Monsters (Ashes Trilogy #3)

either. He reached into the box to rummage for sugar. “Last thing we

need is a martyr.”

Because his back was turned, he missed her expression. He would live to regret that.

37

“Look, unless you have a better idea, keeping him locked up ought to be fine. I mean, he’s not a ghost or a zombie or Lazarus.” Jayden ran a hand through his light brown mop. “The dogs gave him a pass, so we know he isn’t turning. You need to take a breath, Hannah. This kid being alive isn’t a miracle any more than Ellie’s a superhero.”

“She dragged a boy easily twice her body weight.” Hannah sipped anise tea, rolling the steaming drink around her tongue, enjoying the light aroma of sweet licorice. The fact that the drink was still hot, almost a half hour after brewing, was nearly as wonderful. Equipped with its own woodstove, this second-story bedroom was toasty warm, and spacious, with its own sitting area. It was also the only room that could be locked from the outside, unusual in an Amish home. Sometimes Hannah wondered if the previous owners had been forced to keep a lunatic relative under lock and key, like Mr. Rochester squirreling away crazy Bertha.

Now, if we can keep Ellie from camping out in the hall. Reluctant to let Chris out of her sight, the little girl had argued for moving into the sickroom. Thank goodness for Eli: Ellie, he’s not a pet.

“You know that death house,” she said. “There’s no way she could’ve gotten Chris to the ramp, much less hoisted him across the saddle. She doesn’t have the strength.”

“Which doesn’t make it a miracle. In an emergency, more adrenaline means increased blood flow to muscles and, therefore, more strength. You know the science as well as I do.”

“Granted, but science doesn’t explain it all. And what about the crows? Ravens and crows and sparrows are psychopomps.” She’d lugged up books from her collection downstairs and now tapped a text from a sophomore seminar: Encyclopedia of Myth, Magic, and Mysticism. “Guides to help the soul reach the afterlife.”

“And bring a soul to a newborn.” Jayden shrugged. “I read the same entry. Angels performed the same function. You saying that crows brought this kid’s soul back?”

Or were drawn there to take it away. She stared into her mug. “I don’t know what I mean. There are just too many questions for which I have no answers.”

“Which, I repeat, does not make any of this a miracle.” Jayden eyed her askance. “I know you and Isaac do the hexes and charms, but you don’t still believe all that, do you? I mean, you went to college.”

Oh, she could tell him a couple stories. Amish pow-wow and folk magic paled compared to the weird rituals she’d seen from some kids at school who decided they were Wiccans. “But all sympathetic magic has some basis in fact. The brain’s wired to seek the mystical, so . . .”

“Just because we’re hardwired to want to believe doesn’t make it true.”

She could easily point out that there must be some evolutionary advantage to belief or out-of-body experiences. Hard science was a language Jayden would understand. He demurred to Isaac and Hannah about the hex signs, the Brauche bags, and charms because he saw no harm. Besides, she was the botanist and Isaac’s apprentice, with just enough physiology and biology under her belt to understand which folk remedies might actually be helpful.

“Okay. Fine. It’s not magic,” she said. “You got a theory?”

“I’ve got ideas. I think he”—Jayden tipped his head toward the bed and the boy under a heap of comforters—“is a combination of serendipity and really good luck. There’s a logical explanation for why he survived. We just don’t know what. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t science behind it. That’s like saying thunder’s Thor’s hammer. A much bigger problem is what to do when he wakes up.”

“If he does.” While Chris’s color had improved in the last hour, the blush coming back to his nails and gums, he showed no signs of waking. If he really was asleep. She honestly didn’t know. In the hush, his raw, jagged breaths were very loud but normal, if you were dreaming. The rough gasps Ellie heard might not have been proper breathing at all, not in the technical sense of drawing in air. It was normal for people on the verge of death—and those teetering on the edge of a deep coma—to gasp.

Except I saw that already; I listened to this boy die, and now he’s come back to life?

“If ?” Jayden frowned. “But I thought you said he’s dreaming.”

“I think so, but he’s been like this for hours. Ellie said he was in REM back at the death house.” From her exam, it was clear that Chris wasn’t in any coma or other state of unconsciousness described in the books at her disposal. For all intents and purposes, Chris was deep in the sleep of the dreaming dead, a state from which he couldn’t or wouldn’t be roused. Lord knows, she’d tried: shone her tiny penlight in his eyes, pricked him with a needle, shouted, squirted icy water into his ears. Zip. “REM sleep shouldn’t last this long.”

“But you said there are people who have breakthrough episodes of REM all the time.”

“Those who have narcolepsy, yes. It’s the closest match.” She placed a hand on the topmost book in her stack, Standard Textbook of Clinical Neurology, Tenth Edition. The solidity of those embossed letters against her palm was reassuring. “It’s not an illness or true sleeping sickness. It’s a disorder, like diabetes, where people are overcome with an urge to sleep.”

“But you said narcoleptics have these really vivid hallucinations.”

“Hypnagogic, yeah. They’re not true dreams.” She bracketed a sliver of air between two fingers. “They happen in this very narrow window between dreams and wakefulness.”

“So how do you know he’s not on a really wild trip? Isn’t that what the mushroom was for?” Jayden flicked a finger at a hand-stitched leather diary. “Not to kill but help you dream?”

“According to the original recipe. The encyclopedia says the Ojibwe drank the decoction in order to help the soul find its way to the Land of the Ghosts.”

“By way of visions, right? Weird dreams? Like, they took a helluva trip?”

“Yes, in low doses. And in higher doses, it kills you,” Hannah said, a little impatient now. What a formula using hallucinogenic mushrooms was doing in an old handwritten journal of Amish Brauche spells and pow-wow charms, she had no clue. Neither did Isaac. They both supposed the original Amish settlers had incorporated local customs. But why this decoction from this particular mushroom? While the old ways involved a fair amount of folk magic and white witchcraft—and most practitioners were Pennsylvania Dutch—as a rule, the Amish weren’t into ecstatic experiences. If she were back in Houghton, she could consult the university library, the science department’s database, maybe figure it out, but . . . She gave the idea an irritable mental shove. Wishing would get her nowhere. “I know all that, Jayden, but isn’t the more pressing question, why isn’t Chris dead?” And what brought him back?

“That’s easy. The dose is weight-dependent and you had to guess. He was so weak already, he slipped away fast and you figured you’d given him enough.”

She’d already thought of the same thing. “I accept that. But think, Jayden. It’s really cold. Why haven’t his tissues frozen? Or let’s say that, by some miracle, his core temperature didn’t drop far enough. That still leaves hands, fingers, toes, his ears. But he doesn’t have frostbite. His wounds are half healed. How did that happen?” She didn’t bother pointing out that a badly lacerated liver ought to be a death sentence all by itself. That and his collapsed lung were why she’d poisoned Chris in the first place. Letting him slip away into sleep was a final kindness.

Looks like you were wrong about that, too. Which brought up unsettling questions about the other children to whom she’d given the poison. But you had no choice. They were turning. The dogs told you so. Once that happens, there’s no coming back. As far as they knew. Considering the people-eater’s limited menu, just how would you keep someone like that alive long enough to find out?

“Doesn’t it say in the encyclopedia that the old Vedic recipe used honey and that it was supposed to make you immortal?” When she only gave him a look, Jayden shrugged. “Look, you have to get past this. I accept there’s science underneath all this. But we’ll never explain it without a detailed chemical analysis and a couple dozen experiments.”

“So, take this resurrection on faith?” She couldn’t resist. Clinging to science was, when you got right down to it, just a god of a different flavor.

“Ha-ha. Let’s hypothesize, all right? For whatever reason, his metabolic rate slowed down. There are precedents in nature. Many species of fish and insects and flies can live perfectly well in intense cold. They manufacture glycerol from fat, which lowers the freezing point of their blood. And before you tell me that he’s not a fly or fish, I’ll remind you that the human body also makes glycerol as a by-product of fat metabolism. So what if this particular mushroom also stimulates the production of glycerol? Then he’d be protected. His body would cool down, but his core and brain wouldn’t croak.” He pointed at the neurology text. “It says in there that they put coma patients on cooling blankets and used drugs to lower body temperature.”

“To protect the brain,” she said. “I know. But that’s still a lot of ifs.”

“A heck of a lot easier to accept than a miracle. There’s also something else we’re not considering. Maybe he’s just, you know, different.” Jayden tapped his temple. “Something about his brain protected him from the poison and turned it into something else. I mean, think about us. We ought to be people-eaters and we’re not. You can say it’s a miracle, but I’ll bet if there were scientists, they’d eventually figure out why we’re still okay.”