They drove in silence through a town before Wick chanced a look over at her. "I am sorry--"
Jacqueline refused to hear another admission of sympathy from someone who couldn't have had a reason. Wick didn't know her mother. Even if he had suffered a commensurate loss, it was not Jacqueline's. Her mother had been dead just long enough that Jacqueline did not think of her everyday, even living in her mother's former home (which, to Jacqueline's thinking, was as much hers, having grown up there). She did not want to endure her mother's death being refreshed so that Wick could... what? Bond with her? It was gross even to consider.
"It's not worth getting into. My mom was going to die. Nothing could be done about it, and, even if there were, she wouldn't have done it," said Jacqueline, as sharply as she meant it, the resentment toward her mother as much as the person in the driver's seat. "It was just before the Christmas Flu. She wouldn't have survived that, not with what was going on inside her lungs. It's good that she died when she did, so she didn't die worse."
"It was not a flu," said Wick, turning onto a side street without any direction from Jacqueline and her paper map, "but it was unlikely that she would have survived that had it found her."
He said the first clause so factually, so bereft of its emotion, that the effect bordered on chilling. Jacqueline cuddled her hoodie closer to her body, then remembered that it contained its passengers who might prefer a softer touch. "What do you mean 'it was not a flu'?"
"It was designed to eliminate specifically--" Wick began as though reciting from a dry history book, though the flu happened barely a year ago.
Without conscious thought, her hand met the door handle, not that she was going anywhere at sixty miles an hour. "Oh my God, are you one of those people? You think that flu was designed?"
"I do not think. I know," he answered, seeming the picture of composure. It was not the demeanor of a man who didn't see a need to prove anything so evident. "I had met the young woman who was the first incubator, the steward of Red Hook, and know roughly the mechanics, involving--"
"So, you aren't an anti-vaxxer?"
"No vaccination would have sufficed to halt it," Wick said calmly. "But, no, I am not an anti-vaxxer. I am vaccinated against a hundred illnesses, though I am unsure that I require them. I believe all alive are now immune to that strain of the, as you put it, Christmas Flu. At the very least, the creature who brought it into this world died. It should not be able to reoccur."
The silence in the car was of a different texture now as Jacqueline wrestled with what she was required to believe. She already acted as though she thought she was the abandoned child of an Egyptian god. "Was it painful?" she finally asked. "When the creature died? Did it suffer?"
He tried to read her expression before the slightest smile found his lips, understanding what she wanted to hear. "A pain like we could not begin to fathom, her every particle going nova until she was erased from existence."
She smoothed out her hoodie. "Well, that's all right then."
She reached into her pocket for the comfort of touching the beetles. It was a fraction of a second before her brain processed the lack.
Four.
She patted her hoodie, but she knew at once that she would not find it on her.
"Houdini!" she shouted, jamming her hand into the pocket. One of the scarabs scurried up the outside of her left sleeve in answer. "Where did I lose the other one?"
It wiggled, as was its wont, able to convey nothing more. Was Houdini not its brothers' keeper? (Were they brothers? Or sisters? Gender was notional to her for insects, but it had not occurred to her until this moment that this might have been a case of unrelated scarabs being impressed into service by her birth father.)
"We have to turn around," she said, her anxiety peaking. "One of them got out."
Wick gave a mild look, too sedate given her sudden panic over a creature she would have starved to death had he not knocked on her door.
"Wick, come on! No soldier left behind. We're not that far away." This was a lie. It had been an hour. She didn't know how much of a delay they could suffer on this trip -- the final destination was still a mystery to her and, she suspected, Wick in equal measure -- but she assumed the sacrifice of time would be unwelcome. How long would her father cling to life? The journey was going to be winding, but it had to have its temporal limits.
"Was it left behind?"
"Well, it's not in my fucking pocket, so yes."
He barely raised his thick eyebrow, but enough that she felt she was being willfully naive.
She turned to look out the window, the bile rising in her throat. The barely green farmland, furrows deep, rushed by the window. The day seemed too sunny for this mission, and she wished they were already at their next stop as though that could banish it.
"I don't want it to be scared or hurt, you know?" she pleaded. "Let's just go back and find it -- I'm sure Houdini can help with that -- then we can get back on the road, okay?"
His foot applied the slightest bit more pressure on the gas pedal. "Are you sure this is what we should do?"
"We are listening to my dancing instructions. We do what I say."
She had barely said it before her brain registered how much Houdini was shaking.
"Do we keep going?" she asked the insect, her Magic 8-Ball.
It wiggled up and down.
"What did the scarab say?" asked Wick, but it was a formality. He knew before she had asked the beetle.
"We plow on, I guess."
When they were in the parking lot of the Kaatskill Kaleidoscope, Wick had asked for their next destination. Jacqueline looked back at the tower behind them, the memory of the beauty fading, its scattered light pretending at infinity. She wanted the opposite of that.
"Howe Caverns," she said, a place she had not been since she was in high school for a class trip: dark, dank, and enclosed.
Fifty miles before they arrived, billboards announced that they were approaching, and shouldn't they stop to visit? These featured smaller-than-life pictures of the cave lit unnaturally bright, as though it were the background of a cartoon instead of a geological feature.
The gloss of youthful memory had polished the place to a shine. The reality must be less charming, but that was the way of memories. Jacqueline remembered not rocks but crushing on her seatmate and riffling through the gift shop.
No one was working at the entrance when they arrived at Howe Caverns. Wick said nothing about this, and she was grateful for it. She was here by the grace of her random, almost infantile wants. Too much light, so now she craved the dark.
Would he read some omen in the closure? The sign on the door said that it ought to be open, but the city of Cobleskill took its time waking this morning.
Jacqueline refused to countenance that they had driven hours for a locked cave and sacrificed a scarab for it.
Adjoining the cave was a rundown hotel. Jacqueline's hopes for answers there were not robust except that she assumed that a hotel would always need to be staffed.
A woman with a nearly black, messy pixie cut was at the desk, poring over a thin paperback with more attention than Jacqueline could imagine it warranted. Wick approached the desk, Jacqueline keeping feet behind as though she meant to stay in the umbra of Wick's body to shield her.
The woman looked Wick over, noticing Jacqueline only once she was done. "Aren't you a weird pair?"
Jacqueline was offended by this remark, though she couldn't figure out in which way it was meant to be offensive or, at that, if it were at all. It wasn't how one greeted guests; of this, she was sure. "How are we weird?"
"Oh," said the woman. "I mean, you know what he is, right?"
Again, Jacqueline wasn't sure how this was offensive, but it had to be. "What would that be?"
The woman, her eyes a green specked hazel, sniffed, amused, then traced her finger over the book again. She closed it. "I don't need it for that. We met once, him and I."
Wick leaned back, estimating her. "You came into the diner because of--"
"Yeah," she said, cutting him off. "Him."
Jacqueline felt pushed further from this lobby with each word of this odd reunion. She had been the one to bring them to Howe Caverns and, now that it was closed, into this motel. She suspected that Wick would have something to say here about coincidence, but it would be nothing that Jacqueline cared to hear. It was as though the caprice of her choice had been seized by a purpose she couldn't understand.
She felt the lack of the nameless scarab more keenly for a moment, though she couldn't draw a line between the woman and the loss.
The woman pulled herself up to the counter, sliding off to stand before Jacqueline.
"Mica," she said by introduction. "Mica Hunter."
"Your parents named you Mica?" asked Jacqueline, feeling a thrill of jealousy. She was named for her maternal grandmother, whom she sure was a fine woman, but Jacqueline had never met her and doubted she served as much of a namesake.
"My parents had the poor taste to name me Michelle, which meant that I spent my early years being called Shelly. I doubt there is a shell-like thing about me. Shells grow around soft things that need protection. Then they are discarded or stolen. When the living thing inside was eaten or otherwise died, the shell was all that remained. Not something I seek to emulate. I've mostly survived because I am good enough at parlor tricks -- or parlor tricks are good at me. Also, killing me would mean the person who did it would end up the steward, and it isn't exactly a high prestige job."
There was that word again: steward. Jacqueline tapped Wick's arm and asked, sotto voce, "Is she the one who incubated--?"
"No, that was another. I served Mica food. We did not have even as long as a conversation as this."
"Are you a steward?" Jacqueline asked Wick, feeling that there was no use being cagey about the word any longer.
"I would sooner die," he said bluntly.
Mica cracked a lopsided smile. "That is a cruel thing to say in front of me, you know. Someone has to save the world."
"You do what?" asked Jacqueline, feeling that too much was being said, making the world too big and, in turn, her too small. It was not a day ago that she was toying with the idea that there were gods, and she was a descendent of a dying one. Now people were saving the world, something that she was not aware needed direct saviors. Yes, one could stop using disposable plastics and drive less, which would not be in effect today, but "saving the world" seemed to require more direct threats.
Mica's brow furrowed in amusement. "I hang out near a hole in the ground and make sure the things down there are not too interested in coming up here."
"There are things in Howe Caverns that want to get out?"
Mica puffed out her cheeks in thought. "There are things everywhere, but especially here. Also, 'things' tends not to be the best term. Some of them like 'daemons.'" She inclined her head upward to Wick's round face. "Unless that is not the operative term any longer?"
"It's suitable."
"Why don't you just -- I don't know -- kill them?" asked Jacqueline, feeling that world savers usually did more crowd control than that. "Or do you?"
"I have never done more than annoy the daemons down there. It's their cave. Why would I impose?" Mica asked. "Not that I estimated that I could kill them much, even if I got a mind to. Parlor tricks only go so far, and, since they are away from mundane people, they aren't too worried about the agents."
"Agents?" asked Jacqueline, knowing a dangerous term when she heard it dropped so casually.
Mica didn't lord over them that she had knowledge that they did not -- or that Jacqueline did not, since she could not even be sure what Wick knew -- but she also did not apologize for this or break things down. It was using jargon in front of the uninitiated, though perhaps Mica assumed that Jacqueline knew this all by dint of being in the company of Wick (who was a daemon? Was that the implication?)
"Oh, damn. You don't know anything," said Mica, shattering the case Jacqueline was building in her head. "I can't see why the agents would care about you -- I don't know anything about you, name included -- so it is better not to know about them."
Jacqueline didn't see why she would agree to this assessment, but she wasn't given the opportunity.
"So, do you want to go to the cavern?" Mica asked.
Jacqueline perked up at once. "You can do that?"
Mica's mouth drew. "I don't see a solitary reason why I can't or who would stop me, so yes."
"Don't you have to be at the front desk?"
Mica looked around at the otherwise empty, beige room. "Check-in isn't until five."
Jacqueline noted, "The sign says three."
Mica picked up a marker, scribbled on the sign, and returned. "The sign says five. Come along."
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.