Chapter Text

Chapter Five

~ Wednesday Addams ~

Both Wednesday and Enid carried deep scars from their heritage. Traumas that ran deep and continued to burn since the two of them had met, causing pain and confusion and identity crises: Wednesday’s raven abilities and Enid’s rough relationship with her birth family.

Now, having exhausted everything else that they had tried, Wednesday was left with two routes that she feared (even if she wouldn’t admit it aloud), which were long shots but may just lead her to her best friend: attempting to summon psychic visions and reaching out to the contemptable Sinclairs.

Fantastic.

But she would travel down any road to rescue Enid.

Wednesday had been reading her aunt’s diary over the last few days, but not wanting to let herself get distracted from her real priority—finding Enid—had limited herself to only an hour each day of occult research in place of her usual writing time. The administrative records and Nightshades’ archives had felt more promising initially.

The records and archives had taken a lot of time to process, but the main reason for this was simply sheer quantity. Even Wednesday found herself susceptible to boredom, and needed to find ways to stave it off. Especially after days of no success, while trawling through the uninspired misdemeanours of past students. They didn’t even deserve the privilege of the punishments that were doled out.

But Ophelia’s diary was an entirely different beast. Had it been straightforward text, Wednesday could’ve consumed the relatively short number of pages in an hour, easily. Instead, the process was more like linguistic exhumation. (Well, digging up graves was something that Wednesday was efficient at, so this was maybe more like exhumation when one didn’t know where exactly the body was buried.) There were multiple layers of riddles, both intentional and unintentional, to unpack. Ophelia had genuinely gone mad toward the end of the time over which she was writing the diary, so it was a significant challenge to work through the degrading logic of the writings. Then, some of the text was physically obscured, whether by drawings, damage to the pages, or the addition of more writing over top. Even once both of these barriers had been sifted through to reveal the ‘true’ text underneath, it often wasn’t literal. Or, at least, the useful pieces weren’t literal. Ophelia would move from describing her day in a mundane fashion to making an offhand, irrelevant comment that, while seemingly innocent at first, may later ring with psychic importance in Wednesday’s mind until she returned to it. Some terms, like ravens and doves, were obvious, but others seemed to have no clear referent to Wednesday, or could mean so many things at once that any one interpretation couldn’t be clearly isolated.

Wednesday progressively spent more time with the diary as the piles of administrative and historical documents dwindled. Any secrets that Ophelia had for her were buried somewhere within these pages. Morticia had given Wednesday the diary for a reason; her mother never did anything without several layers of intentionality, and her Dove visions were only part of the Addams matriarch’s second sight, with much of her ability and talents laying in being attuned with the ether even outside of direct psychic episodes. This told Wednesday that she had what she needed to find whatever trail Ophelia had left for her, wittingly or not. She also had the sense that, while Morticia knew more about her sister’s condition than she had revealed, there wasn’t some silver bullet solution (oh, the irony of that phrase) that her mother was keeping from her. Morticia would certainly toy a little with Wednesday’s fate, but Wednesday genuinely believed that her mother wouldn’t put Enid’s life on the line like that.

It said much, however, that, faced with the deeply troubling and dangerous challenge of mastering her visions and walking the line of madness that came with being a Raven, versus making a singular phone call to the Sinclair household, Wednesday found herself diving into the former to postpone the latter…

Resolving one afternoon to finally reach out to the Sinclairs, Wednesday collected Enid’s phone from among the werewolf’s stored belongings. This involved a short trek up to Ophelia Hall, where her own side of the room was even more barren than her typically minimal and monochromatic sensibilities usually made it, and Enid’s side had been reduced to boxes stacked haphazardly against one wall. Wednesday did not dwell in the space, unwilling (and without the luxury of time) to let herself become sentimental about what was ultimately just a room, which was only ever theirs temporarily anyway. The phone was, fortunately, in an obvious plastic sack at the top of the pile, wherein Enid’s belongings that she had taken down to the lupin cages the night of her transformation had been gathered.

The itch that the colourful phone case set off in the palm of her hand, a sure sign that Wednesday was soon due her evening dose of allergy medication, felt more symbolic than it really was. Had Wednesday fallen so low that she was not only reinterpreting mundane occurrences as maudlin things, but piling existential meaning on them as well?

What Wednesday had forgotten to account for was that Enid’s phone would be a puzzle in itself. One that Wednesday was less equipped to solve than Ophelia’s journal. Contrary to local hearsay, Wednesday wasn’t completely technologically illiterate (even though she was just as technologically adverse as claimed). She could navigate a phone just fine, even if she didn’t have deep knowledge of trends on social media unlike Enid, nor how to write or exploit code unlike Pugsley. But it was the first, most basic hurdle that caught Wednesday: Enid’s passcode.

Trudging back down from Ophelia Hall, no longer caring about subtlety now that it was obvious that the onsite staff knew about the Nightshades’ lingering presence, Wednesday headed for the woods. Though Jericho was a sleepy town, and Nevermore itself was nestled in the forest, this was (unfortunately) still the modern world, and signal surrounding the school was perfectly adequate. In fact, the place that signal was worse on campus, which Wednesday knew thanks to the frequent complaints of her internet-addled and addicted acquaintances, was actually the underground Nightshades library.

(Agnes had found a way to route physical cables down into the hidden space for improving the connection for laptops, but over the last few days, Wednesday had frequently seen various others stand on the couches and reach their phones toward the ceiling in a vain attempt to overcome periodic signal dead spots. It was embarrassing to witness. Then again, it was most often Tanaka, who was an embarrassment to the living and the dead already, so little change there.)

The woods would serve as a more private and calming space than anywhere in the school proper, to Wednesday at least. Both as she wrestled with technology, and when she tried to communicate with the woman who held a special and substantial place of loathing in Wednesday’s blackened heart. (Wednesday’s list of favourite hobbies may have included, at number one, ‘daydream about the long, slow, excruciating murder of Esther Sinclair.’) Even Yoko didn’t deserve to face the version of Wednesday that Esther would doubtlessly bring out of her, let alone Agnes and Eugene. Enid would want to return to her friends still being alive, Wednesday supposed. Whether Enid’s mother maintained the same status was optional. But for now, she might be necessary.

There was a dead tree only about five minutes’ walk from the Nevermore gates, technically outside of school property, but close enough that the Jericho locals left it to the school to manage and monitor. A creepy, liminal space of the kind that Wednesday had long found soothing. It was hollow, and overgrown with a green-black moss that provided quite the comfortable seat. A black widow had moved in at one point, bearing the striking, irregular red spots along its abdomen, unlike its kin’s hourglass markings elsewhere in the world. Its chaotic webbing stretched across a hollow to one side of Wednesday’s chosen place to sit. All in all, the tree gave her the peace of mind that most parts of the campus never could.

Bringing Enid’s phone to life (and realising after a moment that she hadn’t thought to check how much battery it had left before departing campus; fortunately, it was a little under half charged), Wednesday stared at the number pad and tried to channel what little of Enid she had in her own personality. WWED, and all that. The row of dots above the numbers suggested that Enid’s passcode was only four digits long, but even that was an insurmountable quantity of combinations for Wednesday to try to brute force.

She quickly ruled out Enid’s birthdate and birth year, the name ‘Enid’ itself, and the most basic and common numerical combinations: 1111, 1234, etc. Only, after a few attempts, the phone began to inform her that a cooldown would prevent her from continuing to guess too rapidly. The initial cooldowns were manageable, but would become longer and more problematic if Wednesday continued to fail, so she needed a more logical approach.

The thought that next came to mind was one that Wednesday wanted to reject outright. It felt egotistical, and for all that Wednesday had a high (though accurate) assessment of herself, acting on this notion before trying other, more rational approaches felt foolish. But the itch remained one the idea had been planted, and when the cooldown next ticked to zero, Wednesday’s thumbs moved almost of their own accord.

Wednesday tried her own birthday.

No luck. Like she had thought, a long shot and a selfish one at that. Sure, Enid had called Wednesday her pack, not even just part of her pack, but the entirety of it. But that didn’t warrant such a baseless attempt at…

The cooldown hit zero again. Wednesday entered ‘ESWA.’

Nothing.

Next she tried ‘WAES’—surely not, as that was even more presumptive than the previous arrangement of their initials—which failed also.

She shouldn’t have kept pursuing this line of thinking. It was wasting precious time, and soon Wednesday would be locked out of new attempts at the password for long stretches of time, during which she could do nothing but wait unproductively.

Nevertheless, she resolved to try just once more before changing her tactics, and maybe giving into asking Yoko or Ajax if they had any ideas. Thing probably already knew the code, having habitually stolen Enid’s phone for his own vainglorious pursuits, and though he would’ve been infuriatingly loyal to preserving Enid’s privacy in the past, he would no doubt reveal whatever it took to find her again now. But the hand would be hard to reach if he was still on the lam with Fester. The cooldown marched toward zero, the minutes passing slowly, finally revealing the number pad again right as Wednesday’s patience was about to expire.

She typed W, E, D, N.

Right, well, if Wednesday ever had any doubts about the validity and depth of her friendship with Enid, they dissolved in that moment. The lock screen slid upward with an unnecessary flourish, revealing Enid’s myriad applications of dubious value.

And the phone practically exploded in Wednesday’s hand.

(It took her far too long to realise that this was simply the consequence of two weeks of notifications having built up. A small, wretched part of Wednesday conceded, before finding itself squashed, that maybe the accusations of technological illiteracy weren’t entirely unfounded…)

Wednesday tapped through to what she knew was Enid’s primary messaging application. Most contacts had already gone silent over the recent days, as everyone progressively heard of Enid’s fate, or perhaps just gave up on expecting a response. But in the first few days after Enid had disappeared, she had received an onslaught of correspondence. Regular messages from people who had yet to realise that anything was amiss, then concerned enquiries from her friends and acquaintances who were in frequent enough contact with Enid to notice her absence but not enough to have been proactively informed. The latest thread of messages, however, which sat at the top of the list, was Enid’s family group chat.

Not bothering with any of Enid’s other communications, as Enid was the one person whose privacy Wednesday actually bothered to respect, but also because she had a task to accomplish here that started with Enid’s deplorable mother, Wednesday clicked through.

Two weeks ago, the chat was rife with barely veiled irritation at Enid’s transformation, only thinly masquerading as concern, which presented a snapshot in real time of the Sinclairs learning of their daughter’s and sister’s fate. Wednesday was able to see not just how they wrote to Enid, but also how they spoke to one another about her disappearance. Then, a week ago, some vague chatter about Enid’s absence about once each day. And now…

Murray was asking whether they had milk at home. Esther shot back passive aggressively about him never knowing what was in the kitchen because he never cooked. One son tried to play peacekeeper, but the three others ignored the exchange to report on or ask after their own interests.

And, sure, life had to go on. But Enid was just… completely ignored. No one had mentioned her in four days, and the last comment about her had been snarkier than should ever be directed at a person missing and in danger. By comparison, Wednesday knew that the Nightshades were all diligently maintaining some ambiguous show of respect and decorum when it came to their own group chats. They had migrated certain conversations away from the ones that included Enid, because they said that it felt wrong to message them without her. Wednesday had thought this foolish, when she overheard, but recognised now just how cruel something as asinine as a group chat could seem when it erased Enid’s presence so easily.

Wednesday selected Esther’s portrait, which took her through to the woman’s contact information. (It certainly said something that Esther was the only individual in Enid’s phone who didn’t have even a singular emoji or nickname as part of her contact details.) There were two numbers listed: home and mobile. For all that Wednesday was tempted to play Sinclair roulette and maybe get a fractionally more tolerable respondent than the matriarch herself, she pushed aside the thought and selected the latter. Esther Sinclair would be the source. Any information that the family had about Enid would be filtered through her, and Wednesday didn’t want to risk missing anything.

The number rang once, shrill in the quiet air around her. God, Wednesday hated phones.

Twice.

Three times.

What kind of woman didn’t immediately spring to answer when the call came from her missing daughter’s phone, no matter how busy she was?

Four, five.

The call clicked after the sixth ring. A brief moment of awkward silence, followed by a dramatic sigh.

“Enid? I’m a little caught up in something right now. Not a good time to be interrupted, especially not by you.”

It took all of Wednesday’s willpower to not throw the phone against a nearby trunk. Or board a plane to San Francisco immediately, her bluntest knives in tow.

“Esther Sinclair,” Wednesday responded through her teeth. “Your daughter remains unlocated and in high but unquantified danger to her life and wellbeing. But it sounds as though you have already forgotten. Will a verbal reminder be enough, or do you need it carved word-for-word into your flesh?”

“Ah, the Addams girl? I don’t have time for you. But I appreciate the reminder at least to end this phone plan.”

Wednesday was rarely at a loss for words. And now wasn’t the time to lose them. But she genuinely didn’t know how to respond to a mother who cared more about saving on phone bills than her missing daughter. She took a breath, and forced her mind back onto the topic at hand.

But, before she could continue, Esther spoke up again, “So, what do you want? If you haven’t found my daughter, then I can’t imagine that you want to chat. Until then, I will await word if you do find her, so that we can begin the proceedings to manage the mess of having an alpha on our pack’s registry. Alphas are naturally policed for a reason, but it seems that none of the packs at Nevermore had what it took to do their duty.”

Wednesday had never desired murder more. And that was saying something.

“Do you have any information that could aid my investigation into locating Enid?” Wednesday asked. She took the majority of her mind, which wouldn’t have been capable of asking that question without a violent tirade, and pushed it firmly to the side. Her thoughts would obey her, and finding Enid was first priority. “Despite your apparent apathy toward her, or even outright disdain, some of us would like to see her safe and happy.”

“I didn’t know that Addamses even knew what those words meant. And they’re certainly not something that should be afforded to a feral alpha. No, I’ve heard nothing. Not that there’d be any value in entrusting you with it if I had. Now, you’re wasting my money on this call. Please do not contact me or my family again unless you have real news.”

The call ended.

Gomez Addams answered an incoming call to his crystal ball some twenty minutes later. He had never seen his daughter’s eyes so dark. Even he felt a sharp fear at the sight. The call lasted for all of a minute and a half, and Gomez was up and moving the moment that the ball went dark.

An envelope from an anonymous sender was on its way to the west coast within the hour, laced with at least four substances that would put the recipient on a national terrorist watchlist.

This was followed by a second package containing a rusty muzzle, which his wife had used as a vessel into which she lovingly potted a small but healthy wolfsbane shrub.

An Addams cousin was briefed to disrupt the power, phone, and gas lines of a nice little San Francisco neighbourhood, and to relocate his nightly bagpipe performances outside a specific address instead of in his usual cemetery spot.

Grandmama eagerly began devising a brand-new hex that simultaneously increased the libido and physical resilience of fleas, and could be cast upon a remote location.

And Pugsley reckoned that he could figure out how to charge random phone bills to the wrong accounts, and was working on automating a virus to randomly identify a phone number and reallocate it to a certain family plan every quarter hour.

Gomez hadn’t had quite such a fun afternoon in a long while.

The only stipulation was leaving the targets alive. Apparently, his little viper had other priorities right now, but wanted to keep the privilege of their murder to herself. A little limiting on Gomez’s creativity, perhaps, but he could never deny his daughter such a treat when she demanded it with such sweet malice.

The Nightshades library did not see the return of Wednesday Addams until the early hours of the following morning. The sheriff’s department didn’t hear about her activities in that time either. Their loss. The lone sighting of her was at a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant, perhaps the only genuinely authentic instance of such cuisine within miles, where only a handful of words and some cash was exchanged a little after midnight, between an ash- and dirt-covered girl and a trembling employee, for a meal that contained more spice than he had ever willingly sold before.

“You’re in a good mood,” Yoko greeted Wednesday as she crept down the stairs into the hidden library.

Wednesday was glad that she had chosen to shower first, elsewhere in the school. The others were all asleep, but Yoko had an enigmatic and inconsistent sleeping schedule even for a vampire.

“Less than twelve hours ago, even breathing near me would have resulted in an end from which, this time, you would not return,” Wednesday replied, pushing past. “I am still in the process of recovering my tolerance for imbeciles and leeches.”

Something in the way that Yoko raised her hands and stepped back indicated that, though not as hyper-specific as Wednesday often delivered her threats, this one had landed honestly and Yoko wanted no part in it.

Returning to her dark corner, Wednesday sat on the cold floor with legs crossed. From her small backpack, she pulled out the last wrapped portion of a burrito, a phone with a more miraculous survival than a mosquito in a hurricane, and her aunt’s diary. The spiders here in the back of the hidden library weren’t quite as good company as the black widow had been, but would have to do for now. Wednesday leaned back carefully into the corner so as not to disturb them, and flipped the battered book on her lap open to her last place.

The base text of this section of the book was an ordinary journal entry. Though the words veered into unintelligible ramblings at times, Ophelia was ostensibly recording the events of a normal day during her third year at Nevermore Academy. Mentions of a roommate, who Wednesday had found enough evidence earlier in the diary to identify as an unremarkable formikinetic girl (similar to Eugene, but for ants—how did one even discover that they possessed such an ability?). Complaints about the dinner menu that week. Commentary on an outcast anatomy module that initially had Wednesday’s attention, when the word ‘wolf’ started appearing more often than normal, only to prove to be a red herring. Other such mundane drivel.

However, the double page had clearly been returned to more than once, as a second narrative was written in a different ink, the words running vertically over the paper. Then, some kind of diagram or abstract line art had been sketched in now-very-smudged pencil. The second lot of text repeated the words ‘I must hold onto her soul’ again and again in English, French, and Latin. In the top left corner, where the date of the original diary entry had been written, the year was crossed out in the same pen as the repeated phrase, and replaced with… the current year, in which Wednesday was reading. Now referencing a day in less than two months’ time.

Brushing her fingers over the altered date, Wednesday felt a shock run up her arm, before her head was flung backward and the world around her disappeared into swirling blackness.

“Eugene,” Wednesday called, prodding the younger boy’s shoulder with her boot. She didn’t much care that her volume caused the other sleeping students to groan as she interrupted their early morning rest. Sunrise was less than an hour away anyway. They would survive. “Eugene, if you do not wake up right now, I will test whether a bee smoker has the same calming affect when directed immediately into your trachea.”

“Whaa? God, Wednesday, I’m awake!” said Eugene, sitting bolt upright and rapidly blinking sleep out of his eyes. “We don’t even use smokers!”

“Get up,” she instructed, already walking over to his laptop.

Eugene pulled himself to his feet, wrapping his blanket around his shoulders and following.

“Did you find something?”

“Vision,” Wednesday said by way of explanation. “Boot this up. Get onto… whatever depraved part of the internet that you have been using to play animal smuggler.”

“Alright, give me a minute. What am I looking for? Looking up?” he asked.

Still standing over him menacingly, if only because Eugene slumping down into his chair gave Wednesday the height advantage, she described the contractual papers that her vision had shown her. Wednesday had watched Enid being traded between hands several times, never gently, and at least two of those had clearly been sales between different groups, not just the one group transporting the imprisoned werewolf between locations. The first document had mentioned Alphoclast as the seller. Which suggested that they were merely a hired group as the muscle to catch a feral alpha. The second document was partially obscured from her second sight, with the buyer’s name being blocked by a hand on the paper. But the buyer from Alphoclast and the seller to the third group had been the same entity.

“See what you can find about R.C. Freight and Management Ltd.,” Wednesday said.

“Uh, may take me a minute?” Eugene replied.

She wanted to hurry him then and there, but recognising the response as Eugene following her instructions to the best of his ability, Wednesday made herself back off. Eugene tapped away at the computer for a few minutes, gave a dramatic sigh, and rose to shake Agnes awake. While he may have had the black-market credentials from Pugsley, the vanisher was definitely the better of the two at navigating this clandestine digital world.

However, it was only a short while after Agnes took over that she called Wednesday back.

“They’re a front for a trafficking group,” Agnes explained, gesturing to a forum where two anonymous individuals were discussing options for who to contract to move some unspecified cryptid creature between continents. “They do some grunt work, by the sounds of it”—clicking to another tab with another example—“but not only the grunt work, unlike Alphoclast. Their role tends to be more… coordination. Matching supply with demand, so to speak. Those who hunt werewolves and other supernatural creatures aren’t always the best placed to actually on sell them.”

“So another transaction that does not really tell us anything,” Wednesday said, holding back her frustration.

“Not exactly. Look, here,” said Agnes, clicking to yet another page. “This one should’ve been a private conversation, but someone posted screenshots after they weren’t happy with R.C.’s work. Sounds like it was their own fault, but they’re choosing to blame the middleman. But still. Right at the bottom there.”

Following where Agnes gestured with the mouse, Wednesday caught the first part of a sentence before the text cut off.

Not to mention how rude and unprofessional their representative was (some freak herself who went by the name Capri of all things, like, are we using juice brands as false names now, huh?) when they finally…

“It’s not impossible that it’s someone else, but…” Agnes suggested, trailing off.

“I rarely encounter true coincidences once the universe starts getting involved and pushing visions on me,” said Wednesday. “And she disappeared, not just going home like the rest of the teaching staff, someone mentioned?”

“Yup. Dropped off the face of the earth,” said Eugene.

Not two minutes later, everyone in the hidden library was awake, and none dared let their attention stray from Wednesday and Agnes, who stood at the front of the room directing the sudden flurry of activity. This was genuinely the only real lead that they’d had since Agnes had found the trail camera footage of Enid the morning after her initial disappearance. And Wednesday was not in the mood to let even a second go to waste.

Wednesday herself tried to stay on task, but found it quite the challenge to not let her thoughts stray to how she would disembowel the traitorous music teacher.