by C. C. Mahon
“A hard-working student, doesn’t cause problems. She doesn’t deserve what happened to her.”
I thanked the principal and walked away. She and Lola continued their conversation for a few moments, then Lola joined me. We were leaving the offices when I felt a hand pressing a small object into mine. By the time I turned around, the blonde girl had already joined her two companions. She ignored me with great diligence. I followed Lola to the exit.
Once in the school parking lot, I examined what I had just been given: a paper folded several times until it formed only a square of less than an inch on each side. Inside, two small pills that shone under the sun like a shimmering rainbow.
“The famous drug?” asked Lola.
“I suppose so. I’ll get Britannicus and Lizzie on it.”
“I would also like to have it analyzed by our lab,” said Lola.
She took a small plastic bag out of her pocket and placed a pill in it. I closed the paper around the second pill and put it in my jeans pocket.
It was time to have a serious conversation with Alicia Perez.
26
This part of Las Vegas’s suburbs looked like a maze of quiet streets and identical houses. So I let Lola lead to Alicia Perez’s home. She parked directly in the driveway, and I did the same. I let Lola ring the doorbell and went around the house to Alicia’s window. As I looked into the kid’s room, I called Lola with all the strength of my lungs.
Alicia’s room still looked like that of a model little girl, with her flower paper and stuffed animals on the bed. What stood out was the corpse lying among the stuffed animals and the grieving teenage girl kneeling beside it.
Lola came in with a gun in her hand.
“No need,” I said, pointing to the weapon. “He’s dead this time.”
Lola knocked on the windowpane, but Alicia didn’t seem to hear it. Lola took out her penknife and used it to force the window. A smell of carrion caught my throat.
I let Lola slip into the room. Officially, my wings prevented me from going through the window. In fact, I had no desire to deprive myself of the garden’s fresh air.
Lola approached the bed, reached out her hand towards Jeffrey’s neck, and suspended her gesture. The boy had explained to us that he no longer had a heart and, therefore, no pulse to look for. And all Lola had to do was look at the green color of his skin, and the black flies buzzing around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth, to understand that he was dead. How could his condition have deteriorated so quickly? That very morning he seemed…almost normal.
Lola let her hand down. Then the corpse opened its mouth.
“It hurts,” Jeffrey breathed.
Lola jumped, and I think I cried out.
Alicia, on the other hand, straightened her head and took Jeffrey’s green hand in hers.
“I’m here, my darling,” breathed the girl.
By all the saints, was the kid still alive? He was rotting from the inside, but he was still there?
I mentally sent my wings to hell and twisted myself into the room. I left a few feathers on the window frame, bending the frame as I passed. I didn’t care. The smell raised my stomach, but not as much as what the poor kid was going through. I knelt on the other side of the bed.
“Jeffrey,” I said, “can you hear me? It’s Erica. We spoke this morning.”
Jeffrey turned his head towards me and lifted his eyelids, revealing white eyes, already swarming with larvae.
I wanted to look away and go and throw up in the toilet. Instead, I forced myself to face the poor kid.
“Jeffrey,” I said. “Do you want to…”
The words got stuck in my throat. Was I really going to ask a kid to end it?
“To die…” breathed Jeffrey in response. “I want to die. For good this time.”
Alicia burst into silent tears.
“I can do that for you,” I said.
“Please…” Jeffrey said. “Yes.”
“Lola,” I said, “can you get your car near the front door?”
My friend nodded and went out into the hallway.
“What are you going to do?” asked Alicia in a hoarse voice.
“I know a way to part Jeffrey’s body from his mind and the life the necromancer attached to it.”
“What does that mean?”
“Everything will return to normal. Jeffrey’s body will be returned to the morgue. His mind…will go where the spirits go.”
Alicia nodded silently then burst into tears.
“It’s done!” Lola announced on the threshold of the room.
I wrapped Jeffrey in the pink bedspread and carried him through the house to the front door. Lola had aligned the back door of the car with the door of the house. I put Jeffrey in the back seat, as gently as possible.
“Alicia, you and Lola go up front.”
I got on my bike and left without delay. I needed a little solitude.
When Lola engaged her car in the club’s parking lot, I signaled her to stop.
I had opened the big door of the hangar, but before letting Lola move forward, I wanted to talk to Jeffrey one last time.
“When the car crosses the threshold,” I said, “the necromancer’s spell will be destroyed. Do you understand what that means?”
Jeffrey slowly nodded his head.
“Alicia?” I called.
“I understood. I don’t think we should wait any longer.”
In the back seat, Jeffrey got agitated. “Tell…tell my parents to burn my body.”
“I promise,” Alicia whispered.
I waved to Lola, and the car crossed the threshold.
Nate was in the basement. He had his toolbox and was working on the doorframe as if nothing had happened. He dropped his hammer when he saw our faces.
Alicia was underage to drink, but I ordered Nate to serve her a good dose of bourbon. She needed it. So did I, by the way.
While Lola was making a phone call to the morgue, I summarized the facts for Nate.
“Does that mean the others…” breathed Nate.
I nodded. Yes, the other twenty-eight undead were probably decomposing, too.
“The people in the morgue will eventually ask questions,” Lola commented when she joined us.
I handed her her glass of whiskey. “Especially if they find the other resurrected people in the same state as Jeffrey,” I muttered.
“If I had the bastard…” Lola began.
“What if he’s a cop?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s something you said the other day, that it was very convenient to be able to interview people even after they had died.”
“It was a joke.”
“It is also the principle of necromancy: bringing someone back to talk to them. What if…”
“There are only a handful of unexplained deaths in the cases we are interested in.”
“What do you know about the cops who are in charge of it?”
“I’d have to find out, but…”
“You don’t like the idea,” Nate said. “I understand. But the necromancer might not have been aware of the harm he was going to cause.”
Lola frowned. “‘One life for one life’ is pretty clear, though. And what amateur brings back thirty people all at once?”
“Maybe they didn’t take into account the magic leak,” I said. “Maybe they wanted to bring one person back and pushed too hard?”
Lola contemplated the bottom of her bourbon glass. “I guess it’s possible,” she finally said.
When the morgue workers rang the intercom, I let Lola go up alone to talk to them.
“I’m going back with them,” she said. “I want to talk to Milton. Call me if you hear anything.”
I answered distractedly. My mind was playing back scenes from the high school earlier in the day.
Nate took his tools and left to finish the new doorframe. I settled in front of Alicia. The girl seemed to have gone to another world, and it took me a few moments
to catch her eye.
“Alicia,” I said, “what time do your parents get home from work?”
The girl stared at me and blinked. “I… My mother works at the hospital. I don’t know… I forgot when she gets home today.”
“What about your father?”
She shook her head. Obviously, there was no father in the Perez family.
“Maybe it’s not a good idea to go back to your place if you’re going to be alone. Do you want to call a friend? Chloe, for example?”
She startled and opened her eyes wide. “Chloe?”
“Well, yes. You know Chloe: purple hair, black clothes, goes to the same school as you…”
“Ah. Uh, yes. It’s… We’re not really friends.”
Okay, I thought. But why does the mention of her name upset you?
She looked away, seemed to rediscover her glass of bourbon, and emptied it. Judging by her expression, she was not used to strong alcohol.
Good.
We were going to talk.
“So you know Chloe, but you’re not friends,” I insisted.
She shrugged. Her cheeks regained color, under the influence of alcohol or her emotions, I wasn’t sure. I felt sorry for the kid; she had just lost her boyfriend, violently and twice in a row. I didn’t want to add to it. But there was also Dan, the poor kid who had skewered his brains because of that damn drug…
I decided to push Alicia to her limits.
“So, how would you describe your relationship with Chloe? A business relationship?”
The red went up to Alicia’s temples. She gave me that frightened deer look I had already seen her do with Jeffrey. But she was going to have to do better; she wasn’t the first big-eyed deer who kept dirty secrets from me.
“Chloe’s your supplier, right?”
Alicia tried to get up and staggered. I sat her down hard.
“Did you know Dan?”
“Who? What?”
“The kid who killed himself in chemistry class. Do you know how he died? He stuck an iron bar in his ear, all the way to his brain. He would have done anything to silence the voices. Do you understand?”
Alicia’s eyelids were fluttering faster and faster. She wasn’t the innocent deer anymore. Now Bambi was caught in the headlights, and the truth hurt her beautiful brown eyes.
“I…I don’t know…”
I slammed my fist on the table, and the glasses spilled.
“Yes, you know!” I bawled. “You know because you’re the one who sold him that shit! You’re the one who put the pills in his hand. You’re the one who tortured that poor kid and pushed him to kill himself!”
“I didn’t know!” she shouted. “I didn’t know it could do that. She didn’t tell me…”
“Chloe?”
Alicia nodded.
“Tell me,” I ordered.
She began to cry in silence. From the threshold, Nate gave me a look of reproach. Yeah, I was making a poor kid in shock cry. But Nate hadn’t seen Dan collapsed on the chemistry bench, a piece of metal pushed to his brain.
Alicia sniffed. “Chloe and I are cousins—we’ve known each other all our lives. Chloe, she’s a little weird. She thinks she’s a witch. It used to make me laugh. But not long ago, she started…making things happen. She offered me a spell to attract the boys, and the next day, Jeffrey and I… Anyway, it worked.”
“So you decided to take advantage of it?”
“Why not? I was already selling my Ritalin to a few people. I asked Chloe if she could make spells to pass exams…”
“But she created a drug instead?”
“It’s herbs, meth, and glitter. She puts the spell on the pills and so she can produce more, more easily.”
“But why telepathy? How about a lucky spell, for example?”
“She says telepathy sells more. Luck, you can never be sure where it comes from. But with telepathy, it’s easy to prove that it came from the pills.”
“So that customers will come back to buy more.”
“That’s the principle of all businesses, isn’t it?”
“Most businesses do not push their customers to pierce their brains. Where does Chloe live?”
Alicia frowned, crossed her arms, and fell silent.
27
The sun was about to set, and I hadn’t slept since the day before. I was exhausted, at the end of my tether, and Jeffrey’s stench lingered in my nostrils. I had neither the desire nor the patience to extract information from a crying kid.
“You keep an eye on her,” I told Nate. “She doesn’t move from here, doesn’t contact anyone.”
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“At home.”
In my loft, I found Britannicus and Lizzie as I had left them, leaning head to head above my coffee table. But instead of Britannicus’s little notebook, the table was now covered with a chaos of loose sheets of paper. Neither of them seemed to pay attention to the purplish sky overlooking the glass ceiling above them.
“Lizzie!” I called.
The witch jumped and blinked.
“Yes? Weren’t you supposed to go out and join Lola?”
“I went out and came back. I need to find Chloe, right now. Do you have her address?”
Lizzie put her hand on her face as if to clean up her ideas. “Maybe at my place. I don’t know if I kept it.”
I didn’t have time to send Lizzie back to search her apartment for a hypothetical address book.
“Do you have her last name?”
“Garcia.”
My cell phone spat static in my ear, and I decided to send a text to Lola.
“Drug made by Chloe Garcia, Alicia’s cousin, who goes to the same high school. I need her address ASAP.”
After a few minutes, my phone vibrated.
“I’ll pick you up.”
Of course, she wasn’t going to let me go alone. Maybe it was better. Alicia had said that the pills contained amphetamines: even without mentioning their magical side, Lola could arrest Chloe for drug trafficking. I didn’t particularly want to throw this kid in jail, but we had to stop her from selling “horns” before other kids ended up like Dan.
I cobbled together a makeshift sheath for my sword with two leather belts and once again abandoned my two sorcerers to their obscure calculations.
Lola couldn’t have gone before receiving my text, because she was waiting for me in front of the club.
“Should we call for reinforcements?” she asked.
I made a face. We weren’t going to bring in the commandos to talk to a kid. “She’s a teenager,” I said, “not Al Capone. At worst, I pull out the big Valkyrie razzle-dazzle, with the wings and sword on fire, and that should calm her down.”
The air was crackling on my skin, and I felt a breeze that didn’t lift the greasy papers off the street. The wet earth smell of raw magic was everywhere.
Lola took us to the same quiet suburb where Alicia and Jeffrey lived, bypassed the high school, and entered a wealthy neighborhood. Here the houses had second floors, swimming pools, and gardens kept alive by intensive watering. Lola stopped her car in front of a house three or four times larger than that of the Perez family, whose architecture was reminiscent of both a hacienda and a wedding cake. The garage had two extra-large doors, and a grove of palm trees shaded the porch.
Lola rang the bell and got no answer. She tried to look in the window, but the curtains were pulled. I knocked, with the same lack of result.
“She may still be in school,” I said.
“I called to check,” said Lola. “I think the principal closed the school because I couldn’t reach her there.”
“Let’s go around,” I said.
The back of the house included a large terrace, a pergola, a swimming pool, and a particularly annoying automatic watering system—the bottom of my jeans got wet in less than a minute. But again, no sign of Chloe.
“Either she went to sell her stuff near another high school,” I said, “or the dealers who kil
led Jeffrey got their hands on her… Or she went shopping. Do you have her parents’ phones?”
Lola gave me a look of reproach. “What do you think I am? Of course, I do. Since Chloe is a minor, I tried to contact her parents. I couldn’t reach them, and I left messages.” She took her cell phone out of her pocket and shook her head. “They didn’t call me back.”
“What do we do now?”
“Maybe she overdosed on her own merchandise,” said Lola. Her tone made it clear that she didn’t believe that. She continued, “In which case, this poor child may be in danger right now. I have to intervene.”
With a wink, she drew her weapon and used the butt to hit one of the French windows. The glass took the impact with a thumping noise but did not even split.
“Burglar-resistant glass,” grumbled Lola.
“Let me do it.” I grabbed my sword, which sent an electric shock into my arm.
“I’m not a can opener,” said the sword.
“You’re afraid of failing,” I answered.
In response, the weapon caught fire. I repressed a smile and applied the tip of the blade against the reinforced glass. A simple pressure and it broke into a myriad of tiny opaque fragments. After that, it was exactly like opening a tin can.
“You will pay for this,” grumbled the sword.
“I will make it up to you,” I said silently.
I stepped through the bay window and entered a large room. White marble on the floor, ivory sofas, matching decoration. Even with all the curtains drawn in front of the windows, the whole thing was bright. And in an unspeakable disorder.
Clothes lay on the ground and the furniture, fast food packaging sat next to empty cans, and the air smelled like old fries.
“It looks like my ex’s apartment,” commented Lola.
“Was she kidnapped?” I asked.
Lola slowly walked through the living room into the dining room. There, everything seemed to be in order; the chairs were carefully arranged around a large glass table, in the middle of which an old bouquet finished withering.
“It seems like no one has been cleaning for some time,” said Lola. With a quicker step, she reached the front door. “No sign of forced entry. Someone closed the locks on the way out. Let’s check the upper floor.”