Under a Spell uda-5 Page 13

“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.”

  Chapter Nine

  Nina poked her head over my shoulder. This time, her super speed didn’t faze me. “What is it? Who’s it for?”

  She crouched down, poked the box. It moved an inch, the motion benign, not setting off a slew of knife-wielding Vessel thieves or rabid witches with skin-carving tendencies.

  “It’s probably from Amazon. Open it.”

  I frowned. “Amazon boxes have a smile on them.”

  And I got the distinct feeling that this box wouldn’t make me smile.

  I bent over anyway, picking up the box. It was surprisingly light and ChaCha sniffed at it, her little paw working its way under the twine. I set her down and slipped the twine off myself, the brown craft paper popping open and slipping to my feet.

  I thumbed the lid open carefully, squinting my eyes and peeking in.

  Then I slammed the lid down hard.

  “Jesus Christ, it’s a dead bird!”

  Nina was back on the other side of the room, standing on the table, arms flapping like, well, a live bird. “Ew! Ew! Get rid of it!”

  While garlic, holy water, and sunlight were the reigning terrors to most vampires, Nina had one more to add to the list: birds. Dead or alive, in any form. They terrified her.

  I looked into the box again and my heart started to swell for the poor creature laying silent in the box. And then my heart dropped down like a fist to the gut.

  “People only send dead livestock for one reason,” I said, licking my paper-dry lips. “It’s a warning.”

  Vlad looked up from his computer, his fingers still hovering over the keys. “About what?”

  The little corpse shook in the box as my hands started to tremble. I clamped my eyes shut, thinking back to the horrendous clanging of metal, of porcelain, of the water shooting to the ceiling in the Mercy High bathroom—the words GET OUT scrawled in angry red across the mirror.

  “About me getting any closer with this investigation.”

  “What now?”

  My head snapped up to Will’s door, cracked open, and Will, his eyes narrowed and caked with sleep. He stepped out of his apartment and raked a hand through his sleep-ragged hair, sandy brown streaks pointing in every direction. He was dressed in nothing except a pair of well-worn jeans, and he didn’t look happy.

  I was almost too distressed to notice that he was shirtless, his incredible abs tanned nicely, his jeans slung low enough that the muscles under his hip bones were exposed, sloping toward his groin, a glaring invitation.

  “S-Someone left this,” I said, tearing my eyes from the abs I wasn’t staring at because I could be in the midst of a life or death situation and once again, there was a sexy-as-hell, half-naked man in the middle of it.

  Will crossed the hall in two swift strides and gingerly took the box from me.

  “Get rid of it!” Nina screeched from her tabletop perch.

  Will glanced into the box and then up at me, his hazel eyes clouded. “Are you upset because it’s a terrible gift or because you didn’t get anything?”

  I frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s for Vlad.”

  Will upturned the lid. There was a thin, white envelope with the name VLAD scrawled across it.

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t care who it’s for or who it’s from. It’s a dead. Freaking. Bird. Get rid of it! Those things carry disease! They carry the plague!”

  I looked at Nina. “You’re immortal. What do you care?”

  Will shook the box. “It’s just a pigeon.”

  Nina gaped. “A pigeon? It’s not even a classy bird!”

  Once we were able to dispose of the bird—which we soon learned was a warning from Kale, for Vlad—and lure Nina from her spot on the dining room table, Will and I sat down with two cups of tea.

  “So, I take it that it wasn’t just a dead bird that woke you up in the middle of the night?” Will said, wrapping his hand around his mug.

  I wagged my head. “Couldn’t sleep. I just don’t feel like we’re doing enough, Will.”

  “We’re doing all we’re supposed to do.”

  I pinned him with a glare. “And that’s not enough. We’re no closer to finding—” I paused, then snatched the papers Vlad had printed out for me. “I forgot.”

  “What’s that then?”

  “Police files.”

  Will cocked an approving brow and I handed him half the stack.

  “Wait a minute—didn’t the preliminary report say that they found Cathy in Marin?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, Battery Townsley. Definitely over the city line.”

  Will looked up. “If you’re going to drop a body anywhere around the city, that’s the place to do it.”

  I nodded. “What else?”

  Will scanned. “It says there was a preliminary search, but they didn’t find any additional evidence and deduced that the Battery was merely a dump site. Subject was not killed there.”

  I bit my lip, thinking of Cathy, of her pink-and-cheery room with the frozen-in-time smiles and the deep, ridged lines on her mother’s face. Hearing her referred to as a “subject” that had been “dumped” made my heart clench, became a tightening knot in my chest.

  “Feel like going on a field trip?”

  Will looked over my head, out the front window where the sky was even blacker than normal, the lights of the city barely punctuating the all-encompassing blackness. “I have a feeling there is absolutely no chance I’ll be able to go back to sleep if I don’t go.”

  I smiled and nodded. “You catch on quickly.”

  I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with San Francisco in the hours just before dawn. Normally, the city vibrates—it pulses with life, with people going about their day, with horns honking and smoke spewing and, just, life. But in these hours the entire city is still—but perilously so—as if something is slowly lurking, fingers of evil trailing through the night, claiming victims, claiming life.

  I leaned forward in my seat and kicked up the heat, circling my arms around me and trying to shrug off a cold that was bone deep.

  “It looks like the end of the world, doesn’t it?”

  Will looked sideways at me, the light from the passing streetlights shining over him, then plunging him right back into darkness. “You mean because the streets are so empty?”

  “Yes—and no.” I shivered again. “It feels like something more this time.”

  Will guided Nigella toward the Marina, each mile toward the bay thickening the fog around us. “Something more?”

  “You can’t feel it? It’s like . . .” I looked out the window, pressing my forehead against the freezing glass. “Unrest.”

  I didn’t look at Will and he didn’t answer me. We crossed through the Marina and coasted onto the bridge in silence. The fog was cotton-ball thick now, squeezing through the night-muted cables of the Golden Gate, wafting over our windshield, leaving spitting drops of moisture. Behind us, the city faded into it, the lights struggling against the haze. I knew there was a mountain in front of us, but all I could see were the two slashes of Nigella’s headlights illuminating the fifteen feet in front of us.

  “I’m thinking we probably could have done this in the morning.”

  I swallowed. “Probably. But we’re running out of time, Will. And this”—I waved the sheaf of police reports Vlad printed out—“just proves that the police aren’t any closer to finding Alyssa or catching her kidnapper either. There’s something more. Girls don’t disappear into thin air.”

  “And a dump site isn’t just a dump site?”

  We were turning off the bridge and beginning the steep road up and down toward Battery Townsley. I bit my bottom lip the whole way there, and let out the breath I didn’t know I was holding when Will pulled into the deserted parking lot. He handed me a flashlight.

  “Ready?”

  My heart thumped. My ski
n felt too tight. But somewhere, in the back of my head, I could hear that voice. Alyssa, calling. Pleading. Begging.

  “Yeah.”

  The ice cold hit me like a stinging slap in the face the second I pushed the car door open. It was a wet cold, heavy with salted sea air, and it snatched my breath away and clawed at my hair. I zipped my jacket to my chin, cursed myself for not changing out of my pajama pants, and yanked my hood up over my head. I jutted my chin toward the black blanket of grass leading to the battery.

  “That way.”

  Will and I cut across the damp grass, walking in companionable silence, the round blobs of light from our flashlights bobbing in front of us. The wind howled and whipped and the water sloshed below us when I stopped, my flashlight hand dropping straight to my thigh, suddenly feeling as though it were tied there.

  Will stopped and looked at me, his concerned face yellowed by the glow of the flashlight. “You okay, love? Cramp or something?”

  My tongue was solid, stuck to the roof of my mouth. All I could do was shake my head and command my arm to move, but it didn’t. I moved a finger, then two, then wrestled my arm a half inch from my side before wincing at a searing pain around my wrist.

  “Sophie!” Will’s arms were around me, but I couldn’t feel them. All I could feel was the searing heat circling my wrist—both wrists now—and the terror that washed over me. Heat pricked at my hairline and burned the back of my neck. I struggled against invisible bonds that pressed against my shoulders, my rib cage. The pain was intense. I felt my skin splitting.

  Finally, I fell backward, suddenly and without warning, expelled from whatever “held” me. Will ran to me and crouched.

  “What the hell was that?”

  I sputtered and coughed, pushed Will away and pushed myself to standing, righting my flashlight. “Let’s go,” I said, my voice a strangled choke.

  I stomped across the grasses and Will trotted behind me before grabbing my left shoulder and turning me toward him. “What the hell was that?” he repeated, slowly this time.

  “Cramp,” I said, my eyes holding his.

  I bit down hard on my molars so the tears wouldn’t fall, and pulled my hands into my sleeves so he couldn’t see the bruised, reddening marks that circled each wrist.