CHAPTER 18 
If my house is isolated, Germ’s is almost impossible to find. It’s not on GPS or any maps because it’s not really supposed to exist. Her dad, when he was around, parked their mobile home there because the land was unclaimed and it didn’t cost anything, and they just… stayed. It’s like the house that isn’t, tucked behind an old junkyard.
Tuesday afternoon, one day till dark moon, that’s where I go, breaking my promise to myself about leaving Germ out of things.
I do this for two reasons: One, I can only stand not talking to Germ for so long; forty-eight hours is about the maximum. Two, if anyone can teach me how to shoot a bow and arrow, it’s Germ, who never met a physical activity she wasn’t great at. I once saw her do a front handspring in gym class, her heavy frame flipping deftly end-to-end, simply after watching someone else do it one time. She can ski backward. I need her for this. And, I reason to myself, it doesn’t involve her fighting a witch, only her helping me figure out how to do it myself.
Above, the sky is so overcast, the clouds look like a wet soggy web. Worried that we could be in for a dark, moonless night, I bundle the bow and arrows into my backpack (they poke out the top, but I wrap them in an old towel) and climb onto my bike.
I steer into the woods—down the well-worn path between Germ’s house and mine. As I ride, I keep thinking about last night and everything Ebb told me. I keep coming back to something he said about his death—that he feels like he was responsible for something terrible, and now he needs to do something good to rectify it.
It’s not just the sadness of the story that clings to me. It’s that it feels like it means something important, but I can’t quite figure it out. The meaning is out of my reach, something that keeps slipping my mind.
A few dragonflies follow behind me as I go deeper into the woods. As I pull up at Germ’s, I leap off my bike and lean it against the usual tree, and on second thought, tuck the bow and arrows behind the bike in case Mrs. Bartley is home from work early. (Usually she works till long after dinnertime.) Germ’s brothers do sports after school and are rarely home before seven.
Germ thinks her trailer is shabby, but I’ve always loved it because it’s overflowing with her and her mom and her loud and unruly brothers. Today the sight of it makes me nervous as I climb the stairs. Usually when I need to apologize but can’t find the words, Germ says, “Let’s pretend we already did this part,” and all is immediately forgotten. But this—Bibi West and how Germ is changing and I’m not—is bigger than any fight. It’s not something that can just go away. And that’s something new.
I knock, and wait. After a minute the door opens and Germ appears. She looks unsure whether she’s happy to see me. A hint of a smile flashes across her face, but then it moves aside for anger, and also, maybe, uncertainty.
The gulf between us feels wide. I wonder, with a feeling like an astronaut floating in space, if it might even be unfixable. I swallow the lump in my throat.
“I have something to show you,” I say.
We are standing over the bow and arrows, which I’ve laid on Germ’s bed.
She stares at them for a long time.
“Why’re they painted?” she asks.
I shrug. “I don’t know. The Witch Hunter’s Guide… the women who hunted witches in my family, their weapons… they all involved beautiful things, music and embroidery and stuff. I guess it’s connected to that somehow.”
Germ takes it all in, looking hesitant. “Well”—she nods to the bow and arrows—“does it work?”
She looks at me. I look at her.
“You haven’t tried it yet?”
“You know that if you don’t help me, I’ll end up hitting the nearest person within a mile and killing them.”
Germ thinks on this, and nods. “That’s true,” she says. “But, Rosie, dark moon is tomorrow.” She heaves a sigh. “You’ve got almost no time to learn.”
“I don’t have a choice,” I say.
We go out into the yard, which is really just scraggly woods all around the trailer. Germ selects a big old dead oak tree as the target. Dusk is falling quickly. I hold out the bow and arrows to her to try first, but she shakes her head.
“You’re the one who’s good at this stuff,” I say.
“But you’re the one who needs to know how to hunt witches,” she says.
“Witch, not witches One witch.”
Still, I guess she’s right that it has to be me. At the same time, if all that’s standing between me and a witch is my athletic abilities, well… I try to push the thought out of my mind.
Germ helps me get my stance right, back leg facing forward, front leg bent slightly to ground me, arms strong.
I’m pretty sure we both expect this to be the first of about a thousand tries to hit the tree.
But things do not go as we expect.
The arrow veers far wide of the tree—that much isn’t surprising. It sails in the direction of Germ’s brother’s junky old car, which he saved all his money last summer to buy. It’s going for the windshield or the hood or the front right tire, depending on how fast it spirals downward.
But as it’s flying, something miraculous happens. A shimmer—a puff of something—appears, filmy and delicate but unmistakable, like the trail of exhaust you might see from an airplane. Only this is in a wave of colors and small, diaphanous shapes so exquisitely beautiful, so full of light, so warm and clear and sparkling that just looking at it makes something feel better inside you. The shapes are the shapes my mom has painted on the arrows; the colors are my mom’s colors come to life—as real and unreal, at the same time, as ghosts. They shimmer in the air for a moment, then disappear.
I turn to Germ just in time to see the same look of awe on her face a moment before the arrow hits its mark, landing with a thwack in the car’s front tire after all. There is a loud hiss as the tire loses air.
Germ says two things.
“Well, that was something.”
And then,
“David’s going to kill me.”
We practice for two hours, until my arms feel like they’re going to fall off and I can’t feel the pads of my fingers. When I want to give up, Germ makes me practice some more while she runs little circles around the yard and picks up the spent arrows. We take a break for dinner, and then we start again.
For a while, the beautiful shimmering trail of color flies out behind the arrow each time, but it gets dimmer and dimmer. Soon, it stops appearing altogether, which worries me.
“Maybe witch weapons have to rest,” Germ says.
By seven p.m., after about three hundred shots, I’ve hit the tree a total of four times. Still, three of those are in the last twenty tries, so I’m getting better. At this rate, if I practice all day again tomorrow, I should have a 20 percent chance of actually hitting the witch when she comes for me tomorrow night. As long as she stands as still as an oak tree, I guess. It’s not great odds, I have to admit.
Finally, spent, we lounge on the metal landing outside Germ’s front door, which all the Bartleys jokingly call “the veranda,” and drink Gatorade. We are quieter with each other than usual. Sometimes when we lie out here, we pretend to talk with our feet, so not talking with our feet is another sign that something is off. I know we are both worried about our friendship, underneath all the other things we are worried about. And what I really want to say is that I just wish things could always be the way they have been for us. But I don’t say that.
Instead I tell Ebb’s sad story to Germ. I tell her about my failed conversation with the Murderer, and how I even thought of running away before Ebb took me to his cave last night.
“Do you think the arrows can really hurt the Memory Thief?” I ask, thinking out loud. “I mean, they just make a kinda weak puff of colorful stuff. Even if it’s a magic puff.”
“Puff the magic puff,” Germ says listlessly. She’s lying on the one decrepit, strappy outdoor chair, with her legs dangling over the arm. “Maybe it could, though. Maybe you just have to hit her one time. What if you get her with just one arrow, Rosie, and all your troubles are over?” I think about this, but it’s too hard to imagine.
“I wish we knew where she was hiding,” she goes on after a moment. “It’s weird to sit and wait for you to be attacked.”
Something nags at me.
“There’s this giant piece missing,” I say. “I still don’t know what happened the night I was born. There’s some big part of the whole picture that I can’t see, and it’s important. I know it is. The thing about someone out there swimming, waiting for her, and how it’s tied to that night.”
Germ nods slowly, thoughtfully. “And I guess that’s the one thing the Murderer won’t tell.” She runs a hand through her thick blond hair. “He’s not really the kind of person to do a good deed.”
I loll a lazy, tired foot in agreement. And unbidden, my mind drifts back to Ebb—to the things he said about his parents, to his own wish to do a good deed to cancel out a bad one.
And I sit straight up.
“Unfinished business,” I say.
Germ looks at me in surprise, confused. “What?”
“It’s something Homer said about moving Beyond. And then Ebb was saying he feels like if he can just save someone—just one person—he can cancel out his guilt for what happened to his parents.”
Germ squints at me, not quite following.
“What if it’s the same for the Murderer?” I say in a rush. “What if, if he helps me by telling me his secret, he makes up for the person he didn’t help? And what if that could let him move Beyond? Every ghost wants to move Beyond, more than anything else, don’t they?”
Germ, catching on now, smiles.
“I’ve gotta talk to him,” I say, standing up and moving quickly toward my bike, feet crunching in the dry leaves.
Behind me, Germ hurries to her bike too.
“You can’t come,” I say.
“It’s just talking to a ghost,” she says. “It’s not mortal combat or anything.”
And because Germ can be as stubborn as I can, I don’t argue.
We pedal into the woods and ride for home, and the Murderer.