Squeaky leather chirped and groaned under Andy as she shifted her weight in the uncomfortable chair across from the Professor’s desk. The Professor was a big man, bald and pale. He wore a white lab coat, the kind you’d expect doctors to wear in a place like this, but his was yellowing with age, and it was tattered a little along the sleeves. The Professor smoked a thin cigarillo that he ashed into an empty coffee mug sitting on the desk between them, and he made the whole office — a grand room with mahogany walls and high ceilings — smell of smoke. Maybe it was the smoke that made Andy squirm in her chair, but probably not. The Professor didn’t squirm, though as the smoker he’d be used to the smell. Dr. Fig, the Stoddard-Barclay’s general practitioner when it came to all magical health concerns, was sitting beside her in a similar squeaky chair but he didn’t squirm either. Even Andrea, Andy’s youngest, who insisted on coming with her mother to this place so that she didn’t have to bring her sister Mia alone, seemed content. She was sitting in a stiff wooden chair by the back wall near the door, contently reading her book, staying quiet, and being very well-behaved without an inch of squirming. No, it wasn’t the smoke that made Andy squirm, it was this place, the Institute for Paranormal Trauma. She hated this place.
“Interesting.” The Professor flipped through the files on his desk, reading over Mia’s case file, smoking and thinking his way through it. Andy leaned forward, a bit too eager, trying to get a glimpse of what he had read that made him remark out loud. They had been there for almost five minutes, sitting in that quiet room with him reading and smoking, and he hadn’t said as much as a peep the whole time. But Andy couldn’t read upside down, and Dr. Fig put a hand on her arm to settle her back down into her chair. He trusted the Professor, he trusted this place, and she trusted Dr. Fig, even if she couldn’t shake this horrible, horrible feeling.
“My colleague here is the best in his field,” Dr. Fig said after a few more minutes of silence passed. He must’ve sensed Andy’s apprehension and felt the need to repeat his friend’s credentials. Where the Professor was wide and pale, Dr. Fig was short and dark. His naturally curly hair had been chemically straightened and was sticking upright and to an angle like a crooked candle wick.
“I’m sure he is,” Andy said back. “We need the best.”
“Of course, of course,” Dr. Fig said. “Nothing but the best. Nothing but the best.”
A few more minutes passed. More reading. More smoking. More thinking. Andy tugged nervously at the hem of her skirt. What was making this all so much worse was that Mia wasn’t there with them in the room. From the moment they arrived at the Institute, nurses and orderlies were swarming all around them to check Mia in. It was a chaotic swirl of energy and Andy felt like her attention was being drawn and quartered, pulled in every which direction. There was the paperwork, the attention she was giving Mia who she pushed in a wheelchair, and she needed to keep her eye on Andrea. Andrea may have looked like a teenager but she was still very much a little girl, a little girl who cared deeply about her family and was prone to getting swept up in emotions. Andy had to balance that out and make sure all of her exits were counted.
“It seems to me that young miss Mia is in the right place.” When the Professor finally spoke he did so with a big, booming voice, more of a contrast to Dr. Fig’s gentle, sing-songy way about him. Andy lit up when the Professor finally finished.
“Can you help her?” She asked.
“If anyone can, it’s me.” There wasn’t arrogance in the Professor’s voice, simply confidence. His smile eased Andy some. “I’d like to walk through this with you if you don’t mind, it’ll help me better treat her. She hasn’t spoken in how many days?”
“Since Friday,” Andy said. “Friday night. Since it happened.” It was Monday now. Andy slowly closed her eyes and swallowed down the pain of that before getting back to the strength she needed as a parent.
“And no one was there in the room when it happened, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Where were you?” Again, the Professor’s voice didn’t hold malice. He wasn’t accusing Andy of anything, he was simply fishing.
“Asleep,” she said. “Asleep on the couch with my wife. Mia had been sick all day and her sister Avery was sitting with her.”
“Was the witch a… blood sister?”
Andy shook her head. “No. Avery was adopted. Mia,” she sniffed and wiped her nose, “Mia is too, though she’s from another world, a parallel world. She was the daughter of a parallel version of myself and my wife and when her universe was destroyed she came here.”
“So this isn’t the girl’s first run in with substantial trauma involving the supernatural?” The professor asked.
Again, Andy shook her head.
“Tell me about the day leading up to it?” The Professor asked, jotting some things down in his notebook. “You say that Mia had been sick all day. Sick how?”
“We thought it was just a cold,” Andy said. “Or a stomach bug or something, she had been up since early in the morning. She couldn't keep anything down, that’s why I was asleep by then. I had been up with her and was drained.”
“Then they found the mark on her arm,” Dr. Fig added, waving a wispy finger around.
“Right,” Andy nodded. “In the afternoon. It appeared under her skin and it didn’t take us long to figure out it was a hex. Avery wasn’t just a witch, she was… she was a very special witch, and a very clever girl. She cut the hex out and we thought that was the end of it. We thought Mia would get better after that and for a little while she was, she was just tired, you know? Sleeping a lot.”
“And then…”
“And then… it happened.” Andy swallowed and closed her eyes.
“The hex was already enrooted in her soul,” the Professor said. “Cutting the mark away, clearing her in the normal sense, it only held off what was already inevitable. This hex, it commanded her to kill the witch? Her sister?”
Andy’s eyes stung with tears and turned red. She sniffed and took a moment to gather herself. Then another. And another. Dr. Fig put a hand on her back to soothe her. She couldn’t stop the tears from falling but she had to hold herself together. She knew Andrea was near by and even though she never hid her emotions from her children, she knew the importance to be strong for them too. Andy nodded, unable to get any words out, but she answered the question anyway.
“And soon after it was over, that’s when you found them,” the Professor said, as if he was learning more from Andy’s emotional reaction to recounting what happened on Friday night than he could just reading it on the page. “Mia, controlled by the hex, pushed her sister down the stairs and cracked her face in with the shell of a pet turtle until the turtle and the face turned to soup in her hands. She witnessed the whole horrible thing, felt powerless as she watched herself murder her own sister, and she shut down soon after, once you managed to pull her away, yes?”
Andy managed a weak, “Yes.” And she nodded along to accompany it.
The Professor ashed out his cigarillo in his mug and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk. “Mrs. Stoddard-Barclay, I can’t promise you that any of this is going to be easy, but what I can say is that Mia is in good hands here. We will work through her trauma, have her come to terms with what happened, what can still happen, and what is outside of her control, and we will give her the tools to manage the aftermath of this horrible… tragedy.”
“How long?” Andy dug tissues out of her bag and was wiping her face clean now.
“Hard to say.” the Professor shrugged. “My normal answer is as long as it takes. We’ll keep her here, treat her well, and get the ball moving, and we’ll discharge her and send her home at the earliest possible convenience. The work I do is only half of it. The strong family support system, that’s the rest. I want to get Mia talking and back home as soon as we can, but it’s important we don’t rush this. The last thing we need is to set her back even more.”
Andy nodded and contained herself. “What about visiting? Will we be able to visit?”
“Of course,” the Professor said. “Though realistically, it should be limited encounters. You and your wife are welcomed for a short check in daily. I’d recommend not bringing any of Mia’s siblings more than once a week.”
It was another fifteen minutes of conversation until the paperwork was signed and the professor was walking Andy, Andrea, and Dr. Fig through the polished white halls of the Institute toward the exit. Everything looked so clean there, so clinical. But why did that make Andy’s stomach churn even more aggressively? Andy had her arm around Andrea as they walked and the Professor was walking through the list of things he’d be calling to update Andy with daily, and Andy committed it all to memory.
“Would… would it be okay if I said goodbye?” Andy asked before they reached the main lobby.
The Professor looked skeptical of the idea at first, squinting and thinking, but eventually he relented, saying yes, but it was best if she went alone. Andy explained why Andrea couldn’t come with her best she could, and then told her to wait with Dr. Fig while she followed the Professor to where they were keeping Mia. It was a long walk through identical hallways but eventually, Andy got to where she was going. The big metal door was locked when they got there — for her safety, the Professor assured — and when he opened it up for Andy, she went inside and cautiously approached her near catatonic teenage daughter.
“Hi, Mia,” Andy said softly, trying to keep from crying. “It’s mom.”
Mia said nothing back. She stared off at nothing on the wall, rarely blinking, a blank look on her face.
The room was even whiter than the hallway had been. The walls were padded, so was the floor. Mia sat on a basic looking white chair by a basic looking white bed. There was a shower stall and a toilet and sink on the other side of the room, but the rest of it was bare, blank, and empty just like her traumatized daughter. Mia was pale beneath the star field of freckles on her face. Even the orange of her hair seemed to be missing some of its natural shine. Andy approached Mia slowly and got down to one knee in front of her, taking her hand and holding it tightly. Her skin was cold to the touch.
“We’re going to get you better, sweet heart,” Andy explained, unsure if Mia was even listening. “I promise you, we’re going to get you better. We all know it wasn’t you, we all know you didn’t mean to do what happened. We’re… we’re going to get Avery back, I don’t know how yet but we will. And we need you back, too. We love you, Mia, my brave, strong girl.” Andy dug into her purse and pulled out a plain looking circular wooden necklace made out of Buckthorn. It belonged to Mia’s namesake, Mia Allen, the woman who gave her body so Andy could continue to live. It was a symbol of strength in the Stoddard-Barclay family, one that had a deep symbolism with Mia, and she curled it up in her daughter’s fingers for her to hold on to while she got better. “We love you, Mia,” she repeated. “We love you.”
Leaving the Institute for Paranormal Trauma was harder than Andy thought it would be, and she had been preparing for it to be pretty damn hard. She walked through the gates holding Andrea’s hand as they stepped out into the perpetual night that was Necropolis City. They had to travel to the dangerous city of the dead — the city between cities — in order to find Mia the help she needed, and now that they were leaving the Institute behind Andy wondered if maybe this was what was causing all the dread inside of her. It wasn’t the building, or the Professor, or any of the treatment her daughter would have to undergo in order to get better, it was this place. Necropolis wasn’t the safest place in the world, especially for humans like Mia, and leaving her there only meant that Andy was not going to have a good night sleep again until she was back home.
“C’mon, sweetie, we’ll be home soon,” Andy said to Andrea as she quickened her pace. Andrea nodded and held her hand tighter.
“Okay, mama,” she said, clutching her chapter book under her arm, careful not to lose it.
They reached the end of the driveway, that fed into a group of alley mouths, just before the main road that would take them to their exit, when Andy noticed a familiar looking blonde woman sitting on a motorcycle in one of the alley mouths. She smoked a cigarette and gave Andy a wave when they made eye contact.
“Morgan?” Andy squinted.
“Morgue,” the woman said back to her in a thick Australian accent. She blew smoke over her shoulder and slid off her bike, moving to meet Andy and Andrea half way. “Just Morgue is fine.”
Morgue ‘N Graves, as she liked to call herself, was a human hunter of sorts who focused on the migration patterns of an Australian pack of werewolves that she kept promising would cause Claire a world of trouble. She also happened to be related to one of Mollie’s girlfriends — er, ex-girlfriend? It was hard to tell anymore — and although Morgue had a bit of a foul mouth on her and was rough around the edges, they were on the same side. Surprisingly, it made Andy feel a little better seeing a familiar face in a place like this. It didn’t make Necropolis any less dangerous, but maybe it meant her and Andrea were a little safer.
“What are you doing here?” Andy asked, approaching and reaching out for a handshake.
“Looking for you, actually,” Morgue said. “Kept me ear to the ground, had a feeling you’d be turning up round here sooner or later. Happy it was sooner rather than later. Haven’t had a good sleep in some time. I reckon I’m overdue.”
“Andrea, I don’t know if you met Morgue before,” Andy introduced her daughter. “Morgue is Ophelia’s aunt.”
“Oy, little ankle biter, good to meetchya.” Morgue went to shake the kid’s hand too. “You look just like yer mums, you do, bloody uncanny.”
“So you were looking for me?” Andy refocused the conversation.
“Right, right,” Morgue flicked her cigarette away and dug into her leather jacket to pull out a few photographs she had. “I know you and yours have been having troubles the past couple of days. I think what I’ve been getting on with might help ya with that.” She handed Andy the pictures. “I’ve been tracking this bloke for days now, ever since he got into Texas. Caught him snagging that bloke late last week. Bagged him, tossed in his boot, and carted him off to New Orleans where he sold him off to some vampy.”
“Copy,” Andy sighed when she flipped through the photographs and saw that the man being kidnapped was a man she called Copy, though if he had a real name it was Andy. Copy was a soul duplicate of Andy. She hadn’t heard any updates about him in some time, but she knew he was out there. If the vampires had Copy they were probably able to use him to learn more about her, which meant they learned more about her family, which explained how the witches knew how to use Mia to get to Avery. “Do you know where they took him?”
Morgue shook her head. “Not a clue,” she said. “I’m more interested in the big bloke with the scruffy beard. He’s a mean Dingo, the second to his dad... Goes by Junior. He’s back in Texas. Just figured you’d want those photos, maybe show them to that Alpha wife of yours.”
“Yeah, hey, thanks Morgue. These… these are huge.” Andy smiled.
“Ah, I reckon you’d have done the same for me if you had something that helped me out in a time of need. Answers are important when we don’t got any. Hey, you lot need a ride back? The streets down here aren’t the safest and you two are small enough to fit. I got room for three on me bike.” Morgue leaned in to Andrea. “What do you say, kiddo, ever ride a motorcycle before?”
A degree of pain still lingered as they left the Institute behind and Necropolis soon after. Andy would ache with pain and regret with every night Mia spent there, but the answers were out there, she knew they were. As Morgue sped Andy and Andrea back home, Andy told herself that she was going to find the answers she needed to make sense of all this. She would put her family back together sooner or later, and when they were whole again, she would figure out what she had to do next.
