Something Wikkid This Way Comes (5 page)

“Sir, we’re making headway. We’re on a stakeout as we speak,” I say. Moo’s watching me talk with a disgusted curl to her lip. For an insane second I consider passing her the phone to let her deal with the priest. But then we’d probably get fired and never paid.

“Good. Make sure that headway gets somewhere. This week.” With that, Father Matthews hangs up on me. I put my iPhone to sleep, leaning back in my seat with a groan.

A few weeks after Shar first met Jodi in the cornfield, we’re back to square one. Jodi’s cult appears to be just that—Jodi’s cult. They’re having a grand old time dancing naked, making out, and playing at Satanism. Compared to the real cult, it’s only play—nude boogying and necking. Although they did sacrifice a pigeon. It was an already dead pigeon, however, which was still enough to send Ana headed for the hills. She bailed before she knew the thing in the box had been pining for the fjords for at least a day. So Jodi’s cult is down to three—her, Jenny, and “Starr”—and although they’re doing their best, their meetings more closely resemble an audition for a seventies soft porn horror film than anything else.

One interesting thing is that the girls who leave Jodi’s cult don’t seem to remember anything about it the next day. Using her position as the guidance counselor as an excuse to call each girl into private meetings, Moo has carefully questioned all the cast-offs about what they did the night before. As she has to keep her magic dampened, Moo can’t use magic to force them to answer, and all of her questions yield vague responses involving “the mall” or “some homework or something.” Frustratingly, they also present all the cues one normally does when one’s telling the truth, and yet we know they’re lying. They also don’t stink of a glamour, although there are subtler mind magics that aren’t detectable. All of which leaves us unsure whether they’ve been forced to forget, somehow really forgotten, or “forgotten” in that way teenage girls do so well, when memories might lead to them getting grounded.

Moo’s long since decided Jodi’s the wrong tree up which to bark, and I can’t help but agree. We no longer bother to accompany Shar or even mic her when she goes to meet Jodi. For her part, Shar still insists that there’s something fishy about Jodi, but I can’t help suspect Shar’s just out for the easy essence refuels she gets rolling around with the wannabe cultists. While this case leaves Moo and me frustrated, and my nails a wreck from all the janitorial work, it’s keeping Shar in the succubus version of lobster and caviar.

But we do need someone watching Jodi, leaving our other suspects to Moo and me. Oh, and me to clean the school. Because I’m still the janitor, and the real cult has been as active and scary as Jodi’s has been pathetic.

Rather than dancing around naked, making out a bit, and bothering dead pigeons, like Jodi’s, the real cult had progressed in their own animal sacrifices all the way to a very-much-alive goat, which they beheaded on the front lawn of the school. That no one saw them attested to why Tom had sent Father Matthews to us. After all, while they keep an incredibly low profile—so low many of the girls don’t even know they’re there—the school’s being monitored by police, FBI, and not a few private investigators, including us. At night, after everyone leaves, the surveillance is amplified by actual foot patrols. And yet, no one saw anything. The girls managed to get onto school grounds and past various cameras, patrols, and random passersby, all in order to behead a goat and string it up by its back legs in the school auditorium.

Worse yet, we never felt an ounce of magic. So whatever’s helping the girls can do it with magic so strong he or she can cloak it, something that’s virtually impossible. I may have camouflaging capabilities, but they only extend to myself. That’s the nature of the power. So the thing that’s helping the girls has a different kind of magic altogether, and I don’t even want to contemplate what that means.

“They still haven’t moved,” Moo says, her flat voice gone even flatter with boredom.

“I know,” I say, putting down my binoculars. We’re watching McEachern’s house, but he and his fiancée, Stacey, had sat down to watch TV a few hours ago and hadn’t moved since. We can see their forms perfectly through their sheer curtains, making me wonder what they watch every night with such close attention.

I bet they’re reality television people. They seem the sort.

I start as my musings are interrupted by a loud beep, indicating that one of the trackers we’ve hidden on our suspects is active. Moo had borrowed Frank’s and Fernando’s cell phones, during which time she’d slipped a tiny tracker in their phones’ cases. Masters and Powers had been a little more difficult, as they didn’t carry cell phones. I’d had to slip a tracker in their voluminous handbags while cleaning their offices. But, as usual, the effort was worth it.

“Fernando’s on the move,” Moo says, frowning down at her laptop as I start up the Bronco. “He’s headed to town.”

I drive down the block before turning on my lights, then race toward downtown Springfield. I admit I’ve always liked Fernando as a suspect. He’s too good-looking, too suave, too charismatic not to suspect in a case like this. And what’s he doing in Springfield anyway, teaching at a girls’ school? I know jobs in music education are rare these days, but still. He’s the Chicago type, not the Southern Illinois type.

Following Moo’s tracker, we find Fernando at a fancy downtown restaurant. Peering through the door, we have a perfect view of his table. He looks gorgeous in a tailored black suit, and I wonder where he gets the money for those clothes. My eyes move to his companion. He’s sitting with a woman who might be his mother. She’s elegant and silver-haired, with an innate authority that has the waiters prancing around her, eager to please.

I gesture to Moo to stay put as I look around. No one’s watching us, and I pull my glamour and camo around me. I wait until I can follow another couple that walks inside the restaurant, so no one wonders how the door opened by itself. Then I sidle carefully up to Fernando’s table, wondering what I’ll hear.

It’s not what I expect. It rarely is.

First of all, the woman isn’t Fernando’s mother. She’s a state senator, whom the solicitous host—who checks up on the couple constantly—calls Mrs. Campbell.

Secondly, and more importantly, Fernando’s head over heels for her.

“I love you,” Fernando says, for about the fifth time in a row. He sounds frustrated, adamant.

The woman shakes her head. Fernando says it again.

“You can’t,” she says. “You’re just a boy.”

He laughs. “I’m thirty-five, for God’s sake.”

“And I’m fifty-seven. I could be your mother.”

“But you’re not my mother. And age doesn’t matter.”

“You say that now.”

“I’ll say it forever.”

“What about those girls you work with? They’re closer to your age than you are to mine. They can offer you things I can’t.”

“Like what?” Fernando scoffs.

“Like youth. Children. A lifetime together.”

“They offer me nothing. They’re not even women. It’s you I want.”

The woman looks down to where Fernando’s taken her hand. Her eyes are wet; she’s holding back tears.

“Why?” she asks.

“Because you are what you are—because you’ve seen so much and done so much. You know who you are. I love your strength, your experience, your wisdom. I love that you’re
not
a girl. I love that you’re someone I can learn from. I don’t want a child; I want a woman.”

Fernando sounds so sincere, because I suspect he
is
sincere. The passion in his voice and the expression on his face are too raw to be faked. He’s desperate, and desperately in love. He’s not off seducing young girls; he’s off trying to marry someone twenty years older than himself.

Shit
, I think.
There goes my best suspect
.

I can’t be certain, of course, but we’ll do our homework the next day and check up on Mrs. Campbell’s schedule. But I’m pretty sure the senator will be able to fill the mysterious gaps in our Fernando’s alibis.

Not bothering to find out if the woman reciprocates, I head outside to Moo. We’re done here.

After I tell her what I heard, Moo and I are silent on the drive home. We swing by McEachern’s just in case, but he and Stacey are still sitting there, silhouetted perfectly in the picture window.

I’m stupidly frustrated by the time we get back to the hotel, so I’m not too pleased to find Shar lying on the bed in my room. We have a suite, but there she is in my space, reeking of sex and Ed Hardy perfume. I’m about to yell at her when I take a deep breath and smell something else.

Blood.

Shar’s sitting up, watching my face as I register everything. She smiles when she sees my expression flash from anger to fear to curiosity.

“It’s blood all right,” she says. “Real blood. From a live pigeon.”

I arch an eyebrow. “Are we going to have two active cults to worry about?”

Shar smiles. “Not two, only one. Tonight Jodi brought another animal sacrifice, but this one wasn’t already dead. It was a live pigeon. She killed it in front of us with a kitchen knife. Jenny fainted. Jodi told her she could go.”

“And?” Moo asks impatiently from behind me. I hadn’t heard her come in.

“And that leaves just me. I won.”

“Won what?” I ask.

“According to Jodi, I get to meet the Master.”

This is so “Buffy
,
”
I think to myself as we descend into the bowels of Holy Trinity Academy.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
is one of Moo’s favorite shows, so we have to watch it all the time. We all know Moo has a crush on Spike, but she’d never admit it. I wish I could needle her about it, but Moo’s back in the Bronco, keeping tabs on our progress through all of her gadgets, while Shar walks ahead of me, blindfolded and led by Jodi.

Once again I’ve got the camera on my head and I’m micked up to Moo through my earpiece. And once again I’ve got my camo up and ready. Unlike last time, however, I’m very hopeful to end this case tonight.

And if anything goes wrong, Moo’s Alfar powers can rip the whole school off its foundation. But I still keep a carefully camouflaged feel out for any magic, and I know Moo’s Alfar senses are doing the same from where she’s parked outside in the Bronco. Because there has to be magic involved for the girls in the cult to be able to stay hidden and to keep f-ing up the school the way they are. And yet we’ve never felt anything the least bit supernatural coming from anywhere nearby.

I keep pondering this fact as Shar and I ascend into the subbasement of the school. It’s creepy down here—the lighting is dim, and it’s a very old school that used to be a nunnery, so it’s a
real
basement, not one of those brightly lit new-build basements. There also doesn’t seem to be anyone around besides Jodi, Shar, and me.

We keep going farther into the basement, until Jodi leads Shar into a room full of old desks, chairs, boxes of textbooks, and dilapidated shelving units. We go through another similar room, and then another. It’s only when we’re in the last room that I start to get worried. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of another human being, and I know exactly where we are, since I’d had to cart up a whole load full of desks from this very room one afternoon.

This is the last of the storage. There’s nothing else past here. What the hell?

And yet Jodi’s calmly walking Shar directly toward the back wall of the room. Jodi never slows down and neither does the blindfolded Shar, but they’re on a collision course with concrete. I watch with rapt attention as Jodi walks right through the seemingly solid wall. I scamper to keep up, tucking myself right in behind Shar’s now-disembodied arm. I squeeze my eyes shut as concrete looms alarmingly, feeling a slight tingle on my shields as I walk through the wall.

When I open my eyes, we’re in Cult Central.

There are cots lining the walls, which have been festooned in black and red bunting. It would look festive if it weren’t so bedraggled and covered in pentagrams and anarchy signs. On one end of the room looms an old, dilapidated altar, also painted black. Only the middle of the floor is swept clear, one enormous pentagram painted on the concrete.

It’s like a bad seventies horror set
, I marvel.

Jodi leads Shar to the middle of the pentagram, and I back up against a wall where I can give Moo a good view of the action. I carefully pan the camera around so that Moo can see that sprawled around the room are all the missing girls.

“They’ve been under the school the whole time?” Moo hisses in my ear. I don’t have to respond; the question is rhetorical.

“This whole thing is impossible,” she continues. “I know this school like the back of my hand, as do you. There’s not supposed to be a wall there. I’m even looking at a map. No room.”

I don’t say anything back, waiting for my chance. The missing girls have all stood up now and are pacing around Shar as if sizing her up. Some walk forward to touch her curiously. The bolder ones kiss her. Shar’s happy to keep them entertained. They’re also starting to talk more animatedly, so I chance a whisper.

“Old magic,” I hiss,
sotto voce
.

“Of course,” Moo says, still sounding remarkably calm. “Did you feel it?”

“Against my shields. The tingle,” I whisper, under cover of chatter.

“Well, that throws a wrench into our plans,” Moo says.

I want to say, “No shit,” but I don’t risk it. I know we’re in trouble.

The thing is, my ability to camouflage is a secret, but it’s not my
real
secret. My real secret is that, when I’m in camo mode, I’m not as vulnerable to certain types of magic as I should be. The magic Moo and I use, the magic that all of our kind uses, runs off different kinds of elemental forces. Unfortunately, it’s this type of regular elemental magic that my camo doesn’t really affect. So, if Moo threw a mage ball at me I’d probably be toast. But there are other types of magic than just elemental. And it’s the old magic—that which existed before there was my kind, the magic that I suspect is real magic—to which I’m immune. This immunity became obvious when I was a child. I’d play Find-and-Seek with our house brownie, Terk. Brownies use only old magic, and Terk couldn’t apparate me if I had my camo up. He should have been able to sense and apparate me, or make me appear in front of him, and he could when I wasn’t camouflaged. But if I was camoed, I wasn’t just invisible to him, I was also immune to his magic.