking about it.”
The scene faded away entirely and we were left in the field of brown grass and gray skies. Brian turned to us for some type of explanation, but his eyes widened as I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
“Yeah, so that’s when I figured out I was dead,” Emmett said as I spun around. “Why did you drag all this up?”
“Oh. Emmett, hello,” I stammered.
“This is not happening,” Brian said.
“Make peace with it,” Wes told him. “So, Emmett. You’re dead.”
“And?” the spirit chuckled.
“Just wanted to make sure we’re on the sa
me page. Pixies, right?”
“Little bastards. I was always hoping it would be something cooler. More masculine. Like a werewolf or a dragon.”
Wes and I glanced at each other and tried not to laugh. Dragons had been extinct for centuries. “We’ve been pretty vigilant about monsters like that for the last hundred years or so,” I said. “Can’t draw attention.”
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