Buckley Township, Michigan, Wednesday Evening

[arboreal_priestess]

They had left the main highway behind them easily an hour ago, and were now wending their way through dense forest, traveling along roads that could have used some serious repair, and maybe a few closures. The potholes were big enough to qualify as small ponds, at least when they were full of water, and this far into Michigan's Upper Peninsula, they were always filled with water. Michigan might not be on Portland's level when it came to being damp, but it was making a good effort, and Verity wasn't ready to count it out yet.

Liam was asleep in the passenger seat when they crossed the line into Buckley Township - they'd had a late night last night celebrating the new year and he'd taken the earlier shift driving while she'd napped. Verity pulled the SUV off to the side of the road and stared into the imposing tree line that surrounded them on what felt like all sides. The sky was a thin sliver of blue overhead, already trending toward sunset. Chicago and the Carmichael Hotel were eight hours of hard driving behind them. If they didn't want to spend the night in the SUV, she would need to push on, and soon.

She didn't move.

It was strange, being back in Buckley: it was like she was a compass, forever seeking magnetic north, and had just locked on to her target, no matter how much she wanted to go in a different direction. This was where her family's tenure in America had started. This was where, for better or for worse, the majority of their bodies were buried. Her grandparents had met here. Her great-grandparents had died here. It was impossible to understand the history of the Healy-Price family as it currently stood without also understanding Buckley - what had gone right there, what had gone wrong there, and what had gone unbearably weird there.

Liam	Generally speaking, Liam got by on far less sleep than your average human needed; one of the perks of being part-energy-based-alien. But apparently even that was no match for the rhythmic lull of a vehicle making its way down the highway. By the time they'd reached those pothole-laden backroads, he was asleep enough that even hitting those didn't jolt him awake, nor did Verity pulling off and stopping at the side of the road.
Verity	The sun was losing its hold on the sky when they came rolling down Mill Road, Verity making up for time lost reminiscing. She pulled the truck up in front of an old two-story farmhouse set way back from the street and surrounded by a white picket fence that wouldn't have done any good against anything that really wanted to get inside. She leaned over and shook Liam's shoulder. "Hey," she said. "Hey, wake up. I need you to see this." When Verity's paternal grandmother talked about Buckley, it was always with longing mixed up so tightly with loss that no one could see the seams between them. When Verity's father and her Aunt Jane talked about Buckley, it was with the deep relief of people who felt that they'd managed to avoid some terrible fate. As for the members of Verity's generation, they were caught somewhere in the middle - and wasn't that always the case? Buckley was in their blood. But not everything that got into your blood was good for you. A lot of the things that got into your blood could be fatal.
Liam	"Hmm?" Liam rolled his head toward Verity as he opened his eyes. He blinked for a moment, still a little sleep-addled and slightly confused by the unfamiliar surroundings (and unfamiliar sensation of waking up inside a vehicle), and then he sat up a little straighter, stopping only when his seatbelt pulled tight against his chest and pushed him back into his seat. "Where are we?"
Verity	"Buckley. That," Verity gestured toward the farmhouse with one hand, "is the old Healy place. That's where Alexander and Enid moved to after they left the Covenant. Where every Healy was born up through my dad and aunt." Verity's generation was the first to be born anywhere else.
Liam	He ran a hand back through his hair, sending it sticking up in uneven spikes, and focused on the house. "It seems nice," he said, after a moment to collect his thoughts. He didn’t exactly have a lot to compare it to; there had been the Bachelor Pad in Fandom, and then the current Price family home in Portland, neither of which were typical examples, he figured.
Verity	"I know, right?" Verity smiled a little. "It's amazing what hard work can do. I've seen pictures of the place right after we bought it. We don't have too many photos from back then, but a lot of them are of the house. My great-great-grandparents rebuilt that thing basically from the ground up, and then, when they realized they didn't know jack about home repair, they hired some people to help them do it all again. Blood, sweat, and tears. That's what that house is made of. Mostly blood." Blood in the walls, from accidents during construction, from painted runes intended to keep the darker things the world had to offer at bay. Blood on the floors, tracked in by hunters or escaping from between clenched fingers in the time between slash and stitches. Blood on the grounds, watering every inch of the soil. If the way to own a place was to bleed for it, Verity's family would own that house and the land it sat on until the sun went cold.
Liam	Okay, maybe not so typical an example either, despite outside appearances. Liam reached to unbuckle his seatbelt and get out of the car.
Verity	Verity held up a hand to stop him. "We're not going in."
Liam	Liam frowned at her in confusion. "But- I thought your family still owned this house?"
Verity	"We do. We rent it out to people who actually want to live in Buckley, not just visit every decade or so. The folks who live there now have been living there for the past fifteen years. They're the ones who put up the fence." They had sent a letter asking for permission, which had been good of them. They hadn't asked for permission before they started cutting back the forest, thinning the tree line and removing the underbrush. Verity had been home when they sent pictures for approval. Grandma Alice had been there, too. That had been the first time Verity ever seen her cry. "They'd probably believe me if I showed up on the porch claiming to be one of the owners. I have ID, and I have my parents' number in my phone. But we'd be invading their privacy, and that isn't our house anymore. I mean, it's still our house. It's just not our home."
Liam	"But you wanted me to see it," Liam realized. It was a part of her family's history, after all. A family that he was now a part of.
Verity	And a family history that he now had a place in. Verity nodded. "It's sort of important, you know? That's where all this started. The Healys in America. All of this history leading down to you and me. You're part of this now."
Liam	"It's absolutely important," Liam agreed, a small smile lighting his face at Verity's reminder that he too was a part of this. "I just wish," and there that smile faltered a bit, "I wish I could do the same for you." The only blood tie he had left was the part-sibling Street was still trying to find, and even beyond that... the people who'd 'raised' him had done so more or less under duress.
Verity	It wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. As he was going to see as they got going. Verity started the SUV. It was better if they moved along before the tenants noticed that they were sitting on the street like a couple of weirdoes. The poor people were twitchy enough, thanks to living right on the border of a forest that they had never learned to love. "Family is...complicated," she said quietly. "Too much, too little, both can squeeze at you sometimes." It was odd, in its way. Buckley Township wasn't a big place. It was one of two Buckleys in Michigan, and almost everyone who recognized the name was thinking of the other one, the thriving town with the healthy economy and the low unexplained death rate. Their Buckley was small and quiet and fading a little more with every year that passed, sliding an inch at a time toward irrelevancy, if it wasn't already there. The people who rented their old house weren't natives and didn't have any family in the township; they were holding on as much from stubbornness as anything else. But maybe that was true of everyone who chose to keep on living here, in a place that time had passed by. Verity drove down Mill to where it met with Woodside, and followed that until they came to Old Logger's Road, which was really just a glorified logging trail, already half-returned to the wilds from which it had come. The pavement began to decay immediately after she made the turn, first becoming unstable, then becoming unreliable, and finally giving way to gravel and hard-packed dirt. The SUV bounced and jittered all around them. She could practically hear the security deposit being scraped off by the rocky soil as it destroyed their shocks. She kept on going. There was still some light in the sky, and Liam deserved to see the Parrish Place before he had to spend the night there. Old Logger's Road was relatively uninhabited. There had been several houses there once, but most of them had been left to crumble back into the land. A few skeletons still stood sentry over their foundations. They wouldn't last for much longer. The world was working against them, and nothing could endure forever. That was just the nature of entropy. They came around the final bend in the road just as the sun was entering its final descent. Verity stopped at an angle. No one was going to come driving along here, and Liam needed to see. Maybe the Parrish Place would have been more attractive by sunlight than it was by the harsh, artificial glow of the headlights, which were unforgiving of its many flaws. Probably not. The Parrish Place hadn't been a pretty house when it was new, and now, after decades of repairs and tragedies, it looked like the sort of place that should have been dripping with ghosts, so haunted that it ached. It wasn't haunted. No self-respecting ghost would have tied themselves to those walls, which were already possessed by the past. But it looked like it should have been. From the outside, it appeared to be somewhere between three and four stories tall. No one had ever been able to get a reliable count of the windows, which seemed to shift and change every time they weren't being watched. The porch sat snugly against the front of the house, thanks to some efficient repairs and maintenance, but the porch swing was missing again, and its rusty support chains dangled freely. The whole thing was painted in a streaky, weathered combination of green and brown. It looked infected, like it was so sick that it might collapse inward at any time.
Liam	It may not have been haunted, but it absolutely had a certain type of malevolent energy surrounding it. Liam, who was somewhat sensitive to those sorts of things, could tell. "This house doesn't want us here," he pointed out, probably unnecessarily.
Verity	"Nope, but it's not haunted. I have that on excellent authority."
Liam	That earned her a long-suffering sigh. "Those dead aunts of yours, I assume." He hadn't yet met either of them, but there had definitely been stories.
Verity	"They both died in Buckley. They keep a very good eye on the local hauntings. Sometimes they drop by and lecture the newer dead about their technique." Verity opened her door and climbed out of the SUV. "Come on. I'll get the mice if you'll get my overnight bag."
Liam	"'So what did you do during the winter break, Liam?' 'Oh, you know. Got married. Went on a road trip. Stayed overnight in a murder house.'" Liam grumbled, even as he was getting out of the car and heading for the trunk to get their bags.
Verity	"See? Just think of all the things you'll have to talk about with Beau and Steve!" Verity said cheerfully, as she grabbed the bag with the mice. Tellingly, they were not cheering. "Now come on. I want to make sure the generator still works. It would suck staying here overnight without lights on."
Liam	"Right, of course, it's the lack of lights that would suck," Liam said, shaking his head and following her toward the house.
Verity	Verity dropped the mice off inside, then when out to the shed to check on the generator. It still worked, and had been recently topped off with fuel: Grandma Alice had been through within the last few months. This was the closest thing she had to a home anymore, the fixed point that she circled when she wasn't running through dangerous dimensions, flipping over rocks and begging her missing husband to come home. Mom and Dad had both tried a hundred times to convince her to move to Portland. They could clear a guest room for her, they always said; they could make it her room, and she could be surrounded by her family when she needed to rest. But she'd always turned them down. This was the house where she'd lost her husband. This was the house where she was going to find him. Verity's family was strange, yes, and no stranger to loss. "Lights are good!" she announced, returning to the house.
Liam	She'd find Liam standing at the dead center of the living room, looking around like he wasn't sure whether it was safe for him to touch anything. That wasn't a bad response to the Parrish Place, really. The couch was probably originally red, before decades of use and dust wore it down to a distressing dried blood color. The wallpaper was peeling in archeological layers, revealing the tastes of at least five full redecorations. The only thing in the place that looked like it had been dusted in the last year was the bookshelf, which was loaded down with charming titles like Venomous Spirits of the American Ghostroads and What Just Bit Me? A Guide to Emergency Triage. (There was also a short stack of old Trixie Belden books on the bottom shelves, all of them well-worn and marked with multiple slips of paper. This was where Verity's Grandma Alice went to recover from the sort of things that required trauma kits and toxicology texts, after all, and she didn't have cable.) "We're really sleeping here?" demanded Liam, instead of actually reacting to her announcement. He'd been dubious enough about the prospect before entering the house, and now he was doubly so.
Verity	"Sleeping, lying awake all night and wondering what that sound we just heard was, it's all the same." Verity walked to the bag that contained the mice and knelt to open it. They looked up at her, their tiny, furry faces grave. "We're home. Do you remember the rules?"
Aeslin Priest	"Do not enter the bedroom where once the Noisy Priestess slept, before she became the Pilgrim Priestess; do not enter the library on the second floor, where once the God of Difficult Bargains and Unwanted Knowledge left us," said the head priest. "Do not run across your face in the small hours of the night, no, not even if we are afraid of the sounds in the walls and hoping that our claws will wake you."
Verity	"Very good," Verity said, and stepped away from the bag. The mice poured out and were gone, scampering off into the corners and disappearing. She turned back to Liam. "This is holy ground for them, especially since we started renting the Healy place to strangers. They have relics stored in the attic, and graves all around the foundation."
Liam	"And this is all fascinating, but why do we need to sleep here tonight?" Liam practically pleaded. It was odd; he'd certainly slept in what were objectively worse accommodations at times, and yet something about this place specifically... "It smells like mold and decomposition. I feel like the walls are watching me."
Mary	"They probably are," said a voice from behind him. Verity smiled.
Liam	Liam's response was somewhat more dramatic, as he whirled around to face the newcomer, hand reaching for his sidearm. When he shot Verity a sidelong glance and noted that she was not similarly startled, he relaxed slightly, surprised expression deepening into a scowl. "You going to introduce us?" he asked Verity with a resigned sigh. He had a fairly good idea who this must be, based on some of Verity's stories about her childhood, but a proper introduction was always nice.
Verity	"Mary!" Verity said, grinning at the ghost. "You shouldn't sneak up on people like that." She tried to sound chiding, but it had been awhile since the last time she'd seen her old babysitter.
Mary	"Technically, I didn't sneak," said Mary. "I just appeared while your back was turned. If you had any ectoplasmic sensitivity at all, you'd know when a ghost was showing up behind you." At first glance, Mary Dunlavy looked like the kids they taught back at Fandom. Young, pretty, with white-blonde hair and a Buckley High School letter jacket. But looking closer, one realized that her hair wasn't white blonde, it was just white. And her eyes...There was something wrong with Mary's eyes. Looking into them was like looking at a hundred miles of empty highway, and the crossroads that stood at the end of every long road. Which made sense, with her being a crossroads ghost and all. Dead in high school and brought back by the need to take care of her father; she'd babysat Verity's grandmother to help make ends meet. Once he died and the Healys had discovered Mary's condition, she'd been brought in full time as the family babysitter. With the Prices, family wasn't always blood, but it was always weird.
Verity	"What did I say about tormenting the new husband?" Verity asked, putting an arm around Liam's shoulders as she pouted at her dead aunt.
Mary	"Hello, new nephew," Mary said, offering Liam a nod. "I'm Mary, babysitter for generations of Healy-Prices and honorary aunt."
Liam	"Liam," he replied. Which he was sure Verity had already told her, but there was protocol to be followed here. "Not a fan of being startled under the best of circumstances, for the record." "And I may not have 'ectoplasmic sensitivity', but I've psychic sensitivity enough to tell this isn't a place generally meant for the good sort of surprises."
Mary	"There were a bunch of murders here before Tommy bought the place, or before the Covenant bought it for him," said Mary, as easily as if she were disclosing a history of termite damage. "I guess they weren't too thrilled with him, since they stuck him as far out in the sticks as they could, in a house that had a history of swamp cultists and slaughter."
Verity	"Fun for the whole family," Verity said dryly.
Liam	"The Covenant bought this place?" Liam asked, clearly surprised. Having not grown up with its spectre (excuse the turn of phrase, Mary) looming over him the way Verity's family had, he was still unacquainted with some of the finer details of her family history.
Mary	"They wanted Tommy to spy on the Healys. Alexander and Enid were still alive back then, God rest their souls, and Fran was relatively recent in her grave." Mary shook her head. "The Covenant wanted to know if the Healys were still a threat, or so they said. Personally, I think they'd heard about Alice, and wanted to bring her back into the fold before she got too committed to the family path."
Liam	"Dominic mentioned once they had what essentially equaled a breeding program," Liam mused. It hadn't surprised him; the Taelons had done much the same in his world, although more covertly. "Bringing back your grandmother would probably have made whoever oversaw that particular part of their operations very happy."
Verity	"The more I learn about the Covenant of St. George, the more I wonder how my family managed to leave without setting a lot of things on fire," Verity said philosophically. "So basically, yeah. Grandpa Thomas was supposed to spy on the Healys, but he was sort of not in the good graces of his employers, for reasons I've never been a hundred percent clear on, and so they stuck him out here."
Mary	"In the murder house," added Mary. She sounded helpful. That was never a good sign. Not for any ghostly reason. But whether by nature or nurture, the Healy-Prices came by their bratty dispositions honestly.
Liam	"Okay, I was being sarcastic when I called it a murder house, before. Do I want to know why you're also calling it a murder house?" Liam asked, already dreading the answer.
Mary	"Because the man who lived here before Tommy was Abraham Parrish, and he murdered his whole family to gain the favor of the god of the swamp," said Mary blithely. She flopped down on the scab-colored couch, stretching her arms languidly up above her head before draping them across the back of the cushions, like a teenager getting ready to tell some particularly gruesome ghost stories. Which, in a way, she was. "See, he started hearing voices. And then he started seeing visions. The usual assortment of beautiful naked ladies and unearthly flames, promising him wealth, power, eternal youth, all that good stuff, if he would just prove his faith to the swamps before they sealed the deal. So he sharpened his axe, and one night he chopped his wife and three children into mincemeat. The local authorities found the bodies, or what was left of them, anyway. And they found the axe."
Liam	"And Mr. Parrish?" asked Liam, in the tone of someone who didn't actually want to know the answer. He glanced at Verity as he asked, like he was trying to figure out just how badly he didn't want to know.
Mary	"Never found him," said Mary. She sounded like she was relishing the words. "Not most of him, anyway."
Liam	"I'm going to regret this," Liam said, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I know that I am going to regret this, even though know that if I don't ask, you'll find a way to bring it up later, probably while I'm eating, or attempting to sleep, or otherwise even more primed to regrets than I am right now. What, ah, part of the unfortunate Mr. Parrish was located?"
Mary	"His skin," said Mary blithely. "Just all hollowed out and gross and discarded on the edge of the swamp like a big ol' balloon. Guess whatever drove him to do all that murdering didn't want him anymore after it was finished."
Liam	"Right," Liam shook his head. "So again I ask why we're spending a night in the murder house?"
Verity	"Because we need to spend a night in Buckley," Verity reminded, like she wasn't the one setting the itinerary. "There's only one motel, and anyone who works there would recognize my last name and wonder why we're not sleeping here. We can't kick out the tenants of the other house we have locally. That leaves this one. It's like a remake of Haunted Honeymoon." Except how it completely was not.
Liam	"I haven't even seen that and I know that's not true," retorted Liam. "In fact, while I know I don't have much experience with what constitutes normal family traditions," since he hadn't, you know, had a family, "bringing one's new husband to the family murder house to be lectured by one of an assortment of dead aunts is distinctly abnormal." And that, of course, was when there was a knock on the door. Liam stiffened, eyes narrowing. Hadn't he just said, like five minutes ago, that he hated being startled?
Mary	Mary sat up straight. "Please, please tell me that one of you ordered a pizza before I got here," she said. "Is this place even in the delivery range for the pizza parlor?" Mary shrugged. "How am I supposed to know? Tommy used to get deliveries out here all the time."
Verity	"Yeah, because he lived here and he tipped really well and everybody wanted to be nice to the invalid Englishman so that maybe he'd leave them something in his will," Verity said, warily eyeing the door. There was already a knife in her hand. "Most of the town figured he was loaded and Grandma was a gold-digger."
Liam	"Was he loaded?" Liam couldn’t help but ask.
Verity	"He figured out how to turn mud into gold, so yeah," Verity said. Which explained a lot about the current state of Price finances, even if Verity's own were generally in shambles. The knock came again. It was just as startling the second time, and had the immediate effect of shutting down their digression and pulling their attention back to the door. Something had to be done. There was one obvious solution. "I'm going to answer it."
Mary	"If that's old man Parrish looking for his skin, tell him it's not here," said Mary. She sounded far too relaxed about the whole 'someone is knocking on the door to the abandoned murder house' situation. Being dead already probably helped.
Verity	"Fuck you," Verity said genially, and moved toward the door. She was almost there when the knock came a third time. She did a quick calculation on how many knives she had and how long it would take me to draw another if she needed to. Then she swallowed her fear and opened the door, revealing...the two boys standing on the porch. Neither of them looked to be more than twelve. Both of them were covered with mud, and soaked to the knee. Verity blinked at them.
The Kids	They blinked back. Finally, one of them worked up the courage to open his mouth. "The light was on," he said.
Verity	"Um," Verity said. That didn't seem like enough, so she followed up with, "Yes, the light was on. Is on. Because we're in here. We're not trespassing. This is my family's house."
The Kids	Their eyes widened in comic synchronization. "Your family?" asked the one who had spoken before. He seemed on the verge of saying something else, but the other one quickly shook his head.
Verity	"Yeah, I'm a Price. The family that took the place over after Mr. Parrish went off to--we are getting off-topic here. Yes, the lights are on, because we're here. My husband and I are on a road trip, and my folks asked us to swing through and check on the property." It was a little white lie, but it covered the basics, and it was close enough to the truth to be believable. It wasn't like her family had a problem lying to mundanes anyway. "Can I help you boys?"
The Kids	The one who hadn't said anything yet looked at Verity with wide, solemn eyes, said, "The bad flowers ate my brother all up and now I can never go home," and burst into tears.
Verity	"Oh," Verity said. "Well, crap." Beat. "Liam, I'm going to need you." Look, he was just better with kids, okay?
Liam	"What's going- oh," Liam said, both eyebrows shooting up as he made his way over to the door, saw Verity standing there with two dejected-looking boys. "You guys okay with coming inside?" he asked. "It's warmer in here, and you can explain to us what's going on." Well, slightly warmer, now that the generator had been going for a little bit. He was, yes, also aware that strange adults inviting kids into a house was usually frowned upon but, well. They'd been sought out. And maybe Mary's presence would mitigate things a bit? She was a babysitter after all.
Mary	In fact, Mary was there with bottles of water, leading the boys inside to sit at the kitchen table. She'd disappeared when they weren't looking, robbed a 7-11, and then reappeared with water 'from the car'. Now she and Liam were quietly talking to them, getting them to calm down and stop crying.
Verity	Once Mary had stopped working her magic - the kind that had nothing to do with being a ghost and everything to do with who she was as a person - Verity took over again. "All right," she said, sitting down across from them. "Let's try taking this from the beginning. My name is Verity Price, and this is my family's house. What are your names?"
The Kids	"I'm Joe," said the spokesboy. "This is Andy." "Hi," said Andy miserably.
Verity	"Okay, now we're getting somewhere," Verity said. "My friends are Liam and Mary, and they're going to help me find your brother, all right? What did you mean when you said that the ‘bad flowers' ate him up?"
Andy	"You're not going to believe me," said Andy dully. The first rush of excitement over finding a house with its lights on this close to the wood had faded, leaving two pre-teen boys who were utterly convinced that adults would never listen to them.
Verity	Verity considered whistling for the mice, since talking mice were always good for proving the presence of an open mind. She also considered asking Mary to turn transparent or Liam to glow. And in the end, she settled for the path of least resistance, using something that already existed in their sphere of experience. Smiling, she leaned forward a little, and said, "I'm guessing you know the history of this house, right?" They nodded. "Then you should know that we'll believe a lot more than you think, because it's never a good idea to sleep in a murder house if you don't believe stories about things that could hurt you."
Joe	The two boys exchanged another look, engaging in the complicated silent conversation that has been the purview of close friends since the dawn of mankind. Finally, they turned back to the grownups. "If you laugh, we're leaving, and since you don't know who our parents are, you can't call them," said Joe.
Verity	"Works for me," Verity said. "Mary? Liam? Any objections?"
Liam	"I for one promise not to laugh," Liam said, tone hopefully projecting earnestness.
Mary	"Hell, I'll open the door for them," said Mary. "I want to get back to the subject of pizza."
Verity	"See?" Verity offered the boys another smile. "No one here's going to laugh at you. So what happened?"
Andy	"We snuck out," said Andy. It was simple, matter-of-fact, and perfectly logical: the woods were dangerous, they probably weren't allowed to play there, and they were little boys. The woods were thus the coolest place in the world. "Me and Joe were going to go by ourselves, but Neil heard us, and he said--"
Joe	"He said he'd tell if we didn't take him with us," said Joe. He sounded incredibly affronted, like this was the greatest betrayal in the history of boyhood.
Liam	"There's no honor among thieves, kid," Liam said sympathetically. Not that he'd had a boyhood himself to draw experience from, but they didn't need to know that. "Mind if I take over?" he asked. Verity's usual interrogation methods were better suited to goons who'd broken in to their hotel room, not scared kids.
Verity	"Please," Verity said, leaning back in her chair. "Of the three of us, I'm the last one who should be the babysitter."
Liam	And while Mary might have been able to scare them into talking, Liam had a way about him that just... made people trust him, sometimes. He was fully leaning in to that right now. "We're not interested in whose fault it is," he told the boys. "We're just interested in helping your brother. So no tattling, finger pointing, or blaming. Just talk. And fast."
Andy	"We snuck out and Neil snuck out with us only there were these weird flower things in the woods, and one of them grabbed his leg and then he went all limp like he was sleeping, even though his eyes were still open, and the plant pulled him all into its petals and closed up around him and now he's gone and we're going to be in so much trouble." The words spilled out of Andy in a rush, like he had just been waiting for an excuse.
Verity	"What did they smell like?" Verity asked.
Andy	Andy stared at her like she had just grown a second head. "Apples," he said finally. "Apples and strawberries and they ate my brother." He was a little concerned that she'd missed that part. "That's why I can never go home. My parents would kill me. I'm not supposed to go into the woods. I'm sure not supposed to take my little brother with me."
Mary	"We'll figure out how to deal with your parents when we have to," said Mary. "Where in the woods were you?"
Joe	"Not far from here," said Joe. "We could see the lights from where we were. That's why we came here, and then when we saw that it was the old Price place, we thought that maybe it was the ghost, and she could help us."
Mary	"The old Price place?" said Mary, looking confused. Nobody called it the old Parrish place anymore?
Verity	"But this house isn't haunted," Verity said, also confused. Why would they be looking for a ghost here? Not just any ghost. The kids had said the ghost. A specific one.
Liam	Liam wondered if maybe they meant Verity's grandmother. That bookshelf in the living room had made it pretty clear she'd been making use of the place, but those appearances would be sporadic and unpredictable enough that it would be clear this wasn't someone's long-term residence. So... 'ghost' held a certain logic. "We're here, and we can help you," he said to the boys. "I don't think it's a good idea for you two to go back into the woods, but if you'd like to wait on the porch while Mary keeps an eye on you, we'll go and find your brother."
Andy	"Alive?" asked Andy hopefully.
Liam	Liam managed not to wince, but just barely. "That's outside our control," he admitted. "But we'll try. Verity?" he glanced at her for confirmation.
Verity	"I'm with you," Verity said. "Let's just swing by the SUV on our way out, okay?"

[Adapted from "Swamp Bromeliad," by Seanan McGuire and preplayed (and coded, yay!) by the wonderful firstofitskind. NFI, NFB as per usual. Part 1]