Once upon a time, there were two little girls, who lived in a house in the middle of the woods with their father. One day, he went into town as usual, and came back with a wife. The wife did not like the daughters; the daughters did not particularly like her either. Still, they made an uneasy peace with her.
Until, one day, the cold came. It was a quick cold, but a biting one—and it killed every fresh crop, every growing field, every unprotected living thing it touched. There was no harvest—and no food.
Things got worse and worse. The larders emptied out, and the girls went to bed hungry every night. When Younger Sister cried from the pain in her stomach, Older Sister sang quiet songs to her, and wove stories of their true mother. Neither of them remembered her; but where there was no memory or truth to be had, fairytale was enough.
One morning, their father stirred them from their beds, and told them to follow him into the woods. They were going to gather firewood, he said—but before they left, the birds chirped to Younger Sister, “Take heed! Take heed! Fill your pockets with stones! Leave a trail!”
Younger Sister did so, and as their father led them deeper and deeper among the towering trees, she trailed the stones behind them, white and pearly against the dark loam of the forest floor. Then, she looked up—and their father was gone. They were lost. But Younger Sister found the trail of stones and guided them back to their cottage. Their father’s face was filled with mixed relief and shame, but they could see the fury in their stepmother’s face. The next morning, they were awoken even earlier, and herded out to the forest too fast to keep with them anything more than a crust of bread. Younger Sister crumbled it behind her to leave a trail; however, when once again, their father vanished and they were left alone in the forest, she turned behind her to see nothing but the birds eating the crumbs she’d left.
“Why do you betray me like this?” she cried. But it was too late. They were lost.
Older Sister closed her eyes. She turned in a circle, trying to feel the winds, the earth under her feet. Then she opened her eyes and took Younger Sister’s hand.
“What are we going to do?” Younger Sister asked.
Older Sister looked down at Younger Sister. They were all each other had left in the world. Even if they could make it back to their home, she realized, it wasn’t home any more. They were no longer welcome.
“Survive,” she said. She squeezed Younger Sister’s hands and strode into the dark.
“Jo,” said Will in a low, urgent voice, “check outside the door.”
Jo nodded, face drawn and worried—
“Did she just nod?” Will asked me.
“What?”
“I can’t see her, remember?”
“Oh. Right. Yes, she nodded.”
Jo vanished through the wall. Gurjas had vanished the moment things had gotten tense, although I couldn’t blame him. Will hadn’t ever picked up he was there, and hearing about yourself was bizarre for anybody. I supposed if he didn’t talk, Will couldn’t hear him. Trying to work out the logic of that made my head hurt.
What’s going on? I thought as loudly as I could manage, and Will winced a little.
You don’t need to yell. Just, uh—remember how I asked if you were in danger?
Yes. You made it sound like a normal question oh my god there’s somebody after me WHAT THE HELL.
Your train of thought would be funnier if it wasn’t so badly timed, she sighed.
Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you—it was panicky and out of tune, but it was what I had.
Johara stuck her head back through the wall. “I don’t recognize them,” she said nervously. “That’s bad, right?”
“What do they look like?”
“Uh, red hair, really tall—?”
“Shit.” Will tugged me to my feet. Jamal, where does that window go?
Outside? The back yard? Neverland? I just moved here.
I’ll take it.
We’re on the second floor!
She shoved the window open and stuck her head outside. There’s dirt, and a bush. You’ll live.
“Who even is this person?” I asked.
“Annoying,” Will grumbled—then the window snapped shut, almost biting off her fingers. She yanked her hands back, shooting a snarl over her shoulder.
A click of heels against hardwood announced the stranger’s ascent up the stairs, and soon, they appeared—a tall, leather-clad woman with flame-red hair and a self-satisfied grin on her face. Unlike my hair, hers had definitely come out of a bottle, and from the looks of how close some of her clothing clung to her body, that might have come out of a bottle too. She looked like an off-duty dominatrix, leather straps criss-crossing her chest under her shiny jacket. It was pretty cute, actually, in a Mad Max sort of way—I just couldn’t get over the smirk.
“Lila,” Will groaned. “What do you want?”
“Willow,” she preened back. “I’m surprised to find you here. Have you expanded your clientele? Or are times just that hard?”
“I will hurt you,” Will hissed back. I didn’t really understand the comment, but I thought perhaps I should be offended. With how Will’s eyes were flashing, though, I decided just to step back and let the two of them fight. Nothing to do with me.
“I’m here for the new Salt girl. I need a favour.”
Wait. What now? “I’m sorry, what?” I managed to sputter out.
“And you’re what, asking nicely as you break into her house? She’s got better things to do, Lila.”
Lila’s red lips formed a perfect pout. “Shouldn’t we ask her? What’s your name, darling?”
Don’t look into her eyes, came the warning in my head. I wasn’t sure how much to listen to Will, but I could at least be smart. I focused on Lila’s lips instead. “Jamal. My name’s Jamal. Don’t call me darling.”
“Jamal. What a nice name. I need your help.”
“Your help?” Despite myself, I glanced up at her eyes—then away again. I didn’t trust how much they shone. I’d seen a lot of weird shit in the last few days, and I decided to trust Will on this one.
She smiled sweetly, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “I need somebody around who can help me calm people down. Especially in bad situations. I’ve got a lot of friends going through rough times, and they want a kind of comfort I can’t give them.”
I glanced over at Will. Another thing I hadn’t been told. “And what does that have to do with Salt?”
“…Oh sweetie, you’re new. Aren’t you?”
“Stop calling me sweetie,” I mumbled. “And yes.” I wasn’t sure what kind of comfort she meant but I didn’t like the way she said it, no matter what. It sounded altruistic enough. Everything about it dripped with slime.
Will sighed. “Salts can talk to the dead. But your secondary ability is that when elementals spin out, you can… get them back under control.”
I snorted. “That doesn’t sound like me. I start fights, not end them.”
“It doesn’t have to, dear. So why don’t you come with me and help me—”
“You’re full of shit,” Will interrupted, voice harsh.
“Willow.”
Will turned her back, yanking at the window and trying to get it open again—then she flew backwards across the room, some invisible force yanking her away. I sprang for her, but the same force hit me in the chest, and I fell into the desk, the sharp edge hitting me in the middle of the back. I struggled to stop the dizziness, my entire body suddenly aching. Lila’s hands were outstretched in front of her, and her pout turned into a cruel smile.
“Stop getting in the way,” she taunted at Will. “It seems like every time I turn around, you’re messing with my territory. She’s on my turf, which means she’s—”
“Nobody belongs to you, you uppity bitch,” Will grumbled. “And your ‘turf’ ends at Wellington.”
“What’s a city block between friends?”
I stumbled to my feet, digging in my pocket for my knife. I flicked it open, but it jerked out of my hand, coming alive and then twirling slowly in the air.
“A knife? That’s rather bad-mannered.” The point of my knife turned to face me. “Maybe I should teach you a lesson—”
“Stop,” came Will’s voice. Lila froze, but the knife kept turning, the dim light sending sparkles off of the dull blade. I looked over at Will—her head was bent, hair falling over her face, but I could see the focused look in her blue eyes, cold and sharp as ice. “Drop the knife.”
The knife clattered to the ground, leaving a small nick in the wooden floor.
“Turn and leave.”
Nothing happened. Will chewed on her lip and opened her mouth—then the knife lifted from the ground and drove straight for her face.
“STOP!”
The knife didn’t stop—but it changed course, just nicking the edge of Will’s arm and pulling a cry of pain from her lips. It snapped me out of my shocked daze—I ran for Lila while she was distracted, then ducked and kicked at her high-heeled feet. She fell forward with a snarl, one of the heels snapping, and I winced at the dull thud as her face met the landing.
“Don’t feel bad,” Will grumbled. “She’s horrible.”
I backed away from her as she slowly got to her feet. “I think you should leave my house now,” I said with a confidence I really didn’t feel.
“Fine,” she spat. “I know when I’m not wanted.” She got to her feet, dusting off her black pants and corset, then stalked down the stairs, wavering as she wiped some of the blood off her face.
The moment she was gone, Will sat down on the floor with a heavy ‘thunk’.
“Are you okay?” Johara asked.
“I’ve had worse,” she grumbled. The nick in her arm wasn’t deep, but there was blood welling up slowly between her fingers. I grabbed a dishtowel that was hanging over the railing and knelt down next to her, wrapping it around her arm.
“Is that okay?”
She twisted it tighter. “That’ll do. I should probably check in with Avery.”
“Alright. Thanks for, well. Today.”
“Oh, no no no. You’re coming with me.”
I was about to disagree, then—”Yes. Yes, I am. Because what the hell are you not telling me?”
“She’s trying to respect me,” said Gurjas from behind me, and I started with a yelp.
“Oh, what, you leave when things get tough and show up again once the weird woman’s gone?”
“I was here the whole time. Willow wants to respect that I kept my abilities secret. But I was a Salt like you.” His eyes shone slightly at that, and for a second, he looked younger. I didn’t know how or why, but ghosts as a whole were still a mystery to me.
“And you didn’t tell me fuck all. You’re really not winning me over.” I couldn’t help the bitterness. Nobody was telling me anything.
Will stared up in Gurjas’s general area. “You pulled her into this?”
“Not on purpose. I just wanted peace.”
Will sighed. “I guess there was nobody else.”
“Nobody else? Well there must be—” I paused. It was starting to click together in my head, and I didn’t like it. “…Will. Why was Lila coming to me? Where are all the other Salts? There’s—there’s lots of them. Right?”
There was silence from both of them, and I glanced up at Johara, who stared back at me, coming to the same horrible conclusion I was.
“They’re dead,” Will murmured. “There’s you, and one other. There’s only two Salts left in the city.”
“Help?” Will echoed, her voice slightly slurred. She cleared her throat. “Who is this? Like, great opening, but I just woke up, man.”
I closed my eyes, sat down on my desk chair, and rubbed my temple in frustration. “…Jamal? Jamal Kaye?”
“…Yeah, not ringing a bell. Are you a telemarketer?”
Wow. I mean, I was too busy being furious to be scared anymore, which was a step up. “Are you actually this stupid or am I going to have to go hit somebody again—”
“Cool it, cool it,” she laughed. “Okay, you’re the cutie from last night.”
I groaned and lowered my forehead to my desk. “Don’t say it like that. God, even when you’re on the phone you’re fucking with my head.” Beat. “You, uh. You can’t read minds through the phone, right…?”
“If I say yes, can I keep screwing with you—?”
“This is kind of serious.”
Will cleared her throat again. “Sorry. Yep. So you’re not calling me for a date?”
“I—No!” I debated hanging up, and—just barely—managed to resist. Apparently she was even more annoying during daylight hours. “I—you—you and Avery were talking about a lot of things last night. And…” I trailed off. Words were hard.
“You want the proper welcome wagon.”
“No! I’m not joining your secret society!”
She snorted. “It’s not a secret society. For one, we don’t have a handshake.”
“I just want to know what the fuck is going on. Can you meet me somewhere? There’s a Starbucks over on Wellington or something—”
“No offense, but I’d rather stay private. You live near Wellington, right?”
I hadn’t decided whether to be offended or not. “Yes. Is that a problem?”
“Yeeeeah… You’re stuck in the hipster neighborhood.”
I was suddenly very aware that I could see the Elmvale Oyster House from my window. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied, probably unconvincingly. “That’s—that’s not the point.” I was so glad she was taking this seriously. “I don’t particularly want you in my house.”
“Isn’t your house your office? ‘Jamal Kaye, Private Investigator—”
“Are you—did you google me?”
“It’s a nice Facebook page. Very professional looking. You need some testimonials, though. Like, ‘she found my neighbor’s cat so quickly, ten out of ten!’”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, and turned around, catching Gurjas’s eye. Gurjas. Right. There was a point to all this. “Just get your ass over here,” I grumbled. I hung up on her with a cathartic click (although it wasn’t nearly as good as slamming down the landline at my old house) then glared at Johara and Gurjas, who were studiously looking anywhere but at me. “What? What are you looking at?”
“Nothing,” Johara said in an oddly squeaky voice.
The phone rang again. I picked it up—
“Where do you live, genius? Wellington’s a long-ass street, and it was dark last night.”
I stared at my feet, then gave her my address with a grumble. Which wasn’t even on Wellington.
Then I hung up. I wasn’t going to be denied the last word.
—
Will showed up more than half an hour later, and my first sign of her was a cheerful “Knock knock!” from outside. I groaned, and went to let her in—
“Are you sure about this?”
I glanced over at Gurjas. It was the first time he’d spoken in a while, and I’d forgotten how gravelly his voice was. “…No. But I’m not sure of anything.”
“You don’t have to get involved anymore.” He sounded almost… embarrassed? “I—came to thank you. But you should move on.”
I gave him a smile that was almost genuine. “So should you. But I don’t think either of us can do that without answers.”
He glowered at me. “I have all the answers I need. I don’t want you dying in search of yours.”
“Suit yourself. I’m stubborn, I’m curious and I’m stupid. It’s a terrible combination.” I would have probably brushed off the ‘dying’ thing a little more if he wasn’t, well, floating in front of me all dead as a warning sign. All the same, it didn’t deter me quite as much as it should have. Concern for my own skin was maybe… four, five on my priority list?
I went downstairs and opened the door.
“There you are. I thought you were going to keep me waiting.” Will pushed her way inside, handing me one of the fountain drinks she was holding. “I got you a soda.”
“…Uh. Okay.” I took it, eyeing the Subway logo, and glanced up at her. She was a little less intimidating in daylight, I had to say—I could see the pink streaks in her hair, and the butterflies in her earlobes. She hadn’t gotten any less frustratingly tall, but that was life as a hobbit. “Uh—” I just pointed upstairs. I wasn’t entirely sure how to open the conversation.
She snorted and climbed the stairs. “Enjoy the view.”
“The—Oh, for—” She was wearing a miniskirt, black with lace on the bottom. “I don’t do that.”
“What, appreciate nice legs?”
…They were nice legs, I had to admit. Aesthetically. But not the point. “I meant ogling people randomly,” I mumbled, but she probably didn’t hear it.
“Ooooh, pretty skirt!” commented Johara from above, and I glared up at her.
“Thank you!”
Great. I’d forgotten. Jo wasn’t just my own personal heckler anymore. I grumbled something incoherently to myself, then followed Will upstairs…then grabbed her before she could go exploring the rest of the house.
“Office is this way.”
“But—”
“My roommate isn’t even moved in yet.”
“Is she cute?”
“He’s tall, awkward and otherwise a total blank. Please stop asking me questions.”
Will took a sip of her soda, but it didn’t hide the little smirk on her face. I just pushed her towards my office with a huff.
“Wow, this place is a shithole. I thought my apartment was bad—”
“I don’t remember asking for your opinion.”
“Technically, you invited me.”
I was already getting a headache. “I haven’t even unpacked. Can I get the home reno commentary once I’ve actually settled in?”
“Fine, fine.” She waved her hand. “So what do you need?”
I sat down at my desk and opened my computer, glaring at her a little over the top of the screen. She was so…chipper. But I hadn’t forgotten what kind of abilities she had.
I pulled up the image I needed. It was one from Facebook, nice and clear. “This is Gurjas Chaudhury. I found his body in the Lebreton Flats yesterday.” I turned the computer over to Will—and oh, I could see the look on her face. Instant recognition. “You know him?” I asked. I might not have been a mind-reader but the change in mood was obvious.
“Uh—only in passing. How’d you get involved?” It wasn’t a denial. She was too smart for that. But her hand strayed up her arm anyway, fiddling with the sleeve of her t-shirt in sudden discomfort.
“I’m a private investigator-”
“You’re seventeen. Don’t get cute with me.” There was a rough edge to her voice. “You’re supposed to be chasing down lost bikes and investigating shoplifted candy bars.”
“Well, I got stuck with this instead. Are you going to start giving me answers?” She’d probably plucked my age from my head at some point. I wasn’t particularly comfortable with that, either.
“I don’t have any. I thought you wanted the welcome wagon.”
“I told you, I don’t give a toss about your secret society. All I want to know is which of you fucks can disguise yourselves as other people.”
Will froze, blue eyes wide. Then her mouth twisted into a humourless smile. I’d hit a nerve. “Right. That’d be Mercuries. They’re the shapeshifters.”
“Shapeshifters.” I kept my voice steady, even as i felt my heart beat a sudden taboo against my ribs, quaking and frightened. At least she’d answered me.
“I can feel you freaking out—”
I slammed my hand against the desk and was both gratified and ashamed to see the way she jumped in her chair. She was paying attention now, at least. “How do I keep you the fuck out of my head?”
“By keeping that temper of yours in check,” she drawled, deliberately too cool, too calm.
Temper. Right. “I’m surrounded by cryptic assholes who think straight answers are too much work. I’ll calm down when I feel like it.”
“If it’s any comfort, nothing about me is straight.”
The line took me enough by surprise that I laughed, although it was abrupt and bitter. I buried my hand in my hair, covering my eyes and trying to let the new information settle in. Shapeshifters. Fucking hell. Whoever was commissioning me to keep investigating Gurjas’s murder had taken Mrs. Chaudhury’s form – what, just to screw with me? It was hard not to feel that way, let alone wonder whether or not it’d been the real Mrs. Chaudhury who had hired me the first time. It had to be. It was the only way any of this made sense. I’d been talking to two versions of her at once. “Okay,” I breathed. “So shapeshifters, mind readers, and… whatever I am.”
“A medium?”
“I’m not using that word.”
“Shame. Loud weirdo talking to dead people is such a mouthful.”
Johara snorted in laughter behind me, and I wouldn’t have minded so much if I didn’t know perfectly well that Will could hear her too. “Laugh all you want,” I shot back at her, “She’s sassing you too.”
“Yeah, but it’s funny.”
“One day I’ll make you pay for how much you stab me in the back.” I sighed and pushed the palm of my hand into my eyes, wondering if I should tell Will about the shapeshifter. “Okay. So—rewind. You know Gurjas.”
At the sound of his name, Gurjas drifted curiously through the wall—and blanched, as much as a ghost could. It was confirmation that Will wasn’t just talking out of her ass. They knew each other. I didn’t acknowledge him, and if he didn’t say anything…well, I didn’t know how this stuff worked. But I could pay attention.
“Only in passing,” Will repeated, showing no awareness that Gurjas was there. “He’s out in Nepean area. Bayshore? I dunno. Avery and I kind of go everywhere.” She scratched at her ear, obviously uncomfortable.
“You and Avery? Are you two—” I wiggled my hand awkwardly, trying to find the right word.
“God, no.” Will pulled a face, then laughed, the tension falling from her shoulders. “What, are you jealous?”
“No. I was just asking.”
She snorted, then pulled some of her hair out of her face where it had fallen out of her ponytail, a sad smile twitching at the corner of her mouth. “I was hoping he was okay. I guess not.”
Gurjas still hadn’t said anything, but his stony masquerade was starting to falter. I wondered if he’d let himself even think about being dead yet, or if this was the first time it’d started to sink in. Then—
“You make it sound like he was in danger.”
Will definitely twitched that time. But I must have let too much slide, and I still didn’t know how to lock down my head completely. “Are you in danger?” she answered my question with one of her own.
“You sound so concerned.”
“If you are it’s probably your own fault, so I’m not sure concerned is the right word.” She tightened her ponytail with a smirk. “You seem to throw yourself into stupid situations.”
“You’ve met me once.”
“Yes, and you were punching my mentor in the face.”
“I don’t know if I regret that.”
“Yes, you do.”
I—just barely—resisted the urge to slam the desk again. “This isn’t going anywhere if you don’t tell me how to stop you doing that.”
She blinked, then shrugged. “I’m sorry.” It sounded mostly sincere. “Avery has an easier time just not picking things up.”
“What does that mean?”
“Do you actually want to know or is this step two of your weird ass-backwards interrogation style?”
…Dammit. I wished I had a defense against the interrogation thing. “I do actually want to know.” I left out the part where knowledge was power and/or a defense against whatever bullshit was coming my way.
“Avery and I can do the same thing, but we do it differently.” She was still fidgeting with her hair, and I stuck my hand between my knees to stop myself from drumming my fingers on the desk. She was nervous enough. “Avery senses things, like… tendrils? That’s how they described it last time. They pick up on things but it’s easier for them to ignore things, although that came with practice.”
“Tendrils. That’s not creepy.”
“Look, describing brain shit is hard. You try it sometime, see how far you get.”
“And you?”
“I actually hear things. I can’t stop myself from hearing whatever’s rattling around people’s heads. It’s not like I dig for it. It’s just… there. As obvious as your voice. Just quieter.” Her eyes flicked downwards, staring at the ground in a sudden display of genuine shyness. It was weird, seeing an actual person peeking out from behind the glitter-coated bravado. “I really don’t mean to hear. It’s just hard not to. I’ve been working on it for a while and if I make jokes about it, it usually puts people a little more at ease.”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “That’s… frightening. Can you tell the difference?”
“Pft, yeah. It’s not identical.”
“So how do I keep you out?”
“You have to think of something consistently. Like a brick wall, or a nursery rhyme. My ex used lines of poetry.”
Well, there was only one option for that. Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down—
“…Really?” Will seethed. “You couldn’t think of anything—” Then she stopped, head cocked.
“What?” I could feel my heart skip a beat already. “What’s—”
She lunged forward, slapping her hand over my mouth, and my nose was filled with the lingering scent of nail polish. “Hush.” Then in my head—Somebody else is here. Another elemental. Follow me.
Whoever was standing in front of me, it wasn’t Mrs. Chaudhury. But as I looked at her, my mind struggling to erase the paradox and reassert some sort of reality, I couldn’t place exactly why I was so certain. Perhaps she had an earpiece in. Perhaps I’d hallucinated the phone call. Perhaps I’d just lost some time in there.
Or perhaps I just needed to accept what Will and Avery had been trying to tell me yesterday—that the world was darker and stranger and more uncertain than I knew. Not that it’d been particularly bright to begin with.
“Mrs. Chaudhury,” I said after a while, trying to sound normal.
“Miss Kaye,” she replied. I made a mental note of that. In the phone call, she’d called me Jamal. Even if I’d made up the phone call, I didn’t trust anybody who called me Miss. “I just wanted to stop by and thank you.” She was too calm—too put together. Even the sadness in her voice had a fake undertone to it.
On the other hand, I’ve been accused of being paranoid before. I tried to push my discomfort aside. “Don’t worry about it. A job’s a job.” The fact that it was my first actual PI gig didn’t matter, not when my heart was trying to crawl its way out of my throat.
“May I speak to you inside?”
Oh hell no. I didn’t know who—or what—was standing in front of me, but I didn’t want them in my space. I’d finally gotten a place of my own. I didn’t want them—her?—tainting it. I shrugged. “It’s nice out. Also it’s still a disaster in there.”
Was I imagining the flash of uncertainty crossing Mrs. Chaudhury’s face? I couldn’t shake the feeling that the person in front of me had never been inside my apartment before. But—I couldn’t trust my own mind. I couldn’t trust the impulses that told me that everybody was a danger, everybody was a threat, everybody was trying to hurt me. What I’d done to Avery still lingered on my conscience, even if they’d brushed it off as doing no lasting damage.
“Well, I suppose.” She sat down next to me on the steps, a little too close. “The police came and talked to me this morning.”
This morning? I checked my phone. It was nearly seven—so it probably wasn’t too early for the police to have visited this morning instead of last night, but I had my doubts. Besides—where were her kids? They couldn’t be at school yet.
And this was all assuming that I’d made up the phone call out of thin air.
Anyway—”I figured they had.” I tried to keep it as vague as possible, fishing for information. “What’d they say?”
She shrugged. It was an oddly young gesture on her—she wasn’t old by any means, but old enough not to have the body language of a gangly teenager. I briefly wondered if Willow was behind this, but my own feelings aside, from what I understood, Will’s power couldn’t let her do something like this.
You don’t know anything about it. Perhaps this is Mrs. Chaudhury, with Willow at the wheel. Perhaps it’s Willow sitting there next to you, and it’s only your mind that’s being controlled. You see what she wants you to see—
I dragged myself out of it, my heart racing. It was too easy to find possibilities branching off of possibilities. It never ended, unless you forced yourself to look away.
She was talking. “It looks like he was murdered,” she said with a sigh, and this time, the tear that fell down her cheek felt real. I wondered what the impostor next to me was really crying over—
—Jamal stop it she’s mourning her husband everybody mourns differently—-
—blue scrubs stained with red you bit them don’t you remember that—
“I—they told me there’s no way to know. That it could have been a random mugging—it could have been anything. There’s so few murders in Ottawa you think they would spare the time, but…” She shrugged. “Nobody cares about us.”
Nobody cares about us.
That part was real.
I was so sure, so sure she was a fake. Too many pieces didn’t add up. But—but—ugh, I couldn’t make myself be certain of anything. Every time I tried, scattered images from my dream flashed across the back of my mind—the weight of Johara in my arms, the sound of the black windbreaker fluttering in the breeze, wrapped tightly around somebody walking away.
Nobody cares about us.
I had the distinct sense that I was being manipulated. But I pulled out one of my three cigarettes and my lighter anyway. “What are you saying, then?” I asked, even though I knew exactly what she was asking of me.
“I want you to find his murderer.”
I flicked my lighter on and held it to the end of my cigarette, steadfastly refusing to look at her. “That all?” I couldn’t help the sarcasm. “I’m a teenager with computer skills and too much time on her hands.”
“You’re talented. And I don’t know how, but you found him. I trust you.”
“I’m still charging you even if you butter me up.”
She laughed at that. There was an edge to it, and it was both familiar and more than a little uncomfortable. “I brought plenty of money. Don’t worry.”
“I didn’t say yes, yet.”
“You’re going to. I can see it in your eyes.”
I gave in, and looked up at her, the smoke from my cigarette drifting uselessly into the air. Her eyes were a vivid green against her dark skin, and I couldn’t figure out why I was noticing. “Yeah, what the hell. I’ll give it a shot. But if I get stabbed, it’s officially your fault.”
She snorted at that, and smirked. Again, it looked out of place on Mrs. Chaudhury’s face, below the black headscarf. “Try not getting stabbed, then.” She pushed the canvas bag from her shoulder, then over to me. “That should be enough, if I remember your rates correctly.”
Shit. If she wasn’t Mrs. Chaudhury then how—Well, okay. I had a Facebook page. That one wasn’t exactly a challenge to figure out. I peered into the bag and tried not to choke. Okay. So that was rent taken care of, and money to actually buy food. The littlest things make you happy when you’re dirt poor.
“I should head off.” She got to her feet, again with that long-limbed gracefulness—
“Wait.”
“Yes?” She turned to look at me.
I took a long drag on my cigarette, then tapped the ash off on the banister. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“I don’t—”
I didn’t bother looking at her. “Out with it.”
“I hired you. That’s all you need to know.”
“Mmhm. Any chance you’ll tell me why?”
She just gave me another enigmatic smile, then walked off into the misty horizon, turning the corner on Wellington Street and vanishing from sight. I kept my eyes on her until she was out of view. Perhaps it was my stubbornness.
But the moment I could be sure she was gone, I dove back into the house, trying not to let the sudden panic in my chest speed up my pace. I locked the door behind me with an exaggerated slowness, and I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking.
Johara met me at the top of the stairs. “Gurjas came back! He wanted to—”
“Give me a moment,” I mumbled, ducking into the bathroom. I felt so nauseous, but as much as my stomach roiled, I managed to keep it together. Instead, I turned on the tap and stuck my head underneath it, cold water rushing over me and clearing my head. Mostly. Not really. I was here, and somewhere else, and deep in the past, a thousand places at once.
“Jamal?”
I took my time responding, wiping the water from my face. “Jo. Yeah. I’m—” How did I even begin to explain what had just happened? “I have a new case,” I settled on, with a breathlessness I couldn’t make go away. “Give me a minute.”
I ducked into my office, ignoring Gurjas’s ghost and mentally filing him away in ‘deal with later.’ Then I picked up my phone, sorting through the papers I’d left, then giving up and just staring at the faded numbers on my arm. It rang, and rang, and rang, until I was ready to throw it against the wall.
“…Willow Moray, who’s this?”
I took a deep breath. “…Will. I think I need your help.” I raised my eyes to Gurjas. He stared back at me in silence, and while I’d been pretty certain that I wasn’t making things up, the look in his eyes—the sad confusion hiding behind the cold mask he kept putting up—was what sold it for me.
Whoever had come to see me today, it had not been Chandra Chaudhury, because Chandra Chaudhury’s husband was dead, and her impostor didn’t know what grief looked like.
The Civic Hospital emergency room is dressed in beige, white and blue, and the lights above flicker, desperately trying to provide light and warmth to a room that’s absorbed the unhappiness, misery and pain of countless people. Hospitals try so hard to be something other than they are. I can’t fault them. We all do it.
I can’t decide whether I’m dreaming or not. I can’t feel my feet against the floor, or the air against my hands, even though I know I should. One moment I think I’m seventeen and fully-grown and too, too aware of all the things I’m here to find out. The next moment, I’m fifteen, and my sister’s dying. And then I’m twelve again and Johara’s next to me, small and nervous and wondering why we’re here.
My brain skips the part where the nurse comes up to us and asks if we’re lost and guides us elsewhere in the hospital. I vaguely remember how she found somebody to keep us company, concern mixed with a desire to help. Instead, my dream keeps us in the emergency room.
A baby starts crying. I turn around, and I can’t see Jo next to me, even though I can feel her chubby hand in mine, sweaty and sticky—and between the automatic glass doors, I can see the little girl, in a borrowed coat too big for her and somebody else’s name stitched inside. She’s maybe three, four years old. The baby in her arms is too big for her, sliding out of her arms. She’s small and brown and dirty, and somebody’s tried to cut her red hair short so it sticks out at angles from her head.
The baby won’t stop crying. “You have to be quiet!” she insists. “Mama said she’s coming back soon!”
There’s somebody walking away from the hospital, a black windbreaker wrapped tightly around her thin frame. I don’t know if she’s my mother. But I find myself running anyway, hand stretched out, because I’m so close, so close this time. All I need is to see her face.
I cross the space between her and me in a single step. My hand brushes against her shoulder, but then suddenly I’m holding an empty raincoat in my hand. I stare at it. I look up again. The parking lot is full of ghosts, grey and misty.
Nothing but smoke and ashes.
Again.
—-
I’d never woken up from nightmares with that catapult terror that you saw in movies or TV. Instead, every time, my eyes snap open, and I think I’m somewhere else for however long it takes for my nerves to unwind and my muscles to relax. It’s always been like that, and this time, it wasn’t any different.
“Jamal?” Jo sat cross-legged in front of me, the pose making her look a lot more solid than she really was. It helped.
“Mm. Hi.” I managed to move my hand up to the pillow, fingers digging into the soft fabric. The blanket below me wasn’t doing a lot to soften the hardwood below me. That was alright. It was helping me wake up faster.
“Which one was it this time?”
“Oh, just…” I shrugged. “The hospital.”
Even in the dark, I could see how her eyes softened. “Any idea why?”
I snorted. “Could ask that about a lot of things.” I sat up with a groan. “Can you get the light?”
“I can’t, sorry.”
“Right.” Two years and I still found myself forgetting she was—Yeah. I didn’t want to think about that right now. I considered getting up, but then decided just to sit in the dark for a while. The dark didn’t bother me. Not most of the time, anyway.
“Are you going to be okay?”
“Yeah,” I lied, or almost lied. I didn’t really know what ‘okay’ meant. Did it mean back to normal? Did it mean up to everybody else’s standards of normal? Did it mean having fifty percent less nightmares than normal? No nightmares at all?
I suddenly had the urge to cry. That was unusual. I managed to shove it away, and finally grabbed hold of one of the surrounding boxes, hauling myself to my feet and switching on the light. It was brighter than I expected, and I squinted, covering my eyes.
“You’re going to have to sleep in more than a t-shirt when Nathan moves in, you know,” Jo added brightly. I scratched my stomach in response.
My notepad from yesterday was sitting on the desk, and I stared at it for a few moments, letting the events of the previous day sink in. It hadn’t really occurred to me at the time just how much had happened, or how much of it had been weird as hell.
I picked up the pad, flicking through it and pausing at the last page. “Core—Celestial?” was scrawled on it, with “Fire, Earth, Air, Water” scrawled underneath Core, and “Sulfur, Mercury” scribbled underneath Celestial. At the bottom, in big and uncertain letters, was ‘SALT.’
Me. That was me. At least, according to two mind-readers with hidden agendas and a disturbing Trinity cosplayer with a vanishing act . The worst part was, it was more information than I had about myself currently.
Fueled by either nostalgia or self-destructiveness, I opened the top drawer of the desk and pulled out the very first thing I’d put in there. Jo was hovering a distance away, but she didn’t need to come closer. She knew what it was. The two of us had taken ourselves to the hospital one day five years ago.
I snorted. We’d been so excited.
I opened the folder. Two pieces of paper sat nestled inside. I knew their contents mostly off by heart.
K., Jamal.
Date of birth: unknown.
Ethnicity: Unknown.
Age: three, probably. Same for Johara, except she’d been a six-month-old baby.
There’d been a lot of guesses made as to where we were from, especially since white people couldn’t hide their fascination with Jo’s hair (soft, bouncy ringlets that had a life of their own). As far as I had figured, Jo was part Black, part… something else. Probably the same whatever I was. That was the problem. Jo had her hair and her nose—even on top of light brown skin, people made their assumptions. And with me, well, nobody even got that far. Brown kids didn’t have red hair, and whether I was Middle-Eastern or Indian or Mexican or Native American—none of that mattered when ‘terrorist’ or ‘illegal’ summed up people’s feelings about me pretty neatly.
All of that—all the guesswork, all the desperate searching of our faces for phenotypes and stereotypes we could turn into something understandable—boiled down into less than half of a page.
Still, I found myself scanning the piece of paper, searching for some missing clue, some extra hint. I thought I’d grown out of it, but that one extra word—salt—felt like another arrow. I scoffed at myself. Not so much an arrow as a compass needle, spinning endlessly, pointing nowhere at all. I shoved the folder back into the drawer, probably more roughly than I meant to. I was over it.
Instead, I copied down the number from my arm (a little faded now) onto my pad of paper. After a moment, I dropped the pad into the drawer as well. I’d found Mr. Chaudhury. My job was done.
Speaking of… I glanced over at the clock. 5:30. Too early, still. But I imagined within the next few hours it’d be time to give Mrs. Chaudhury a call.
In the meantime—
“You’re not done, are you?”
I didn’t bother meeting Jo’s eyes. She’d be all flamed up and righteous and accusatory. “I did what she wanted me to do. And what Gurjas wanted. You’ll notice he’s not here.”
“But somebody killed him! And—what was all that yesterday?”
I paused, not sure what I wanted to say. Despite myself, I looked up—and in her face, I could see the same desperate need for identity written in block letters, on the slightly oversized nose we both had, the high cheekbones, the widow’s peak hairline.
“Don’t you want to know? Aren’t you curious at all?”
I did. “And what if it’s a trick, or a trap, or too big for me to handle?”
“Us.”
“What?”
“For us to handle,” she said insistently.
The anger surged up inside me out of nowhere. It wasn’t worth yelling at her. It wouldn’t solve anything or make the dark bubbling cloud in my chest go away.
“I’m going for a smoke,” I snapped, grabbing a pair of plaid pants from the top of another box and yanking my box of smokes from the top of the desk.
I went down the stairs and outside, sitting down on the wooden steps and listening to them creak reassuringly underneath me. The house was old, but that wasn’t saying much—this was the corner of Hintonburg that had escaped the yuppie renos of the rest of this part of Ottawa. With the sun rising behind me, the street was bathed in the half-light of dawn, grey and slightly misty. It’d clear later. The autumn mornings always felt like oncoming storms.
I flicked open my cigarette case. Three left, and then I’d have to buy more. With money I didn’t have. The cash Mrs. Chaudhury had given me was going towards next month’s rent. The business I expected to drum up sometime between now and then would pay for food, and until then I was living off the cans and ramen my last foster family had given me as a gesture of goodwill. The boxes in my office were things they’d been trying to get rid of or the things I’d managed to hold onto, some donations from people I’d actually managed to learn the names of in school…
I glared at the three cigarettes as if I could conjure a fourth one into existence. Then I closed the case, and rested my head on the banister, eyelids burning with exhaustion and frustration. I had to call them, at some point. My old foster family, and the people at school I didn’t talk to anymore—everyone who had helped, sort of. They hadn’t been terrible. I just couldn’t work up the energy to talk to people I never had anything in common with. I missed them, sometimes, but not enough to get over the sinking feeling that they’d be happier now that I was gone.
I didn’t fall asleep, not exactly. But whatever trance I was in was disturbed by my phone vibrating in my hands. A text, labelled “Nathan Beaufort.”
Right. Between the murder, the psychics, and fighting with Jo, I’d forgotten about that guy. Another perfectly nice person I didn’t understand. I opened the message.
N: Hey! The lnadlord says its all good and I can move in this week! Is Thursday good?
N: *landlord
God. Another person to keep track of.
J: yeah sure
J: dont touch my shit
N: Are you not going to be there? :questioning:
What was a good way to answer that? Nathan was clearly a bit skittish, but I wasn’t sure if he was ready for “socializing makes me want to kill myself,” let alone “that’s ironic, because I can talk to dead people.”
Which brought me full circle back to Jo. Great. Thanks, brain.
J: i have an inconsistent schedule
J: dont worry about it
It would have been great if I was the ghost and not Jo, I grumbled to myself, probably a little more morosely than the situation really warranted. All Jo wanted was to talk to people, and all I wanted was to be left alone. Instead, I got stuck being the one who had to deal with everything.
I dialed Mrs. Chaudhury’s number into my phone anyway. Best to get it over with.
“…Hello?” Right away, I could hear that she’d been crying, although she was doing her best to hide it.
I took a deep breath. “Mrs. Chaudhury. It’s Jamal, Jamal Kaye.”
“Yes, of course. The, um…” She paused. “The police were here last night. Thank you.”
Thank you? I’d been expecting screaming. Or coldness. I opened my mouth, trying to figure out how to respond—”I’m sorry. I—I’m sorry. For your loss.”
“You don’t need to apologize. You aren’t—” She sighed. “You did what you promised. You took my desperate hope and you followed through, and that’s more than I should have asked of any child.”
“Child? Listen—”
“Don’t start,” she chuckled wearily. “Will you come to his funeral, Jamal? I would be honoured to have you there.”
Now that I really didn’t have a response for. I wondered where on earth Gurjas had hopped off to—I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should ask his permission.
Then I caught sight of the figure walking down the street towards me, and my blood ran cold. “…I’d like to think about it, if that’s alright. I’m sorry, Mrs. Chaudhury, I have to go.”
“Oh, that’s alright. Have a good day.”
“Yeah. You too.” I hung up.
Mrs. Chaudhury stood in front of me, eyes dark and her hands empty. “Hello, Jamal.”
Elliott Dunstan 