Somebody Tell Aunt Tillie We're In Trouble! (The Toad Witch Mysteries Book 2) (25 page)

“Did you see that?!” I yelled.

“Holy. Fuck.” Gus panted.

Now that one crow had shown the way, the others swooped down, digging toad livers out of their little bodies with surgical precision. Toad after toad exploded, making the ground even slipperier, covering it (and us) with blood and entrails.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” I said.

A phalanx of crows peeled off the main group and came after us. They attacked Gus, tearing through his shirt and pecking bits of flesh off his mid-section, trying to dig into his organs.

I didn’t know if they could do the same thing to him that they were doing to the toads, and I didn’t want to find out. I didn’t want to see Gus explode.

I picked up a handful of stones and whipped them at the crows, trying to drive them away. “Leave him alone!”

It worked for a moment, although I accidentally hit Gus a few times. As we kept moving, I randomly continued throwing stones at the crows, backing them off. My aim was terrible, but avoiding my mini-missiles slowed them down a bit. Which was good, because between Gus’s precarious breathing, his limp, and how slippery the ground was, we were forced to go slow, making pretty easy targets.

When Gus stumbled and fell, a bird came diving down at him. Since I was out of stones, I dug into my pockets and started throwing loose change at it. A quarter hit it in the chest and it pulled up, squawking its displeasure as it flew away. We were clear for the moment.

I bent down to help Gus up and suddenly realized what we were standing in. J.J. had come very close to finding his stash—he just needed to go deeper into the cemetery. I almost laughed I was so relieved. I was going to put a new twist on
stone the crows
.

“Does your lighter still work?” I asked.

“It should,” Gus said, clutching his mid-section. “Shit, that hurts.”

“It’s going to hurt a lot more if we don’t get out of here. Hand me the lighter.”

He dug into his pocket and tossed it to me. “What are you going to do with it? Throw it at them?”

The black cloud returned as crows swooped in for another attack. Gus tried to hobble towards me and fell, hitting his bad knee on a tombstone. “Fuck!” he swore, hissing in pain. “Mara, run! Get out of here.”

“I’m not leaving you,” I said. “Protect your liver. I don’t want to see you suffer the same fate as the toads.”

Gus curled up in a ball, head tucked in, arms protecting the back of his neck, as the birds took turns dive-bombing him. “Whatever you’re doing, hurry!”

I flicked opened the top of the lighter and held the flame to one of J.J.’s missing marijuana plants, but the leaves just weakly smoldered. They were too wet.
Shit.

I picked up some more small stones and whipped them at the crows. “Go away!” I screamed.

My efforts weren’t going to hold them off for long. There were more crows poised to attack, than I had stones. And with Gus not very mobile, we were going to be screwed.

“Remember, you’re a witch. Act like one.”
Aunt Tillie’s voice said, inside my head.

Of course!
Hekate’s fire!

I pulled dragon energy up from the earth, through my feet, into my body and into my lungs. I could feel astral wings form on my back, as my spirit started to expand. It was as if I was turning into a dragon.

Then I reached up to the sky, and focused on gathering whatever residual electrical energy I could. There wasn’t enough left to create a lightning strike, but there was enough that every hair on my body stood on end and every cell of my skin started vibrating.

I combined the dragon energy and the electrical energy within me, forcing the heated exchange through my blood and into my lungs, until I couldn’t hold it any longer. I exhaled with all my might on the crops, sending a small heat wave searing through the pot plants, drying up the leaves.

I inhaled again, driving Hekate’s fire deep into my body. My temperature started to rise. I could feel heat searing the inside of my lungs when I exhaled.

I took another deep breath in and clicked open the lighter. When I exhaled into the flame, it shot forward like a blazing torch, over the entire spread of marijuana plants. This time, the leaves hungrily grabbed onto the flames. Soon, all the pot plants were burning, enveloping the birds in thick smoke, blocking their view.

The astral wings pulled back into my body and vanished. I was back to myself again. Just a normal witch girl.

I coughed and I could feel my lungs burning. That must be the residual after-effects of breathing dragon fire. Hopefully, I hadn’t done any permanent damage. But we needed to get out of here, while the crows were still disoriented and crashing into each other.

I hurried to help Gus up.

He was looking at me, awestruck. “Are you… getting the… Devil’s minions… high?” he asked, grinning. “That… was awesome. I didn’t… know you could… do that.”

“Neither did I,” I said, smiling. “It’s one way of stoning the crows. Now, let’s get out of here before they get the munchies.”

I helped him up. A crow dropped out of the sky in front of us, looking blissful and uncaring. Gus eyeballed him, and I could tell he was thinking about kicking the crow or taking it hostage, in revenge.

“Leave it be,” I said. “Don’t give the Devil another reason to come after you.”

I coughed again. The smoke was so thick, I couldn’t tell which way the cottage was. I wondered how high we were going to be from the pot cloud, by the time we got out of the cemetery. Then, the spirit of Grundleshanks appeared, looked at us, and started hopping away, like he was trying to lead us somewhere.

“Come on, Gus!” I coughed, and urged him along. “Follow that toad!”

Chapter 46

W
e followed Grundleshanks back to the cottage, before he vanished. There was a clap of thunder and it started to rain again. I hoped the rain would stay heavy enough to put out the fire in the cemetery and send the demonic crows scurrying back to hell.

Gus and I were both shivering, so I hit the upstairs bathroom, and let him have the downstairs one. We took hot showers and met back on the couch, in warm, clean clothes, sipping cups of tea.

“Where’s the toad bone?” I asked.

Gus pointed to a leather pouch hanging on his neck, and then tucked it out of sight inside his shirt.

“How are you?” I asked. “Are you breathing any better?”

He carefully shook his head. “I’m… not,” he said, taking a slow breath between each word.

I felt a chill crawl up my spine. I had thought Gus would be fine, once we got back to the cottage.

“How…did…you…” he mimed giant wings with his hands.

I knew what he was talking about. It was that weird dragon metamorphosis. It wasn’t like my exterior body had changed, but it’s what my astral body had changed into, and Gus was tuned-in enough that he had been able to see it.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was like… a part of me woke up. It was what needed to be done and I just… did it. I didn’t even think about it, really.”

Gus nodded, either not able or not willing to speak.

I extended my ‘sight’ over his astral body, and was shocked to find his entire midsection, from his chest to his waist, had turned black, as if his organs had been replaced with the darkness of the void.

I put my teacup down. “Let’s go.”

He looked at me, questioningly.

“We’re going to the new Medical Center in Oldfield. There’s an Emergency Room there. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but if you can’t get enough air into your lungs to have a conversation, it’s getting worse.”

He nodded, and within minutes, we were in Zed and I was driving as fast as I dared down the rain-slicked roads.

*     *     *

The medical center had an Emergency Room, a Surgical Center, various doctors’ offices, and an Urgent Care Center about a block further down. There were a few rooms with beds, but half the place was still under construction. It really didn’t inspire much confidence, but it was the closest E.R. we could get to at three in the morning. By the time we got there, Gus’s left arm and face had gone numb, and he was still having problems breathing.

In the Emergency Room, they were able to see Gus pretty quickly. The perks of a small town.

They ran an EKG in case he was having a heart attack, and said his heart was fine. They gave him a nebulizer treatment and while it worked a little, it didn’t work as much as it should have. They gave him a spritz of nitroglycerin under his tongue, and that seemed to work better, for a little while. And then he couldn’t breathe again.

His one leg was swollen, and I wondered if it was because he had hit the tombstone in the cemetery with the same knee that had taken a pounding earlier. Because of it though, they couldn’t give him a physical stress test, and they didn’t have the equipment to give him a chemically-induced stress test with a 3-D heart imaging system. They suggested we put that on our to-do list.

They asked me about the trauma around his midsection, and I told them he fell in a rocky stream. I didn’t think they’d believe me if I said it was the result of a demonic crow attack. They ultrasounded him for blood clots, since his leg was swollen, but didn’t find any. They also MRI’d his knee, and confirmed what I had suspected about the meniscal injury.

Since Gus still couldn’t breathe, they sent him for a CT scan of his lungs, but it took five tries to get the IV contrast in. Poor Gus. His arms looked like they had been beaten with a baseball bat by the time the procedure was done.

*     *     *

Eventually, a doctor brought down the paperwork from the CT scan and said he hadn’t seen anything that would cause the breathing problem. He wanted to release Gus.

Something nudged me and I asked to see the report. He shrugged and left it with me.

“What…is…it?” Gus panted.

I held up my finger and read over the entire report. Everything seemed normal, until I got to the end. There was a phrase I didn’t recognize. Dependent Atelectasis. I pulled out my iPhone and looked it up.

“I know why you can’t breathe.” I said.

“The… doctor… didn’t…”

I interrupted him. I didn’t want him to waste precious oxygen on talking. I showed him the report. “Look here, see this bottom paragraph? Where it says dependent atelectasis?”

He shook his head. “Eyes. Blurry.”

Great. A new problem. This all had to be related. “Okay, well, it means the bottom lobes of your lungs have collapsed. That’s why you can’t breathe, and why none of the asthma meds are working.”

Gus gave me a thumbs up, signaling he understood, then raised two fingers, ticking off a question on each one. “Why? How fix?”

“I don’t know how to fix it. And I don’t know the why. Most of all, I don’t know why the doctor missed that part of the report. They want to release you, but I’m not going to let them. Are you going to be okay? I need to go find a doctor and discuss this with them.”

A panicked look came into Gus’s eyes, and I had to weigh which one was more important—keeping him calm, or tracking down a doctor and beating them over the head with the report until they coughed up the answer to those two questions: Why and How Fix.

“I’ll be right back. You’ll be okay. It’s not a big place. I have my phone. Text me if you start to freak and I’ll drop everything and run back to you.”

*     *     *

I walked through the corridors, looking for one of Gus’s doctors. I stopped at a diagram of the human body, and looked at the organ layout. From what I read, pressure from the other organs could cause dependent atelectasis. And the largest organ under the lungs was the liver.
It figured.

I should have realized we were dealing with a liver problem. Was it related to the crows trying to peck Gus’s liver out in the cemetery? Did they cause the liver to swell? Or were they drawn to Gus because his liver was swollen?

I started walking faster. I was pretty sure I had the why, but now I wanted the why behind that. Why was the liver swollen and pressing on the lungs?

I finally tracked down the female doctor who had ordered the CT scan and ultrasounds. That was fine with me, because I thought the male doctor who showed up to give us his misreading of the CT results was an idiot.

I pointed out the dependent atelectasis phrase, and she gave me a blank look. I swear, it was like they were all being blocked from seeing what was going on.

Blocked.
Of course. They probably were. The Devil said that Gus would be begging him to take the toad bone in exchange for the mercy of death. The Devil had to be behind this entire thing. I was going to have to take a different approach.

“Can you scan his liver? It wasn’t included in the lung scan. I think it’s swollen and that’s what’s causing his lungs to partially collapse.”

She grabbed the report from me and looked it over. “Sure. I don’t want to send him for another CT, but we can ultrasound his liver.”

“Great. Let’s do it.”

*     *     *

I went back to tell Gus he was going in for another test, and found Forrest there, sitting in my chair, sipping on a cup of coffee from the local diner, with Gus’s iPad on his lap. It was morning in the outside world, and Forrest was bright and fresh, ready to face a new day. And clearly, he hadn’t given a thought to bringing any coffee for anyone else.

“What are you doing here?” I asked coldly, oddly annoyed at his lack of exhaustion after what had to be the longest night of my life.

“I got a text from Gus,” he said, flashing his smarmy, lounge lizard grin at me. “I thought I’d come and see if he was okay.”

“Let me save you the guesswork. Of course, he’s not okay,” I snapped. “Otherwise, why would we be here? Now that you know, feel free to leave.”

Gus frowned at me.

“You’re going in for another ultrasound,” I told him.

Gus rolled his eyes, but he didn’t say anything. Then he pointedly looked over to Forrest and back to me.

“I’m not the enemy,” Forrest said. “Gus left his iPad at my place and I brought it here, thinking he could use it to spend the time. Would a bad guy do that?”