She’d awakened today with an ominous emptiness in the pit of her stomach and a heavy heart, and that sense of pending doom hadn’t left her all day long. It eased as she’d sat beside Carl outside and chatted with Wanda, probably because those were all things that brought her joy.
But as the day crept into late afternoon and Nina and Marty prepared to do a quick round of trick-or-treating with their girls, that doom grew.
Calamity skidded into the room, sliding right into Poppy, who sat on the floor in front of some drawers beneath Yash’s old bed. She hadn’t really bothered to look around much since she’d been here. Moving in had felt like an invasion of someone else’s space. Add to that Rick’s original dislike of all things familiar, and she’d avoided even unpacking her overnight bag.
This had been Yash’s, and his imprint was clear. But today? Today he was everywhere. Every single thing she looked at in the shed screamed his name in big, bold letters.
“Whatcha got there, Pop Star?”
She pointed to the hidden bottom she’d mistakenly come across when she was looking for her ballet slippers. Arch had tidied up, and she couldn’t find them anywhere. The bottom of the drawer, lined in a velvet lavender material, had bubbled up and the strange notion she had to pull it back at all costs, the surge of urgency, made her do just that.
“Look!” she waved a hand at the scads of pictures and papers.
“You think this is all the Yash guy’s pictures of Rick?” Marty asked, coming to sit next to Poppy. “If he took off like a bat out of hell, I guess the dirty SOB didn’t want any reminders of the boy he raised like his own.”
But Poppy shrugged her shoulders. She heard the words, the tinge of venom associated with them, but that just didn’t sit right.
“Let’s find out.” Sifting through the pictures, Poppy couldn’t help but smile, her heart clenching. There were tons of them. Rick in a Boy Scout uniform. She almost laughed out loud. Of course, he’d been a Boy Scout.
Rick in a Santa hat next to a stack of partially opened presents, wearing a pair of batman pajamas. Rick building a snowman, his nose red from the cold. Rick with a big turkey drumstick. Rick getting his high school diploma. Rick with Avis wearing hard hats at what looked like an earlier development project. Rick surrounded by a circle of small children with a building of some kind in the background. The back of the picture read, Africa, 2011.
“He built things in Africa,” she whispered softly, staring at Rick, sweat glistening on his forehead, his dark hair slicked back.
“Well, our Rick isn’t such a dick after all, is he?” Wanda said, tapping the picture with a smile.
And the final pictures, Rick with a man in a dark brown robe with an embroidered pattern down the front, that looked exactly like what Poppy had pictured someone doling out advice would wear. His face was kind amidst the wrinkles lining his cheeks, his eyes shining and happy, his snow-white hair but fringe surrounding his mostly bald head.
In one picture, he had his arm around a young Rick, protectively tucking him to his side. In another, Rick’s head was thrown back as he laughed, apparently at something Yash had said or done. Yash sat next to him at a table, his hand stretched across the surface to rest on Rick’s, his eyes laughing, too, his smile wide.
There were easily twenty or so of Rick and Yash, and even one of Yash by the shed, tending the gardens she had earlier enjoyed sitting beside.
But it was the very last one she touched that caught her attention. Fanning her hand over the pile, she revealed a picture of Avis, Rick, and Yash, standing in front of Littleton.
Her heart began to drum up a beat of raging panic as she looked closer, leaning forward at the waist. Everyone was smiling but Yash. In fact, he looked quite pained. Reaching out, she picked the picture up to examine it more closely—which was exactly the moment her stomach began to roll much in the way it had when she’d puked an aura.
A groan slipped from her lips as her fingertips burned and she fought a scream of agony as the white-hot pain seared through her belly, forcing her to roll to the ground.
“Poppy?” Marty bellowed, grabbing her shoulders. “Poppy! What’s happening?”
She gripped the picture harder, her fingers clamping onto the shiny paper so hard, the bones in her fingers cracked, and her arms shook.
As quickly as it began, as severe as the pain became, it just as swiftly dissipated before the picture caught fire.
Poppy’s fingers let go in reflective response, flexing outward until she hissed a protest.
“Fire in the hole!” Calamity yelped with a hiss, bringing Nina from around the corner.
“Got this!” Nina yelled as Poppy dropped the picture, and the vampire yanked her wand from behind her back, aiming it directly at the flames.
The spray of yellow mist from her wand extinguished the fire in a mere second, the remaining smoke wisping to the ceiling in threads of acrid black tendrils.