by Sara Snow
I touched the barstool where I had sat with Carter last night. Our unwashed brandy snifters sat on the bar, a film of liquor lingering at the bottom of each glass. I picked up one of the snifters and held it in my hand, replaying the memories of that kiss.
“I figured I’d find you here. Back at the scene of the crime.”
Olympia materialized beside me, apparently out of nowhere. That seemed to be one of her powers: showing up at exactly the wrong time, like some kind of psychic chaperone.
“No crimes were committed. I’m a consenting adult.”
“Barely,” Olympia said with a little snort. “Besides, I’m not worried about your body being violated—you can take care of that part yourself. I’m worried about your heart.”
“You don’t need to worry about any part of me, Olympia. I learned how to look out for my heart years ago.”
“That’s why I’m worried. Girls who act tough are always the easiest to break.”
Her know-it-all, big-sister attitude was really starting to annoy me. I didn’t need a witch watching over my every move.
“How did you know I was here with Carter last night?” I asked.
She sat down on a barstool and gave me a sidelong smile. “I checked my crystal ball. It’s right up there.”
She pointed at the ceiling. A gray orb ringed with black plastic stared down at us from above the bar.
“Is that a camera?” I asked, horrified.
“It certainly is. The very best in-home surveillance. We record everything that goes on here.”
I had thought it was scary being stalked by demons. Now, I had a witch watching me on videotape. Olympia had probably found it arousing to watch Carter and me kissing last night. I never would have guessed that we weren’t alone.
“Why would you do that? You’re all friends. You trust each other.”
“Yes, we do trust each other. But we don’t trust our uninvited guests. Those cameras are installed all over the warehouse. They have a special infrared light that can capture beings who turn up unannounced. As you can imagine, we get a lot of invisible intruders.”
“Then why were you using a camera to spy on me?” I asked accusingly. “That’s creepy.”
“It was an accident.” Olympia shrugged dismissively. “Kingston has me review the security recordings twice a week. I didn’t see you and Carter here until this morning, when I was dutifully completing my task. I never understood voyeurism as a sexual fetish until I saw the two of you going at it in here.”
She smiled like a cat who had just polished off a dish of cream.
“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. I only wanted to let you know that I’m aware of what’s going on. And I’ll be watching Carter closely to make sure he doesn’t take advantage of you.”
“I wish all of you would stop being so damn overprotective! I can take care of myself. How many times do I have to say that?”
Olympia backed off a little. “I know you can. But I also know Carter. He can be a real player.”
I already knew that about Carter. I knew he was not just a few years older than me, but decades older with way more experience. And I knew that a lot of his experience involved erotic encounters with other females, only a few of which were one hundred-percent human.
“Carter’s sexual adventures don’t bother me. We’re not in love—we’re just friends.”
“Friends with benefits,” Olympia corrected my statement. “As long as you don’t fall in love, you’ll be okay. But from what I can tell, you’re already there.”
I hung my head, letting my long hair fall over my face. I didn’t want Olympia to see that my cheeks were the color of a fire engine.
“We’re not in love,” I repeated. “I don’t even know what to call our relationship. We’re more than friends, but we’re not lovers. We have an emotional connection, I think, but we don’t have an emotional bond. I sound like some delusional guest on a daytime talk show, don’t I?”
“I don’t think you’re deluded, Georgia. I think you’re just at the beginning of a long and dangerous roller coaster ride.”
With or without Olympia’s approval, my relationship with Carter had started rolling. We had nearly kissed once at the bar yesterday morning. We had kissed last night. And we had been kissing again this morning when we were interrupted by the Wicked Witch of the Warehouse.
What Olympia didn’t know was that her warnings were having the opposite effect. Instead of raising red flags about Carter, her predictions gave me a glimmer of hope.
If Olympia saw something happening between Carter and me, something more than a drunken midnight kiss, maybe he cared for me more than I thought. Maybe there was a chance that we had more going on than a flirtation on steroids.
“I know what you see in Carter,” Olympia said. She reached across the bar to squeeze my hand. “He’s dark, brooding, complex. An older man—well, half a man—with a lot of experience under his belt. Along with a few other tantalizing surprises. And I can tell he’s got a thing for you, too.”
I rolled my eyes. “Please, Olympia.”
“If you like, I could put a spell on him for you.”
“A love spell?”
“No, that part will take care of itself. I’m talking about putting a spell on his dick, so if he tries to be unfaithful to you, it’ll get gangrene and fall off. It’s one of my most popular hexes.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” I said. Carter and I hadn’t gotten anywhere near that point. My ex-boyfriend Adam, on the other hand, would be the perfect subject for an infidelity spell.
Carter will leave you, too. They always do.
The soft voice of a familiar ghost echoed in my mind. She was the ghost of the little girl I used to be, a scrawny kid with uncombed hair and a gap where her two front teeth had been. Now, she hung in the background of my mind, waiting to greet me whenever I got close to someone.
Remember, it’s just us, she said, reaching for me with her sticky hands. No one is going to save you. No one is going to love you. No one but me.
Now she was here with me again, lurking in the shadows.
I’ll be here when he leaves you, she whispered. I will always be here.
24
Georgia
Each time I stepped into the maze of cubicles at the call center, it got harder to remember why I was there. Sitting down at the tiny desk in the box where I worked felt like crash-landing on the earth after a trip to a distant, exotic planet. My main incentive for returning to work the next day was the thought of a paycheck waiting for me. But when I opened the check and saw the total that I’d earned after taxes and my miserly benefits had been deducted, my mouth dropped open in dismay.
“What happened to my check?” I wailed. “I got a bonus last week for picking up extra shifts. Half of it disappeared!”
“Taxes,” said my neighbor. “The more you make, the more they take.”
“That should only apply to millionaires,” I said. “Not to call center drudges like us.”
Nevertheless, I put on my headphones and sat down at the computer, waiting to log the calls from our charming customers.
I watched the numbers turn on my computer clock as I waited for the lunch break to begin. How pathetic that I spent my entire day waiting for the time to pass by. There was nothing interesting or pleasurable to look forward to, except for that half-hour in the middle of the day when I was allowed to get up from my desk and heat up my frozen meal in the break room.
Life didn’t have to be so dismal. I knew that by now. I could stay at the warehouse indefinitely if I wanted to—Kingston had assured me that I would have a home there. I could spend my days sharpening my telekinetic powers and fighting with Eli. In the evenings, I would have all the time I wanted to play my guitar and write music that nobody would ever hear.
All my normal life had to offer was a tiny pilot light of independence. But giving up had never gotten me anywhere. I had survived by pushing myself forward through one hellish situation aft
er another. Though I would never say I was a positive person, I was someone who hated giving up.
Five minutes before my long-awaited lunch break was supposed to start, my cell phone rang. My heart jumped. No one ever called me here except for Carter. I picked up the phone and answered, breathless.
It wasn’t Carter’s husky voice that greeted me. It was Jose’s.
“Hey, Georgia. Where did you go?”
Jose sounded like a little boy who had woken from a nap to find that he’d been left all alone.
“I’m at work, Jose. At the call center.”
“Can you come back to the warehouse?”
“Sure, I’ll come back in a day or two. I need to pay some bills, catch up on school—”
“No, I mean can you come back right now?”
Jose’s voice, usually so mellow, had an urgent edge. He had never called me before. In fact, I had never seen him with a phone.
“Why? Is something going on?”
“Not yet. But I got a message that something bad is going to happen. You need to come back now.”
I stood up and glanced around the maze of cubicles. I didn’t see my supervisor anywhere around the office, only the heads of my coworkers bent over their computers as they answered calls from thousands of customers. Day after day, they showed up dutifully, spending their lives in the service of a billion-dollar corporation that rewarded them with wages that barely paid their bills.
“Give me a little time—I have to let my boss know I’m leaving.”
“Okay. But hurry, Georgia.”
My supervisor wasn’t thrilled when I told her that I had to leave early to take care of an emergency. “Can’t you take care of this on your lunch break?” she asked. “We give you half an hour, after all.”
Her thin mouth knitted into a concerned frown. She wasn’t concerned about me, of course. Only about the all-important corporation and its productivity goals.
“I don’t think the company will collapse if one cubicle monkey escapes the cage for a few hours,” I said, perhaps not as politely as I would have a few weeks ago.
“I don’t like your tone, Georgia. Corporate policy clearly states that employees cannot leave their desks for more than fifteen minutes at a time on designated breaks, and thirty minutes for lunch. For emergencies, you have one hour of unpaid leave. I believe that’s quite generous.”
“You can take your generous leave policy and shove it up your tight ass,” I said sweetly.
I tossed my headset in the garbage can, waved goodbye to my supervisor, and fled the building. I didn’t bother to clock out.
Every one of my coworkers stood up at their desks, heads rising above their cubicle walls as they watched me escape. My last memory of that place was my supervisor’s appalled face, colorless as a ghost’s.
I wondered who else would walk out of the maze that day, never to return.
Since the night I’d restarted my car with telekinesis, the old gal had never given me a lick of trouble.
Maybe I should get a job as an auto mechanic.
It would pay a lot better than the call center, and I already had the only tool I needed. Just thinking about walking out of there put a smile on my face that lasted the whole drive back to the warehouse.
Jose and Carter were waiting for me there. I briefly made eye contact with Carter, but he was all business this morning.
“Thanks for coming, Georgia,” Jose said. “I know you didn’t want to leave work.”
“Oh, I didn’t mind at all. In fact, it felt like breaking out of jail.”
Jose’s spaghetti-thin arms wrapped around me in a hug. His thin face was smudged with the shadows of lost sleep. He looked like he had lost weight—a loss he could not afford. Those visions must be taking their toll on the kid, draining his mind and body.
“Come on, you two. Let’s go to the training room.”
“Where are Kingston and Eli?”
“I haven’t been able to reach them yet,” Jose explained.
“That’s okay—we can call them later. We need to start planning this out. Jose, you can tell Georgia about your dream.”
We sat on benches in the training room while Jose recounted the vision he’d seen the night before.
“I’ve been seeing a yellow balloon in my dreams for a few weeks. A single balloon, bobbing up and down in the sky. I knew it had to be a warning. Whenever I tried to pull it down, it popped back up into the air. There was never anyone else in the dream, just me and that yellow balloon.”
A balloon. That symbol of childhood innocence appearing in a dream as a warning gave me chills.
“Did you dream about it again last night?” I asked.
Jose nodded. “Yeah. But this time there were other people in the dream. Lots of them, walking around at the pier. It was nighttime, and the sky was full of colors. I saw a Ferris wheel, an octopus ride, and a lot of booths with games and prizes.”
“The traveling carnival,” I murmured.
I had gone to the carnival at Navy Pier last year when I was still dating Adam. It seemed like a lifetime ago, but I remembered how the carnival atmosphere both delighted me and creeped me out at the same time. In the haunted house, a leering clown had tried to grab my breast. I shuddered at the memory. No wonder Jose had been terrified of this dream.
“In the crowd, I saw a super pretty lady,” Jose continued. “She had long blonde hair in a ponytail and dark blue eyes. She was wearing a pink t-shirt and jeans, and holding a stick of cotton candy that was the same color as her lipstick and her t-shirt. The t-shirt had three letters on it. Not English letters, maybe Greek.”
“Was she with anyone?” Carter asked.
“She was with two other girls. They all had the same letters on their t-shirts.”
“Sorority girls,” Carter said, “out for a night at the carnival. What happened after you saw the girls walk by?”
“The other two girls blurred into the colors, but the blonde girl stayed behind. She turned around and smiled at me. Then, she held out her hand, like she was going to accept something from me, but I didn’t have anything to give her.”
“What happened after that?”
Jose squeezed his eyes shut, grimacing as if he was in pain. “The vision changed. Suddenly, I wasn’t looking at the pretty girl anymore. I saw a line of vendors selling toys and shirts and stuff from the carts and booths. There was loud music playing, carnival music. Lots of people laughing. Then, the people all vanished, and the carts all vanished, except one.”
Jose rested his head in his hands and began to sob. Carter and I looked at each other. We waited. I took Jose’s hand, urging him to go on.
“I know it’s upsetting, Jose, but you have to tell us what you saw.”
He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I saw balloons. All different colors. Red, blue, white, purple. And yellow. I saw the yellow balloon. There was a man selling them from a cart. At least he looked like a man, but he wasn’t human. In my dream, I knew that he had horns under the cap he was wearing. He had eyes like a goat and a pointed tongue.”
“What happened to the blonde?” Carter asked. “You’re doing a great job, kid. Just keep going.”
All of a sudden, Jose sat up straight as a board. His eyelids flew open. He stared into space and began to shake all over like he was having a seizure.
“Hell-loo, beautiful. Wanna buy a balloon?”
The voice that emerged from Jose’s mouth was deep and dangerous and rough as gravel. The sight of him channeling a demon was almost too terrifying to bear. I fully understood now why Carter was so scared of me going out into the city alone. Demons were lurking everywhere.
Jose’s chalk-white face slowly regained its color. He blinked at Carter and me.
“He kills the yellow ones,” Jose stammered. “The yellow girls. I mean, the girls who buy the yellow balloons.”
“Was the blonde in your dream going to buy a yellow balloon?” Carter asked.
“Yes,” Jose whispered. “She
was reaching out her hand, and she asked for a pink balloon to match her t-shirt. But there weren’t any pink ones left, so she asked for a yellow one.”
Carter glanced at his watch. “You said this vision happened at night. It was dark, and there were colored lights in the sky. We have a few hours to get there. That will give us plenty of time to meet up with Kingston and Eli.”
Jose’s brown eyes overflowed with tears. “It happened at night. But it was last night.”
“How do you know, buddy?”
“I saw the date on a poster for a concert at the carnival, and people were standing in line waiting for the concert to start.”
I swallowed hard. I imagined the demon behind the balloon cart, grinning with anticipation as the blonde chose the balloon that sealed her fate. If only she had chosen a blue balloon or a purple one, she’d be safe right now. Instead, she had pulled the losing lottery number.
“Can you see where she is now?” Carter asked. “Is she alive?”
“He’s still got her. But I don’t know if she’s alive. I got the message too late to save her, didn’t I?”
“No. You got the message at the right time. We can save her, but we have to hurry. Jose, you stay here and keep trying to call Kingston and Eli. Georgia, you and I are going to the carnival. Grab some iron and a flamethrower.”
“A flamethrower?” I echoed. “At a carnival? With all those people?”
“Yes. It’s the perfect weapon. The crowds will be expecting a spectacle. They’ll think we’re putting on a show when we torch the demon.”
“People must have a sick idea of entertainment,” I said.
“Oh, that will just be the opening act.” Carter smiled. “Wait till we pull the damsel in distress from the demon’s burning arms.”
“You’re assuming she’s still alive, then?”
“Anything less would mean giving up,” Carter said. “And when it comes to saving human lives, I never give up.”
After Carter left to get the car, Jose stopped me in the hallway. He was biting the cuticle of his right thumbnail, a sure sign that he was mulling over one of his psychic visions.