by Kami Garcia
“So what do you think?” Gimble asked.
“About the book?” Mulder shrugged. “I think all that stuff about keeping the balance between Law and Chaos is interesting.”
“Me too. But don’t tell the Major, or he’ll want to talk to me about it nonstop.” Gimble tossed some sunflower seed shells in the trash.
Mulder was impressed. His dad just left them all over the place.
“So back to your friend. Do you think she’ll like me?” Gimble sounded genuinely concerned as he crunched the seeds.
The question annoyed Mulder. “I don’t know. Why does it matter?”
“She sounded sexy on the phone. And if she looks half as good in person as she does in that picture in your wallet, I might propose to her.”
Mulder instinctively touched his back pocket. “You went through my wallet?”
“You asked me to. The night you got pulled over for having a busted side mirror? Remember?” Gimble flicked the hair out of his eyes and broke into a grin. “So will she like me or what?”
“You’re not Phoebe’s type.” Mulder sounded like a jealous boyfriend.
She wasn’t his girlfriend or anything. Not that Mulder was opposed to the idea. He just didn’t have the guts to bring it up. They had kissed a handful of times—okay, exactly five times—in the last two years, and one night after a party they had made out long enough to steam up the windows of the Gremlin and give Mulder something to daydream about for months.… Phoebe in jeans and a black bra, cheeks flushed and lips swollen from kissing him. But she didn’t act like it was a big deal, and she didn’t bring it up. So he didn’t bring it up.
“I’ll impress her with my wit and extensive knowledge of Star Trek. You’ll see.”
“Now I understand why you’re so good at D and D,” Mulder said. “You’ve got a great imagination.”
Gimble was thinking of a comeback when the doorbell rang. Both boys spun around fast enough to give themselves whiplash. Mulder rushed to the door and flung it open.
Phoebe stood in the doorway, wearing flared jeans that looked cool instead of trendy on her; the gray-and-blue NASA T-shirt Mulder had given her two Christmases ago, which was an inch from becoming a full-fledged crop top; and sandals that crisscrossed over the tops of her feet, in tan leather that matched her skin tone. Her long blond hair was knotted just above her ears on either side of her head in Phoebe’s version of Princess Leia buns, except Phoebe’s were smaller and the ends of her hair stuck out of the center of each bun. Mulder couldn’t tell if his best friend/girl of his dreams wore any makeup, but if she did, it wasn’t much. A constellation of freckles spread over the bridge of her nose and spilled onto her rosy cheeks.
Phoebe planted her hands on her hips and opened her mouth to say something, but Mulder threw his arms around her neck before she uttered a word.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” he whispered.
She rested her palm against his chest, fingers splayed open, and gently pushed him back far enough to get a good look at him. “Of course you are. You look like a zombie.”
Phoebe stepped around him and surveyed the living room. She picked up the half-eaten bowl of cereal from the coffee table. Then she spotted a second bowl on the end table. “Is this all you’ve been eating?” She plucked two Hostess apple pie wrappers off the sofa and scrunched up her nose. “And don’t lie, because I’ll get the truth out of your Dungeons and Dragons–loving friend over there.”
Gimble beamed at her. “You play D and D, too?” He turned and mouthed to Mulder, I think I’m in love.
Phoebe took another quick look around the room. “I take it your dad is on another one of his top secret trips?” She turned to Gimble. “And no, I don’t play D and D. But I know how, and I speak Elvish.”
Gimble brought his fist to his chest and let out a long breath. “It’s like gods sent you down from heaven.”
“How could you let him get this bad?” She glared at Gimble.
“It’s not his fault,” Mulder said. “I’m a big boy.”
“So you claim.” Phoebe marched down the hallway and peeked into each room until she spotted his open bedroom door. She walked in and shook her head in disgust.
Clothes were strewn all over the floor, along with books, sunflower seed shells, and more apple pie wrappers. Mulder scooped up an armload of clothes and dumped the heap in his closet.
Phoebe inspected his perfectly made bed. “Are you sleeping on the sofa again? Or did your insomnia come back?”
Mulder ran a hand through his hair. It was sticking up and he tried to smooth it down. “Sort of.”
“Sort of to which one?”
He shrugged. “Both, I guess.”
She picked up the book on his nightstand and read the title. “The Meaning of Murder? Doing a little light reading before bed? No wonder you can’t sleep.”
Gimble scanned the collection of serial killer books on Mulder’s shelf and flipped through Year of the Zodiac Killer. “I love the Zodiac Killer.”
“Do you know how disturbing that sounds?” Phoebe asked.
“I just meant that me and the Major—that’s what I call my dad—we tried to crack the cryptograms the Zodiac Killer sent the cops,” Gimble rushed on. “The authorities figured out three of the codes, and a high school teacher solved another one. But nobody ever deciphered the rest.”
“Like I said, disturbing.” Phoebe poked around the room, searching for more proof that he wasn’t taking care of himself.
Mulder took the paperback out of his back pocket and dropped it on the nightstand.
Gimble looked through the rest of the murder books, as Phoebe called them. “So have you read all of these?”
“Uh … yeah.” She held up the copy of The Meaning of Murder. “He made me read most of them, too.”
“No one makes you do anything,” Mulder said.
“True.” Phoebe smiled just enough to make him remember what it felt like to feel her lips against his. She was like the sun—the bright spot in his universe, resisting the pull of the black hole that threatened to suck him in.
Why was she still hanging around with him? Guys tripped all over themselves to talk to her, even though most of them didn’t understand half the things she said. Maybe that was the reason Phoebe hadn’t found a boyfriend after he left. She didn’t have a lot of options at a tiny island high school full of jocks.
But she will next year.
Mulder rubbed his eyes and tried to bury the thought. It was the beginning of April. Phoebe would be leaving for MIT in the middle of August. Less than five months—that was all the time he had left with her. Then she would meet a good-looking college genius and forget all about him.
“Stormbringer?” Phoebe noticed the green paperback on his nightstand. She skimmed a few pages.
“It’s a fantasy novel the Major is obsessed with.” Gimble didn’t mention his mom.
“It sounds kind of weird.” She flipped it over and looked at the cover.
“Everything about the Major is weird,” Gimble admitted. “But it’s actually a really popular book, and the author, Michael Moorcock, is a genius. The series inspired the alignment system in D and D.”
“Is the guy on the front an elf?” she asked, referring to the male character with long white hair and alabaster skin, wielding a black sword.
Gimble gave her a strange look. “He’s not an elf. He’s an albino warrior from an alternate dimension.”
“Of course.” Phoebe tossed the paperback on the bed and took Mulder’s hand, dragging him into the hallway. “Let’s get you something to eat that doesn’t come from the cereal aisle at the grocery store, while you fill me in.”
Mulder nodded. He didn’t have the energy to argue. His mind was reeling, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the articles he’d found at the library this morning.
In the kitchen, Phoebe riffled through the cupboards while Mulder and Gimble sat at the table. She pulled out a loaf of white bread and jars of peanut butter an
d jelly. Then she placed slices of bread on the counter, assembly-line style.
“Start at the beginning, when you were jogging by the cemetery and you saw the body.” She pointed a knife with a glob of peanut butter on the end at Mulder. “And don’t leave out anything. You barely made any sense when you called last night.”
Mulder took a deep breath, and for the next twenty minutes he described every last detail of the scene—the way Billy Christian’s body was arranged on a bed of dead rose petals, with the black-and-white bird lying on his chest. The arrows sticking out of the bird’s body that made it look like a cross between a compass and a medieval torture device. The white pajamas with the elephants, and the stain that reminded him of a hippo.
“Then I called you,” he said finally.
Phoebe crossed her arms and her T-shirt rode up, exposing a wider sliver of skin. “That’s it? You didn’t do a single thing between last night and thirty minutes ago, when I showed up?”
Gimble coughed and looked away, as if he were the one being grilled, and Phoebe pounced on Mulder. “What are you leaving out?”
He shrugged. “I might have gone to the police station for a few minutes last night.”
She balled up a napkin and threw it at him. “I told you to wait until I got here.”
“I couldn’t.” Mulder pushed his chair away from the table and walked to the counter. He leaned over the sink and counted the water droplets in the aluminum basin. “I had to try.”
“And let me guess. They didn’t take you seriously?” she asked gently.
Gimble peeled the crust off what was left of his sandwich. “It was worse than that. They threw us out. Well, technically, they just kicked Mulder out.”
“Anything else?” she asked, sensing there was more to the story.
Mulder scrubbed his hands over his face. Gimble already knew he’d gone to Blue Hill. Mulder had filled him in when Gimble showed up at the apartment. Now he had to tell Phoebe. He couldn’t hide anything from her—except the way he really felt about her. And he probably wasn’t doing the best job at hiding that, either.
“I went by Billy Christian’s house today,” he admitted. “I wanted to tell his parents how sorry I was, but I couldn’t do it.”
Phoebe nodded. “That was a good call. His parents must be a wreck. To have someone find their child in a crypt, with a dead bird…” She hesitated. “It’s so awful.”
“I didn’t even see them, but an old lady across the street told me about the night Billy was kidnapped.” Mulder stalked around the kitchen. He couldn’t stand still. His body buzzed with nervous energy. “He was playing in the living room when it happened.…” He stopped moving and looked Phoebe in the eye. “The person who kidnapped him just walked in through the front door.”
“Fox…,” she warned.
“What are the odds?”
“It probably doesn’t mean anything. You know that, right?” Her voice wavered.
“That’s the same thing that happened to his sister,” Gimble said.
Phoebe’s eyes darted to Mulder.
“I told him.”
Gimble frowned. “He had to tell me. I’m his best friend.”
“His second-best friend.” Phoebe jutted out her hip.
“You two can fight over me later. Right now I need your combined brainpower and genius-level IQs,” Mulder said. “I spent the afternoon in the library looking up articles about missing kids.”
She shook her head. “Why would you do that to yourself?”
“Because I found six reports of children who disappeared from their homes at night, under what seemed like similar circumstances, in the past five years. Delaware, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania”—Mulder ticked off the states on his fingers—“Connecticut, Virginia, and Massachusetts. And I didn’t include Wendy Kelly or my sister.”
Mulder reached in his back pocket and took out the library card application he’d taken notes on. He didn’t need the notes to recall the information, but he wanted to see the names of the kids and the dates they’d disappeared.
And the other dates.
His stomach clenched when he looked at them again. “These are the dates the kids were taken.” He held up the paper so his friends could see it. “And these are the dates their bodies were discovered. Except for Daniel Tyler, who vanished six months ago from Cookstown, Virginia. The cops never found a body, so he could still be alive.”
She closed her eyes for a second and took a deep breath before opening them again. “Did the article say anything about dead birds with arrows sticking out of their bodies?”
Gimble shook his head and shoulders like a wet puppy. “That’s a disturbing thing to ask.”
She glared at him. “It’s a legitimate question.”
“There was nothing in any of the articles about finding weird stuff with the kids’ bodies, but you do the math.” Mulder handed her the crinkled page. “The kids’ bodies were found nine days after they disappeared, just like Billy’s, which means the killer keeps them alive for eight days.”
“A cult could be killing the kids,” she said. “A group would explain the different locations.”
Mulder didn’t have that part figured out yet. “We don’t have enough information to know for sure.”
“But the police do,” Gimble reminded him. “They’ve got photos of the body and the crime scene. Plus, they take notes.”
“He’s right,” Phoebe said. “The case file would have all the details.”
Mulder pressed the heels of his hands against his eyelids. “The detectives in charge of the case practically threw me and Gimble out of the station. There’s no way they’ll talk to us.”
“Unless…” Gimble jumped out his chair. “So this one time, Theo—he’s my dungeon master—he came up with a quest where I had to sneak into the royal castle and find out if the king was planning an ambush.” He turned to Phoebe and puffed out his chest. “Gimble—my character in D and D—is a spy, so I do that kind of stuff all the time. But Gimble—my character, not me—doesn’t have a high level of skill when it comes to doing stuff like scaling walls. But he’s a level two—that’s good, by the way—when it comes to deception.”
“Did you really just say the words, ‘my dungeon master’?” Phoebe rolled her eyes. “And I told you that I know how to play D and D. Is there a point?”
Gimble ignored her comment. He was too busy laying out his plan. “All we have to do is stake out the police station and wait until Detective Walker and Detective Solano aren’t around.”
“Or we could call the precinct and find out if they’re on duty or not,” Phoebe said.
“Or we do that,” Gimble said, undeterred. “The point is, we’ll wait until the detectives aren’t there. Then we’ll go in and say we’re witnesses so we can get more information about the case.”
“I tried that already, remember?” Mulder’s mood was getting worse by the minute.
“You told them that you had information, not that you were an eyewitness,” Gimble corrected him.
“What if they don’t offer up anything?” Phoebe asked. “Detectives don’t usually make a habit of telling potential witnesses the details about a case.”
Gimble pulled an octagonal-shaped die out of his pocket. “Then we switch to diversion. Phoebe and I will distract the cop, which will give you a chance to get a look at the case file.”
It wasn’t the worst idea, and Mulder was willing to try anything.
Phoebe frowned. “Why do I have to help you distract the police?”
Gimble waved two fingers back and forth between them. “We speak the same language, like the Fonz and Pinky Tuscadero. You know?”
Phoebe looked at Mulder. “Do we need him? Because I might end up killing him before we get to the police station.”
“You can’t kill him,” Mulder said as he led her out of the kitchen.
“Why not?”
Gimble scrambled behind them. “Lord Manhammer’s Underground Strategy 101. Never kill
the guy with the plan.”
CHAPTER 11
Outside the Mulder Residence
10:30 P.M.
X sat in the black sedan, watching Fox Mulder and his merry band of fools. He had a decent view of the living room and kitchen, thanks to the sliding glass doors on the balcony. Not that it mattered. X was more interested in what the three kids were saying, and a few strategically placed bugs in the apartment allowed him to eavesdrop on their conversations. Unfortunately, there was no way to filter out the boring ones, like the one they were having now.
Fox and his friends had formulated a plan to go back to the police station what felt like hours ago, and ever since then X had been stuck listening to a lot of crap about a stupid game.
He almost regretted bugging the place.
This assignment was starting to feel like the organization’s version of latrine duty. Nights like these made him second-guess his decision to turn down a job offer from the CIA two years ago.
At least the radio stations in DC were better than the ones in his backwoods hometown, a place he never planned to see again. He turned up “September,” by Earth, Wind and Fire and closed his eyes.
The passenger door opened and X jumped.
“Sleeping on the job?” the boss asked, sliding into the seat next to him.
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Sleep on your own time, and give me a report.” A Morley dangled from the corner of the boss’s mouth. “What has Fox Mulder been doing since the last time I saw him?”
“Plenty.” X sat up straighter. “The kid’s smart. I’ll give him that much. Smarter than the DC police department, that’s for sure.”
“Details.”
“Fox has been nosing around the Billy Christian case. The boy they found dead in the crypt.”
“I’m familiar.” Smoke filled the car with every word.
X couldn’t understand how his boss managed to smoke and hold a conversation at the same time without dropping the cigarette out of his mouth. But as X’s grandmother used to say, “The devil has his tricks.”
“Fox thinks there’s a connection between Billy Christian’s and Sarah Lowe’s kidnappings. He claims the Christian boy was wearing the girl’s pajamas when they found him. Fox noticed a distinctive stain.”