Chapter 5 - Dead Lines

Conrad opened one of the French doors, set one foot inside the kitchen, and stopped. Igor and I had turned to watch him, so I could count the seconds he stood there, assessing the situation.

It was one.

His pale yellow eyes barely moved, and the nostrils of his black nose might have flexed once. That was all.

No doubt he smelled the smeared trail of blood coming down the back stairs, across the dining nook, and ending at the bottom of my foot. I was sitting on a dining chair between the table and the kitchen island, gripping the edges of my seat with both hands and grimacing enough to scare a hobgoblin. There was a small tub of water at my feet, and I had my ankle up on the opposite knee, displaying my bloody sole. Igor was kneeling on the floor in front of me. He had tweezers in one hand and was holding his phone up as a flashlight with the other. Mrs. Park was slumped in a dining chair at the table, looking pale and holding a hand over her eyes. Beside her, open on the table, was a humongous first-aid kit. Since the only light in the room was the evening sunlight coming from the windows along the western wall, we probably looked like some dramatic Dutch Baroque painting, except my fuchsia T-shirt ruined the color scheme.

After the count of one, Conrad finished coming into the room and shut the door behind him while saying in a resigned monotone, “Yeah. That’s about what I figured.”

I almost laughed.

How dare he walk in there and, in under one second, judge a situation using nothing but circumstantial evidence! The butthead!

I wrangled my smile back to a frown. There was no point in accusing someone if you couldn’t do it with a straight face.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “You think I did something stupid and managed to hurt myself, and poor Igor here has to help fix me up.”

Conrad pulled out the nearest chair so he could sit down and take off his boots. “Something like that.”

“I’ll have you know, wolf-boy, we just so happen to be rehearsing the final scene of Cinderella.”

“And you’re Cinderella?”

“Yes.”

He put his boots aside. “Which makes Igor…?”

“Prince Charming,” I insisted.

His Highness let out a humph and went back to gouging around the bottom of my foot with the tweezers, looking for the next sliver of mirror. I let out a yelp and squeezed the edges of my seat harder. Igor’s hands were quick and deft, but the man had zero sympathy and no concept of “gentle.”

“That’s what you get,” Prince Not-So-Charming said.

The engagement speech needed some work before we presented our play to the public, but I was gritting my teeth too hard to tell him so.

Also, it occurred to me that glass slippers were a terrible idea.

Conrad stood up, walked around the table, and rested a hand on Mrs. Park’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”

Mrs. Park looked up and offered him an unsteady smile. “Fine. Thank you, Conrad. I’m not hurt or anything. You’ll think it’s silly, but I’m not good around blood.”

“Mrs. Park’s my fairy godmother,” I informed him. “She helped me limp down here from the third floor.”

Conrad turned back to me. “So what really happened?”

Wolfmen are no fun when there’s blood around. All they want is “the truth” and “answers.” Go figure.

“I dropped a mirror,” I admitted.

“I’m surprised you didn’t hear the crash,” Igor said.

“Oh, I heard it,” Conrad said, “but I didn’t hear any screams, so I assumed it wasn’t a big deal.”

“It wouldn’t have been a big deal if yours truly”—I put a hand to my chest—“had been smart enough to stay where she was. Alas!”

“I thought this was Cinderella,” Igor grumbled, “not Shakespeare.”

He put down the tweezers and the phone and pressed on the bottom of my foot with both thumbs. It was a type of primitive sonar location; if I screamed, he knew there was still something in there.

“Was there a reason you dropped the mirror?” Conrad asked.

I couldn’t answer. I was gritting my teeth again. Even if there were no more stabby bits stuck in my foot, it still hurt.

Mrs. Park said, “She was startled when the lights cut out.”

Igor stopped pushing on my foot. I relaxed back into the chair, but my frown stayed where it was.

There was something eerie about how certain Mrs. Park sounded. I didn’t think she was lying or anything—I wasn’t even sure that she was wrong! Trying to piece together those crazy fractions of a second made my head spin. But I couldn’t shake the idea that the light had gone out after I’d dropped the mirror.

Then there was what I’d seen in the mirror—or what I thought I’d seen. I had no idea what to make of it. I needed to talk to Iset. Probably sooner, rather than later.

Conrad was watching me with a thoughtful look in his eyes.

He could probably smell my unease. For a panicked moment, I wondered if he’d call me out, but all he did was hum quietly.

Igor wiped his hands on an old hand towel and got to his feet. “I think that’s all of them. Conrad, now that you’re here, you can help Shoeless Joe finish patching herself up. I have to get back to work.”

“Thank you for your help, my prince!” I said.

Igor let out the loudest humph yet, then picked up the half-full jug of water that was sitting beside the first-aid kit. He used it to motion to Conrad. “You’ll need to wash your hands with this. The power’s still out.”

I lowered my injured foot into the small tub of water that Igor had set up for me. What with my bleeding foot and all, I hadn’t bothered to think about it before, but he’d filled the tub with water from the same jug.

“We don’t have water when the power is out?” I asked.

Conrad walked over to join Igor by the hand-washing sink.

Mrs. Park said, “This house gets its water from a well and a spring, but the pump used to pull it from the reservoir is electric. If the power is out, the water is out.”

“Which means dinner is going to be that much harder to make,” Igor said.

I had spent my whole first life in places where the water came from pipes that the city took care of. I’d never wondered how people outside of civilization got their water, and the idea that we could be stuck without it because the power was out made my heart race.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“What happens if the power is out for a long time?” I asked, sounding slightly squeaky.

Mrs. Park stood up, walked over to the pile of hand towels that Igor had deemed crummy enough to get blood on, and passed me one.

“It’s all right, dear,” she said. “The power doesn’t usually stay off for long, but there are gallons of back-up water, just in case.”

My heart rate slowed down, but the small, cold weight in my stomach stayed where it was.

Igor finished drying his hands on one of the clean kitchen towels and passed it to Conrad. “It’s getting late. Will you be staying for dinner, Mrs. Park?”

“Thank you, but no,” she said. “I have too much to do at home. I’ll wipe up the floors, then head out.”

My cheeks flushed. “I can do that, Mrs. Park. It’s my fault—”

She batted my shoulder. “Nonsense! It was an accident, and a few drops of blood aren’t going to bother me.”

“And you need to take care of yourself first,” Conrad said as he walked over to me. “Otherwise she’ll have to follow you around, wiping up the new trail.”

Mrs. Park went to grab a few rags and the all-purpose cleaner. Conrad put the first-aid kit down on the floor beside me so I could point out what I’d need: disinfectant, gauze, and lots of medical tape. He sat on the floor and handed me each item as I asked for it.

“Where’s Kappa?” I said.

Conrad looked toward the French doors and the yard beyond them. “I’m not sure. He wondered off somewhere while we were outside. About a minute after the crash, I looked around, and he was out in the wild yard.”

The weight in my stomach got heavier. “Is—is he okay?”

Conrad turned back to me. One edge of his black lips was lifted in a smile. “Don’t worry. He probably saw or heard something on the grounds that he wants to investigate.”

Right. We were in his territory, so he couldn’t be lost. But…still…

I wondered why Conrad’s ears looked tense.

“Does he wander off a lot?” I asked.

“We don’t follow him around, you know,” Igor said from over by the counter. “He’s his own person.”

“Sure, but—”

“He’ll come back within the hour.”

“How do you know that?”

“Dinner,” Igor intoned.

It was a good word for intoning. Without any other details or context, it gave me a complete and incontestable answer.

“It’s all right, Mera,” Conrad assured me. “Kappa likes to play outside when it’s warmer.”

Yeah. That would take some getting used to.

I’d met Kappa in the middle of October, then spent all winter with him. I only knew cold-weather Kappa—the one who slept ten to twelve hours a night, took two naps a day, and was always hanging out with me or huddled up against something warm.

I caught myself frowning and shook my head to dislodge the expression.

I mean, I wasn’t about to tie Kappa to my wrist or anything. Like Igor said, he was his own person. He’d survived without me for sixty years, and I’d survived…

Well, I’d only died once in the whole time before I knew him.

Anyway, we didn’t have to be together all day, every day. But I was clingy enough to mope about it.

I looked down at my foot. Several thin lines of blood had trickled out while I was distracted. They ran along the web of water trails, following the lines of my sole. I ripped open another gauze pad and pushed it against my foot, hard.

The repetitive clicks of Igor trying to light the gas stove sounded loud in the silence. There was a pause, then a much longer series of clicks.

Mrs. Park walked back into the room as Igor let out a grim, “huh!”

“Is there a problem?” she asked.

Igor lifted one of the stove grates and set it aside. “The stove won’t start.”

Mrs. Park put the squirt bottle and rags down on the kitchen island. “Is it moisture?”

Igor’s voice was firm, as any king’s would be if he were questioned in his own castle: “No.”

Mrs. Park knew enough to repent. “No, of course not.”

She walked over to the stove. The two of them fussed over it for a minute, there was some more clicking, then Igor said, sounding puzzled, “Our gas appears to be cut-off.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Mrs. Park said.

“It’s not attached to the electricity?” I asked.

Igor’s head swung around, as if he’d forgotten we were there and had to check who was in the room. His right eye swiveled back to give the stove a dirty look.

“No,” he grumbled. “It should still be working.”

Mrs. Park straightened up with a sigh. “I’ll have Iset call the gas company, and we can call the electric company while we’re at it.”

She left. Igor was still scowling at the stove.

“Igor?” Conrad said.

Igor turned and walked away. “I’ll have to figure out a back-up plan.”

Igor stood over the pile of carefully chopped food he’d left on the kitchen island and glowered. Anyone would think it was the food that had shut down our gas.

Conrad nudged my leg with his elbow. “Your foot.”

I returned my attention to taping down the gauze. The small zick and rip sounds as I tore off the strips of tape felt like dull background music to my muddled thoughts.

“What is all this stuff?” Conrad muttered.

I glanced at him. He was leaning over the first-aid kit, poking around the jam-packed pockets with the tip of one claw. He had the same kind of expression that I imagined on the faces of the old-timey explorers when they first encountered some strange example of mother nature’s experiments—like a pangolin or an axolotl.

I smiled. It made my chest feel ten pounds lighter.

Lycanthropes had super-healing. That meant Conrad knew less about first-aid than your average human toddler. At least they knew that a band-aid with your favorite cartoon character always worked better than one without.

“Not all of us can be lycanthropes,” I said. “The rest of us have to do some pretty barbaric things to stay alive long enough to heal. There are bandages, burn creams, butterfly closures—lots of B words, actually—”

Conrad interrupted my recital: “You know how to use all of this?”

I glanced into the enormous, yawning mouth of the kit. I didn’t have a tape measure, but I was willing to bet it’d be too big to be a carry-on bag. Paramedics would have dismissed it as “excessive.”

“Not me.” I pressed down the last line of tape and put my injured foot down with a sigh. “That kit is bigger than your average household first-aid kit.”

Igor said, “Vasil insisted on it. He’s had training, and he said that if he knew how to use a tool, he might as well have access to it. Something about a little first aid being useful.”

“A little!” I cried. “He could reattach a limb with what’s in that case!”

Conrad chuffed and patted my knee with one of his large fluffy hands. “Try not to need that, zombie-girl.”

There was a sharp cling of something metal hitting the stone counter. Conrad and I looked up. Igor didn’t usually make noises like that. He was careful about his tools.

He was standing in front of the cutting board with his hand still on the chef's knife that he'd slapped on the counter. He was staring at us with both eyes.

That meant Igor had stopped cooking three times in one day.

Maybe that was why he sounded crankier than normal.

“What did you call her?”

Conrad’s ears dipped. He was a six-foot-nine-inch wolfman, but he looked like a puppy being told off. It might have had something to do with how shy he was. Or it might have had something to do with the size of the chef’s knife and how menacing it feels to be glared at by two different-sized eyes.

Igor went on, “I know Vasil has talked to you—both of you—about that. I’ve heard him.” He pointed at me with the knife. “Whatever else that girl is, she is not a zombie.”

I raised my hands in a placating gesture. “It’s okay, Igor, I promise. It’s a joke! I’m not offended—”

His eyes riveted on me. “You should be.”

Yikes. He was pissed.

I swallowed. When dealing with an irate, knife-wielding chef, it pays to keep your voice mellow when you present your arguments. “I call Conrad wolf-boy all the time. He’s not a wolf.”

“Whether or not he objects to your inane teasing is his business—”

Still using my trademarked Mellow Voice, I interrupted: “Wouldn’t that mean that whether or not I object, it ought to be my business?”

Having two mismatched eyes meant that Igor could glower and glare at the same time, and he abused the ability to the utmost. I looked back at him with my best innocent expression.

Igor turned away and walked over to a cupboard.

“You’re not a zombie,” he insisted as he pulled out the plastic wrap.

“I understand,” I assured him. “I’m a revived.”

It was tomato, toh-mah-toh as far as I was concerned, but I didn’t want to make an issue of it. Things were tense enough already.

Igor started wrapping all the food he’d prepared. I packed up the first-aid kit while Conrad picked up the scraps from the gauze packaging.

With his ears still low, Conrad mumbled, “Sorry.”

I gave him a lopsided smile and rolled my eyes while faintly shaking my head. Hopefully he got the message: don’t worry about it. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just…something…

Conrad lapsed into silence. Igor grumbled to himself, but it was muted and sporadic compared to his usual grumbling. I wanted to say something to break up the strained atmosphere, but I couldn’t think of anything, and I didn’t know why the atmosphere was so strained in the first place.

Mrs. Park came into the room and stepped back so Iset could get past her. The moment we saw Iset in the kitchen, something changed. Igor reached out to brace himself on the counter. Conrad stood up, his ears high and forward. My hands clenched around the paper scraps in my hand. It was like we’d all been waiting for something, and Iset was the harbinger.

“Excuse me.” Her voice was as mild as ever, but there was a faint quiver in it. “Do any of your phones happen to be working?”

Conrad, Igor, and I reached for our pockets.

I pulled out my phone. It woke up when I pushed the power button, but when I opened my home screen, at the top, where I usually saw my bars and wi-fi signal, were the words “No Service.”

I looked at Conrad and Igor. They were looking at me. None of us said anything.

Igor returned his phone to his pocket and walked over to an ancient-looking black and brass rotary telephone that was tucked into a nook below the edge of the last cupboard. I had assumed it was there for decoration. I’d certainly never seen anyone use it.

Igor picked up the handset, put it to his ear, and tapped the switch several times.

Iset took a hesitant step toward him.

Igor returned the handset to its cradle and turned to her. “The line’s dead.”