by R K Dreaming
“Why isn’t it wonderful?” he demanded petulantly.
“Because you said you were a Humble now. A human being. These things don’t happen to human beings.”
He looked grumpy. “But you were happy before when I said I was going to try and get my powers back.”
He seized her shoulders and shook her as if trying to jostle some excitement into her. He picked her up and twirled her around.
“Darling, this is wonderful news. Do you know what this means?”
“What?” she said feeling a little numb.
It was happening too fast. She was not sure if she liked it.
She thought he was going to say this meant that he would be free of the school and free of Headmistress Glory and that the two of them could go off and have fun exploring the world together. That wouldn’t be too bad.
Instead he said, “It means I know how to bring the old me back! It’s her death that did it!”
He looked back in the direction of Judge Emma with joy.
He didn’t seem to care that she was dead, that just half an hour ago she had been alive, and contemplating the whole life that she had ahead of her. That she had family and friends who did not know yet that she was dead.
“What you mean it was death that did it?” she said. “It can’t be.”
“Not just any death! A dark death! A death like hers. A murder!”
Percy’s eyes went wide, and a horrible thought occurred to her.
“Tell me you didn’t do it!” she begged. “Tell me you had nothing to do with this!”
He chuckled. “Of course I didn’t! It wasn’t me. You think the Powers That Be are going to send me down into the mortal realm and give me the power to kill people? It is like they have shackled me. I simply cannot do it. But that doesn’t mean other people can’t.”
“You think this was a murder and you are happy about it?” Percy said incredulously.
“Of course I’m happy,” he said, his eyes full of intense joy. “Murder means there is a murderer.”
“So long as it isn’t you, I don’t care.”
“Of course you care! Somewhere in this school is a dark soul, tainted by the acts that they have committed. And what does a Lord of Hell do with a dark soul?”
Percy swallowed hard. She shook her head, refusing to say it.
“Feast on them,” he said. “Feast on the darkness and their pain and their regret and their suffering.”
“You can’t.”
“Feast on them and grow strong!” he said triumphantly. “Oh darling, don’t you see, all I need to do is find this murderer and claim their soul for my own!”
“But you won’t!” Percy said quickly. “Tell me you won’t do it!”
He looked almost petulant now, displeased that she wasn’t happy for him.
“You can’t do it because Mother — Glory — won’t let you do it,” she said hurriedly. “And anyway, the police are on their way, and probably the Eldritch Council too. You should leave now. I don’t think you should be here when they arrive.”
“Pfftt!” he said airily. “What do I care about these police and the council? I am a Lord of Hell!”
“But you are not,” Percy said firmly. “You are just a Humble, and the last thing that you want is for them to be suspicious about you. For people to start monitoring you. So why don’t you get out of here, and I will do the investigating instead?”
His eyes narrowed. “I suppose you could do that. Especially since you’re already inside the pageant. An ideal place to do the questioning from.”
“Exactly! I will find out who the murderer is.”
His eyes lit up. He hugged her again. “I always knew you were your father’s daughter,” he said proudly.
This time he did not resist when she started pushing him further away from the stage and urging him to leave the vicinity of the crime scene before anyone saw him.
“You’ll tell me as soon as you find out anything?” he insisted.
“I’ll tell you when I know who the murderer is,” she said firmly. “But only if you promise to stay out of this for now.”
“It’s a deal,” he said cheerily. “You know how boring I find these things. Administrative nigglings are not for a Lord of Hell to worry about,” he added rather pompously.
Percy watched him saunter off as if he had not a care in the world. She did not want this smarmy sauntering Lord of Hell in her life. She had forgotten this side of him. She wanted Mr Fun Dad, not Mr Soul-Hungry Maniac.
And it occurred to her now that as a Lord of Hell her father had never cared much for Demonling. It was Lucifer Darkwing she wanted in her life. Percy rather liked Lucifer Darkwing. Maybe it was because he had seemed to rather like her.
She swallowed hard. She had promised to find a murderer for him, and she had no idea how to do it.
And worse, she had promised to tell him who it was.
14. Moaning Mosshead
Percy hurried back into the practice room before anyone noticed that she had been gone.
She had promised to tell Lucifer who the murderer was. But not until after the murderer was safely in the custody of law enforcement and out of his reach. She had to make sure of it.
There would be no soul eating on her watch.
Which meant she had to find out who they were before anyone else did.
Someone had called the police who arrived in very quick time. The ambulance arrived too, but the paramedics merely confirmed Judge Emma was dead. After that they were unable to do anything at all but stand by and wait for the police to release the body.
And somebody, probably Octavia, must have called the Eldritch Council, because in short order Councilor Strickt was marching into the practice room with Octavia and Felix and several junior counsellors traipsing after him.
Councilor Strickt was furious when people from the Conclave of Magic also arrived at the school. But he could not get rid of them since the death of a witch was in their jurisdiction.
Headmistress Glory had to take the heads of the three law enforcement parties aside and mediate their row over who was in charge.
Percy watched them through a window. She saw the witch from the Conclave of Magic get out her wand and point it towards the Humble Police Officer in charge and mutter something. After this he went very docile and nodded and left the group.
This left just Councilor Strickt and the witch to argue about jurisdiction. Perhaps they agreed to work together because moments later they both strode back into the practice room together.
“We will have to take all your names and addresses, just in case we need to speak with you later,” said Councilor Strickt to the occupants of the room.
Many of the parents looked outraged at this.
Bella’s father, Mr Osterich, said in a booming voice, “I was under the impression this incident was an accident! We all saw it happen, councilor. Surely there’s no need to question our children?”
All of the other parents nodded their heads, and looked at Councilor Strickt accusingly.
Councilor Strickt did not back down. He agreed that it did look like an accident, however he insisted that names and addresses be given.
“It is routine procedure,” he assured them.
This calmed most of the parents down.
Nan hurried to arrange a seating station for the council minion who would collect all of the details.
Percy rushed forwards to give her name first. She needed to get out of here right now if she was going to have time to check out the crime scene. It was Felix who noted down her details.
“Can I leave now?” she asked him.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
“Fine. Can I leave?” she said shortly.
He looked towards Councilor Strickt first, and then nodded.
Percy left the practice room in a rush. From the corridor that adjoined the stage, she looked through the window Lucifer had been standing at earlier.
She saw that the police had cordoned
off the stage with red tape, but none of the officials were on the stage. The headmistress had taken most of them away into a nearby office to speak with them.
Knowing she did not have much time, Percy used a side door to enter the stage unseen and ducked under the red tape.
The body had been covered up by a sheet, and the ambulance men were loitering some distance away near an exit, speaking to a couple of people who had a certain look about them that made Percy sure that they were from the Conclave of Magic.
She ducked low so that they would hopefully not see her. When she heard footsteps following her she looked around guiltily, and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw it was Nan.
“What are you doing?” Nan hissed. “You can’t be on the stage!”
“Shut up!” Percy whispered.
She glanced nervously towards the ambulance men and the people from the Conclave of Magic. Fortunately neither of them had spotted Percy and Nan.
Percy hurried over to the judges’ table, making a wide semicircle around the cloth-covered body of Judge Emma Waters.
She felt odd being in the presence of a dead body, but told herself not to think about it.
Nan grabbed Percy’s arm to try to drag her away, but Percy resisted.
“I need to take a look around,” she whispered.
She did not know what she hoped to find. She needed a clue. Something.
She took a quick look on top of the judges’ table. On it were some notepads and pens, and the empty plastic cups from the orange juice that Nan had brought them. Her eyes were drawn to the cups, but Percy could not see any clouds of black hovering near any of them.
She crouched to look beneath the judges’ table, and then gasped as her eyes settled on a bag slung over the back of Judge Emma’s chair.
It was a medium-sized brown leather handbag with a long strap. And a horrid black smoggy cloud was hanging all around it.
Percy reached for it, and Nan snatched at her hand, trying to stop her.
“There’s something inside that handbag!” Percy said insistently. “I can see the cloud of doom again.”
Slapping Nan’s hands away, she hastily unzipped the bag and looked inside it.
It was full of random things. A purse, a makeup case, a wand, various small empty bottles for a purpose Percy could not fathom, hairbrushes, hair straighteners.
Percy’s eye landed on a plastic bottle full of dark green juice and she knew right away that it was the thing she was looking for.
It was one of those bottles that people bought to put their home-made juices into rather than buying ready-made juice from a shop. Half of the green juice inside had been drunk. The ominous black cloud was concentrated around what was left.
Percy grabbed one of the empty plastic cups from the table, and poured a little of the green juice into it.
“What do you think you’re doing?” hissed Nan urgently. “That’s evidence!”
“You heard them,” said Percy heatedly. “They’re insisting it was an accident. So this is not evidence. This is going to end up in the bin. Unless I take some of it now.”
“Are you kidding me? It was an accident. We both saw it happen. Her foot slipped on someone’s juggling ball and her heel broke.”
“It wasn’t an accident,” said Percy shortly.
“How do you know?”
Percy refused to answer.
“It’s something to do with Lucifer isn’t it?”
“No, it is not!” Percy snapped. “He had nothing to do with this. But he does think this was murder.”
“You said he was a Humble now! Not a Lord of Hell. So how would he know?”
“He just does.”
Nan gave a short laugh of sheer desperation. “That’s really reassuring,” she said sarcastically. “And what exactly do you think you’re going to do with it? Send it to a crime lab for analysis?”
“I don’t know,” said Percy. “But I am not going to let them throw it all out without the chance for somebody to check what is wrong with it.”
Replacing the juice bottle back into the handbag, she zipped up the bag, and hurried offstage carrying the small cup of juice carefully.
She ran to her locker, got out her backpack, and found her water bottle inside it. She dumped the remnants of the water onto the floor, to a squeal of protest from Nan, and then carefully poured the green juice from the cup into her own water bottle. She stashed the bottle inside her backpack.
She couldn’t believe she’d managed to do it without being caught. Now the evidence was out of sight, she felt much calmer.
She turned to Nan and said, “I told you I thought what happened to Nilgun was sabotage. And now it’s happened to Judge Emma and she’s dead!”
“But it was an accident,” said Nan almost pleadingly. “It was just another weird freakish accident. How could Judge Emma have died from that? I don’t understand it.”
“Exactly. How could she have died?”
But Nan got a stubborn look on her face.
She said heatedly, “You think that drink is spiked with a potion, right? But what potion do you know that is going to break one person’s leg but kill the other? Why not just use a potion that gives someone acne? Why not use poison if they wanted to kill someone?”
“I don’t know,” said Percy irritably.
“It doesn’t make sense,” insisted Nan. “First a contestant, now a judge? Why? To win the contest? It’s not like hurting the judges will get any competitors out of the way!”
“Don’t you remember Judge Emma was worried about something earlier?” said Percy. “She wanted to meet the headmistress and the other judges to tell them about it, but she died before she could!”
Nan gave a bark of shrill laughter. “It’s only a high school beauty pageant! It’s not that important. Why would anyone care so much about winning it that they would kill someone?”
Percy was stumped. This was a question she could not answer. Why a competitor and a judge? It didn’t make sense to her either. All she knew was that something was wrong.
“I don’t understand it either but…” Percy hesitated and looked around.
At this time of day the school corridor was abandoned and nobody was within earshot. Even so she pulled Nan into a nearby empty girl’s bathroom and checked to make sure no one was in any of the cubicles.
And then she turned to Nan and told her in a very low voice about her conversation with Councilor Strickt and Octavia and Felix, and that two students in their school were undercover sentinels.
“No!” Nan gasped.
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Are you saying I’m a liar?”
“Of course not. Never.”
Nan got a funny look on her face, like she simply couldn’t believe it. She looked a bit upset.
“And you’re sure that you didn’t misunderstand?” she said finally.
Percy nodded. “Councilor Strickt told me himself that I’d better not tell anybody or I’d be in big trouble. He said that it was a new scheme that the Eldritch Council and the Sentinel Alliance were working on together.”
Nan’s eyes went wide. “You think they’re here because they know about… about Glory and Lucifer?”
“No!” said Percy. “Octavia and Felix arrived before Glory and Lucy were even here. It’s the students. The Council want to keep an eye on eldritch students at Humble High because they think some are dangerous.”
“That is ridiculous!” said Nan. “More than half of the teachers at Humble High are eldritch too. They’re perfectly capable of making sure the students are behaving!”
“If they don’t think that someone is dangerous, then why would they send two undercover sentinels into the student body? And you should have seen them, Nan! The way that Felix and Octavia caught that werewolf was so scary and so efficient and so… I hate to say this about Octavia, but so impressive.”
Nan chuckled at the look of grudging admiration on Percy’s face.
“It is not funny,” said Percy heatedly. “Octavia didn’t even care that the Sentinel Alliance had sentenced that werewolf to death. It was like his life didn’t even matter. No rehabilitation. No second chances. Councilor Strickt didn’t care either. They said that if an eldritch being kills someone then that makes them feral and they deserve to die for it.”
There was a ringing silence as the two girls turned this statement over in their minds. Percy could tell that Nan liked it as little as she did.
“Maybe they didn’t really mean it,” said Nan hopefully.
“Maybe they did,” said Percy grimly. “Does sentencing someone to death so easily sound right to you? What if some student got stupidly involved with Judge Emma’s death? What if it really was Bella?”
Percy did not mention that Lucifer himself was after the murderer’s soul. She thought Nan would either pass out or have a fit of righteousness at that news.
“Will you stop harping on about Bella?” said Nan.
“My point was that I might not like Bella much, but I don’t want her to be sentenced to death either!”
“They wouldn’t,” breathed Nan, the point seeming to strike home now that she was thinking of one of her fellow students being found guilty of murder.
“All I know,” said Percy, “is that it would be better if we found out if Bella really is involved before Octavia or Felix or Councilor Strickt find out. That way we can give Octavia’s parents a heads up and they can make sure she gets a fair trial.”
Percy might not like Octavia much, but she thought everyone deserved a fair trial. And a chance to make things right.
Nan looked doubtful. “How are you going to do that? Do you have any idea what you’re going to do with that green juice? Maybe you should just tell Councilor Strickt that there is something wrong with it and then he can investigate it himself.”
“I just told you Councilor Strickt would give someone a death sentence with the snap of his fingers!” said Percy.
“Okay, let’s take it to one of the conclave people who are here.”
“And say what? Please test this green juice on the word of a teenage Meek with a paranoia complex? And anyway, they’ve agreed to work with Strickt already.”