Seraph of Sorrow (42 page)

When he finally returned to the hospital, he ran into the person he least wanted to see. Right outside his wife’s room, poking her head through the door and waving at his family—
waving!
—was Jennifer Scales.

“What are
you
doing here?!”

It gave him no small satisfaction to see the adolescent creature flinch at the sound of his voice. She broke away without looking at him. “Nothing, Mr. Blacktooth.” He stared at the back of her head, fingers itching for a weapon. As if reading his thoughts, she gave him a parting shot: “Shame about your sword.”

He barged into his wife’s room and slammed the door.

“Cripes, Hank! I’m resting, here.”

“Still taking visitors, I hope.”

Her eyes narrowed. “When they bother to show up, yes.”

Eddie shifted uncomfortably in his own bed. “You guys aren’t going to argue again, are you? I don’t want to have to get up—”

“No, please, don’t move on my account. I know your tender arms and legs are still sore from the beating you took at the hands of a girl.”

“It wasn’t her; it was her boyfriend—”

“I don’t think he’s her boyfriend anymore, Mom. What’s your point, Dad. I should be back up and trying to kill my best friend again?”

“Isn’t that what you promised?”

Eddie swallowed. “That was a mistake. I wasn’t thinking right. I was surprised at what I learned that day, and I reacted badly. I’m going to apologize to Jennifer, and—”

“You. Will. Do. No. Such. Thing.”

Eddie’s face hardened. “Jennifer’s my friend, Dad. I don’t care if she can turn into a dragon, or a spider, or a fish. That part never upset me. It upset me that she lied. I’m going to forgive her, because I lied, too. And when friends hurt each other, they forgive each other.”

“You are
not
her friend.”

“Hank, do you hear yourself?”

“I hear myself fine. Can anyone else in this room hear me?”

“Unfortunately. Hank, you’ve been trying to tell me the same thing about Lizzy for years—that she and I can’t be friends. Then you try to tell me she and Jonathan can’t be lovers. Then you try to tell your son he can’t be friends with their daughter. At what point do you finally give up and accept—you don’t control any of this?”

“I
don’t
give up, Wendy! As a good parent, it’s my job to help my son make good choices! That means exercising authority! I wish you saw it as your job, too!”

“It’s not your call, Dad.”

“It is! You will
not
see that girl again!”

It irked Hank a great deal that neither Wendy nor Eddie seemed particularly upset at this edict. In fact, Wendy appeared to be smiling. “Hank, do you realize you’ve just told your son the one thing most certain to drive him closer to Jennifer Scales?”

“Then let me tell him something else. Eddie, if you see that girl again,
I’ll
kill her. In fact, if
I
see her again, I’ll kill her.”

Eddie slowly pushed back his covers and slid out of bed. The bruises that peeked out of his hospital gown were yellowing, and he limped toward his father. Instead of confronting him as Hank expected, however, the boy pushed past and leaned against the doorway.

“Where are you going?”

“Well, gosh, Dad. You just told me you were going to kill my best friend. I’ll be damned if I can stop you—we’ve established how much I suck with a sword. So I figure the only thing I can do to be helpful is warn her.”

“How does that help me?”

“I’m not trying to help
you
.”

“Get back into bed, before I beat you worse than you already are.”

“Screw you. First I’m a pussy for lying in bed with bruises. Now you’ll beat me for standing up? What’s next, you shiv Mom for backtalk?” He slipped through the doorway.

“Edward George Blacktooth, if you leave this room, don’t bother coming—”

“Eddie, don’t take too long,” Wendy cut in. “Remember they serve dinner early on this floor. Tell Jenny I say hi, and ask her to have her mom swing by.”

Furious at his wife, Hank grabbed the boy by the gown and yanked him onto the floor.

“Hank!”

Eddie lay on the floor as Hank put his foot on his throat. In fact, he taunted his father with a strained voice. “Finishing what you couldn’t last spring, Dad?”

“Finishing what never should have started. You were a mistake and a failure from the day you were born. You’ve shamed the Blacktooth name and lost its enduring symbol.”

“That fucking sword? It was a piece of crap.”

“IT WAS EVERYTHING!” Hank pressed down hard to stop the kid from talking.

“Hank, please!”

“Why do you care, Wendy? If the boy was worth anything, he’d have saved you from getting hurt. I’m doing us both a favor.”

“Hank, if you kill him, I’ll tell Mother.”

She threatened me with that last time, too.
Feeling something snap deep inside, he kept his foot on Eddie and looked up at her.
Funny how she looks so much like Mom in that hospital bed.
“Who’s to say you’ll be alive to tell her?”

If the threat fazed her at all, she did not show it. “She’ll recognize the boot print. So will Lizzy. After all, they’ve been seeing it on my throat since we met.”

He paused. Yes, he could finish off his son, and then his injured wife without much trouble. What of Glory? An overrated elderly woman, whom he’d never seen kill or hobble a soul in his life. Yes, the stories beaststalkers still told of her teenaged exploits were impressive—but old. Dispatching her would be a long-awaited pleasure, if it became necessary.

But then, what of Lizzy? What of her daughter? What of Jonathan Scales?

An unbidden memory emerged through the fog of time: a statue of gold, in the shape of a dragon, bathing in a sea of unnamed horrors. Hank remembered nothing more than that statue, yet he knew he had barely escaped Smokey Coils with his life that day. What other dread shadows waited for him, if he went after Jonathan Scales?

He took his foot off his son, rapped the boy’s jaw with a steel toe, and stood tall. “So you’ve chosen a side after all, Wendy. Shame it wasn’t the right one.” He spun on his heel and headed for the door. “Neither of you are welcome at my house.”

“I wouldn’t go back there to live with you,” Eddie gargled, “if dragons burned down every other house in town.”

“They may do just that, by the time you and your mother are through.”

The days that followed were hard for Hank. The Blacktooth house was too quiet, and when he learned his son and wife planned to live next door with the Scaleses, he could not abide the place anymore. Nor would a hotel do. Winoka had only two kinds, derelict-depressing and weekender-expensive.

He turned instead to another beaststalker family. Jim and Sarah Sera were not what he would have called close friends, but Sarah served on the city council with him, and they were all he had at this point. They agreed (reluctantly, he noticed) to let him stay for a while . . . “Until you can make it work with your family again,” Sarah told him with a skeptical eye.

Life at the Sera household was torturous. Both of the Seras were devotees of Glory Seabright. Worse, they knew his own thoughts on the mayor. Sarah treated him with the distant respect of a colleague; Jim plainly did not trust him; and their daughter, Amanda, avoided all three adults as often as she could. The second day he was there, as he was coming out of his guest room, he heard the girl’s end of a phone conversation through her closed bedroom door.

“Ugh. Yes, Abigail, he’s
still
here. Can we . . . Yes, Amy, it’s very funny. Hoot it up. Care to join in, Anne? Whatever. Listen, guys, can we
please
talk about something else? I know it’s superfascinating to you all that Eddie Blacktooth’s lame father is mooching off my parents, but I find it PFP. What? Geez, Anne. PFP. ‘Pretty freaking pathetic.’ Do you not listen to your friends when they talk—I’ve been using that expression ever since he moved in—”

He fumed and tromped down the carpeted stairs to find something to eat.

“Hank, have you seen Amanda?”

Hank barely looked up from his book. “No.”

There was a worried silence, which made him look up. Sarah did not look well.

A twinge of conscience rattled him. “Have you tried her friends?”

“I tried the whole A-List.”

“Come again?”

“A-List. All her friends have names that—it doesn’t matter. They all missed her at school today. In fact, I can’t remember seeing her this morning before school at all. I’ve called her phone six times, but I don’t even get her voice mail.”

“Battery’s probably dead. Does she have a boyfriend? We could call him.”

“Not . . . I don’t think . . . I’m not sure . . . It’s so hard to tell with kids these days. Besides, I’ve checked her room and there’s nothing missing. I don’t think she’d run off without—”

She was wringing her hands and shifting on her feet. Hank exhaled and got up off the couch. “Where’s Jim?”

“He just left for business in Chicago. He’s supposed to be gone for weeks. I called him and he said he’d come right home if I was really worried, but I didn’t want to get him upset . . . I mean, we have a weekend alone planned down South after he gets back, and he’s really busy with this project to get it done on time, and what if it’s nothing . . . ?”

“We should talk to Mr. Mouton.”

“I left a message for him at the principal’s office, but no one’s returned my calls.”

“Let’s go find him.” It felt good to take charge of this situation.

“Oh! Well, sure . . . but what if she comes home while we’re gone?”

Good point. Jim’s lucky to have a wife who thinks under pressure and works as a team.
“Okay, you stay here. I’ll talk to Mr. Mouton.”

A few minutes later, Mr. Mouton answered his front door. “Councilmember Blacktooth? To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Amanda Sera didn’t come home from school today.”

The principal cocked his head and searched behind Hank.

“Sarah’s waiting at home, and Jim’s out of town. They asked me to check with you.”

“I see. Well, I’m afraid I don’t commit attendance rolls to memory, so I’m afraid . . .”

“Then we’ll go to the school together and look them up.”

“Now?”

Hank slammed his hand onto Mouton’s shoulder, and the slight man jumped. “Now.”

Winoka High at nighttime had an uneasy feel—too dark, too large, and too empty, like a cruise ship at sea with no guests. Hank hadn’t visited the building much as an adult, and he found some areas familiar while others seemed different. New carpet? Lighter wallpaper?

Mr. Mouton led him to the administrative offices, flipping through keys and tunneling through doors. The principal’s own office was behind four different locks. Why the man was protecting crappy vinyl and fiberglass chairs with so much hardware, Hank could not figure.

The top drawer of the cheap, gray file cabinet slammed open, and Mouton began flipping through. “Attendance records are notoriously unreliable,” he explained. “Most of the time, parents pull children out of school without so much as a phone call. It’s only weeks later that we’re able to sort out the excused absences from—”

“This is
not
,” Hank interrupted, “an excused absence.”

“I suppose we’ll see” came the sniffed reply. “Here we go—today’s records . . .
M
,
N
,
O
,
P
. . . Okay, here’s
S
. . . Sabathany, Samuelson, Saxon, Scales, Scofield . . . Here we go, Sera. Amanda. Marked as . . .” His eyes followed his finger across the file. “Absent. Unexcused.”

Hearing one of the previous names gave Hank an idea. “What about Jennifer Scales?”

“Councilmember, I don’t think it’s appropriate for—”

Hank drew up to full height and cornered the sniveling bureaucrat. “You and I both know what that girl is, Mouton. I want to know if she was absent, too. If she’s responsible for Amanda’s disappearance, and her parents find out you didn’t cooperate with me . . . Well, you’ll be lucky if Mayor Seabright gets to you first.”

“Fine! Fine!” The principal’s shaking finger moved back up the file. “Scales, Jennifer. Um . . . she was . . . in. She was here!”

It doesn’t matter,
Hank steamed.
She’s still a suspect. So is everyone she knows.

“What about that boy Skip? His last name’s a
W
. . . Williams, or Windsor, or . . .”

“Wilson.” Mouton flipped a few pages. “Tardy. Excused.”

Hank thought some more, snapping his fingers. “And that girl Susan? Elm-something.”

“Elmsmith.”
Flip, flip, flip.
“Present.”

He thought some more and gritted his teeth. “What about my son?”

“Eddie?” Mouton looked like he was about to ask why Eddie’s own father wouldn’t know if his son had attended school; then he clearly thought better of it.
Flip, flip.
“Present.”

Eddie knows
. He had no proof, but the more he thought about it, the more it made sense.
Amanda’s missing because of something that Scales girl-freak did. And Eddie knows about it.

“Will there be anything else?” The question came out a bit coldly; Hank guessed Mouton was redeveloping his spine.

“No. Thank you. Good . . . wait.”

His eyes had strayed down to the uncluttered desk. A single file lay there, its bottom edge parallel to the desk’s edge. The label on the pale green tab had three words typed in capital letters: NEW STUDENT APPLICATIONS.

“Did you admit any new students recently?”

“One today, in fact. A certain Andeana, though I think she prefers ‘Andi.’ Her paperwork’s in there.”

Hank flipped open the file and found her application right away. His blood ran cold the moment he began reading the first page. Little Andeana did not give up very much. She had answered nothing about family, or hometown, or frankly a whole bunch of questions Hank would have considered critical for a school to know. Yet what she did write, if Hank was reading it correctly, wracked his nerves.

Was
he reading it correctly? He couldn’t be sure. Foreign languages were not his forte.