“Will you what?” Jay asked. “What? Is he writing an M?”
“Yes. Definitely M. Followed by an A. Wow. I can’t believe he’s proposing to your sister through graffiti. That’s either adorable or awful, depending on her tastes.”
“My parents will freak! Seriously! They’ll stop paying for Ronnie’s tuition! I have to stop him!” Jay helped Ellie back onto the bridge deck. Once she was safe, he climbed onto the lowest beam and began to inchworm up. His hands and knees dislodged flakes of rust. Unfortunately for mere mortals, the truss was shaped like an X. It was easy to climb the first half, but scaling the crisscross juncture ought not be attempted in skinny jeans.
“Cut it out,” Ellie said. “Jay, seriously. You’re going to fall! Have you ever heard the story of Icarus?”
“It’s wider than a balance beam. I’ll be fine!” Unfortunately, balance beams weren’t steep and rusty. Jay’s lower body slipped with a spray of oxidized metal. He dangled over the river. His feet were ten feet above Ellie’s head.
“Damn it!” Ellie said. “Hang in there! Al, a little help, please?”
Al shouted something, but Ellie missed it, because Jay was slipping, and she had to catch him, and—
In her attempt to lean over the railing and catch Jay, Ellie fell. No time to call Kirby. Barely enough time for a scream! The river was thirty feet below her face. Twenty feet. Ten. With a tremendous, bubbly rush, her world became cold and dark. Her nose burned as water filled her sinus cavity. She kicked, trying to surface, fighting the weight of waterlogged jeans.
Denim was lead-heavy when it absorbed liquid. She wore pants to protect her legs from insect bites, but the extra fabric might drown her now.
Ellie’s head popped above the river surface. As the downstream current drew her under the bridge, she breathed deeply and slowly, filling her lungs with buoyant air. The water was cool but not cold; she’d survived the fall, so escape should be easy. As Ellie cleared the shadow of the bridge, there was a splash. Seconds later, Jay bobbed up, coughing.
“You okay?” Ellie shouted. She had to shout. Her ears were muffled by water.
“Yes! Swim to shore! Diagonal!” He spat out water. “Hard to float! My pants are so heavy!”
“Mine too!”
“Like this!” Jay drew ahead with a powerful breaststroke. Ellie tried to imitate him, but more water gushed up her nose, stinging like chili powder. She snorted with pain and transitioned to an old faithful doggy paddle. Kirby drifted beside her, swimming without disturbing the water, his body a hot-asphalt shimmer. “Having fun, boy?” she asked.
At least he seemed calm. That probably meant that PCBs and catfish were the biggest threats in the Herotonic. Then again, when the Kunétai creature attacked Six-Great, nobody—and that included her dogs—had been prepared.
Ellie felt dread building in her chest. What if the creature had friends? Poison-scaled, barb-tailed monster fish with human faces and a thirst for revenge? It wouldn’t be the first time that Six-Great’s enemies carried grudges across many human generations. And now Ellie was in the middle of a river, fighting the pull of her soggy jeans.
How did Six-Great survive the encounter at the Kunétai?
After Six-Great reached the southern Lipan band, she requested two things: a net large enough to ensnare a bison and something that belonged to the missing boy who visited her dream. A dozen women started weaving the net at once, and the boy’s parents provided a pair of his knee-high boots.
“They were discarded near the riverbank,” the father said. “As if …”
Six-Great said, “Xastéyó, Shela.” And she asked her dogs to track the boy’s scent. Even their paranormal sense of smell was confounded by the river. For three days, as the women wove her net, Six-Great traveled up and down the Kunétai, searching for any trace of body or monster.
On day four, her dogs found a hair tie near the bank. It was grimy and half-buried in drying mud. A knot of long, black hair was tangled around the strap. Six-Great put it deep within her satchel and returned to her hosts.
“We finished the net,” the women said. “Do you need anything else?”
“Fresh meat,” she told them. “Bait for the monster. Shech’oonii, did the missing boy tie back his hair?” In those days, most people wore their hair long and unrestrained.
“Only when he swims,” one woman said. “In the lake, not the river. Our children never play there. We teach them caution!”
“Understood,” Six-Great said. “So if he removed his boots and tied back his hair …”
“What?”
“He must have entered the water willingly.”
The women protested. “Why would anybody do that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Yet. Thank you for the net. Ha’au. Right now, I must go foraging.”
The following morning, Six-Great returned to the isolated bend where she found the hair tie. A hunter had provided her with a freshly slain buck. After thanking the animal for its sacrifice, she laid its heavy body near the river, so close that its hind legs dangled in the water. A copse of juniper trees grew nearby; Six-Great sat beneath them and waited. She played with her dogs to pass the time and made them toys from scraps of cloth and leather. She always carried a bundle of grinning dollies that rattled like gourds because they had dry mesquite pods in their bellies. The dogs never tired of fetch.
Six-Great wished she could be so easily entertained.
She waited.
And waited.
She waited until nightfall. Until her eyes burned with exhaustion. Until she fell asleep.
Until a scream woke her.
Briefly disoriented, Six-Great called for her dogs. They whined, confused but not defensive. Carefully, because scorpions and snakes hid in shadows, she maneuvered through the shrubs between the juniper copse and river. All that remained of the buck was an indentation in the grass. “Help me, Auntie!” somebody cried. “It won’t let go!”
When Six-Great looked at the silver-ripple, moonlit surface of the Kunétai, she saw the missing boy. His face bobbed on the water, as if he floated with his head tilted back. “Please!” he repeated. Water spilled into his open mouth. With a gurgle, the boy slipped underwater.
“Hey!” Six-Great shouted. “I’m throwing a rope!” She unwound a cord from her dog sled and searched for a spot to cast the line. There were no signs of movement in the river; was he unconscious? How could he be conscious at all? Sometimes, people returned from the dead, but their body had to be in good condition. If they couldn’t return their last breath to their lungs before rot set in, all hope was lost.
Six-Great hesitated on the bank. Why would the boy remove his boots, tie back his hair, and swim to his death?
“Is that how you lure victims into the river?” she shouted. “I know what you are, and it isn’t human! That courageous boy spent his last moments in my dreams. He told me about you, creature. I hope you enjoyed the deer.”
Ripples broke the river surface seconds before the monster jumped. It burst into the air, all ruby scales and black barbs; over ten feet long, the fish had two faces. The first was shaped like it belonged to a large river gar, and the second, which was roughly human-shaped and malleable as clay, protruded from the top of its head like a mask. Both faces laughed as the monster leapt, filling the air with shrill, discordant shrieks.
“It’s a long river,” the monster said, splashing down and swimming away. “You’ll never see me again.”
Six-Great’s dogs began to howl, finally recognizing the danger. She raised a hand and commanded, “Quiet! We don’t need to chase him.”
She returned to the juniper trees and waited until dawn. Then, Six-Great gathered the woven net and traveled downriver. All day she walked, until she saw it: a great red body bobbing on the water’s surface. Dead. She cast the net and scooped it from the Kunétai. With great caution, Six-Great dragged it to the middle of the desert and buried its body so deep, even burrowing badgers could not reach it.
She’d fil
led the deer with poisonous herbs. The monster died by a taste of its own medicine. But it was a monster, and they were harder to kill than humans. If she buried it near the river, a flood might draw it back into the Kunétai.
As Ellie thought about Six-Great, she glimpsed Jay’s face bobbing on the Herotonic and wondered if the monster’s bones still waited to be unearthed.
“Hey! You two! Grab a branch!” Al stood on the nearby bank. He’d pulled a sapling from the earth and now held it over the water. Jay and Ellie were swept toward its mane of thin branches. They each grabbed ahold and allowed Al to pull them ashore.
“Thanks,” Ellie said. In the shallows, her legs scraped the river bottom and raised a murky cloud of silt. With a groan, she crawled onto the gravel and grass and sat beside Jay. “This will either give us superpowers or stomachaches,” Ellie rasped. “Uck.”
“What was that, you two?” Al said. “Does anyone need resuscitation? Nine-one-one?”
“We’re okay,” Jay said. “Are we?”
“Yeah,” Ellie said. “Now that we’re out of the water. I’d appreciate a towel, though. And a bottle of something that doesn’t taste like goose turds and dead fish.” She scrutinized the Herotonic. It seemed calm. Safe. That’s what frightened her the most: danger hiding in plain sight.
“There’s a gas station down the street,” Al said. “Stay. I’ll be back in five minutes.”
Once Al left, Ellie wrenched her phone out of her soggy jeans. As she feared, the water had trashed it. “Black screen of death.”
“Aw, no,” Jay said. “Mine’s waterproof, but …” He patted his jacket pockets. “It’s also in the river.”
Ellie wiggled her toes, cringing. Her socks were squishy. “On the bright side, the two-faced fish can now phone in a pizza order like the rest of us.”
“The what?”
She shook her head. “Just … it’s an old story.”
“Ellie?” he asked.
“Yeah?”
“I’m really sorry.”
“For what?”
“You tried to help, and this happened. I’ll replace your phone.”
“Appreciate that,” she said. “But don’t worry. I have a backup at home. There was a two-for-one deal from the phone company. My parents let me keep both, because Dad refuses to upgrade his eighty-year-old flip phone, and Mom always wants the newest models.”
Her mind wandered to the fall. How it happened so quickly. How it hadn’t been part of her plan. How she could have drowned because of a doodle on a bridge.
“Did I ever tell you about the howl incident?” she asked. “The one that happened in sixth grade?”
“Kirby destroyed your class, right?”
“Pretty much,” she said. “He gave everyone nosebleeds, too. I’m glad you and I didn’t share a homeroom.”
“I’m not! That sounds exciting.”
“You weren’t there, Jay! You weren’t there!” She wagged her finger. “Anyway, after I came home, suspended, Mom told me about the death of Icarus. It’s an ancient Greek parable. Icarus had this inventor for a father, Daedalus, who built functioning wings from wax and feathers. It was impressive engineering for the time. Daedalus warned him, ‘Don’t fly too high or too low.’ Of course, Icarus didn’t listen. He flew too close to the sun, and the wings melted, which sent him plummeting into the Mediterranean Sea, and—”
“Oh, sure, I know that story,” Jay interrupted. “We learn about the ancient Greeks every year.”
“That’s what I figured, but you didn’t get my two-faced fish joke, so I wanted to be safe.”
“How does the parable relate to ghosts? Is there a sequel?”
“Not for Icarus. He stays dead.”
“Aw.”
“Mom told me, ‘Don’t be like Icarus, Ellie. Caution is our friend.’ Because I was immature back then, I asked, ‘Aren’t we supposed to take risks?’”
“That’s a good question,” Jay said. “Not immature at all.”
“Mom thought I was being—in her words—obstinate,” Ellie said. “She was probably right, considering that I’d just been suspended. That’s not important. What I’m trying to say is: this summer, investigating my cousin’s murder, we might skirt the line between wise and unwise danger. It’s hard to know that you’re flying too high until the feathers start dropping.”
“Don’t worry. Everything will be okay,” he said. “We’re nothing like Icarus.”
“Says the guy who just fell into a large body of water.”
“Fell into a large body of water and survived.”
Shyly, stars appeared one-by-one. As the dusk thickened, Jay held out his hand. “Look what I just learned,” he said. A white, marble-sized globe of light blinked into existence and hovered over his palm. At first, Ellie mistook it for a firefly.
“Magic?” she asked. The light flickered, faltering.
“Yes.” Jay’s voice sounded strained. “It’s a will-o’-the-wisp. Your family secret is way more powerful.”
“My secret isn’t magic, though. How are you doing that?”
“I’m descended from Lord Oberon.” He lowered his hand, and the orb followed, as if bound to Jay by an invisible rod.
“You’re serious!” Ellie slapped her knee; it made a soggy thunk sound. Oberon’s line was known to have a stronger-than-typical knack for magic, although the reason for that trend was unknown, like many quirks of the alien dimension. “No kidding! You’ve mentioned it before. But … sorry … I thought, uh, the ‘I’m descended from fae royalty’ line is just something people say at parties to impress their friends. The same way everyone claims to have a Cherokee princess great-great-grandparent.”
“To be fair,” Jay said, “Oberon has a lot of distant descendants.” The light winked out, and Jay dropped his hand. “After a while, though, all the magic gets diluted from our genes, or something. I’m probably the last light-maker in my line.”
“Lucky for Kirby, my family secret is knowledge, not genetic,” Ellie said.
“I’ve always meant to ask this: could you teach anyone—even me—how to wake up the dead?”
“Theoretically.”
“Whoa.”
“Generally, the secret is passed through eldest daughters when they come of age. Twelve, thirteen years old.”
“Why’s that?” Jay asked. “Why don’t you teach more people?”
“It’s dangerous. But … in the right hands, the secret can change the world. That’s why it cannot be forgotten.” As a breeze dried her face, Ellie said, “My six-great-grandmother once crushed an army of murderous invaders. She was twelve years old.”
“How?”
“Six-Great woke up a thousand dead bison. Her ghost dogs herded them straight to the bad guy army. Flattened ’em.” Ellie clapped. “Day saved. Guess what I did when I was twelve.”
“You got your ears pierced?”
“No. I traumatized a room full of children and got suspended. Now, my victims egg my house every Halloween. Six-Great must think I’m pathetic.”
“Hey. Don’t say that. My grandma gave me a cookie when I learned how to tie my shoes. The point is … grandparents are easy to impress. Six-Great probably thinks you’re the best.”
“That makes me feel a little better.” She looked at the bridge, thoughtful. Al’s graffiti was still visible, though the black ink blended well with shadows. “Hah,” Ellie said. “He actually wrote ‘Ronnie, will you marry me?’ on the Herotonic Bridge. I hope there aren’t other Ronnies in the city.”
“What should I do?” Jay asked.
“Leave it. Our graffiti days are over.”
“No argument here. Let’s move to the sidewalk,” Jay suggested. “The mosquitoes are gathering.”
“Light our way, Baby Oberon.”
The will-o’-the-wisp sparked in the air between them. It was bright enough, though barely, to navigate up the bank without tripping over a mica-glinting rock or empty beer can. Together, they climbed to high ground and waited fo
r Al to return with towels. As Ellie and Jay watched the stars, Kirby tried to catch the will-o’-the-wisp. It slipped through his ghostly jaws.
* * *
Ellie’s father was pacing on the porch when she returned home. “Why didn’t you answer me?” he asked. “I’ve been calling all night!”
“My phone broke.”
“Look at you. Covered in mud.” He ushered her to the kitchen, ran warm water over a hand towel, and wiped grime from her face. In the well-lighted room, Ellie could see stress lines deepening on his brow.
“Sorry, Dad,” she said. “It’s a long story. Jay and I—”
“Of course he’s involved.”
“Hey, we didn’t plan to fall in a river. It was an accident.”
“The river, Elatsoe?!” He chucked the towel into the empty sink and left the kitchen in a scowling huff.
“I can explain! Dad, come on. Accidents happen.” Ellie followed him to the living room. It was, more accurately, a living-room-slash-library, since every wall was lined with bookshelves. One shelf contained nonfiction, mostly medical reference books and biographies of great Indigenous people. Another shelf was filled with her mother’s favorite genre: paperback fantasy. Another with her father’s favorite genre: whodunits and crime thrillers. The fourth bookshelf, the largest one, had most of Ellie’s comic book collection. She enjoyed indie titles and self-published series. They were more relatable, to her, than most popular superheroes.
“Accidents also kill,” her father said.
“Are you referring to Cuz?” she asked. “He was murdered. I thought you believed me!”
“I’m referring to you in a river, Ellie.” Her father pulled a comic book from the shelf. The cover depicted a brown woman wearing a billowing red cape. Jupiter Jumper #3, a stellar issue. “This is wish-fulfillment,” he said. “Understand? It’s not a guide to healthy living.”
“I know.”
“You don’t act like it.”
“I’m not wearing a cape, am I?”
“You’re grounded.”
“We’re driving to the burial the day after tomorrow.”
“You’re grounded after the burial! Go take a shower. The Herotonic River is probably radioactive.”
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