I go back to the Powers’s place and ask Tricia if I can search Aden’s room. She gives me full access as long as I don’t break anything. My glasses don’t reveal any magic use, but I can’t take that at face value when there’s so much at stake here. Alchemy and potion-brewing are always good places to start a curriculum in self-taught magic, so I go through Aden’s chemistry sets and various scientific paraphernalia—but it looks like he only ever used those tools to study the laws of nature, not bend them. I sift through his bookshelves; instead of forbidden necronomicons, I find obscure comic books. After digging through his laundry as a last resort, I end up sitting on the floor in a disheveled mess, empty-handed but for an old, lovingly repaired elephant plushie with a crooked smile.
No magic. I don’t understand. What the Hell am I missing? Maybe all of these people are latent mages—well, no. There’s no such thing as a “latent mage.” Being a mage is like being an artist. You can be born with talents that make art easier—like an eye for color, good hand-eye coordination—but unless you actually use those talents to make art, you don’t count as an artist. Same goes for magic. All the people I’ve pinpointed as mages so far have singled out some form of energy and attempted to manipulate it, whether through candlelight rituals, Scrabble tile prophecies, or frosted cupcakes. That’s what makes them mages.
Aden shows no signs of being like them. Literally everything points to his being a straight-cut muggle, completely without superstition or subterfuge. Well, maybe a little subterfuge, given that he disappeared after sneaking out to a party. But that’s just what kids do. Parents push them, and they figure out who they are by pushing back. And if he’s already eighteen and only just now pushing, well, he’s nowhere near as bad as I was at that age. Man, he must have been a great son.
Must be. Must be a great son, present tense. Damn it Harry, get it together.
I guess for now the only thing to do is to call Dick, see if he’s made any progress on his end.
…Dick doesn’t pick up his phone. Which is weird. It would just be weird if someone hadn’t just tried to shoot me in the face; as it were, it’s not just weird, it’s very, very threatening.
A van, a black van. Did I see that black van more than once today, or am I just imagining things? George wasn’t just a random encounter—he was an assassin. And if the person who sent him has enough resources to dig into my past and set up a childishly simple murder with a convenient scapegoat…
The Nightwalker twins. The Nightwalker twins killed Johanna on a contract, and then their employer burned them alive. I sifted their ashes through my fingers, and never found out who signed their check.
My hands are shaking as I send a panicked text to Isabella’s number.
Izz, need u to find a phone for me
It takes less than three minutes for her to send me back an address and a screenshot of a map. Dick’s phone is at… Jenny’s place? Why would he go back to Jenny’s place? Why isn’t he answering his phone?
She died in her kitchen. Our kitchen. The kitchen that was our happy place.
Jenny’s place is close enough that I’ll make better time sprinting than trying to find public transportation. I close the distance in about six minutes, calling Dick twice along the way. Both times, his phone is still dead. Gods, it’s like I’m stuck in the same nightmare two nights in a row. When I finally bound up the stairs to Jenny’s apartment, the door is just barely open.
I’m too late.
I bulldoze into the apartment, shouting, “Dick! Jenny! Are you—”
Jenny and Dick are sitting on the bed. Kissing. Necking. Snogging. Making out. It takes a moment for them to notice me; then Jenny’s eyes fly wide open and she shrieks into Dick’s mouth. Dick lets out a choked yell of his own.
I don’t know whether to be relieved or angry.
I watch, mute, as the two struggle to untangle their limbs in a flailing tango that could be classed as modern performance art. The guilt radiates off of them in sticky waves. Dick scrambles off the bed altogether and stands, rapidly adjusting his clothes. Jenny yanks down the hem of her shirt and leans back against the headboard, trying to look casual, but rapidly twisting the ring on her left hand. Her eyes are rimmed with red as she glances sporadically in my direction. I clear my throat.
“Your… door was open,” I say to her, awkwardly pointing behind me. “I was looking for… well, um, I just thought that…” I run out of words as I see that Dick’s fly is down. And his underwear is kind of caught in the zipper, so… Dick’s dick is out. He notices just as I do, and his face turns a shade of red I didn’t think was possible in a human. I avert my gaze to give him a chance to pull himself together. “We need to talk, Dick,” I say, pretending to study a light fixture. “Can you meet me outside? Back of the building?”
“Uh, yeah. Yeah, sure. Totally.”
I speedwalk out of the apartment as fast as my legs can take me.
Dick meets me in about a minute. His pants are thankfully well-fastened, but he’s obviously still feeling the awkwardness. The gray spot in his hair keeps drawing my eye, like a mustard stain on a white shirt. Seeing him again, shuffling his feet and coughing discreetly at the ground, wakes me from my emotional stupor.
“What the Hell, Dick,” I hiss at him. “Did you just conveniently forget that we’re looking for Jenny’s kidnapped, possibly dead fiancé right now? That every second you just spent with your d—tongue down her throat was another second David and the others might have been fucking murdered?”
Dick is mumbling, squirming. “I didn’t—never meant to—I only—”
“Took advantage of a twenty-something-year-old who’s been crying for a week straight and still has no idea whether or not she’s supposed to be grieving the love of her life?”
“I didn’t take advantage of her, I was just comforting her, she let me kiss her—”
“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should! Children know that! You’re a fucking PI, you’re supposed to be smart! How are you a professional?”
Dick’s Adam’s apple bobs. It’s a small but pronounced movement, and I can’t help but notice that it’s accompanied by a disconcerting twitch of his left cheek.
“…You are a professional, right? You have training and a license? You didn’t just slap on that fedora and coat and decide you were going to stalk people for a living. Right?”
A single drop of sweat slides down Dick’s temple.
I slap my palm across my forehead. “Fuck. Okay. This is great. Really great. Really, really, really… fucked. We’re fucked. No, I’m fucked. Because no rational mass-kidnapping, murder-scheming villain would ever consider you a real threat.”
“I don’t understand—”
“Someone just tried to kill me, you half-cooked Brussels sprout.”
“What?”
Dick’s eyes are bulging like peeled grapes. There isn’t a point to my explaining further but I feel like doing it anyway, just because I’m angry and frustrated and need the vindication.
“Someone looked up my client history, found a suitable candidate for murder, and dropped him off on the sidewalk behind me with a loaded gun.”
There it is—the stiff shock, the naked guilt. There’s at least a little petty satisfaction to be gained from that. Dick’s words trip over one another as his panic rises.
“A-are you alright? They must have resources, if they were able to dig into your past so quickly—”
I’m about to respond to that, when I remember something about telling Isabella—Could you please, please, pretty please do that thing where I show up on the first page of a Google search with certain keywords?
I don’t say any of that out loud. Instead, I keep my jaw square and my chin up as Dick sputters, “What—you—how did you survive?”
I give a brusque shrug. “I got lucky.” Lucky with a certain lady, more like. “Look, the point is, I agreed to work with you because I thought you were a professional. That if you had a license, you’d at least kn
ow some shit that I don’t. But apparently that’s not true—and apparently you’re more enthusiastic about getting in your ‘client’s’ pants than actually finding missing people. So, whatever. Just give me the information and pictures you have so far—if you even have them—and I’ll do this on my own.”
“But—but you need help—”
“Shut up and do as you’re told before I clothesline you again.”
He shuts up and does as he’s told.
***
Dick’s pictures are borderline useless. Most of them are blurry, and there’s very little salvageable detail beyond nebulous outlines of furniture, wavering ceiling lights, and the occasional crisp, perfectly captured image of a random piece of trash. His notes don’t clarify much either; there are names of people who are apparently also missing, tentative dates of when they disappeared, no further usable detail beyond that.
So not only is Dick an asshole, he’s an inefficient one. Asshole. Damn it, why did I ever trust him to help?
I write down the missing people’s names on a piece of notebook paper, trying to find connections, but the longer the list gets, the fewer possible commonalities there are. Some of the people disappeared the same night that Aden did, but more of them didn’t. Some of them showed vague signs of having practiced magic, but a lot more of them didn’t. Some were old, some were young, some lived alone, some lived with others, and some didn’t even really live in the homes they were crashing in.
I stare at Dick’s notes and photographs again without really taking them in, feeling my mind cloud over with frustration and anger and lack of sleep. I look at the list of addresses again. There’s too many fucking variables, that’s the problem. What about the evicted family? Are they relevant? They must be, if Joy’s prophecy pointed me to them. I need to—need to approach this from any other angle possible. I need to consider the possibility that… that…
…it’s been a long time since I’ve thought about my family. Years on years. How old is my sister now? No, not Luce, the other one. Biological. The one I… left behind. Seven? Eight? Her name was… was…
I sang her to sleep when she was a baby. There was a nursery rhyme that always made her laugh, even when she was crying. Three bears lived in one house. Daddy bear was fat, mommy bear was thin, and baby bear was… was…
I can’t remember what her name was…
“SNRRK.”
I jolt upright with a wet snort and a piece of paper stuck to my cheek. Fuck. What just—what the shit—shit, I nodded off. I rap the side of my head with my knuckles, trying to knock out the brainfuzz. I need to focus. There’s got to be something I can do with this information, I’m just not seeing it. Maybe I need glasses—oh, wait. I do have those. They’re just totally fucking useless in this current situation. I’m going to have to get new ones anyway, because I cracked one of the lenses a week ago in the alligator mole tunnels. Alligator moles… they’re so weird. But they’re kind of cute. I gave one of them chocolate… are they even able to eat chocolate? Alligators aren’t supposed to eat—no, that’s dogs, dogs aren’t supposed to eat chocolate. Dogs aren’t… alligators… supposed to eat… fingers… in a jar…
This time I swing my head to the side as I wake up, just at the right angle to knock my skull against the desk lamp. Fuck, shit, ow. That’s it, I can’t do this right now. There’s nothing to be seen in these notes or photos or addresses. I need more information, but I’m in no shape to get that information right now, so I’m just going to have to wait until I can. I’m not going to sleep though. Why would I sleep? Sleep is when the devil gets you. Actually—I should get to work on those anti-demon wards. Ha. Suck on that, Lilith.
Or, you know, suck on me. Because that felt really, really good.
I pry my wards out of grooves I gouged into the doorframe and windowsill and get to work. This I can do—for this I have the necessary tools and information. Demon wards are surprisingly simple to create. Mine aren’t made of anything special, just polymer sculpting clay that gets rock-hard in the oven. Demons abide by two rules: first, no harming humans unless with consent or in retaliation. Second, respect contracts, above all else. Witches take liberal advantage of Rule No.1 to make demon wards. Essentially, we construct a boundary of warding around an area, charge it up, and detach a little bit of our magic—a bit of our soul, in a way—and work it into the boundary. If a demon attempts to cross the established border, they would destroy the little piece of soul, which, hypothetically, would hurt like an ice pick through the eye socket—hypothetically. We don’t actually know, because no demon has done that. Because no demon can, see?
Except Lilith, apparently. Somehow she can cross my wards with no problem, and she doesn’t even seem to destroy them that way. Every time she gets into my apartment, I check my wards; they’re always a bit beaten up, but not out of commission. Almost like they tried to keep her out, then got hopelessly confused and gave up. My guess: this is directly related to her brick-dropping stunt. Some way, somehow, she’s finding and exploiting loopholes in the no-harming-humans rule.
So I’ll have to make a ward that isn’t based on that rule. Something more personalized, specifically to keep Lilith, and only Lilith, out. She refuses to tell me her true name, so I can’t look her up in a book. Or I could ask Samael… nope, nuh-uh, not worth it. I’m not that desperate. But the sigil she put on me, that’s got to have some link to her.
I ditch the polymer clay for a more interesting spell vessel, just for variety’s sake. I use the sigil on my stomach as the identifier, prick my finger for some blood, do some charring work with a candle, and… there. Done. It’s that simple. Right? I mean, I feel as though Lilith wouldn’t have made this bet if she knew I could win so easily, but that’s only assuming she’s super smart and diabolical. I also have to cover the possibility that she’s just a dumb, overconfident, fun-loving troublemaker with horns and a tail.
But she is fun, I have to admit that. I’ve never had so much fun hanging around a demon before. I mean, I don't think I’ve ever had fun hanging around demons, since they’re kind of evil and always trying to trick you or your second-ever girlfriend into damning her eternal soul—but I really think Lilith is different. There’s something… something I can’t put my finger on, a sort of disconnect between her and every demon I’ve met so far. Something that I don’t think can be faked, a sort of… a sort of alienness, something new and soft and shiny that I could almost… reach out and… touch…
BRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNGGG!
My entire body seizes up in alarm—I’m thrown back into my chair by the force of it. There’s a horrible noise echoing throughout the room—my gods, what is that? What is that? Shut it off, shut it—
Oh. It’s my ringtone. I stare blankly at my phone where it’s vibrating on my desk, loudly demanding my attention. As I check the caller ID and pick it up, I vaguely realize there’s a trail of drool down the side of my mouth and wipe it off on my sleeve.
“Izzabella? Izzat you?”
“Harry!”
Woah, that’s not Isabella. The frantic, hoarse whisper is too high-pitched, too squeaky.
“Harry you have to come here right now, there’s somebody in the apartment, we’re stuck, Isabella has her gun but—”
Nikki’s voice is cut off by a piercing shriek accompanied by the horrible splintering of wood. Someone shouts over the chaos—Isabella. The thundering CRACK of what is unmistakably a gunshot. A deep, muffled grunting, impact, Isabella’s choked cry of pain.
And then an ungodly screech, louder and more terrible than anything I’ve ever heard in my life. The phone is knocked from my hand as I double over, hands flying to my ears, shouting hoarsely myself in response to the nails-on-chalkboard chills tearing up the inside of my head. I’m still recovering when I realize the call’s disconnected, leaving the phone with a silent, pitch black screen.
It takes me eight minutes to get to Isabella’s place. Eight minutes she could be dead or dying or taken, eight fuc
king minutes I can’t afford to lose. I spend another minute getting up to her apartment, each stair step a sickening jolt of déjà vu, and throw myself through the yawning gap between the door and its frame.
Isabella is slumped on the floor, her hair loose and falling over to shadow her face. Nikki is kneeling next to her, her shoulder sling askew, huddled against Izzy’s arm.
“Isabella? Isabella!” I shout, rushing over. I have to stumble over an upset drawer and glass from the face-down TV porcelain crunching under my boots, curtains snapping against an open window, too late, always too late to save her to get within arm’s reach. Isabella lifts her eyes—oh, thank the gods—revealing a glassy sheen and bloodshot veins.
That’s when I notice Nikki’s face. It’s ashen—literally. Her white-gray cheeks and forehead are cracked like dry clay, lined with a million fine wrinkles that absolutely weren’t there the last time I saw her.
I skid to a halt. A shard ripples into my hand out of sheer reflex, and I hold it up in a guarded stance.
Nikki stares at me with black, black eyes.
“Harry,” Isabella gasps. “It’s—it’s okay. It’s okay, it’s just Nikki.”
I keep watch on the creature, but spare a glance at Isabella. “What?”
“She—she scared him away. Did—something. I don’t know…” Isabella reaches up with a trembling hand to push her hair out of her face; there’s a trail of dried blood starting from inside her ear and disappearing into her shirt collar. “She protected me. Protected us.”
I take one more look at those inkwell eyes. Then I drop the shard and hurry to Izzy’s side, kneeling in front of her. “You okay?” I ask, lifting my hands carefully to her jawline. She winces at the contact, but doesn’t protest as I gently turn her head from side to side, inspecting the damage. Her gaze slides downward and to the side, at her handgun lying on the floor beside her. She swallows, and a shudder runs through her.
“I—I’ve never shot anyone before,” she whispers. “I hesitated. I missed him the first time, my hands were shaking so hard—but then Nikki made that noise, and I hit him, I shot him—”
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