Pyxis: The Discovery (Pyxis Series) (13 page)

“Hi, Aunt Dorothy,” I said, laying my hand on her arm. “It’s me, Corinne. And Bradley.”

Her eyes moved to my face, but she didn’t really react. I bit my lip and tried not to cry. It was like her essence was gone, and only the shell of her body remained. No matter how many times I reminded myself that she wouldn’t recognize me, it still hurt every time.

“I’m sorry it’s been so long since we’ve seen you,” I continued, pretending that she knew who I was. “Bradley drove me into town so I could get my driver’s license.”

I pulled my newly-minted license out of my bag, laid it on the table, and pushed it toward her.

“See? I passed.” I tried to smile.

“Sorry, Corinne,” Bradley mumbled, and his chair scraped the floor with an unpleasant metallic screech as he stood up. “I’m going to wait by the desk.”

I felt a moment of guilt for making him come in here with me. It might have been a little easier if Aunt Dorothy didn’t look like such a ghost of herself, and of my grandmother, for that matter. I decided I might as well get it over with. I glanced over my shoulder to verify no one was near enough to overhear, and leaned closer to Aunt Dorothy.

“Aunt Dorothy, I really need your help,” I said. “Grandma Doris left me that box, the
pyxis
, with the bottles in it. Do you know anything about the
pyxis
?”

I waited for a few seconds, but there was no change in her face or eyes.

“What about a person who is a shield, or a guardian? Or Harriet Jensen? Or things I need to watch for in my dreams?”

She wasn’t reacting at all. It was time to try a different tactic. I pulled out the cookies.

“I made these for you, Aunt Dorothy.” I peeled back the foil. “It’s Grandma Doris’s sugar cookie recipe.”

My voice caught a little on my grandmother’s name. But I thought I saw a flicker of interest in Dorothy’s eyes. She watched my hands as I opened the foil and drew out a cookie. I held it out to her, as if she was a little kid, and she raised her hand. I jumped as a different hand swooped in and snatched the cookie before Aunt Dorothy could take it.

|| 20 ||

“OH NO, SORRY, HONEY, I can’t let you give her that.” I looked up; the nurse who had been sitting at one of the tables reading a thick paperback stood over me. “Dorothy is diabetic, and we’ve got her on a strict diet.”

Damn it! How could I have forgotten that Aunt Dorothy had diabetes? I wanted to smack myself.

“Not even just a bite?” I said. “She seemed kind of excited about it.”

Maybe “excited” was overstating it, but I was desperate.

The nurse shook her head. I hoped she’d move away and leave us alone, and then maybe I could slip Dorothy a little piece, but she didn’t budge.

“Sorry about that, Aunt Dorothy,” I said. “I’ll come back to see you again soon.”

I stood and gently hugged her stooped shoulders. It was all I could do not to bawl as I walked down the hall toward the reception desk. Between seeing her in that condition in this depressing place and completely failing in my mission, I wasn’t sure I could hold it together.

Bradley couldn’t get away from the retirement home fast enough. I slid into his car, and, letting my hair swing forward to cover my face, I slouched in the seat. Frustration, fear, and sadness washed over me. I let the tears trail untouched down my cheeks.

I hid in my room for the rest of the evening. I didn’t even go upstairs for the quiche my dad brought home from the café. I texted Ang to let her know I’d passed the driving test, and Mason to tell him I’d utterly botched things with Aunt Dorothy. He said he’d come by later, and around eight-thirty, I heard a soft tap on my bedroom window.

I let him in through the basement door and led him back to my room, where I flopped across my bed in despair.

“I’m such a dumbass!” I wailed, covering my face with my hands. “Of course Aunt Dorothy has diabetes. She’s had it since before I was born!”

Mason, slouched in the purple chair, smiled sympathetically. “A little oversight, maybe. But you can go back with something else she can eat.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Maybe I could sneak a couple of drops into a cup of water or something. I perked up a little. “You’re right. I’ll try again. My biggest problem is getting back to Danton. Even though I have my license now, I seriously doubt my parents will go for me taking the car by myself.”

“We’ll figure out something,” Mason said. “Soon.”

I, too, felt a growing sense of urgency. The part about the dreams and “impending perils” really worried me. It seemed obvious to me that the dreams Mason and I were having meant something bad was on the horizon. And we were completely unprepared to deal with it.

I looked at my left hand and realized I’d chewed off two nails. The last time I chewed my nails this much was during Bradley’s illness. I sat up and tucked my hands under my thighs.

“Have you had any more dreams lately?” I asked.

“None that I can remember.” Mason didn’t bother asking me if I was having any. “It’s kind of a relief. But I also wonder if maybe it’s not a good thing.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “With the dreams, at least I felt like I was getting some kind of … information. I’m not sure the silence makes me feel better.”

“Speaking of information, I got into that website you found.”

“Oh my God, why didn’t you say anything?” I sat up straight. I had a feeling there was something there that could help us.

Mason chuckled. “Sorry. There’s not a whole lot to say. I didn’t get very far, but I saved the source and took a screenshot so I can play around with it later.”

“What did you see?” I asked eagerly.

“It was strange.” Mason leaned forward to prop his elbows on his knees and frowned at the floor. “It looked like a login page where you’d enter usernames and passwords, but nothing was actually functional. I couldn’t type anything into it.”

“Huh. Could you send me the screenshot?”

“Yeah, I’ll email it when I get home.”

“The other weird thing is that the website seems to have a dynamic URL.”

“A whaty-what?”

“Every time I went to the website, it had a different address.”

I gave him an exaggerated blank stare.

Mason smiled. “The w-w-w-dot part. It’s different every time. And I can’t access previous ones. It’s like they expire.”

“So how did you find it? Can we even get back to it?”

“It took me a while to find it after you told me about it. I had to repeat some of your searches until it came up in the search results again. But once I had it up, I saved the source code. There’s some hidden text in the source, so to get to the site again, I search on that hidden text.”

“That’s tricky.”

“Kind of.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

Mason shrugged one shoulder. “Make the website harder to find. Impossible to link to. Who knows.”

We talked for a few minutes more, and then he stood to go. I walked him to the basement door, where he bent and wrapped his arms around my ribcage. Surprised, but not unpleasantly so, I hugged him back.

“Maybe it’s just the power of suggestion,” he said with his cheek against my hair, “but I have this compulsion to run over here, like, hourly to make sure you’re okay.”

I could feel my pulse in my throat, and I held my breath. I didn’t know what to say. I was afraid to admit that I felt the need to have him near. If I said it out loud, I felt like I’d be verifying some of the things in my grandmother’s letter, and I wasn’t ready to do that.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you.” It was the truth. I didn’t want to think about the state I’d be in if the dreams continued, and I had to face them all without Mason.

He pulled back until he could see my face, and his arms dropped down to my waist. He leaned toward me, and for a second, I was sure he would kiss me. My breath quickened. Then I remembered the blurry picture of him and Sophie captured on Ang’s phone, and I pulled back out of his reach.

His face fell a little, and he hesitated. He was on the verge of saying something, but instead slipped through the door into the cool evening air.

* * *

I checked my email an hour later, and there was a message from Mason. The attachment was a screenshot showing a web page that was blank except for five username and password login pairs, each with a set of initials above it: ALL, BC, PC, RC, and TLC.

“Damn it,” I muttered. “Again with the mysterious letters.”

I pulled the
pyxis
from the wall and took out the waxy piece of paper. I’d pored over it a hundred times, but I had a nagging feeling that the
pyxis
and the website were connected. I just had to figure out how. The letters on the website definitely didn’t match the initials of anyone on the
pyxis
list.

I smacked my palm to my forehead. “Duh! Oh my God, I’m an idiot.” I didn’t care that I was talking to myself. I suddenly knew what P, S, and G meant. In my grandmother’s letter, she’d said I was the pyxis (P), Mason was the shield (S), and Angeline was one of the guardians (G). I had no idea what any of those things meant, but whatever they were, my grandmother had been a Pyxis, and so had my great-grandmother. Aunt Dorothy was a guardian. And Harold Sykes was a shield, same as Mason.

I grabbed my phone and called Mason to tell him. We both agreed it was even more important that we talk to Harold Sykes again. He had to know
something
. I said goodbye, called Ang, and repeated what I’d told Mason.

“Well, that’s something, I guess,” she said.

“I know, it doesn’t tell us a whole lot,” I said, frowning at her lack of enthusiasm. “But as far as we know, Mr. Sykes is the only person on this list besides us who’s alive and coherent. He’s our best chance for answers.”

Actually, there was
one
other person on the list who was alive and coherent, and seemed to know a lot more than me and my friends. I remembered Harriet Jensen’s cold green eyes, and a tingle crawled up my spine.

|| 21 ||

THE REST OF THE week passed in a blur of school, coffee shop shifts, homework, and more futile searches for information about the
pyxis
. Ang and I dumped the rest of the cookies down the food grinder in the café sink. We couldn’t draw any firm conclusions about the effects of the blue and yellow liquids, so we hoped Mr. Sykes would be able to explain everything and spare us any further experiments on our unsuspecting classmates.

Friday afternoon, Mason sent me a text just as school was letting out.

caught up w Mr Sykes. Call me ASAP?

“Hey, what’s up?” I said when Mason answered.

“I think you need to hear this,” Mason said, his voice tense. “Can you come to Mr. Sykes’s house right now?”

“I’m just leaving school. I’ll walk straight there, and I’ll see if Ang can come.” I hung up.

“I’m going with my parents to help my cousin move,” she reminded me.

“Crap,” I said, frowning. “Sounded like Mason had something important to tell us.”

She promised to text as soon as she was free, so I left her and walked as fast as I could to my grandmother’s neighborhood.

Out of breath, I knocked on Mr. Sykes’s door. I glanced down the street at my grandmother’s house and chewed the inside of my cheek. It still felt strange to know that the house was just sitting there empty. Mr. Sykes let me in and hobbled ahead of me to the living room where Mason sat on the sofa.

I gave Mason a little wave and turned my attention to Mr. Sykes as he settled himself onto a dark brown La-Z-Boy, propping his cane against the armrest.

“When we spoke last, I did not realize poor Dorothy was in such bad shape,” he began apologetically. “I assumed you could speak to her about the … situation, and she could take your grandmother’s place as your mentor. But young Mason here has informed me that Dorothy is not in her right mind.”

I nodded and glanced at Mason, who sat next to me. “I went to visit her a few days ago, and I don’t think she even knew me. I talked to her for a while, but she barely looked at me and never said a word.”

Mr. Sykes frowned and looked down at his hands. His wiry eyebrows drooped over his eyes. “That is most unfortunate. I am afraid there is not much I can do for either of you without Dorothy.”

“What … what do you mean?” I asked. I wanted to jump up and down with frustration. Why was he being so difficult?

“It is a bit complicated, unfortunately, because I am not at liberty to say much to you.” He sighed. “Your grandmother would have been the one to explain, and to mentor you, Corinne. Since she is gone, those duties fall to your great-aunt. If Dorothy was deceased, those duties would fall to me. But as long as Dorothy is alive, I cannot fulfill that role.”

I didn’t feel like I knew much more than I had fifteen minutes ago. I desperately wished he’d stop being so cryptic.

I held up my hands in a helpless shrug. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Mason told me a bit about the dreams you have had recently. Most troubling.” I glanced at Mason, who mouthed
sorry
. I wasn’t mad that he’d talked about the dreams, though. I just wanted to see how he was reacting to all of this. “But you are right to try to help Dorothy. I believe your dear grandmother is guiding you, and you must give Dorothy a bit of the rectification fluid, the white bottle in the
pyxis
.”

Rectification fluid? So he
did
know about the
pyxis
. And what was he was saying about my dead grandmother
guiding
me? The back of my neck tingled, and I shivered.

“So you think if she takes some of the, uh, rectification fluid, she’ll get better?” A spark of hope lit in my heart for the first time in ages.

|| 22 ||

“I BELIEVE THE RECTIFICATION fluid could be the answer, but there’s no way to know until you try it,” Mr. Sykes said. “I am deeply sorry I am unable to assist you further. But the sooner you can get back to Dorothy, the better for all of us, I think.”

“Then that’s what I’ll do,” I said firmly. Sounded like I had no choice anyway.