Waiting for Sunday

chapter 12 - hero of none

The car ride is anything but stable, the backroads littered with potholes and sharp curves that make Lillie's stomach churn. Lillie alternates her eyes between Felix, laying on his back across the backseat with his head resting in her lap, and Nao, driving in near perfect silence. As for Moses, she can only see the back of his head. His neck is tense.

Lillie swallows, hovers her hand over Felix's chapped lips. A sputtering, featherlight breath brushes her palm like a soft breeze. Despite Quincy's observation, he is breathing, but for how much longer?

"Careful."

Lillie looks up, her eyes catching Nao's in the rearview mirror. They are the sort of eyes that catch you from a museum wall and never let you go, a soft coffee brown in the tangerine light of the setting sun. He goes on, "I meant it when I said not to touch his bare skin. It'll get you, too."

"What is it?"

Nao pushes out a harsh exhale, drumming his fingers along the steering wheel. There's three black bands tattooed onto his pointer finger, like rings sunk beneath his skin.

"What the hell is happening?" Lillie adds, as once the tide of her exasperation has broken she has no choice but to let it all go. "Who are you?"

"I'm Nao. Not that it matters," he answers curtly. His eyes shift away from hers, focusing back on the winding road ahead of them. "You must have been real desperate to go to Shay, by the way. She ain't a real witch. Just heard one of her faraway ancestors might've been one and started getting some lofty ideas."

Moses chuckles, but it's a dry sound. "I could've guessed."

"Only reason I know her at all is 'cause her father's one of my oldest clients."

"Clients?" Lillie asks.

"I don't run nothing out of a barn like Shay does, you get it? If you really know something about magic, you know how dangerous it is to just...advertise it like that."

It takes Lillie a moment to say it out loud. It doesn't feel real, but if she's honest, nothing about this day does. "You're...some sort of witch?"

Nao looks at her, then away again. He says, "Close enough."

Felix tenses in Lillie's lap and makes a horrible noise, a hacking, body-shattering cough that sounds like it rattles his ribs.

"Felix?" Lillie cries, and as he coughs again, two small, crumpled leaves fall from his mouth and into her lap. "Felix? What—"

"Shit." Nao steps on the gas, the truck lurching forward suddenly enough that Lillie almost rams her face into the seat. "If it's already in his lungs, we're fucked."

In another two minutes, they pull up to an old ranch house with gray wood peeking out from beneath the white paint, vines climbing up the house's siding as if in a warm embrace. Nao and Moses hop out of the car, and Lillie carefully squeezes out from under Felix so they can take him again. He's still coughing, and his lips are beginning to turn a faint shade of blue.

Lillie pauses, watching Quincy's Subaru and her own sedan pull up into the driveway, headlights splitting the settling night.

"Ponytail!"

Lillie turns at the sound of Nao's voice.

"The door, would you, sweetheart?"

She runs to meet them at the front door, and has to tug it a few aggressive times before it opens. "It's Lillie," she says once she has her breath back.

"Lillie. Right. You'll have to forgive me; I've been a little focused on saving your boyfriend's life."

"He's not—" Lillie starts, but Nao has already moved on, he and Moses swinging right to take Felix into the living room, and depositing him there on the floor with a less than graceful thump. On one of the sofa chairs is a short-haired cattle dog, who immediately picks up his head at the commotion and emits a concerned bark.