Elatsoe: Chapters 1–5

There were the mundane ones: sit, stay, heel, play dead (literally! wink, wink!), and track scents. Moreover, the door had been opened to a bunch of marvelous supernatural powers.

He just had to learn them without causing too much incidental chaos.

In response, Kirby turned fully visible, as if somebody had flipped a switch from "shimmery transparent" to “opaque.”

Paranormal vibrations hummed through her bones. She felt like a tuning fork, one resonating with worry.

Sometimes, as Ellie walked home from school, she noticed people on the abandoned bridge. It drew even greater crowds at night. Darkness protected graffiti artists. They climbed forty, fifty, sixty feet above the river to paint the highest trusses.

It was possible—likely, even—that those who climbed bridges at night were more resilient than mere humans.

From a hundred-year-old oak tree that dominated her modest lawn, a barn owl hooted twice.

The second kind of owl, though, Owl-with-a-capital-O, was a bad omen times ten. Owl will wait until your life skirts the precipice of tragedy and shove you straight into the abyss.

Brick factory buildings flanked the river, their facades crumbling, their windows dark and occasionally cracked.

Their bites would stitch a quilt of welts and ring-shaped rashes across her flesh.

Darkness obscured the view, and there were no pedestrians to avoid.

"That's fine. Just stay behind the velvet rope."
He seemed ambivalent to her bicycle, so Ellie wheeled it inside to prevent theft.

She sat and basked in butter-smelling air, comforted by the relative calm.

There, Ellie saw a single phrase painted on the highest horizontal beam: HIS LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.

Ellie's skin was prone to hyperpigmentation; every scrape, scratch, and blemish left a deep brown impression for months.

As a young woman, Six-Great visited the southern Kunétai—the Rio Grande River—to investigate a series of disappearances. People were vanishing near its fertile estuary.

Horses, skittish things, did not enjoy the company of ghosts, and her dogs could tote her supplies by sled.

There was no time for reverie.

Was Jay prescient? He had a psychic auntie, but that didn't mean anything.

She touched the empty space where Trevor's smiling face used to be. The absence made her house feel subtly unwelcoming.

Ellie had heard the dark and violent stories about human ghosts. They were rare and fleeting things that almost always left violence in their wake.

Her father stepped back, perturbed.

Judging by his furrowed brow, that was an exaggeration, at best.

Her father adopted a dry tone, the kind he used to talk about clinical details from work. “Your cousin's injuries are consistent with trauma from a high-speed collision.”

Crying helped blunt the edge of loss, and Ellie wanted her current pain to stay sharp. To prod her in the ribs until Trevor was avenged.

The prospect that somebody might comfort her was viscerally upsetting, although Ellie didn’t know why.

The United States tracked cursed individuals through Vampiric Citizen Centers. The VCCs provided yearly checkups to monitor curse progression. Once deleterious side effects crossed a “safe” threshold, the cursed were moved to a sanatorium until death.

He sat straighter, intrigued.

He thrust his hands in his jean pockets. Tragically, his pants were so tight, he reached an impasse at the knuckles.

It was the old fist bump vs. shake conundrum: if she didn’t act decisively, the confusion would transform into a cringeworthy series of half-greetings and awkward laughter.

Unfortunately for mere mortals, the truss was shaped like an X. It was easy to climb the first half, but scaling the crisscross juncture ought not be attempted in skinny jeans.

As the downstream current drew her under the bridge, she breathed deeply and slowly, filling her lungs with buoyant air.

After Six-Great reached the southern Lipan band, she requested two things: a net large enough to ensnare a bison and something that belonged to the missing boy who visited her dream.

Even their paranormal sense of smell was confounded by the river.

A copse of juniper trees grew nearby; Six-Great sat beneath them and waited.

The first was shaped like it belonged to a large river gar, and the second, which was roughly human-shaped and malleable as clay, protruded from the top of its head like a mask.

She scrutinized the Herotonic. It seemed calm. Safe.

“Mom thought I was being—in her words—obstinate,” Ellie said.

Oberon’s line was known to have a stronger-than-typical knack for magic, although the reason for that trend was unknown, like many quirks of the alien dimension.

Her father pulled a comic book from the shelf. The cover depicted a brown woman wearing a billowing red cape.