Free Pyxis: The Discovery (Pyxis Series) by K.C. Neal

eyes looked tired. But that was nothing new.
    “Have you heard from Ang? I didn’t see her today, and she’s, um, not answering her phone.”
    “She called in sick this morning. Tell her I hope she feels better soon.”
    “Oh yeah, I will,” I said. I was relieved she was home sick and not tied up in a dungeon somewhere with Snake Eyes, but I still felt terrible. How could I not know my best friend was home sick? How long was this silence going to last?
    After work, Brad and I stopped at Ang’s house so I could drop off some soup for her, but her mom said she was sleeping.
    That night after dinner, I was itching to pull the pyxis and from its hiding place. Focusing on a mystery might keep me from dwelling on Ang. Plus, I hoped to learn something new because I thought it might make her happy.
    I sat in my room, staring at the names on the crumbly piece of paper from the secret compartment . I had about a million questions, and, more and more, I believed my grandmother was supposed to be here, explaining all of it to me. But she was gone.
    Pyramidal union formed 1915
    P: Ruth Jensen
    S: Daniel Smith
    G: Catherine Abel
    G: Louise Sinclair
    Pyramidal union formed 1951
    P: Doris Conner
    S: Harold Sykes
    G: Dorothy Conner
    G: Evelyn Wellington
    Pyramidal union formed
    P: Harriet Jensen Corinne Finley
    S: Mason Flint
    G: Angeline Belskaia
    G:
    I examined the first set of names on the list, the one that started with my great-grandmother. She’d died long before I was born. I wondered what life in Tapestry had been like in 1915. Did teenagers party at the cove back then? I grinned at the thought of serious-faced girls in long dresses and boys in suspenders hanging out on the beach on warm summer nights, watching for twilight rainbows.
    The year—1915—nagged at me. That was a year I knew. I sat down at my desk, navigated to the Tapestry town website, and clicked on the history page.
    There it was. My pulse sped as my eyes raced down the page. Nineteen fifteen was the year of the epidemic. The bank robbery. The fires. The McClintock murders. Was it a coincidence?
    I grabbed my phone, excited to tell Ang what I’d found, but paused. I’d already sent her a ton of texts, and it was nearly midnight. Besides, this seemed like something we should talk about in person. Maybe the superstition surrounding the McClintock murders or my paranoia about the pyxis made me cautious, but I wasn’t going to text it to her. It could wait.
    That night, I tossed and turned through a series of bad dreams. In one of them, I watched helplessly as my grandmother stood on the beach at the cove while the black fog swallowed her. I tried to scream, to warn her, but I felt like a spectator watching from afar. My grandmother and the fog faded, and Mason and I ran, hand in hand, on the dirt road leading away from the cove.
    Mason’s hand slipped from my grasp, and I blinked against the glare of a blindingly white room, empty except for Aunt Dorothy, who lay encased in a glass coffin on a slender glass pedestal that appeared much too fragile to support its load. Her chest rose and fell with such long pauses between breaths. I stared for a few moments to make sure.
    The urge to rescue her welled up in me, but I didn’t know what to do. I could see no visible opening in the coffin, no hinge or latch. My hand felt heavy at my side, and, looking down, I realized I grasped the neck of the white pyxis bottle.
    Then I remembered Grandma Doris’s instructions. I began to approach the coffin with careful steps when a blaring fire alarm shattered the silence in the white room.
    The persistent beep of my alarm clock hammered at my ears, and I groped for the snooze button.
    Remembering the stark room with Aunt Dorothy encased in glass, I sat up in bed. I needed to get to Danton to give her the white liquid. But how? I was pretty sure Ang wasn’t up for doing me any favors. The café tied my dad’s every waking hour to Tapestry. Mom worked in Danton, but it