Under a Spell

Chapter Eight

ChaCha was snoring away, making those little dream-doggy running motions with her tiny legs while I stared at the ceiling. Headlights from three stories down streaked across my ceiling and every time I tried to pull my eyes shut, they popped back open again, the voices in my head chattering, needling, telling me I was missing something. By 3:45 AM I gave up, clicked on my bedside light, and buried myself in my closet.

I found it behind an avalanche of polyester pants and Nina-vetoed hoodies, shoved in the farthest corner of my closet: a cardboard box, packing tape still pristine, the word SOPHIE printed across it. I sucked in my breath as bat wings flopped in my gut, then I pulled the tape off in one swift motion.

In the same instant, Nina was in my room, a quarter inch from me, staring down. No matter how many times it happened, I could never get over the vampire super-speed, super-stealth thing.

“God, Nina, you scared the crap out of me.” She flapped at the air, rolling her coal-black eyes. “I know, I know, I should get a bell. Just wanted to make sure you had your clothes on.” She grinned, all Crest-white fangs. I rolled my eyes and she plopped her bony butt right down beside me on the floor, the chill from her skin sending goose bumps over my flesh.

“What are we doing?” she wanted to know.

“I’m checking something out and you’re scaring the bejesus out of me.”

“Oh, Soph, you’re such a pansy.” She pushed herself onto her knees; then her whole top half disappeared into the newly opened box.

“Well,” she said from its depths, “I can see why you wanted to keep this particular expedition to yourself.” She flopped back out, each hand clutching a framed picture of the Backstreet Boys in various just-dangerous-enough poses.

I yanked the frames from her grip. “It was a long, long time ago.” I shoved the photos behind me, surreptitiously using the sleeve of my pajamas to wipe a leftover Bonne Bell Lip Smackers kiss from the glass. “Move.”

“Oh my gosh. Did you wear this? Sexy!” Nina had a piece of my Mercy uniform in each fist. I ignored her and dug in the box myself, while she yanked on my old skirt and blouse, rolling the skirt to porn-star heights and tying the blouse over her smooth, perfect midsection. I glanced up.

“Yep, that’s exactly how I wore it, too.”

Finally, after pawing through a hideously thoughtful senior photo and seventeen wistfully dog-eared prom dress ads, I found what I was looking for. Nina’s eyes went wide, the glee shooting from her mouth all the way up to her ears.

“Yearbooks!” She yanked one from me, sat down again and started thumbing through it. “You never showed me these before!”

I opened the top one left on my stack and sighed as seventeen-year-old me stared out from the pages, my hair a frizzy, barely-in-the-frame mess, my black eyes pleading for death. Or, possibly, that was just my interpretation.

“Self-preservation,” I said without looking up.

“Aw, Sophie! You were adorable!” Nina cooed, holding the page with my junior-year photo up against her cheek. “Bless your heart!”

I narrowed my eyes. “Bless your heart is what people say to sugarcoat something ugly.”

“Bless your heart,” Nina said again.

“I hate you.”

“I hate this beehive! Didn’t anyone let this Heddy creature know the sixties ended a hundred and fifty years before this picture was taken?”

I smiled. “That lady is still at the school. I ran into her again. Sans beehive.”

“Well, I suppose I should forgive a woman who dedicated fifty years of her life to high school girls.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’ve been out of school barely ten years.” Give or take.

Nina ignored me. “Who’s Gretchen Von Dow?”

She turned the yearbook around, her finger pressed against the smiling, half-page photo of a very blond, very pretty student.

“Why does it say ‘we’ll miss you, Gretchen!’? She die or something?”

I bit my bottom lip. “I don’t think so. She was a foreign exchange student.” I took the yearbook from Nina and pointed to the smaller text. “See? ‘Gretchen is a foreign exchange student from Hamburg, Germany, who shared her many traditions and sparkling smile with us for the past two years. She is now back home, but will never be forgotten! From the members of the Lock and Key Club.’”

“Touching,” Nina said, bored. “What’s Lock and Key Club? Some kind of bondage thing?”

“What kind of high school did you go to? Lock and Key is one of those honor society, public service things. You know, to look good on your college applications. They have them at tons of schools.”

“Were you one of these Locked chicks?”

I pursed my lips. “Not exactly. I was more the locked-out chick.”

“Isn’t it weird for a foreign exchange student to be somewhere for two years?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess not.”

Nina tossed the book aside and grabbed another one from my lap. “So, what brought on the three a.m. walk down memory lane?”

I sighed, leaning back on my palms. “Nothing. I guess I just thought there might be some kind of clue, something that would point me in the right direction. I filled Nina in on the day’s activities—including my chat with Lorraine and the dozens of glowing pentagrams.

Nina shivered. “Those witchcraft things always creep me out with their symbols and their chalk and stuff.”

I couldn’t help grinning, watching my undead roommate flip yearbook pages, the tip of her tongue playing with the point of her angled fang as she fretted over witchcraft.

“Doesn’t vampire trump witch?”

Nina cocked a brow. “Vampire trumps everything, toots. Except for sunlight. But we do what we do”—she splayed a hand elegantly against her pale chest—“because we have to. Essentially, we’re not born bad, we’re made bad.”

I squeezed Nina’s bare knee. “You’re not bad.”

“But witches?” Her upper lip curled into a disgusted snarl. “They choose to be bad.”

“Some of them.”

Nina cut her eyes to me. “Tell that to my nephew who practically got shish-kabobed today in the finance meeting.”

“Kale’s still mad?”

Nina flipped a page. “Madder. She hit the roof— el kabob-o—because she saw Vlad talking to a Kishi demon in the waiting room.”

“Kishi demons tend to eat the faces off the men who engage them.”

Nina shrugged. “Not punishment enough in Kale’s eyes. So you’re strolling down memory lane, looking for the pentagram-drawing club?”

I closed the yearbook on a sigh. “I guess there’s nothing in here. And you were right. I want to find Alyssa. I just keep feeling like I should be doing more than sitting around looking for clues. I should be out looking for her.”

“And Sampson said stay put. Look for the coven only. Check yes for coven, no for no coven.”

“And then what?”

“And then UDA goes in and tries to make them compliant.”

“But they could be murderous witches!”

Nina fixed her eyes on mine. “Check yes for coven, no for no coven. Even if they’re murderous, it’s not your investigation.”

I shrugged.

“It’s Alex’s. He does the normal, you do the para. Right?”

I shrugged again, looked away. “Like you’re such a rule follower.”

Nina cocked an eyebrow, then produced a blood bag from her robe pocket and pierced it with a fang. “I like the deeply contemplative senior pic,” she said, holding it up for my inspection. “It looks like you’re considering whether you should read Tolstoy or Nabokov next.”

“Probably more like Seventeen or Cosmo Girl—I wasn’t that deep. Or that smart. The only chick who read Tolstoy—and paid for it dearly—was Suri Lytton.”

“Suri? Like Suri Cruise?”

“No, like the name Suri existed independent of the late Cruises. Look her up; she’s probably right next to me.”

Nina looked back at the book and frowned. “Nope. No Suri. Maybe she was younger?”

“No, we sat next to each other in every class. She’s got to be in there.”

Nina flipped back to the index. “Not here either.”

I opened my book, thumbed a few pages, then pointed. “See, right here next to me. Junior year.”

“And not here senior year.”

I flopped back onto the carpet and yawned. “I don’t know, I can’t remember. I have to get more information.”

Nina’s head bobbed over me, her long black hair swishing over my cheeks. She grinned, her fangs pressing against her lower lip. “Spy trip?”

I bit my cheek to hold back my grin. “I need to get the police reports from Alex.”

“Didn’t Sampson give you a copy?”

“Of the preliminary report, but I know there’s more.” I pinched my bottom lip. “But how am I going to get it? Last time I broke into the police station—”

“You broke out with your left arm handcuffed to a desk chair.”

“Yeah, that really slowed me down. We need someone here. We need someone who can get into the computer system. Someone who’s good with technology and has no moral compass.”

As if on cue, the front door slammed and we heard Vlad shrugging out of his duster and unloading his keys onto the counter.

Nina waggled her brows. “I think we’ve found our morally bankrupt companion.”

“Vlad!” Nina and I went tearing into the living room, catching Vlad wide eyed, a half-smashed blood bag in one hand, a tiny trickle of velvet red dribbling down his chin. He caught it deftly with the tip of his tongue and my stomach lurched. “What?”

“Can you help me out with something?”

I yelped as Nina body checked me, shoving me aside. “Here is your mission should you choose to accept it,” she said, hands on hips, legs akimbo. “And you have to accept it or we’re kicking you out. You are to break in to the SFPD computers and filch a couple of case files for us.”

“Please?” I said, poking my head over Nina’s shoulder.

Vlad regarded us coolly, crossed his arms in front of his chest, and cocked out a hip. “So you’re asking me to break into the city’s computer system.”

“It’s a matter of life and death.”

“It’s illegal,” he said, as though he had suddenly sprung a conscience.

I gaped. “You care?”

“No, I just want to make sure you know what I’m risking.”

“Can you do it?” Nina wanted to know.

Vlad scoffed. “Of course I can.”

He crossed the room to his laptop, and I nipped at his heels behind him. “You can do it without anyone knowing, right? The police”—Alex, I thought—“absolutely can’t know. Will they be able to trace this back to us?”

Vlad sat down, minimized the CGI vamps in the middle of his BloodLust game, and glared at me. “I need some space. You need some toothpaste.”

I snarled, backed away, and did one of those huff-breaths into my cupped hands. I was a little dragon-breathy. But then again, it was nearing 4 AM.

As Vlad’s long, thin fingers weaved deftly over his keyboard, my heart thumped, the adrenaline shooting like ice water through my veins. I paced, then finally grabbed my shoulder bag and upturned it on the table, spreading out the preliminary files that Sampson had given me, the receipt, my sparkly unicorn notebook containing all my notes, and an etching of the protection symbol carved into the desk. I sat down, grabbed a pen, and waited for Vlad to feed me information. Instead, he poked his face around the side of his laptop screen and narrowed his coal black eyes at me. “What are you doing?”

“Waiting. You find the files, shoot me any pertinent information and I’m here”—I waggled my pen—“waiting for it.”

Nina came up on my left, her arms wrapped around her as if she was chilled. “Are you sure about this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Alex, Sampson getting pissed at you?”

“Yes,” I said, standing. “I’m way more worried about the forces of evil schoolgirls raining down on me.”

Vlad popped around the computer again. “Schoolgirls?”

“Keep working.”

Nina pulled out a chair. “So it’s officially schoolgirls, not witches?”

I nibbled my bottom lip, considering whether or not to share my bathroom experience.

“Will said you got locked in the john,” Vlad murmured.

Nina clapped her hands over her mouth, her small body collapsing in giggles. “Is that true?”

“It was magic! I was magically . . . locked in the john. Have you found anything yet?”

Vlad pursed his lips and crinkled his nose. “Okay, here they are.” He looked up at me, his dark eyes fixed and steady. “You sure you want to do this?”

I looked from Vlad to Nina and back again. “For once I have the opportunity to help on a case in which I am not the deadliest catch. Print, dammit.”

I took the pages out of the printer as it spit them out, stacking them carefully. I divided the two files on the kitchen table, laying the preliminary files I had gotten from Sampson next to them, and topping each side with a photo of one of the girls. My evidence pile looked substantial and Nina came up over my shoulder, nodding, impressed.

“Looks like you have a lot of information.”

“Yes.” I slipped into my room and came back with four years’ worth of yearbooks. “And these, too.” I started to pace. “Now we know that a student may have disappeared my senior year of high school, and that there is a legacy”—I glanced at Nina and Vlad to see if either of them were impressed with my witchly knowledge—“of spell casters. Cathy goes missing last year, Alyssa goes missing this year.” I flipped open the files. “The dates the girls went missing are within days of each other and each feature the number seven.”

I put the kitchen calendar in Nina’s hands. “Look up these two dates. Did anything significant happen on the days the girls went missing?”

I took my seat and opened my sparkly unicorn notebook, ready to write.

“Yes,” Nina said. “Cathy went missing on the seventh, which was a Tuesday, and was officially declared Birds Eye Frozen Foods Day in 1957.”

“I think I remember that,” Vlad said with a nod. “There was a parade.”

I pressed my fingertips to my temples. “How is frozen food significant to this case?”

Nina narrowed her eyes at me. “You asked for significant happenings. Not necessarily significant happenings in view of this case.”

I groaned.

“So I suppose you don’t care that the day Alyssa went missing is National Send a Card to Your Grandparents Day?”

I could feel the itchy buildup that started my left eye twitching.

I snatched the calendar from Nina and pointed to the square in question. “Half moon. That is slightly more significant than frozen vegetables.”

“I was getting to that! You didn’t let me finish!”

“Half moon the day Alyssa went missing, too.” I raised my eyebrows. “Coincidence?”

“You people tend to do crazy things at the full moon,” Vlad said with a cluck of his tongue.

“Us people?”

“Breathers.”

“Right, we do. But witches tend to cast on full moons, too, right?”

Vlad waggled his head as if considering. “Depends on the spell. Incantations, portals, protections, callings—usually done on full-moon nights.”

“What the hell does a half-moon mean?”

Vlad shrugged. Nina looked blank. But I refused to be deterred. I was moving forward. I was taking steps in the right direction. I had my friends—my real friends. I didn’t need Alex or Will.

I scrawled, Half moons, in my notebook, and started to hum.

I was going to solve this case. And I was, for once, going to do it without putting myself in danger.

ChaCha’s yips broke through my pat-on-the-back revelry as she tore from my bedroom across the living room, her quarter-sized paws scratching the front door.

“What’s up, ChaCha?” I said in the customary high-pitched voice one must adopt when talking to children or pets.

ChaCha allowed me to sweep her up, but she kept her little marble eyes focused on the closed door, growling fiercely, as her tiny paws scratched at the air.

“Guess she needs to go,” I said, shrugging my jacket over my pajamas and grabbing her leash. I opened the door and was mid-step over the threshold when I saw it.

A shoebox. Wrapped simply in brown craft paper and stringy twine, settled up against the threshold.

Fingers of fear crept up my back, touching and chilling each vertebra. My mouth went dry and a whoosh of chilled air seemed to wash over me.

“Are you coming or going?” I heard Nina yell.

I swallowed.

“There’s something out here.”