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Beatrice Strand opened her mouth to shout, arms outstretched to grab her older sister’s shirt. She stumbled over an exposed root hiding in the long shadows and went down, arms flailing. Her hands caught the trunk of a tree, a finger jamming up against the rough bark. She looked up at the retreating back of her sister, rays of warm orange light rippling over her.
“Maddie,” Beatrice called, gasping for breath. “We’re not supposed to go into the forest after dinner!” She watched her older sister raise a hand and wave it back at her.
“We do this all the time,” Maddie said. “Nothing bad ever happens.”
Beatrice pushed off from the tree and hurried to catch Maddie, glancing around to catch any scary monsters that might be sneaking up on the two. “Then why would they tell us not to go in the forest after dinner?”
“Because the people on the news tell them scary stories.” Maddie brushed aside a branch, and Beatrice caught up just in time to be smacked by the rebound. She squealed and threw up her hands, stumbling backwards.
“Jeez, Bea,” Maddie said. “If you’re gonna be that loud we might as well head home. You’re gonna scare off all the pokémon.”
Beatrice pouted, wiping the tears from her eyes. “We should head home!” she said, crossing her arms and looking away. “The forest is dangerous.”
Maddie made a disappointed noise. “Come on, Bea, don’t you want to see the pokémon? We’re gonna be trainers one day, don’t you want to get a head start on where all the best ones are?”
Beatrice shook her head. She didn’t want to be a trainer. Wild pokémon were big and scary. They did whatever they wanted and it was best to stay away from them unless you had your own pokémon to protect you. That was what mom said. Mom wouldn’t lie to them.
“Don’t be like that,” Maddie said, leaning over into Beatrice’s line of sight with an exasperated smile. “I know you want to be one. Just think about it—free to travel the region, do whatever you want, and no one to tell you what to do. Doesn’t that sound good, Bea?”
Beatrice ducked her head, shrugging. She hated when Maddie talked about being a trainer. It always ended up with the two of them sneaking off into the forest, and more often than not getting grounded upon their return. Beatrice had yet to be able to convince her mom that she was only following Maddie to make sure that she didn’t get into trouble.
“Are you coming or not?” Maddie said. “You’re such a scaredy-pants.”
“I’m not a scaredy-pants,” Beatrice said to the ground in front of her feet.
“You are too.”
“Am not.”
“Then come on,” Maddie said, grabbing Beatrice’s wrist and tugging her deeper into the forest. Beatrice yelped and pried at her sister’s hand but was no match for her older sibling’s strength, honed from years of running through the forest looking for pokémon. Beatrice had no choice other than to be pulled further and further from home, stumbling down a small path that wound around trees and bushes. She glanced back, peering through the brush. Any sight of their house was long gone, blocked by the trees. She was unable to stop a whimper from escaping her lips.
She was a scaredy-pants, even if she wouldn’t tell her sister that. She hated being out in the woods, getting all sweaty and dirty only to look at some pokémon that she could have easily looked up in a book. She could read everything about that pokémon species in a book, and not be limited to staring at a wild creature going about its business like a simpleton. Beatrice suspected that Maddie only cared about breaking their parents’ rules. Seeing the pokémon was a happy side-effect.
Maddie stopped, wrenching Beatrice’s arm. “Look,” Maddie whispered. “There. See that? It’s a murkrow.”
Beatrice peered up into the trees above, squinting hard. Eventually she spotted the dark-colored bird with its distinctive “hat” of feathers hiding in plain sight on a branch. Luckily it was facing away from them, staring off at something only it could see from its higher vantage point. “Murkrow are bad luck,” she said, backing away. Maddie gently pulled her back.
“It’s not night yet,” Maddie said. “So it’s not bad luck to see one, if you believe in stuff like that. The sun hasn’t even set yet.”
The murkrow cawed and spread its wings. Beatrice slammed her eyes shut, certain that the bird pokémon was going to swoop down and start attacking them. It took off in a cacophony of sound that made her jump, sounding as though it was right next to her. She waited for the first strike, certain that the next moment she would feel the peck of a beak against the top of her head or the raking of talons across her face.
The beating of wings grew faint, lost to the rustling of the leaves in the breeze. She cracked one eye open.
The murkrow was gone. She opened her other eye and squinted up to the branch it had been sitting on. If she focused she could hear the faint beat of wings, though she couldn’t tell if it was a real sound or only her mind playing tricks on her.
“See?” Maddie said. “Nothing to worry about. As long as we stay quiet and out of the way they won’t notice us. Now c’mon, let’s follow it! I’m sure there’ll be more pokémon in the direction that it’s flying.”
Beatrice did not believe that one bit, but let herself be pulled forwards by Maddie. Beatrice stared at her wrist, a deep frown on her face. Maybe it would be okay like Maddie said. After all, they had never gotten in trouble for going in the forest from the pokémon.
The two trekked deeper and deeper into the forest, catching glimpses of some of the more common pokémon like wurmple and its split evolutions, silcoon and cascoon. Budew and the rare buneary cropped up from time to time, and they even ran into a hoothoot, silently scanning the forest floor from its perch in a tall oak. Maddie had to drag Beatrice past that one, whispering encouragement all the way.
Maddie had finally let go of Beatrice’s wrist right around the time that she stopped looking for pokémon and started muttering discouraging words about the path and the surrounding foliage. Beatrice glanced around at the unfriendly trees and stuck close to her sister. She couldn’t even tell the path they were taking from any other direction. Everywhere she looked was dead leaves. There was nothing like the well-trodden dirt path that they had followed into the forest.
Maddie stopped and crossed her arms, looking around. Beatrice did the same, hoping that it would help. The sun had set some time ago, and the world around her had lost its saturation. The leaves of the canopy above seemed to descend until they were right above her head, and the branches moved as if to reach down and grasp at her hair. Beatrice shuddered and reached out to grasp Maddie’s hand.
“It’s getting dark,” Beatrice said. “Can we go home now?”
“Yeah,” Maddie said, staring off into the dark depths of the forest. “I guess so. Maybe we’ll see something cool on the way back.” She continued looking around. Off in the distance a hoothoot called out. Beatrice wondered if it was the same one they saw earlier. Another pokémon cried out, a buzzing screech that was completely unfamiliar, and Maddie perked up. “Come on, slowpoke!” She shot off between the trees in complete disregard for the fact that they were lost.
Beatrice hurried after her sister, unable to hold back a whine. All she could do was cross her fingers and hope that they came across a recognizable trail.
The buzzing grew louder, and Maddie only seemed to speed up. Beatrice stumbled along, occasionally losing sight of her sister and feeling as if her legs were slowly filling with wet sand. Then, over the wheezing of her breath, there came a sound of something crashing into a tree trunk. It was a heavy, reverberating sound that she could feel inside her chest and she stumbled to a stop. Her heart raced madly and she reached out to grasp at her sister’s retreating back. Beatrice cringed when the reverberating thunk came again, accompanied by another buzzing screech. The pokémon up ahead wasn’t anything like the small primary evolutions that they had run into so far. This was something dangerous. This was why her parents didn’t want them going into the forest by themselves.
Up ahead, Maddie slid up to the trunk of a tree and peered around it at a clearing. She motioned back at Beatrice with a hand, whispering, “look at that heracross!”
Even in the gloom of the approaching night, Beatrice could see the gleam of excitement in Maddie’s eyes.
Beatrice clenched her fists and sucked in the deepest breath that she could muster. She crept up to the tree, catching a glimpse of the blue, beetle-like pokémon whipping its head horn into a tree trunk. The leaves of the tree shook as though a great wind ran though them. Several dark shapes flew around the heracross, though it paid them no mind. “We should go home,” she said, voice cracking.
“Not just yet,” Maddie said. “Don’t worry, he’s probably just looking for food. If we stay right here and don’t make a sound we’ll be fine.”
“It’s mad.” Beatrice wasn’t sure which meaning of the word she meant by that. Perhaps it was both. She shuddered, and hid herself as well as she could behind the tree and her sister. She had heard the stories of pokémon infected with pokérus begin particularly aggressive, even going so far as to harm humans in some cases. She didn’t know how to tell if that heracross was infected, but she knew getting any closer to it would be a bad idea.
“I want to go home,” she said, tugging on Maddie’s shirt.
“So go home,” Maddie said, waving her off. There was another loud thud. “Just follow the trail back.”
“No,” Beatrice said, shaking her head. “You have to come back with me.” The sound of the murkrow cawing and taking off replayed itself in her mind. Maybe it wasn’t too late. If they started back now, nothing bad would happen. She tugged at her sister’s hand.
Maddie slapped Beatrice’s hand away and turned to glare at her. “You’re such a scaredy-cat,” Maddie said. “Look, he’s just eating the honey from that combee nest it knocked down. That’s why it was attacking the tree. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Beatrice was not comforted by that statement. “We should go then,” she said. Maddie rolled her eyes and turned back to the feeding heracross. Beatrice frowned. She grabbed her sister’s arm with both hands and threw all her weight backwards. “We should go home!”
“Quiet!” Maddie hissed, pulling her arm out of Beatrice’s grasp with a twist of the wrist. “He’ll hear you.”
Beatrice clenched her teeth. Her eyes burned. She sucked in a deep breath through her nose and opened her mouth. Maddie’s head whipped around, eyes flaring with anger. She shoved her younger sister away with her free hand. Beatrice lost her grip and fell to the forest floor, a stick snapping under her back. All the air left her chest and she stared unseeing up at the treetops above, her lungs doing the motion to breathe in but air continued to seep out of her like a deflating balloon. She squealed, blinking away tears and scrabbling at her chest. She couldn’t breathe, and yet it was the sight of her sister’s angry face that pushed out all rational thought.
“I told you to be quiet,” Maddie said. Her face, a pale circle in the gloom of the falling night, hovered over Beatrice. She still couldn’t take a proper breath—everything she breathed in came right back out again and she thought she might suffocate.
In the clearing the heracross buzzed its wings and cried out. Maddie’s face disappeared for a moment, only to return with wide eyes and a half-open mouth. Beatrice had never see Maddie’s face take that shape.
“I’m sorry,” Maddie said in a hushed voice, pulling Beatrice to her feet. The heracross gave another cry and Maddie looked back at it, then met Beatrice’s eyes.
She had just enough time to note the panic in her sister’s eyes before Maddie took off at full tilt.
Beatrice was dragged along by her arm, trees and the occasional bush whipping past in the gloom. She felt like she was floating. Behind her, the heracross screamed. She hadn’t realized how much there was to the forest around her—there was the smell of dirt and leaves and sap, and the trees reached so high above her head that she couldn’t see their branches without tilting her head all the way back, and the bushes reached out to grab at her clothes and scratch her arms. In front of her the back of Maddie’s neck was a ghostly sickle rising up to cut the short strands of hair that rippled though the air. Her hand was clammy around Beatrice’s wrist and she could feel herself slipping away with each impact of her feet against the ground.
Beatrice decided that she was dreaming. She would not believe that she was currently running away from an attacking pokémon with her scared sister. The sounds of the heracross crashing through the forest behind her wasn’t real. In a moment she would slip from her sister’s grasp, tripped up by a perfectly placed root. The ground would rush up to meet her face and she would open her eyes to the ceiling of their bedroom, hot and sweaty underneath her blanket.
She looked back, wanting to see how close to the end of the dream she was. The heracross had its head down and horn pointed, battering everything out of its way and only a bus-length behind. It gave a chittering cry and the sound made her teeth vibrate against each other. She felt herself slip further out of Maddie’s grip.
The next stumble ripped the two apart.
Beatrice tumbled to the ground, the world spinning up and over until she didn’t know up from down. She heard her sister scream her name, louder even than the rampaging heracross. She lay there, confused, with a cheek pressed up against the dirt and her palms stinging from their impact with the ground. She picked her head up off the ground, a leaf peeling itself from her forehead. This wasn’t home. She wasn’t in her bed.
A pair of hands grabbed the back of her shirt and yanked her into the air. She choked and flailed her arms. In front of her the heracross stampeded towards them, the tip of its horn shaped like a pair of butterfree wings. Some part of her mind helpfully supplied that heracross horns weren’t used for impaling, but for grabbing and flipping its targets. The arms tugging on the back of her shirt let go and she dropped back down to the ground, her legs unable to hold her up. Maddie’s head hovered into view above, face a ghostly circle. Her mouth moved yet Beatrice heard nothing but the approaching heracross. Maddie glanced up. Her eyes widened even more. She turned back, locking eyes with Beatrice. In that moment everything else faded away—the heracross, the root digging into her back, and the irritation at her sister for dragging her this far into the forest. All Beatrice wanted in that moment was to be at home, in bed, watching Maddie stare longingly out their bedroom window at the forest behind their house. Beatrice would give anything for that.
The heracross’s horn slid between the two, the blue of its chitin appearing black in the lack of light. Beatice was confused. It moved so slowly. What had happened? Then the heracross’s head came into view, eyes glowing. The top of its head collided with Maddie’s arm and Beatrice watched the ripples from the impact flow across her sister’s shirt. The heracross wasn’t slowed at all from the impact, blocking more and more of her vision with each passing moment. Maddie’s mouth moved as if to say something.
Then she and the heracross were gone, carried clean over Beatrice’s position on the ground. The pokémon let out a victorious screech and she picked her head off the ground to see the body of her sister hanging in the air. Beatrice refused to believe her eyes. There was no way that was her sister in the air, upside-down and a look of disbelief on their face. Beatrice locked eyes with the girl for a moment and they shared a look that said “what just happened?”
Then the girl’s rotation tore her away and she collided with a tree trunk head-on with a thud that wrung Beatrice’s stomach like her mother wringing out a dish towel. The heracross turned and she let out a scream, scrambling to her feet and running away.
She was certain that every step she took would be her last, but she kept running until she couldn’t breathe and her legs were so heavy that it was all she could do to shuffle her feet across the ground. There was no sign of the heracross behind her and her vision was blurry. What was she supposed to do now? She was lost, and her sister needed help, wherever she went. Beatrice had blindly ran off into the forest without thinking, and now nothing looked familiar. She stopped, hiccuping, and rubbed the tears from her eyes. What had a pokémon that dangerous been doing in their forest?
The sound of wing beats came from above. She lifted her head to the cry of a murkrow, a violent shudder running through her body. The bird was diving at her from the trees above and she turned and ran, crashing against tree trunks and stumbling through bushes. The murkrow called out again, sounding as if it was right behind her head. She should have never let her sister talk her into entering the forest without an adult. Maybe things would have turned out differently if Beatrice had been able to resist her sister’s needling.
The next thing that Beatrice knew was her running down a familiar path. The murkrow harassing her had disappeared, leaving her with the raggedy sound of her wheezing for breath and the pounding of her heart in her chest. The trees parted to show her home and a tingle went down her spine. She didn’t care anymore that her parents would know that she had been out in the forest without their approval. Maddie was more important.
Beatrice ran up to the door and threw it open. The kitchen was empty and dark, the only light coming from the doorway into the living room where there was the muffled sound of a TV. The light spilling across the tile floor flickered and changed colors. She struggled to get her breathing under control, wanting to lie down and curl up into a ball. She shook her head and took a step into the kitchen, feeling like she was an alien invader stepping into the hero’s spaceship. There was a tinny bang from the living room and a flash of light. She flinched. It was only the TV, she told herself. It was only the TV that her parents were watching, not knowing that their daughters had been out in the forest. She froze, legs refusing to take another step. What would she even tell them? Would they even believe her?
An image of the girl’s body lying in a disorganized heap at the roots of a tree flashed through Beatrice’s mind and she forced her way across the kitchen and into the living room.
Her mother and father sat next to each other on the couch, completely still. All she could see was the backs of their heads and she stopped in the doorway. She opened her mouth but there were no words to break the spell that the TV seemed to have over them and she shrunk back.
Her father turned his head around as though sensing her presence.
“Bea?” he said, “what are you doing in the kitchen? Not sneaking more dessert, I hope.”
Beatrice opened and closed her mouth. “I—”
Her mother turned around.
“It’s Maddie,” Beatrice said weakly. She swallowed, staring at the floor to avoid the piercing gaze of her parents. “The forest.”
“I don’t understand,” said her father. “You’ll have to give me more than that.”
She screwed her eyes shut, forcing away the image of Maddie flying through the air. How could he sound so nonchalant? “Maddie’s still in the forest.” She had to force each word out through shaking lips.
“What happened to your shirt, honey?” asked her mother. “And you hair is a mess.”
“Maddie’s in the forest,” Beatrice said. Hot tears ran down her cheeks.
“Are you okay?” her father asked. “What has your sister done now?”
“She’s in the forest!” Beatrice shouted, throat twinging in pain. Didn’t they see how distressed she was? Why was it taking so long for them to figure it out? Right now Maddie could be—
“Is that where the two of you have been? You know you’re not allowed in the forest after dinner—”
“You don’t understand!”
A pair of big, strong arms wrapped her up in a hug. She hiccuped, feeling her body go slack. It was warm, and she never wanted to leave. An irritating voice in the back of her head told her that she was wasting precious time.
“It’s alright,” her father said, the words a soft rumbling that she could feel as well as hear. “We’re not mad at either of you.” He pulled away, looking down at her with a soft smile.
“Now why don’t you slow down and tell us what happened?” he said.
Beatrice looked down at the floor, shivering. “We were out in the forest and we ran into this pokémon that... that....”
She didn’t have the will to say the words aloud, as if speaking them would make her worst fears come true.
“What did it do, Bea?” asked her father.
She shook her head.
“Honey?” her mother said from the couch, worry creeping into her voice. Beatrice’s father let go of her shoulders and stood, the floor creaking under his feet.
“Call the rangers,” her father said.
***
Beatrice sat halfway up the stairs with her arms wrapped around her shins and her head perched on her knees, listening to the mumbling of the pokémon rangers and her parents. Out the open front door there was a parked ambulance with its lights off, a menacing rectangular shadow in the night. It had come screaming in along with a pair of rangers and sat flashing red and white in front of the house while she gave monotone answers to questions like “what kind of pokémon was it?” and “how long did it take for you to walk to where you were when it happened?”
At some point the ambulance turned off its lights. She stayed on the stairs and waited for her sister to come home, digging her nails into the soft bit between the tibia and the muscle of her shin like it was a handhold in the climbing gym that her parents had once taken them to. In the living room there was talk of the heracross. The words “freak accident” and “honey-crazed” were said in a low voice so that Beatrice wouldn’t hear, but she did.
Her mother came over to the staircase after that and stared up at Beatrice. For a moment she thought that she would be in trouble for not going up to her room like she had been told, but the look on her mother’s face wiped that idea away. She didn’t know what to make of that face. There was anguish and pain like an actor in a sad movie, only it was her mother making that face. Beatrice found herself wrapped tightly in her mother’s arms, head pressed up against her chest. Her mother let out a single sob, trembling ever so slightly.
Later that night, after the ambulance had left, she was coaxed to her bed by her father with the promise that she could keep a watch out the window for her sister. Through her bleary eyes, she spotted a movement in the trees. She squinted and rubbed the crust from her eyes.
It was a murkrow.
She held her breath, waiting to see if it would do something. Maybe it was only a figment of her imagination. It let out a cry that sent her scrambling for the cover of her sheets. Eyes shut and tears leaking into her pillow, she had a terrible realization.
Her sister wasn’t coming home.