Baehrly Alive (15 page)

I might even live long enough to see the great extinction.

I told Thomas that we were going to cure him—that we were going to make it so nobody died of this problem ever again. I promised him that I wouldn’t let him die, no matter what.

I said that part extra loud, just in case Death was listening in.

I scheduled my appearance with the Council of Magic. My report was already longer than most novels, and I had plenty of graphs, slides, and images to illustrate the damage that was being done by ignoring the danger of the thinning of Magic in our atmosphere.

I didn’t have to work alone, of course—Hypatia sent Nat—the oddly awkward young man—to assist me.

As it happened, he had a brain that feasted on statistic. He crunched numbers faster than my calculator and typed at speeds I thought might actually cause internal combustion for my computer.

So, he was pretty useful.

I got the impression that Nat spent even less time around people than Hypatia did. That’s why he always sounded so odd and stilted when he talked—he just didn’t know how to converse with people.

I also suspected that he might be cripplingly shy. He certainly had a tendency to blush and stammer whenever I asked him a question.

I called in all my sick days at work. After the way I had lit into Kodi and fallen apart, I really couldn’t face the idea of seeing him. I didn’t know how I felt about Kodi these days—I knew he cared about me, but I wasn’t sure I was okay with that.

Because I was still very much in love with Donovan, even if I had lost him.

But I couldn’t bear to lose Kodi, too.

I knew it was selfish of me. I was finding out that I was a very selfish person. I was doing this all—all this research, all this fight, just so I wouldn’t have to lose anyone else that I loved.

“You’re working too hard,” Gwyn said softly, bringing in a tray of sandwiches and peanut butter cookies. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that peanut butter cookies made my mouth itch. “And for what? You’re not going to be able to cure us, Goldie. The healers know what they are talking about.”

“But it’s not that simple.” I grabbed her hand and walked her through a brief version of the presentation that I had prepared for the Council of Magic. “See? There’s still hope.”

There were tears in Gwyn’s eyes. “But, Goldie,” she said softly. “Do you really think the Council of Magic will give you permission to take us to Faerie?”

“I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t,” I told her. “We’re talking about curing the most deadly plague known to Magic—why wouldn’t they leap at the chance?”

Gwyn nibbled on her bottom lip. “I don’t think you should get your hopes up too high,” she said. “People who are involved in politics rarely do what seems sensible and logical to the rest of us.”

I frowned as I looked down at what I had worked so hard to compile. “I just can’t understand how anyone would be able to look at this research and not realize how easy it would be to solve this problem.”

“That’s because you are good,” Gwyn said. I realized that her voice had grown almost as faded as the rest of her. She had stopped taking care of herself as carefully—ever since Thomas had gotten sick.

I felt guilty. I had been so busy trying to save them that I had been neglecting my family and their needs today.

I just didn’t know how to do both.

Time. I didn’t have enough time. Even if there were ten of me, there wouldn’t be enough time to get done everything I needed to.

I didn’t want to think about hiring someone on to take Donovan’s place, but I had to do it, or the animals would never have been cared for.

I realized I hadn’t even seen Petunia in days.

“She’s on Thomas’s bed,” Gwyn told me, when I asked. “She spends a lot of time there with him. Silas does, too. I think they help him to feel a little better… he looks more peaceful when they are there.”

I wondered if my little family were sharing their Magical reserves with my little brother to help him stay alive long enough for me to get him the help her needed.

“Done,” Nat said, in his usual abrupt way. “Tomorrow is it.”

I wrinkled my nose as I nodded. “Yep. Tomorrow is the big day. Everyone has me starting to worry. What if the Council of Magic can’t understand how important this is?”

Nat shrugged.

“You don’t strike me as the type of person to rebel against authority,” I told him as we gathered our handouts and everything we would need to make a good impression.

Nat paused and looked at me steadily. “Sometimes authority is wrong.”

“I can’t argue with that logic.” I labeled the box I had packed and frowned thoughtfully. “You know, you have a very unusual accent. Where are you from, anyway?”

Nat went still, pausing as he always did before speaking. “You would say Mycenae.”

I looked down at my box to hide my shock. Nat was a great deal older than he appeared—thousands of years older than Hypatia, who I had thought to be the oldest undead being in history.

“So, you’re undead?” I asked curiously. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

He shrugged. “No. Not undead. More like… unlifed. Not alive, but not undead. Unlive.”

I had never heard that one before. I wondered what the difference between undead and unlifed might be.

One thing was for sure, I had underestimated Nat. I’d thought he was just an awkward, slightly dorky guy not that much older than me—a Witch, maybe.

And here he was—unlifed—or was it unlived? He was ancient and full of mystery.

“I’ve got to stop looking at book-covers,” I muttered to myself, hefting up the box I had packed to take it to the car.

Midnight found me scrounging around for snacks in the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to go to bed and listen to the increasingly noisy voices in my head.

Nothing sounded good—I hadn’t had much of an appetite lately—but I no longer had a project to keep me occupied in the small, terrible hours at night, and I didn’t know how to handle that.

A movement in the cupboard caught my attention. I grinned to myself. I had almost forgotten about Fred and his crazy nest of eggs.

Today, even Fred seemed ready to take a break. He hopped of off his shelf and came straight to me, making those odd little chicken sounds that always made me smile.

I picked him up and held him against my chest. He was such a pain in the butt sometimes, but he always seemed to know when I needed him.

“What am I going to do?” I whispered to him as I rubbed his earlobes in the way he particularly loved. “Do you miss Donovan, too?”

Fred cocked his head at the sound of my voice and stared at me with one eye. He pecked gently at the glint of a tear on my eye. The taste of it made him ruffle up into a miserable ball of fluffy feathers.

I never knew quite how much Fred could understand. Was he as smart as he had been as a chicken, before he’d been hit by a truck and reanimated as a zombie? Was he smarter than he had been before he was undead?

It helped me to think that he was my friend. That he might actually care for me—as much as a zombie and a chicken could care about anyone. Strange as it might be, he was part of my little weird family, and that meant that I was never completely alone.

Even when it felt like I was.

Just about the time that I heard a very strange sound coming from the cabinet, Fred bounced out of my arms and scuttled back to his makeshift nest.

I followed him, curiously.

I had no idea what to expect.

It certainly wasn’t that.

“Okay,” I said, staring Fred in the face. “First off—sorry for the whole boy thing, I think. Secondly, you do know that zombies can’t reproduce, right? Or are the rules different for chickens? And how come I’ve never seen you lay an egg before?”

Fred just clacked his beak smugly as he tucked his little mini-Fred tufts of fluff around him.

I counted as best I could, recounting as they ran away like tiny dandelion heads with feet.

Six. Counting Mama Fred, I had seven Freds now.

Seven zombie chickens.

I could swear someone started playing the death march about then.

Maybe it was just in my head.

They were awfully cute, considering there was no doubt in my mind that they were just as undead as their—Mother? Father? Their ambiguously gendered parent, who may have created offspring like amoebas do.

Trust Fred to unlock the key to spontaneous cloning in zombies.

I didn’t even want to think of the implications of that.

It’s not as if I could go around giving away zombie chickens like kittens.

I could just imagine the horrified faces of an Ordinary I tried to pawn a zombie chick off one.

Maybe I could stick them under a heat lamp and advertise for ‘hot chicks’.

I sniggered at my own bad joke.

Gwyn came down stairs, as she often did this time of night. She padded over in her super-cute bunny slippers to see what I was staring at with such obvious hilarity.

“Seven Freds,” I announced. “Doesn’t this mark the beginning of the Apocalypse or something?”

Gwyn shook her head. “Aw, they are so darling. They’re like little puff balls.” She picked up one of the chicks and rubbed it against her cheek, where it immediately pecked her. “Ow, you little shit.”

I laughed. “You should have known better—it came from Fred, after all—at least, I think it did. I actually don’t want to think too hard about the how, though.”

Gwyn nodded in agreement. “Sounds like the path to madness.”

“Oh, we’re already mad,” I told her. “Didn’t you notice? We’re all mad as hatters here.”

“Fine, Alice,” Gwyn said dryly. “When was the last time you got some sleep? I think you’re a little slap-happy and that’s not a good sign when you have such a big day tomorrow.”

I made a face. “I don’t like sleeping these days,” I admitted.

“Nightmares?” Gwyn asked, sympathy all over her face.

“No.” I felt tears sting in my eyes. “Much worse—good dreams.”

“Oh,” Gwyn said softly. I had a hunch she understood.

After all, she had lost my dad.

I wondered if the good memories still haunted her, or if, instead, his image had begun to fade in her memory as I knew it had in mine. Which was worse—seeing the departed in everything and everyone—or waking up one morning with their faces impossible to recall?

I wandered around the house, still fighting off sleep. This house was still new enough to me that it didn’t quite feel like home—not the way my little cottage had.

I hesitated with my hand hovering over the handle to the door that would lead to the attic—and Donovan’s rooms.

I’d been blocking it all out—the funeral, hiding in the mourners, watching people offer Donovan’s brother and his wife—his family—their condolences. I hadn’t known how to tell them that, even for a brief moment, that blissful flash in time, I had been Donovan’s family, too—his wife.

But no one knew about that. I was a stranger among his friends from the force, from his family…

“Who are you again?” his brother had asked—looking at me with familiar blue eyes without a spark of recognition when I told him my name.

Donovan had been everything to me.

He had died in my arms.

And I couldn’t say anything—anything at all.

I shouldn’t have gone at all. Donovan wasn’t there. Funerals were for the living, not the dead.

And I was neither.

I swallowed hard, looking down at the challenge of that doorknob. I’d never been up here while Donovan was alive. Would there be ghosts and shadows here to haunt me?

Or would there be no imprint left here, either? No trace I could cling to?

I leaned my forehead against the door, closing my eyes against the pain that flooded through me.

I missed him.

I missed him so much that the pain would stop my breath and I would find myself on my knees, gasping hopelessly.

He had been my oxygen.

I closed my hand on the doorknob and turned it.

I felt like the door should have creaked sorrowfully or something, but it opened easily, silently.

My fingers found the light switch. Light flooded the small apartment.

Everything was neat and tidy, as I had known it would be. The furnishings were his—from his apartment—but they were unfamiliar to me. Certainly there was nothing there that could remind me of the man who had lived here.

I wandered through the apartment, brushing my fingers over dishes left to dry that had never had the chance to be put away in the kitchen—an eReader left on the kitchen table, the battery was dead now.

The fruit in the fridge needed to be thrown away. I couldn’t even leave this place as a tribute to him—life, even here, had continued on without him.

Life paused for no one.

I hesitated before going into his room. I felt like I was trespassing, as if I didn’t belong here.

The time in his arms meant nothing. I had never had the opportunity truly to be his wife.