Chapter 12.
Iden shut her eyes and clutched the tattered old badge. She saw nothing, felt nothing, no matter how hard she strained. Her visions evaded her.
His face, much younger than it was now, stared out at her from the badge. Iden had little faith in finding him with something he had abandoned so long ago, but it was the only thing she could find in her backpack that belonged to him. She brought it to school one day for show and tell. Her backpack was the only thing she had time to grab when Dana dragged her out of the house that morning. It was barely dawn when Dana dropped her off with Nancy, promising to call if she knew anything more – and leaving Iden with a terrible piece of information.
Fox was missing, along with all the other men in town.
She was trying her best to be useful. Nancy had been storming around the house all morning, keeping her kids close. Her oldest son had gone missing as well. She was on and off of the phone with her husband, who was out of town on business, and she never seemed to sit down for more than a few seconds. Iden hated to see anyone so worried, and she worried about Fox herself, and wondered what Dana was doing – so she tried her hardest to have a vision.
She was holding the badge to her forehead when Nancy rushed back into the kitchen with the phone. Nancy barely noticed her strange behavior. She was talking quietly, in an intense tone, "Is that really why you're going to the hospital? Be honest with me, please."
Iden sat up. "Is that Dana?"
Nancy gave her a 'shush' motion and went on. "Okay. Okay. If you get any news… Yes, I have her here. Did you want to…? Okay. No, I understand. Okay. Good luck."
She hung up, setting the phone on the counter and bracing her hands there, like she was afraid she was going to fall down. Iden went to her side, waiting eagerly for news. "Was that Dana?"
"Dana is busy right now," Nancy said hastily, but not unkindly. Her mind was obviously somewhere else. "She said she'll call when she knows something."
"But she did call. Does she know something? Is she at the hospital? Is someone hurt? Is it Fox?"
"Iden, calm down." Nancy pulled Iden into a mom hug, rubbing her back. "No one is hurt. Dana is just going to the hospital to follow up on a lead. We still don't know…"
Iden looked up and found Nancy struggling for words. Now it was her turn to be the comforting one, because there were things she knew that Nancy could never understand. "Don't worry. Dana will find them. She used to be a special agent, you know."
Nancy smiled sadly. "I know. Just hold on for a while, and if she doesn't call back in thirty minutes, we'll call her, okay?"
Iden went reluctantly back to the kitchen table, picking up a crayon and halfheartedly adding eyelashes to the picture she had drawn of Dana. She watched Nancy in her peripheral vision. She went back into the living room and sat beside her two remaining sons, putting her arms around them like she was ready to hold them down if they started to disappear. Iden thought that if she had seen Fox vanishing, she would have held onto him the same way.
But she was tired of waiting. She slipped out the back door and took one of the boys' bikes, starting toward the hospital. If she was going to use her powers, she had to be closer to the action.
Iden had made this ride many times during the summer to go and visit Dana at work, but today the town was different. Some streets were deathly quiet, where there would usually be lawnmowers snarling and kids playing, and lots of people were standing in their driveways, talking in low tones. Iden had never felt that kind of unrest in this small town, and she wondered if this was the way the townspeople had acted before they killed those women at the Widow Tree.
She took her usual route in through a side door at the hospital, waving at anyone she passed and getting a half-hearted wave back. It was only women today, and they all seemed to be in a rush.
Dana was not in her office, or in the cafeteria.
But something else was here.
Iden felt it like a strange tickle at the back of her neck, leading her up one hall, and then down another. None of the adults paid her any mind, all consumed by their own problems.
She stopped at a room at the end of the hall, where a single female officers was sitting. Iden approached, giving the officer a little wave, but the woman stared right past her. Iden started to feel uneasy. She stopped five feet away and waved her hand again, but the officer said nothing, did nothing to indicate that she knew Iden was there.
"She can't see you. Come in."
Iden jumped at a voice coming from inside the room. She looked doubtfully at the officer again and then scampered past her. She found herself face to face with the woman she had seen at the festival that night – Mora.
Mora was trying to sit up. When their eyes met, she smiled, and croaked, "You lost again, kitten?"
Iden was appalled by her appearance. Her face was heavily bruised on one side, the skin sagging and purple, and one of her eyes was almost swollen shut. Her hospital gown hung down one shoulder, showing off a nasty row of stitches leading down across her collar.
"I was looking for my parents," Iden stuttered, staying just inside the doorway.
"Well, your mother just left," Mora said, finally achieving a somewhat upright position and looking harder at Iden. She rubbed a welt on her cheek. "And your dad…"
Iden went straight to her bedside, "Do you know where Fox is?"
"What an odd name." Mora smiled. "And yours, too. Not something you hear every day. But you're not someone you meet every day, either. No. You're something else."
Iden fiddled with her hands. "What does that mean?"
"Have you seen the tree?"
Something cold touched Iden right in the center of her chest. She shivered. "How did you…?"
"You can never go there," Mora said, suddenly intense. She swung her legs around, wincing, so she could lean closer. "Bad things happened there, and only bad things will happen there."
Iden stared at her, unwilling to admit she had already been to the tree.
Mora sat back, groaning as she settled into bed. She said nothing for a few moments, staring out the window like she could see something that Iden could not.
Iden finally piped up, "What happened to Fox?"
"Black magic," Mora responded plainly.
"You mean like…? Evil? Witches?"
"No, not evil. She's not… evil." Mora seemed to struggle for an explanation. "She just… she lost her way. It happens sometimes, to all sorts of people. Grief can do that. We have to understand… we have to see…"
Iden was full of curiosities, and she suddenly wished Fox were there to ask all the right questions. She only had the first things that came to her mind, what she impulsively blurted out.
"But she set the festival on fire, right? She beat you up!"
"Yes. She did. But she thought she was finding justice. I was involved in something… something that ended in a tragic, unavoidable death. She thought… well, she thought I deserved to burn."
Iden looked again at her injuries and pictured that purple fire radiating from the center of the festival. If there was something that could do that, could take all the men from town in the dead of night without anyone hearing them, how were they sitting here talking?
"How did you survive?" Iden whispered.
Mora smiled again, a distant, knowing smile. "I'm fireproof." She reached up again, stroking the welt on her cheek, and Iden realized suddenly it was a burn. She noticed Iden looking and dropped her hand. "She touched me. I let her get too close."
Iden asked a third time, with more resolve, "Do you know where Fox is?"
"How about we make a deal? I'll tell you who set the fire, and you go and tell your mom. I could tell that whatever I said to her earlier was going to go in one ear and out the other, so I said nothing. She is a very passionate woman… just like Charlotte."
"Charlotte," Iden repeated.
"Charlotte Gregor." Mora looked out the window, her jaw set. "You go and tell your mom that name and let me worry about those missing people."
