“Echoed in the form of?” I asked him. “What does that even mean?”
Xander took another step toward her. “I’m here to listen to you. To help you. Can we talk?”
“How did you find me?” she asked, foregoing manners and keeping the shotgun centered on Xander’s chest. Whipping her head to the side and staring at the nearest tree, she screamed, “Shut up, Andy!”
I flinched at her sudden outrage toward the tree. My stomach tightened with lead balls of gaseous pain. I should have never ordered the chorizo. They wrecked my stomach every time. “Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?” If I hadn’t felt like I’d just lost a bout with a locomotive, I may have broken out my best Michael Jackson dance.
“I have access to certain information that led me to you,” Xander said, ignoring her outburst—that in itself was a damn miracle, making me rethink my religious convictions. “You’re not…” Xander meant to say crazy, but he switched the word at the last second, “wrong about what you saw that day. There are things that exist outside our human comprehension. Things that history has written off as myth and legend—not as fact. Annie, I know about that monster that killed your brother. I know what it is. Do you believe that?”
Annie lowered her weapon a few inches.
Xander continued, “You abandoned society because they mocked you, because they refused to listen to you. You moved out here, onto the river, to prove them wrong—or maybe to prove yourself wrong. That you’re not losing your mind. That you saw what you saw. That your brother didn’t just drown, that he was really attacked and brutally murdered by a Scylla.”
“Shut up! You’re wrong! I’m not going to shoot them!” Annabel yelled, shoving her gun’s barrel into the ground. Her eyes never stopped bouncing and moving. She switched to a calm, normal voice, as if she hadn’t just screamed at thin air. “She was like that bad lady from The Little Mermaid. Ursula, I think was her name. Half-octopus, half-human. She wrapped her tentacles around Andy and dragged him beneath the current. I never saw anything more of him, other than the blood that rose to the surface.”
“Did you ever see her again?” Xander asked. “This octopus woman.”
“No,” Annie said.
“Hey, Annie,” I said, stepping forward and scratching my forehead. “Listen, really important question here. What’s your bathroom situation like? I ate this massive chorizo burrito on the way out here, and I’m sorry to say this, but it didn’t settle well. Do you, like… have a hole that’s pre-dug? Should I grab a shovel and dig my own hole? I honestly don’t know if I have that kind of time. And what about the TP situation? You go with smooth rocks, leaves, or sticks? Or do you make monthly trips to the local Walmart and grab the good stuff? I prefer the baby wipes. They’re a little uncomfortable at first—but once you get accustomed to them, game-changer.”
“Joey,” Xander said, shifting his head to face me. “Not now.”
My bowels begged to differ, but I didn’t speak up. Annie, like the crazy hermit she was, straight ignored me. Apparently, she could see and hear her dead brother, but I was nothing more than an absent breeze.
To Xander, she said, “I’ve followed the river for the past decade, looking for any signs of her—searching for places where she could possibly live. Locations deep enough for her to hide from the public eye, but with enough traffic for her to regularly feed.”
“Did you find anything?”
Annie stared at the river for a second, then jerked her head to the tree. “I’m going to tell them, Andy!” She smiled at me like a murderous lunatic, and I may have relieved a slight pressure from my bowels in that moment. “I use the river,” she said to me. “It’s awfully cold this time of year, though.”
Did she mean she used the river as a bathroom? I gagged thinking about her feces and piss streaming down to the recreational areas—about people swimming in that water, stepping in that mud.
She faced Xander again. “Are you here to kill her?”
Xander licked his lips and hesitated.
Remember that globe in Xander’s office that opened the bookshelf to a stairwell that led to a secret prison housing cursed humans? Well, MIS had recently went from executioners to rehabilitators. They hunted cursed humans and tried to reverse the Nephil’s influence on them. So far, they hadn’t had any luck. But I had the feeling that if Xander could have his way, the Scylla would find herself in a padded room with three meals a day and a New Testament Bible to keep her company, instead of floating down the river and staring at the sky with unblinking eyes.
“I’ll do what needs to be done,” Xander said.
Annie regarded him, lifting her shotgun. “Sorry, Andy, but I’m showing him everything.” She placed the weapon on her shoulder and turned toward her cabin. Taking a step forward, she called out, “Let’s go inside. It’s warmer. And I’ll show you what we’ve put together.”
Before following her into the insane asylum, I grabbed Xander’s arm. “Hey. Hey. Hey. We’re not going in that place. She just said ‘we’, like there’s more than one of her crazy asses. And she keeps arguing with someone clearly not there.”
“We’re going.”
I stared at the cabin hidden in the trees and shuddered.
11
Xander and Annabel entered her cabin like it was any other kind of house—like she didn’t live in a ten-by-ten space in the middle of nowhere. I stood at the bottom of a single wooden step just outside the open front door. It reminded me of the open cabin door Terry and I had stepped through as kids, twenty years ago. Despite my downhill and outside vantage of the interior,
