Under a Spell uda-5 Page 12

  “Wait, what? No, I—”

  Nina held up a silencing hand. “Not another word. It’s done.” She yanked me off the counter and toward her, my chest mashing into hers in an overzealous hug that nearly knocked the wind out of me. “You don’t have to thank me, sweetie. You’re my best friend. Of course I want to have you in my commercial. Oh, I feel so bad—it was almost an oversight.”

  She flitted out of the kitchen and I stood there, completely dumbfounded. “No, that’s not what I meant. That’s not—I don’t want—”

  But Nina was already out of the room and I was left with my day-old muffin and the second most horrible job in the world.

  I shoved the last bit of sawdusty muffin in my mouth and upturned a can of something meaty and congealed into ChaCha’s rhinestone-studded dog bowl, thinking that the only thing that could possibly alleviate the angst of high school and UDA: The Documentary was a hot bath and a cold Chardonnay. I drew my bathwater extra hot and sat on the edge of the tub, watching the steam waft up and coat the mirror in a fine, foggy mist. After adding a mammoth glop of coconut bubble goo and downing my first glass of wine, I stood in front of the mirror and wiped off the steam. I glanced over each shoulder and, finally, used my index finger to tap the edge of the mirror.

  “Hello?” I whispered. “Gram?”

  After my father abandoned me and my mother killed herself, my grandmother had always been my rock, my one voice of sanity in an insane world. She was a seer, a mystic, and a regular at a mahjongg game that included a pixie and most of a centaur. She occasionally would pop up in shiny surfaces to offer me words of encouragement, advice, and the latest about Ed McMahon and the waffle situation in Heaven.

  In our family, sanity was relative.

  I tapped the mirror again, waiting, hoping. I hadn’t talked to her in ages and I suddenly was feeling very alone.

  “Gram?” I tried again. Then, desperately, “Ed McMahon?”

  Nothing.

  I poured another slug of wine and slipped out of my robe. I had a toe in my bathwater when I heard a little scratching tap. My whole body perked. “Gram?”

  I rushed out of the bath and toward the mirror, my heart exploding with joy—she had answered! Finally!

  I slapped that one dipped toe onto our old-school tile floor and went sailing. I saw the golden arc of my wine as it sloshed out of the glass. I saw my own bare feet as they slid out from underneath me. It was graceful, and silent. Soon the sun was overhead and my neck and shoulders were cuddled by something fluffy and soft. I had to close my eyes just for a second. . . .

  “Ms. Lawson? Ms. Lawson?” It was a desperate, echoing whisper. I didn’t recognize the voice, but everything inside me told me that I knew the voice. Something told me that I knew everything.

  “Alyssa?” My own voice sounded weird—it echoed almost, like every syllable was bounding off a concrete wall and ricocheting through my head. I couldn’t tell if the voice was inside or outside of me.

  “Alyssa, is that you? I’m Miss—Sophie. Sophie Lawson. Do you know me? Let me help you. I can help you.”

  “Help me. Help me. . . please . . .”

  I was panicked. I felt myself spin; I could hear the gravel crunch underneath my sneakers. “Where are you? You have to tell me where you are!”

  “It’s so dark.”

  I hadn’t noticed that and suddenly I blinked. The darkness was all encompassing. I couldn’t see my hands. I couldn’t feel my limbs. I was sinking and it was suddenly getting hard to breath. Someone was squeezing my legs, my waist. Pinning my arms. Pressing against my chest.

  “Alyssa!”

  “She’s awake now.”

  I sucked in a giant gulp of air that burned at my lungs and reached up, feeling my arms, my hands. I was clawing, scratching, trying to get more air into my lungs.

  “Whoa, whoa, just relax there.”

  It wasn’t Alyssa’s voice anymore. It wasn’t dark anymore. The sun was overhead, beaming into my eyes.

  “That’s right, open your eyes.”

  “Will?” I squinted, then shivered, staring toward the sun. That was attached to the ceiling with the peeling paint. In my bathroom.

  And I was naked.

  “Ahh!” I kicked and squirmed, then yanked open the linen closet door and hid behind it. “What are you—” My eyes traveled over Will’s shoulder to Nina and then Vlad. “All of you, what are all of you doing here?”

  “We heard a crash,” Nina said, inching around Will and handing me my robe.

  “A loud crash,” Vlad added.

  “You had the door locked and you weren’t responding. And I could smell blood.” Nina’s eyes were wide and terrified. She hugged her arms over her chest and I could see the edge of her fang as she nibbled her thumbnail. “I was worried.”

  I looked down and saw the blood smeared across the usually white bathroom tile. The grout was stained a deep rust color. “Where did that come from? Whose is it? What happened?”

  Will pushed himself up from his knees and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “Best I could tell, you were drinking and took a bit of a spill, landed smack on your back in a pile of glass and were murmuring about your grandmother, darkness, and waffles when I was able to get through the door.”

  “They called you?” I peered out from around the linen closet door. “You called him?”

  Nina shrugged. “I couldn’t open the bathroom door. I mean, I could have, but with the stab hole in the front door and the coat closet permanently smelling like Steve, I thought I should give Will a try first. Open things the human way.”

  Will grinned. “I used a butter knife. So what about the waffles, then?”

  I gingerly touched the goose egg that was rapidly forming at the back of my head. “Nothing. No waffles. I—hey, how long was I out?”

  Another shrug from Will. “Long enough.”

  “Was I naked the whole time?”

  “I figured I could either save your life or your dignity.”

  I looked down at my left arm, which was miraculously bandaged, and tightened the belt on my robe.

  Will nodded. “Couldn’t risk you possibly bleeding out while I was choosing which panties you should wear.”

  “You’re an absolute savior, Will Sherman.”

  He shot me an aw-shucks look, and Vlad and Nina went into the living room. I grabbed Will’s sleeve just before he left. “I saw something, Will.”

  He turned and shot a salacious smile over his shoulder. “I saw something, too.”

  A shot of heat pinballed through my whole body, pooling just below my navel. “You’re gross,” I said, pulling a brush and dustpan from under the sink. “I mean when I was out. I could hear Alyssa calling for me. She knew I was looking for her.”

  Will took the brush and pan from my hands, crouched down, and swept up the remains of my wineglass. “How did Alyssa even know who you were?”

  I shivered and pulled my robe tighter. “I have no idea. Maybe she just knew, you know? Knew I was looking for her.”

  Everything on Will’s face told me that he was wondering whether to call the paramedics or the loony bin, but he surprised me.

  “All right, then. Where was she?”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. “That’s the thing. I don’t know. But it was very dark, and I felt confined. And it was echo-y. My voice echoed. I think.”

  “Did it echo like you were possibly mumbling while half passed out in a bathroom?”

  Once Will was assured I wasn’t going to pass out in the raw again any time soon, he went back to his apartment. Nina and Vlad went back to whatever it is vampires do, and I paced a bald spot in the carpet. Finally I sat down in front of my phone and stared at it.

  “What’s wrong, Sophie?”

  Nina was standing in my doorway, her hip cocked against the doorjamb.

  “I passed out naked on the bathroom floor.”

  “You and I both know that’s pretty much par for the course for you.” She stepped into my room
and pulled me to sit on my bed next to her. “What’s really going on?”

  “I heard something, Neens.” I explained, then looked hard at her. “Do you think I should tell Lorraine? Do you think it could have been some kind of spell or something?”

  Nina paused, then took both of my hands in hers. “Honey, you’re looking for a little girl.”

  I stiffened. “I know that. I’m not new to casework—”

  “Right. You’re not new to chasing down killers and investigating dead bodies. This is a girl. A teenage girl. Alive.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  Nina avoided my eyes and I pulled my hands from hers, tucking mine under my legs.

  “I’m saying that your job is to investigate a coven at the high school. That’s what you should be doing, not trying to find this girl. You’re putting too much pressure on yourself, Soph. And also, you were passed out. In the bathroom. You hit your head. Don’t you think it’s a lot more likely that the voices came from you wanting so badly to help this girl, rather than from bathroom-tile-penetrating witchcraft?”

  The funny thing was, it wasn’t.

  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 s
tay 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?”