Chapter Text
The forest doesn't burn. Isaac's always kind of believed in miracles - the fact that none of them are dead yet, definitely, the resurrection of Jesus, maybe - but the flames pressing to the walls of the church convinces him. They flicker up, lashing out but not too far, and thick smoke fills his nose as they stumble through the trees. His arms are looped under those of a sobbing Janice, the hard flesh of her legs already starting to crumble and soften, like sand.
The old church burns, the Striga with it, but not Isaac. Not Janice or his friends or a single neighboring tree.
The sight of hospital lights, bright and artificial against the early morning sky, comes with a flood of relief. Seems like they're the one of the only places in town with a generator.
They drop Janice off in the waiting room, having dumped the broken pew at the edge of the woods. William stays to check on his parents, Norah to deal with hers, and so Isaac's on his own. With the blackout, and a good chunk of the student body probably still out sick, he's sure school's been canceled. Suddenly, he has nowhere to go but home.
He waits around the side of the Wisp's until his mom leaves for work - he just had to hope the library still wanted her to come in. His dad's already gone. When he slips inside, the house is quiet, except for the creak of his sister's floorboards up above his head.
He rubs at his eyes, considers a nap, considers food - only his stomach turns, not nearly as sharply as it had under the direct influence of the Striga, but still a twisting roll of nausea. On unsteady legs, he pulls himself up the stairs and locks himself in the bathroom.
Vomiting is easy when he pictures the cockroaches that climbed up his throat and along the soft inside of his cheek. He flushes occasionally, unwilling to glance down at what he might be coughing up. The scent is a thick, sick one. It eats away at his throat as it comes back up, acid against the back of his teeth. His mouth feels sticky with it.
Better out than in, he thinks, dully. Something his dad used to say, overhearing vomiting on the occasions Isaac got sick when he was a kid.
"Hey, are you almost done in there? I want a shower, come on -"
It's only his sister, through the door, but he nearly tips over. Not for the first time, he wishes they moved into a house big enough to have a second bathroom. "Just fucking - hang on -"
It comes out rough and wet, but maybe he sounds even worse than he thought, because she actually sounds a little concerned. "Are you, like, sick too? Mom brought something home, I think. She's doing okay, but a bunch of people from -"
"No," Isaac grits out, "it's fine. I'm fine. Just give me a second -"
"Whatever," she says. "I'll just - whatever."
He waits until he hears her door click closed to stand and turn on the shower himself, the heels of his feet aching on the hardwood floor. His clothes are gross, so he dumps them directly in the washing machine rather than the hamper - although he can't run it without electricity. When he climbs in the shower, he closes his eyes.
The pressure of water is a relief. He can still feel the itch of legs all over him, taste the horror of being completely engulfed by something writhing, something with a mind of its own. He washes his hair, twice.
He stays in the shower until their warm water runs out, insulated by their tank during the blackout. His sister will be pissed, but she didn't almost die last night - or this morning - so he's not feeling super sympathetic. Afterwards, he bandages the small cuts on his hands from the glass window. He brushes his teeth with a vigor that would make his dentist proud. Having spit out water and toothpaste, he opens his mouth and stares at the space between his teeth in the mirror. No bugs. The back of his mouth looks red and raw, but that's to be expected. It feels raw.
The lights flicker back on just as he's trying to fall asleep. He doesn't get up to turn them off. He breathes out and tries to get comfortable without his blankets getting anywhere near his face.
"Hey, God," he says, tentative, mumbling to his ceiling. "Sorry for blowing up a church today. In all fairness, I guess I almost died. Dude, that's a good enough reason for you, right?"
Sirens are going off. At the edge of falling asleep, he wonders how they're going to get firefighters out into the middle of the woods. Then he pictures an old school fire brigade, passing sloshing water buckets in between trees, and he laughs.
He wakes up and stretches, first thing, trying to get the stiffness out of his joints and swallowing back of a jolt of unnecessary panic. He only got a few hours - probably better for his long-term sleep schedule, anyway. His eyes ache, damp with sleep, but his mouth is dry. His throat hurts.
He gets up and slips outside into the sun. He runs into a handful of more people on the sidewalk than yesterday - Mr. Ellis, walking his dog. The Zelkowitz's, all out raking leaves. It's quiet, still, the noise of Deadwood muffled as the neighborhood slowly digs itself out of a tragedy.
About halfway back to the hospital, he sees a police car. Just lights, this time, no siren. Officer Donalds rolls down his window.
"Isaac, kid."
"What now?" He doesn't try to keep the bitter edge out of his tone. "Can I - can I help you?"
"I sure hope not." The locks click. "Get in, Isaac."
He hesitates for a few heartbeats too long - long enough that Donalds' flat gaze turns a little sour. He steps towards the back door, hand on the handle, but the officer waves him up.
"The front - you're not in any trouble."
"Sure," Isaac grumbles, climbing into the car. "Right."
He buckles his seatbelt and they start to drive. Isaac's never been in the front seat of a police car before, but he feels mildly vindicated to find it looks pretty much the same as his mom's Ford, besides an extra radio and what might be a small computer, attached to the dashboard. "I'm headed to the hospital."
"You still not feeling well?"
"Visiting Will," he clarifies. And Janice, and Norah, but he doesn't need to bring them up their business out of nowhere, not with this guy. "I'm better."
"Good," Donalds says. "With so many people sick, I bet you had to wait at the hospital for a while, huh?"
"Uh, yeah. A while."
"All night?"
Isaac's fingertips feel numb. "I don't really know, man. I felt like shit."
"Give me an estimate," Donalds says.
"Is there, like - something else you're trying to ask me? Because if so, this definitely feels unethical."
He sighs through his nose. "You hear about the fire out East yet?"
"… No."
"Building way out in the woods," Donalds says, voice tight. "Records say it was a church, way back when - I couldn't even tell what it used to be, looking at it. Mostly ashes, now."
Good, Isaac thinks, thank God. Or, thank Norah. "And you, what - want my alibi?"
"Seems like you and the Wisp kid are always popping up in weird places."
"I wouldn't really say always -"
"And you smell like smoke."
"It's an unhealthy habit?" Isaac tries, but Donalds looks unamused. Seems like he needs to take another shower. "Look, man, I didn't do anything. I'm not an arsonist, or a terrorist, or whatever. Me or my friends."
The only thing worse than burning a church, he figures, is lying about it afterwards. He rubs at his neck and tries not to think about sunken eyes boring into his - Donalds' are lighter, a weedy brown. His mouth is down-turned in a frown, but Isaac knows his teeth are neat, yellowed only by coffee and a lifetime of cigarettes.
"Isaac," he says. Confess. "You're sure there's nothing you want to tell me?"
"Yeah." It comes out with a little more force than necessary. "I don't even really go to church anymore."
"Wrong church. Nobody goes to that rundown place anymore."
"Well, yeah, I'd hope not," Isaac says. "Isn't it, you know, on fire?"
Officer Donalds drops him off with little more than a few warning glances, thankfully. The hospital waiting room isn't as packed as it bad been last night, or this morning - he only has a couple minutes to wait in line before he gets to talk to the receptionist. It's the same one he talked to the night before.
"If you're back for treatment," she says, "you'll have to sign in again."
"Er, no, but -"
"You're feeling okay?"
"Yeah," he says, shuffling from one foot to another. "Way better, actually."
She smiles at him, small and loose with exhaustion. "Glad to hear it. Thankfully, lots of folks have been having a quick recovery. Those who - who made it this far, at least."
"Good. That's good." He swallows. "I'm, um, here to see Norah, and Mrs. Wisp? And Janice Dawson, if she's…"
What, alive? Thinking about the sound her flesh made when it cracked and tore lead to another wave of nausea. The receptionist gives him another sympathetic look, a visitor's pass, and directions. Janice isn't accepting visitors yet - a fact that stirs a traitorous relief in his chest - so he heads to Ms. Wisp's room on the second floor.
He finds William hovering by the window, staring out at something, or maybe nothing, eyes on the treeline. His dad is tucked neatly into a stiff armchair, jacket laid over him like a blanket. His mom's asleep, but he can see the rhythm of her breath, the return of color to her skin. Around a sheet, her fingers twitch.
Not wanting to wake her, Isaac knocks lightly on the doorframe and waves. Mr. Wisp waves back, eyes crinkling up, and Will follows him out into the hallway after nearly jumping out of his shoes. Carefully, he closes the door behind them.
"How is she?" Isaac whispers anyway.
"Good," Will breathes out. "I mean, not really. But she looks better, right? Mr. Fleetwood said things are okay."
"That's awesome." It feels like an overstatement, like they're celebrating too soon, but Will smiles at him, a rare expression of tired ease.
"Yeah. You feeling okay?"
Admittedly, Isaac's getting a little sick of being asked. He nods anyway, because it's Will. "I don't think I'll turn into goo, at least. Threw up, like, a thousand times, though."
"Because of the orange stuff? Or…" He watches his friend shift between concern and curiosity, and back again. "Um, the bugs? That stuff was -"
"Gross," Isaac says. "It was so fucking gross, dude. But, hey, we've seen worse, right? Like, that bridge troll mugging all those middle schoolers was pretty gnarly."
"Lots of warts," Will admits, but his smile is gone. It's kind of him, Isaac thinks, to play along. "And that last death cult used a lot of blood, you know? Made Lui sick."
"Buckets of the stuff." Isaac wrinkles his nose at the memory of an overwhelming, coppery smell. "Kind of corny."
"Yeah, can't we get a cult with some originality around here?" Will huffs, knitting his eyebrows together like this is a serious concern. "Draw your pentagrams with something else, you know?"
"Chocolate sauce, maybe. That much sugar's gotta get you somewhere."
It's nice, when his friend laughs. They head down the hall to visit Norah. She's sitting up in a bed, knees up, book cradled in her lap. She has a fresh bandage across her forehead, and she smiles wide when she sees them. Her braces glint under the hospital lights.
"Hi guys," she says softly, placing her bookmark in between pages. It has a holographic picture of a wolf on it. "I'm really glad they let you in here."
"How mad were your parents?" Will asks, perching at the end of the hospital bed. Isaac takes the chair.
"I don't know." Norah wavers. "They didn't even take away my book. They were mostly… scared, I think."
"You did kinda -" Isaac puts his feet up on the edge of the hospital bed and knocks his knees together. "- Like, break out of the hospital. With a head injury."
"Yeah, it seems pretty reasonable," she says, glum. She straightens up as she glances between them. "Are you guys okay? Mrs. Wisp, Janice? They won't really tell me anything."
"My mom's getting better," Will says. "A lot of people are. And your dad told me Janice was in surgery, as of a couple hours ago. She'll be okay."
"Isaac?"
"Yeah," he says, sliding a little further down into the arm chair. "All good. But Officer Donalds thinks we blew up the church."
Norah hesitates. "We… did blow up the church."
"Sure, but, like -" He frowns at the ceiling. "I'd prefer not to get arsonist tacked onto my record, you know?"
"I can give you guys an alibi, if they ask any more questions," she says. "I kind of already said I was hiding out in the Wisp's basement all morning, at least until we found Janice."
"Okay, epic. We were, you know, playing video games."
"The power was out," Will says.
"We were playing board games," Isaac amends. "Easier for the mildly concussed, anyway."
Will nods. "Monopoly, maybe."
"But Monopoly sucks."
"Clue," Norah suggests. "When I get discharged, do you guys want to play Clue?"
"Norah," Will says, deathly serious, "I would fucking love to play Clue."
Isaac says, "Hell yes."
Eventually, Mrs. Fleetwood kicks them out in the name of rest. Norah offers a sad wave and Will returns to his mom's room with a promise to see him at school the next day.
By the time Isaac gets back home, both cars are parked in the driveway.
Selfishly, he considers hiding out in Will's basement. But when he imagines the empty seat next to his mom's at the dinner table, he grits his teeth together and opens the front door.
His mom is in the kitchen, slicing vegetables. At least his dad is nowhere to be seen. He steps onto tile and waits for her to turn around, but she doesn't. "Hey. Mom?"
"Isaac, sweetheart." Then, she looks at him. He checks her eyes for a signature cloudy glaze, but only finds the fragility of glass. "You're back."
"Yeah, I - hi." He's not sure where to go from here, what to say to make this make sense. "How was work?"
"Just fine. How was -" She stops herself, and offers a watery smile. "Well. Whatever it was you were doing?"
"Sorry," he finds himself saying. It crawls out of his mouth. "I said I'd be back. It was just - important stuff, I guess. Sorry."
"You're always - always running off. I don't -" She shakes her head, kitchen lights catching on a streak of gray hair. Her voice is so thin. "Are you going to tell me what it was?"
"Can't you just trust me? That it was really important?"
She doesn't say anything. She just bites her lip.
"Right, yeah. Sorry -" He swallows around his own words, quickly moving towards the stairs. There's something bubbling up his throat, and he's afraid it's not acid, not insects. There's a pressure building behind his eyes. "Hey, I'm gonna go upstairs. Let me know when it's time for dinner, okay? Yell."
She lets him go, and it feels like a mercy.
Sleep turns out to be a futile effort, despite the exhaustion weighing down his limbs and pounding against his head. After just a few minutes of lying down, he gives and decides to figure out how to pry his windows open instead. Just in case.
His desk is a mess, but he's pretty sure he has a screwdriver somewhere. He averts his eyes from the unfinished assignments for the weekend piled on top and digs through a drawer.
He jumps when his dad's voice comes through the door, grating against his fragile nerves. "Isaac -"
"Yeah - hang on -"
He dances around his desk chair and goes to open the door. His dad doesn't make eye contact, just holds out the home phone. "For you."
There's a hard spike of panic, when he presses the phone to his ear. He closes up his bedroom door again. "Hello?"
"Isaac? Oh my god -"
It's Lui. Not the police, not Norah or Will with another mystery to solve. "Hey, dude. What's, uh, up?"
"What's - oh my god, man." Lui sounds like he's the one panicking, actually. "I've been trying to get a hold of you guys - William’s not answering, Norah -"
"They're okay," Isaac interrupts. "Just - in the hospital. Well, Norah's in the hospital, Will's just visiting -"
"What?"
"Uh, it's complicated." He sits down on the edge of his bed. "But we're okay. We worked this one out. Killed the monster, and everything, you know?"
"You guys are okay?"
"Yeah," he says, "we're okay. How's Italy?"
He hears Lui's breathing through the phone, quiet static. "My parents are kind of freaking out, man. My grandmother's doctor was supposed to check in, you know, because she really wasn't doing that well - but no one can get a hold of him, and I knew you guys were gonna go over there earlier -"
There's this horrible dread, sinking in his stomach like a stone. "Oh, fuck. Lui."
"Was she okay? Did you see Dr. Guerrero?"
"I - I don't know." Norah hadn't said exactly what she found in that house, and Isaac hadn't dared to ask. And then, with the bugs, the coffin under the floor - he had forgotten completely. What if she had started to recover? What if she was all alone, awake and still in pain? "I'll - I don't know. I'll check on her, okay? I'll go right now."
"Okay," Lui says. "Okay. Thanks, Isaac. Thank you so much. Please be c-"
"Don't worry. I'll call you back." He hangs up and presses the phone across the bridge of his nose, pressure between his eyes. As quickly as he can, he tears out a piece of paper from his school notebook and scribbles out a note, only to crumple it up. He doesn't have time to get one of his windows open, anyway.
He tries his best to be quiet on the stairs, sneaking towards the living room to put the phone away, but his dad's there anyway. On the couch, washed in low light from the television. "Isaac."
"Look, I'm sorry, but I really have to -"
"Isaac -" Suddenly, his dad crashes their gazes together. Under all of his anger, there's something like a sore wound. "If you leave this goddamn house -"
Isaac doesn't wait for him to finish.
It's already getting dark outside. Despite all his hurry to get here, Isaac pauses at the back door of the house, anxiety all the way down to his fingertips. The lights are on inside, but the curtains are drawn. He can't see anything when he tries to peer through the windows.
He tries to draw out the rush of adrenaline and bravery he felt in the woods, and only ends up breathing heavier. In Ms. Dupont’s backyard, he's all alone. The rest of the world is still.
Finally, he steps inside. He simultaneously feels weightless and like he's crashing through heavy glass. The living room is cold, with the back door left open to let autumn air seep in all day. A handful of leaves had blown in, skittering across the floor and crunching under his shoes.
The door still being open is probably not a good sign, Isaac figures, rationally. Neither is Dr. Guerrero's car still being parked in the driveway. But there's always a chance - maybe she hasn't recovered enough to move, just yet. Slowly, carefully, he starts to walk through the house.
"Ms. Dupont? It's Isaac Brooks. Lui's friend?" His words are met with a freezing, static silence.
The Striga is dead, he reminds himself, swallowing back fear. He knows it. He can feel the weight of a makeshift bomb against his palm and see its arc, the perfect angle to land at an ancient man's feet. He can smell the old wood burning.
Isaac turns the corner to the dining room, and he finds what he's looking for.
Agnes Dupont is on a hospital bed, placed between the doorway and the dining table. Half-burned candles have left a small wax pool on the wood. He can see viscous orange liquid and dark blood soaked through her pajamas, the maw that used to be her chest and is now an aching cave of yellowed ribs and gore. Like she'd only been half-eaten. Her head is turned to one side, away from him, hair fallen over her face. He can't see her expression.
It smells like blood, but not decay, not yet. He very nearly throws up again, the back of his throat burning with it. Doubled over, breathing heavy, he finds what probably used to be Dr. Guerrero at his feet.
He goes back to the other room, grabs Ms. Dupont’s phone, and calls 9-1-1. He waits for them on the front steps.
Officer Donalds is the one to interview him, tucked around a table on the small back patio. At least he didn't have to go all the way down to the police station.
Isaac explains it simply. Lui asked him to check in on his grandmother, so he did. He found the back door open and was worried about her. No, he doesn't think he touched anything. Yes, he called right away.
What he doesn't say is this: if it had been almost anyone else, he wouldn't have called at all. But what would he have told Lui - yes, your grandmother's dead, an ancient vampire drank most of her insides, you better come home right away to officially discover the body or else you're never going to get the corpse-stink out of the dining room? What a shitty friend move that would have been.
And, he reminds himself again, again - the Striga is gone. There's no evil to defeat, no mystery to solve. There's only the dead left in its wake, bodies to count and clean up. There's nothing else he can do.
"I have to call Lui back," he says, at the end.
Donalds shakes his head. "Someone's already alerting the Duponts."
"Okay," Isaac says. "But I said I'd call."
"I'm sure they'll be busy."
"Sure, yeah, but -"
"Isaac," Donalds says, voice hard.
"Please -" Isaac can't help it. "- Don't ask me if I did this, or something. Jesus Christ."
He sighs, and Isaac can see the heave of his chest. "No, kid. Sickness did this."
"Oh. Okay." It seems insane, to see their state and say it was caused by anything but distinct, starved violence, but he'll take what he can get. "Okay."
Donalds says, "Let me walk you back home."
That might give his mother a heart attack. "It's just down the road."
"Isaac."
"Seriously, man, it's fine." He crosses his arms tight. "I think I'll make it."
Thankfully, Officer Donalds lets him go. He walks home under the light of the street lamps and thinks about how Agnes Dupont used to offer him candies every time he stopped in with Lui. Dr. Guerrero couldn't have been too bad, either - he had been putting so much effort into curing the seemingly incurable. He had wanted to see the end of the sickness that ripped through Deadwood, again and again, and now that it was dead and gone, so was he.
It's only nine by the time he gets home, but all the lights are off. He slips inside and grabs the phone, and heads up to his room. He doesn't have a lock on his bedroom door, so he pushes his desk over to half-cover it. He sits criss-cross in his chair and slowly lets it spin around.
He tries to call Lui, but it doesn't go through. Maybe the Duponts are still talking to the police, maybe they're asleep - it's pretty early in the morning there. Maybe Lui just doesn't want to talk to him.
He calls Norah's burner phone instead. He's just about to give up hope that she has it with her at the hospital when he hears her voice through the speaker. "Hello?"
"It's Isaac. I didn't, like, wake you up or anything, right?"
"Oh, no, don't worry." But she sounds tired. "Hi, Isaac."
"Hi, Norah."
"Is there… an emergency?"
"Uh, no, it's all good. I just -" He stops, suddenly, voice sticking with regret. Norah was probably the last person he should be talking about Agnes Dupont with. "I don't know. How's the hospital?"
"Food's kind of bad, but I think it's the best they could do with a small budget for that kind of thing. Underfunding's a real problem, so I get it." It's funny, how she's always giving out the benefit of the doubt. It's nice. "Are you sure everything's okay?"
"Yeah." When he runs a hand over his face, he finds his fingers are shaking, palm damp. He should probably see if there's any leftovers in the fridge. "Can we talk about band stuff?"
He practically hears her perk up. There's the rustle of thin sheets as she sits up in bed. "You think you're really interested in drums?"
Isaac shrugs even though she can't see him. "I'll try it. Hitting stuff sounds like something I can do."
"There's a set at the school they might let us borrow. The jazz band uses it. We'd probably have to practice there, though, which might be kind of a bummer…"
"I can save up for a set," he says. "Maybe I'll get a job."
"Oh, you don't have to do that all on your own. I can chip in." She sounds like she might be smiling, soft.
"Okay, sure."
"But maybe you should try it first," she says. "Before we decide on anything. What if you totally hate it?"
"I don't think I'll totally hate it," he tells her. "And if I do, we'll make Lui try it."
"He might like the rhythm of it."
"Probably," he says, and kind of means it. He pulls out a necklace from under his shirt, and dangles the small, silver cross in front of his nose. He hadn't even taken it off to shower. He holds it in his fist. "Norah, um -"
"Yeah?"
"I think," he swallows, "that if we didn't kill that thing, I'd be in hell right now."
She pauses, for a moment, silence on the phone line. "You… really think so?"
"I felt it." He can't bring himself to talk about the teddy bear in so many words - how its malicious shadow had felt like the only safe place in the world. "Calling to me, I guess."
Serious as the grave, Norah says: "If that happened, we'd come and break you out."
"Norah," he says, and suddenly he's laughing. It bursts out of him and takes him over. After a few seconds, he hears her start to giggle, too.
"What's even funny?" She asks, voice breathy between laughter.
"That -" He tries to even out himself out. "That's insane. That's the most insane thing you've ever said."
"I don't think so. If hell's a real place, we'd find a way to all go and get you."
"I don't know if even the Unwitness Protection Program can manage that." He's still smiling, though, chest aching.
"We'd try," she says, sweet and raw with sincerity, and Isaac thinks himself, I guess that's what counts.
They talk until Norah's phone starts to die. With Will's broken, Isaac has no one else to call. He falls asleep, eventually, and dreams of his childhood confessional booth.