Autumn

by Sierra Dean

  She’d asked for a sign, but she hadn’t expected him to be so literal about it. Knocking pipes or shutters was more what she’d been thinking, so for him to actually spell it out for her was a bonus.

  “Look?”

  The beads rolled again, this time spelling Mirror.

  Lou wanted to point out she had been looking in the mirror, but her father hadn’t been a fan of backtalk during his life, and death likely hadn’t made him any more patient.

  She pivoted back to the mirror. In spite of him telling her to go there, she still started when she saw his reflection next to her. He was grim, showing no sign of joy at seeing her. In fact, in spite of his open eyes, he maintained an appearance of death. He still resembled the plastic, phony version of her father she’d seen in his casket. Shouldn’t death make him fresher, healthier looking? What point was an afterlife if you had to float around as the animated corpse of a cancer patient?

  “Hi,” she said, not sure how she was supposed to greet a dead parent. What was the Miss Manners take on ghostly encounters?

  He said nothing.

  But he was there. Her father was in the room with her, even if he wasn’t really standing beside her. Last time she’d run away, but this time she wasn’t going to let him go so hastily. She touched the glass.

  “Oh, Dad. I miss you.” Her eyes brimmed with tears which she swiped away with the back of her hand. “Mom misses you. We don’t work right without you.” More tears slipped through, and she didn’t bother trying to stop them this time.

  Her father nodded solemnly. “Miss you… love… you.”

  “Are you…are you okay? Wherever you are?” Her fingernails clawed at the glass as if she might be able to free him and bring him into the world with her.

  “There is…no…here. There is…nothing…”

  Her heart ached, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to ask anything else for fear of what the answers might be.

  “Did it hurt?”

  He shrugged his boney shoulders, looking so brittle she worried he might turn to dust. “No…pain.”

  His form faded, and Lou suddenly remembered her reason for being there.

  “I know about the dreams.”

  His image wavered again, like ripples on the surface of a pond. Once he solidified, his stern expression was gone, replaced by a sad one. He was wearing the suit he’d been buried in, a charcoal-gray number that he had considered too fancy for regular wear. Now he was going to wear it forever.

  His feet were bare, making her wonder if the funeral director had stolen his shoes.

  “I found your drawing,” Lou explained.

  “Morena.”

  “You dreamed about her too, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” His voice was distant, a tinny echo heard through six walls. She strained to make sense of the raspy whisper, hanging on every syllable. She wanted to ask him a thousand more questions. She ached to know what it had been like to leave her, and how it was he found himself in the mirrors. Did he feel pain now? Should she wake her mom up so he had another chance to say goodbye?

  Anything she could have possibly imagined asking him flitted through her mind, and every word pushed her mouth to speak, but she bit her tongue, nervous she might only get so many questions.

  She still scarcely believed he was here.

  “Why am I dreaming about her?”

  “Whit…taker.”

  Lou felt like she’d been punched in the chest. “She’s a Whittaker?”

  “Was,” he rasped.

  “Why did she curse Cooper’s family?”

  “Rey…nolds?”

  “Yes.”

  “They…failed.”

  “Failed how?”

  “Killer…lost.”

  “So this really is all about her son’s killer?”

  “Yesss.”

  “And what does that have to do with us?”

  “Someone…must…wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  His form thinned, fading away to near nothingness and making her heart skip a beat as she waited for him to reappear.

  “Wait for what?” she asked again.

  “Justice.” The word was as sharp and clear as if he’d whispered it right in her ear.

  Justice? It was a loaded concept because it implied a wrongdoing on the part of the Reynolds family. But it had been centuries since Morena’s son had been killed. How long could a grudge last? Morena was dead, so what was keeping the rage alive now that she was long gone?

  Then the meaning of someone must wait sank in.

  “We keep the curse alive.”

  “Yesss.”

  “As long as there are Whittakers, the curse lives on.”

  “Yesss.”

  Which meant as long as Lou was alive, Cooper would be cursed.

  “Can’t I do anything to undo it?”

  “Justice,” her father scolded. “Only justice.”

  His figure turned to static, like an old analog TV set, all black-and-white hissing dots of noise. He became lines of meaningless energy without form or features.

  Then he vanished.

  Lou was left alone in the room with only the nagging silence of the house and the pounding of her heart. She didn’t have to ask him why Cooper’s mother hated her. Or why Granny Elle hated Cooper. He was a Reynolds, she was a Whittaker. Their animosity for each other was born in their blood because her ancestor had cursed his. And that curse lived on in each of them.

  If Cooper was shackled, she was the ball and chain.

  Or more specifically her family was the key to his humanity, and the only way to keep him in human form was solving a murder that was over two hundred years old.

  “Yeah.” Her hand was still pressed to the mirror, but now it only showed her solitary reflection. “No big deal.”

  But it was something. It was something they hadn’t had a day before, and it gave her somewhere to start.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Lou arrived at the library on Saturday morning before it opened and sat on the front steps, gorging on a Snickers, waiting for Nigel to show up. The place she’d bumped her knee climbing up the stairs had formed a bruise, and she prodded the purple-black edges of it through the hole in her jeans.

  A small Honda hatchback that was older than Lou rounded the corner and sputtered its way around back. A few moments later Nigel appeared, wearing a Star Wars T-shirt over a long-sleeved gray shirt, his jeans looking as battered as hers.

  “Lou?”

  “Hi.”

  “Are you desperate to do some research, or did you just miss me?”

  “My dad saved your life,” she blurted out.

  “He did.” Nigel stepped around her and unlocked the front door, holding it open wide for her. She got to her feet, embarrassed to look at him, and walked into the dark interior of the library, breathing in the musty smell of old books.

  Lou wanted to see what, if anything, Nigel knew about the curse. It seemed impossible that his near death by coyote had been mere coincidence. For all Lou knew, every coyote in the Poisonfoot area had once been a Reynolds boy.

  What an unsettling notion.

  Lou imagined them like a pack of lost boys straight out of Peter Pan, except instead of wearing furs and ensembles made of leaves and twigs, they’d gone fully native, turning into true animals. Would they recognize each other as family? She hoped at least out there they got to be a family.

  She decided not to ask Nigel anything. There was a good chance he didn’t know about the curse, seeing as he’d only been a baby when the coyote had tried to take him. But maybe his family was involved like hers. And that was what had brought her to the library. Not to quiz him directly, but rather to take advantage of his librarian prowess.

  “Where do you keep the local history?”

  “How historic are we talking?”

  “Like, settlement of Poisonfoot? The early frontier days, I guess.”

  “Frontier days? If you’re hoping for some Deadwood-sty
le, shoot-’em-up, showdown-type stuff, I think you’re going to be sorely disappointed by the lack of excitement in Poisonfoot’s history.”

  “I’m actually looking for more of my family history from that time. I’ve heard the Whittakers have been here since the town was founded. I guess I just wanted to learn more about them.” She avoided mentioning Morena specifically, but something in Nigel’s demeanor shifted anyway. His jovial grin was gone, replaced with something dark and unmistakably unhappy.

  “Why do you want to know about that?”

  “Curiosity.”

  “Maybe you should talk to Elle.”

  “I don’t want to bother her with something like that when I can find it on my own.” She narrowed her eyes at him, not sure she liked his sudden change. “This is a library, isn’t it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I’d like to look at some books, please.”

  Nigel hesitated, glancing at the front door as if he might make a break for it. Why was he getting so cagey about her checking local history books unless he knew there was something there she shouldn’t read? He huffed a sigh and walked down one of the aisles to a door at the back wall. This one was opposite the periodical room and was marked Private.

  “Because of the rarity of books dating back that far, we have to keep them out of general circulation. A lot of them are private journals from the Civil War, or family Bibles, that sort of thing. One-of-a-kind items I don’t want everyone getting their hands on, you understand?” Nigel stood outside the door, shuffling uneasily. “I must insist you be incredibly careful with the items you find in there.”

  Was he going to check her hands to make sure they were clean?

  He pulled out his keys and unlocked the door, hands trembling. The inside was dimly lit with a low desk along the back wall, and several hip-height shelves with slim leather books and sheaves of paper in plastic folios.

  “Go ahead,” Nigel offered, extending an arm into the room. “Ladies first.”

  Lou hesitated outside the door, a warning voice in her brain shouting, Don’t do it! But she’d been alone in the library with Nigel before, and nothing terrible had happened to her, so why were the alarm bells going off now? Maybe it had something to do with the sudden influx of weirdo paranormal drama in her life.

  Being forced to believe that human boys could turn into animals, and she was able to speak to her dead father through mirrors…well, it had been enough to make her uneasy. If those sorts of things were possible, what else was possible? If someone told her vampires were real, she was just going to call it quits on the world and go live in a cabin in Bora Bora or something.

  She shook off the warning sensation and stepped into the room ahead of Nigel. A moment later the room went dark, and Lou briefly thought he’d shut off the lights. Then she registered a sharp point of pain at the back of her head that fanned outwards until her entire skull was throbbing.

  “Oh.” Why would Nigel have whacked her in the head? She should have trusted her gut when it had warned her something was wrong. Her mouth moved to form additional words, but they faded out as she stumbled to her knees and pitched forward onto the floor.

  Before she passed out, she saw Nigel duck out of the room, and all the light from the library vanished. The last thing Lou heard was the heavy bolt of the lock tumbling closed behind him.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Cooper awoke on Saturday morning in an unapologetically foul mood with a ferocious headache pulsing behind his eyes. He stumbled his way into the kitchen and scraped the chair out from under the table, staring at the laminate surface like breakfast would magically appear there. Mia must have followed the sound of his motions because she arrived a moment later and sat across from him.

  “You got in late last night,” she observed.

  “So? Just because Mom’s not here doesn’t make you a default parent. So lay off.”

  Mia blinked, at a momentary loss for words which was rare for her. She pushed her long bangs back from her face, revealing her startlingly blue eyes, and her stunned silence vanished.

  “I’d ask who pissed in your cornflakes, but you’re too much of a lazy asshole to even make breakfast for yourself.” She got up, kicking her chair backwards into the cabinets behind her. Instead of storming off, she grabbed a bowl and spoon, a box of Lucky Charms and the milk out of the fridge and slapped each item down in front of him with an obnoxious thunk that made his temples throb.

  He growled at her.

  Mia froze.

  “Did you just growl at me?” Her voice dropped to a near whisper. When he didn’t answer, she crouched in front of him and placed one hand on each of his forearms. “Cooper. Did you growl at me?”

  “Yes,” he admitted finally.

  Mia slapped him.

  “You can’t do this, Coop. You need to get a grip on yourself.”

  His cheek stung, but so did his pride. Mia was right. They’d both seen what Jer had gone through before his transformation, and Cooper was honestly surprised the symptoms hadn’t begun to show sooner. It had been hard to see the signs with Jer at first. Sullen, surly mood swings were hardly abnormal in a seventeen-year-old boy. But then he’d started snapping—literally. He’d bared his teeth and growled like a dog. He’d sniff the air around him.

  Hadn’t Cooper used his sense of smell just the previous week?

  The marks of his change were already setting in.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Her fingertips twitched against his arms, and she smiled in the sad way she’d learned to over the last year. “I want you to stay the way you are.” Her voice had lost its edge and taken on a softer, more confessional tone.

  “That’s what I want, too.”

  “There has to be a way…”

  “Mia.” He shook himself free of her and got to his feet, not sure he could deal with the look in her eyes when he said what he was about to. “With Jer, we were unprepared. We never thought that was going to happen. We all thought…well, we all thought grandma was nuts, didn’t we?” He laughed lightly, trying to add some cheer to the dark atmosphere of the room.

  Mia took the chair he’d been sitting on and poured some of the cereal into his bowl. She didn’t say anything.

  “It’s different this time,” Cooper went on. “We know it’s coming. Instead of thinking there’s a way out of it, maybe we should just be happy for the time we have.”

  “No.”

  Cooper stopped pacing and looked at her. Her lips formed a thin line, and the tension in her jaw was evident from across the room.

  “No?”

  “No,” she repeated, her voice more forceful this time. “I won’t just sit here twiddling my thumbs and thinking about how to spend my last months with you. I won’t wake up one morning and deal with a dog being in your bedroom. Or are you going to run away instead? Go hide out in the woods or something to, like, spare mom and me from dealing with it? No, you stupid idiotic dumbass. If you think you can say anything that’s going to make me stop trying to find a way to fix this, you’re out of your mind. Got it?”

  She got to her feet, sliding the cereal bowl towards him. He picked it up, and she opened the milk, pouring some into the bowl until the little marshmallow treats were bobbing up and down in the white sea.

  He’d been so caught up in his own feelings about his transformation, he hadn’t stopped to think about what it was doing to his family. He’d dealt with Jer’s loss right alongside Mia, and he’d seen the changes in her. More than the dyed hair and strange boyfriend, he’d seen a lot of his sunny, sweet sister leach away since Jer had changed.

  Cooper was an idiot for not understanding that losing him was going to suck twice as much because this time she knew it was coming. This time Mia and his mother had a countdown clock running, same as he did. Only once he changed, there would be no one there to comfort the women in his life. Mia and his mom weren’t exactly buddy-buddy. They didn’t communicate the same way Cooper and Mia could. How were they
going to make it work without him there?

  “I want to find a way, too, you know.”

  “Maybe you should spend less time being a grouchy prick and more time researching or something.”

  “I told Lou Whittaker the truth.” Those words hung between them, even more shocking when spoken aloud. He could hardly believe they were true and that he’d been so willing to share something that big with a girl he barely knew.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “No, and more importantly, she doesn’t seem to think so either. She believed me.”

  “Cooper…”

  “No, Mia, just hear me out for a second. Jer has been following her, she told me so herself. Why would he be tracking her if there wasn’t a reason? And when I told her the story Grandma told us, she knew it. She said…” He stopped himself. It wasn’t his place to share Lou’s secrets, not if he expected her to keep his. “She believed me.”

  “You’re leaving stuff out.” That was Mia. Always too smart for her own damned good.

  “Just trust me when I say I trust her, okay?”

  Mia furrowed her brow and picked one of the marshmallows out of his bowl, chewing it thoughtfully. “Didn’t Mom forbid you from spending any time with Lou?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “She told me to rat you out if I saw the two of you together at school.”

  Considering Cooper and Lou were together daily at school, Mia wasn’t doing a very good job of playing spy for their mother. “What’s your point?”

  “Mom isn’t very big on social rules like that.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You think maybe there’s a reason she doesn’t want you hanging out with a Whittaker?”

  “Lou and I thought about that.”

  “And what did you come up with?”

  “Nothing yet, but we’re working on it.”

  Mia stole another marshmallow. “Well, work a little faster, okay? We don’t have all the time in the world, here.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four